The Parts We Judge Most May Need the Most Love

Most of us have qualities we would be quite happy to live without.

We may have spent years trying to become less anxious, reactive, sensitive or controlling. We would like to stop procrastinating, anticipating disaster or needing quite so much reassurance. The inner critic is especially unwelcome, although our disapproval doesn't appear to have discouraged it.

By adulthood, many of us have developed a fairly elaborate internal sorting system. Some qualities belong to the person we are pleased to be: generous, capable, perceptive, independent, thoughtful. Others are treated more like unfortunate defects in an otherwise promising design.

Internal Family Systems unsettles this arrangement because it begins from a different premise. Rather than dividing our inner lives into the healthy bits and the troublesome ones, IFS asks us to become curious about how those troublesome responses came to exist. Behaviour can be painful, disruptive and completely out of proportion to what is happening now without being meaningless.

There is often a history behind what we have come to dislike about ourselves.

What made sense then

A child doesn't need to understand family dynamics to adapt to them. She notices what happens when somebody is angry and whether mistakes are tolerated. She learns how reliable affection is, what happens when she has needs, and whether the adults around her can manage their own emotions. Without necessarily thinking about any of this consciously, she becomes increasingly skilled at being the particular version of herself that works best in that environment.

Perhaps it is safer to stay quiet. Perhaps being useful earns warmth, achievement brings approval or humour changes the atmosphere when things become tense. Some children become very good at disappearing; others become accomplished at anticipating. A child who can read the emotional temperature of a room may acquire a skill that looks remarkably like maturity.

Years later, we tend to judge these qualities according to what they are doing to us now rather than what they once did for us.

Perfectionism is exhausting, but carefulness may have mattered enormously in a home where mistakes carried too much weight. Hypervigilance can make it difficult to relax, while also having developed from an exquisitely accurate awareness of other people's moods. An ability to anticipate everybody else's needs may eventually become so automatic that nobody, including the person doing it, thinks to ask whether she wants to.

Sometimes we are rewarded for an adaptation long before we suffer from it.

The capable child becomes the capable woman, and capability is useful. People admire it. They rely on it. Quite often they benefit from it. The difficulty may not become apparent until she realizes that being able to carry a great deal has somehow turned into an expectation that she always will.

This is one of the complications of protective patterns: they are rarely all bad. If they were, we might have abandoned them much sooner. They often arrive with abilities, identities and ways of moving through the world that we genuinely value.

The question is less whether a quality is good or bad than whether we still have any choice about using it.

What happens when we make an enemy of a part

IFS uses the language of parts to describe something most of us already recognize in ordinary conversation. Part of me wants to go and another part absolutely does not. I trust this person, yet something in me remains wary. I want to finish the project and have nevertheless developed a passionate interest in doing almost anything else.

The model goes considerably deeper than naming conflicting moods, but there is something important in recognizing that contradiction itself is not pathology. We contain different wishes, fears, loyalties and responses because human beings are multiple in this very ordinary way.

The difficulty is that we tend to extend considerably more sympathy to some of those responses than others.

A procrastinating part interfering with something important may be protecting against overwhelm, exposure or the possibility of failing at something that matters. An inner critic can be brutal while sincerely believing that criticism prevents humiliation or complacency. Anger may be defending something more vulnerable that has had little success getting our attention by quieter means.

Understanding any of this does not require us to approve of the behaviour.

This is an important distinction because compassion is sometimes mistaken for permission. A protective strategy can damage relationships, distort decisions and keep us repeating something we genuinely want to change. If I understand why I become controlling when frightened, I am still responsible for what my controlling behaviour does to other people. If I know where my anger comes from, the people around me are not therefore obliged to absorb it.

But responsibility and contempt are not the same thing.

When we hate a response in ourselves, we tend to approach it with some version of How do I get rid of this? The anxious part becomes one more problem to solve. We attack the critic for criticizing us. We are ashamed of being needy, furious about being sensitive and impatient with the part that is apparently incapable of becoming less impatient.

The original difficulty is still there, but now an internal relationship has formed around it, and that relationship can be surprisingly hostile.

IFS offers the possibility of doing something different: not allowing every part to dictate our behaviour, but not requiring it to justify its existence before we are willing to listen either.

The parts we'd rather not claim

This becomes harder when we move beyond the parts of ourselves that are relatively easy to explain sympathetically.

