Sophia Graham from Love Uncommon – who has so many great resources on self-consent among other things – and our beloved co-author Alex Iantaffi have put together an amazing programme of handouts, videos, recorded exercises and more. The course helps you to:

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New zine!

The zine I’ve just published is called Plural Selves 2. I made the first Plural Selves zine back at the end of 2017. It feels very meaningful to revisit this topic five years on from then, after what has been a pretty epic journey in understanding my own plurality and how it relates to trauma.

The first Plural Selves zine introduced the idea of plurality – that our selves can be usefully understood as multiple rather than singular. It suggested a lot of different practices and forms of play that you might try in order to locate your own plural selves and to improve communication between them.

Plural Selves 2 is a more in depth exploration of the different kinds of selves that you might uncover and how they operate together in a system. The zine touches on a number of plurality models, before going through the model that I’ve developed from my own experience of plurality: that we have cover-up (foregrounded), carrier (backgrounded), and container selves. I introduce my seven selves and their journeys, and include workbook pages for how you might explore and connect with similar selves in yourself – if you have them.

I’m hoping to follow up Plural Selves 2 with a couple more zines on plurality. One will explore in more depth all the different ways in which you can communicate, or relate, between your selves. The other one will explore how plurality shows up in our relating with others, and how we might get more conscious about that to address the ways in which relationships can be/come traumatised/traumatising, and hopefully improve our relationships with others, in our communities, and with the world.

Other zines

The other zines that I made this year were:

• Welcome Monster Feelings: A collection of colourful drawings of my emotions depicted as monsters.
• Welcoming Your Monster Feelings: A zine about how to do the practice of welcoming your emotions as monsters (and drawing, writing, dancing, acting, or otherwise expressing them).
• Relationship Struggles: A zine about the diverse ways of doing relationships that are out there, and how no one true relationship – or relationship style – will fix our relationship struggles. We need to explore how we relate to do that, including reflecting on trauma, consent, and conscious connection.
• PIERS(c) Relationship Check-In: A zine about how to do a share, or check-in, in a relationship with another person, or group.

Other zines I’d love to make in the coming months and years include ones on shame,  on existential approaches to trauma, on surviving traumadoes, and on various multi-layered ways of understanding ourselves and our relationships as embodied and embedded – beyond the sense of separate individuals acting on each other.

All about zines

The two pieces that just came out about zining, which mention my work, are:

• Lea Cooper‘s great series for The Polyphony about health-related zines: In the Zine House. My zines get a mention in the article on self-care zines, In the Zine House: The Bathroom.
• Gemma Lucas’s lovely blog post about the collaborative workshop we did last year on Moving Shame, including Elizabeth Fortnum‘s amazing collaborative zine based on what came out of that workshop.

Why zines now?

Heading towards facilitating a new workshop about zining, I’ve been reflecting again on why zines are so important and helpful for me, especially now. It’s something I have written about before in this interview with Helen Spandler, and in this interview between two of my selves (the one currently writing this and another one!) about Welcome Monster Feelings.

The most important thing at the moment is that zine-making feeling possible, and helpful, through a period of severe trauma/madness/mental-health crisis. When things are so emotionally hard, many things that I would have done before feel somewhere on a spectrum from challenging to completely impossible. This can make struggles worse when it means that I can’t do the things I would previously have done to feel that my life was meaningful, to connect with others, and to find that sense of presence – or flow – that comes with creativity (three things that are often agreed to be important for emotional well-being).

Meaning

I’ve often found my sense of meaning through writing for others, particularly by weaving together all of the ideas and practices which I’ve personally found helpful, and presenting them in ways that are hopefully accessible and engaging to those who might not otherwise come across them (because they don’t often get out far beyond the academic, activist, therapy, or spiritual communities in which they originate, or – if they do – it’s not in a language that is easy for others to understand).

Big writing projects feel overwhelming for me during times of struggle and crisis, especially ones aiming towards a polished product like a book. There’s a lot of fear of ‘getting it wrong’. Zines feel more manageable because they’re meant to be short and DIY. The zine format models that it is okay – inevitable in fact – that we are messy and imperfect. It’s fine to produce a few pages and put them out there as they stand, with false starts and tippex marks, for example.

For me zines are also something I can put out in an invitational way. Mine are free for anyone to access, and people can donate me some money only if they enjoy them and can afford to. That feels less pressurising (for me and hopefully also the reader) than the format of published books which have to be purchased. It also recognises both that my stuff in particular, and zines in general, are not for everyone. We all resonate with different ideas and experiences, and different mediums are more or less helpful to us depending on where we’re at in terms of neurodiversity, disability, trauma responses, and all kinds of other things. Comic style zines work for me partly because I’m quite visual, enjoy words and pictures together, and respond well to the weaving together of ideas and lived experience. Other people will find that podcasts, books, audio zines, video clips, or other mediums are a way better fit for them.

Connection

Connecting with others can be really difficult during periods of crisis, because part of how (relational) trauma works is that other people feel threatening and a potential source of unbearable shame or attack. Our worlds can often shrink to only those we have safe-enough, trusting relationships with, and even they can feel shaky at times. For me this means that many of the ways in which I used to connect one-to-one and in groups are off the table for the moment.

It is much easier for me, at such times, to communicate through writing (and images) – where there is a lot of time and space for me to get my thoughts and experiences down in a way that conveys them accurately, and then a lot of time and space to let any response land with me, rather than having to engage in (written or face-to-face) conversations in real time.

Zines have been a wonderful way to connect with other people during this time, to get across my experiences to others in ways they might connect with, and to still feel part of things – like Gemma’s small collaborative workshop, or Lea’s series about zines – even as I’m still in retreat from the world much of the time.

I am going to brave facilitating this zine-making workshop soon, and have managed a couple of these online over the last couple of years. Somehow inviting people to try various forms of zine-making feels more comfortable than the kinds of events or workshops which I used to run, where there was more of a hierarchy between an ‘expert’ speaker/facilitator, and the audience/attendees. There’s something about both where I’m at, and where the world is at these days, which makes the model of co-creation or collaboration feel more comfortable to me. I’m so aware of all the different wisdoms that everyone holds, and of not wanting to value some more highly than other. I’m also so aware of just how vulnerable so many of us are, and the kind, tender, invitational spaces we might need in order to express ourselves, and feel held and heard.

Presence/Flow

Finally, zine-making has felt like a place where I can find glimpses and glimmers of presence or flow during a time when overwhelming emotions and my struggles with these have made that rare and hard to come by.

Part of this is that it’s possible to easily do just a zine page – or part of page – at any moment when I do feel okay. I can also separate out the stage of planning the next bit of a zine (often walking or staring out of the window) from the stage of drawing it, from the stage of inking it, and eventually scanning it (both of which latter activities don’t require me to be in such a good place).

It’s possible to make zines very slowly, and still get a rewarding sense of something building up over time.

Also the kinds of zines I make don’t always have to be made when I am in a good place. The Welcome Monster Feelings zine was so helpful because I could draw specifically when I was having a difficult feeling – that was the point. The Plural Selves 2 zine included illustrating the parts of me who struggle, and how they struggle. It’s still hard to draw when there are extremely painful processes going on, but zine-making offers to potential – for me – to value painful experiences, to see how getting them down on paper is helpful to me, and to get the sense that they might help others to feel less alone, or to understand their experiences better, through engaging with the zines.

Zining Futures

Through a tough time like this it is very easy to focus on the different place that you hope to get to, or the different person you’d like to be once you’re out the other side, whether that is a place and person like the one before the trauma hit, or the one you imagine you might be after it has passed. It seems cruel that such thinking often makes the tough time even tougher, because it involves struggling against how things are, and giving yourself yet more messages that you are not okay unless you are ‘healed’ or ‘fixed’ and are able to get ‘back to normal’ or to a somehow better, improved version of who you are now.

Just as the various global crises we’re in the midst of are unlikely to get better, or back to normal, I’m trying to view myself in the same way, and embrace the uncertainty and not-knowing of what might be ahead. Part of this is coming to see myself as a zine-maker, rather than a zine-maker on the way towards being something more ‘proper’, or on the way back to some kind of normal – of all the things that I used to do.

I’m deeply grateful to all the other people – in my life and beyond – who model similar ways of being okay with who and how they are to me, as well as to those who have engaged and connected with me through my zines. These are the kind of vital, delicate threads that keep us going through such tough times. Thank-you so much.

I might even make a zine about zining at some point. Watch this space…

December update – I did it! You can find my zine-maker zine here.

The post All about Zines appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

It takes the form of an interview between the part of me who created it – Fox – and another part – James. If you haven’t read one of my plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out our Plural Selves zine, and our free book about Plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here interesting.

Location: Fox’s favourite cafe.
Food: Halloumi tomato pesto sandwich, OJ.

James: It’s my great pleasure, today, to be conducting an interview with the artist behind the new zine Welcome Monster Feelings. Thankyou for taking the time to speak with me today Fox.

Fox: You’re welcome.

James: Would you like to begin by telling the readers a little bit about who you are?

Fox: Nope.

James: Well this is getting off to a great start.

Fox: I think it’d be more fun if you say who I am and I’ll say who you are.

James: Oh go on then. How best to describe you?

Fox: It better be good.

James: No pressure then.

Fox: *giggle*

James: I would say that you’re the youngest child part of our plural system. Or rather we tend to think of you as who we might have been without all the rules we learnt about who it was okay and not okay to be in the world – without our developmental trauma. You are the most able of all of us to just be in the moment, to find delight and wonder in things, to move through the feelings you have rather than getting stuck in them. How am I doing?

Fox: Why do we call me Fox?

James: Because you often feel more like a creature than a human: a wild little thing.

Fox: Heh I like that. Okay I’ll do you.

James: I’m not sure it’s regular to introduce the interviewer.

Fox: I’m gonna anyway. You’re our James. We call you lots of other names like Old Man and Saint James and Captain Admin and ruder ones.

James: Captain Admin is pretty rude. I don’t just do admin.

Fox: That’s why it’s funny. You are the one of us who does most of the everyday life stuff, particular the bits that the rest of us find boring or scary like emails *shudder* But you’re also the main one who looks after the child parts of us: me, Morgan (aka Beastie), and Robin (aka Tony). You’re really good at that.

James: I’m not sure how Morgan would feel about being called a child part.

Fox: She’s not here!

James: I mean technically, given that we share a body…

Fox: If she was properly here we wouldn’t be doing this interview coz it’s not easy for her to do this kind of thing. But we’ll get to that.

James: Is that enough introductions then? Am I allowed to start the interview proper?

Fox: It’s about time!

The aims of the zine

James: *shakes head* Okay then. First question. What were you hoping to achieve with this work Welcome Monster Feelings?

Fox: Two things I think. The main one was I wanted to help the other members of our system – particularly Robin and Morgan who carry most of our trauma – to find a way to be with their most painful feelings. We’ve been in this big trauma period for the last few years, so our feelings can be very overwhelming at times, especially for those two. 

The other thing I wanted to do was to find a way back to drawing. We made quite a few zines and comics a few years back, but it was something we found much harder to do during the trauma time.

James: Why d’you think that is?

Fox: Well Morgan’s trauma often comes out as being an inner critic – so it’s very hard for her to let us draw without feeling it’s not good enough, or comparing it to what other people do, even though she also really wants us to be creative. Robin’s trauma comes out as fear and shame so it’s scary for him to put stuff out there in the world, in case people are mean about it. Also it’s just generally pretty hard to sit down and draw – or do anything much – when you’re feeling that bad. 

James: I think it was a genius move to find a project that we could do even when we felt rotten, in fact tough feelings were kind of a bonus.

Fox: I know right? And – as we say in the companion zine Welcoming Your Monster Feelings – the practice of making the monsters often helps overwhelming feelings to calm down a bit. So you gradually get this knowing in your body that making a monster will make you feel better, which makes it easier to do it the next time you feel rough.

James: Positive reinforcement.

Fox: Right, and I love that it showed Robin and Morgan that they were vital – to the project and to us. They can both so easily feel that they are ‘bad parts’, or ruin things for the rest of us, and that they should be cast out again – as they both were for so much of our lives. But I couldn’t have done this project without them. It was their feelings I was drawing most of the time. 

Also when we showed our friends, and they found it helpful and said they felt similar things, that helped Robin and Morgan to feel seen, and less alone, and like they were being helpful to others.

A plural project

James: Just brilliant! So it sounds like you see this as a plural collaboration, even though you were definitely the one leading on it.

Fox: Absolutely. Robin and Morgan mostly had the feelings, and told me about them, and then I found the way to draw them that felt most right. But we also got everyone else’s feelings in there somewhere.

James: I particularly like the holding and hearing monster towards the end…

Fox: That’s you! And he looks a bit like Sully from Monsters Inc because that character reminds us of you, and his full name is James P. Sullivan.

James: I also helped as Captain Admin right?

Fox: Yes! You did all the scanning and the making it a pdf, and learning how to make a pdf small so people can download it, and putting it on our website, and all kinds of things that I find an-noy-ing!

James: And conducting this interview of course.

Fox: Of course. Next question.

Feelings, art and monsters

James: Well I was interested in exploring with you the links in our life between feelings, art, and monsters. I know you’ve been reflecting on that.

Fox: I have. It feels like we’ve been trying to do this project our whole life, and it involves going back towards these three things that were all kind of crushed in us.

James: Do go on.

Fox: Well we’ve written before about how we weren’t allowed ‘difficult’ feelings as a kid. People at home and school tried to train us out of them with punishments for unacceptable emotions, and rewards when we made it through the day or week without crying. That’s part of the reason that Robin and Morgan got disowned. They held all the least acceptable feelings: fear and anger, but also loneliness, sadness, jealousy, pride. All sorts.

James: Right. Our feelings get so unbearable during the years in our life when PTSD hits because we’re feeling all the things that were locked inside Robin and Morgan.

Fox: Feeling the feelings they held for us our whole life. That’s it. 

Another thing that got pushed out of us in a similar way when we were small was art. We LOVED drawing. We drew all of the time. Our bedroom wall was full of our pictures.  But gradually people around us tried to make us draw the kinds of things they wanted, and to draw in the ways they wanted us to.

James: For example?

Fox: Like being asked to draw pictures as a present for people’s birthdays. And they generally wanted things like landscapes or still lifes or whatever, which isn’t what we enjoyed drawing. Also when we did art at high school we were shocked because we had to draw things from real life rather than out of our imagination – as we’d always done before.

James: What did we enjoy drawing?

Fox: Mostly people and imaginary creatures. And we drew to tell stories from our fantasy life, or to get down feelings that we couldn’t talk about or express in other ways. But eventually we learnt that wasn’t how you were meant to do art.

James: So, not only were both feelings and artistic pursuits suppressed, but those two suppressions were also related. Losing the ability to draw from our imagination and feelings denied us an important outlet for emotions we weren’t supposed to have. How do monsters fit in?

Fox: Monsters feel like the third leg of the stool somehow. 

We were always fascinated by monsters. Our favourite TV shows as a kid were Rentaghost and Dramarama. Our favourite books were pop up ghost books. Later we read true haunting books over and over and over. We were addicted to Ghostbusters – one of the first movies we saw at the cinema. When we got to choose our own topic to do a project on at school we did dinosaurs every time.

James: We had a huge collection of plastic dinos too didn’t we?

Fox: Yes! Dimetrodon was my favourite dinosaur, but they don’t think Dimetrodon was a dinosaur any more!

James: This may be a tangent.

Fox: Heh. 

James: How did monsters relate to art and to feelings?

Fox: Well they relate to art because a lot of what we wanted to draw was mythical creatures like dragons. 

They relate to feelings because, when we reached double figures and things got really bad, we started reading authors like Stephen King, Dean Koontz and James Herbert. We thought that reading horror books would help us to be less scared in our real life – like maybe we could get used to facing frightening things by reading those books, and become braver.

James: And did our monster love get suppressed too?

Fox: I think so. We once tried to do a book review of a horror book in school and they didn’t like that. It wasn’t a proper book like the ones you were meant to read. When we studied psychology at university – and afterwards – we were always drawn to monster-y topics, like the paranormal, and why people do evil things, and the meaning of fairy tales. But those things were always looked down on as not proper, so we wound up doing our projects on other stuff – somehow making it acceptable.

James: And yet our PhD was on loneliness, our first paper was about goths and Pagans, and the first conference we organised was about vampires. We kept finding our way back to feelings and monsters didn’t we?

Fox: All the way through. Like we did the A levels that people said we should do, instead of the ones we really wanted to do (drawing and stories!) But we spent the whole summer after we finished those exams painting our room with a giant dragon, even though we were just about to move out of there. Then after our PhD we started writing fiction. We were going to do a whole collection of alternative fairy tales and take a creative writing course, but we didn’t get accepted. For a long time we’ve had an idea for a book called Everyday Horrors: a mash up of horror fic and self-help.

