I have been doing a lot of what we call “parts work” in my therapy office lately. In short, that means working with the many parts of people’s human experiences.
No, this is not because my specialty is clients diagnosed with multiple personalities. It just means that each and every one of us has many parts that are inside of us, that we’ve developed through the years, largely in response to our lived experiences. Sometimes, the parts that come forward in specific reactions, aren’t the right ones for the job at hand.
Have you ever had the experience of knowing something deep in your bones but still not being able to do it? How many of us have said,
“I know what I should do, but part of me just can’t get it done.”?
That is a very simple version of our parts being at work. In a more complicated explanation, it may mean we feel ourselves stuck in repeating patterns and we can’t figure out why. Or, we have an intellectual understanding of what keeps us stuck but we can’t move on and no amount of talking or reasoning gets the job done. It is the reason that sometimes traditional talk therapy gets a bad rap because it doesn’t always get to all our parts. So we intellectualize a problem, but we never can quite FEEL the solution.
I started working with ego-states or parts years ago when I was taught about trauma therapy in grad school. The reasons for our parts are often obvious if we have some kind of Big T trauma that we can identify in our lives. But as I’ve worked with more and more people over the years, and embarked on my own parts work myself, I’ve seen the magic of it personally and with all clients, even the ones who don’t think they have anything remarkable in their pasts.
I have seen and experienced first hand how tuning in to all parts of ourselves can provide clarity, peace and genuine healing that allows for abundance and growth to take over where fear once lived.
Gosh that sounds hokey at first, doesn’t it?
Admittedly, I feel a little weird typing something so “woo woo”. I mean, a sentence that includes abundance and healing, right on the coattails of using works like magic, makes me feel a bit like an icky “healing influencer” who you might see on TikTok or IG promising to solve all that ails you with crystals or oils. (That you must purchase from their online store, of course.) Ew.
But as icky as I feel writing it, it’s the truth. Good news is the truth is much more pragmatic than social media goddesses would have you think.
The bottom line is that this work has helped to solidify for me the importance of tuning in. I see the magic that can happen when we really pay attention to ourselves fully-body, mind and spirit. I always say when working with children, behavior is communication.
The same is true for adults. So, when we practice tuning in, it means we get to learn what our own actions/reactions are trying to communicate about what we need, and that can be a total game changer. I’m cooking up something great for the new year that will help us all work together to communicate with our own parts. In turn, that will help us communicate better with the world, especially those inside our homes.
In the meantime, I want to challenge us all to tune in a bit more this week. What are we feeling? Where are we feeling it? Why did that feeling start? And how did we change it? Let’s start by simply tuning in to our daily selves-fully-and see how the magic unfolds.
You got this!
xoxo, Cristie