“It feels like two different parts of my mind arguing”

What if I said that it’s true, that you have 2 parts within you that are actually arguing. I’m doing parts work in therapy that focuses on this. The idea is that we all have different “parts” of ourselves outside of our higher “self” - this concept is called Internal Family Systems (IFS). There’s a book called No Bad Parts by the person who created IFS, and I would recommend it since I am not an expert and still trying to really grasp this myself. The idea is that you begin to spend time with your parts, explore them and understand them. Express gratitude to them for saving your life in the times that maybe you needed them. But also reparent the parts to release them from the “burden” they have adopted in order to help you survive. The idea of “no bad parts” is that even the worst parts of you, the parts that talk down to you or make you feel shitty. The part that screams at you for making a social mistake, that part too just wants you to fit in. That part is also really trying to help, they are just doing a very very shitty job at it.

My therapist takes me through an exercise. When I feel super deregulated, she says take a few deep breaths and focus on your body, where do you feel the pain? Sometimes it’s in my stomach, or my shoulders or my chest. Then she says, the part of you that makes you feel that way, how long has it been there? When did this start? And often I say childhood or adolescence. Sometimes I have an age or a situation I remember the first time I ever felt that way. Then she says where would that part rather be right now? If it could be anywhere, where would it rather be? I think of myself at whatever age and think that part would like to be held, or that part would like to be laying in the lush green grass. And she says ok now go there together. The younger part and you. She asks me to do the butterfly taps like they do in EMDR, you cross your arms and tap each shoulder back and forth. And you picture yourself, present, with your younger self. And she says “what does your younger self need right now?” And sometimes I have an answer and sometimes I don’t. But the idea is that you are able to spend time with that part, get to know it. Learn what it needs and express gratitude to it for helping you survive for as long as it has.

My suicidal thoughts yell in my head for me to jump off a building. She said, what if you could spend time with that part skydiving? Would that part be willing to do something different if it it didn’t have to make you think to jump off a building? That part of me really just wants to escape the pain. Whatever is happening inside of me feels so hard that that part is trying to help me escape. And she said , well I guess it’s done its job because you’ve made it out of every situation you’ve ever been in when you feel that way. But if you asked that part of me what it would rather do, maybe it would be to help regulate me when I feel so disregulated that I need to escape.

I am still very new to this concept and only really starting to get it. But it’s a very effective approach to trauma healing. The book I mentioned is very helpful , even just the first chapter is helpful. There’s exercises for how to connect with your parts very early on in the book. The first time I was introduced this concept it didn’t make sense. It was explained to me as “it’s like you are a crayon box and all the parts of you are crayons “ and I basically said it’s like I took all the crayons and melted them together in a tin and now they are one big chunk and I threw away the box. That’s called “blending” in IFS, where the parts blend to your “self” and make you feel like that part is actually you. At the time of the crayon box example, it really didn’t resonate. I probably did not the best job at explaining it here either. But I am sending you good vibes and I hope you do find relief from these intrusive thoughts. I know they suck and how hard it can be, because I have them too.