James: It seems like we’ve been trying to make Welcome Monster Feelings our whole life, and finally, we’re making it, now that we’re nearly fifty.

Fox: Speak for yourself old man!

James: *Grin* 

Reclaiming lost things

Fox: It’s like reclaiming isn’t it? By reclaiming art, and reclaiming monsters, we’re also reclaiming those feelings and the parts who hold them. No part gets left behind.

James: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. And I suspect that many people have a similar history – at least with feelings and with art. The world, and the people around them, tell them that they mustn’t show their feelings, and that they ‘can’t draw’.

Fox: That’s why we love Lynda Barry, who we mention in the zines. She says that most kids just naturally tell stories with pictures, but then they get taught proper writing and proper drawing, and they lose all that. Her books and resources are all about getting it back, by playing with it, using wax crayons, drawing quickly, colouring in, that kind of thing. And lots of drawing from the imagination!

James: I notice that when we can allow you – Fox – to just draw from the feeling (with the odd bit of help from Google images to see what certain things look like) it just comes out looking right.

Fox: It’s amazing. Morgan is often sure there’s no way it’ll come out looking like we feel it, but it really does. It’s all about keeping it simple, not trying too hard, just getting the feeling down.

James: I think Lynda Barry is helping people get back to the child part of themselves who can draw that way, and tell stories too. The part like you that perhaps everyone has somewhere inside.

An early attempt to welcome monster feelings?

Fox: More questions please!

Inspirations

James: Well you’ve mentioned Lynda Barry. Can you say something about your other inspirations for this project?

Fox: I guess there are two kinds of inspirations: other people who’ve used monsters as a way of exploring feelings, and other people who have come up with practices for welcoming feelings. 

For the first one we’re super inspired by Pixar movies. They are something we watch a lot of because they are so gentle, and we generally need that in the evenings. Inside Out and Monsters Inc are the obvious ones, but lots of the Pixar shorts explore trauma and plurality too. Far From the Tree and Twenty Something are great examples.

We also recently watched the movie A Monster Calls, which is all about monsters and fairy tales as ways of dealing with huge tough feelings. Hannah Eaton’s graphic novel, Naming Monsters, is about that too.

We really love this Zen Pencils comic version of Rumi’s poem, The Guest House, by Gavin Aung Than. That poem captures the whole idea of welcoming feelings better than anything else, which is why we included it at the start of the zine.

James: What about the practices for welcoming feelings?

Fox: We wrote about focusing and Pema’s F.E.A.R. practices in our Staying With Feelings zine. Those are about feeling feelings in the body. Our therapist helped us towards the idea of visualising feelings. She suggested imagining the feeling you’re having as just one cell of the body, and picturing it outside of yourself, describing what it looks like: its colour, texture, that kind of thing. That helps it be more manageable – it’s not all of you, just one cell, and it’s outside of you so you can approach it curiously.

James: Externalising the feeling, so it doesn’t feel like all that you are and all that you’ll ever be, as traumatic feelings often feel.

Fox: Right. But cells aren’t much fun. I think that imagining feelings as monsters makes it more playful. And you can do with a bit of lightness and humour when you’re dealing with something that hard.

James: Agreed. And that makes it a bit more like the Tibetan demon feeding practice that we’ve written about before.

Fox: Except in that practice you don’t tend to draw the feelings. Lynda Barry adapts a Zen practice where you draw your demons in her comic One! Hundred! Demons!

James: It’s so cool that you’re now part of this group of comic and animation creators who’ve explored monsters in this kind of way.

Fox: I know, I love that. It’s what I’ve always wanted.

James: We found our long, slow way towards art, monsters, and feelings, didn’t we?

Fox: We sure did!

Monster feeling practice

James: I know that you’ve also made a companion zine called Welcoming Your Monster Feelings. Do you want to say something about that?

Fox: Yes. We wanted to find a way to share our practice with people, in case they might find making monsters about their feelings helpful too. We were going to finish the Welcome Monster Feelings zine with a few pages about how to do it. But our friend H said they thought we shouldn’t do that, because it should stand on its own as art!

James: What did you think about that?

Fox: I think they were right. Because we still struggle to see ourselves as someone who can legitimately draw pictures or tell stories, we often want to wrap those things up in a kind of self-help project, like we used to do with academic projects. Publishing Welcome Monster Feelings as a standalone book of our art felt really important. But we did still want to share the practice, so I made an extra little zine about that.

James: And do you describe your process in that zine?

Fox: Not exactly, because I know that not everybody will work the way that we do. The zine explores all kinds of different ways people might access their feelings and turn them into monsters, and the different reasons they might find that helpful.

James: Can you share a bit more about your process here then. That’s something people often want to know about artists.

Fox: Heh that still sounds funny – artist. What I do is I sit down, usually with Robin or Morgan. That means that we’re… what is it?

James: Co-conscious. That’s the word for when two parts of a plural system are foregrounded at the same time, like you and I are right now.

Fox: Cool. So the other part really tunes into their feeling, and kind of shows me and tells me what it’s like. Sometimes we feel it inside our body, and sometimes we have an image. Like that last feeling in the book from Morgan – we got a strong image of that classic Peanuts comic where Lucy pulls the ball away from Charlie Brown.

After they’ve shared the feeling, I find a way to turn it into a monster picture. And I draw, with a mechanical pencil, whatever comes out. I like to draw in this sketch book we got from WHSmiths, it has a hard cover so it looks like a proper book. And that means you can’t just rip out pages if you don’t like it. It feels important that we keep them all – however they come out. That’s part of the welcoming.

Once it feels like I’ve got the sketch right I go over the pencil lines with drawing pens. I like the ones that have several different sizes. Then I rub out the pencil lines, and we do the colouring in. That’s very soothing and often we do it together. I like these felt-tips which have a brush end and a fibre tip end. It feels good to use felt-tips because that’s more child-like than pastels or pencil crayons or paints I think. And I like the bright colours.

James: We might need to get you some more of those felt tips for your birthday. We’re close to using some of them up.

Fox: I’d like a bigger set because there’s only one grey and it doesn’t come out great on the scanner. There is a really big set you can get, just saying.

James: Heh, that is a whole lot of felt-tips. 

Trauma, shame and monster feeling practice

Fox: Can I ask you a question?

James: Unconventional, but fire ahead.

Fox: Well you’ve written a graphic guide about trauma and mental health, which goes pretty well with my zine, right?

James: I guess I was the main author of that one – on behalf of the whole system and what we’ve just been through. It’s like the grown up version of your zine in some ways – except not that grown up because it’s still a comic with lots of superhero references. Hopefully Jules will be illustrating that one this year and it’ll be out in 2023.

Fox: Grown up books take a lot longer it seems.

James: *grin* I do think they go well together though, you’re right. What was the question?

Fox: I wondered why you think monster feeling practice is so helpful, given all the stuff you’ve learnt about trauma.

James: Ah yes, I do have a few thoughts about that. One thing that we explore in the graphic guide is how trauma is often the result of violence combined with silence: painful things that happen to someone which aren’t heard or held by anyone around them. We realised that many of the things that help with mental health struggles – like meditation, therapy, or activism around social injustice – are about the opposite of violence and silence – they are about kindness and honesty. Make sense?

Fox: Kindness is the opposite of violence, and honesty is the opposite of silence.

James: Right. And drawing monster feelings is all about being more honest with ourselves about what our feelings actually are, and more kind around them – that gentle process of drawing them and colouring them in, and the whole idea of welcoming them rather than trying to eradicate them. 

Sharing those feelings with ourselves is also a great way to connect more with the different parts of us – to really hear what it’s like for them and to hold them in their tough places. 

Fox: The holding and hearing monster! Kind holding and hearing the truth.

James: Yes! The zine also helps us to connect with other people when they resonate with your drawings. That’s a way of healing the disconnection (with self, others, and the world) which lies at the heart of so much trauma.

Fox: But why is it so important for us to be able to feel the monster feelings? 

James: Ara and I explored this a bit last year in our Staying with the Big Feels blog post. One reason is that it’s hard for a person to be authentic – to be real about who and how they are – without all of their feelings. And it’s hard to have real intimacy – or good relationships – with other people too if you’re still hiding some of your feelings from yourself and/or from them. Being able to be yourself, and having good relationships, are both vital for mental and physical health.

Another thing is that the feelings that many people, including us, most often avoid or repress are the most vital for self-protection and for caring for others. Robin has held much of our fear, and Morgan much of our anger. We’ve realised recently how those feelings are so important for keeping ourselves safe-enough and for acting with integrity.

Fox: The integri-tree!

James: That’s right, you drew a few pictures relating to this. Robin’s fear of shame – when it isn’t unbearably intense – helps to guide us in what we take on, and what we don’t, recognising when other people are trying to pull us or push us into things, or when it’s coming from a dodgy motivation inside us. Morgan’s anger – when it isn’t twisted into confusion – helps us to state our needs and boundaries, as well as seeing other people more clearly. Your anger sunshine picture captured this beautifully.

Fox: Thank-you.

James: There’s lots more I could say about this, but the point is that without access to some of the supposedly ‘negative’ feelings, it’s very hard to empathise with others, to recognise danger, and to value ourselves equally with other people, rather than seeing ourselves as worse-than, or better-than.

Fox: For us it’s often worse-than. That’s why a lot of our pictures are about shame.

James: Mm, and it’s very common for shame to be at the heart of people’s tough feelings as Brené Brown has pointed out. We’ve been reading a lot about shame since we did a workshop on the topic last year, linked to the shame and medicine project. 

The book we’re reading right now says that it’s very hard to express shame verbally because it’s often non-conscious and not available to the language parts of the brain. So perhaps you’ve really hit on something with these drawings – giving us a way to communicate feelings that would be impossible to express in any other way.

Fox: Wow.

James: I know right? And it’s vital because so much of what people do that hurts them and others is an attempt to avoid painful feelings – particularly shame and the fear of shame. If we were able to get to a point where we were okay with all those feelings – where we could weather them, if not actively welcome them – then potentially we wouldn’t do those hurtful things. It’s a lifelong journey though, as Pema would say.

Fox: Life long, and many books of monster feelings!

Where next?

James: That’s a great segue to the final question I have for you. Where are you hoping to go next in your creative pursuits, now that you’ve got us here.

Fox: Well I’ve already started Welcome More Monster Feelings, so that we’ll keep going. Most of the monsters in the first book were Robin’s ones, partly because he was foregrounded for a lot of the time we were making it, and partly because Morgan initially didn’t want to do her feelings because she struggles so much not to be critical of them.

James: She really didn’t like the volcano drawing you made of her rage.

Fox: I knew that would happen! It’s the only one where the colours ran, and you can’t see the face very well. But then I did the one of her snake-eating-its-tail, and the sunshine anger, and she loved those, so I think she’s on board now. She has quite a few more monsters to share.

James: Anything else you want to do, or is it all monsters all of the time?

Fox: I would like to make more plural zines now that we all know each other better. I’ve started one about how people can learn to love their different parts, and there’s another one to do about how they can communicate better between them. 

But I also want to listen to H and do some more stuff that’s just about our own experiences – not trying to be a self-help thing. Maybe I could do more plural comics like the Chalk Board one. Also I think Morgan would love to write about our journey of embracing our inner critic, perhaps with fairy tales!

James: It would be great if she could feel free enough to create herself. She has such a powerful and tender voice when she can find it through all the horrors she’s experienced.

Fox: Totally.

James: Okay. Well thank-you very much for sharing some of your precious time with me today Fox, and for joining me at the keyboard instead of the sketchpad for once.

Fox: You are very welcome. I expect extra cuddles later.

James: You got it. And I hear there’s a new Ghostbusters movie…

Find out more

• For more on this topic check out our monsters and feelings zines, and our workbook with Alex Iantaffi, Hell Yeah Self Care.
• Patreon link: If you enjoyed this please feel free to support our Patreon.
• Plural tag: This post was by Fox and James.

The post On monsters, emotions, and drawing: An interview with the artist behind the zine ‘Welcome Monster Feelings’ appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The team who brought you Staying With Feelings and Plural Selves, now brings you Welcome Monster Feelings – a zine of comics illustrating feelings as monsters – and Welcoming Your Monster Feelings – a zine about how to do the monster feelings practice (if you want to).

Here’s a taster…

You can download the zines on our zine page, or here.

Welcome Monster Feelings

Welcoming Your Monster Feelings

Coming soon! Interview with the artist.

The post New Zines! Welcome Monster Feelings! appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

If you want to learn more about plurality, check out our introductory zine, and our free book on the subject. The book ‘No Bad Parts’ is definitely recommended, and is available in paperback, ebook, and audio.

Ara: Hey Morgan.

Morgan: Hey Ara.

Ara: So good to be writing with you. It’s been a while hasn’t it?

Morgan: A lot has been going on in our inner world since we last wrote a plural post. Two of us have new names for a start.

Ara: And most of our writing time has been going towards our new book – a graphic guide to mental health – so we haven’t been blogging so much. But we couldn’t let a new book about plurality go by without comment could we?

Morgan: No, and I’ve been thinking about it so much since we finished reading it. I need to get some of that down.

Ara: There’s quite a lot of overlap between what Dick writes about in ‘No Bad Parts’, and what we’re covering in our own mental health book, so it’ll be helpful for us to summarise some of the key points. What are our intentions in this post?

Morgan: I’d like to cover the key ideas from IFS for people who aren’t familiar with it, and also distill the practice that Dick presents – which we’ve been trying to apply since. Finally I’d like to write about how those of us who already have a vivid sense of their plural system might do this kind of work, because we found that quite challenging at first.

Ara: Great, let’s go.

Key ideas

Humans as systems

Morgan: Okay, so the main idea of IFS is that a person is a system rather than an individual. Just as family systems therapists locate people’s distress in whole family systems (or other groups or communities), IFS locates it in whole internal systems.

Ara: Right, so systemic therapy points out that families position different individuals in ways that become stuck, often with one or more members taking on – and expressing – distress that’s actually in the family: the intergenerational trauma that it holds, and the various beliefs and habits that it has formed in order to avoid the pain of that. For example, when one member of the family develops depression or addiction they are probably manifesting some distress that’s actually within the whole family, and the whole family system needs to shift in order to release them from that.

Morgan: In Internal Family Systems therapy the idea is that, as we grow, different parts of us develop to hold different burdens – or trauma – and to protect us from experiencing the pain of that: pain that was too overwhelming or dangerous to feel as a child. By the time we’re adults we are a complex system of parts, interrelated with each other, which – if we explored it – we might map just as a systemic therapist, or family constellations practitioner, could map an external family and how everybody relates to everybody else.

Ara: This is a key theme that we’re exploring in the mental health graphic guide: how every level of human experience can be helpfully understood as a complex interconnected system, which attempts to keep itself stable through reinforcing feedback loops (which often keep unhelpful patterns going), but which can also shift to more balancing feedback loops (which return it to stability). Systems theory applies this to everything from the micro to the macro level. For example our bodies – and the world – can both be seen as a set of interconnected systems within systems within systems. We, and Dick Schwartz, both explore how dominant cultural systems like neoliberal capitalism result in reinforcing feedback loops where ‘success’ is defined by getting more and more, increasing the gap between rich and poor people and countries, and bringing the planet to crisis point.

Morgan: This is something I really liked about ‘No Bad Parts’ – the way he kept relating individual struggles to wider culture. So many self help books fail to do that.

Ara: Do you want to explain how dominant cultural ways of understanding human struggles are part of the problem here?

Morgan: Absolutely. Dick calls it the ‘mono mind’ approach, which has pervaded western culture and western psychotherapy: the idea that we are singular individuals, and that any problem we have should be diagnosed and treated at that level. So standard psychiatry or psychotherapy might say ‘this person has anxiety, or a compulsion, which is interfering with their life, and we need to treat them to make that go away’. Plural approaches, in contrast, would see that experience as a sensible response that one of that person’s parts developed in order to survive. The answer would be to go towards that part, really listen to why they are doing that thing, and help them put down the burden and transform – if they are ready to. Dick says:

‘Most of the syndromes that make up the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual are simply descriptions of the different clusters of protector parts that dominate people after they’ve been traumatised.’

Ara: There’s a real danger with approaches which don’t recognise plurality that they might make things worse rather than better. For example, if you manage to get rid of a protective survival strategy without attending to why it was there, and which vulnerable part of the person it was protecting, it’s likely that other strategies – perhaps even more destructive ones – will pop up to take its place – likely making the person feel even worse about themselves in the process. Also the approach of fighting, or battling, ‘dysfunctional’ aspects of ourselves actually tends to make them much louder and stronger. Dick says:

‘We often find that the harder we try to get rid of emotions and thoughts, the stronger they become. This is because parts, like people, fight back against being shamed or exiled.’

