Free Books

The first three free books I’ve created are largely based on the writing I did last year as I navigated learning about trauma (personally, and in general), and considering how my relationship with my (plural) self, and other people, might work (consensually) under this new understanding – all during a global pandemic! So there are now three free books on these topics of trauma, plurality, and consent.

In future I hope to add free books of my best writing on gender, sexuality, love, and mental health, along with one about writing itself.

I thought I’d announce each free book over the coming weeks for people who follow my blog or twitter but don’t regularly check out the website.

Plurality

The first free book is all about plurality. This is the idea that we can usefully conceptualise ourselves as systems made up of interrelated parts, rather than as a singular whole ‘individual’.

The book is mostly made up of written conversations between my own parts about the concept of plurality, and how it relates to trauma, mental health, mindfulness, attachment, and more. Hopefully, along with my zine about plurality, this would be a useful introduction to people who want to engage with these ideas, or who are wondering about how to explore their own plurality. I – or rather we – are currently working on a follow-up zine about plurality as a way towards self (selves) love. Plurality and systems will also be major themes in the next graphic guide on mental health.

We hope you enjoy this first free book. More about the other ones to come…

The post Free book 1: Plurality appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

It turns out these two have a lot to say so we’ve divided the post into two: The first post dealt with understanding plurality from this trauma-informed perspective. This second post deals with working with plurality in practice. A further post to follow covers how these ideas and practices link to mindfulness.

James: Are you back with me Beastie?

Beastie: Yep, time to continue our conversation. One of the delights of plurality is that different parts have different ideas about the best ways to spend our time, so it’s been a couple of days since you and I had a chance to sit down to this.

James: Fox is off in the hills or dreaming up drawings, Max is still deep in her trauma healing, Tony needed to go swimming with friends apparently.

Beastie: And Ara seems to think that sitting still is just as valuable as all the studying and writing that you and I want to do.

James: I know right? It’s an interesting co-parenting arrangement that she and I have.

Beastie: I’m struck that teasing is probably our main inner love language. I really hope that translates in our written conversations! 

James: Me too. I’m honestly not sure it would be possible to love all of you more than I do. Teasing Tony about his ego, or Ara about her openness to woo, definitely comes from a place of deep love and respect. Like what would we do without one part who actually thinks we’re awesome most of the time, or one who is open to life’s mysteries which keep hitting us over the head?

Beastie: You get to be all mushy in this post old man, don’t worry, it’s coming.

James: Alright then Beasie, heh maybe we’ll get to see the softer side of you too.

Beastie: We’ll see about that. Anyway, to recap on the last post. In that one we explained this understanding of people as being divided into parts: each of which represents one of the survival strategies of fight, fawn, flight, freeze, and attach. Child and adolescent parts of us remain stuck in those patterns – and in the times in the past when they developed, so when we are retraumatised, or triggered, they feel like it’s all still going on.

The trick is to recognise – when we’re triggered or reactive – that it is not the whole of us who is struggling, but just a part. Then we can cultivate ‘dual awareness’ where a part who is not struggling can help the part who is. In this post we’re going to dig deeper into how we actually do that.

James: Alright, let’s do this.

No part gets left behind

Beastie: I loved this phrase in the book: no part gets left behind. It reminded me of the TV show Sense8 which was a hard plural relate for us when we watched it.

James: A cluster of people who can experience the same things and occupy the same body, who all bring different skills and struggles to the team. Dunno what was familiar about that to you Beastie.

Beastie: Gosh it’s good though. A crime it got cancelled. Oof now I’m super tempted to do an aside about which of us is closest to which character…

James: I’ll take tough Wolfgang with a hint of good-guy Will.

Beastie: Tony is obviously Lito *eye roll*.

James: Jonathan’s Capheus. Aw, I love Capheus.

Beastie: I think Fox would be closest to Kala; Max to Riley.

James: Making you Sun, of course. And leaving Ara as Nomi. I’m so intrigued whether plural experience was a part of the Wachowski’s inspiration for this show. 

Beastie: Fascinating that the cluster connect through various erotic, romantic, and close friendship bonds too, no?

James: Indeed. But we got sidetracked. Our point here was that Sense8 has that same ethos of ‘no part gets left behind’. A few times they are faced with a challenge where it makes sense to leave somebody in danger, and they insist on bringing everyone along, even when that puts the cluster at greater risk.

Beastie: And by the end it is clear the same applies to the ‘sidekicks’ as well. Everybody is equally valued, equally important.

James: I guess this is another place where we were already on it with Janina’s perspective. Ever since realising that we were seven we’ve had that sense that it’s vital to bring everyone forward equally; to regard everyone as having just as much to offer.

Beastie: Whether they have been foregrounded or backgrounded through our life, whether they are grown-up or childlike, strong or gentle.

James: Janina describes a couple of challenges in this process with clients. First they have to recognise that they have vulnerable child parts, then that they have challenging adolescent parts, who often come in to block the process in some way.

Beastie: Right. With the vulnerable children the challenge is to recognise that we really have parts to us who are that vulnerable and fragile, but they tend to be very easy to love once we’ve found them. Teenage parts are often more challenging because they can seem harsh, critical, angry, even highly destructive. This maps onto what we’ve written about elsewhere about how important it is to own the parts of us who have been victims/survivors, and the parts of us who are capable of oppressive or abusive behaviour: if we are to engage helpfully in social justice, that is.

James: The trick with the more challenging parts is to assume that they are being sensible – given the life that they’ve had – and that they are probably trying to protect the whole, or the vulnerable ones, even though it may seem like the opposite. Ring any bells Beastie?

Beastie: Yeah, teen me seemed to think the way to protect us was to scream hateful abuse at us constantly. I’m not proud.

James: But it makes sense in a life where we had to learn very complex contradictory rules about how to be in order not to be attacked or abandoned by the people around us. To have a loud inner critic to keep ‘reminding’ us of the rules was essential to survival, if not particularly pleasant.

Beastie: That’s an understatement. So Janina describes many times working with a client to take care of their frightened child parts, and then suddenly an angry, sabotaging, sceptical or destructive part pops up. The thing you can do then is to shift the work to that part, treating it just as respectfully.

James: And she suggests shifting the tone too. Child parts need a really gentle, soothing tone, and simple language. Sometimes they even communicate non-verbally. Teen parts need straightforward language. Janina suggests asking clients how they would communicate with an actual troubled teen, and going with that.

Beastie: Vulnerable child parts often want reassuring that they are safe and loved, whereas tough teen parts want to know they are respected and honoured – like war veterans – for how they helped us to survive. All parts need to be spoken with truthfully too.

