How I learned to love myself
Internal family systems therapy, my parts, and how you can do it too
The prequel to how I got out of bed.
Two days after I first put words out onto my friends screens, a friend who read them asked me…
“How did you fall in love with yourself?”
The words felt silly out loud and I teetered on a seesaw of awe and self doubt. I asked if they were making fun of me. “Why would I ever do that?”
I said, it’s okay, we’re safe to my insecure part. I helped her sit her sweet little self back down. This process took me seconds instead of hours like it has before. She sat quietly, trusting me, and I turned back outwards to my friend.
I stumbled again because I didn’t know exactly where to start. It feels so obvious, but… where did I start? Or where did it start actually working?
“Do you know about Internal Family Systems?”
How I found IFS or Parts Work
Personal story time, feel free to skip if you’re just looking for the facts facts facts!
In January of 2023 I finally cracked open from therapy, after having been in and out of it since 2016. I had been hammering, sometimes wildly, sometimes slowly, at my walls for years and making cracks, but in January, when I met my first part, I felt like my PlaySkool hammer was suddenly replaced with a construction-grade sledge and I had unknowingly built the strength to swing it.
I struggled deeply with insecurity. I was in both a relationship and a job that made me incredibly insecure. I also knew that this wasn’t the first relationship or job I had been insecure in. I had seen the pattern. The previous six years of therapy had at least shown me that. Part of me thought that perhaps this was just me. Incessantly unsatisfied, insecure, and anxious.
But I wanted to fix it. I just wanted to NOT be insecure and weak and desperate and emotional and pathetic. I had gone in circles with my coach about how to feel more secure and did not understand why I wasn’t. I like myself. I know I’m powerful! I can do anything I put my mind to. Why am I so insecure?
Out loud I said, “I just need to get rid of this insecurity and unsureness so I can change the world!”
My coach smiled, and said something like,
“I love that ambitious part of you.” She let that land. Made me sit in the kindness. “I think I get to speak to her a lot. And I’m noticing there’s another side of you, maybe a softer side. A more fragile side that feels emotions deeply. A side that feels unsafe and insecure and maybe weak.”
“I guess so.”
“And you hate her.”
The biggest, ugliest, most childish cry erupted out of me. I have never more than shed a few tears in my years in therapy, always saving them for my shower. But the idea of hating part of myself hurt. Deeply. It hurt the part of me that hated and it hurt the part of me that had been bearing the brunt of that hate. All of a sudden I could see this part of me. She was young and vulnerable and soft and she was scared. Of me.
I had always viewed my insecurity as a negative trait I could overcome. And I was frustrated I couldn’t fix it. But when I shifted the narrative slightly - when I learned insecurity was just a part of me having a natural reaction to my past, ambitious me softened.
My coach said something like,
“Part of you feels unsafe, insecure, and weak. The other part of you is coming in hot and wants to figure it out. You are frustrated with yourself because (and I, Stephanie, am going to break these out here because each is really important)...
You don’t believe there’s a legitimate reason for the insecure feelings.
The part of you that feels unsafe is not going to respond to your louder part because she needs compassion and vulnerability. She probably holds a lot of truth and you can’t get rid of her or pretend not to see her - you have to help her heal. Why does she feel not sure of herself? Is she holding secrets that the world can’t know about Stephanie?”
The revelations here were huge for me.
One thing that echoed in my core was that my insecurity and anxiousness weren’t personality traits to get rid of. They were real reactions by a part of me to the life I had lived so far. There were reasons for them - they were explicable. That they were rooted in reality, and attached to part of me, immediately made them harder to judge and hate.
It was time to get curious compassionately. Compassion for my parts changed my life. This was how I started parts (IFS) work.
Okay okay, what’s Internal Family Systems though?
First, I am not a scholar on this topic. This is my own version of IFS and how it has worked for me. This is not a research paper and I am not a psychotherapist. Kthanks for not suing me and knowing you can continue your own research if you want to, loveyousomuch.
IFS is basically the concept that we each have parts, or sometimes called “sub-personalities”. Parts is the term I like because I was already using it before I knew what IFS was.
Part of me is really scared to do that thing I want to do. Part of me really wants a piece of cake right now.
It just makes sense.
Therapy uses IFS to help identify, accept, and heal the different parts of ourselves and heal the parts that are wounded. Many parts hold trauma and in recognizing them we make space for them to heal.
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)
You may have heard of parts if you know anything about Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously referred to as multiple personality disorder). That’s just parts who don’t communicate with each other.
