The self and selves
Sometimes it feels impossible to navigate our internal world and to find the words - or answers - that we crave to explain our situation. When things feel muddled or murky for a client, I encourage the use of ‘part work.’ Accepting that we are multifaceted and often have conflicting feelings or thoughts can bring an openness to the work of therapy. It allows us to acknowledge that we are not fixed beings. Nor that we need to have a single, compelling explanation for our struggles. By embracing the idea that we have multiple emotional parts within us, we can approach these with curiosity in an effort to untangle confusion or frustration. When I first experienced this technique in my own therapy, I found that it allowed me to focus on a particular viewpoint or feeling without being as easily distracted by opposing thoughts or critical analysis. It enabled me to slow down the process of working out how I felt and to explore each part more deeply.
When I work with clients to explore these parts, it can be useful to apply a visual image or quality to them. I have worked with clients where parts of themselves appear as clouds of smoke, a black box or a 4 year old version of themselves. Depending on what role a part plays in a client’s emotional state, it can be confronting to meet with it so directly. This is where the role of the therapist is particularly meaningful. It is important to calm the nervous system before engaging in this inner work and I see my job as maintaining a sense of safety and guidance throughout this exploration. By honing in on these parts, and sometimes engaging in dialogue with them, I have seen clients reach powerful realisations or ‘breakthrough moments’ about how they have come to feel the way they do.
I have observed that part work also decreases the chance of inner-judgement. The process of allocating emotions or thoughts to distinct parts of ourselves allows us to temporarily project them onto the third. This can be helpful if working with emotions that we judge in ourselves; it is often easier to speak about something we believe to be ugly if it lives outside of ourselves. For instance, ‘I was pleased when my brother failed to get into university’ is more difficult to accept as belonging to us than ‘a part of me was pleased when my brother failed to get into university.’ This is compounded by the next phase of exploration, which might go on to examine how painful this part had found the pressure of being the youngest child in an academic family, where older siblings’ performances had felt like an enormous expectation to live up to. By acknowledging that only a part of us felt this way, and by applying curiosity and exploration, we are more able to welcome in compassion or forgiveness for this piece of us.
Thinking of ourselves as multiple parts also supports one of the key philosophies within psychotherapy, which is that there can be multiple truths, meanings and perspectives at once. It discourages us from feeling we should fix ourselves to one state or explanation, that we need to tie things up in a neat bow. By acknowledging that we are multi-faceted beings with many selves, we allow ourselves to be complex and have contradictions, rather than fighting this truth.