James: You and Max wrote last time about how things shifted dramatically for us when we befriended you Beastie. That was a turning point, when we quit fighting you and finally embraced you.

Beastie: And we’ve kept that as our rule now. Whatever part turns up, or whatever aspect of a part, however resistant or scary, we welcome them home.

James: Janina says that when we can welcome home the hurt, lost, and lonely parts, self hatred and disconnection can transform into self-compassion.

Beastie: Again deep resonance for us. The idea of loving ourselves was entirely impossible to us as a single individual. Loving our parts from the perspective of other parts is easy.

James: The metaphor of home is helpful here too. Janina notices that child parts often feel stuck in dangerous home places of the past. She helps adult clients to literally show those parts the safer homes they inhabit now, to bring them home there.

Beastie: We do some of that. Finding a safe-enough physical home space has certainly been important to us. But we also imagine a fantasy home that we live in as separate selves. That can be a safe place to go to when things get hard, a good location for internal conversations, and a space to play in our imagination. The child parts find it soothing to imagine where each of us is in that space at the end of the day, or when they are struggling. Janina says that ‘imagined experiences of safe attachment can generate the same feelings and sensations and evoke the same attunement bliss’ as actual experiences.

Holding and hearing

James: Okay we should say more about Janina’s practice. We’ve explained that trauma responses can be understood as merging or blending with traumatised younger parts, but how do we cultivate the ‘dual awareness’ or ‘parallel process’ required to un-merge? 

Beastie: Janina describes how to do this in the therapy room: the therapist guides the client to always use the language of ‘a part of me feels…’ rather than ‘I feel…’, and then to engage in internal conversation with that part. If they start to merge, she gets the client to ask the traumatised part if they would mind sitting back a little. She explains that parts usually feel safer and more relaxed when that happens. It makes them feel unsafe to be that merged, and it is a relief to unmerge.

James: That makes sense. So the alternative to merging or blending is dual awareness. As we said last time, Janina refers to this as the ‘getting on with normal life’ part taking care of the traumatised part. In our case it is whichever part – often a parental part – who feels in the ‘C’ place: able to access compassion, clarity, calm, etc. That part looks after whichever part is in the ‘F’ place…

Beastie: …freaking out or trying to figure everything out, with the five F survival strategies.

James: Mm. And the mantra here is ‘hold and hear’. A part who is struggling needs to know that they are held safe enough, and that the other part is hearing them well. It can take a while to locate which part is struggling, to separate from them enough that they feel held, and to find the way that they like to be heard. But with practice we get used to the process of finding what works each time.

Beastie: Right, it’s like being up for being flexible and shifting the container to find out what’s needed each time. Who needs to be held and heard? Who do they need it from? What does holding and hearing look like this time? And there can often be a real sense of clicking – and nervous system relaxing – when we get there.

James: I’m also struck that this process relates to what we’re aiming for in our outer relationships now too Beastie. That move from fear/shame trauma responses to a combination of protection and connection.

Beastie: Right, the holding provides that sense of being protected enough and safe enough to come forward. The hearing is the connection piece, feeling really heard and understood.

The befriending questions

James: One piece of solid gold this book has given us are the befriending questions. That’s a set of simple questions to ask the part who is struggling.

Beastie: Every time I think it’s not going to work – that it can’t apply in this case. And pretty much every time it’s been an incredibly helpful process. There are other practices that Janina suggests too, like showing the child selves that they are safe now, or working with them to figure out which aspects of everyday life they want to engage with and which they don’t. But these befriending questions would be the central practice: the questions to ask in order to hear a part once you have got them sitting with you.

James: Here are the questions. You identify a part that is in some kind of distress. Then you ask them:

1. ‘What are you worried about if you…?’ (e.g. say ‘no’, read that message, see those people)
2. When they reply, ask them, ‘what are you worried about if [repeat exact description they gave] really does come true?’
3. When they reply, ask them, ‘if those worries that [repeat exact description they gave] really do happen, what are you worried will happen next?’ Keep repeating this question until the core fear is reached, often a fear of annihilation of self, or abandonment by others.
4. Acknowledge that fear by mirroring it back to them, then ask them ‘What do you need from me right here, right now, to not be so afraid of…?’ You’re looking for a small enough, sufficiently concrete thing that can definitely be met by you.

Beastie: Wanna role play it with me old man?

James: Oh go on then, am I talking to old struggling Beastie?

Beastie: Yep and she’s a hot mess. Somebody just assumed we’d do something for them that we really don’t want to do. She wants to tell them where to go.

James: Okay Beastie. I feel your rage and it’s welcome indeed. But are you up for exploring this a bit with me first before we do anything.

Beastie: Did you see what they did? Those fuckers. I’ve got to show them how non-consensual that is.

James: I’m so up for a conversation about what we might communicate with them in a bit, but you know when these strong responses come up it’s often a good opportunity to understand each other better. I really want to understand what’s going on for you here.

Beastie: Alright, I guess.

James: Thank-you. I promise we’re going to take this seriously.

Beastie: Okay. Ask your damn questions.

James: What are you worried about if we don’t tell them where to go immediately?

Beastie: We’ll wind up doing this thing they’re asking for, allowing them to treat us this way.

James: And if we wind up doing it: allowing them to treat us that way? What are you worried will happen if we do that?

Beastie: They’ll keep doing it more and more. 

James: And if they keep doing it more and more? What are you worried will happen next?

Beastie: I hate it.

James: What do you hate?

Beastie: It’s this image of us, with like these knives getting in, like they’re intruding on us, and there’s nothing we can do.

James: I can see it Beastie, that image. Can you put a word to it?

Beastie: Invasion, annihilation, it’s like there’ll be nothing left of us.

James: That’s spot on. You described it well. That fear we have of people treating us that way and us just being annihilated by it. Can you tell me what you need from me right here, right now, to not be so afraid of this happening?

Beastie: I get what you’re saying about not responding right away, while this is so live. But could you help me write some bullet points of what I want to convey about how we need to be treated? Then we can agree to return to those in a few days and turn that into an email if it still feels right.

James: You need to know that the rest of us are going to listen to you, to take this seriously, to make sure we’re clear that we can’t offer what they demanded from us.

Beastie: Oo now you’re going off script.

James: Phew that got pretty real actually.

Beastie: You doing okay old man?

James: Are you?

Beastie: Yeah. Maybe a little pause before we continue. Thanks for being up for that.

James: You’re very welcome.

Emotional attunement 

Beastie: Ah that’s better. What’re we on? Attunement. Great, now for the bit where you get mushy.