A year or so ago, I watched a docuseries called the Sides of Jane on Hulu, in which Jane lets us into her experience with DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder. It’s eye opening, heart-wrenching, vulnerable, brave sad, and also deeply hopeful. I am in awe of Jane’s vulnerability. When I watched it, I felt like I too had parts. But I quickly wrote those feelings off as tokenizing her much more serious experience. I do not have the trauma she does and I don’t have the totally dissociative experience she does. So the parts didn’t feel like they could be true either.
But they are. We all have parts and working with our parts is just another version of therapy. It happens to be a version that really resonates with me. Probably because storytelling is how I understand the world.
Why does parts work help?
I understand myself better and I like myself better.
For me personally, recognizing and understanding things has a huge impact on me. My parts help me acknowledge the reasons I react the way I do instead of judging myself so harshly. They help me make sense of my past and the way it manifests in me today. They also help me humanize and show more compassion for myself because I picture younger versions of me who need adult me to help them. They’ve shown me that everything I’ve done that I harbored shame or guilt or negative feelings about was for a reason and that reason was not “because I’m a bad person”. We did the best we could with what we had then and now we heal and do the best we can with what we know now.
I don’t hate any part of myself anymore. How can I? They’re just human.
I feel calmer because my parts feel seen and aren’t warring.
The parts of you that aren’t being heard will not lay down quietly and be ignored. They will cause anxiety, insecurity, depression, racing thoughts, numbing behaviors like excessive alcohol or drug use. And they will be stored in the body creating pain, fatigue, and more. They will not be calm until they are seen and healed. When I am calm I can do all of the other things I need to do to be a person like exercise and eat and get out of bed.
I’ve reconnected with my intuition.
When I understand parts of me, their needs start to overlap. They integrate, my nervous system is more regulated, and I feel calm and clear about what I want and where I am going. It provides me clarity of purpose and has put me back in touch with my intuition. I know what my intuition feels like again. My intuition is when my parts can be calm and agree.
My parts
I’m sure I haven’t met all of my parts yet and I don’t really rush them out.
I have a very anxious part. She is not sure the world is safe and I constantly have to reassure her that it is. She’s just a baby who was allergic to the giant dogs in her house, but no one knew it. No one knew why she couldn’t breathe, and despite her parents doing everything they could to help, babies don’t understand intention. So she still harbors a lot of fear about whether the world is safe for her.
I have an innocent part who loves to create and write that I call the poet. She’s my most sensitive part and is maybe eight. She really loves puppies. She’s not always sure if there’s space for her with so many louder parts. But there is
I have an inner critic who works so so hard to keep me safe, but sometimes she does that by telling me things will go poorly or I am not good enough. She’s a teenager and she dreams were made of glass. She doesn’t want any more to shatter, but sometimes she thinks that means we can’t have any at all.
My ambitious part is in her twenties. She wants to change the world and I think she can. She charges ahead and pulls the other parts along, sometimes without asking them if they want to come.
I have a part who is a warrior, fierce and self righteous and sometimes pretty full of herself, but her intentions are good. She also DOES NOT CRY because CRYING IS FOR LITTLE GIRLS. I have a part who cries at sunsets and interactions between dads and their daughters because they’re just too beautiful. I have a part who is insecure and thinks people will leave her because she has been left and doesn’t want us to feel that again. I have a part who finds immense safety in depression and watching reality tv for hours on the couch. I’m still figuring out how to support her, but she’s sitting at the table instead of underneath it now.
I have more parts I probably haven’t even dug into yet.
They all sit at my table. I love to sit there with them now that I know the table exists and they’ve been waiting for me.
How do I meet my parts?
Unconscious parts can be found in a couple of ways. Here’s two I know, but I’m sure there are more.
One way is to look at what you judge in other people. You will generally find a quality of yourself that a certain part is holding. I have judged, even hated, people for being too loud before, but that is a part of me who is scared to take up space and jealous of people who do. I used to find that I couldn’t stand sensitive people. I hated the way they sighed and spoke softly and looked at me for affirmation. I wanted them to toughen up and thought they were weak little bitch-babies. Welp, one of my parts is the sweetest, most sensitive, tenderest little thing and she did not feel safe being her tender self so she covered it up with toughness for years… decades.
But I’ve mostly found them when they’ve needed to be found. I’ll be stuck or frustrated and unable to deal with a reaction or emotional response that I don’t quite understand or like. I’m lucky to have a coach that helps me through these moments.
