Afleveringen
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join me this week for another guided meditation practice. wishing you a neutral to good week ahead as you take these ten minutes with me to connect to your matrix of support đ©”
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Hello dear readers/listeners,
As we prepare to wrap up our read-a-long of No Bad Parts and transition to our next book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, I wanted to end with some free practices for you to keep in your back pocket as you continue to explore connecting to the Self, the Observer, and the Adult Conciousness. I hope you find this practice helpful.
We will begin our next read-a-long in April as I use this month to transition - as a thank you for being here, everyone will receive a free one-month subscription. Paid subscribers - all of your subscriptions are extended for a month. Free subscribers - feel free to use this month to listen to some of our book club posts and see if youâd like to join us in April!
If you enjoy what you learn here, feel free to share with a friend - it helps keep my work going :)
Wishing you tiny moments of neutrality and curiosity,
trisha
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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This episode is free this week to welcome our new readers/listeners :)
Welcome back to our No Bad Parts Read-A-Long. Iâm so glad to have you here, and I know weâve got quite a few new people this week. For those who are new, this is our little club where we come together to explore different books and healing modalities. Weâve previously gone through The Practical Guide to Healing Developmental Trauma, which explores NARM, the NeuroAffective Relational Model. Right now, weâre diving into No Bad Parts by Dr. Richard Schwartz, which focuses on Internal Family Systems (IFS).
Each week, we meet here to discuss a chapter, and I provide some interpretation to help you along. Whether youâve read the book or not, itâs all good - youâre welcome to join, ask questions, or simply listen in and learn. As we wrap up No Bad Parts, Iâm excited to share that our final live meeting will be on Saturday, February 22nd, at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. Iâm hoping this time will allow some of our friends from Europe and other parts of the world to join us. If you canât attend live, donât worry, the meeting will be recorded, and youâre welcome to submit questions in advance.
Looking ahead, Iâd love your input on what we explore next. One option is Unlocking the Emotional Brain by Bruce Ecker, which delves into Coherence Therapy. Itâs a bit dense, but if thereâs enough interest, we could study it together. If there isnât another book we want to dive into, Iâve been considering doing some longer-form research or deeper video work. We could explore how to really get underneath some of these patterns in more practical ways - like a little trauma school, if you will. Iâd love to hear what would feel supportive or connecting for you. This space is meant to be a connected community, and I thank every one of you for being here and exploring this work together.
As we start Chapter Eight, weâre diving into vision and purpose. From the Internal Family Systems model - or really any healing model -we know that as we gain more access to Self, we also gain more access to curiosity, compassion, and clarity. This leads us to connect more deeply to our values, vision, and purpose.
For those who saw my recent post on values through a survival strategy lens, you know how valuable it can be to start teasing apart what we truly value versus what protective parts or child-consciousness parts make us think we want. Protective parts, burdened by survival patterns, often hold the weight of trying to keep us and our exiles safe from terror, shame, or grief. This means that while we might feel we value certain things, weâre often stuck in patterns driven by survival rather than authentic desire.
For example, someone might say they value caring for others. As a therapist, of course, I see the importance of caring for others. But if that value stems from a protector part, itâs not about genuine care - itâs about avoiding oneâs own needs, boundaries, or wants because they feel too unsafe. When protective parts are driving us, we may shut down, freeze, fawn, or dissociate to maintain a sense of safety.
This can lead to over-performing - taking care of everyone elseâs needs at the expense of our own - to avoid the feeling of being âvoted off the island.â It can be confusing, though, because those values may feel deeply important. And they might be! But if theyâre driven by protective parts rather than Self, theyâre rooted in fear, not authenticity.
As we begin to unburden our protective parts and exiles, these patterns relax. We then gain access to our authentic, altruistic selves, the parts of us that genuinely enjoy giving, creating, or helping without overriding our own needs. This creates a spaciousness within us, allowing for softer, more connected, and more loving parts of ourselves to emerge.
tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This week, weâre exploring Chapter Eight, which focuses on vision and purpose. In the IFS model, as we gain more access to Self, we naturally begin to uncover what we truly value and want for ourselves. This process often involves distinguishing between our authentic desires and those shaped by protective parts or survival strategies. For example, you might believe you value taking care of others, but upon reflection, you may find this stems from a protector part that fears setting boundaries or expressing your own needs.
Protective parts carry burdens, often rooted in past trauma, and work tirelessly to keep us safe. These parts may push us toward hyper-performing, dissociating, or intellectualizing as a means of survival. But as we unburden these parts and invite them into connection with Self, they can begin to relax. This creates spaciousness, allowing us to access the softer, more loving, and more creative parts of ourselves.
When we live a Self-led life, we get to shed layers of armor that weâve been carrying. This doesnât mean our personality changes - it means we become lighter and more authentic. With this newfound clarity, we start to notice values and desires that were previously hidden beneath survival strategies. Instead of forcing outcomes, we can approach our lives with curiosity, allowing our vision to emerge naturally.
However, this journey is not without challenges. As we connect with a Self-led vision, itâs common to experience backlash from our internal protector parts. These parts might voice doubts like, âWho do you think you are to pursue this?â or âYouâll never succeed.â This backlash is a natural response from parts that are trying to keep us safe. Instead of silencing these voices, we can acknowledge them, offer reassurance, and invite them to trust us.
Over time, with gentle curiosity and observation, we can rewire these old patterns. This process takes time and patience, but it leads to profound shifts. As we integrate our thoughts, emotions, and body sensations, we move closer to a state of alignment and flow. In this state, weâre not striving or controlling but rather moving with the rhythm of life, like a river.
Dr. Schwartz highlights the importance of integrating all parts of ourselves, likening it to a fruit salad rather than a smoothie. Each part retains its individuality while contributing to the whole. This perspective aligns beautifully with other modalities like NARM, which emphasizes making decisions from an adult consciousness while holding the complexities of life with compassion and curiosity.
As you continue your journey toward a Self-led life, notice what arises for you. Are there parts or patterns that feel particularly sticky? Are there values or desires that are beginning to emerge? This is an opportunity to explore these questions with curiosity and without judgment.
If youâve listened to me for any period of time, you know we canât start with an outcome. We canât force our way toward what we want because if we do, weâre just overriding all those protector parts and exiles that have already been overridden in the past. Many of us have lived this way - over-functioning, overperforming, pushing our needs aside, and striving to be perfect. Weâve intellectualized, avoided emotions, and hidden our humanity.
As we become more Self-led, we realize we donât need to pressure ourselves to get what we want. In fact, itâs when we slow down, get curious, and stop pushing that things start to become clear. When weâre in Self, thereâs a sense of clarity, connection, and alignment. You may have heard of a flow state - that feeling when time seems to pass effortlessly, like when youâre reading a good book and look up to find an hour has gone by. Thatâs the type of experience we can access more and more when we live from Self.
We donât need to strive toward what we want. Instead, we can move with the flow of life, like a river, and things come with more ease. This integration allows us to experience our thoughts, emotions, and body sensations without one dominating the others. Itâs exciting to feel individuality alongside wholeness. For example, you might still have a rational, intellectual part of you, but instead of that part trying to control everything, it can simply enjoy pursuits like reading or learning, which feel good and fulfilling.
Dr. Richard Schwartz references Dan Siegel, a neurobiologist and neuropsychiatrist, who talks about parts coming together in the Self like a fruit salad, not a smoothie. Weâre not trying to blend away our uniqueness or cut off any part of ourselves. Instead, I think of it like a board meeting - each part has a seat at the table, but Self is the CEO who listens and makes decisions.
Itâs also important to acknowledge that not everyone experiences their internal world in the same way. Yes, weâre reading about parts and talking about the idea of a fruit salad versus a smoothie, but how you interpret and experience this work will be unique to you. Personally, I donât always think of my internal world in terms of specific parts. After doing a lot of work, I tend to approach it from the perspective of adult consciousness, as described in NARM. This allows me to hold the complexities of life - whatâs hard, scary, or angering - alongside whatâs good, true, and loving.
If I notice a contraction or discomfort, I observe it and recognize it as a child-consciousness pattern or an old predictive pathway getting activated. Thatâs what works for me after years of practice. For you, it might look different. You might always find value in naming and communicating with specific parts, and thatâs okay. The beauty of this work is that you get to choose what resonates with you and leave the rest.
The process of moving toward a Self-led life can look different for everyone. You might always want to name and communicate with the different parts of yourself, and thatâs perfectly fine. The beauty of this work is that you get to choose what works for you and leave behind what doesnât. Itâs also worth noting that this journey often progresses much more slowly than described in books. If youâre exploring this path and finding yourself in a place where you feel more Self-led, take a moment to notice what that feels like.
Are there parts of you - child consciousnesses or neural pathways - that feel sticky or seem to hang around? This is an opportunity for curiosity. For instance, if youâre reflecting on your values and something like creativity feels important to you for the first time, it can feel liberating. You might feel spaciousness and excitement as you connect with this value. But sometimes, backlash occurs. You might feel tense, anxious, or critical of yourself later, wondering where those feelings came from. These reactions could stem from parts of you that still feel unsafe with this newfound clarity.
Dr. Schwartz talks about this experience in the chapter, and itâs an important one: the backlash or blowback that arises as we connect with a Self-led vision. This is a common and normal experience but can feel disconcerting. Imagine youâve unburdened, connected to yourself, and started to feel your emotions and body sensations more deeply. Now, youâre connecting to something exciting, like creativity or a new vision for yourself. Maybe youâve decided to start making art, writing, or pursuing something bigger. It feels exhilarating and aligned with who you are.
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But just as you begin to step into this clarity, your protective parts may react with fear. Having agency and moving toward what we want for ourselves can be one of the scariest things for those with relational or developmental trauma. For many of us, being ourselves felt unacceptable at some point in our lives. Perhaps we grew up in a family of rational intellectualizers, and as a child, our big emotions werenât welcomed or understood. Even if no one explicitly told us to stop feeling, we might have internalized the message that some parts of us were unacceptable.
This creates a global lens where anything tied to agency - wanting something, being ourselves, or stepping into authenticity - feels unsafe. Protective parts react strongly because theyâre trying to shield us from past experiences of rejection or disconnection. This pattern becomes ingrained, like a predictive neural pathway thatâs been laid down and continues to fire under perceived threats.
When old protective patterns are triggered, it can feel overwhelming, like a tiger is about to pounce. Pain, shame, fear of failure, terror, and grief flood our systems, and familiar internal voices start to play their old tapes: âWho do you think you are? No oneâs going to care. The worldâs so broken, whatâs the point? You canât make a living doing that. Itâll be embarrassing when people laugh at you.â
These voices can feel mean, but they arenât mean because of who we are. Theyâre expressions of deeply protective parts that fear the risks associated with agency and authenticity. These parts say, âIf you get too close to something big or meaningful, I need to stop you.â The backlash can feel disheartening like youâve swung from clarity back into self-doubt.
Itâs essential to normalize this experience and understand that itâs expected and anticipated. When it happens, it may suck, but it makes sense. This is where we practice not overriding or silencing these voices but bringing them along for the journey. Building a Self-led life means letting these parts know, âI understand why this feels scary. I see why you might not fully trust me yet. But Iâm here now, and itâs okay.â
Over time, those old predictive patterns soften. It becomes less like a tiger is trying to eat you and more like, âThis is big, but I can handle it.â The brain supports this shift, neurons that fire together wire together. With repetition, we can form new patterns, and our protective responses become less dominant.
Neutral, curious observation plays a critical role here. Instead of trying to control or suppress your internal world, you simply notice, name, and observe whatâs happening. Dr. Schwartz includes exercises in this chapter to support this practice. Iâll record at least one as a guided meditation for those interested. Remember, you can take things one small drop at a time - titration is key. This work moves quickly in books, but in real life, progress is gradual, and thatâs perfectly okay.
Another vital aspect of living a Self-led life is connecting to something greater than ourselves. Dr. Schwartz explains that as we become more Self-led, we feel more. This happens because weâre less frozen, more present, and more in tune with ourselves. While this increased sensitivity can bring awe, joy, empathy, and presence, it also means feeling more pain, sadness, fear, and anger. These emotions are part of being human.
Feeling emotions proportionately and in the present is part of the healing process. Itâs not about living in constant fear or terror but about engaging with emotions as they arise, allowing them to move through us rather than overwhelming us. When we come out of freeze, fight, flight, or fawn, we regain access to the full spectrum of human emotion.
Being Self-led doesnât mean youâre consumed or flooded by emotions, but rather that you can engage with them, feel them, and allow them to move through you. Dr. Schwartz describes this connection to Self as having a transcendent perspective, a sense that, in the grand scheme of things, everything is okay.
And so there's a paradox that he discusses. The more that we feel our vulnerability, the more we remain grounded in a sense of calm and clarity. We can engage in the intensity of human life while staying connected to the Self who can observe it happening.