James: Hmph.

Beastie: So these next bits relate to what we’ve been learning about shame and trauma more widely. This sense that the aim is ‘emotional regulation’, ‘expanding the window of tolerance’, and ‘earned secure attachment’. 

What you’re trying to do is to learn how to regulate emotions that come up rather than being flooded by them, so that you can tolerate them more easily over time. That involves meeting yourself like a parent should meet a child with a tough feeling. We wrote about this particularly in the post about Pat de Young’s book on shame. She said that chronic shame was caused by not having our emotions regulated as kids, and that we could learn to do it now. That would lead us towards that ‘earned secure attachment’. 

James: Kids who aren’t emotionally regulated like that are likely to form insecure attachments with caregivers – and later others – in various ways. Kids who are emotionally regulated by their caregivers can form more secure attachments. They know that they have a safe place to return to from their explorations where they will be emotionally regulated (rather than being punished or ignored, or evoking stress in their caregiver, for example). 

This ‘earned secure attachment’ idea suggests that we can learn to do this emotional regulation for ourselves if we haven’t had it as kids. Back to the neuroscience, we are retraining our brain and our nervous system by holding and hearing those trauma responses or overwhelming emotional states.

Beastie: Which we can do because of neuroplasticity. Follow a different neural path enough times when these things happen and we’ll eventually respond to potentially triggering situations with curiosity and containment rather than overwhelm, melt down, shut down, or fragmenting.

James: So I notice you’ve called this section ‘emotional attunement’ rather than ‘emotional regulation’ Beastie, why is that?

Beastie: Still trying to avoid the mushy part James? Okay I’ll bite, it’s because of neoliberal capitalism.

James: Of course it is.

Beastie: Think about the language ‘emotional regulation’. I don’t like it. It suggests that emotions are a problem, something to be regulated – presumably by rationality – rather than being immensely valuable. There’s a disturbingly patriarchal and colonialist legacy right there. We’re watching the documentary The Century of The Self at the moment. It demonstrates the roots of the consumer capitalist model – which is responsible for climate crisis, the rich/poor divide, exploitation and dehumanisation, huge mental and physical health problems…

James: ..the eroding of real democracy, everything bad basically. 

Beastie: It’s rooted in psychoanalytic thinking, particularly the ideas of Anna Freud that people need to learn how to regulate their unconscious forces by bringing in the rational ego. Anna and co encouraged people to do this in order to conform to normality (which at the time meant a whole bunch of misogynist, homophobic, racist ways of being). And many of the people who drew on her ideas back then believed that they – as the elite – should control the irrational unconscious forces of the masses, making them into docile consumers who would cause no trouble and keep the economy going.

James: And we’re living through the terrifying end result of this approach to humanity. I can see why you’re not keen on ‘regulation’ Beastie.

Beastie: It also doesn’t accurately capture what these authors are actually describing James. I think ‘emotional attunement’ is a much better word for it.

James: Agreed. When we are holding and hearing one of us who is struggling, we’re not trying to regulate them into shutting up. In fact, trying to do that was the problem. When we used to try to repress these parts – and their feelings – that damaged us, leaving us disconnected from ourselves and from others. 

Beastie: Or the parts and their feelings just got louder and louder because they were being ignored, or ended out reacting when in such states. Not helpful either

James: So the aim of attunement is that we stay with that part, demonstrating to them how much we welcome them, how we are able to hold them, and how we are interested and committed to hearing them.

Beastie: And when we find that click moment, where they feel truly held and heard, that is emotional attunement…

James: Okay now I’ll get mushy about it. So the books we’ve been reading describe emotional attunement as like the feeling a parent gets with a child. It’s that state that a parent and child go into when the parent has figured out exactly what that child needs and has provided it.

Beastie: ‘Are you crying because you’re tired? Because you need changing? Oh no you’re hungry, here’s your bottle…’

James: And then both parent and child go into that blissful state. That’s emotional attunement.

Beastie: We had another smug moment realising we’d already got to this with each other before reading Janina’s book.

James: But that’s been the part of plurality that we’ve perhaps found most difficult – embarrassing even – to convey to others.

Beastie: Indeed. We’ve gone from not even being able to conceptualise what loving ourself could be like, to experiencing moments of deep emotional attunement with ourself, which feel precisely like that feeling of parent/child bliss, falling in love, or the afterglow of sex.

James: Indeed they sometimes actually are those things, if they’re between parts which feel a parent/child bond, a romantic bond, and/or an erotic connection.

Beastie: Tell us about your feels old man!

James: Okay well this week I had the parent/child version with Fox. They’d dragged us up to one of their favourite outside spaces and taken a bunch of pictures of flowers and animals, and we were walking home all sun-soaked and tired, and they were chatting away to me, and… honestly Beastie when it’s like that I just find it hard to believe that somebody looking at us would not see a tall man walking hand in hand with a little kid. It feels so vividly like two different people. And I looked down at them with such love and fondness, and such wonder you know? That this delightful part of us exists and wants to be with me. Is that mushy enough for you?

Beastie: You did good *grin* So I guess we’d already found our way to attunement moments with each other in various different ways. We can also get there by joking together…

James: The teasing. It’s like we’re getting to know each other better and better so those jokes come from that place of deep understanding of each of our foibles.

Beastie: Like knowing it’ll embarrass you to be so open about your feelings, for example.

James: Like that, yes.

Beastie: And we can reach a similar sense of attunement in romantic or erotic moments, whether in fantasy or reality, or the in-between.

James: The other day I pulled you up to dance with me after we finished writing.

Beastie: To Stevie Wonder no less, very smooth.

James: I love that it’s me you come to to have these conversations Beastie.

Beastie: And I love that our inner prof respects me and my ideas so much, it’s a good counterbalance to all the patriarchal bullshit we’ve had to endure.

James: I do respect you Beastie: deep respect for your ideas and how they develop our thinking.

Beastie: Okay, okay enough. So I guess we’re saying that any kind of emotional attunement you can get between parts is awesome. And specifically – drawing on Janina’s work – it’s good to aim for that when a part is struggling, in other words when any tough emotion, thought, or sensation comes up.

James: Which is a great way of flipping that experience, so that each time it happens it’s an opportunity to find attunement, and to keep moving towards that part with curiosity until we’ve found it. That’s a radical shift from any tough experience feeling like it’s a bad sign, or something we should avoid.

Earned secure attachment and inner parents

Beastie: A little more on earned secure attachment and inner parents?

James: This perhaps relates more to Pete Walker’s work on cPTSD, although Pat De Young writes about earned secure attachment too. One of the bits of Pete’s book which really stuck with us was the idea of ‘reparenting yourself and reparenting by committee.’

