Why Every Part of You Deserves Love and Understanding

Image by Tashi Nyima

Let me ask you a question: How do you feel about yourself, in general? I hope you mostly like and approve of yourself. But the opposite may be true – you may really dislike yourself and find it hard to treat yourself with anything approaching kindness. Sadly, this is especially likely to be true if you have a trauma history, because that often scrambles our sense of ourselves.

But even if you’re lucky enough to like yourself, most of the time, I bet there are parts of you that you’re not so keen on. Your inner Critic, for example. As I often say to my clients, nobody loves their Critic! That’s because this part of us often treats us harshly, or is highly demanding, pushing us way too hard with a long lists of shoulds (‘You should be doing better than this, what’s wrong with you?’ or ‘You should be thinner/smarter/richer/more popular/harder-working…’).

We may also feel negatively towards parts that make us do stuff we find shameful, embarrassing or destructive in our lives. The part that makes us drink too much. The parts that tell us to gamble, smoke weed, work obsessively, pick the same kind of unsuitable person over and over. Nobody loves these guys.

No bad parts

But as I have written before in these posts, we need to understand that there are no bad parts (such an important idea that Dr Richard Schwartz, founder of Internal Family Systems therapy, used it as the title of one of his books). Even what are called ‘extreme’ parts in IFS, like the ones listed above, genuinely mean well. It can be hard to see that sometimes, but every part of you is either holding some kind of pain or trying to protect you from it. And the weed-smoking one, or the gambling one, are just trying to help you numb, soothe or avoid painful emotions.

It’s why people get home from an uber-stressful day and say, ‘God I need a glass of wine!’ Or why people rush out from high-pressure meetings to smoke a hasty cigarette. In both cases that’s a soother-type part, helping the person deal with painful/stressful feelings. Now this doesn’t mean that we should drink like fishes or smoke 40 a day! Of course not. We may need to help these parts change, or set limits on them, but it’s imperative that we do that collaboratively, with compassion, or it just doesn’t work.

That’s why people get sober and relapse, over and over. Or why many smokers quit again and again and again, but always end up back on the baccy. If you want to make deep, long-lasting changes in your life, you have to work with these parts, not against them. You need to understand why they are making you drink/smoke/work/gamble. There is always a reason – and that reason is usually helping you with some kind of pain.

Easier said than done

I’m well aware that it’s much easier for me to write some encouraging words in a blog post than for you to actually change. To change the way you behave, day in and day out. Or the way you interact with these parts of yourself you may dislike, or even despise. It is not easy – take it from someone who spends their whole working life trying to help people change.

But it is doable. And this is one reason I recorded a new guided meditation recently – Sending Loving-Kindness to Every Part of You: IFS Meditation. I blended the classic Buddhist metta (loving-kindness) practice with the IFS approach, to help you develop greater feelings of self-acceptance, self-kindness and self-compassion for every part of you, even the tricky parts.

I’m pleased with this one, so I very much hope it helps.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Your Inner Critic: Friend or Foe?

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We all have an inner critic – the part of us that gives us self-critical messages. This critic (which I call the Critical Part) is on a spectrum of harshness, from mild at one end (‘Come on Dan, that wasn’t a great blog post, was it?’) to harsh and aggressive at the other (‘Why do you always screw everything up Dan? You’re such a pathetic loser!’). The view in mainstream psychology is that this self-criticism is harmful, bad and must be silenced to stop us getting stressed, anxious or depressed.

Of course, if your Critical Part is at the harsher end of that spectrum, the messages it gives you will make you feel some kind of bad – sad, hurt, anxious, stressed, unconfident or ashamed. But having tried many different approaches to help people with this hurtful inner dialogue, I now believe that trying to silence the Critical Part just doesn’t work. And getting angry with it, or trying to get rid of that part of you doesn’t work either.

The critic is part of you

As I often say to my clients, it’s like really hating your left hand. You might not like it. You may even want to get rid of it. But it’s part of you! So whether you like it or not, it’s not going anywhere. Same goes for your Critical Part – like it or loathe it, this is a part of your inner world. You can’t get rid of it, any more than you can your hand. So it’s better to understand, even have compassion for this part.

So how do we do that? First, let’s try and understand its origin and function in your inner system. I believe most Critical Parts come online when you are around five years old. That’s the age when you start to get cognitive, when your brain has developed enough that you can start asking big questions, like ‘Who am I?’ or ‘Why does mummy love my sister more than me?’. You not only wonder about who you are as a person, what you’re good or bad at, what you like and dislike, but also start comparing yourself to your siblings and friends.

Protecting you from HARM

At this age you also figure out what makes your parents treat you well or badly. For example, if your dad gets drunk and screams at you for tiny mistakes, you learn to avoid making any mistake (like spilling your drink, or leaving toys scattered about the floor) that will trigger a scary, hurtful attack. I think that Critical Part is the hypervigilant inner guard dog, that barks at you when you make a mistake that might get you hurt.

Throughout your life, this part becomes more entrenched until, as an adult, it just seems like you. But it’s not – it’s just a part of you, that is barking at you when it thinks you have done or are about to do something that will get you hurt in some way (usually attacked or rejected). If we think about the Critical Part this way – that it’s actually protective – it seems a lot less like some big, scary monster.

And we can have compassion for it too, because in my consulting room I often see these parts freaking out. Your Critical Part is usually anxious, scared, hypervigilant for danger. Because of course it’s just part of you, so if you get hurt, it gets hurt.

Love every part of yourself

I wrote in a recent post that we need to develop love and compassion for every part of us, even the parts we dislike or hate. And that absolutely includes the Critical Part, because the only way to turn the volume down on that hurtful inner criticism is to reassure this part that it’s OK, we hear it, and we’re perfectly capable of handling whatever it thinks we can’t handle – scary boss, angry partner, presentation at work, or whatever the threatening person or situation may be. I will guide you in exactly how to do this in an upcoming post.

I am dedicated to helping people be kinder and more compassionate to themselves, so I hope this helps you, a little, with that hard and lifelong work.

Warm wishes,

Dan