"No Child is Too Much for Me:" Being with Wounded Parts

As of this morning, I’m halfway through my Level 2 training. This means that I’ve spent around 40 hours over the past few weeks listening to live lectures; participating in activities meant to deepen our knowledge of IFS; connecting with others in the training to process; participating in supervised triads as practitioner, client, and observer; and watching real-time, live demos of sessions facilitated by lead trainers. I have taken many (many) IFS trainings, and this is the first time that I have seriously struggled to be present.

I find myself asking myself why that is. It’s not because the content is particularly new to me, nor is it because it’s particularly dense or challenging or triggering. But a part of me kept taking me out over the past three days, making it almost impossible to focus on the material unless I am actively engaged in a practice session. So, something is happening.

I always engage in these kinds of trainings as both a person dedicated to my own healing path and as a practitioner who hopes to use what I learn about myself and others to help people. Yesterday, it was my turn to be the client in the supervised triad. My system can present in a complicated manner when I am a client; I often get a menu of several potential trailheads to follow, and there are often parts with strong opinions mixed in there with protectors who want to avoid vulnerability at all costs.

Yesterday, after surveying my inner landscape a bit, with the support of the person in the practitioner role, we turned my attention towards the part of me who was making it hard to be present in the training. And, wow. Did things ever get…..interesting. Almost immediately, I was dropped into a scene. There was no color, just an ominous presence directing vitriol at a small child hunched over herself, on her knees on the floor. My parts are often uncooperative with standard IFS protocol, and yesterday was no exception. I felt bad for the person in the practitioner role because, as a part said through me, I am a bad client. This part thought, I am notoriously difficult. No one can help me. With guidance, I was able to insert myself between the inner abuser and the child, to let them know I was there. Once I broke their connection, I started filling with very big feelings. A vast, deep sadness; a desperate, pleading need to be understood as good; a sense of not knowing what to do except whatever others needed me to do; a teeth-gritting sense of “let’s just get through this session.” I felt these all come through my body, as it shook, got cold, cried, trembled, and locked up. There was a sense of such freedom at just being able to express emotionally and physically. There was also fear and shame because we were in a training, others were watching, and I wasn’t supposed to be that unprofessional. I was being, as I feared, a bad client.

The standard IFS teaching when clients become flooded with emotion from parts is to ask the part to dial down the emotion. The idea is that if parts flood with emotion or sensation without their protectors having been asked for permission to go there first, there is likely to be a backlash in the system. This all makes good sense, and I’ve experienced this kind of backlash myself before. Yet, as often happens when I am in that vulnerable state, my parts got even sadder at being asked to dial it down because they felt rejected and like they were being “too much.” What ensued was a tug-of-war between my exile who wanted their intense feelings to be fully felt and known and a shame-filled manager who wanted to suppress the eruption of feeling to save face in a professional setting. When I spoke to this, I was reminded to find even a sliver of Self energy. I found space, for sure, but my Self energy was just a presence that stayed there, holding a warm space full of light for all of this to happen, but it was not active. It just held it all, nonjudgmentally.

Then, a young part of me who didn’t know what to do took over. Despite the pain and the inability to advocate for myself or my needs, I was grateful, even relieved to be able to watch all of this play out. This little system that we opened up was showing me in real time some of the lasting vestiges of my childhood abuse. And, as someone whose system usually takes me out or shuts me down, it was such a relief to be able to feel, even if what I was feeling felt awful or overwhelming. It was so nice to just be real. After struggling to take in the care of the others with me, I eventually realized I needed to be with my hurting parts by myself for awhile, just letting them express their feelings in any way that felt right to them.

It goes against standard IFS protocol to just let my parts express fully, but I am glad I followed my system’s lead. After allowing my parts to express their pain and sadness, I sat outside in the 100-degree heat and watched as the vicious part dissolved in the light of my Self energy. Its energy slowly lifted out of the top of my head, as it pulled away from its intense berating of the child part. It no longer had a home in my system. The child part at first went to an imaginary hospital room, where she was hooked up to IVs and all sorts of tubes to get well. Later that day, she moved into a more restful bedroom somewhere in my psyche, where she remains, gathering her strength. My skeptical parts are still wondering if what happened was real, but I can feel a shift inside myself. My heart is more open, I feel softer and gentler, and my inner world seems to have slowed down a bit because of this experience.

In a recent podcast, IFS therapist Einat Bronstein speaks to this instruction to ask exiles to wait or dial down their feelings. “People are often worried about flooding,” she says, noting that she has become increasingly uncomfortable with the instruction of asking exiles not to flood: “It’s almost like, it felt like, here we are, finally connecting with this part that has been isolated and alone and abandoned, and we’re coming with all these conditions. Ok, well, you know, don’t be flooding, don’t be too much, scale yourself down, taper it down, say things slowly. You know, it was kind of like, it’s a young part, it’s already been holding so much, and here we are coming with all these conditions and terms and yes and but, and so I realized that I am not comfortable doing that and that we’re coming to the exiles sort of with an open spaces like show up the way you need to show up. And sometimes, it will be just a little girl telling you a story, very manageable, and sometimes it can be a pretty intense experience.” She continues, noting that clients may cry or freeze or tremble and says, “the piece here is that the client is not flooded. Self is not flooded. Parts get flooded. So certain protectors that always try to keep that exile at bay and like things to be neatly wrapped and under control, those protectors are looking now in horror at those exiles showing their pain, showing their tears, showing their trauma somatically or otherwise. [. . .] These protectors are overwhelmed. They are shocked and they are flooded. They are like Oh my gosh, the worst has happened. It came out of its cell, and now it’s all over the place. Self does not get flooded. Self is like this spacious, spacious container of compassion, of courage, of Of course. Self can contain any part of the system. It’s like this optimal parent: No child is too much for me.”

 My personal experience of my wounded parts feeling even worse with standard IFS protocol is why I sometimes practice a bit differently than some. If a client begins to show emotion in a session, I might simply ask “is this emotion OK with you right now?”  Sometimes, I might add something like, “because it is OK with me.” And clients often say yes, sometimes sounding a bit surprised at their own answer. If they say no, that’s great, too, because it just means there’s a protective part there that we can then get to know and understand its concerns about the emotion. When wounded parts show up in sessions, I might just say, “There’s a lot of sadness here, huh?” I do this to let protectors and exiles know that emotions are OK, that we can meet them, together, without fear. I do this because when my wounded parts begin to express their feelings, I need a human in the room with me, to help my parts let me hold Self energy for whatever magic is about to happen.