Morgan: So interesting how military metaphors of fighting and battling are so problematic in both physical and mental health, but the standard go-to in dominant western culture. The prime example here is how to work with an inner critic. Even some of the pretty good trauma literature, like Pete Walker’s book on cPTSD, repeat the standard idea that you need to fight the inner critic, shame it for holding you back for so long, or even exile it entirely.

Ara: As our reformed inner critic you have some pretty strong feelings about you don’t you Morgan?

Morgan: I’d love to write a whole piece specifically on that with you one day Ara. But yeah, the rest of you tried that approach with me for a long time, and it only made me more loud and desperate, and I hurt you all a lot more.

Ara: When we finally came towards you wanting to listen to you, and prepared to feel your pain, things shifted radically for the better.

Morgan: Still a work in progress.

Ara: A labour of love.

Morgan: *smiles*

Ara: A final point on dominant culture – and psychotherapy – I’d like to make here. Like us, Dick argues that what has been called Multiple Personality Disorder, or Dissociative Identity Disorder, is just one end of the spectrum of plurality: that everybody can helpfully be understood as a plural system. Dick says:

‘The only difference is that people with DID suffered horrible abuse and their system of parts got blown apart more than most, so each part stands out in bolder relief and is more polarized and disconnected from the others.’

I’m struck how, like trauma, there has been so much gaslighting within psychiatry and popular culture around plurality. It’s like the very things that hold the keys to understanding and working with human distress are the ones that have been fought hardest against.

Morgan: Judith Herman says that each time psychiatry, psychotherapy, or social movements, have finally revealed the extent and impact of trauma around, for example, child sexual abuse, military action, domestic violence, or systemic racism, a huge backlash occurred, often arguing that these things were entirely fabricated, or nowhere as bad as they were being made out to be. We can see a similar thing happening around plurality. The first time we learnt about MPD in our psychology degree we were taught it was entirely made up, and plenty of psychologists would still hold that position. Dick outlines the results of this:

‘The mono-mind paradigm has caused us to fear our parts and view them as pathological In our attempts to control what we consider to be disturbing thoughts and emotions, we just end up fighting, ignoring, disciplining, hiding, or feeling ashamed of those impulses that keep us from doing what we want to do in our lives. And then we shame ourselves for not being able to control them. In other words we hate what gets in our way.’

Ara: It’s painful to wonder how much easier our life might’ve been had a plural systems understanding of human being been available to us earlier, as somebody with such a vivid experience of plurality – whose parts stand out ‘in bolder relief’ as Dick puts it.

Morgan: I feel such grief and rage around that.

Ara: I know love. Maybe a break to feel that.

Morgan: Thankyou.

…

Parts and their burdens

Ara: So let’s say a little more about how Dick understands parts and the burdens they carry. The idea here is that parts become locked in the past events which were so traumatic for them, so part of the practice is to find them there and bring them out of that time they’re frozen in.

Morgan: Right, and it’s useful to distinguish the part from the burden they carry. There’s a sense that, freed from that burden, they might transform into something quite different.

Ara: Mm let’s use you as an example here, okay?

Morgan: Sure.

Ara: So you were our inner critic, and whenever you came forward you’d be telling us what we were doing wrong, and how bad and worthless we were.

Morgan: Screaming it at you when things got really bad.

Ara: So our explorations with you took us back to late childhood / early adolescence, when we got the message that we were deeply unacceptable and unlikeable from pretty much everyone around us.

Morgan: I learnt to internalise that message a thousand-fold. It was like one knife was coming towards us and I turned it into a thousand. A sense that if I could make us feel every criticism hard, then we’d learn what not to be and become something that could survive.

Ara: So you, Morgan, were our part, and the burden you carried was internalising all those real and imagined criticisms. IFS would work with you by helping you to release that burden, and transform into what you could be in our system if you hadn’t been forced into that role, and weren’t carrying that burden.

Morgan: Which is pretty much what I’ve been doing, over the months we’ve worked with me, becoming a part who can be a force for seeing things clearly, and for self-protection. I think.

Ara: Again, still a work in progress darling, and that’s okay. I see you making huge strides in that direction.

Morgan: Thankyou.

Personal burdens and legacy burdens

Ara: We particularly resonated with Dick’s idea that parts can carry personal burdens and/or legacy burdens. Drawing on our friend Alex Iantaffi’s writing, we’ve been increasingly talking about developmental and cultural trauma in our own work. Developmental trauma is the trauma we carry from our own upbringing: the overwhelming experiences and the feelings that accompanied them which weren’t heard and held adequately by those around us as we were growing up. Cultural trauma is the trauma that exists in our wider culture, such as the norms that trap some of us and exclude others, or the injustice in the way some bodies, labour, and lives, are treated as so much less valuable than others – and the gaslighting around that.

Morgan: The concept of intergenerational trauma brings these together, because – in a way – developmental trauma is the way that cultural trauma – or toxic dominant ways of doing things – are passed down through families. But it can be useful to tease out the two: developmental trauma is our more personal burdens, and cultural trauma is the legacy burdens we carry, for example due to being positioned in certain ways within axes of oppression in our particular culture.

Ara: IFS, or parts work, gives one great way to work with cultural trauma that it can be very hard to own, for example the recognition that we will all carry oppression in the form of racism, misogyny, homophobia, ableism, etc. If we believe that we are a singular individual then this can feel like an incredibly threatening idea. Either individual ‘I’ am an oppressive person, and therefore bad, or I am a non-oppressive person, and therefore good. So people put a huge amount of energy into trying to prove that they’re not oppressive, or in justifying their oppressive beliefs and actions, often enacting far worse oppression in the process.

Morgan: A systems within systems approach is far more helpful. If we see all oppression as systemic – out there in the world – then we can acknowledge that of course oppression will operate through all elements of the system – including us. So we don’t have to individualise and attack ourselves so much when we experience ourselves thinking or feeling oppressive things – or attempt to deny that we do so. The idea of oppressive thoughts and feelings being legacy burdens that we carry, rather than something that we are as individuals is a good way to put it. 

And if we see those oppressive thoughts and feelings as residing in parts of us – in our inner system – which carry those burdens, then we can move towards those parts with curiosity, and a genuine possibility of transformation, rather than becoming overwhelmed by the fear that we might find that ‘I – as a whole – am a bad oppressor’.

Ara: This approach means that we could be much more able to engage in anti-oppression work without, for example, collapsing or becoming defensive, or having to polarise as ‘entirely good’ in opposition to those who are ‘entirely bad’. It also leads us towards working in solidarity with everyone who is hurt by these oppressive systems, rather than only focusing on the systems which hurt us personally.

Morgan: This aspect of IFS is a hard resonate for us: the sense of deep connection between inner and outer work, and how we need both. Social activism without personal work often leads to burn out, or to escalating things and making matters worse. Personal work without social activism leaves the damaging cultural systems and structures in tact, so people just continue to be damaged and need to do ever more personal work to address that damage. And, of course, these systems and structures are currently leading us to some very dangerous places.

Ara: We’ve been really working with the paradox of the massive urgency of the current situation, and the slow carefulness required to do this work, if we are to engage with it at all effectively.

Morgan: Yeah, not an easy one for a reformed inner critic who sees all this pain so clearly and wants to do something right now.

Ara: We are doing something love. This is something.

Morgan: I guess.

Protectors, exiles, and firefighters

Ara: The aspect of IFS that’s quite different from the ways we’ve approached our own plurality to date is this idea that parts come in three roles: protectors, exiles, and firefighters. Shall we talk about that?

Morgan: Sure.

Ara: As I understand it, protector parts are the ones who developed survival strategies, or defenses, in order to protect the traumatised parts from having to feel the overwhelming feelings about what happened to them.

Morgan: The feelings that weren’t held and heard by anyone at the time, so they were too much for that part to process.

Ara: The vulnerable, traumatised parts are the exiles who carry those terrible feelings and experiences, and keep them hidden away from us. These parts are often called ‘inner children’, whereas protector parts can be seen as ‘parentified’ inner children, who may feel like adults. 

Firefighters are parts who come in when there’s a risk that we’re getting too close to the exiles – perhaps if they are triggered or retraumatised by something that happens in the present. Again this helps to explain how even very seemingly destructive impulses, even suicidal ones, are understandable survival strategies: Anything to stop that exile from being uncovered and overwhelmed. Firefighter strategies are not ‘irrational’ impulses to be eradicated, but sensible instincts to be understood deeply, and hopefully replaced with something less destructive in collaboration with that particular part.

Morgan: Right, so for example hypervigilence might be a protector part who learnt that if we constantly keep a lookout for ways in which we might ‘get it wrong’ then we’ll never have to feel the appalling terror and self-loathing of the exile who holds all the times that we were shamed and humiliated as a kid. The kind of depression that has us under the duvet all day watching Netflix could be a firefighter who kicks in when that exile gets triggered by something in the present. It feels like it’s better to give up and withdraw from life than risk feeling those feelings.

Ara: A really nice example Morgan.

Morgan: Do I get a gold star?

Ara: Ah do I detect a hint of the old Beastie?

Morgan: She’s still around.

Ara: I’m so glad to hear it.

No bad parts

Morgan: Speaking of Beastie, shall we get to the title of the book.

Ara: We love that Dick puts this right out there. Janina Fisher’s mantra ‘no part gets left behind’ is one we’ve found very helpful, but how great to make ‘No Bad Parts’ front and centre of the whole book.

Morgan: I suppose it’s a bit like that move from shame to guilt. The sense that people are not bad, even though their behaviour can be harmful. If we could ever drop the strong belief – that most people have – that we are fundamentally flawed and that others are going to see that – then we could be way more likely to see clearly when we have behaved in harmful ways, to acknowledge that, and to do things differently in future.

Ara: And parts work helps with that by locating all our patterns in parts of us – not the whole – so we can turn towards them with kindness, understand why they did what they did, and release them of the burden of needing to behave in that self-protective – but harmful – way in the future.

Morgan: Even though we’re so vividly plural I think we struggle to let go of that deep, fundamental sense that we’re bad and wrong – and that others are going to see that – which fuels all the habits of hypervigilence, self-criticism, shapeshifting to be what others want, and presenting a mask to the world rather than our real, messy, imperfect selves. I loved that quote from Jonathan Van Ness that Dick includes: 

‘There is still a little voice in my head wondering, Would you still be so excited to meet me if you really knew who I was? If you knew all the things I have done? If you could see all my parts?’

Ara: We’re getting there. We’ve made a lot of progress.

Morgan: Here we are everyone, our real, messy, imperfect selves, at least one of them!

Ara: I don’t get to be real, messy, and imperfect?

Morgan: No you are our good, pure Self under all the mess remember?

Ara: Ah, that’s one aspect of IFS that we still wonder about. The theory is that we all have a Self which is different to a part – it’s often felt as the ‘real me’ behind the rest, and – according to IFS – it contains our capacity for the eight Cs: curiosity, calm, confidence, compassion, creativity, clarity, courage and connectedness.

Morgan: We have certainly felt something like that – and it certainly feels related to you. We’ve had days when we’ve walked or meditated and it’s felt like you were watching each of us pop up and think our thoughts and feel our feelings, then fall away again, and all the while you were present like this compassionate witness.

Ara: So there’s something in it, but I certainly feel pretty awkward claiming ‘Self’ for myself, especially as apparently that makes me the leader.

Morgan: No hierarchies here!

Ara: Shall we come back to our uncertainties about all that a bit later? 

Morgan: Sure. We should say more about the practice of IFS before we get into the challenges we have for IFS, and the challenges that it has for us.

Ara: Time for a cuppa first.

Morgan: But if we don’t get this whole thing written today then we’re a terrible person and I’ll have to scream at us all night. Oh wait I quit that didn’t I?

Ara: Heh, if Beastie still needs to wrangle a bit I’m so here for that.

Morgan: You are a good, pure angel Self, it’s true!

Ara: Behave *grin*

…

Practice 

Morgan: So what is the practice for working with parts, according to IFS?

Ara: I feel like Dick never completely sets it out as a staged process, but you get a sense of it through the various examples that he gives of taking clients or collaborators through it.

Morgan: Those parts of the book were so moving, I found myself in tears nearly every time.

Ara: Mm that suggests to me that it’s really onto something. We find that most books which describe working with parts in these deeply loving, respectful, ways have that embodied impact on us.

Morgan: One of our parts just weeping and weeping to feel that understood; to see deep care taken towards some part that resonates with us.

Ara: Sometimes several of us crying together.

Morgan: Can we try for the bullet point structure? Setting out the main parts of the process as we understood it.

Ara: Let’s do that. First I want to give the caveat that Dick himself gives, that people may well need help to do this kind of work, particularly with the exiles. A therapist trained in IFS or other plural approaches would be a good bet. The risk is that contact with exiles without enough holding and support will bring up firefighters who could become more destructive in their attempts to protect the exile.

B: Mm that’s such a helpful point. I can think of times when we’ve cracked through to important revelations, but then a backlash of self-destructive habits has made us think it can’t have been real, or has stopped us going back there.

Ara: As with all trauma work, slow and well supported is the way to go. 

The process that Dick describes reminds me of two processes that we’ve written about before Morgan. In some ways it is a combination of them both: focusing and demon-feeding.

Morgan: Right, focusing is a western psychotherapy approach where you attend to sensations in the body and listen to what they’re telling you. Demon-feeding is a Tibetan Buddhist approach where you imagine that felt sense as a demon sitting across from you. You inhabit it to learn what it wants and what it needs, and then it often transforms into an ally.

Ara: The IFS approach seems like a version of these practices which more explicitly uses the felt sense to locate – and communicate with – parts. And, like those other practices, we can do it as a solo practice where a kind of witness part of us works with the other parts, or we could do it with a therapist or a peer who also uses this approach to talk us through it. When somebody else is taking us through, they might direct us to have internal conversations with the various parts ourselves, or – if that is proving difficult – they might talk to a particular part directly themselves for a bit, before going back to getting us to do it for ourselves.

Morgan: So the practice…

Ara: I would highly recommend reading the book for all the session examples Dick gives of how he does that work, and for his exercises where he takes you through self-guided ways of working with your parts. 

Here’s a list of key moments that happen in many of the sessions and exercises.

• Some deep breaths and grounding can be helpful before you start.
• You can start with a particular issue or memory that you want to work on, or just by feeling into your body to see what’s there wanting attention.
• As you tune in you may well find that something else comes up to block that feeling, such as a critical thought, or a blankness. Whatever that is is another part. You can either ask that part if they’re willing to step back a bit (or sit in an imaginary waiting room where they can observe what happens) so you can work with the original part, or you can shift to work with the part who has come up.
• Let the part you’re working with know that you are here to help, and see how they react, then ask if there’s anything they want you to know and wait for an answer to come in the form of words, images or feelings. Continue to encourage them to really let you know what it’s like for them, and feel what you feel towards them in response (often love and understanding), until they seem to be done (check if they’re done). 
• With protector and firefighter parts it can also be useful to explore what they’re afraid would happen if they stepped out of their role, and what – if they were liberated from that role – they would choose to do.
• Again if other parts come up to block the process at any point, see if they will step back, or work with them a bit about what’s going on for them, until they feel able to. You can explore what they fear would happen if they didn’t do what they’re doing, and reassure them that they might not have to do that so much if you can work with that other part they’re protecting.
• Affirm with the part you’re working with that you’re now here to protect them and all the parts. Ask what a safe place might be to take them to, imagine taking them there, and see how they respond.
• Ask if they are willing to unload their burden – ask them where they feel it in the body, and whether they’d like to give it all up to earth, air, fire, water, or something else. Then allow that element to take the burden away.
• Ask how they feel afterwards, notice any transformation, and check in with any other (waiting room) parts how they respond to the transformation. Let them know that they don’t have to protect this part – or keep them away from you – any more, so they can start to think about what new roles they would like. You can work more deeply with them on subsequent sessions. You might also ask any parts present what they need from you in future. 
• Before ending, express gratitude to the parts present, and reassure them that you’ll return.
• End with some deep breaths and grounding before coming back.

What do you think Morgan? Does that capture it?

Morgan: I think that’s the main points. I noticed that Dick also often asks protective parts what age they think you are. They often think you are much younger than you are – perhaps the age at which they came into being – and it’s useful to update them and see how they react to that.

Ara: Mm. Dick also sometimes works like a relationship therapist with two parts who are in conflict, asking them both to tell your Self what’s going on for them, and then encouraging them into communication with each other. We liked that because we feel it’s important to nurture all the dyadic relationships within our system, as well as working with each part individually.