Beastie: That’s what we’ve been aiming at since reading his book. How to provide yourself with care and protection, and to cultivate multiple relationships where you receive that kind of care and protection too.

James: Reparenting by committee means that you don’t put that on one person – as we can so easily do in codependent-type relationships – but rather you develop your support system of people who you turn to for care and protection, as well as offering that too.

Beastie: Hold your horses James, we’ll get to plurality and external relationships in a sec.

James: Okay, okay. So the sense we have is that a key aim here is to cultivate an ‘earned secure attachment’. This would mean that we were less flooded by tough emotions and trauma responses because we would trust our own capacity to attune to ourselves, and to care-for and protect ourselves, when those things came up. Practising emotional attunement with all parts of us, in all situations, is the way of moving towards that earned secure attachment.

Beastie: And inner parent parts are pivotal in that – we think. There isn’t much about that in Janina’s book – it’s more a sense that the ‘getting on with normal life’ adult part is the inner parent. But Sarah Peynton, Pete Walker, and others have more of a sense of cultivating specific inner nurturers, protectors, or wise witnessing parts, however they describe them.

James: And I guess that’s what we have done with me and Ara.

Beastie: It almost felt like building you out of patchwork. Mm, like we said in our previous conversation James, an act of excavation and creation simultaneously: finding what was always already there, and deliberately shaping you both and bringing you forward. You feel like a combination of memories of attuned moments we had with actual family members, teachers, companion animals, etc., as well as our relationships with a few great therapists, supervisors, and mentors along the way, and a lot of examples in fiction that we draw on.

James: My starting point being queer James Bond, although now our littlest one is addicted to hospital dramas I’m becoming more of a combination of Richard Webber from Grey’s Anatomy and Daniel Charles from Chicago Med.

Beastie: Fox is bizarrely obsessed with Dr. Charles right now. 

James: Our first experience of Ara was one of emotional attunement huh? Jonathan felt that sense of being cradled, after we started our process towards gender surgery.

Beastie: Now we have that cradling feeling more and more. I guess the point here that all people have these potentials in themselves, even if woven together from the merest scraps of memories and fictional examples. And we can all work on developing and strengthening parental parts, or whatever we want to call them. Perhaps caring and protective parts is less loaded.

James: I can’t even with the shift we’ve experienced in this. A few months back we rarely felt me or Ara around much, whereas now we can have whole days where one of us is to the fore in our everyday life, and/or much of our time is spent in dialogue between one of the two of us and other parts.

Outer relationships: Delegating our parts to others

Beastie: I think this gets us to the final issue that we want to touch upon, although I expect it’s one we’ll return to in more depth in future. One reason why we didn’t have much access to you and Ara in the past is because we didn’t understand how we needed to cultivate parental parts for ourselves.

James: Right, so one thing we did was to look for other people – mainly partners – to be that for us. And another thing we did was to offer us – me and/or Ara – to other people, rather than learning how to be that for ourselves.

Beastie: I guess this is the piece we’re least proud of. It seems so obvious now that we’ve done all this reading. But we’ve hurt others and ourselves a lot by trying to be that kind of parent for them, and by trying to find that kind of parent in them. What does Janina have to say about this?

James: She cites Judith Herman who said that trauma leaves us with desperation for an omnipotent rescuer. She also points out that therapists have often done damage in the past by assuming that their role is to become that attachment figure for a client, and to work with the relationship in that way. She sees the therapeutic role instead as facilitating the client to find the capacity in themselves to parent their traumatised inner child and teen parts. She writes a good bit about how to explain this to clients, and to side step attempts by them – and temptations in yourself – to take on that role.

Beastie: This has been so helpful in understanding how we want our relationships of all kinds to be. When we feel drawn by somebody else into that kind of role, perhaps through them pedestalling us or assuming that we can parent them, we now feel highly uncomfortable. We try to discuss openly where our boundaries are, and how we might facilitate them finding that capacity in themselves, if indeed we have that to offer in that relationship. We can also notice when one of us has fallen into projecting this kind of thing onto somebody else.

James: That one of us often being Tony.

Beastie: Now we realise that he’s our ‘attach’ part, yep.

James: There’s something so important about empowerment and disempowerment here. To take on a parental role for another person’s child parts is inherently disempowering, however great it might feel for all concerned. It so easily leads to dynamics where the child parts become dependent on that person to feel safe, or where that person simply can’t sustain that level of ‘parenting’ and the child parts become retraumatised. Instead we need to trust others to find their own inner parents, whichever way works for them. That’s far more empowering for them, and less risky for everyone involved.

Beastie: Writing like Janina’s, and hopefully ours, might help people to find something of a route-map for this, but nobody should ever be offering to do it for another person, or telling them how to do it. Everyone has to find their own path, ideally well-supported with others who understand this work and are doing it alongside them, and/or facilitating them in it.

James: I’m struck that the internal process Janina describes requires de-blending, or un-meshing from our parts, and how that relates to doing the same in relationships with others. It doesn’t help anybody to become blended or enmeshed, as we do when we unconsciously enter stuck parent-child dynamics in relationships. Remaining separate and mutual is the thing.

Beastie: Back to being both protected and connected.

James: Okay another 5000 words for part 2 of our epic blog post Beastie. Time for another break before we come back, write a summary, and put it out there.

Beastie: Plan.

Plural superpowers

James: So we’d like to end by suggesting that plurality is a superpower.

Beastie: I mean we would say that wouldn’t we? But I think Janina agrees. First she points out that fragmenting or compartmentalisation is only ‘pathological’ when it is unconscious. It is a natural response to trauma. It enables us to survive. And when we make conscious use of it, it can make us incredibly strong.

James: For a start, cultivating dual awareness means that we’re far less likely to get reactive and hurt others and ourselves out of that reactivity. But beyond that, when we’re conscious of all our parts, and able to bring them forward or allow them to retreat, we can find the ‘right part for the job’: the part with mastery in that area. Like the times we’ve found Tony for public speaking, or Ara for facilitating a workshop, or you for holding our boundaries Beastie. The feeling is extraordinary when one of us is in their element, and it connects way better with others too.

Beastie: I think there’s way more to discover here. Like the kind of art that might emerge from playful Fox rather than productive Max, or what it will be like to bring Jonathan’s capacity for emotional empathy to relationships when he’s not so overwhelmed.

James: Heh right now it’s more like the bit in the superhero movie where the hero realises they have powers but has no idea how to use them.

Beastie: Spidey crashing into buildings and getting goo everywhere.