Fear is understandable. Grief generally receives some kindness. Even perfectionism has acquired a certain cultural respectability. It is much easier to say, “I'm working with my perfectionist part” than to announce that we are currently getting acquainted with our jealousy, resentment, spite, neediness or rather embarrassing desire to be admired.

An inner child is considerably easier to put on a book cover.

Yet a psychologically mature person does not cease having undignified reactions. If anything, personal work can create a new problem when we become attached to the identity of being someone who shouldn't have them.

We don't stop feeling envy because we disapprove of envy. We become envious and ashamed of being envious. Resentment doesn't disappear because it conflicts with our image of ourselves as generous. We may simply become less willing to acknowledge it, which is not the same thing.

There can be information in these reactions, although I am reluctant to turn every unattractive feeling into a secretly beautiful messenger from the psyche. Sometimes an unkind thought is an unkind thought. We are allowed to be ordinary human beings without discovering a profound therapeutic meaning behind every lapse in graciousness.

Still, jealousy may tell us something about what we want. Resentment may appear where we have repeatedly agreed to something we didn't want to give. The desire for recognition can become particularly charged in someone who has spent years being overlooked or who learned that wanting attention was itself suspect.

Curiosity allows us to investigate these possibilities without rushing to either justify the feeling or prosecute ourselves for having it.

That middle territory interests me enormously.

It leaves room for responsibility, but also for honesty. We can acknowledge that something in us is petty, frightened, furious or desperate for approval without deciding that this is the truest thing about us.

When understanding doesn't make something disappear

One of the more humbling features of personal work is discovering that insight doesn't necessarily produce immediate cooperation from the rest of us.

We can understand where a fear came from and still feel it. We can recognize an old pattern while participating in it. We can have spent years developing a more compassionate relationship with ourselves and then discover, under enough pressure, that an old critic has retained both our address and an impressive amount of material.

This isn't evidence that the work hasn't worked.

Some responses were formed through repeated experience, often over many years. It makes sense that they are not entirely reorganized by our intellectual understanding of them. A part that expects rejection, for example, may need more than an explanation that the people in our life now are different. Trust develops through what happens repeatedly in relationship, including our relationship with ourselves.

This is where compassion becomes more substantial than simply thinking kind thoughts.

What happens when the anxious part appears again? What happens when we make the mistake we promised ourselves we wouldn't make? How do we respond when jealousy, neediness or the old desire to please everyone arrives after we thought we had become considerably more evolved?

We are building an internal relationship in those moments.

If the response is immediate disgust or exile, the message is familiar: certain versions of you are welcome here and others are not.

If instead we can become interested in what has happened, take responsibility where responsibility is required and remain present to ourselves while doing it, something different is being practised.

Not indulgence. Relationship.

What love might mean here

I am cautious with the language of loving all our parts because it can very easily become another impossible standard.

There are moments when liking a particular part of ourselves would require considerable imagination. I don't think we need to manufacture affection we don't feel, nor pretend that every internal response is charming once properly understood.

Love, in this context, can be much less sentimental.

For me, it has more to do with refusing abandonment.

We can dislike what happens when a part takes over and remain willing to know it. We can regret our behaviour and repair what needs repairing without turning that regret into a verdict on our worth. We can ask a protective part to step back without requiring it to disappear.

Over time, the relationship can become less adversarial. The critic may still have opinions. Anxiety may continue to anticipate. The part that learned to keep everybody happy may notice other people's moods before remembering to check her own. The aim is not necessarily an internal world in which nobody ever gets upset.

IFS uses the term unblending for the experience of having some space between ourselves and a part. Something in me is frightened, rather than I am frightened and fear is now the entire truth of this moment. A part of me desperately wants this person's approval, rather than allowing that desire to determine what I do next.

That space gives us more choice, but I think it also gives us something else.

Dignity.

We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives trying to become the person we think we should be. Inevitably, certain qualities don't make the final cut. We attempt to improve them, overcome them, heal them or, failing all of that, keep them somewhere out of sight.

They rarely disappear because we have stopped approving of them.

Perhaps the work is not to reach a point where we finally love every part of ourselves equally. I am not sure that is either necessary or particularly realistic.

It may be enough to stop making belonging conditional.

To become a person with whom even the less flattering parts of us are allowed to have a relationship.