Morgan: One for me and Robin to try I think given that we’ve often pulled in different directions. I was also very struck by what Dick says is a ‘law’ of inner systems. Once a part has agreed not to overwhelm the system with its feelings, then they won’t any more. He says that you might feel some of their feelings as that part ‘blends’ with you a bit when it is triggered, but it will no longer overwhelm you: taking you into that trauma zone that we’re so familiar with.

Ara: How do you feel reading that Morgan?

Morgan: It sounds amazing, and I also feel some skepticism and frustration. Like can that be all there is to it? Could we have done that two years ago, or twenty, and not had these horrendous times when we were totally overwhelmed by the ‘big feels’ for days or weeks at a time?

Ara: Even this last week, the grief you were feeling tipped into overwhelm a couple of times and it was hard for you to come back from it. I share your mixed feelings about this love. I’m keen to try something more like this approach to see whether that might enable us to hear you and your feelings without becoming overwhelmed. And I also suspect that there’s no magic answer to all this, and that overwhelm will sometimes still happen and that’s okay.

Different forms of practice

Morgan: Alright, before we get more into the bits we were less sure about, can we say more about different forms of practice? We already said that you can do this alone or supported.

Ara: Right, another one I noticed was the idea of doing it as an everyday meditation practice, versus ‘on the spot’ when something difficult comes up: a distinction that our favourite Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön also makes.

Morgan: Mm, and the ‘on the spot’ one added another nice element that reminded us of Babette Rothschild’s ‘mindful gauges’. Basically you come to learn how your body feels when you’re in Self, and the kinds of sensations, thoughts, and experiences that indicate that a part is becoming activated or starting to ‘blend’ with you.

Ara: Does that resonate with our experience?

Morgan: Totally, there’s all kinds of little uneasy, tense little feelings and thought patterns that tell us that one of us is struggling a bit. Before we started doing this work we would try to push those away, or distract ourselves. Now we tend to go towards them to really feel them, but there’s still often a fear that, if we do that, they will overwhelm us. Talking with whichever part is having the experience helps, but IFS does potentially give us a more formalised practice to work through.

Ara: Yes, and I’m also thinking that it really helps for those moments when more than one part is in play. 

Any other versions of the practices that we liked?

Morgan: Yes, an idea in here that is very similar to Pema is that the people we struggle with in our lives are our greatest teachers. Dick calls them our (tor)mentors.

Ara: Very clever! Yes, it’s also like Bonnie Badenoch – who we love – who reframes getting triggered as having something ‘touched and awoken’ which means an opportunity to work with it – to enable that part to put down their burden, in IFS terms. 

‘No Bad Parts’ includes a nice exercise for working with parts that are triggered, compassionately exploring what was so hard for them and what they want you to know. There’s also a couple of great ones where you imagine somebody who you find really difficult, or who you’ve been with while they were in pain. You put that person in an imaginary safe room, where you can look through the window, and imagine them doing the difficult behaviour, or being in pain. Then you work with whatever parts come up and how they respond.

Morgan: IFS resonates with our own sense, which we’ve written about a few times, that we have – inside us – all the same kinds of energies that are out there in others, including the people we find most difficult. In fact, the two things we find most difficult ‘out there’ are identical to the two parts of us who seem to be ‘underneath’ everything now that we’ve done all this work: the parts who are most disowned in us, and who hold most of the trauma.

Ara: You and Robin (previously known as Tony).

Morgan: Right. We find it really hard when people out there attack us, and when they ask more of us than we can give. And I’m the part of us that holds anger and criticism, and Robin is the part who holds neediness and fear or rejection.

Ara: Our deep hope is that, by working with the two of you so much, we’ll finally be able to ‘hold our seat’ when those kinds of energies come at us in life, recognising the parts of the other person that are involved, and not feeling that we have to turn their attacks against ourselves (as you’ve done in the past) or become what they want us to be (as Robin has in the past). Dick says:

‘When you see through the clear eyes of your Self that someone is doing something hurtful to your parts, you don’t have to turn them into a monster. That clarity empowers you to see that their actions arise out of their own hurt, and you also can better see without confusion the damage they do to your parts. This means you have the courage and confidence to set boundaries with them in an effective way… When a part takes over you can also know to stop, get some space, listen to the part, and come back and speak for it rather than from it.’

Morgan: Relationship repair is meant to become easier when we do this parts work, because we can  be less afraid of the inner turmoil that someone else’s behaviour will cause in our system – having worked with all those parts and built trust with them or helped them transform. 

We can also relate with others, when they resemble our parts, in the same way we’ve learnt to relate to our parts. Like when I’m furious, even furious with you, you generally respond with kindness and curiosity, really wanting to know what’s going on for me. What I’m doing doesn’t trigger you into believing you might be bad and collapsing or defending, or trying to get rid of me.

Ara: I so long for the day when we could be with someone else’s rage that way. I also know that we have to be honest that that is an edge for us right now – not something we can offer to be around without serious risk to ourselves. It’s okay to be a work in progress.

Morgan: This book does get some of that sense of being a work in progress, and how this takes time and continued daily work. But I struggled with some of the sense that IFS could be a ‘fast track’ through all this difficult stuff of life, bringing everyone pretty quickly to a place where they can navigate the world from Self all the time.

Ara: Shall we have a little break and then get into our dialogue with IFS: the bits we’re less sure about, and the challenges it poses for us.

Morgan: Yes please.

Ara: Good girl.

Morgan: Don’t push your luck *grin*

…

Dialogue

Ara: Okay so we want to finish by naming a few challenges that came up for us with this book.

Morgan: Challenges for the approach from our experience, and challenges for us from this material.

Ara: Shall we start with our more critical thoughts on the book?

Morgan: Channelling Beastie I suppose I was disappointed by something that I feel in quite a few books written by people from a certain demographic. There was a bit of a sense of IFS being the One True Way: greater, faster, and better than all other forms of therapy or faith-based approaches. That didn’t sit well with me. 

We’ve got a lot from several books we’ve read by people in this demographic over the last couple of years, but we also feel frustrated by that tone, and by the way so many of the authors have set up institutes around their Great Work. We wonder what it would be like if they all got together – with everyone else working in these kinds of areas – in collaboration and solidarity, instead of trademarking their particular approach and focusing on that in this kind of way. I notice that the books we’ve read by folk from the margins in the past year generally have quite a different tone: more humble and more drawing in of other people’s ideas and practices, recognising their roots, often outside of dominant culture.

Ara: I agree, although I like that Dick does mention through the book his own work with his various parts around his leadership. He has certainly been up for recognising when his protector parts are getting in the way. I’m also keen to read more about the dialogues that various Tibetan Buddhist practitioners are having with his work – noting that he is collaborating with various people of faith, and somatic practitioners.

Morgan: I’d love to read more in these kinds of books about the writers’ own parts work. I feel like the fact that they all write with one voice – as if they were singular – perhaps implicitly reinforces a sense that some kind of singularity is the aim – or possible – here, even as they embrace plurality.

Ara: I also rather love that we get to be one of those bridge-builders: someone who writes about plural ideas and practices in a plural way, drawing more on our own system experience. 

Morgan: I love that too. What about The Self?

Ara: What are your reservations about that?

Morgan: I already wrote a bit about this with James when we reviewed Janina Fisher’s really excellent book based on IFS combined with sensorimotor psychotherapy. There’s something about the concept of one underlying Self, a ‘compassionate witness’ self, or a ‘getting on with normal life self’ that feels uncomfortable to us, even though it resonates somewhat. 

Ara: Why do you think that is?

Morgan: Maybe because that sense of people as singular individuals is still finding a way in here. And/or maybe because we’re drawn to the Buddhist idea of there being ‘no-self’. The Self feels like it could too easily slip back into a sense that our plural parts are somehow ‘lesser’, I don’t know.

Ara: I get the feeling from ‘No Bad Parts’ that the Self is something more like ‘no-self’, a kind of ongoing flow in which parts can emerge and fall away again. But I agree that in our culture it is far too easy to find yourself falling back into a sense that there is an independent unit – ‘you’ – who can be judged as good or bad, which so many faiths warn against. But I feel like we’re drifting off somewhere here. What about our lived experience?

Morgan: Maybe that’s what my discomfort is really about. I’m not keen on setting one of us up as our Self. I like the idea of us as a collective who all contribute.

Ara: And Dick does touch on that possibility in ‘No Bad Parts’. In one chapter he suggests that each part has a Self. I think that’s more our experience.

Morgan: You don’t have to say that Ara. I also know that our experience of you is much more like the Self experience that he talks of than the rest of us are. When we first asked you to be more present in our life, alongside the rest of us, there was this moment when you felt sadness and fear around that, as if it was a choice and you knew that you’d be losing something in order to manifest more in that way.

Ara: I’m glad I made that choice. I want to be in this life with you all, making cups of hot chocolate and writing blog posts, even if it does mean that perhaps I’m less able to touch the… whatever-it-was that I would perhaps have been more in contact with if I hadn’t done this. We really are in indefinable indescribable territory here aren’t we?

Morgan: I wouldn’t know, I feel very grounded in messy human reality!

Ara: Ah but I see something very sacred – for want of a better word – in you at times. There’s a kind of grief/rage you get to which takes in everything from our own experience, to the experience of those who have hurt us and been hurt by us, to all the systems and structures out there and their impact, and it feels… appropriate to the place we’re all in as humans right now: beautiful and real and terrible all at the same time.

Morgan: My superpower: feeling the darkness.

Ara: It’s a vital one isn’t it? If we can’t feel all that – in us and out there – then we’ll struggle to address it wisely.

Morgan: In our post about Janina’s book, James and I suggested that all parts can manifest their most stuck, caught up, traumatised versions, and their most sacred, liberated, potentials. We called them the Fs and the Cs, recognising that our parts all hold one of the ‘F’ trauma survival strategies (fight, flight, freeze, etc.) and the potential for one of Dick’s ‘Cs’ (compassion, calm, creativity, etc.)

Ara: I do like that way of understanding it. And one Self doesn’t make a lot of sense of how we experience three of us as containing parts: me, James, and Fox.

Morgan: ‘No Bad Parts’ also suggests that many people have several non-traumatised parts, it’s just that those people are less likely to go to therapy.

Ara: Right. So there’s space in IFS for something more like our experience. 

Parts within parts?

Morgan: One final problem, and it’s a big challenge for us.

Ara: Go on.

Morgan: We just have seven parts, but when IFS works with people generally way more parts come up than that. After reading the book we felt pretty reluctant to try the practices because it’s been so important – and wonderful  – for us to get to where we have: to this place where we can feel all seven of us and know us and work with us so well. What if doing IFS reveals loads of other bits and pieces that don’t make sense within our system of seven? What if we’ve been getting this long, often agonising, work wrong in some way despite all our best efforts?

Ara: Want me to respond?

Morgan: Yes please!

Ara: Well maybe this does speak to something I’m not so keen on about this book – and quite a few others. 

Bonnie Badenoch’s great book ‘The Heart of Trauma’ holds a strong ethics that people know the path they need to follow, and that we need to trust them in that: to empower them to find and follow their path. Dick Schwartz gestures to something like that in the idea of the Self, but he is still putting forward one very specific process for doing this work. 

My sense – our sense – is that different things work for different people, and that it is more empowering for people to find their own ways, with guidance from others – sure – but with deep trust that they will know, at heart, the best way for them. Pushing them to follow a specific path risks moving them off the path that they need to follow. Is that too ‘woo’ for you Morgan?

Morgan: *grin* No, I think it’s right. And I guess I really want to believe that this painful, beautiful path that we’ve been walking this last couple of years was the way that we needed to go. It’s confronting to think that there might’ve been a fast track we could’ve taken, or that we’re somehow a bit inferior because our parts work didn’t get us to the exact same conclusions as IFS.

Ara: I think it’s important to remember that trauma work has to be slow work. IFS, or other forms of therapy, or meditative experiences, or drug experiences, might give people a quick glimpse of what’s possible. But they’ll still have to then take the longer, slower path towards healing – towards developing connection and trust between all their parts.

So where does that leave us with applying IFS ourselves?

Morgan: Well we’ve been experimenting with it and I think we’ve found a way that works. I’m not sure yet whether it’ll become our go-to practice, or just one in our toolkit for when it seems the most appropriate. 

‘No Bad Parts’ does introduce a way of understanding parts that resonates with our experience, without implying that we need to drop our sense of the core seven that we have identified. Can you describe it Ara?

Ara: The head of garlic model! Dick talks about parts within parts. He says that people are like a head of garlic, within which there are many cloves which cluster together in threes, fours, or fives.

Morgan: That helps us to understand something else: how some plural systems we know identify hundreds of parts while we – and others – remain at a smaller number.

Ara: So just as each part contains their own Self, they also contain other parts in a mini system-within-the-system: a protector, an exile, and a firefighter, for example, or more than one of each. Another way Dick presents it is that we might have a cluster of parts around each traumatic memory – or perhaps around each particular arena of trauma.

Morgan: Like mine cluster around learning to self-hate, while Robin’s cluster around learning to shapeshift to please others, and Jonathan’s around learning hypervigalence and the sense that he could never ‘get it right’.

Ara: That seems like a good way to understand it, which honours what we’ve found on our journey with this, but opens us to be able to use the IFS approach. 

Morgan: Right and we’d kind of got there already. 

Ara: Do you want to give your example?

Morgan: Sure, well with me there was the original raging inner critic screaming at the rest of you, then there was Beastie the reformed inner critic who was a force for clear-seeing anger and self-protection, then we realised that there was me – Morgan – under Beastie who was the girl who had learned to internalise all those attacks and hate herself.

Ara: Our sad girl.

Morgan: Yes. And at times we’ve contacted memories of her/me at different ages, perhaps where those things happened: an infant alone full of pain and rage, a child trying to express a boundary and being overruled and attacked for it, a depressed kid dragging through a life where she was getting the message she was unacceptable everywhere.

Ara: And all of those aspects feel like you.

Morgan: Very much so, there’s no sense that they are new parts, or aspects of our other parts, even when their feelings are quite different. 

Ara: I agree, they all feel Morgan to us: Morgan’s embodiment; Morgan’s energy. Just as how the seemingly contradictory feeling of Tony (cocky, funny, sexy) and Robin (needing, scared, desperate) are definitely the same part.

Morgan: The cloves of garlic actually helps to explain that, and gives us a way in to working with aspects of each of us that might’ve been tricky before: like how inner critic thoughts can still come in when I have ‘reformed’.

It also explains something else… how each of us doing our work have had a sense that we want to go back and look after those younger versions of us, rather than you or James being the ones to go back. It’s like we want you to look after us now, but we want to be the ones who hold the younger versions of ourselves.

Ara: Right, and that’s something Dick writes about too I think. He says that if you visualise going back and you can see both yourself and the younger part then that means another part of you is in the mix. You want to actually be able to embody the part of you who is approaching the younger part. I remember times when I could watch you with younger Morgan, but you could be the one actually talking with her, or holding her.

Morgan: That feels right. So with the bullet point process we described before, we tried it with me a couple of times, because I’ve been struggling the most this past week or so. You’ve taken the role as Self (or at least Self-of-Ara) walking me through it.

Ara: D’you want to say how it’s gone?

Morgan: Good. Today felt particularly good. I woke up in thinking, thinking, thinking mode. I remembered what we’ve read in a couple of books lately about obsessive thinking as a trauma survival strategy: what we learn to do as kids when connecting with others to support us doesn’t work. And Dick says that Self is that openness we experience under all the thinking, which Pema also talks about – the wide open space which we absolutely were not experiencing this morning.

Ara: So… may I?

Morgan: Please.

Ara: I encouraged you to go towards the thinking, thinking, thinking part, and what happened?

Morgan: It was so unexpected. Suddenly I went kind of blank. I couldn’t contact the thinking at all.

Ara: So we remembered IFS and figured that was another part.

Morgan: Both parts felt like me, for sure. You asked if blank could step back a bit to let us work with thinking but she really didn’t want to, so we decided to work with her. We explored how she felt and it was very tired indeed. She wanted to lie down and never get up. We contacted that early part of me who was internalising criticism at all times, trying to avoid doing or saying anything deemed unacceptable by the world around us, and how the only break from that was when we were sick and got to be alone in our room and rest.

Ara: It was wonderful to talk with that part of you, and recognise that inner tension in you too: one aspect of you needing to be constantly awake and thinking critically, and the other aspect so weary and needing rest. It explains some of the difficulty we have in allowing ourselves to be sick.

Morgan: We explored her feelings for a while, and then we asked where she wanted to be, and she went for a hammock on the veranda of a little beach cabin, with lots of cushions and blankets and nice gentle food and drink to hand. And she released her burden down into the earth. 