James: We’re so using that superhero theme for our next graphic guide on mental health Beastie.

Beastie: I can’t wait. Let’s end with a list of the key practices here.

James: Great writing with you Beastiegirl.

Beastie: Right back atcha.

Repeat the following (repetition is soothing and required for neuroplastic shift) 

• Recognise all feelings and triggered reactions as sensible communications from a part (e.g. expressing worries, attempting to find solutions, up/down regulating emotions)
• Elicit a felt sense of that part and respond curiously from differentiated adult part
• Emphasise the togetherness of adult and child: holding and hearing
• Encourage reciprocal communication, attending to how each part feels and responds
• Use the four befriending questions
• Anything that doesn’t work is an opportunity to learn and develop trust (e.g. if a part backs away let them know you understand why)
• Maximise moments of attunement, stay embodied
• All parts are equally valuable so bring them forward equally – no part gets left behind
• Check in with everybody regularly to let them know that they are held in mind and get curious how they’re doing
• Cultivate compassion for all parts and communication and trust within each dyad

Check out the first blog post in this series to find out more about the theory around plurality and trauma.

Patreon link: If you liked this, please feel free to support my Patreon.

Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie and James.

The post Plurality and trauma – 2 – practices appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

It turns out these two have a lot to say so we’ve divided the post into two: The first post deals with understanding plurality from this trauma-informed perspective. The second post deals with working with plurality and trauma in practice. A further post to follow covers how these ideas and practices link to mindfulness.

Beastie: Ready to shoot the breeze with me again James?

James: Always Beastie.

Beastie: I’m glad we finally got around to this post.

James: Worth waiting for this moment I think. Janina’s book filled in so many of the missing pieces for us. 

Beastie: And affirmed much of where we’d already got to ourselves, drawing together our learning on trauma with our experience of plurality. I felt quite smug reading parts of the book. Like ‘we got there all by ourselves, nice going.’

James: Should we explain what we’re intending to do in this blog post?

Beastie: Right, well we considered doing another book review post like we did on the books by Pete Walker, Pat de Young, and to some extent David Treleaven. But that would’ve been a lot because we basically highlighted something on every page of Janina’s book. Also we’re more interested in digging into some of the key ideas and practices, and how we’ve been applying them, rather than just summarising it.

James: Yep. We’d certainly recommend the entire book to anybody who this blog post resonates with. 

I’d also like to start with my usual point that this stuff is relevant to everybody, no matter how extreme or mild their experience of trauma, or how muted or vivid their experience of plurality. We all get reactive and experience overwhelming feelings at times. And it’s valuable for everybody to locate that reactivity and emotion in parts of themselves rather than in the whole of themselves, in order to work through it rather than becoming stuck in it.

Beastie: I mean who isn’t traumatised during a pandemic? And who doesn’t disown parts of themselves growing up under the shaming self-policing system of neoliberal capitalism. Am I right?

James: As you are about so many things Beastiegirl.

Beastie: I sense you’re a bit looser than last time we had one of these conversations old man. This is going to be fun.

Plurality and trauma: An Overview

James: So we were excited about this book because Janina brings together somatic work around the neurobiology of trauma together with a multiconsciousness model of how people work. These are the two areas we’ve been bringing together in our work of late, although we also like to mix it up with Buddhist and social justice / intersectional feminist understandings. 

Specifically Janina weaves together Sensorimotor Psychotherapy with Internal Family Systems Theory, but she also draws more broadly on the literatures on trauma, attachment, mindfulness, and plurality.

Beastie: Right. So what that looks like in practice is that she assumes that all distressing thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations are communications from traumatised parts of us, who are still stuck in the past when the traumatic things happened to them. What needs to happen is for all parts to be befriended, heard, held, and brought into the present, where they can finally feel safe enough.

James: What we were smug about is that Janina suggests that our parts often map onto those trauma survival strategies of fight, flight, freeze, etc. The way these have become encoded over time as learned patterns of behaviour.

Beastie: Regular readers will know that we already got there a couple of months back: Mapping me, Jonathan, Max, and Fox onto the four Fs.

James: But Janina throws a further F into the mix, which isn’t an F at all: Attach.

Beastie: And that finally helped us to make sense of our wild card, Tony. Tony is totally the 5th F.

James: He also had a different idea about what that 5th F might stand for in his case, which I won’t repeat here because it’d only encourage him.

Beastie: Well I guess that is one way of attaching to people.

James: We’ll get more into the Fs in a moment. Anything else we need to say up front about this way of understanding – and working with – ourselves?

Beastie: A key sense is that what people tend to do when traumatised parts show up is either to disown them – which is probably what they did in order to survive growing up – or to completely identify with them: feeling like the flood of emotions are theirs and worrying that they’re broken because of how overwhelming that feels. The alternative to this is to cultivate a dual awareness so that you can hold and hear the traumatised part, but not become them.

James: Right. We’ll say a lot more about how that works in the second half of this post.

Beastie: As a therapist Janina is mostly describing how she works with clients in this way, but here we’ll emphasise how we’ve used this approach ourselves. There’s important stuff in the book about how the therapist’s task is to help the client to develop the parts of themselves who can meet and hold their traumatised parts, not to do it for them. That’s very much how we’ve experienced our own therapist.

James: Yeah she was stoked when our most compassionate self – Ara – showed up in therapy, clearly well capable of holding the rest of us through the tough feelings. At that point our therapist spoke of stepping back and her trust in our own capacity to do this work.

Beastie: It helps to keep seeing her for now though. The way she talks us through these practices teaches us how to do it for ourselves in a space that feels very held and safe, particularly when going to the really hard, vulnerable places.

James: I’d certainly recommend that people access a trauma-informed therapist with a non-pathologising affirmative understanding of plurality to facilitate this kind of work. We’ve had plenty of past experience of therapy as both therapist and client, but we still really needed that kind of guidance and holding through this process.

Beastie: Just make sure the therapist is all about empowering you to find this wisdom and capacity in you, rather than being invested in doing it for you. We’ll come back to that in the second post.

James: Mm. Janina suggests that a lot of therapy in the past hasn’t worked for clients – and might even have damaged them – because it has assumed them to be singular rather than plural, and because it has focused on replaying past traumatic memories, rather than helping traumatised parts to find safety in the present.

Beastie: Right, if you assume you’re working with a singular self who has all these overwhelming feelings and experiences, even to the point of self-destruction, then you’ll easily reinforce the belief that they are ‘crazy, damaged or inadequate’ because of their bewildering reactions and contradictions. 