He talks about the balance between these states of observing the world around us and observing ourselves. There's some discussion here about how spiritual practices might connect in this in different ways that are certainly interesting to explore if that feels interesting or connected to you. Thereâs also more discussion about that wonderful flow state - how it can feel enjoyable, fulfilling, and how we perform an activity for its own sake rather than for an award or a reward. Thatâs what weâre curious about, even if itâs something as simple as standing outside listening to the birds. It doesnât have to be a huge career change; it can be the little moments in our life. Again, thatâs why Iâm such a fan of glimmers, the small moments that allow us to connect with the goodness around us.
Just like anything else in this book, you can take or leave the discussion around spirituality and transcendence. You can take what works for you and leave the rest, or you can titrate the experience. Also, knowing that when thereâs so much going on in the world, this idea that we can hold the world and ourselves at once can feel pretty impossible and pretty complicated.
We might be feeling overwhelming presence and overwhelming feelings here in the present. Thatâs what I call âtop-level stressors,â where these are stressors that are real and actually happening in the present. They feel really scary and overwhelming. And then there are the âunderneath stressorsâ that come up as a result of those. For example, when things feel really stressful and overwhelming in the world, we might start criticizing ourselves, stop taking care of ourselves, or feel shut down. All of those reactions are, again, normal and expected because of the neural pathways.
So, just knowing that whatever youâre feeling right now with everything thatâs happening in the world, itâs normal and itâs expected. Survival strategies, or protective parts as theyâre called in IFS, are there for us when we need them, not when we want them. That means we donât get a choice when those parts are active. We donât get to decide when terror, grief, or rage comes out to play.
Knowing this, now is the time to take things extra gently for yourself. Slow way down. Be curious about finding little glimmers, finding moments of neutrality, finding little moments of connection, whatever that means for you in whatever way is available right now. And know that itâs okay to take care of yourself even when stressful things are happening.
Even if parts of you say, âNo, itâs not,â we can be curious about noticing those parts. Notice the parts that say, âYou canât stop and take care of yourself because this horrible thing is happening.â That part must be feeling a lot of terror. Can you notice that for a moment? Can you put a pinky in the present and connect with the Self, even if itâs a teeny tiny 1% of you, or 0.01%, or 0.001%? If you canât right now, thatâs okay.
Maybe try a little grounding. Look around the room and pick out six colors to see if you can come back and observe it again. All of life is expansion and contraction, in-breath and out-breath. If you feel a deep contraction right now, know that another expansion will come again. And if you canât feel access to your Self right now, know that it will come again.
Iâm wishing you a good week ahead.
Thanks for reading tiny sparks - trisha wolfe! This post is public so feel free to share it.
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Welcome back to our No Bad Parts Read Along. Can you believe we have made it here to chapter seven The Self in Action. I'm really excited to talk about this chapter today, and to dive further in into what it means to connect to the self and be self-led.
So it's really popular on social media right now to talk about attachment theory. And if you're not familiar with attachment theory, it's a basic idea that how we attach to our primary caregivers affects later how we attach to others in our life, romantic, platonic, and otherwise. And you can have a secure attachment, which means you are okay and comfortably attached. And if the person goes away and they come back, you can reconnect with them.
There is anxious attachment, which is when the person goes away or starts to pull back. There's a holding onto and this might be a person that gets called quote unquote needy, which of course is a sort of derogatory way of looking at what's actually a survival technique. But that's a person who's grasping, always trying to bring people in closer and closer, and is fearful of losing them. You also have an avoidant attachment, which is that person who kind of pulls back and pulls away, and they might stay detached and they might never fully show themselves to others. And if someone goes away, they might say, well, I don't care, I didn't need you anyway. And there's also the idea that we can have a disorganized attachment, which is sort of a combination of those two.
It's important to understand that it's normal for attachment, to flex and flow in different relationships and in different situations, and based on what's happening in our lives. So it's not like a Myers-Briggs test where you can just say, I'm an anxious attacher and that's that. But it's important to understand going into this, that IFS and that connection with the self takes this idea of attachment and brings it inside where the self or the adult consciousness, as we call it in NARM, gets to figure out how to build that good, secure attachment to those internal parts who might be anxious, or who might be avoidant, or who might be disorganized.
And this is really, really exciting because it means that we can start to repair and rebuild from those environmental ruptures we may have had with our caregivers, our teachers, our peers, or even in romantic or platonic relationships later in our life that have left us feeling uncertain and disconnected. We get the opportunity here to reconnect with the self who holds our secure attachment to these other parts. And as these parts start to trust the self and become, we become more self-led and more internal.
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We might actually find that our attachment patterns externally to people around us may start to shift little by little, as those neurons fire in a securely attached way that those pathways may become available to us in other relationships. So it may go from internal to external. And that's the coolest thing in the world to know that we have the capacity and the agency and the choice and the flexibility to start to pattern this by becoming the âgood parentâ or âgood caretakerâ or whatever it is that we never had in the first place. We get to bring in those young exiles who never got to be seen or held. We get to connect with the inner critic, the intellectuals or the perfectionists, the firefighter part of us that dissociates us. Over time, we get to become the primary caretaker of these parts, and that means that we no longer have to rely on other people to try to take care of these parts.
Now, it's important to understand we're meant to heal in relationship. We're meant to heal and connection. And so it's normal and expected that when you're in therapy or a relationship or whatever it is, that that person is part of your well-being and part of your regulation. But what can happen is subconsciously, at times, we look to other people to try to heal these parts of us. And while they can play a role in it, we also need to be connected to these parts of us as well. And so we can start to connect to other people relationally more from our adult consciousness, more from our self. And it can be really hugely shifting to relationships.
When the person, the therapist, or whoever can be sort of that secondary caretaker as Doctor Schwartz calls it, to those parts instead of the primary caretaker. Right now, for many of us, that might be reversed, where we're looking to others to try to fill that hole. Now, again, I want to say I'm not one of those people who's like, you have to love yourself to have others love you. I firmly believe we are meant to heal in connection and in support with other people. But if we are not consciously aware of these patterns, of these survival strategies of these parts of us, then our relationships may continue to feel unbalanced where we are all in or where we're very pulled back and it feels anxiety producing and it feels scary and we feel disconnected. And so we might never get to feel an authentic, balanced, connected relationship. And again, that can feel so dissatisfying. It can build up resentment. It can build up anger and sadness and fear. So this is such a cool opportunity not only to change how we relate internally, but externally as well.
This is also why in therapy, sometimes it can feel unbalanced. If you're working with a therapist who doesn't understand the parts or the child consciousness of developmental and relational trauma, because the therapist can get hooked in with their parts and think they need to fix you. And by doing so, they may unintentionally take your agency away from you where they come in as the fixer of time and time again. That might feel good to some parts of you, but it doesn't lead to you over time. Connecting to your agency, your choice, and yourself. You might also be labeled as disruptive or self-sabotaging, or like you're not really trying because you might feel really resistant to this person who's trying to fix you.
And so understanding that when you go into therapy, that person can hold space and be curious and be a stand in participant in your nervous system, meaning they can lend their nervous system and their self to you while you're exploring. They cannot, nor should they be the one who fixes you, because that doesn't lead you to becoming a self led person who can, who can walk through their life with agency and connection and authenticity and curiosity and neutrality and all of those things. So if you've had that experience in therapy, just know that you're not alone. And it's something that can happen as therapists, systems and parts and bodies and minds can get hooked in unintentionally as well.
A big part of this chapter is dedicating to Doctor Schwartz going through a session with Ethan and Sarah. And in this he is exploring connecting to these different parts in each of them. Where Ethan is exploring a part of himself that he calls the destroyer of injustice. And this part is very fiery, very justice driven, all about being deeply committed to protecting the planet and trying to fight systemic oppression. But it was manifesting in a way that created some tension in their relationship. For example, his partner was wanting to build an addition to their small house, and that was so activating to this part in Ethan because he wants to live smaller for the earth and talks about there being homeless people out there who don't have anything.
But it was creating a lot of disharmony in the system between Ethan and Sarah, and making her feel like she was unable to have her needs met as well. And I think this is a valuable read or listen if you want to go back through and listen to the full session, but it's such a cool opportunity to notice what it's like connecting to these parts and how some parts can have really important things, like, of course, fighting for injustice can also get burdened with other experiences. And as this session unfolds, Ethan is able to connect to this part of himself, burdened by the grief and guilt of losing his father to a drunk driver, and that that loss really left him rejecting everything around him that could be considered superficial and pushed him towards this intense drive for justice.
And as Ethan was supported in exploring this from an IFS perspective, he found that this part actually held this belief that he was somehow responsible to his father's death. This old belief about a childhood decision to skip a basketball game his father invited him to. And what a burden. What a burden that this part had taken on, and that driving through this injustice, this singular focus, with the real difficulty connecting emotionally that left him disconnected from those around him. And as he was able to release this burden, he could connect to some compassion and understanding and find the dual role of this destroyer of injustice. Protecting, of course, Ethan's all for the earth and driving him to act, but also isolating him due to its intensity, and by unburdening that grief and guilt carried by that part, bringing that self in to be self-led and listened to that justice driven part, that he could find a way to honor his purpose and his drive without letting it take over and isolate him.
It's a really interesting and fascinating, fascinating session. If you'd like to go back in and read the full session, you can really feel this reconnection between Ethan and Sarah and space for each of them to feel their feelings and connect from their self, and not letting the parts drive a wedge between them. Understanding. When we connect to those parts, we can also connect to others. And what I thought was so lovely about Doctor Schwartz sharing the session.
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Hello and happy new year and welcome back to our No Bad Parts read-along.
We are starting part two together on self-leadership and within this chapter there is an exercise called the path meditation and I just wanted to remind you if you missed my earlier episode I have a recording on that for you.
And it's a wonderful practice to be curious about as we move into this next phase of connecting to the self and building the self up as a leader.
As we dive into this chapter on healing and transformation, I think we hit upon something that is a core part of the IFS model as well as the NARM model and something that I think can be such a paradigm shift for many of us because oftentimes in the world and in therapy there's this idea that these behaviors that we do are bad and all we need to do is just change our bad behaviors and then we'll be better and our life will be better and we'll be the person we want to be.
But when we understand that those behaviors, emotions, impulses, thoughts, emotions are not bad or defective or sick, but instead are a part that are playing a role to protect you and keep you safe, that we're trying to keep you connected to the world and to people around you, well, that's a major paradigm shift.
Of course, the name of the book is No Bad Parts, and IFS teaches us that these parts and everything they hold are not inherently bad, but are carrying burdens and playing roles to protect us and doing the best they can to navigate life based on the lenses that they hold.
And when we start to understand that these parts aren't a sign that there's something wrong with us or that we're broken, but that we're protecting ourselves from something, that allows us to shift into that curious observer, that self.
Remembering, noticing and observing is responding. Noticing and observing these parts and experiences is what we're here to do.
NARM, too, reminds us that these survival patterns are adaptations. And they're actually really clever adaptations. They're not pathology algorithms. They're the body and the mind and the nervous system working together to try to keep us safe, try to keep us in connection when things feel overwhelming and when systems don't make sense.
As we've discussed, systems are systems, whether it's our internal system or family system or a work system. Systems want to maintain that homeostasis, meaning keeping things the same.
And so oftentimes in literature about families that are impacted by addiction and substance use, they'll talk about these roles, the scapegoat, the hero, the lost child, the golden child.
Those roles are simply names we give to the parts that people are playing in the system to try to maintain the homeostasis, to try to maintain safety and connection.
If those families are supported towards more well-being, more safety, and a new homeostasis, then those roles drop because those are not innate to the person, but rather things that develop in a system to try to keep them safe and in connection.
And of course, it's likely that we have parts of us too, or ourselves, who are connected, who are online.
But those parts sometimes get hidden behind these other parts that are trying to protect us. So oftentimes in our own self-exploration, we're working to connect with these burdened parts to help them to feel safe and to transform into the other side for more access to the self nature of those parts.
So an important part here is to revisit those four goals of IFS. To liberate the parts from their roles and return them to their natural states, where we can access the gift of these parts.
Like a part that is an intellectualizer might become a part that helps us plan and dream and be connected to the future and to carry out tasks.
The second goal, restore trust in the self. And that is where that path meditation that I recorded can come in very handy, where we're being curious about supporting the parts and trusting the self.
We're rebuilding that internal relationship. Reharmonizing the inner system, so we're building a new homeostasis, a new sense of safety, where we can feel safe with those parts unburdened and at rest.
Whereas right now, when we try to rest and those parts try to sit down, we likely don't feel safe. And that's because of the homeostasis and the predictive patterns in our brain that says, resting, relaxing, being authentic, being ourselves, having autonomy, connecting, those things are not safe.
So if you try to do so from yourself, those parts will try to protect you at all costs by stopping you.
And that's what oftentimes people will call the quote-unquote self-sabotaging behavior.
We know it's actually not self-sabotaging. It's very protective. It's coming from those managers, those firefighters who are all working together to try to protect that burdened exile who feels so terrified, so rageful, and so grief-filled.
And so when we think of healing or transformation, we're not trying to change you.
Oftentimes people ask me, well, who am I if I'm not a perfectionist? Or who am I if I'm not an intellectualizer? Who am I if I'm not focusing on everyone else's needs?
And it can be really scary to think, I don't know who I am. What is my identity? If these things that I thought were my identity are actually part of our protective parts.
And the good thing is you are you and you will still be you.