Ara: And what happened to the thinker?

Morgan: She decided to write this blog post with you! It felt good to put all that thinking towards this – rather than getting all caught up in the current tough stuff of our lives.

Ara: And when that kicked back in we had a sit and acknowledged it.

Morgan: Mm right, and that time we didn’t do the whole process, but when you spoke with me directly, rather than me spinning off into all those thoughts alone, I got this image of us and our ‘traumado’ of burdens that we haven’t managed to let go of yet (like the cows and houses and debris caught up in an actual tornado). And I got an image of everyone else in our life, and theirs. It lifted that sense I’d been spiralling into of me being  uniquely messy and bad. There was more sadness for how these traumados keep knocking into each other and making even bigger storms.

Ara: So maybe we can adapt IFS, as we have other practices, in ways that work for us: quick on-the-spot dips like that, as well as longer meditations. And we can bring it together with some of the other practices we’re finding helpful with the big feels.

So I think there is room in IFS for having a core few parts – as we do – and systems within systems. Dick says that research suggests that infants rotate through five or six states, which are perhaps the basis of parts in everyone. Bonnie Badenoch describes a similar sense of a core six or seven states. And that’s important because we wouldn’t want people to miss out on the kind of thing we’ve gone through: finding this inner family and learning to flow between them and work together as a team, even as they open to the full range of parts in their whole system. As Dick says:

‘If you can establish a new, loving relationship with your parts and help them transform, they become wonderful companions, advisors, and playmates…it becomes a lovely life practice just to spend time with them.’

I’ll say.

Morgan: Thankyou! Are we there?

Ara: I think so. One more plug for ‘No Bad Parts’ by Richard Schwartz. Janina Fisher also has a new book out which is a workbook for trauma survivors themselves, unlike her previous book which was really for therapists. We’ll be reading that with great interest next as we love the way she weaves plurality together with somatic approaches.

Morgan: And if people want more of our (many, many) thoughts on plurality, here’s our free book of previous blog posts, and our original zine.

Ara: A sequel to which is currently a slow work in progress when Fox is allowed to get creative, while James (with assistance) works on the mental health graphic guide.

Morgan: Heh we should also thank Jonathan for all his administrative work on the free book – and this blog post – if we’re name-checking all of us who are involved in these processes.

Ara: We certainly should. How funny that the two of us who presented the first plural zine – Max and Robin – are actually the least involved in our work these days.

Morgan: It is. And I’m so grateful to be so much more present these days than I was back then. Thanks Ara.

Ara: Any time love.

The post ‘No Bad Parts’: Some Plural Thoughts on The New Internal Family Systems Book appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

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.

If you haven’t read one of my plural blog-posts before and aren’t sure who these people are, feel free to check out my Plural Selves zine, and my previous post about plurality. But hopefully you don’t need to get that part in order to find the content here useful.

James: Hey again Ara.

Ara: Hey James. So good to talk with you again so soon.

James: I thought about writing this as a regular post, but I realised I could really do with somebody to bounce off: to ask me questions to help me clarify my thoughts.

Ara: I’d love to do that. I’m aware that in our last post together you asked me a lot of questions. It feels good to balance that dynamic by doing it the other way around.

James: Mm like you are more of the expert around feelings and embodiment, but perhaps I have the expertise on this more intellectual piece: weaving the various theories together.

Ara: I like that.

James: I also feel like I need you as a kind of anchor. I feel so excited about the puzzle pieces that seem to be slotting together here. I want to zoom off in a hundred different directions at once.

Ara: How can I help to ground you?

James: Remind me to breathe, to slow down, I don’t have to do it all at once. You could ask me questions to lead me through one step at a time. Are you up for that?

Ara: Absolutely. Want to breathe before we start?

James: Sure *laughs* *breathes*

Overview

Ara: Okay. Can you start by giving us an overview of the terrain you want to cover in this piece? If the terms we use here are unfamiliar to people, we’ll define them in the next section.

James: Absolutely. It’s something I’ve been building to ever since I did that Bowlby Centre event last month which I wrote up here, about attachment theory. My sense is that perhaps everyone contains all of the different attachment styles – or at least the capacity for them – within themselves. Rather than aiming at some kind of static secure attachment, perhaps there’s more value in getting to know all our different attachment potentials very well. Maybe that even is the way that we get to ‘earned secure attachment’.

Ara: A kind of paradox? We’ve tried to get to ‘secure attachment’ by getting away from ‘insecure’ attachment styles, but perhaps the way to get there is through them, not away from them?

James: Precisely. And there’s this sense that it also maps onto emotions and the ‘window of tolerance’. The only way to expand the window of tolerance and get to a place where you can be with all emotional states is through experiencing (tough) emotions, not by trying to avoid them or get away from them.

Ara: So that’s attachment and emotion, what about plural parts work?

James: We’ve reached these conclusions by getting to know all of the parts of us deeply. I’m suggesting that we can do this work by befriending the three parts of us who map on to the three ‘insecure’ attachment styles, and the emotions that they hold. That’s the way to both earned secure attachment and an expanded window of tolerance.

Ara: Wonderful. So you can explain to us how we now understand our parts having operated together in the ‘old’ system, that we had our whole life. And you can describe how we’re working with them now to reconfigure the system towards more secure attachments in our inner and outer relationships, and towards an expanded window of tolerance. How am I doing?

James: This is really helpful, thankyou Ara. 

Ara: Another breath before we continue?

James: Mm. *breathes*

The faux window of tolerance, faux secure attachment, and faux parts

Ara: So one thing that we read which helped you click together on all of this was the concept of the faux window of tolerance in Kathy L. Kain and Stephen J. Terrell’s book ‘Nurturing Resilience’. Do you want to explain that, and how it relates to attachment?

James: That’s a great place to start, yes. So Kathy and Stephen explain that many, if not most, people develop a ‘faux window of tolerance’ when they’re growing up, in order to handle intense emotions. The window of tolerance is Daniel Siegal’s term for the space in which we can be present with – and regulate – our emotions, rather than being overwhelmed by them. 

Growing up if our caregivers and others can meet us in various emotional states and help us to know that they are okay, understandable, and manageable, then we will develop that window of tolerance. We’ll learn in those early relationships that those feelings are okay, and we’ll learn from experience with others what we can do to soothe ourselves when feelings are really intense. We’ll end up with a nice wide space in which we can welcome a variety of different feelings at different intensities.

Ara: So that’s how it relates to secure attachment? The window of tolerance is developed within secure relationships?

James: Right, a secure attachment refers to that kind of nurturing relationship where we have a ‘secure base’ or ‘safe haven’ to return to when emotions are unfamiliar or overwhelming. As a child, if we learn that we can return there and be welcomed, understood, soothed, have our needs met, then we’ll be more and more able to extend out from that base to explore our world with openness, curiosity, and creativity. We‘ll have more of a sense that we can tolerate any tough experiences and regulate our own emotions, as well as a strong sense of trust in that base we can return to if it gets too hard.

Later in life that would translate into building strong, secure relationships with other people in our lives – friends, partners, mentors, communities, etc. – so that we still have a place to return where people can help us coregulate around the tough feelings, where we can express our needs and have them met, and so on.

Ara: So what’s the ‘faux window of tolerance’.

James: Most of us carry some degree of developmental trauma: a sense of key relationships not being very secure and of not all emotions – or all intensities of emotion – being tolerated and regulated by those around us. Kathy and Stephen suggest that what therapists call ‘defences’ are what we develop in order to have a ‘faux window of tolerance’: the impression that we are tolerating our emotional states, but really we’re defending against them.

Ara: That resonated for us.

James: So much. This last year or two we’ve often wondered how we’ve done so seemingly okay in life despite clearly carrying so much developmental trauma, such that we’ve been plunged into intense trauma periods and overwhelming emotion several times over the years. The idea of a ‘faux window of tolerance’ makes so much sense. It might have looked like we were handling difficult experiences and the emotions they brought up pretty well, but really it was more that we were adept at various defences, or survival strategies, to avoid or sidestep them.

Ara: I think that fits well with what we discussed last time about emotions James. The sense that we thought we were pretty good at ‘staying with feelings’ but have lately realised that there were several vital emotions that we were barely feeling at all.

James: Exactly. So what we were generally doing was repressing feelings, or reacting out of survival strategies in ways which made the difficult experience and/or feelings go away. Part of why the last year or two have been so intense is that we’ve finally been feeling many of the feelings – and the experiences they resulted from – which we hadn’t allowed ourselves to feel along the way.

Ara: And you think it may be useful to conceptualise this as a ‘faux secure attachment’ as well as a ‘faux window of tolerance’?

James: I do. We – and I suspect many, many people – were able to do a pretty good impression of functioning in the world, and relating with ourselves and others, for much of the time because we’d developed pretty remarkable defences and survival strategies. However, the ‘faux-ness’ became apparent any time something retraumatising happened – beyond the capacity of the defences and survival strategies to cope with – which put us into periods of intense PTSD where the feelings were terrifying and overwhelming and we couldn’t function. 

The ‘faux-ness’ was also revealed in most of our close relationships because eventually it became apparent that we – and the other person – weren’t really securely attached – in ourselves or with each other – and the relationship ended. Maybe they became more insecure and needy over time and we had to get away, or vice versa, or the level of conflict became unbearable to us. Often it was revealed how much we’d been shaping ourselves to fit that person, and how much we’d lost ourselves in the process, and we finally began to struggle with that.

Ara: I notice that I feel some resistance to the word ‘faux’ here.

James: Me too. It does feel rather harsh and judgemental, and there’s also a sense in it of having been a ‘false self’ covering up a ‘real self’ which is something that I would question.

Ara: Being seven selves all of whom are a work in progress definitely raises questions around any sense of a real ‘authentic’ self!

James: It does indeed.

Faux selves?

Ara: Do you want to say how all this relates to plurality?

James: Well, if we were to use those terms, we would say that we developed a ‘faux part’ – Max – who was to the fore for most of our life. She was the one who formed that ‘faux window of tolerance’ and who formed those ‘faux secure attachments’. She would likely have looked pretty happy and successful from the outside, except for the few times – when traumatic things happened and/or relationships ended – when it became very hard for her to maintain that facade.

Ara: We find it so interesting that we chose the name ‘Max’ for her, given that it sounds a lot like ‘mask’, which is kind of what she was.

James: And her survival strategies were to dissociate a lot, not that she realised that at the time. Throwing herself into work, and into helping others, both enabled her to keep our own intense feelings, and traumatised parts, very disowned and buried. Busy-ness and distraction was her main ‘faux window of tolerance’. Focusing on becoming something for others – rather than bringing herself openly and vulnerably to relationships – was her main ‘faux secure attachment’.

Ara: And this is why we don’t love ‘faux’ for her, although it is accurate in a way, because these survivor parts – in all of us – are something we should be deeply grateful for, and celebrate, not dismiss as ‘false’ or flawed.

James: Agreed. We simply wouldn’t be here now were it not for Max. She protected the other parts of us through some truly horrific early – and later – experiences. And she kept searching for answers to all of the tough stuff that we encountered with our mental health, and in our relationships, and that she saw others around us struggling with too. Ironically if she hadn’t had the survival strategies of workaholism, and trying to help others, we would not now have this huge foundation of knowledge and writing to build upon. 

Ara: We can feel deep gratitude to Max, and huge grief for what she had to go through. One image of her is of the ‘parentified child’: an inner child or teenager who has to act like an inner parent in order to survive and look after the other parts of the inner system who are even more vulnerable. It’s rather like the way a big sibling might have to look after the other kids in a family where parents are struggling, or unable to handle tough experiences and emotions.

James: How it feels at the moment is that we have finally freed Max of that burden and she is off walking in the hills alone somewhere.

Ara: Mm I always think of her when I read the Mary Oliver poem, The Journey. By finding/developing our own inner parents – you and me James – and by working with our three traumatised child parts directly, we have liberated Max.

James: Which brings us on to those parts and how they function in terms of attachment.

Insecurely attached parts under the faux secure attachment

Ara: Go for it James.

James: Right, so this is the idea that all of us have all of the attachment styles present within us. Parts work gives us a nice easy way of working with this. Our experience is that we literally have members of our plural system who map on to each of the forms of insecure attachment.

Ara: I sense a table coming on!

James: How did you guess?

Ara: A lot to unpack there James. How about getting a drink before we start?

James: Hot chocolate?

Ara: You read my mind.

James: I was going to say that’s not so hard when it’s the same mind, but given how poorly parts of us knew each other in the past perhaps I can’t say that.

Ara: We’re getting to know each other better and better now thankfully. Also I feel like we both do and don’t share the same bodymind, given how differently each of us think, feel, and inhabit our body, but perhaps that’s one for another blog post!

…

James: Okay then. So to explain the table. We’ve introduced these four ‘traumatised parts’ before in various places, although our understanding of them – and how they fit together – has definitely clarified over the past year. Mapping onto attachment theory we’d now say that Tony was our anxious-preoccupied part: needy, clingy and desperate for connection. Morgan – who we used to call Beastie – is dismissive avoidant: struggling to trust others and pushing them away. And Jonathan is fearful avoidant: terrified of that other people will hurt or shame him.

Ara: And the ‘okay’ bit of the table?

James: Transactional analysis is another therapeutic approach which seems to map fairly well onto attachment theory. The anxious-preoccupied part – Tony – believes that other people are okay, but he’s not, so he craves others’ love, approval, and attention, and he fears their disapproval, dismissal, and disgust. The dismissive avoidant part believes that she is okay but other people are not, so she tends to blame others and push them away. And the fearful avoidant part believes that he isn’t okay and neither are other people, hence Jonathan’s fear/shame trauma response: other people are dangerous and he is wrong and unacceptable.

Ara: But most of our life these three parts have been disowned?

James: Precisely, which does not mean they haven’t had an impact. Now we understand it that Max was constantly responding to others’ demands inside and out. On the inside she was constantly getting, often rather desperate, messages from Tony, Morgan and Jonathan, about what they needed. She tried her best to balance and meet those needs. On the outside she was very tuned into what other people wanted of her and tried to balance and meet those demands. No wonder she’s off in the hills these days taking a well-earned break!

Ara: So dismantling Max’s defences and setting her free, as we did last year, left us with a much clearer sense of the other three traumatised parts. They have been gradually revealing themselves more and more as they’ve come to trust us. They’re gradually feeling more securely attached to us, and to other people, and they’re gradually sensing that their feelings have a more expanded window of tolerance to be held in.

James: Nicely put. What just clicked with me this morning is that not only did Max have her set of defences – or survival strategies – that covered over the others, but each of the ‘insecure’ parts also have a set of defences that we need to get underneath in order for them to show themselves fully and to feel all their feelings.

Ara: This is so exciting, and it makes so much sense. Do you want to take me through it?

James: Please. The thing that struck me was about Tony initially. He didn’t seem to make sense. On the one hand we experience him as this cocky, hot, humorous part of us: very extrovert and craving connection with others. On the other hand we know that he holds the Deep Yearning of the Soul (). When he does feel his feelings they are often feelings of unquenchable thirst, desperate need, and longing. So how can this seemingly confident part also be the part who feels that he isn’t okay and will be abandoned by others?

But with this sense of defences it all makes sense. If Tony is driven by not wanting to feel the traumatic level of neediness and loneliness that he holds then it makes all kinds of sense that he would fling himself into connections by coming over as charming, sexy, funny and so on.

Ara: Mm yes. As he and I recently discussed, tragically that often fetches him up with just the kind of rejection and loss of belonging that he deeply fears. But it does make all kinds of sense as a defence, just like Max dissociating from recognising just how trapped she’s been in work and relationships. What about Morgan?

James: Again initially confusing. The part of us who holds anger, even hatred, towards others has manifested our whole life as the inner critic, turning that anger and hatred inwards. But if you look at it from the defence perspective that, like Tony, Morgan was disowned all our life, then it makes sense.

Ara: So growing up we learnt that we must never be needy and desperate as Tony can be, or rageful and resentful at others, as Morgan can be. So both of them defended by becoming the opposite – when they were allowed out at all. 

James: Tony faked confidence and made light of his pain, Morgan turned anger in against us rather than ever allowing herself to feel it towards others.

Ara: And our chalkboard boy Jonathan did something similar.

James: I think so. Deep down he holds that incredibly vulnerable fear and shame, and it wasn’t acceptable to admit to those things. So he became the people pleaser who pretended to be fine – in order to keep others happy – and who hypervigilantly figured out what others wanted from him and tried to give it to them.

Ara: Expanding out from our particular experience, do you think there’s something for other people in all this?

