The best parts of you

A big moment on my healing journey came as I was experimenting with a journaling process designed to support healing chronic pain.

One morning, this journaling process released a huge amount of emotional energy. A dam broke and material that had been suppressed for almost half a century flowed out of my body.

As I let the waves of emotion released in my writing roll through me, I realized that I had spent most of my life trying to fix or get rid of these parts of myself that were carrying so much emotional charge.

 In a moment, I saw how hard I had worked in therapy and life to “get rid” of these rather inconvenient parts of myself. I had seen symptoms like physical pain, anxiety, worry, fear, confusion, anger and addiction as problems to be solved. If they could only be eliminated, I would be normal and cheerfully participate in the life milestones that seemed to work for everyone else.

 I worked hard at healing myself, but by healing, what I was trying to do was to create a surface illusion of what our culture tells us is “normal”. All my efforts were geared towards fitting in, looking successful, and appearing well. Not actually being well. Big difference. In the words of Julia Roberts: HUGE!

 To achieve this, which I did quite successfully, I was using massive amounts of energy to shut out difficult feelings. I spent years trying to outthink, outperform, out study, outrun, out “therapy”, out meditate, out yoga, out recover, out-organize, out support other people in a desperate attempt to avoid my inconvenient parts. I was disowning those parts of me that did not fit into my narrow view of what a normal, successful person was.

 And while we can fool ourselves some of the time, my body was never going to let me continue with these efforts without consequence. My crippling migraines and other pain symptoms grew more persistent, no matter how much treatment I sought out. No matter how together and satisfactory I felt my life was, the symptom of physical pain kept poking through. I believe our bodies can be the truest compass of our life, showing clearly what our minds can’t quite grasp.

 That morning, somehow, I was able to break through. I let go of effort and was simply present to the ocean of emotion that lay beneath.

 And I realized the most incredible, beautiful thing.

 A realization that truly changed my life at that moment.

 These parts of me I was so desperately trying to get rid of are the very best parts of me.

 They are the most sensitive, the most connected to reality, the most present, the most intuitive, the most artistic, the most talented, the most healing, the most awake parts. They are the most beautifully honest parts of me, the parts that have faithfully recorded my history so that I always know who I really am and what happened to me.

 They are the strongest parts of me, resistant to a lifetime of efforts to erase them.

The symptoms I was so desperate to solve? They were coping mechanisms, perfectly constructed for my needs. While they may have looked like problems to me, they were solutions. Solutions that had kept me going, allowed me to continue living and loving, and creating despite some intense trauma. Brilliant, loving, and life-giving solutions. 

 It was one of those moments where everything changes. Deep love and understanding for myself arose spontaneously.

 There is such magic in our internal world. Realizing how beautiful my unwanted self was expanded my internal landscape so I had the capacity to allow the terrible, difficult, tortured feelings those parts were burdened with to flow through my body. I was able to tend to them with kindness, understanding and compassion.

 Months after this experience I came across the ideas expressed in Internal Family Systems, a form of psychotherapy developed by a man named Richard Schwarz.

 This brilliant model of our internal world proposes that we have parts of ourselves that take on the role of “protectors”. These are the parts that work hard to manage in the world. In my case, I had a lot of protector parts busy with my career, self-development, spirituality, and healing.

 In his latest book “no bad parts” he writes: “…protectors consume most of your attention, they drown out and keep the more sensitive and loving parts of you exiled.”

 In this model, those sensitive parts that have been almost destroyed by trauma and the world get locked away in our psyche and are guarded by our protectors. These exiled, sensitive parts carry terrible burdens that threaten to overwhelm us when not contained, so the protectors will do almost anything to keep them locked away.

 While I certainly gained much in my search for health and healing, I believe in a way I traded my addiction and self-destruction for a desperate search to be well.

 The world of self-development always promises newer, better versions of yourself. I believe its darker reiterations take advantage of our natural desire for growth and learning and can us on a desperate treadmill of always looking for some elusive potential.

 I saw myself as growing and getting “better” all the time, discarding my old unhelpful selves on the way and dismissing their contribution to my path.

 Now I find myself gathering them up, like a mother hen and bringing every single part of me into warmth, love, and understanding.

 The next time you blame yourself, get annoyed at yourself, feel disappointed in yourself or accuse yourself of self-sabotage I invite you to contemplate that the parts you are trying to “get rid of”, might be the best parts of yourself.

 They are either brilliant loving solutions created to protect you, or beautiful, sensitive, vulnerable parts that need protecting.

 The world we live in can be harsh and it makes sense that we might lock away the parts of ourselves that could not meet that harshness without injury. Very cleverly, we create coping strategies that may not always look “functional” to the world, but that play pivotal roles in our self-preservation. And often, all they need to back off and relax is a little love and understanding for them and the vulnerable emotions they are protecting.

 Like a hurt child or a frightened animal, these parts of ourselves need care and tending. They need to unburden their unbearable feelings in the presence of the fully resourced adult we are now. They need to be welcomed back into the whole system of who we are. 

 While the world may be difficult, we do have the opportunity to create a little less harshness inside ourselves by accepting and loving these parts and respecting the life-saving roles they have played.

 Without them, we would be nothing. 

 My only goal now: Just love the whole darn mess.