And when we look at the word heal from this perspective, we're looking at this idea to make whole, to bring these parts of you back in, make the system whole again, build up a felt sense of safety for you so that you can be yourself without the burdens and the protective nature trying to shut you down.
So if you imagine right now that yourself is locked up in a castle, in a turret, looking out, and there's the moat, and there's the alligators, and there's the sentries, and there's the guards, and those are all the protective parts trying to prevent yourself from getting out.
Why? Because if yourself gets out, you might do something that would cause pain to the exile. So the exile is also deeply hidden away in there.
But those protective parts don't want to let you out because you might do something to cause a problem. So you will still be youâit's just the guards will step away, the bridge will go across the moat, and you will be you without all of the burdens.
And that is when we get to have choice and flexibility and agency. And it's not a magic trick. It doesn't mean suddenly our life is perfectâthough I wish it didâbut what it means is we have that choice.
We can be in the present, we can make choices that are in alignment with what we want for ourselves. We can be curious. We can try things on.
Dr. Schwartz says an exile is healed when the self retrieves it from where it's stuck in the past.
Remember, we can't approach the exile without permission from the protective parts.
So as we step into this next part of the book, referring to the book this time versus a part internally, as we step forward to this part two, what we're being curious about is building up that trust with the internal systems so that the protectors can feel free, they can be unburdened, they can take on new valuable roles, and eventually the exile can be freed.
And all that energy that your nervous system and brain are spending gripping so hard to protect you and to try to keep you from being triggered and to try to protect your exile gets freed up.
And that's where the flexibility and choice and agency and feelings and presence and all of that goodness comes in.
And it's the very same in the NARM model where we're not trying to change you as a person. We're not trying to get rid of parts of you. We're being curious about what happens as you're able to step more into the adult consciousness and bring that child consciousness part of you in.
Then you get to see the world through adult lenses.
And so instead of something like setting a boundary with your boss feeling like a life threat because your exile part is so completely triggered and terrified, it might feel like a small challenge, something to be curious about, something you can try on, because you know you can handle whatever comes.
That if your boss doesn't like the boundary, that you can handle that.
But that's something that's very, very difficult to access when those parts are activated to try to protect the exile.
So there's an example in here that Dr. Schwartz givesâa therapeutic process he was in with a woman who came in after her boyfriend proposed.
And instead of feeling joyful and excited and connected, she felt completely terrified.
And she couldn't make sense of it cognitively. Because she loved him, and she wanted to marry him, but she felt this deep-seated terror and fear.
And slowing things down and approaching this from an IFS model, Dr. Schwartz was able to support her in connecting to her fear and exploring, "Ah, this isn't just a random fear, this is a protector part."
This is a part that had been with her for a long time, since childhood, where she had a father who struggled with substance use, and she never, ever wanted to feel trapped like that again.
And so this part developed to try to protect her from pain.
So it wasn't here to try to sabotage a relationship and get in the way of her love, but it was so terrified that moving forward in this relationship would get her feeling trapped with someone who might hurt her or make her feel that deep pain again.
And so through IFS, they were able to work with a protector part and that young exiled part that held all of that terror, that felt trapped and powerless, and who never wanted to be in that again.
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Hey there Substack pals! In the spirit of practicing what I preach, Iâm taking this week to rest and regroup. While there wonât be an episode on a chapter this week, I wanted to offer you another IFS guided meditation from the upcoming chapter in No Bad Parts called The Path. I invite you to join me in a curiosity of connecting to your parts and your Self as you traverse the path in your mindâs eyes. Drop me a line and let me know what you discover. Wishing you a gentle end to 2024 and a soft welcome to 2025.
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I'm back to our No Bad Parts read-along together. This week, we are diving into Chapter Five on mapping our inner systems.
So thus far, we've started to learn a little bit about these internal parts that make up the system of usâthat perhaps we're not just one individual mind, but an amalgamation of all the developmental experiences we've had in our lives that have created these different neural pathways, survival strategies, or parts, as they are called in Internal Family Systems.
Remembering as we go into exploring deeper these parts that this is a big paradigm shift from how many of us have been taught to see the world. And you can take in as much or as little as you'd like to or as feels available to you right now, knowing that whatever you uncover through this experience, all of these parts inside of us developed in pursuit of keeping us safe and keeping us in connection with the world around us.
We are biologically wired to stay in connection with our caregivers when we are young. And when we are able to, because of environmental ruptures, these protective parts emerge to try to keep us goingâto try to keep us through the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn that comes up when it feels like our caregivers can't meet our needs. And so they might not make sense to you now as an adult, but they made sense at the time.
And first up are these parts Dr. Schwartz refers to as the exiles. These are often those much younger parts of us. And maybe you've heard of this idea of an inner childâthat that could be those exile parts. And those young parts of us that hold all of the playfulness, the creativity, the fun, the trusting, the innocent, and the openness that we have when we're young children and we're exploring the world.
And they're also very, very sensitive parts because if you think about us as young children, we don't have the cognitive complexity to be able to think through and make sense out of things. And we haven't fully developed a sense of how to take care of ourselves and soothe ourselves in the world because we are children. And we rely on our caregivers and the people around us to co-regulate with us. So we are very sensitive when we are young. Things that are scary or hurtful, we feel that really, really strongly when we're young children.
And we'll often say that young children have tantrums or they have meltdowns. And what we know that's actually happening is they are very sensitive and they need co-regulation. And so it makes a lot of sense that they might have a quote-unquote meltdown or a big emotional experience when something happens.
And these are also the parts of us who hold those biggest burdens from the environmental ruptures, attachment ruptures, or traumas that we might experience when we're young. And when that happens, it shifts our young self from that fun, playful self to that wounded, terrified, maybe shut-down self.
And this is when some of those core beliefs start to change. And we might move into that, I am worthless, no one loves me, there's something wrong with me at my core, I don't deserve to be loved.
Then as adults now, when those parts blend with us, and for many of us, our exiles are blended with our self because of our lived experiences, then those beliefs, I don't deserve anyone to love me, that becomes the lens through which we see the world. That becomes our paradigm. And we are carrying around all of the time those deep, deep burdened emotions that those younger parts of us feel.
And that can really impact our ability to function in the world as a quote-unquote adult, as we are living in our adult bodies when we are holding the lens that there is something wrong with us and we don't deserve to be loved. And that can also create behaviors that might not make sense as an adult, but make a lot of sense for this burdened, terrified exile.
I want to remind you again that these beliefs or emotions that these younger parts of us hold don't always make sense to our adult selves, and that's because they happened in the mind of a child. And it doesn't always have to be a huge life-altering trauma that can create these burdened experiences.
An example that I use often is, again, think of if you had two parents who themselves were very rational people. They grew up in homes where emotions were not talked about. And so to them, emotions are somewhat forbidden. They don't go there. They don't really even have access to go tthere. They closed that part of them off a long time ago. Now they have this wonderful, fun, playful child who they love very much. But because children have big emotions, when you have a big emotion, even an exciting emotion like surprise or joy or playfulness or fear or whatever might happen when we're young children, their systems feel overwhelmed by that. They don't know what to do with that. And so they calm you down. They shut down your emotions. They distract you. They send you to your room until you can come back out and behave or be part of the family.
And no one is telling you in this scenario that they hate you or that they hate your emotions or that you're too much. But the felt sense experience is you can sense as a child, even if you're not consciously aware of it, that your parents' systems are shutting down when you feel emotions.
And when we're trying to stay in connection to those around us at all costs, then we will learn very quickly the pattern of, my parents, it seems that my parents love me more and that I can stay more in connection with them when I shut my emotions down. And that might be how we develop a quote-unquote intellectualization part.
And again, as part of our coping or being in the world is to try to push these parts of us away, that is again how we might move into an intellectualization, rationalization, people-pleasing, perfectionismâanything we can do to try to control our internal state and push away these hard emotions that these exile parts of us hold, we will do that.
That is part of the paradigm that we've learned, right? Where it's like, Just pick yourself up, move on, pick yourself up by your bootstraps, kind of get over it. Stop being so sensitive. We learn to do the same things to ourselves and then we collude with what was done to us, where then we as adults push these exile parts of us away. We push our emotions away. We push what makes us human away because it feels like too much. It feels too overwhelming.
And for many of us, the more we try to push those parts of us away, the more they try to come out. That's why strategies like perfectionism, for example, never work in the long run because you try really, really, really hard to be perfect and then this part of you that is holding all these really deep terrors that you can never be perfect and that you'll always mess things up, sees you pushing them away more and more. And so then they'll come out and then you'll make a mistake or you won't be perfect or you'll say something you didn't mean to say and you'll beat yourself up more. And that is how this cycle can unconsciously continue.
Dr. Schwartz talks about these sort of mysterious overreactions and really being unsure, like why do small things hit us so hard? Why does making a teeny little mistake feel like the end of the world? What I'll often say to people I'm working with is that if it feels disproportionate, it's likely there's something else going on there. Maybe you've seen a post that's often shared on social media that says, If it feels hysterical, it's probably historical. That's because it's that old pathway, that neural pathway, that predictive pattern, that vulnerable part of us coming up.
The more of these challenging experiences and environmental ruptures we had as a child, the more delicate things will feel in the present and the more dangerous because there's constantly an opportunity where it feels like we are making a mistake or messing something up or risking a connection, and that that is very triggering to these exile parts of us. And their behaviors can become quite extreme to try to protect us from these intense emotions, behaviors, impulses, and experiences that we hold.
When we have exiles, we will also have what is called in IFS, managers. And managers are protectors that are pressed into service, essentially. So you can think of them as our inner children who have been parentified or made to become faux adults, F-A-U-X, faux adults. Oftentimes when I talk about this idea of a faux sense of protection that comes from managers, people might get upset and think that I'm being offensive or saying that it's not a worthwhile tool. And that's not what I'm saying at all.
It gives us a faux sense of safety. And the reason why I say that is because perfectionism, for example, might keep us feeling safe and in control, but we can't be ourselves. We can't be authentic. We can't fully connect with those around us. And thus, it's not a real felt sense of safety that lets us be ourselves. It is a manager. It is a faux sense of safety that is taking on the role of trying to control absolutely everything inside you and in the world around you so that nothing triggering or activating happens that might scare the exile.
And so they might control our relationships, our appearance, our work performance. Every single aspect of our life, these parts will try to control. This is where the inner critic lives.
This is where the inner critic lives.
This is where the intellectualizer lives.
These parts are very, very convincing and often sound like the self or like in NARM, we call it the adult consciousness. And those of you who found me because of my work with intellectualizers know exactly what I mean.
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I hope this message finds you awash in curiosity, bathed in neutrality, full of spaciousness.
As we head into what is, for many, a difficult season, I wanted to offer you a simple daily meditation to support taking a few moments of connecting with yourself, however, you are feeling in the moment.
While the practice is based on Internal Family Systems and the No Bad Parts book, you are more than welcome to join in even if you havenât read the book or donât even know what Internal Family Systems is. Know that when I reference parts, I am talking to our deep experiences that are often hidden away inside of us, the ways we developed to keep ourselves safe in situations that felt anything but. Maybe youâve called yourself a people pleaser, an intellectualizer, a perfectionist. Maybe youâve said youâre âbad at boundariesâ or ânever follow through.â
Together in the moment we hold the idea that everything we do is in pursuit of maintaining connection with those around us and trying to survive, while also knowing it is possible to shift, change, and make room for change for those older patterns that served us in the past but may not be anymore. Each and every part of you is welcome here, even if youâre not ready to welcome them in yet. Join me for this short practice of anchoring in neutrality and curiosity, of working with our brains and nervous systems instead of against them. See you what you notice. Pause. Restart. Stop. Itâs all one big experiment.
See you out there :)
Trisha
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Welcome back book club pals! I had such a lovely time being live with you a couple of weeks ago for our little fireside chat, and we will definitely do one more while we are in this process together. There's something just so fun about getting to see each other's faces, hear each other's voices, and connect lives. So thank you for being there. If you couldn't be there, no worries at all. Thanks for watching the recording and sending me your thoughts. I always really value that.
Chapter four is a really important chapter because it's going to talk a little bit about systems theory, which is such an important thing to understand when we're understanding ourselves, our internal experiences, and how we react with the world around us. As always, just a reminder with any of this exploration or any of these exercises, it's normal that parts of you might feel challenged or activated. Some of your parts might not be ready to trust you, engage with you, or engage with this process. And that's okay. And that's why I always encourage us to take this one little drop at a time. So anything that we're learning here or any of the exercises, you don't have to feel any pressure to do them or to dive in. You can just be curious. And if you feel resistant to doing them or activated by them, it gives you an opportunity to be curious about which part of you or which parts of you are coming up.
It also doesn't mean that we have to avoid activation. If you try on some of the exercises in the book and you notice activation, that can be really scary to those of us who maybe didn't have anyone with us when we were scared or nervous or activated when we were younger. It's also cultivating to know that it's okay to feel a little bit of activation, and if you can access enough of the Self to be with the activation, even if it's just for a moment, you're also cultivating the understanding to the rest of your parts that you, the Self, the adult consciousness in NARM terms, can handle that activation. That's different than when we're children, when we're young and in events happened where things feel really scary and no one is with us; that feels like a threat to our lives, because we're totally relying on people around us to take care of ourselves and to make sure things are okay. If they're not doing that, our nervous system and brain are going to signal that we're unsafe. So we actually will feel terror when there's activation. But when we are adults, we know that we can handle a little bit of activation, and that can be part of the process too.