James: I suspect so. It probably manifests very differently for different people, but it would be worth everyone exploring what their ‘faux secure’ part looks like, and whether they also have all three ‘insecure’ parts in them somewhere. How do those three influence the whole system? How do they impact how they relate with other people? How repressed or available are they?  What are their defensive behaviours and what are those covering up?

Ara: You’ve done a great job at overviewing the theory, and how it applies to us, here James. I’m wondering if we might dig into practice a little more now?

James: I’d love to. What did you have in mind?

Ara: I’d like to reflect more on how we’re working with this internally and externally. How are we building that ‘earned secure attachment’ with each of the ‘insecure’ parts, and how are we bringing awareness of the three different ‘insecure’ styles into our current relationships? 

We’ve had this radical sense lately that strong relationships are not ones in which we’re just securely attached, but rather the ones in which we can honestly and kindly recognise all the different attachments in play.

James: Yes! 

Ara: A little stretch first?

James: Also yes.

…

Working with insecure parts internally

Ara: We covered some of this territory in our last post James, about how we’re working to help each part to expand their window of tolerance and feel their feelings safely enough, which is also how we’re building our earned secure attachment with each of them.

James: You’re doing the big space ‘drop the storyline and feel the feeling’ work with them, and I’m trying to hold them close, love them and hear them when they’re struggling. We’re also checking in with the ‘insecure three’ at least twice a day to see where they’re at with everything. Because they’re so used to hiding themselves and their feeling, it’s important to keep encouraging them to deliberately tune in and share where they’re at.

Ara: So what else do we need to say here?

James: I guess the new piece is recognising those defences that each of those three holds. Perhaps it feels obvious to go to Tony when we feel yearning, Morgan when we feel anger, and Jonathan when we feel fear, to help them really feel it and be held and heard in it. But there’s now this extra piece of recognising that we need to go to them at least as much if Tony is pinning that yearning onto somebody else or falling into over-excited connection or fantasy, if Morgan is going into inner critic anger-inward type noise, or if Jonathan is chalkboarding.

Ara: Those experiences often feel more dissociated – now that we understand what that means. It often doesn’t feel so apparent that there is a feeling present. There may not be clarity around which part of us is doing their thing, or what has triggered them. There’s just a general sense of unease, confusion, or of being a bit scattered or vague.

James: That’s right. I think we got it first with Jonathan because we clearly identified him with hypervigilance and chalkboarding. Last year whenever we found our brain going over and over things in that familiar way, I would go to Jonathan and encourage him to go closer to the ‘traumado’ of fear/shame feelings instead of desperately trying to solve impossible equations. It had to be very slow and gradual, but eventually we could sit together in the eye of the storm and let it swirl around us, finding a way to settle him there instead of trying to figure everything out which usually made it worse and worse.

Ara: And lately we’ve taken any – even fleeting – ‘noisy’ anger in/out thoughts as an opportunity to go to Morgan and encourage her to sit with her feelings of anger. Tony can be very dissociated, but again we’ve been noticing the kind of thing that’s likely to make him feel rejected or lonely when it happens, and encouraging him to drop down into the yearning feeling, with one of us holding him through it.

James: From a trauma-informed perspective it has to be gradual doesn’t it? Feeling the feelings in the times when it feels possible to do so, gradually expanding the window of tolerance so more and more of it is possible to feel. Slowly these parts can drop the defences more and more, creating a ‘secure base’ of more gentle time with us every day to return to. And very gradually they can share those feelings with trusted others too.

Ara: More on that in a moment. Anything else to say on the inner work?

James: One thing is how each part’s go-to fantasies helped us to understand their resistance, as well as the feelings they covered up. There’s a lot more to write about how we us our erotic imagination for such exploration. We sketched out some of it in this zine with Justin. 

Lately we noticed that Jonathan, Tony, and Morgan kept going towards a fantasy where they were welcomed into a home with me. But the way that fantasy played out was very different for each of them. With Jonathan it was about being in a terrifying situation, rescued by me, and taken somewhere safe where he had a lot of time to recover before having to do anything else. With Tony it was about coming to live with me but being convinced that he would mess up and be sent away. He kept acting out until he could admit those feelings and believe my reassurance. With Morgan she came to me very reluctantly. She kept wanting to fight me and walk away, struggling to trust me to really be up for being with her rage.

Ara: So fascinating how those fantasies – and many of the dreams we’ve had too – echo the processes we’re going through in our outer life. Anything else?

James: I guess that the process feels reciprocal. The more the ‘insecure’ parts learn to trust us, the more of the previously disowned ‘unacceptable’ feelings they can bring. And the more they bring those feelings, the more trust is built. Welcoming them in those feelings seems to help all of them to become more real, more fully fleshed out. That is partly why Morgan wanted a ‘real name’ rather than being called ‘Beastie’ which felt like a caricature. 

But on the way towards that more ‘secure’ attachment with us they often balk at it. They try to resist those feelings, like they can’t really believe it’s really okay to say that they hate somebody – or us (Morgan), or to beg not to be left (Tony).

Ara: Mm which is perhaps why they have to practise in fantasy before they’re able to do that in reality. We’ve described it as encouraging them to bring the whole palette of feelings, not just the not palatable elements of themselves.

James: We like a bit of word play don’t we? 

We also find it useful to notice which old experiences keep returning to our mind, and which current ones. With old experiences we can ask where each part of us is at with those. Often it seems that one of them needs to return to that memory and to complete it somehow – by really feeling it, or by saying how they wish they’d been able to respond, for example, if they’d been more available back then. You and I can hold and hear them through that process, instead of our old pattern of despairing that we kept churning round and round old memories. 

With current experiences it’s similarly important for all of them – or the one who is particularly struggling – to be heard and heeded. For example recently we deeply listened to Morgan’s angry response to how someone treated us and found a response that sat well with her. After that she felt a lot more welcome and ‘at home’ in us.

Ara: It’s not about directly reacting to any ‘insecure’ impulse they might have, as Max might once have done. Rather it’s about engaging in conversation, taking them very seriously, and thinking together how we might respond – giving ourselves a lot of time around it.

James: Right, so instead of Tony leaping into a connection with someone the minute he feels drawn to them, we can notice that feeling and consider how we might move cautiously towards that connection, or whether it’s really speaking to a general desire for more contact, or to be looked after internally. Instead of Morgan deciding never to engage with somebody again we can investigate what she’s responding to negatively in them, and what might be a safe-enough, boundaried way of relating with that person, given what they bring up in her.

Ara: I’m thinking that all these ways of being with them are about demonstrating how loved and respected they are.

James: Which is very easy to do. It’s when parts or feelings are hidden that they feel murky or threatening or hard to love. Brought to the surface and into the light they become far easier to love and understand.

Ara: Which brings us onto the final part because I suspect the same is true in relationships with others. When parts of us – and their feelings – are hidden and murky, others may well respond to us with aversion, or by trying to grasp onto the more appealing defensive versions of us. When it’s all available – and clear – to ourselves and others, we stand a better chance of having mutually nourishing, open, relationships.

James: Right. But so hard for the parts of us who have survived for years by employing those defences to believe that.

Bringing all our parts into relationships

Ara: So let’s explore this. How is it useful to bring the ‘insecure’ parts into relationship with others? I can imagine people thinking that doesn’t make much sense. Surely the last thing we want to do is to relate with others in an insecure way?

James: Mm well part of it is that Pete Walker bit we find so useful: reparenting ourselves and reparenting by committee. We can’t do all this work alone because humans are relational, interconnected and interdependent. There’s only so far we can get as an individual (albeit an individual who is also seven people!)

Ara: There’s only so far our inner relationships can take us.

James: Right. I’m thinking that therapy is like an in-between between the inner work and the work of relating to the people in our life. We can gradually bring our ‘insecure’ parts into the therapeutic relationship in order to notice how they relate with another person, and to experience a different response to the damaging ones they’ve received in the past.

Ara: It often feels like that doesn’t it? That me, you or Fox is taking Morgan, Jonathan or Tony to therapy to give them an hour of practicing doing this with another person.

James: Right, they practise with us at home, and with our therapist in that room. Doing similar things. Like the therapist will point out their defences and encourage them to drop into their body, communicate how they’re feeling, etc. They can practise revealing the things that they assume other people will reject in them – because that’s what’s happened in the past – and experience somebody just being okay with them.

Ara: Maybe a couple of examples?

James: Well like whenever Morgan allows herself to talk about what she’d really like to say to somebody who has treated us badly, our therapist clearly enjoys her energy and her capacity to see through people’s bullshit and protect us. And Tony is gradually feeling safe enough that if he shows up in therapy with the energy that he’s scared will be ‘too much’ for people, she’ll help him to stay grounded. She’ll be up for seeing the vulnerability he’s covering over, while encouraging him to go slowly instead of revealing ‘too far too fast’ as he has in the past.

Ara: And you’re thinking that this kind of therapy is a bridge to bringing those parts into more open relation with others?

James: I think that’s where discernment comes in perhaps. Who is it safe enough to openly engage with from those parts? Who might we be able to speak about these parts with, without actually bringing them out? What situations might we want to be cautious around, perhaps only bringing you or me to Ara, at least while this is all so new?

Ara: I’m thinking that maps nicely onto what Tony and I wrote about Dunbar’s number too. Discerning where a relationship is at, in our life, and what that means in terms of how open and vulnerable we’re able to be in it.

James: Heh our computer just told us it was ‘establishing secure connection’. I thought, ‘you and me both mate’!

Ara: *laughs*

James: What were we saying? Oh yeah. So we’re finding it hugely useful to recognise that Morgan, Tony, and Jonathan are already engaged in all our relationships – of course. And now we continually check in where they’re at with them. There’s a sense that, instead of denying that we feel any anger, yearning, or fear towards the people in our life, perhaps it’s more useful to assume that we will feel all of those things – to some extent – in all our relationships, and to name that – to ourselves, and even with that person.

Ara: Absolutely. There’s this paradoxical sense that the more we can allow all of that, the better we’ll be able  to love that person.

James: The more we know how we hate them, fear them, and want something from them, the better the relationship will be! It is surprising indeed, but it’s true. We’ve navigated recent potentially tricky moments in relationships much better, I think, being able to name to ourselves what those attachments – or potential attachments – are with that person.

Ara: Again an example?

James: Well with one friend we noticed how Tony wanted to fling himself into closer relationship with them, while Morgan had flickers of anger that perhaps they weren’t being mindful enough of how vulnerable we are. With another we noticed Tony wishing for more time with them, and Morgan wanting to dismiss them for not making more time for us. 

Those two things happened with friends who we talk about this stuff with all the time so we could name it, and they could reciprocate naming the multiple different parts of them in play. It makes it much easier to be able to say ‘this part of me feels…’ because there’s no blame in it. Not ‘you’re treating us badly’ but ‘I notice that part of me longs for more time with you and another part of me wants to distance from you because we’re not getting it. Can we talk about how we might do time together in future so those parts can have a bit more clarity about where we’re at?’ 

Ara: Mm that’s a good example because it turned out that it wasn’t that we really wanted lots more from them, or to reject them, we just wanted to understand where they were at more clearly, and what we could expect from them.

James: Discernment is important in knowing who will be up for those kinds of conversations and who won’t. Sometimes it’s more of an implicit sense – once we’ve named it all to ourselves – that we need to pull back a bit from this person, or to have a different kind of conversation, perhaps just from one of us Ara.

Ara: Yes, in the deepest relationships we might encourage Tony, Jonathan or Morgan to have the conversation directly, in order to experience that part of us being met well. In less close ones we could report on where our parts are at. In even less close relationships – like a professional exchange – we would talk from one of us as if we were a unified ‘I’, once we’d come up with our boundary, or request, or whatever it was. It feels important to have at least some relationships where all parts of us are welcome, just as we welcome them within ourselves.

James: I think we’re nearly there with this piece Ara.

Ara: One more breath to feel whether there’s anything more to add?

James: *breathes* Okay yes I want to say that it’s important to give these processes a lot of time. That’s why slow, spacious relationships are so essential for us at the moment. Often we need time to notice that an exchange with somebody has brought some of those ‘insecure’ feelings up in us, to find the part – or multiple parts – in us who are triggered, to fully drop into what they are feeling, and then to consider together what kind of response, if any, is necessary. We tend to keep ongoing notes on our phone about each of the current situations in play, and keep returning to them over days, or even weeks, until we have a clear sense of the appropriate response.

Ara: Mm right, and not jumping too quickly to that last stage is so important. As we’ve said, it might be that the feeling just needs to be held and heard inwardly, or that some kind of communication or clarification is important, or that we need the relationship to shift in some way. We often can’t tell which it is till we’ve had time to go through the whole process. And the more we do this – giving it time, and asking that other people give us time – the more those parts of us relax into the process instead of freaking out and trying to solve it immediately.

James: Criticism and conflict are a particular challenge of course. Morgan, Jonathan, and Tony would reactively go into a blame, shame, or tame response – respectively.

Ara: I like that. Blame the other, collapse in shame, or tame the situation by glossing over it or making it okay for the other person without attending to our needs. But taking time, as a team, helps us find more of an ‘I’m okay, you’re okay’ response, where we value ourselves and the others involved equally.

James: This whole thing also helps us to see much more clearly when we’re on the receiving end of other peoples’ reactivity: when they are foregrounding their equivalent of Morgan, Tony, or Jonathan – or their Max cover up. We’re not there yet of course, but there’s a strong sense of building compassion for others – even when they do react against us – because we’re so familiar with those parts of ourselves, and we know the incredibly tough feelings – and the painful experiences – that they come from. On the way to that compassion, though, we need to fully feel our attractions and aversions to those things in other people.

Ara: The sense I’m left with is that ‘earned secure attachment’ requires us to hold – and even share – all of our ‘insecure attachments’. Without that it would just be ‘faux secure attachment’ again.

James: Which meshes nicely with Bonnie Badenoch’s ‘radical inclusivity’, Janina Fisher’s ‘no part gets left behind’ and Richard Schwartz’s ‘no bad parts’. The answer is never to try to eradicate any part, or the less palatable elements of any part. The answer is to welcome them all fully, reach an inner secure attachment with them, and bring them all to all of our experiences in a safe-enough, secure-enough way.

Ara: Nicely put James.

James: Thank-you. And thank-you for doing this Ara. I’ve loved it, and your reminders to pause have definitely helped me both to enjoy the process throughout, and to not stray into the unwieldy lengths of some of our blog posts.

Ara: Mm there’s definitely more to be said about applying this same approach to our relationship with work James, but not for now. Let’s keep it a succinct little piece (for us!) at under 7000 words. Time for a walk *smiles*

More on this:

For more exploration of these themes check out our recent pieces on attachment, slow relating, and big feels and the other work on trauma and plurality on this website.

Patreon link: If you enjoyed this please feel free to support my free writing on Patreon.

Plural tag: This post was by James and Ara.

The post Attachment, emotion and plural parts work appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

We’ve already recently posted conversations between two other parts – Beastie and James – reviewing what this book has to say about trauma and plurality, and how we can work with them if you want to read more on this topic. For background on plurality, check out the plural work page on our website.

CN: Brief mentions of difficult childhood experiences and self-harm, no detailed descriptions. Brief mention of a tarot card as a metaphor, not as a tool of divination.

Ara: Hey Max-y, are you up for doing this one with me?

Max: I’d like that. It seems a good fit given that I was the part of us who struggled to practice mindfulness our whole life – when I thought we were just me – and you are the part of us who mindfulness seems to come most easily to.

Ara: It’s fascinating to me that we moved away from these practices, then returned to them, from a slightly different angle, and suddenly they made way more sense. Like before we understood them intellectually, but only rarely did we feel what others described feeling from them. Now they have become our go-to practices. I notice that we even turn away from things that would have been welcome distractions, or imperatives, in the past, in order to return to our version of these practices.

Max: Like turning off a TV show halfway through if we start to feel troubled, or remaining still rather than going to the next task if it feels like there’s more that we need to stay with.

Ara: That’s what I mean. Beastie and I discussed the way we’re practising ‘the gap’ rather than any kind of formal sitting in our blog post. Here I’d love to talk with you about how understanding and treating ourselves as plural unlocks various aspects of mindfulness. We can draw on the Janina Fisher book which we hadn’t read when we wrote the gap blog posts.

Max: Okay.

Ara: Before we start, how’re you doing right now? I’m aware it’s been a rough ride for you lately.

Max: It has. This trauma process, it ebbs and flows rather than being some kind of steady progress towards feeling less traumatised. It’s hard when the feelings are intense again to believe in the path we’re on.

Ara: That reminds me of the poem we’ve had up in our room from the start, by Ijeoma Umebinyuo. I often read it to you when you’re finding things tough.

“Healing comes in waves

and maybe today

the wave hits the rocks

and that’s ok,

that’s ok, darling

you are still healing

you are still healing.”