It can be incredibly reassuring for a client – or for anyone – to learn that those feelings, experiences and behaviours only reside in a part of them, and that that part can be heard and brought into a much safer relationship to the rest of the self. Also it helps hugely to learn that we all have parts who are strong survivors and who can function well. That’s a much more empowering message.

James: In that way this book is more optimistic than the book on shame that we reviewed, which suggested that those with chronic shame would never fully recover.

Beastie: We’re still sceptical of linear recovery narratives, but we like the sense here that people may be fragmented, but that doesn’t mean that we’re forever broken. Fragmenting, compartmentalision, or dissociative splitting, was actually a normal and smart strategy which enabled us to survive the past rather than remaining trapped in trauma. And it can give us superpower in the present if we can master how to bring each part forward when needed.

James: Comparing this to other books we’ve read, we also prefer some of the message here to Pete Walker’s.

Beastie: Yeah Pete is very down on the inner critic, he’s all about fighting and dismissing the critical voices. Janina rightly points out that angry critical parts are trying to protect us and it;s just as vital to listen to and befriend them as any other part, even if they seem to be destructive or blocking progress.

James: I can see why you might prefer that message Beastie.

Beastie: Reformed inner critics can be the best allies in our experience.

James: Some of them turn out to be pretty keen bloggers too.

Beastie: D’you know what makes me angry James?

James: Um, you’re our fight part. Do you want me to give you the full list? 

Beastie: Hilarious. What angers me is that when we first learnt about plurality, and about trauma, as a trainee psychologist, both were dismissed and ridiculed. I remember us learning that ‘Multiple Personality Disorder’ was made up, just some attention-grabbing behaviour whipped up between crazy patients and their gullible therapists. And I remember hearing all the backlash against the idea that developmental trauma was very common. Again a sense that most people were probably making it up, or making too much of it.

James: I share your anger Beastie: these understandings that are so helpful to us now – and potentially to so many people – have a legacy of gaslighting around them, by wider culture and by the so-called experts. There’s denial that these things are real, or that they really happened. There’s a good deal of the blaming of survivors in order to defend perpetrators and the systems that allowed damage to happen. And there’s a sense that people should be easily able to ‘fix’ their struggles, rather than recognising the huge challenges of living with a traumatised nervous system.

Beastie: Again we’d emphasise that both trauma and plurality are on a spectrum. But the things that have happened to us definitely ‘count’ as trauma, and our plurality is certainly a genuine embodied experience which takes us in the direction of healing. We could have been saved a lot of pain on this journey if people hadn’t attempted to minimise and question these experiences. We wasted far too much time and energy wondering whether what happened to us was ‘bad enough’ and whether our plurality was ‘real’. That kind of internalised gaslighting just kept fetching us back in shame and retraumatising memories.

James: So I guess we’d want to convey to the reader that whatever happened to them, and however they experience themselves, is legit. And whatever they can do to embrace it, assume that it is sensible, and befriend themselves around it, is for the good. 

Beastie: Okay enough preamble. Let’s dig into some of the specifics of this way of understanding – and working with – plurality.

Plurality and the 5Fs

James: So a big ‘aha’ moment for us reading this book, as we’ve said, was realising that our parts mapped onto the major trauma survival strategies: flight, freeze, fight, fawn, and – the new one on us – attach.

Beastie: We have heard another idea that the fifth F is ‘fragment’, but our sense is that fragmenting or splitting is what happened to separate us into these parts in the first place. And it doesn’t seem to map onto a separate part of us in the way the other Fs (and A) do. 

James: We can still ‘fragment’ when something really overwhelming hits. But that, for us, is a sense of being scattered: unable to find each other and to look after each other through whatever is happening.

Beastie: That’s the sense of being abandoned internally rather than accompanied that Max and I wrote about.

James: Another piece that Janina wrote about, which helped us to make sense of our internal system, was the idea of different survival strategies as located at different ages. So she says that attach and freeze are very early infant strategies. The infant is so helpless that they trust and reach out to caregivers even if they aren’t always met or emotionally regulated by those caregivers: that’s attach. The kinds of startle responses and frightened disappearing that we associate with Fox’s freeze response are also very young.

Beastie: We always thought of Fox as a very young part of us, but it’s new to locate Tony as an infant. He always had such strong adolescent energy that we didn’t see that. But it makes a lot of sense as he’s driven by a yearning for intimacy, and he’s also… how shall I put this?

James: Very full of himself.

Beastie: Right, and narcissism is associated with infancy too: you really believe that you are the centre of the universe at that age. Don’t get me wrong, it’s hella useful to have a part of us who actually thinks he’s pretty awesome, given how many parts are convinced that they’re terrible.

James: But recognising that Tony is driven by yearning for intimacy, and can be overly sure of himself, has helped us to understand him better and to help him think about how he can channel those energies in ways that are safe-enough for the rest of us.

Beastie: We generally let him take our public-facing roles, which means him taking credit for all kinds of work that isn’t really his. We help him to understand that there are many ways of getting intimacy needs met to temper his hot love and fastlove tendencies. Given his narcissism, we put him in charge of our ‘look’.

James: Which is why we dress like a teenaged boy.

Beastie: Don’t worry prof, some day we’ll indulge your fetish for elbow patches and tweed.

James: Ahem. Going back to Tony, when his energy gets too hyper…

Beastie: We make him do the vacuuming. It is very helpful to have one hyper inner boy…

James: And another who wants to please us all by making us delicious meals.

Beastie: This has been a real theme since our last post James: finding the everyday tasks that each of us excel at and enjoy, so that we all get some time ‘fronting’ each day.

James: And the tasks that work well for each dyad, so that we nurture each relationship too.

Beastie: Like reading and blogging together in our case. 

There’s definitely that sense in this book too that it’s important to keep checking in on all parts and giving them space. Janina suggests making sure that you ask inner children how they’re doing regularly, buying them soft toys, whatever it takes to let them know that they are held safe and heard.

James: The other aspect of locating our parts in the five Fs that we found useful is that it helps us to know which part a difficult feeling is coming from. Because we have one part who tends to feel all the feelings for everybody – out in the world and in here – we have often assumed that it is him who is feeling every tough feeling that we experience. But now we can remember that Fox’s fear and Tony’s yearning often lie underneath Jonathan’s struggles.

Beastie: Janina also points out that fight and flight are generally more teen parts, because those strategies develop in adolescence. That certainly makes sense of how we experience me and Max, and the period of our life that we associate with Max coming forward and me being cast out – because it wasn’t safe to be angry.