So I encourage you to be curious, track and notice what's happening. And if it's not the time for the activity, it's not the time. But maybe there's just a little experiment. Could I stay with this activation for five seconds more than I normally do? And what happens? What parts emerge? What do they have to say? How do I feel? Thereâs always an opportunity for more curiosity. So I say that specifically as the exercise around working with the challenging protector was there from the last chapter, to just be gentle, be neutral, be curious; and if you can't access any of those, that's okay. You can come back into the space, come back into connecting with the space around you, and come back into neutrality when you can.
In chapter four, Dr. Schwartz is exploring this idea of systems thinking, which is part of what helped him develop this model. And in systems thinking, it's really a framework to allow us to see the different patterns and relationships, the ways that our inner world engage both internally and with the world around us. So a lot of times I'll think of systems theory as gears, and gears are all together with each other. So when one gear turns, the other gear turns, and we don't know which way the gear is going to turn necessarily. So we don't know if we try working with a challenging protector, for example, if another part might get more scared or it might calm down, or it might trust us more, or it might trust us less; we don't know that if we engage with our parts and we start to shift, if people around us might shift, they will. Because when we change, we change the systems that we are in and we don't know if they will change for the better or for the worse. That's kind of part of being in a system that we don't know. We can't necessarily predict how things are going to change and same internally, but we can be curious and observe.
It's really a bigger picture way of noticing we don't exist in isolation. Our parts don't exist in isolation. We are all part of a bigger system. And that this perspective really came about when biologists were studying cells and they couldn't really figure out how they formed these living organisms, and they started to come into understanding that it was a system where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And such a big part of Dr. Schwartz's work that influenced the creation of internal family systems was this idea that we do not exist outside of the context of the systems that we are in, so slapping a diagnosis on someone often ignores the context of their systems, of their symptoms, and how these different ways that they behave-like maybe harming themselves- actually serves them within the systems that they exist in internally and externally. So we don't want to just reduce our experiences to a âsymptomâ or a behavior problem, but rather to start to understand how they fit into our internal systems and the systems around us, our relational patterns with our Self and our relational patterns with the world and our family and everyone around us. This really allowed him to start to understand that we have this internal system. And that always brings us back to the context that everything we do is in the context of our brain and our body and our nervous system.
If you've listened to me in other ways, you've heard me talk about predictive patterns in the brain and that those form based on past experiences to help us predict what's going to happen in the present and what's going to happen in the future. And that's really, really important to understand, because those predictive patterns are formed based on the systems in which we live. If we learn that every time we have an emotion, we're going to be punished or sent to our room or yelled at in the system that we are in, then we start to develop an internal system where when we'll shut down emotions; we'll just hold them down, we'll shut them down, we'll go up into the intellectualization/rationalization. Or if we feel an emotion, we'll start to criticize ourselves before anyone else can't. Those aren't just behavior problems or internal thought patterns; those are systemic ways of being within the context of the system that you're in. Those are developmental patterns to respond to the environment or system that you grew up in. So when we start to understand our experience as part of the greater system, both internally and externally, then we understand that our symptoms are behaviors- the things we don't like about ourselves- actually make a lot of sense in the context of our system to keep us safe and keep us in connection with those around us.
There are some examples that Schwartz shares in this chapter- if you haven't yet had a chance to read them- about a client who is suffering from bulimia, and this internal cycle where one of the critic parts would trigger some feelings of worthlessness, and then the bingeing would come in as a coping mechanism, which would then activate the critic further and perpetuate the loop. So that's part of the system, right? Where the inner critic part is triggering feelings of worthlessness, then the behavior comes out that we might say, like, oh, you need to stop the binging, right? You need to stop the purging. You need to stop doing these things. But in this example, we can understand that it's part of the bigger system. If we work with the critic, we work with that part that is activating some of these events. And we can understand the critic is there to keep us safe in some way based on our past experiences. Then when that slows down and it stops triggering feelings of worthlessness, the behavior of the bingeing and purging may be less available. We might want to do it less, or we might not feel the urge to do it. I always want to be really clear when talking about something like this, that everyone's experience is different and we have to treat people where they are. So we have to understand that not everybody who is struggling with an eating disorder or self-harm or anything like that can jump right into doing this work. There might need to be some stabilization work first, so please know that you can honor your own process. Work with your own therapist. These are just examples to help understand how these systems work.
Speaking of the systems that we're in, Dr. Schwartz was very curious about this idea that we as humans are bad. We are, at our core, bad. Civilization is bad, and that there's just this really thin layer, really thin veneer that protects us from our core primitive, selfish instincts. And we see a lot of that in society where we are so punitive toward other people, and we treat people as if they are bad, if they do things that we consider bad. For example, the war on drugs: that there's an idea that if you use drugs, you're bad and you must be punished by being put in prison or treated really horribly. And that really influences the way we see ourselves and the way we see people around us when we think that they are bad. Instead of understanding human behavior as a way that we try to protect ourselves, the way that we try to keep ourselves in connection with other people, and a way that we try to cope or survive an internal feeling that is really unsafe, or an external feeling that is really unsafe. And this is where we get the name of the book, No Bad Parts. What if we didn't have to see parts of ourselves as bad? Even as we take in information from the world that says, if you do this, you're bad. If you do this, you're not trying hard enough. You know, we have books like Atomic Habits that are like, well, you just need to learn how to access your discipline. And if you can't do this, there's something wrong with you. It's like everything in our society boils down to, well, if you can't do this good thing or the thing that everybody else is doing, there must be something wrong with you and you must be bad.
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Hello and welcome back to our No Bad Parts Book Club/Read along. Itâs really exciting to continue to deepen our understanding of this model together. I'm excited to let you know that we will be having our little fireside pop up live chat about the book: Monday, November 18th at 6 p.m. until 7 p.m. Eastern time. Not to worry if you can't attend live. I kâŠ
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Hi book club, and welcome back to our next little episode together exploring No Bad Parts.
I loved getting to read through all of your comments and hear your curiosities. Of course, you're more than welcome to post in the chat too, and if you don't feel like leaving a comment but you still want to ask the question, you can actually reply directly to this email and it'll come right to my inbox. I know there was a question about schedule, and I know typically a book club would have a pretty stringent schedule to stick to, but I'm sort of tentative about that. I know that might not fit with how some of you like to do things, but itâs because I really like to feel into as I'm recording the episode how much information starts to feel like enough or too much. And yes, that can differ from person to person. So I'm sort of relying on my own tracking of myself and my experience.
But I do have a lot of experience as a teacher and a therapist of trying to feel out what is a good amount of information for people without sending us into overwhelm. Those of us who like to intellectualize and really be up in our head - and I'm one of them- who might want a quicker pace - they want to take in the information, they want to really have it in. And that's okay. Everyone is welcome here. And I honor all of our different protector parts, but I'm a huge fan of slowing things down and slowing them down further and slowing them down further.
And you'll hear me say that a lot! Now my nervous system is the opposite and my nervous system wants to go fast, fast, fast, and learn everything. But I know that the language of our nervous system, when we are in our Self or our adult consciousness is actually slow. So we may do a chapter every time. We may do two chaptersâŠWe will find out together.
One more thing I want to mention briefly before we dive in is a lot of you really resonated with what I shared about environmental failures, and I'm so glad that maybe that's helping you see your experience in a little bit of a different light. Of course, we are never here to blame parents or caregivers, and this isn't really a catharsis process where we go back and rage against the people in your early life- teachers, caregivers, etc.- who may have had environmental failures with you, but rather it's an opportunity for us to be curious about what our own experience may have been and how that may impact us here in the present.
And again, it can be so subtle. Like, for example, maybe you were a gifted child and that didn't get seen. And so in school you often felt on the outside of things or bored and you might have gotten in trouble for being bored. Or maybe you didn't participate because you were so far ahead in the material, and it just created this sense of being on the outside, from your classmates and from your teacher. And you can understand that humans are made to be in connection to others, but particularly as children, we're developing that capacity of who we are and who we are in relationship to others, and what connection feels like with others. That can actually feel so, so scary. And so something as âsimpleâ as that can create this need to protect ourselves, to keep our true self hidden away, because we realize that if we're ourselves, we might be considered unacceptable to others.
Now, as we left off last time, we did not explore the exercises together. And you heard me say, and you heard me say again, that I'm a huge fan of taking it slow. This first exercise here is an introduction to getting to know our parts and specifically our protector parts. So sort of similarly to a mindfulness practice where you're noticing what's happening and what is wanting your attention. And then just getting curious. When we are learning to track and observe ourselves, we have different pathways or doorways into our experience. That is often thoughts, emotions and body sensations, and sometimes those images, impulses and behaviors as well. You're going to hear us emphasize a lot this idea of observing and observing thoughts, emotions and body sensations. And when we say thought, we don't mean thinking or intellectualizing, but rather connecting with the story, the story that these different parts of us hold. So it's not something you can try to rationally or intellectually think your way into. And that can be frustrating to some of us, which is okay, because then we get the opportunity to notice the part of us that feels frustrated.
Remember, when you're trying out this exercise of getting to know a protector, what you're really doing is just noticing and observing. And that is what is really similar to the NARM model, where we're just being curious, we're noticing and observing. We're not trying to make anything happen. And literally just by sitting and trying to notice, you might have a part of you come out that doesn't want you to try and notice. And that's perfect because there is an opportunity to observe a different part of you.
As you'll see from this exercise, IFS offers an opportunity to communicate with these parts and ask these parts what it might want you to know, or what it might need from you. And if you're just diving into this book for the first time, this might feel like a lot. It might feel silly, it might feel hard. It might feel activating. All of those things are okay. I want to give you permission to know that you don't have to do these exercises exactly as they're described here right now. In fact, it's okay to wait until we get more into the book before you even try this exercise in the first chapter at all. It's okay if it feels clunky or weird or stressful or anxiety producing. If you start to notice some activation, you can see if you have enough of yourself or observer online to notice the part that is activated. And when you do that, you're invoking the IFS principle of unblending, where you're a little bit separate from that part for a moment because you're noticing it, you're observing it from yourself, and maybe you observe it for a split second, and then you feel like you go into anxiety or shutdown or freeze or disconnection or intellectualization. That's okay. That's actually really good information for you to notice and pause and see if you can, as I call it, dip a pinky back into the present to find yourself.
Because this is a book, and not an individual therapy session, it goes more quickly than I typically would with clients, which is why- again, I know I'm a broken record-there's an invitation to slow things down and notice that maybe now's not the time for this exercise. Similarly, with the second exercise, maybe it's the time that you can be curious about mapping some of these parts and following a trailhead, as Richard Schwartz calls it- where you're just noticing and following the different sensations and experiences that come up. Again, though, if you're here and you're curious about this book, it's very possible that you've had some trauma sometime in your life, even if your trauma was just, âan environmental failureâ or several environmental failures as children. And that means that we need to go slow, as much as we might want to resist that. I would really encourage you to allow yourself to just be in the information and trust your instinct to know that the time to do these exercises will become clear to you.
Now as we dive into chapter two. We're coming back into that term of blending and exploring why parts might blend. When blending happens, essentially that part of us, or that neural pathway in our brain that is predicting what is happening in the present, and the emotions, thoughts, stories, impulses and body sensations that go along with that part or that pathway in our brain take over.
That becomes the primary pathway in our brain; that becomes the primary part, which sort of obscures our capital s Self. We don't feel separateness from that part in that moment. Instead, we become that part. In those moments, we are not in our self, but rather in that old experience. So we could have that overwhelming fear, that anger, the freeze, the disconnection, the apathy, all of that will come on and feel as if it's happening right in the present moment. This happens again because our brain is trying to predict what's going to happen in the present, based on the past. So if something happens in the present that makes our brain think the same thing is going to happen, then our brain is going to execute that pattern to say, okay, this is what we needed to do in the past. And so that part steps forward.
Let's say that when you were a child, your home was very tense and there was a lot of arguing and a lot of fighting, and it was really terrifying for you as a child. So you start to feel anxious and scared, and your heart would be pounding, and you would either have to freeze and shut down and run and hide, or maybe you became extra sweet and extra kind and extra good and tried to make everything okay between your parents. Then let's say you're in the present and you're out to dinner with some friends. They have a good relationship, but you can tell that things are tense between them. Maybe they had a little bit of a disagreement. Everything's safe. You're not responsible for these people. You're an adult. But the pathway in your brain is saying, oh my gosh, that same unsafe thing is happening. I need to freeze and shut down, or I need to be super on and make everything okay so that they'll be happy with each other and I'll be okay.