Max: That poem has helped me through some very hard times. It’s still helping me through now.

Ara: You particularly I think – of all of our parts – because being to the fore all our lives means that the traumatic experiences we’ve been through have often hit you the hardest.

Max: Mm, and I’m also the part of us who perhaps has to change the most. It’s so hard to see that the strategies I employed in order for us to survive have hurt us so much, and other people too. It’s so hard to confront that without collapsing into shame, and so hard to have any sense of who I might be on the other side of this. Oh I’m crying as I write this.

Ara: Your tears are very welcome Max. When you feel this way we remind you how very grateful we all are to you. As Janina points out, without disowning the sides of us that we learnt were ‘bad’ growing up, and foregrounding only the ‘good’ in you, we would never have survived. Without repressing the feelings associated with trauma and developing a side of ourselves who could get on with everyday life, we could never have made it through. 

And what’s more, as you were surviving by becoming what the world told you you had to be, you were also learning – all the time – psychology, sociology, psychotherapy, philosophy. You learnt all the things that we needed to finally make sense of our own suffering, and the suffering that it came from: the systems and structures around us, the intergenerational trauma playing out through us, the patterns we’d developed that were hurting us. You enabled us to survive, and you kept learning. It’s a huge feat, gentle warrior. You got us here.

Max: I did. 

Ara: At great cost too. So much pain each time you tried to find safety and belonging for us in ways you’d been taught, but which didn’t really work. So hard when your learnings took you in directions which resulted in you being dismissed and ridiculed, even attacked publicly.

Max: So many times Ara. Each time I find the way of seeing things that helps us the most, it always seems to push right at the edges of what people are up for. Like ‘I know you were with me about the relationship rules being questionable, and about gender being fluid and on multiple spectrums, and about the erotic being way bigger than the sexual, but now I need you to believe that I am multiple people sharing a body – and you very well might be too!’

Ara: Thankfully we’re finding some validation for our experiences in others’ writings, and in the way many people respond to our writing. It seems that there’s much agreement, from social justice and intersectional feminism through to the physical and mental health literature – that a huge problem in our current culture is children learning that they have to cover over themselves, and repress their authentic feelings, and pretend to be okay as you did: people being alienated from themselves, from others, from their work, and from nature, as Gabor Maté puts it. 

This is the individualism of neoliberal capitalism which disconnects us from ourselves and others, makes us feel we’re never enough and can never have enough, makes us police ourselves and others – literally and metaphorically, and puts a huge toll on the ecosystems we inhabit.

Max: Sitting alone in our room during lockdown trying to befriend every part of us seems a far cry from addressing systemic violence, the epidemic of addiction, or climate change, but it does seem that they’re all connected.

Ara: The process can be very painful at times though, I know Max. It’s like Janina says: our inner systems develop in ways that reflect the outer systems we grew up in. Schools, families, communities, cultures, where our feelings weren’t welcome, our needs weren’t heard, we weren’t protected from danger, and/or our boundaries weren’t respected.

Max: We keep coming back to that image of the tower, from the tarot deck, again this month.

Ara: We do, although James and Beastie continue to regard my openness to such things in a highly skeptical manner. 

The tower is about a structure collapsing to the ground. It’s perhaps the most frightening card in the deck. But it’s only when systems and structures are dismantled that we can see that the foundations were rotten: that we need to create stronger foundations before we can start to rebuild on top of them. 

That’s true for each individual’s inner system. It’s true for the family systems built on unaddressed intergenerational trauma. It’s true of organisations built on unjust principles like valuing different forms of labour unequally. It’s true of education systems built on the non-consensual ownership of children by adults, and the desire to create conforming citizens. It’s true of criminal justice systems built to protect the owners of property, which included humans when they were first developed. It’s true of economic systems built to make rich people ever richer, and to encourage consumption far beyond what the planet can sustain, by making people believe that they are lacking.

Max: You may be open to the spooky stuff, but you can bring the politics too it seems Ara.

Ara: It does seem that way. Maybe I know that it helps you to open to these painful, vulnerable, processes when you remember how it’s connected to our wider work, and to our politics and values, Max.

Max: That’s true. Holding so much shame and responsibility, it helps me to always return to that question of how I can be most helpful for others and for the wider world. The answer right now is to prioritize this inner work. Shall we talk about mindfulness?

Ara: I think we may have already given some sense of what we’re about to say, and of our process *smiles*

Buddhism and plurality

Max: We were happy when we got to chapter 3 of Janina’s book and saw a quote from our favourite teacher, Pema Chödrön.

Ara: It suggests that the Buddhist perspectives that help us so much are very much in alignment with this neurobiologically and psychotherapeutically informed plural/trauma perspective that Janina is presenting. The quote she uses from from Pema is: 

“We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is, we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us, a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet when we don’t close off and let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.” – Pema Chödrön

Max: That speaks to me so much. We have the image of me, for much of my life, as an armoured up warrior: presenting masks to the world that would gain me some degree of acceptance. I was battling and battling to get love and respect, and covering over my vulnerability, my shame, and my conviction that if anyone saw the ‘real’ me – beneath the masks – they would be disgusted.

Ara: The image of you now is the spiritual warrior that Pema describes in her writing. Prepared for this final act of bravery: removing the armour and the masks and standing there naked, ready to face what comes. But you’re not alone any more.

Max: I have all of you standing with me. 

So Janina understands the disconnection and separateness from the self, that Pema describes, as developing because we disowned vital parts of ourselves: leaving them behind in the past at the times we were taught they were unacceptable.

“By disowning the trauma, or the anger, or the need for contact with others, we lose or deny important aspects of ourselves. By over-identifying with the trauma-related shame, hopelessness, and fear of being seen, we constrict our lives and make ourselves smaller than we need to be. Both strategies, adaptive in a time of danger, become liabilities when the individual is ready to live a ‘life after trauma’, free of the constrictions and restrictions needed for living in a traumatogenic environment.” – Janina Fisher

Ara: And this sounds very similar to Buddhism doesn’t it? Buddhism is all about finding the middle way between hurling things away from us that we don’t want, and grasping hold of things that we do: between aggression and craving. We always use this quote from Martine Batchelor to describe it.

“Let’s imagine that I am holding an object made of gold. It is so precious and it is mine – I feel I must hold onto it. I grasp it, curling my fingers so as not to drop it, so that nobody can take it away from me. What happens after a while? Not only do my hand and arm get cramp but I cannot use my hand for anything else. When you grip something, you create tension and you limit yourself.

Dropping the gold object is not the solution. Non-attachment means learning to relax, to uncurl the fingers and gently open the hand. When my hand is wide open and there is no tension, the precious object can rest lightly on my palm. I can still value the object and take care of it; I can put it down and pick it up; I can use my hand for doing something else.”

Max: So this sense of not disowning any part of us, or identifying with any part of us, is much like that idea: holding it lightly.

Ara: Pema talks about not repressing thoughts, feelings, sensations, but equally not reacting out of them or focusing on them at the expense of everything else that is going on in our bodies and surroundings. The mindful practice involves being with every feature of our experience in a way that is both welcoming and spacious: not too tight, not too loose. 

Max: And we could see our lives as having been a process of disowning some parts of ourselves – and some experiences – and over-identifying with others. So this here-and-now practice of not disowning and not identifying is a way of counterbalancing that.

Ara: Right, we are up for being with the parts we disowned as ‘not me’, and for loosening the grip around those we over-identified with: saw as ‘me’. In our case disowned were our fight, attach, and freeze capacities. Over-identified with was you and your flight tendency to avoid feelings and stay busy, motivated by a strong fawn desire to please others at all costs, because the disappointment, disapproval and disgust of others was what had been so dangerous to us as a child.

This is the ‘no part gets left behind’ ethos that James and Beastie spoke about. Interestingly I found that echoed in a Pema audio I listened to this morning. She says that the aim of Buddhist practice is never to cultivate one part of ourselves and to to try to get rid of another. Splitting ourselves into good, virtuous and bad, irredeemable parts is a form of biased, fixated thinking. Instead the idea is to train in staying open to the whole thing.

Self-compassion

Max: That brings us on to self-compassion right? Self-compassion is a key feature of mindfulness and something that we always struggled to find through mindful practices, until we added plurality to the picture.

Ara: Mm and Janina explains why self compassion, and loving yourself, are so hard – if not impossible. It’s because we had to hate ourselves, or at least parts of ourselves, in order to survive. Any form of self compassion would actually have been dangerous. 

Janina says that, as vulnerable children, we have to believe that we can get love by being what we’ve learnt is ‘good’ and never what we’ve learnt is ‘bad’. This is far safer for a child than believing that they are out of our control and have no-one to turn to: that they’re alone in a dangerous world. 

So we disconnect from anything in us that we’ve learnt is ‘bad’ – because it was disapproved of or rejected by others. Those things are ‘not me’. We also disconnect from the victim child that the bad things happened to as ‘not me’. We hold onto the good child who can be acceptable and therefore safer in an unsafe world. And we minimise any sense that we’ve been a victim of traumatic situations. The good child might be precociously mature, perfectionistic, and/or invested in being helpful to others, for example.

Max: Sounds strangely familiar!

Ara: So we use dissociation, denial and self hatred to keep the ‘not me’ parts out, in order that the ‘good’ parts can keep developing. The ‘bad’ and vulnerable parts of us therefore stay stuck in the past, when they came into being. But we lose vital parts of ourselves in the process.

Max: Janina says that the bargain we make when we disown parts of ourselves as a kid in order to survive – as ‘not me’ – is that we have to hate the self. We have to keep out the parts we’re intimidated by and ashamed of. Again this links to Gabor Maté who says that disconnection from the self means not being able to connect with others authentically, not being in touch with our feelings, being unable to have boundaries, and being unable to treat ourselves kindly.

Ara: Think about that Max, that’s our Tony, Jonathan, Beastie and Fox right there. In order for us to survive, you had to disown the part of us who can confidently be himself and assumes that others can love him. You had to disown the part who is sensitive and vulnerable and feels things deeply. You had to disown the part who feels enraged when people treat us non-consensually and can let them know it’s not okay. And you had to disown the part who is a genius at gentleness and playfulness.

Max: I’d never quite seen it this way before though, that self-compassion would have been actively dangerous to us, that it would put us at such risk of being ‘not-me’. I always struggled to understand why I was so incapable of loving myself when people spoke about that.

Ara: Gabor says that when we disown those parts of us we end up prioritising attachment over authenticity, looking outside of ourselves for things we’ve disowned in ourselves, often in unboundaried relationships with work and with other people, and in addictive patterns more widely.

Max: But none of those things could really fulfill us, because we are like a mask with nothing behind it until we can reclaim those parts of ourselves, their capacities, feelings, and experiences.

Ara: I was interested in our reading on shame to hear shame described as ‘soul-murder’. That is literally what kids are encouraged to do in our culture: to murder their soul. They operate on shame logic: always pretending that they are better than human, because they are terrified that they are ‘really’ far worse than human. 

Max: But when you live like that you know that it is a pretence, and you are convinced that you really are worse, perhaps because you can sense that emptiness within you, that sense that you’ve murdered your soul. That’s precisely how I felt much of the time.

Ara: Janina describes plural work as ‘soul retrieval’: practising self-compassion one part at a time. Of course this is made more difficult by our cultural insistence that we are singular selves, or unified souls, but there are many cultures around the world who recognise multiple souls sharing a body. One even has seven as the norm, you’ll be glad to hear.

Max: I think this soul retrieval, and selves-compassion, was the main feature of our inner work for a long time actually.

Ara: The way Pema puts it is that you have to create a ‘cradle of kindness’ before you can do any of the other work of mindfulness: observing your thoughts and feelings, cultivating compassion for others, becoming comfortable with uncertainty, and so on.

Max: I always balked at that idea and tried to crack on with all the various mindful practices without that cradle of kindness. But now I think it’s right. In many ways we’ve only been able to get to our version of mindfulness now that we have selves-compassion. So interesting that the very first time we felt your presence, Ara, it was as a sense of cradling.

Ara: Jonathan felt me cradling him: our body as both cradled and cradler. I’m so sorry that I wasn’t able to give you all that sooner Max-y. I so wish that I could have cradled you through the hard times.

Max: We got to something like that occasionally I think. Janina helped to explain that experience too. Self-harm can be a way of regulating intolerable emotions. I guess the times I self-harmed were when disowned parts of us threatened to be revealed, or when I felt that they had already been seen. I felt totally overwhelmed by them, with their massive feelings of repressed rage, fear, yearning, or grief. The only way to calm them was to hit myself. After that I do remember feeling that cradling feeling: being able to put myself to bed and soothe myself, almost as if somebody else was doing it. You.

Ara: Babygirl.

Max: I know. I’m so glad that we’ve found another way now. However painful it can be at times to feel all these feelings, it’s so much better than that.

Ara: I guess the self-compassion piece of mindfulness, done in a plural way, involves welcoming all parts of yourself that you previously disowned. In our case it involves cultivating parts who are capable of deep compassion for all of you – the inner carer and protector that Beastie and James described.

Max: And what’s shifted for us in recent months is that you’ve both felt way more available to us, as we have brought you forward more and more. Like we can wake up with you to the fore, draw on you to do everyday tasks, and easily access you whenever we’re struggling. 

Ara: So cultivating a cradle of kindness, for people, could involve an act of self-excavation/self-creation to develop such inner parents. For us it began with journaling with an imagined voice – of how a kind nurturer or solid protector might speak with you if you had one.

Max: Patchworked together, in your case from memories of the kind moments we did have with caregivers and partners over the year, from Pema herself, and from a few wise, compassionate mentors we had recently: Sophia, Lokhadi, and now our current therapist. Do you include any fictional characters, the way James does, Ara?

Ara: Interestingly I think I’m more built from the real encounters we’ve had, whereas James is more built from fictional folk.

Max: I’m sure Beastie would have some theory there about the patriarchy.

Mindful observation

Ara: Okay so as well as helping us to achieve self-compassion, plurality has been a way to unlock the kind of mindful observation which has been so hard for us to date, despite you writing an entire book about it, our beautiful overachiever!

Max: I was trying to get here I guess! 

In mindfulness you’re meant to observe all the thoughts, feelings, and sensations which bubble up, by continually returning to a point of focus in the present: often the breath going in and out. But, for me, mindfulness generally involved being swept away by memories and plans, by fears and doubts, for fifteen minutes until the alarm on my phone went off and reminded me that I was rubbish at mindfulness as well as at everything else! It wasn’t always quite that bad, but not far off. 

Ara: Fortunately Pema is very open that that was her experience for a long, long time too, and still often is.

Max: So how is plurality helping us with this?

Ara: Again Beastie and James described Janina’s concept of ‘dual awareness’ at some length in their posts, including the neurobiological understanding of how it works, and some of how we’re practising it. Basically dual awareness involves one part – who is in ‘everyday life’ mode – holding whichever part is struggling, or having the tough thoughts, feelings or sensations.

Max: And that’s mindful observation unlocked right there! As soon as we can experience it as one part of us holding another, it becomes way more possible for us to do this. Can you describe a few of the times you’ve done it lately?

Ara: Mm yes, well this last week or so we’ve had the amusing image of James and myself in our tiny studio caring for five fractious kids. First we got sick, then this heatwave hit, and perhaps because you’re all finally feeling safe enough, there have been a whole lot of feelings around for everyone. The minute one of you starts crying it sets the others off, and it’s often hard to tell who is actually struggling, and what the problem is.

Max: Nice image. I’m not sure what I think of myself as a screaming child!

Ara: It fits with the tower idea too, like we’re finally safe enough to go back to our foundations, to rebuild them in a way where all of you are welcome, and all of each of your feelings are welcome too. No wonder there’s a lot of feeling there when you’ve been keeping them crushed down all this time.

Max: But we’re still not adept – shall we say – at locating the source of the feeling or what needs to be done about it.

Ara: It’s a wonderful process for me, coming to each of you in turn, exploring where you’re at, helping you to finally feel held and heard.

Max: I’m not sure whether James agrees with you about the ‘wonderful process’. He compared it to the time when our electrics went off, and he just had to turn all the fuse switches off and then flip them back on in turn, to determine which one was tripping the circuit breaker. He wishes he could just switch us all off and then back on again in turn to find out where the trouble is and fix it.

Ara: A very James response. And you know sometimes his approach reaches one of you when mine doesn’t. He’s more skilled at finding the humour in the situation, for example, which can often cut through the struggle. With Beastie that sense of the deep respect he has for her is a big deal.

Max: But you are badass with patience. I have no idea how you do it. 

Ara: I’m so glad that I can. It seems like I just know… you know that this is part of the process, that we will find our way through it, and I can help you to slow down and put a big space around it.