James: So now we can trace tough feelings back through you all. Recognising that the noise of fight or flight is often a response to the frantic hypervigilance of fawn, and that that may be triggered by those younger freeze or attach parts feeling frightened or desperately yearning for closeness.

5 parts, 7 parts, or more?

Beastie: So that’s five parts James, but what about you and Ara? You don’t get a mention here. And what about people who don’t experience their parts as five Fs?

James: So Janina refers to parts beyond the five Fs in several places. There can be further traumatised parts whose job it is to block progress, for example, or who carry the urge to self destruct or to give up. She also refers to a ‘getting on with normal life’ part who is the adult who can be brought into communication with all these parts. We’ll come back to them shortly.

Beastie: For us the way it works is that there’s a vivid experience of the five of us, and the two of you – James and Ara – who feel like parental parts. We used to think of it as two kids (Fox and Jonathan), three teens (me, Max, and Tony), and two ‘grownups’ (you and Ara). I guess Tony has shifted down to a kid, but the rest of that feels pretty accurate.

James: Mm but we did cling rather tightly to the idea of being seven for a while in ways that weren’t helpful. It meant that we didn’t want to engage with any experience or feeling that couldn’t clearly be located in one of the seven of us.

Beastie: The way we’ve loosened that is to recognise that each of us can manifest in multiple ways. Like sometimes we can be the aspects of us that we are now: like an adult aspect of each of us. But sometimes we can still feel the child aspect of each of us: who they were when things were hard. And sometimes we can feel a kind of pure form of each of our energies: like when I really connect with my rage.

James: We could say that each of us has an everyday aspect, a stuck/traumatised child aspect, perhaps also a shadow aspect and a sacred aspect: representing our worst and best potentials.

Beastie: So we might be seven, or twenty eight, depending on how you look at it.

James: For us it works best to mostly function as seven, but to be up for welcoming and listening to each of our aspects when they’re around.

Beastie: It all reminds us that it’s wise not to hold too tightly to any one model. Like the sense of us as the five Fs is very helpful, but it can equally be helpful to see us as more like the emotions in Inside Out (anger, fear, sadness, joy, shame, with peacefulness and powerfulness as the parents), or more like the five Buddha families when Ara’s getting our spiritual on.

James: We’re mostly hopeless geeks so we can spend a lot of time going down those rabbit-holes until we’re reminded that we’re meant to be following the feelings rather than spending all our time intellectualising.

Beastie: I don’t mind enabling your geeky habits every now and then prof.

Dual awareness rather than merging

James: Thank you. So another pivotal idea in Janina’s book is that when people feel swept into the trauma vortex they are merging, or blending, with their traumatised parts.

Beastie: This has helped us so much. Even though we understand ourselves as plural, when triggered we often experienced ourselves as purely whichever part was activated. 

James: Most people do. You are just enraged, or terrified, or swamped with shame. It feels like the only possible reaction to what has happened. It feels like all that you are, and even all that you will ever be. And you are desperate to react out of that place: to lash out, to do something, or to disappear, for example.

Beastie: So what Janina is suggesting is that we cultivate the capacity to detach at such moments. Detaching is also helpful at the less intense moments when there are just flickers of such feelings rather than full on trauma responses. She calls this cultivating ‘dual awareness’ or ‘parallel processing’. 

James: It’s a lot like the mindfulness idea that we can have an observing mind who is not caught up in the emotions, thoughts, or sensations. We’ve always struggled with actually doing that, but the plural piece made it all fall into place. If we see everything as messages from traumatised parts, we can absolutely experience ourselves as one part – who is calm and clear – holding another part – who is caught up or activated.

Beastie: Janina suggests that the ‘getting on with normal life’ part learns to hold the traumatised child parts. We do it a bit differently to that, as we’ll explain in a moment.

James: But this way of seeing things – that people have a tendency to merge or blend with their traumatised parts – is extremely useful in making sense of our hugely confusing experience of feeling simultaneously like a competent adult and a fragile child.

Beastie: I know right? In the midst of our post-traumatic stress time it could be extremely disorienting that we’d manage to go and facilitate a training for fifty people, and later that same day we’d meltdown over not having a safe-enough TV show to watch that evening. It was absolutely terrifying that sometime it might flip and a traumatised child part might show up when we were doing something ‘grownup’. A few times we had to get ourselves home fast when that happened.

James: Janina also explains imposter syndrome helpfully in this way. Our five F parts can feel so intense that we can come to mistrust the ‘reality’ of more bland ‘getting on with life’ parts: like they are the ones who must be unreal or fake, because we know that really we are this impossibly fragile person who can hardly function day-to-day.

Beastie: Mm, so when people accept their plurality they don’t have to get caught up worrying about which parts are real or fake. What a relief.

James: Janina says she likes the language of ‘parts’ because it’s what people already use in everyday language. It’s commonplace to say ‘a part of me feels… ‘ And putting it like that helps to create that distance – that dual awareness. ‘A part of me is scared to go out, and I can listen to his fears without imagining that he is all of me.’ Rather than ‘I feel a rush of terror, it must mean that I’m incapable of anything, and when I do seem capable that’s all a facade.’

The neurobiology of parts

Beastie: Let’s not get too much into the neurobiology of trauma here because you have already done a whole post about that, but we can understand all of this on that level: having parts associated with the 5 Fs, and dual awareness.

James: We can. And in fact that helps us to understand just how different each of us feels on an embodied level. We have wondered at that, as have those who we’ve been brave enough to allow to meet separately in person. We really do feel like different beings: bigger or smaller, stronger or weaker, tighter or looser: like our whole body seems to alter as we shift between parts.

Beastie: We always knew we were a shapeshifter! But that makes sense if we consider the way the nervous system is so different in those different trauma responses right? When we locate our parts in those responses then it makes complete sense that we’d experience our embodiment in very different ways.

James: Right, and the idea of dual awareness also makes sense on a neurobiological level. We are able to locate part of us – in Janina’s way of seeing things, the ‘getting on with normal life’ part – in the ‘rational’ brain, and whichever other part we’re dealing with in the ‘emotional brain’.

Beastie: I would still like us to read more about the neuroscience aspect of this, because some authors like Janina and Pat de Young talk about the left (rational) brain and the right (emotional) brain, while others like David Treleaven talk about the prefrontal cortex (rational) and the more mammalian/reptilian parts (emotional). And even then the rational/emotional binary is an oversimplified shorthand for more nuanced distinctions. But whatever the science, it fits our lived experience. 

James: It does seem that attuning to traumatic emotional survival responses, and connecting them up to more analytic, task-oriented, modes is a key part of trauma recovery. And it is helpful that this whole way of seeing things lends legitimacy to experiences of plurality.