And that part is the part of us that becomes active instead of the Self. So that threat feels like it's happening right in the moment so that hypervigilance is there, the freeze or dissociation is there, the âpeople pleasingâ or inner critic or shame is there. That is blending. It's important. You know that blending can happen in crisis moments, but it can also just happen subtly in a daily experience. Maybe part of your day to day experience is the perfectionist part of you is always there feeling like you have to work constantly to avoid failure. So you always have this little undercurrent of hypervigilance and perfectionism. But then when something occurs that can trigger you, like for example, some feedback, then you might feel a surge of the emotions related to that part of rage or panic or shame and not really feel sure, where that's coming from.
But it's important to know that in those moments the Self is not gone. It can be obscured like the sun during an eclipse, but it's still there. It's still present. We know that when we're able to observe and be curious and un-blend, our Self or our adult part will be there again.
Blended parts play a huge role in how we view the world. And again, if you want to envision this with me as a part that takes over or as a neural pathway, it makes a lot of sense that when we're in those parts, it's as if we're experiencing the world as if we are those parts. And oftentimes those parts have developed in our younger childhood experiences, which is why in NARM we call that the child consciousness experience. And so when we are blended with those parts, we're experiencing the world as if we are a younger part of us, which is why things will feel like a threat to our lives that are not actually a threat to our lives as adults.
So, for example, if as a child, we felt we had to be perfect to keep the peace in our home, then any potential for messing something up or not getting a A+ was an opportunity for a threat to our connection to our family, and thus a threat to connection to our life. Being voted off the island was what was at stake. So then in our adult experience, when we get feedback that might sting a little bit, instead of feeling as an adult. Well, I can work on this or I can discuss this or it's okay to make a mistake. I can learn and grow from this. Instead, when we blend with that younger part of us, it feels again as if there was an actual threat to our life, which is why we might feel the deep terror or rage.
It's important to remember that these protective parts of us are only focused on keeping us safe. They don't care if we're happy. They don't care if we're in connection. They cannot recognize the thing, the nuance of things that are happening around us.
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Hello and welcome to our No Bad Parts Book Club and read along together. I'm so excited that you all are here to join me. We have a lot of new people joining me this time, and so I just briefly wanted to discuss the format our book club has taken in the past.
The first thing that's really important to know is it's okay if you don't have the time to read along with us right now. Those of us who are not reading along will still find a lot of rich value in the discussion, and in each post I'll be breaking down the chapter and discussing it. So even if you haven't read it, you'll be able to listen and take in the material. Of course, you are more than welcome to read along, but I know that everyone reads at a different pace and we all have different levels of capacity in our lives, so you are welcome here, even if you will not be reading along, but just listening along. Each week I will discuss a chapter of the book and break it down a little bit of my viewpoint as a therapist, and how we might apply this in our personal lives. That will be the bulk of our book club.
You are welcome to leave questions or comments on each post, and I will respond to your questions, either in the comments or on our next session. I will record a response to your question. We'll also have a private chat on Substack that's for paid subscribers only, which is where we can discuss as we're reading or ask questions or share curiosities that pop upâŠor share interesting TikToks we saw- we can share anything we want to there.
Once or twice during this period, we will have what I call like a pop up fireside chat, where I'll give you about a week's notice that we're going to have a live meeting, and then we'll all pop on zoom together, discuss. I'll answer questions, share curiosities, whatever we might be drawn to in that hour. We will have live meetings that usually take place at 6 p.m. eastern time, which I know will not work for everyone in all time zones, so they will be recorded and then shared on Substack.
This book has 11 chapters and we'll see how we go with the chapters. Usually I do one chapter a week just because there's a lot of rich material to talk about. But sometimes we might do two chapters just depending on how I'm feeling with the content. And this book club is for my paid subscribers, so if you're a free subscriber and you'd like to join, you can upgrade to the paid membership. It is $5 a month, and that helps support the time that I use to put together these book club posts and other parts of my work.
For those of you who are new here, we just completed our book club on the book about NARM- Neuro Affective Relational Model called The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. Because I am a therapist who practices NARM and uses an IFS lens, you will hear me make references to NARM and how NARM works in relationship to IFS. If you would like to learn more about NARM and how that might work with IFS as a paid subscriber, you have access to the entire archive so you can go back and listen to all the chapters that I've recorded about the NARM book called The Practical Guide for healing Developmental Trauma.
So right off the bat, that mono mind paradigm is that idea that we have just one mind or just one consciousness inside of our mind. And Richard Schwarz suggests that we actually all have these different parts inside of us or these sub minds. And this can be really confusing, especially if we have heard of things like multiple personality disorder, which is now called dissociative identity disorder. A lot of times people will think, well, does this mean that I have dissociative identity disorder? Of course, I'm not here to diagnose anyone, but for most of us, the answer to that question is no.
Thinking of these different sub minds or parts of us is a way to understand the different experiences we all have inside of us. So as he uses the example of kind of like that classic angel and devil on the shoulder, one part of us saying go for it and another part of us saying, don't you dare, you can kind of think of that as two separate parts or two separate voices inside of your mind. And so IFS relies mainly on this idea of parts that develop at different times in our lives. If you've seen the Inside Out movies, then you're familiar. They use IFS, Internal Family Systems, as a model for those movies to really help differentiate those parts. In Inside Out, the parts have emotion names in IFS. We don't necessarily assign emotions the names, because we know each part of us can experience a wide range of emotions, but I think Inside Out gives you a great idea of what it's like to have those different parts in our mind that are trying to run the show.
He does a really important and big thing here in the first chapter of laying out this idea of willpower and shame that is so pervasive in the American culture. And if you joined us for the NARM Book Club, you know how much we talked about this idea of shame, and it has this idea that we should be able to manage everything through willpower: pull yourself up by your bootstraps all the time, and anything else is part of your kind of like yourâŠevil impulse. And so you need to keep that evil impulse under control with your drill sergeant or inner critic selves. But most of us find that the harder we try to get rid of these parts of us that are not âwillpower,â the more they fight back. And this is why the self-help industry is $1 billion industry. If you've watched any of my content and you know that, I kind of have ongoing criticism of the Atomic Habits book, and if the Atomic Habits book works for you, that is wonderful⊠But books like that take this idea that you can change your habits and make it really, really simple, as if we all should be able to do it.
What happens is I get a lot of people coming into therapy saying, well, I did all of these things in the book and I still couldn't stick to my habits. And that comes back to this idea of willpower and shame. We should be able to stick to what the Atomic Habits book says or whatever other self-help book says. And if we can't, it's because there's something wrong with us. And so we criticize ourselves more. And I don't know about you, but if someone's criticizing me, do you think Iâm more or less likely to do the habit change? Less likely. Right. So we get stuck in these endless internal battles of trying to willpower and pressure our way into change, and IFS offers a different viewpoint of things. It's really important to know that it doesn't mean there's not room for wanting to set habits or make change in our lives, but that we all have parts that want different things. And some of those things might be things that are not in pursuit of what is good for us or what we really want. We might have parts who want things that are really bad for us, and that's not because they are bad parts, but because there's something they're trying to accomplish with that desire.
Many traditions, whether religious or philosophical or cultural, teach us that we have this single mind, and to control this single mind, we have to overcome our thoughts and overcome our emotions. And what that does is it sets us up to constantly attack ourselves when we can't control our thoughts and can control our emotions. And it really strengthens that inner critic part. Certain types of therapies and spiritual practices can reinforce this with this idea that to be successful in life or to achieve enlightenment or whatever it may be, that we have to control more tightly; grip more tightly onto our thoughts. But in IFS, we're challenging this, and we're suggesting that the thoughts and emotions and body sensations (I'm going to throw that in there) that we experience come from different parts of us. So rather than having one mind that is just throwing these thoughts at us that we need to try to control, we have these different parts that have developed in different parts of our lives to try to keep us safe. Rather than viewing them as obstacles that need to be controlled through habit change and planners and spreadsheets, instead we view them as parts of us that need to be heard and loved and taken care of.
Now, mindfulness or observing is a really big part of IFS- not to try to shut down our emotions and thoughts or to stop our thoughts, which oftentimes mindfulness has gotten to be this idea that we need to stop our thoughts- but rather to observe and be curious and notice. So if you go back and listen to any of my posts about the NARM model, for those of you who weren't there with us, you'll hear me talk nonstop about observing and noticing. Because if we can observe and notice with curiosity and neutrality, then we have the opportunity to intervene, do something different, or show up for these parts in a way that they have never been shown up for before. So our goal in observing isn't to push these parts away, but to connect with and support the healing of these different parts of us. So we're not trying to quiet the mind, but rather to bring them in, listen to them, and nurture them. And that as we do that, they can express what they've been holding all along. Then, they will lessen or shift into strengths.
Doctor Schwartz really shares his curiosity and learning here as a therapist, where he used to subscribe to the sort of mono mind idea of just trying to control and change our behaviors by changing our thoughts. But then he started to notice that a lot of his patients were sharing these different parts of them. Some of them were helpful, some of them may have been enacting harm to the patient, but all of them were protective and shaped by that person's past experiences. And when he was able to be with the clients and allow these parts to share their stories and how they might have been frozen in time from a younger part that experienced trauma or difficult experiences, then things started to shift a little bit. Then the part started to be less destructive and less harmful and start to take on different roles. And so even a behavior as they share in this book, like self-harm, could be part of one of those internal parts of us that is trying to protect us.
tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Hi Book Club pals! Iâve had THE BEST time reading The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. Hereâs the recording of our final fireside chat for this book (thereâs a transcript here on Substack or you can listen on Spotify/Apply Podcasts!) - such a rich evening together. Weâll be starting No Bad Parts with our first post on Chapter 1 on OcâŠ
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Hello Substack Pals! Weâre getting close to wrapping up our first read-a-long and itâs been so wonderful getting to engage and share in this work with you. Iâd love to hear from you about what you liked, what you wish were different, and ideas for future book clubs (or other ideas!).
On TikTok, many of you have expressed a desire for deeper support and connection in your personal growth journeys. This inspired the idea of the âSelf Help Drop Out Clubââa space for those who want to move beyond quick-fix advice and dive into meaningful, lasting transformation - a mixture of a community chat space and live meetings. If this resonates with you, let me know in the comments or reply directly. Together, we can create something truly supportive and connected.
Be sure to scroll to the bottom for our live book club meeting date and link!
Also - new this week, I added a summary! I know for some of us, 25 minutes is way too long to be able to listen to/take in all at once. So if you, like me, enjoy a shorter summary to process and then come back later to the longer post, scroll down to the bottom!
Now, onto our transcript this week:
Welcome back for our read-along of the Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. This week we're going to be exploring Chapter 7, the NARM Emotional Completion Model. And as a reminder, I'm here recapping these chapters for you, whether you're reading along with me or you're just listening along. I want to make this information more accessible so that you can take it and apply it to your life. Thank you so much for being here and supporting my work in this way. Let's dive in.
So as you may remember from our earlier discussions together, when we are children, we are biologically wired to stay in connection to our caregivers above all else. We rely on our caregivers to love us, support us, and provide a safe and caring environment where we can learn and grow and develop. And when our environment is not able to provide that to us and our caregivers are not able to provide that to us for whatever reason, it is the most heartbreaking experience because we won't expect that from our caregivers. We expect our caregivers to love us and show up for us. And when they aren't able to do so, when we aren't able to safely attach to them, when we aren't able to safely develop and grow and be curious and have emotions, it is so devastating. It is hopeless. It is helpless.
And we will have this experience of really, really deep despair. And so, of course, as children, living with that deep despair just feels completely intolerable.
As adults, at the very least, when we experience heartbreak, we have this ability to understand it, to have some cognition about it and to feel our way through it. But as children, we can't conceptualize that maybe our parents are having a hard time or our caregivers are having a hard time. Instead, it feels like something must be wrong with us. And so, of course, we would disconnect from our emotional experience to prevent a deeper feeling of loss. And when we do that, we disconnect ourselves from the full vitality and connection of life. But that's what we had to do to survive.
When we get into our adult life, those survival strategies don't magically disappear. And so we're trying to navigate a life where we want to feel fullness, connection, love, aliveness, but we had to disconnect from that. And that is what can lead to us feeling so stuck and so dissatisfied in our lives. Emotions are such a central part of how we understand ourselves, how we create meaning in our lives, and how we connect with others and navigate the world.
And so if we learned that it wasn't safe and we had to disconnect from our emotions, then we are missing a key part of our experience. That is why people who identify as intellectualizers, though they might understand everything very clearly, still feel stuck because they have that disconnection from their emotional experience.
And often, if we had to disconnect from our emotions, it means we disconnected from our body and the sensations there as well. And that's often where we see that freeze or that functional freeze of the nervous system where we're going through life, but we feel numb or disconnected from ourselves.
So, for example, in our early lives as children, we are crying because we don't have the ability to regulate ourselves as babies because we're stating that we need something from the environment. And in a healthy, securely attached environment, the child will be responded to and the need will be met. And that emotion of distress or need or whatever it is, feels resolved and completed. And we can go back to feeling regulated and exploring and playing and connecting.
But if we live in an environment that can't meet our needs, then we experience an environmental failure or a rupture. In that case, what we will learn is that it's not okay to have needs. Maybe my caregiver comes and they're upset, or my caregiver comes and they're withdrawn, or they don't come at all. So over time, what we learn is to shut down our experience. Because it's futile, it's useless. And not only is it useless, but it disconnects us further from our caregivers. And that, again, brings up that hopeless, helpless feeling.