My coach will ask me how the emotion I’m frustrated about feels in my body and then I try to find the first time I felt that feeling. This is how I’ve found many of my parts. They have been sitting on my childhood bed scribbling in a journal, chatting in the cafeteria, taking harsh peer feedback in a vocal class, arguing with my Dad, writing manifestos, crying in a crib unable to breathe, standing up for themself on a porch in Washington DC, falling down internet stalking rabbit holes, and wordless in my parents driveway.
How do I work with my parts?
The first time I ever spoke to a part of me was an exercise assigned to me by my therapist at the end of the session I described at the beginning of this post. We had found this sensitive, younger part of me who was afraid to speak up, who didn’t think there was space for her. It was my job as the adult to find out what had happened to her, what she was scared of, what she needed to say, and what she needed to hear.
This was beyond me. How the fuck? “Am I just supposed to talk to myself?”
“Yeah, basically. You could try journaling. Open a notebook and write as yourself with one hand and use the other hand and other side of the notebook to respond as your other part.”
This sounded so silly, but I was eager. I was in my bedroom at my parents house because it was the holidays and I found an old black and white composition notebook. I wrote
hi
on the right side with my right hand. Then I switched the pencil to my left hand and wrote
on the other side of the notebook.
The little hi, scratched onto paper by my non-dominant hand, looked like the slow and timid handwriting of a kid. I cried and wrote 5 more pages back and forth.
Sometimes I still write to and with my parts, but more often now I invite them to write or speak themselves. I journal and let them say what they need to say. Sometimes I will literally open my notebook and write… okay who wants to speak today? and wait to see who shows up.
You all stood next to me as I finally talked with my couch self the other day. Sometimes it happens just like that.
My parts have spoken to me about their fears, their shame, their guilt, and their insecurities. And together we are able to heal those things.
If that feels a little woo-woo for you…
It did to me too at first, but now I love it. For a more practical step by step type of approach (that I can do without prodding from my coach) I also use the RAIN method and compassionate curiosity to help discover and heal my parts. You can read more about how to do it here.
Also know, this is just one tactic. It is so far from the only tactic, but it really resonated with me. If it doesn’t resonate with you, that is OKAY. There are other ways to do the same work, I promise.
I love love LOVE my parts.
My parts feel like my own home team. My parts show up so clearly to me now and they help me offer myself so much compassion. Literally 5 minutes ago, for example, I am part of a facebook group that I am obsessed with (I’m also proudly a moderator!) and I was trying to share some of the stuff I’ve been writing here in that group. Another moderator kept removing it calling it self promotion and spam and I got SO MAD. Mad and sad and embarrassed and frustrated. And I started to cry. I cried harder when the admin of the group said I could keep posting the stuff I wanted to.
I would have previously seen this reaction as fucking hysterical. Like why am I a madwoman who cries at everything.
But I can see my parts in it and they are just so fucking sweet. My sensitive part who cried is not weak. She wants to help SO BADLY. She is so earnest and lovely. She wants to be seen so badly. All of my parts want to help her get what she wants. My teenage part went on a mild mannered tirade at the other moderator. Rather than embarrassed, I was understanding of her anger and also a little proud. She is so quick to defend my other parts. She’s passionate and fierce and very good at arguing her point. And she has learned through some healing that she doesn’t have to go full blown explosion either.
I love my parts. They are welcome at my table now. They don’t have to hide. Your parts are all welcome too.
Moments of alignment, oh my god.
A few months ago I was in Sedona. I was driving my rental car whipping around the curves between Flagstaff and the red rocks of this spiritual city. I had just stopped at a cafe and had an awesome breakfast sandwich in a lush back garden. The windows were down, music was playing, and my little dog was napping in the passenger seat. And I could feel my chest expand. And an image popped into my mind of all my parts at the table right in the center of my chest. They were all on one side, looking out a giant window into the red rocks of Sedona. No one was speaking. They were all just breathing and smiling and being. This was one of the most incredible feelings of my life. And they come more often every day. Another one will happen when I push that little blue publish button in the corner of this screen.
Thank you for sharing this. I may try the right hand/left hand parts talking :). The way you wrote about it helped me feel more patience and compassion for those insecure parts of me as well.
A little disclaimer as I continue to learn: I am not really doing traditional IFS protocol. My therapist and I have done some "IFS lite" work and I have taken what resonated and developed my own version of working with my parts that works for me. It's heavily storytelling based and it's changing my life - but it is NOT traditional IFS by the books. ❤️