Max: The other night with Fox, you were looking out of the window together. It was one of those times where the trauma feelings kept flickering up in our body like lightning strikes. Each time we felt calmer, it would flash again. We were all so sick of it: just so tired, so desperate for some rest.

Ara: I held Fox under the big sky, and we just watched it happen, like watching a real thunderstorm – something we all love. Each time the trauma flashed: a moment of fear or shame, attached to a distressing thought or sensation, we named it and noticed it go away. And we remained watching the sky till the next one happened. It was like the lightning was the thought or sensation, the feeling the thunder.

Max: Which is mindful observation precisely isn’t it? To notice the thoughts, feelings, and sensations without following them or attaching to them, and without resisting them or trying to get rid of them.

Ara: James did it a different way with Jonathan later. We tried to enjoy a novel but the flashes started up again. They lay in bed together and James got curious about the feeling. What is this emotion we’re so terrified of when it flashes up? He helped Jonathan to get curious too, to feel safe enough to go towards it instead of closing his eyes, backing away, and putting the duvet over his head every time the feeling flashed. The image was of James holding Jonathan by the hand and helping him look under the bed or in the closet to check for monsters.

Max: That time when they tried to go towards the feeling there was nothing really there.

Ara: Other times there is something, and we’ll talk you through practices like focusing, or imagining it as a cell in front of us, in order to explore the feeling at a distance. Other times working through Janina’s befriending questions have helped you to feel held and heard when you’re struggling. The creative part – which I really love – is shifting the container: finding out what’s needed this time. And then that attunement feeling when you hit on just the right approach for this part on this occasion.

Max: If it was me I’d grasp hold of that – the goal of attunement – wanting to get it right. But that would fetch us right back where we started wouldn’t it?

Ara: I fear so. The beauty is in the process, not just the endpoint, as Meg-John and Justin would say about sex of course! Also, Janina points out how moments of rupture and repair are vital for building trust. So times when James or I ‘get it wrong’ but are able to realise that – or you are able to tell us – then we can acknowledge that and apologise and get curious with you about what would work better. Those times are perhaps more helpful than the times we ‘get it right’ first time, in building that sense of ‘earned secure attachment’ that he and Beastie discussed.

Max: Like when he joked that he wished we’d all calm down a bit, and Fox got the grumps with him, because they’re trying really hard to bring their difficult feelings to him now and not just be this easy, delightful kid.

Ara: The fact that Fox could express that and he could hear it and reassure them was so valuable. It’s like in therapy: rupture and repair are often the most helpful moments in building trust and showing us where our struggles are and how they manifest in our relationships.

Max: I’m thinking that too, how such moments in our inner system reflect struggles we have ‘out there’.

Ara: Always so helpful to see how things play out in here, and how that relates to how they’ve played out in the past, and how they play out in the rest of our life.

Max: So here we’re saying that dual awareness unlocks mindful observation for us. If we conceptualise it – and feel it – as a containing part of us holding another part. Then it becomes possible to sit still and observe the thoughts, feelings, and sensations with open curiosity, rather than getting caught up in them or trying to get rid of them.

Ara: Back to holding the golden object, yes. Sometimes we can just feel that sense of holder and held in silent sitting, often we use slow, gentle self talk to guide ourselves through it: like a guided meditation you might listen to. 

And I think again that the compassion piece drives the mindful observation. Because we love you so much, James and I are genuinely curious about you all and how you work. We really want to learn you better, to earn your trust, to improve our bonds with you. 

It makes sense that it’s a slow process though. As Janina says, it was adaptive in your early life to avoid comfort and self compassion, and to shame yourself and self judge before caregivers or others could find you lacking. It was also adaptive to distrust others as potentially unsafe and uncaring: to assume they will likely disappear or let you down.

Max: So hard for us now to trust even inner parts to really be able to hold us and hear us.

Ara: Such trust has to be slowly earned and built. Janina says that child selves need a palpable sense of someone very glad to see them, tender when they are wounded, unafraid when they are hostile. They need the same experience to be repeated many time over in order to trust it.

Max: That is the sense we’re developing, slowly.

Ara: I know you prefer to go fast, my little fleer.

Max: Janina says ‘slower is faster’.

Ara: She does indeed.

Embracing uncertainty

Max: So the final aspect of mindfulness that plurality seems to help us is with embracing uncertainty. This is what we talk about in Life Isn’t Binary with Alex. People – particularly in the west – tend towards binary thinking, polarising into us and them, right and wrong, good and bad… and me and not-me, I guess.

Ara: Exactly, and as Alex said in that book and elsewhere, trauma makes us polarise even more. In Life Isn’t Binary we explored various alternatives for non-binary thinking: the in-between or middle way; both/and instead of either/or; and holding multiple stories simultaneousy: embracing the paradox and uncertainty of the situation.

We’ve already explained how Janina’s plural perspective helps us to find a middle way between rejecting or disowning parts of ourselves – on the one hand – and overly identifying or merging with them – on the other. Instead of repressing emotions or reacting out of them, we can see all feelings as communication from traumatised parts and move towards them.

Max: Dual awareness is a both/and approach right? We are both the part holding and hearing the traumatised part, and we are the part being held and heard.

Ara: Yes. A misunderstanding about plurality that we’re always keen to challenge is that the aim should be to ‘integrate’ our fragmented selves into a singular self. Janina sites trauma scientist Daniel Siegel as making a strong case against defining integration as fusion. Instead he says that integration required differentiation and linkage. Before we can integrate any two phenomena we have to differentiate them as separate entities, then we can link them up. So instead of either rejecting them or merging with them, we can both discern the separate parts and (re)connect them together.

Janina also talks of holding the bothness of ourselves as one physical individual – in terms of our body and brain – and the fact that that body/brain is fragmented and holds many parts of different ages, stages, attachment styles and defensive responses. That way we get to a sense of ‘we together’ not each part ‘abandoned alone’. 

Max: That helps us to tolerate and understand the unnerving sense that we contain such radically opposing capacities. For example for the last year or so we’ve felt impossibly fragile, as well as knowing that we can be pretty robust. And now simultaneously we can feel that vivid sense of being cradled and of cradling.

Ara: Yes. For quite a long time we felt each one of us come to the fore separately, never together. It’s been under two years that we’ve come to sense two of us together simultaneously: initially mostly when we wrote dialogue in our journal, then increasingly in verbal conversation between our parts, and now much of the time there is a vivid sense of two of us present at once.

Max: What about embracing paradox and uncertainty.

Ara: I have a few thoughts about this. One relates to the cradle of kindness. While we were building that cradle together – bringing each of us forward and nurturing the bonds between us – we were terribly polite to each other, in a way.

Max: Yes, there was a weird sense that we agreed on most things, even though we knew that we were radically different characters, driven by very different motivations.

Ara: That loving kindness between us that we so desperately needed perhaps required us to all pull in the same direction for a while.

Max: And there’s a sense of our inner system replicating early outer ones, where it didn’t feel safe enough to ‘rock the boat’, and we were all very scared of hurting each other, or of ‘ruining the day’ for other parts. Each of us tried to remain in our most palatable forms: Fox being delightful and pretending not to be scared, Beastie being forthright but never letting herself fly off the handle, and so on.

Ara: This last month we’ve noticed less politeness, and much more sense of the inner conflicts being available to us.

Max: As soon as it began you took that as a good sign.

Ara: I’m sure it is. Because Pema and Janina agree that embracing uncertainty, being comfortable with not-knowing, and holding paradox are vital life skills. We’ve written before about the Buddhist teachings on accepting praise and blame, success and failure, pleasure and pain, fame and disgrace as part of life, in fact questioning which counts as which.

Max: Who knows what’s good or bad?

Ara: Janina talks about how all of us contain the seeming opposites of vulnerability and control, shame and pride, longing to be seen and to be invisible, preferring closeness and distance, clinging to others and pushing them away. Understanding our plurality enables us to contain all of that within this system, and work with it to ensure everyone is heard and has their needs respected, rather than pretending that everybody wants the same thing.

Max: Going back to each part as a trauma response pattern, she suggests that attach wants help, love, and protection. Fawn wants to please. Fight wants control. Flight wants safe distance. And freeze wants to stay invisible.

Ara: Although in our case freeze did set up our Instagram account.

Max: To share pictures of animals, not of us though. Although we do occasionally allow Tony to get a selfie in!

Ara: The ability to tolerate paradox and to embrace uncertainty is so vital in the work we’re doing. For a start, as I said before, what we’re doing requires adaptability: an ever-shifting container to hold and hear parts in the way they need each time they are present. That’s much like how actual parents need to adapt how they respond to their different children, in different emotional states, and as they grow over time.

Also there is a huge paradox that learning to do things differently to how we’ve done them in the past can actually cause more tough feelings before we get to a point of feeling more able to deal with them. This makes sense because we’re letting go of our long-held habits and survival strategies, with only faith to go on that the newer ones we’re developing are really going to be more helpful.

Janina describes the paradox that as soon as we relax our anxiety escalates, because softening, letting our guard down, and trusting ourselves or others, have always felt dangerous.

Max: That’s one I experience a lot.

Ara: Pete Walker likens trying new habits to going to the dentist. You know that it will bring more pain in the short term, but less in the long term. 

Max: The area of life that happens in all the time at the moment is around boundaries. We’re trying so hard to honestly let people know what our boundaries are around the type and amount of contact we want. We know that such things should be consensual: that people in our life shouldn’t ask of us to have more contact, or contact of different kinds, than we actually want. That would be just as non-consensual as asking a partner to have more sex, or sex of different kinds, than they actually want.

But pretty much every time somebody assumes that we’ll want a kind – or amount – of contact that’s more than what we want, we go into a trauma response. It can take hours, even days, to process the fear/shame feelings and to formulate a reply to that person which feels both kind and honest.

Ara: I’ve held you through that one a few times haven’t I, using the befriending questions?

Max: Yep, I know where it comes from now: all the times my boundaries have been violated. I’m so scared the person will just push through, will annihilate me, if I hold my boundary. And I guess Jonathan – our fawn part – feels as though we need to give people what they want or they’ll abandon us.

Ara: Luckily we have Beastie now who can bring clarity and protection to those situations, and Tony who doesn’t mind being ‘a bit crap’, rather than feeling he always has to go the extra mile for people who aren’t treating us very well or respecting our boundaries.

Max: But we notice the paradox that doing the thing that’s better for us in the long run, can bring up more trauma and pain in the short term. So we can’t use the intensity of our trauma feelings as any measure of how well we’re doing at all this.

Ara: That can be really confusing love, no wonder you feel frightened and self-doubting at times. This work requires such a leap into the unknown.

Max: Now then, you know that you can always get me on board with a Frozen reference don’t you?

Ara: Just let it go Max-y *chuckles* You are so our Elsa. 

Plurality helps us to be with those paradoxes and uncertainties. Of course parts of us are soothed by us holding our boundaries, but other parts of us are scared by it because people have pushed, or rejected us, when we did that in the past. Parts of us long to trust me and James to hold them through this time, and other parts are very reluctant to trust. Parts of us would love to expand out into the world again, and other parts are terrified by the prospect. As Janina says, it’s about being up for engaging with all those parts, and about having a steady inner presence to hold the bothness. 

Coming home

Max: Nearly there Ara. D’you wanted to finish with coming home?

Ara: It seems appropriate. Just click your heels three times Max-y! Yes this was one final theme we saw in Janina’s plural/trauma writing that rang bells with our Buddhist reading. In fact the Wizard of Oz reference is apt.

Max: It’s one of many childhood tales where a person travels to a fantasy land and meets all these characters, but then has to come back to the ‘real world’ and ‘grow up’. 

Ara: Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, Labyrinth, Alice in Wonderland, the list goes on and on. An alternative plural reading of such fiction is that in childhood we have this capacity to be all these parts, with different characteristics. Our culture – for the last century or so – has forced us to kill off those capacities in order to be what we perceive as ‘adult’: a singular, consistent, rational, self. 

Max: Many of the so-called ‘adults’ are causing untold destruction at the moment in the name of keeping hold of that way of life.

Ara: It relates also to the ways that ‘the other’ has always been portrayed as more ‘childlike’ or ‘primitive’ in order to justify oppressing them: women, disabled people, people of different races or nationalities, the working classes.

So perhaps we might want to flip the ‘home’ that Dorothy longs to return to as Oz, rather than Auntie Em’s. Whatever the case, welcoming home is a key theme in both plurality and Buddhism. Janina says:

“Resolution of past painful events cannot truly be achieved without reclaiming the lost children and disowned parts of ourselves, extending to them a helping hand, welcoming them ‘home’ at long last, creating safety for them, and making them feel wanted, needed, and valued.”

Max: In many of her case-studies Janina encourages clients who are holding traumatised child-parts to show them that they have a safe home which they live in now: like to literally to take them around that space.

Ara: We do that too. Looking around our room and telling the stories of various objects can be a soothing and grounding activity for our traumatised parts. We even bought an armchair which we felt was a good representation of me and James, as the chair we go to when we needed to be heard and held.

Max: That was the most money we’ve ever spent on ourselves, other than for our top surgery which brought Jonathan forward, and for the fox tattoo on our arm. How interesting.

Ara: Inner parents and children are worth a few quid it seems!

Imagining the fantasy home that we all live in together, and where each of us are in or around that home, can work in a similar way to looking around our actual home.

Max: Finding Jonathan a place in the kitchen – the heart of the house – has helped him a lot lately. He can nourish us all, and listen to all our feelings as he cooks without getting overwhelmed by them.

Ara: It’s such a good alternative to the chalkboard room where he was disconnected from us all, and stuck trying to figure out all that confusing emotional input. It’d be great to keep talking between us about our roles and spaces within that imaginary home.

Max: Recently a plural system tweeted about how many plurals imagine a house like this, some larger innerworlds or mindscapes.

Ara: Shaping our imaginary homes is a nice way of reshaping our inner system along different lines to those that originally shaped it, having gone all the way back down to our foundations. Moving between fantasy and reality in this way is something we’ve always found very helpful.

Max: Like tuning into what our fantasies tell us about where we’re at, what our fears and yearnings are. And also using fantasies as ways to deliberately try different ways of relating.

Ara: Recently we tried deliberately meeting all of our ‘shadow’ sides in fantasy. That was powerful. 

I also wanted to mention somatic elements to our work here: increasingly embodied touch is something we now bring into the holding and hearing time.

Max: Mm, like self-talk, nurturing self-touch is not something that people are encouraged to do. It’s seen as pretty weird.

Ara: We need a whole further post to cover how solo talking and solo touch are stigmatised, while talking and touching with others are encouraged. And if you are going to solo-touch, then erotic touch is allowable, but not nurturing touch: cuddles, strokes, and the like. That’s similar with fantasies too, few people try nurturing fantasies even though they might try erotic ones. Sari Van Anders’ theory would suggest that we should treat the solo and partnered, and the nurturing and erotic, aspects of our experience as equally valid.

Max: How does the welcoming home part relate to Buddhism Ara? 

Ara: I’m reminded of Manu Bazzano’s work on hospitality. In Buddhism the aim is to be able to welcome all sentient beings: the image of inviting them all into your home for a feast. That’s one that Jonathan would like. Islamic poet, Rumi, captures a similar idea in his poem The Guest House, which Zen Pencils did a great comic of here: very plural.

James and Beastie didn’t love Janina’s idea of the ‘getting on with normal life’ part. But towards the end of the book she suggests ‘host’ as an alternative word for this part: like they are hosting the other parts, and their body is literally a host for all. Janina says that you need a host, otherwise the kids feel ‘home alone’.

Max: This sounds like what Beastie and I were discussing in our accompany not abandon post. If we can welcome all of our parts home, then we’ll be better able to welcome all sentient beings, because there’s nothing ‘out there’ that we aren’t somewhat familiar with ‘in here’. Part of why the outer world has always been so frightening to me is that I was encountering things out there that I was terrified of in myself: particularly other people who criticised me, became angry with me, or demanded too much of me.

Ara: Recently we realised that the responses you fear when we hold our boundaries are other people becoming furious, or them feeling abandoned. Interestingly those relate very much to the ways in which our Beastie or Tony might respond: our two most disowned parts.

We can see plural work as a way of welcoming all parts of us home, and mindfulness as an act of hospitality towards ourselves, no matter what. Janina suggests that if we do this work it will have a knock on effect on our relationships with others as well. We’ll be better able to tolerate them not being there, and keep our hearts open when they are.

Check out the previous two blog posts in this series to find out more about the theory and practice of plurality and trauma. For much more on plurality, check out the plural work page on our website.

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

Plural tag: This post was written by Ara and Max.

The post Plural mindfulness / mindful 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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