None of this, again, is about blaming your caregivers and parents, but rather understanding how early environmental failures and ruptures led to us disconnecting from our own emotions, from our own needs. And these roots can start so early. And they start in families, even if you weren't harmed, even if your parents loved you, but they couldn't attune to you and they couldn't show up to you, or you had ruptures in school through bullying or from your teachers. Then we learn from this deeply young age to shut down our emotions and shut down our ability to know what we want and move toward it, which is that experience of agency.
Part of moving forward and connecting to ourselves or our adult consciousness is allowing some of these emotions that have been held down for so long to be felt and move through. Oftentimes people think why would I need to feel them now why can't I just be rid of them if I'm not feeling them right now and the answer to that is you're feeling them you're just working really really hard to hold them down to repress them to push them down you may not be aware of that because you may have been doing it for so long.
But that's where that same analogy comes in of driving the car with the emergency brake on. It takes such a toll on us over time. And so the answer isn't to hit the gas harder, but the answer is to start to let off the emergency brake. As we explore this model of emotional completion, we want to differentiate between fear and anxiety, which is such an important part of the NARM model.
Fear or terror is a response to something that is directly threatening us, that is directly threatening our survival. So you're out walking in a bear, you come upon a bear or, you know, my example of a tiger trying to eat you. Your survival system is going to activate. Your nervous system and brain are going to immediately choose a fight, flight, fawn, or freeze response to ensure that you survive. None of this is conscious. It's all happening very, very quickly below the surface with your brain and nervous system deciding what is the best choice of survival.
It is so important to understand that as children, these environmental failures don't just make us feel anxious, but they trigger terror. Because we know, again, that biological wiring makes it so that the threat of the loss of connection with our parents and our caregivers, our attachment relationship, it does impact our survival. We are completely reliant on the adults in our lives as children to survive. So that loss of relationship is literally a threat to our lives.
That is different from the adult experience where we know that losing a relationship or having something scary or challenging happening to us can be hard, but that our life is not at stake. And that is very, very different
NARM talks about this as futuristic memory, meaning where we're holding these past experiences and projecting them into our present and future. Here and on TikTok, you've likely heard me talk about predictive patterning, and this is that same idea where our brain is using what has happened to us in the past to try to predict what is going to happen in the future. And again, that's to keep us safe.
It's actually super adaptive so that we don't have to be making conscious choices all of the time, which would be exhausting. The predictive patterning lets us drive to work safely, even if we're not % focused. But where it becomes challenging is if we've had these environmental failures in our early life, and that sets up a pattern that says, for example, everyone is going to reject and leave me because I'm not good enough. Then we are predicting that all of the time to people around us. And that creates this internal experience of anxiety.
So when NARM is talking about this distorted reality, this futuristic memory that happens for us in adult relationships, that is because in our brain, those old predictive neural pathways are there telling us that is what is going to happen. So it's not just that you're anxious, it's that your brain has an old predictive pattern saying, having needs is unsafe because I may lose the connection. Being my own person is unsafe because I may lose the connection.
And so it's entirely possible that in your adult life, the anxiety that comes up has nothing to do with the present situation, but is rather that old predictive pattern. We know that we can change predictive patterning, thank goodness, right? We know that we can change our brains and form new pathways. But to do so, we have to be aware that a predictive pattern is coming on. And that is why I talk so much, and NARM talks about this too, about learning to observe these different patterns or these different parts of us, and to start to be curious about, similar to rock strata, like the Grand Canyon, where you see all the layers, to see what lies beneath.
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Hi, and welcome back to Tiny Sparks. This week we have a little mini podcast episode. I like to change up the way I present the information to you, because some of us like to listen, some of us like to read, and the good thing is, with the podcast episode, if you don't want to listen, you can read the full transcript below.
So this week, I wanted to talk about something that comes up so frequently in therapy and healing work, which is the idea of self-sabotage. I see people all the time on social media talking about this, and very, very often the people I work with will come in and say, oh, I was making so much progress. And then I did this, this and this this weekend. And I'm just too self-sabotaging. And oftentimes the way that term self-sabotaging is used is it's very critical, it's very collapsing. It's this idea that I was doing good and now I'm bad. I'm sabotaging myself. And very often, what I want to support people in knowing is that it's not that you are âbadâ or purposefully getting in your own way, but rather that a part of your brain is trying to protect you and keep you safe. That automatically shifts the lens from this collapsing blaming lens to this understanding of there's something deeper happening when we talk about self-sabotage.
People mean all kinds of things when they talk about self-sabotage. A lot of times people will talk about things like procrastination, oh, I landed this project that I'm really, really excited about, but instead of working on it this weekend, I scrolled on my phone and watched TV all weekend. I am self-sabotaging and always delaying things- I'm never following through. Self-sabotage can show up in other ways, too. Perfectionism can be a form of self-sabotage, where we set impossibly high standards for ourselves that we can never reach. But oftentimes, self-sabotage people mean that they're not on the path that they want to be on. So they'll say, well, I was really wanting to go to the gym every day to take care of my health, and I did it for three weeks. But then this weekend, I didn't go to the gym at all. I laid on the couch all day and I just ate snacks, and I didn't move, and I didn't even go on a walk. I'm just really self-sabotaging.
So first, there's this really problematic idea, which is that when we're wanting to make a change in our lives or to do something differently, or to move toward something different, that we have to be doing it exactly right every single day, or else we're not successful in that change. That, in its core, is a misunderstanding of how our brain works. When we're trying to make changes or move towards something we want that is new, that is different, that is something we haven't done before, we have to think about our brain and to understand that the things we have done repeatedly in our lives are like beautiful, paved highways in our brain. Our brain creates these patterns on based on what has happened to us in the past, so that it can predict what is going to happen in the future.
So you can kind of think of the roadways in a city. They're not going to make beautiful big paved highways out in the rural country where not a lot of people go. They might have one, two lane rural state highway. They're not going to have a big, beautiful, gorgeous 12 lane interstate. They make the interstates around the major cities where there are a lot of people going, and our brain works the same way. It builds these pathways to say, this is something that's happened in the past. It's likely something that will happen in the future. It's something that I need to be able to access regularly. So I will build a roadway around it. It doesn't matter whether it's something that we like, something we don't like. It's all about what is going to keep us safe, keep us going and what we do repeatedly. When you want to make a change in your brain, you are saying, I want to go off of this interstate highway that I drive on every single day, and I want to go out into the Amazon jungle. That's what it's like in the rest of our brain outside of these neural pathways and predictive patterns.
So when you're wanting to make a change in your life, you are basically getting off the interstate and you get off the exit, and not only is there not a road there, but there's a really, really dense, dense, dense jungle. So it's not realistic to expect that you're going to be able to make a sudden change, because when you get off the interstate and you're in the jungle, it's like, huh, I can't even I can't even drive my car. I'm gonna have to get out of my car and start walking and start hacking down vines. That's what it's like when we want to make a change in our brain. So you can see why. First off, it's simply unrealistic to expect that when we want to make a change, we're going to do the change every single time. Like maybe ten times you'd get in your car and you drive on the interstate, which is not going to the gym. And the 11th time you go out into the jungle, you start hacking down vines, and you do go to the gym. Very often when we start to make a change, we have some initial excitement about making the change, so we're able to override and just kind of go out into the jungle. But after a while, our brain gets fatigued and wants to go back to that old pathway of not going to the gym. In this example, it starts to get a lot deeper than that when we recognize that not only is our brain not wanting to go from the roadway into the jungle, but it's also trying to protect us and keep us safe.
The brain wants to maintain something called homeostasis. And homeostasis means keeping everything the same. It wants to do that because it doesn't want to expend extra energy trying to make changes all of the time. So it wants to stay on those familiar, comfortable highways. When we tried to disrupt the homeostasis by going against the same things that we have always done, the brain is going to say, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa whoa, pump the brakes. In a way, our brain will actively resist change. Then add the next level onto this: when we start to understand that these predictive pathways, these neural pathways in our brain formed to keep us safe based on what has happened to us in our earlier life. Then it gets even more complex.
So if you start to think about what in this example, what does going to the gym represent? Let's just say that going to the gym represents taking care of yourself, that you really want to be able to show up and take care of yourself. It doesn't matter if you walk ten minutes on the treadmill or you stretch or whatever it is, you just really want to start taking care of yourself more. Sounds great right? We're always talking about self-care and taking care of ourselves. What happens if in your early life what you learned is having needs made everyone upset? Maybe in your house what you learned was, when I have a need, when I want something, when I act out a little bit or I reach towards something that I want, everything in my house feels really tense. Maybe it's that your family didn't have a lot of money, so when you wanted something like to go on a field trip, it wasn't that your family didn't want to support you in that, but they just genuinely didn't have the funds. So there was a lot of tension, a lot of stress as your parents tried to figure out how to juggle that and make that work. Or maybe you had caregivers who just couldn't take care of their own needs. They didn't learn how to do that. And so then when you had a need or want or an emotion or an experience that made them feel really overwhelmed, so they pulled back from you, or they sent you to their room or whatever it is, or maybe you lived in an environment that was very emotionally volatile.
So you learn from a young age, having needs and wants was just an unsafe experience. Things already felt so much, so volatile, so unsure, that you just learned to keep your needs and wants shut down- to not take care of yourself, but to focus on taking care of and attuning to everyone else's needs around you. In each of these situations, what is happening is your brain is forming predictive patterns in your brain to say having a need, having a want, having an emotion, having needs, and not focusing on the needs of people around me is dangerous. And this is from the mind of usually a child, a younger part of us. Yes, we can experience this as adults too, but it oftentimes starts in our early environment where children don't have the cognitive complexity- or maybe as adults we don't have the safety- to choose and say, I want to do something differently. This isn't about me. The fact that my parents can't support my needs or my partner or whoever it is isn't about me. We might not have had that opportunity or the ability to do that, because we are so wired to stay in connection to our caregivers in our early life, but instead what we do is we just say, well, if I have to choose between my caregivers and me, I'm going to choose my caregivers. Because it just feels so unsafe to consider anything else. So boom, now you have this really well formed interstate highway in your brain that says choosing myself, having needs, attuning to myself, taking care of myself puts my connection with others at stake, which means it puts my life at stake.
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Welcome back to the read-a-long of The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. This week weâre exploring the end of chapter 5 (finding agency - the thing we all want!) and chapter 6 (reflecting psychobiological shifts aka noticing what happens in ourselves as we shift)! You can join at any time, even if you arenât currently reading the book - Iâm here to recap and break things down for you so you can take this and apply it to your life. Thanks for being apart of this community, Iâm so glad youâre here. (By the way, if you didnât know already, you can listen to this episode on Spotify or Apple Music - if youâre like me and love to listen to podcasts on your walk, add it to your listen list over on those platforms, too!).
By the way, I wanted to let you know I am hosting Part Two to my âLet's Talk About Getting Unstuckâ on August 30th at 7:00 pm EST. It will be recorded if you can't attend live and I'm so excited about it.
Part One was wonderful and so uplifting to get to do. And that recording is available on my website. You don't need to have been to part one to join us for Part Two, but you might find it interesting in Part One I'm talking a lot about nervous system flexibility, how our nervous system and brain work together. Part Two will be about putting it into practice. So I would love to see you there. I have a little coupon code for all my Substack readers. If you'd like to join, you can get 20% off (coupon code is: bookclub). Have a great week and I'll see you back in two weeks!
Welcome back for our reading of the Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. Wherever you are in your reading process is just fine. Or maybe you decided not to read the book at all, but just to join in the discussion. Either way, I'm happy you're here.
We left off talking about the very, very powerful pillar in NARM of reinforcing agency and really getting curious to start to notice how some of the experiences weâre having may be internal processes that we learn to land on ourselves. For example, instead of saying I feel guilty or I felt ashamed, we could notice that maybe there's a way we are guilting or shaming ourselves.
And there's a little reflective exercise at the end of chapter five to notice the shift from I feel pressure to I put pressure on myself. I feel burn out. I burn myself out. This is such a critical, critical piece of understanding what it's like to live with developmental trauma, where for many of us, we didn't have a say over what happened as a child and so we developed these protective survival strategies. As adults, we become the ones who pick up the torch and use those things against ourselves to stay disconnected from our agency, from our capacity, from our ability to move forward because of that internal dilemma where moving forward feels like it's a risk to our connection. So it gets that pathway going in our brain that says, oh my goodness, a tiger is trying to eat me.
So becoming aware of the ways that we set our own agency down by doing things like shaming ourselves isn't to make you feel worse, but to help support you in understanding how some of the roadblocks (not all of them), are things that we can start to be curious about slowing down and getting underneath.
Thereâs a great dialogue here between therapist and client that can be really helpful for us to start to understand how to add this NARM lens onto things, how to add a developmental trauma lens onto things, to notice how so many of these subconscious predictive patterns are happening all of the time. For example, maybe we start to feel anger and we use that shame to shut ourselves down, or we have a need and we guilt ourselves for having the need again to shut down our agency. And all of this is because of those learned patterns that we learned that we had to do as a child to maintain connection with our caregivers and in our early environments.