Beastie: Not that something should need a biological basis in order to be treated as legit of course James, I’m sure you’d never suggest that.

James: Fair criticism Beastie, of course it is all always biopsychosocial. I like when Janina says:

‘I can sense my medial prefrontal cortex is curious about the negative mood state connected to the right subcortical area of the brain’ doesn’t evoke the same emotional connection or self compassion as ‘I can sense in myself some curiosity about the depressed part’s sadness.’

Beastie: All of us – including you and me – could be seen as simply a shorthand for these physiological states, but that shorthand is extremely helpful when it comes to bringing compassion and understanding to what’s happening.

James: My physiological state is up for hanging out with your physiological state any time Beastie.

The ‘getting on with normal life’ part 

Beastie: Heh what’s next? Oh yes, Janina’s idea of the ‘getting on with normal life’ part was a challenge for us, because we really don’t have a sense of such a part any more: a ‘Meg-John Barker’ who is separate from the rest of us. Our sense is that the part that ‘got on with normal life’ for most of our adulthood was Max, who is totally identified with flight. She’s the workaholic, overachiever who has been sent to the hammock while the rest of us figure out how to relate more kindly and consensually to our work!

James: Yes quite the challenge to read that we need a ‘getting on with normal life’ part, when we were so proud of ourselves for getting rid of any sense of having a leader, and working as a collective.

Beastie: I am also extreme side-eye to the word ‘normal’ in there.

James: Yes, and that would be one of our few criticisms of the book right? The lack of critical engagement with this concept of ‘normal life’ which people should be aspiring too, which looks suspiciously like that of the good neoliberal capitalist citizen.

Beastie: Going after a nice normal romantic partnership, a nine-to-five job, and all the goals that make a good successful singular self.

James: I don’t think that is quite what Janina is saying to be fair. The valid – and vital – point is that everybody, even the most traumatised people, have access to a part that can sometimes function in everyday life. Or at least that they could imagine what that might be like. And that is hugely helpful to access when you’re feeling utterly overwhelmed by trauma.

Beastie: Absolutely, no question. But I would like to challenge the sense that the best thing for that part to pursue is ‘normality’ in a world where ‘normality’ is leading us over the edge of a cliff. I would also challenge the sense that the ideal outcome is to appear in the world as a singular ‘getting on with normal life’ part, albeit one who is holding their much-loved inner children close and safe inside, having rescued them from their traumatised pasts.

The Fs and the Cs

James: I think that your comment right there demonstrates exactly what we’re about to say next. All of our ‘traumatised’ parts also hold potentials that are extremely helpful to us. It serves us better to regard each of the seven of us as holding both useful capacities, and particular struggles, rather than the ‘getting on with normal life’ part – whoever that may be – holding all the good stuff, and the other parts just holding trauma. The rage that you have brought to a couple of places in this conversation – and which you bring to our life more broadly – is immensely helpful in enabling us to see clearly when situations are not okay, and in setting boundaries and challenging harmful messages.

Beastie: Thanks, I try to bring the thunder in useful ways.

James: You do Beastie. It is very much appreciated. Again to be fair I don’t think that Janina is suggesting that there is no value in the traumatised parts. There’s a definite sense in there that once the traumatised parts have been befriended and brought home, we can draw on their energies in helpful ways: like encouraging confident parts to give the presentations, and the gentle parts to care for plants and animals. There’s a sense that the ‘getting on with normal life’ part might bring those parts forward for experiences they enjoy and excel at, and encourage them to stay away somewhere safe for things they find scary and triggering.

Beastie: But Janina does suggest that it is only the ‘getting on with normal life’ part who can access all of the ‘C’s.

James: Yes, this book is all about F words and C words, I am so very glad that Tony isn’t part of this conversation.

Beastie: Quite. The Cs are things like curiosity, creativity, compassion, confidence, connection, courage, clarity, commitment, calm. Janina locates those in the ‘rational’ brain of the ‘getting on with normal life’ part, but we have a different experience right?

James: Right. You made a table of it.

Beastie: Here…

James: Oh I like that you found a more decent F for Tony.

Beastie: The main point is that we experience each of those Cs as being a capacity that one of us has more than the others. There’s a sense of each of us having a place where we get stuck, and a capacity which is our most helpful potential.

James: I like that you’ve found Fs for me and Ara. Even the parent parts have places they can get stuck.

Beastie: In our experience Ara’s main difficulty has been actually being available. She’s been the most elusive, hence ‘fade’. And you’ve struggled at those times when you haven’t been able to access your rational competence because a situation is beyond your comprehension or capacity.

James: Which feels like getting lost in the fog. Nicely put.

Beastie: So my alternative to Janina’s ‘getting on with normal life’ part vs. traumatised parts model would be to suggest that all parts have patterns they get stuck in (Fs), and potentials (Cs). Dual awareness, for us, involves finding a part – any part – who is in their C place, and bringing them in to listen to – and hold – the part who is their F place. Often it helps to go to a parental part as you are more consistently in your Cs, but it’s also helpful to mix it up so that all parts can experience their potentials when they have them.

James: It’s good Beastie. And I think there’s also a further layer where the Fs can have a cascade effect: one of us stuck in F can mean others go into their Fs too. But similarly, the more some of us access our Cs the more others can as well.

Beastie: Right. I’m just getting this. Like if Fox is frightened and we don’t notice, or try to ignore the flicker of fear, we often end up with Jonathan going into his hypervigilent fawn mode and trying to figure it all out, and me or Max getting caught up in noisy busy, shameful, or angry, thoughts about whatever-it-is. The whole system goes back to it’s old trauma mode, and it can feel harder to access you and Ara as you go into Fog and Fade.

James: But as we find our way through this trauma time, and Max relaxes, you feel clearer, we notice that suddenly Tony’s confidence is back, Fox’s creativity returns.

Beastie: Right now Fox is planning to write a whole plural graphic memoir so I’m guessing that’s a good sign.

James: I don’t want to say that Janina is definitely wrong about a ‘getting on with normal life’ part. It may well work for other people, and it may even be a better model for us someday. Certainly we find that remembering that we are capable of daily tasks – by moving into them for a while – can be a relief when the trauma is up but not overpowering. However I personally like the idea that each part of us can do that. And I like the empowering and equalising sense that we each have capacities as well as foibles.

Beastie: I thought ‘foible’ was a bit more friendly than ‘flaw’ or ‘fault’.

James: Definitely.

Check out the second blog post in this series to find out more about how you can work with plurality in this way in practice.

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Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie and James.

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