But as adults, those same patterns are now getting in our way of feeling our feelings, expressing our needs, connecting safely to our body, and just having the agency and choice to do those things.
It's one of the scariest and best thing that I've ever done, is to start to accept my role in my current life of where I get in my own way- to own my part of the dynamics in my life. And that doesn't mean that there aren't other dynamics happening around me, in relationships and in the systems in which I live. But to be able to own my part and consider that maybe, possibly, potentially, I can do something differently is the best gift.
Some of this sample language here, while again it's suited towards therapists, can be wonderful for us in our own processes to be curious, to notice: Hmm, I wonder if I'm starting to feel shame when I feel angry, or when I feel sad, or I wonder what I'm telling myself about that experience. I wonder how I'm relating to this situation. So powerful for this process of internal curiosity, internal observation, which we know is what allows us to reconnect to that agency.
I really love this practice exercise at the end, and if you don't have anyone you could do this with, perhaps you could do it with your therapist, or you could even do it written in a journal to notice an area where you're feeling stuck. And then let yourself be curious at this question what else is true? Not because we're trying to override the area where you're feeling stuck, but because we're curious.
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Hello and welcome back to our Read Along of the Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma, where I use my expertise as a therapist who specializes in complex and developmental trauma to break down popular self-help books and to create a community where we can explore and ask questions together.
I have had so many new faces joining me on Substack in the last few weeks, but I decided to make this post a free post so that you could get a little feel for what we do over here in our book club read-alongs. You don't need to own the book, or even to be on the same chapter that we are on. If you are reading along, because I'm going to provide a little summary and then share some of my thoughts about it as well.
Listen above or read the transcript below!
This week we'll be exploring chapter five of The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. This chapter is on reinforcing agency, which is a huge concept in the NARM model.
To understand agency, we need to understand what we're talking about when we talk about our sense of self or our observer, or our curious experiencer, as I call it. And to do that, we need to understand the concept of structuralization. To put it simply, structuralization is a process through our development, starting as children, where we take our life experiences and we internalize them to build maps or models of the world around us, including how we see ourselves.
And this sort of internal map helps shape us: what we think about ourselves, how we feel about ourselves, what we allow ourselves to do. And we're always sort of filing that information away, determining if we can clear through developmental gates. And when I say gates, I kind of imagine it like a hurdle. Can I have my own needs? Can I be my own person? Can I do those things and still be loved? We're exploring each of those things starting from infancy throughout our life, and based on the feedback we get from our early environments, including our caregivers, schoolmates, teachers, anyone who's around us, that's how we build our internal sense of self and our internal map of the world.
You could almost imagine a little kid building something with Legos, and every Lego brick that they pick up represents an experience or an interaction they have with the world around them. Positive experiences where they feel loved, seen, attuned to, or supported help them build a strong, stable structure, a strong, stable foundation. Negative experiences where they might feel unseen, neglected, unsafe, or even mis-attuned to, meaning you're supported and you're loved, but there's a miss.
So maybe you were a highly sensitive child, but you grew up in a family of engineers who weren't extremely connected to their emotions. While they may have loved and supported you and made sure that you had a stable home, you may have felt missed because you felt things strongly and you were always feeling emotions. Being this attuned to in that way leads to a shaky, unstable structure. And so as we grow up into teenagers and adults, that internal structure that we've built influences our entire world- how safe we feel having agency, how safe we feel being ourselves, responding to challenges in our life, connecting with other people, building relationships.
If we have a strong structure, then we likely have a strong sense of us as ourselves, and we can handle stressful things and know that we are still okay. So we're not in survival mode. We don't have those predictive patterns in our brain saying that a tiger is trying to eat us all of the time. But if we had a history of misfortune or a lack of safety or any other sort of environmental ruptures and failures, then we don't have that foundation. And so when things happen, or when we think about the potential for hard things to happen, we might get that feeling that things are unsafe because we don't have that stable structure.
Another way to think about structuralization is through that lens of the different parts. So if you've seen the Inside Out movie, you might be familiar with what I'm talking about, where we might have a very strong sense of self who is able to keep us steady and moving forward even when things are challenging or hard, even if anxiety is trying to take over or anger is rushing up to the board. And if we don't have that experience, then we might have these parts that split off. We might get fragmented internally, where we have to take those parts of us and put them underground, because it doesn't feel safe to have those parts of us out in the world. And when we do that, when we have to take our true self and hide them underground, lock them up in a castle, put on all these suits of armor, then we are disconnected from that curious experience or observer of life. And so what can become impaired is that agency. And that's what this chapter is all about.
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Agency is about that ability to observe and be present to our own experience- how we show up in the world and how we are presenting ourselves to others out in the world. It is such a critical, critical piece of how we move toward what we want for ourselves. It really stood out to me in this chapter, the quotation that they said âI am the one living my life. I am living life versus life happening to me.â
So as you have learned and I read along so far, the NARM model does not focus on reliving all of the trauma that happened to you, but rather being curious about how those survival strategies may have developed for you to adapt to the environment around you based on that early structure, based on that self that you were able to build. So if we lived in an environment where things did not feel safe, we did not have a false sense of safety. It doesn't matter if we actually were safe, if we didn't have a false sense of safety, for example, that misattunement that I used, then we split those parts of us off and we move forward identifying with those survival strategies. What that means is instead of being able to recognize: this is a pattern, I learned to keep myself safe, we feel like it is us.
A great example of that is sometimes people will say, well, I really want to set this boundary, but then I feel so guilty and they'll talk about guilt as it is this external experience that comes out of nowhere and lands onto them. And I know it really feels that way because I have said the very same thing myself. But from an agency perspective, when we can get into that self, that curious experiencer, we can notice- instead of saying, I want to set that boundary, but then I feel guilty. I want to set that boundary. But it's scary. So I guilt and shame myself, and I shut myself down from having the boundary that I want to have because that feels like what I need to do to stay safe and in connection.
So in the NARM model agency is the critical piece that allows us to connect the child consciousness who holds all of those protective survival mechanisms, and the adult consciousness, who is our true self, who knows that no matter what comes, we can handle it- that our life is not at stake in the way it felt like it was as a child. When we are disconnected from our agency because we had to take our true selves underground and offline, we spend so much of our time in shame and shutting ourselves down over and over and over again, often without realizing we're doing it, which can leave us feeling very helpless.
That's also why I'm doing this series right now on Substack about shame, because it is such a big part of so many of our experiences, and so often, if not all the time, is founded in developmental trauma. It's very, very important, as we're taking in this chapter, to take in the idea that recognizing how we might have shut ourselves down or how we might play a role in our current life circumstances, is not the same as blaming ourselves.
It can be very painful to start to become aware of how we have learned to shut ourselves down. So in that boundary example where we couldn't set a boundary because we started shaming ourselves, it might feel incredibly challenging to come to terms with the fact that so many of our relationships feel dissatisfying, not only because of the other people (though the other people may be challenging), but because we shut our needs down over and over again. We don't state our needs. We don't state what we want for ourselves. We don't communicate because we are disconnected from ourselves and we shut those things down.
That is not to say you're a bad problem, and you're the reason why you have no good strong relational connections.
Not at all, but rather to notice: Wow- if I want to have a deeply connected relationship, shutting myself down is actually getting in the way of that, and that's actually something I can explore.
Now, does that mean if I start setting boundaries that every single relationship is suddenly going to be perfect and wonderful and deeply connected and attuning? It doesn't mean that at all, because we don't have any control over how other people respond. But when we're not shutting ourselves down and we can start to feel connection to agency and state our needs or set our boundaries, then we are going to feel entirely different in the world and not reliant on needing other people to read our minds and give us what we want and need. And that is a totally different ballgame.
Please be very gentle with yourself as you're exploring this concept of agency, especially for those of us who have experienced abuse or continue to exist under systemic trauma. And this all can coexist in one universe, so none of this means that what happened to you or what is happening to you isn't deeply wrong or hurtful as they name here. Oftentimes, we are having normal reactions to abnormal and traumatic situations.
In fact, there's often a lot of grieving in this process as we start to connect to our agency because we're grieving for that part of us who was so deeply hurt. And from there, we can start to connect to agency in the present. But remember, when we've had developmental trauma and we've had to live in protective mode and we are split off from our true selves, it is too easy to go into shame and blame and shutdown. So as you're taking this chapter in, as you're hearing what I'm saying, this is a moment to slow down and pause and not use the concept of agency as another opportunity to shut yourself down, but rather as a curiosity to start to connect toward what you want for yourself and how your adaptive protective strategies, which may have served you in the past, may not be serving you anymore.
It's really important to understand that agency isn't always about taking action. It's actually about that internal state of of observing and being curious about our own needs and emotions and experiences. For example, noticing that you want to set the boundary or state a need and that what's happening isn't working for you and that you deserve better or want more, that is agency. And while agency can drive behavior, that's not what this is about. We're not trying to change your behavior or make something happen. We're being curious about what happens when you notice and are aware of what you want for yourself.
Agency is also not the same thing as empowerment, though you may feel empowered as you connect more and more to yourself and to your agency. Empowerment again is about that behavior, about dealing with the external experiences, whereas agency is all about connecting internally to that observer, to that curious experiencer, and noticing the different parts of you that developed to help keep you safe. That is agency. That is your internal relationship to self: building a more secure attachment to yourself, not trying to force it to other people around you.
The NARM model often reflects on a really powerful quotation from Viktor Frankl, that says âBetween stimulus and response, there is space. In that space is the power to choose our response. In the response lies growth and our freedom.â And so in the NARM model, the agency is between the stimulus and the response, where we connect to our self and organize our internal experience and be aware of it before we respond. Again, we don't want to ignore the external experiences because none of us exist in a vacuum.
So in my example, let's say that I'm in a relationship and I don't express my needs. I haven't expressed my needs because I haven't felt safe. And so I feel really lonely and unseen my relationship, because I want my partner to show that they care about me, whether it's doing the dishes or stopping and picking up my favorite treat, or just checking in and asking me how I am on a stressful day. And I don't say anything about it and I don't say anything about it. So I remain feeling really dissatisfied in my relationship. Meanwhile, I'm taking care of every single thing my partner could ever want and need. I always make sure I have their favorite treats on hand. I always text them to see how they're doing, especially on stressful days. I cook their favorite meals for them. I go out of my way to buy special gifts for them, and that leads to me feeling more and more frustrated.
Maybe in therapy, I'm sort of venting about, Well, I just don't understand why my partner can't ever meet my needs. And I need to set a boundary here, but I can't because I don't think that he'll know what I'm saying, or he'll think I'm being greedy or it won't feel the same. You know, it won't feel the same. He should think of it on his own. It won't feel the same if I ask for it. So we could focus on your partner. We could also focus on the behavior of stating your needs. Or we could be curious about the internal experience. What happens when you think about having needs? What happens when you think about wanting things from your partner; wanting to be seen and attuned to by your partner; wanting to be able to state your needs and have them responded to in a way that feels good to you.
There might be a lot of fear underneath of there- or anger or deep grief- and that that leads to feeling too much. It sets off your survival system, those old predicted patterns that maybe you learned in childhood, that having needs was too much. Having needs made things in your household really difficult. And so in comes the ever powerful shame lock box to shut you down and make you feel guilty. Or even more powerfully, the the pride piece. The pride piece of when we feel shame and it's too much, we shift into this pride of, well, I don't have any needs or you know, it won't be special if I have to ask for it. That's another way, actually, that we're disconnecting from our agency. And if we realize that; if we realize that these things that we say to ourselves over and over again are actually tools that we're using to disconnect from our agency because it feels like too much, then we can slow things down and say, we don't have to focus on your partner right now.
Instead, we can focus on what's happening in your brain, in your nervous system, in your survival system when you think about having needs. Is this a pattern for you? What's it like to reflect on that? How do you feel toward that part of you that feels so scared about having needs? As you increase that sense of self-awareness and that connection to yourself, the road will open in front of you about whether you want to address it with your partner or not, because you will feel a connection of knowing that no matter what happens, you will be okay. If you address it with your partner and they can't meet your needs, you can handle whatever comes. If you address it with your partner and they can meet your needs (and that's really scary, it feels like a lot), you can handle that if it comes. So the only person we have any say over is ourselves, and that can feel really scary and overwhelming, but also really exciting to see.
We don't have to try to manage people around us anymore or try to manage our relationships sort of subconsciously, right? Like not stating our needs but being really resentful when they aren't met. I know many of us have been there before, and it's not a bad thing or a deficit about you, but rather a way you learn to survive. And now you can be curious about agency or noticing what you're wanting for yourself. The wonderful thing about this is the connection to ourselves becomes so much stronger, and so does the connection to others.
In my example, when I'm not relying on my partner to read my mind to meet my needs, suddenly so much space opened up between us. And even if my partner didn't know that I was feeling resentful, they could probably feel the energy between us versus when I can state my needs. If that's what I'll decide that I want to do, suddenly we can have such a more depthful connection where we can see each other as adults and navigate things together instead of our survival strategy parts kind of duking it out between each other.
Now you know that if you follow me on social media that I'm a huge proponent of talking about and bringing systemic trauma into therapy, because I think it is wrong to try to tell people that they can heal in a vacuum because many, many, many of us exist under systemic trauma- whether it's our identities or just the system we live in that doesn't provide for our needs to be met- that doesn't give us health insurance or enough money to have food or whatever other things we might be experiencing within the systems we live in. Those things are very real, and they do impact our nervous system, and they do impact our survival system, and they do make it more challenging to have a felt sense of safety and to connect to our agency. That is irrefutable.
What is so important to me to say is that I am never trying to support people in thinking that they can agency or regulate their way out of systemic trauma, but whether to be curious about if there are ways they can connect to themselves in little moments within the system that they're in, so that they are more able to feel their vitality and their capacity to connect and build community and find safety within the system and to build new systems. And that doesn't mean you have to take on the broken system. Oftentimes, we feel like we do have to take on the broken system alone. And that might be part of our survival strategies. Instead, connecting to the safety and agency we have, even if it's just in this moment in this room, and the world around us feel so deeply unsafe, allows us to connect to others in new ways, and that is a way forward toward more resilience, more community, more connection.
So as you're curious about some of these reflective exercises, as always, I encourage you to take it easy, to take it slow, to take it gently, and that when you read words like accountability to slow things down before you even do the reflective exercise, maybe you just slow things down and notice what it's like to read the reflective exercise.
This one says âIf you're able to take accountability for your part in this relational challenge, we invite you to reflect on what impact your behaviors might have had on the other person.â
Just reading that without thinking about a specific situation in a relationship, just thinking about the word accountability might be enough to bring up a lot of anxiety, stress, and shame for some of us. And it's okay to just start there. Remember, we're always taking things little pieces at a time. We know that we're going up against our brains old predictive pathways, and that we can build new predictive pathways that let us have a felt sense of safety here in the present. But that takes time. And that's why we take things little steps at a time. It's okay if this material feels challenging, and if thinking about or even just listening to me talk about agency feels really scary, or makes you angry or makes you sad, that's the case for many of us who had developmental trauma. And you're not alone in that. And so that's why, again, we're not trying to force an outcome here. We're not saying you need to connect to your agency. We're being curious about what you want for yourself, and how disconnecting from your true self and your agency might be a piece of what's getting in the way for you.
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So, again, little tiny bits at a time. Because we know that these survival strategies push upon our survival system and can make us feel as if it's happening in the present, it is so critically important that we take this sort of like the archaeological dig, where there are really cool things under the dirt and you really want to dig in. You want to bring in a big excavator and dig in and get it out. But, you know, if you do that, you're going to break all those precious little pieces. And so instead, you have to mark off a little four foot by four foot section, and you get your little paintbrush and you just brush away little millimeters of dust at a time. But over time you start to see all this beautiful vase underneath or this amazing plate that's thousands of years old. We're excavating through layers and layers of strata of our life up until now, which for many of us is decades and decades. So it makes sense that it would take time, and it's okay to take it little pieces at a time and just keep coming back to curiosity, a felt sense of safety and observation.
So when we come back together next time, we will finish up the rest of this chapter five and move into chapter six. We're coming toward the end of the book- making our way there little bits at a time, and I'm really enjoying getting to take it at this pace with you: to really do a deep dive into these chapters and to be curious and to take it slowly together so that we can really practice it. We're doing it right now. We're being gentle. We're taking little pieces. We're being slow and curious; neutral. So not to worry if you haven't started reading yet or you don't plan to read it and you just want to listen or you feel like you're behind. You're not behind. You're right on time. These recordings will be there for you if and when you decide you're ready. And I'm so glad you're here.
I will be publishing our live meeting to wrap up the book soon as I get a better idea for when we're going to be closing this out. Itâs probably looking like September, I'm guessing. It will give us a few more sessions to just really wrap things up with intentionality, and we will have our live fireside chat, and then we will move into âNo Bad Partsâ together.
So again, I'm so glad you're here. I welcome any questions, curiosities, things you're learning, and you're welcome to just reply to this email. You don't have to post it here if you don't feel comfortable, but I would love to hear what pieces you're taking away from this.
By the way, I wanted to let you know I am hosting Part Two to my âLet's Talk About Getting Unstuckâ on August 30th at 7:00 pm EST. It will be recorded if you can't attend live and I'm so excited about it.
Part One was wonderful and so uplifting to get to do. And that recording is available on my website. You don't need to have been to part one to join us for Part Two, but you might find it interesting in Part One I'm talking a lot about nervous system flexibility, how our nervous system and brain work together. Part Two will be about putting it into practice. So I would love to see you there, and I do have a little coupon code for all my Substack readers. If you'd like to join, you can get 20% off (coupon code is: bookclub). Have a great week and I'll see you back in two weeks!
wishing you moments of curiosity,
trisha
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Thanks for joining me for the read-a-long of The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. This week weâre exploring the end of chapter 2 (all things disidentification) and Chapter 4 - the power of asking exploratory questions and drilling down into our own experiences! You can join at any time, even if you arenât currently reading the book - Iâm here to recap and break things down for you so you can take this and apply it to your life.
Transcript below:
Hello Book Club and welcome back! Super excited to be moving through The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma together.
I'd love to hear from some of you what you have been curious about as you've been doing the reading, and you're more than welcome to leave a comment here or just reply to this email- it comes straight to me. I'd love to feel the connection with each of you as we're undertaking this process together because this book is so rich and so deep that it's so important to hold the container together of knowing that we're in this together- we're learning and being curious as we go along.
Something for me, as I've been rereading this book that has really stood out, is that process of dis-identification. We talked a little bit about this in our last meeting together, but it really, really stood out to me about how impactful and how big that dis-identification process is and can be. We talked last week about that pillar one model of NARM called clarifying the therapeutic contract. What that pillar really represents is connecting you to your agency and what you want for yourself.
An experience that I had in my own therapy when I started NARM long ago was how much I hated doing that. And what I didn't know at the time was that I have a really, really strong part of me that wants to push against autonomy and agency. Part of my predictive adaptive patterns were around protecting me from having wants, having needs, and wanting to be a separate and individual person from those around me. Clarifying what I wanted for myself really hit upon this part of me that was like, oh my gosh, that is a huge thing to let myself figure out what I really want. And that might sound kind of strange because if you knew me, you would know that I'm a very achieving, moving towards goals type of person. But what I didn't realize is that a lot of what I was achieving and moving towards was what I thought other people wanted from me. I didnât have a deep, genuine sense of connection to that desire of what I really want, what I value, how I want to live in my life.
And so whenever I would come up against that therapeutic contract, when I was in training for NARM and doing my own NARM therapy, I would feel a sense of anger of why is this therapist trying to put this back on me? Aren't they here to help? What I was able to realize is underneath of that anger was a strong sense of fear and deep sadness that I had spent a portion of my life trying to make others around me happy. There was also a part of me that was so deeply exhausted from having to juggle everything all of the time to make others around me happy and keep going and keep achieving. I wanted someone to do it for me. I wanted someone to tell me what I should be doing and what I wanted for myself.
What I love about this model is that it's so deeply non-pathologizing- that I was never made to feel like there was something wrong with me for not being able to get clear about what I wanted for myself, or what I needed in my life or in relationship, but rather the support to come into my own capacity and to start to dis-identify or un-blend in internal family system terms from that old predictive pattern that said it wasn't safe to have wants and needs and to not take care of everyone around me.
But that dis-identifying from that people pleasing, perfectionist, intellectual part of me was a pretty intense process, and it took time to start to recognize that wasn't actually me, but rather that predictive, protective part of me. Maybe several parts of me, as I thought, surely those are adult parts of me. They want to achieve; they want to set goals. They want to take care of others. I'm a really caring person, and a lot of times I'll joke with the clients I work with that it sounds like an adult, but if you really look underneath it, what you feel is that there's sort of three child consciousnesses stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat. And that was definitely the case for me, as I was able to slow things down and feel all the fear at dis-identifying from what I thought was my identity.
Then I could start to come into true connection to myself in my own capacity. I wanted to share that story with you all, because I know sometimes these concepts can be sort of clinical, and I think you'll really enjoy towards the end of the book where they intersperse little therapeutic conversations, but that this is real and can be impactful in our lives in such a positive, empowering way. That we can dis-identify from these old patterns, that these predictive patterns are not part of our identity, but rather a suit of armor we put on to try to stay safe and stay in connection with those around us.
Just to be clear, it doesn't mean that I might never have a little people-pleasing or perfectionist strategy pop up, because we know that these protective strategies are always there for us when we need them, not when we want them. And that's okay. Many of us may still be in situations in our lives where it's not fully safe to be 100% ourselves, and that's all right. As long as you have the awareness of your agency and flexibility to stay on your own side and continue to feel the sense of safety in whatever way it's available, that's what is really valuable. So let's dive into pillar two together.
This is one of my favorite things about NARM is the emphasis on curiosity. And if you know me in real life or you've ever worked with me, you will never hear the end of the word curiosity. In fact, one of my friends gifted me with a little resin stand that says be curious because they've heard it from me so much, and the power of curiosity and getting underneath our experience- it's just one of the most valuable things we can do. And it reveals so much without having to try so hard. Itâs really important to understand, here's a little overlay with how our nervous system works, is that our survival system - many people think about it as an alarm system, but really it's a novelty system. And so what that means is it's not just looking for things that are scary, it's also looking for things that are novel or different.
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Hello tiny sparks reader! Joining you this week with another audio exploration - this time of perseverance. Iâm pasting the transcript below for those of you who are readers rather than listeners. Wishing you a great week ahead~
Decided this week to do another little short recorded exploration versus a written exploration just to give my eyes a little break from the screen.
I am still in the midst of writing my candidacy exams for my PhD which means I'm spending a lot more hours on my computer every day reading and writing so I wanted to still bring you some information to explore just in a different format and in pursuit of me continuing to do my exams I want to talk a little bit about perseverance and how we make little changes in our life towards what we want for ourselves.
That is the name of this newsletter after all, Tiny Sparks.
And so I want to talk about this concept of how we take little incremental steps towards a really big thing. And the first thing to understand is that making a change in your life, even if you think it's a small change, is actually a really big thing to your brain.
So from a neuroscience perspective, the goal of our brain is to maintain allostasis and allostasis is essentially keeping everything the same because that is what feels safe to the brain. So it doesn't matter if you feel good, if you feel comfortable, if you feel happy, if you feel you've achieved what you want to do. All that matters to your brain is that you keep things the same so that you are safe and you're not using up energy that the brain wants to conserve.
That's really important because when we want to make changes in our life or move towards completing a big project or task a lot of times we think well I really want to do this thing so why don't I feel motivated to do it or why is it so hard to take steps towards doing what I want to do
Now there's a lot of other things that come into play based on our history, our environment, any trauma or stressors. But just from a really basic understanding of our brain, our brain will actually resist changes. And the bigger the change or the bigger the project that you're undertaking, the more likely it is that the brain is going to get in your way.
So to understand this a little further, what you've got to understand is that when you take steps towards changing something, working on a big project, setting a goal for yourself, you're asking your neurons in your brain to fire a new neural pathway.
And so to understand what that means, you can kind of think about when you're driving around your city every day, wherever you live, maybe you're driving on a big, huge interstate, or if like me, you live somewhere more rural, maybe you're driving on just a two lane highway, you know, 55 miles an hour. But wherever you are, it's most likely that you're driving on a paved road that's pretty well maintained (unless you live in Michigan where the roads are horrible) but you're driving on roads that are at least somewhat maintained they're paved they're familiar you know the speed limit you know where your turns are and so that's what it's like in our brain for things that are familiar to us notice I didn't say good things I said familiar so for example if you have the habit every morning of picking up your phone when you wake up and scrolling on social media for half an hour that's actually a neural pathway in your brain
And so if you say, I want to stop doing that. I don't want to get on my phone when I wake up first thing in the morning. It makes me feel weird. It doesn't start the day off on the right foot.
Well, that's great that a part of you has identified that you want it to be different. But your neural pathway, your interstate highway in your brain is to pick up your phone and start scrolling.
So when you wake up and you say, I'm not going to scroll today, you're sending your neurons in a direction they've never gone before.
So here you are driving on the interstate and now you're telling your brain, hey, get off the highway here and head on into the Amazon jungle.
And if you know anything about the Amazon jungle, you know it's incredibly dense. There's not roads through it and trying to even clear a path to hike through it takes a lot of really intense equipment and the jungle sort of grows back around you as you go.
So that's what it's like in our brain.
When you wake up and you say, I'm not going to scroll today, you're stepping off the interstate. You're pulling your car off the interstate and getting out of your car and saying, I guess I'm going to hike through the jungle.
So maybe you do it the first day and you're like, yeah, I did it.
And the second day you're like, yeah, I'm on a good routine.
Then by the third or fourth day, your brain starts feeling a little fatigued from you trying to send these neurons down this jungle pathway, instead of going down the nice, comfortable, familiar interstate.
And so that's our brain resisting the change to our allostasis or to keeping things the same.
So when you want to work towards a big project or a goal change, that's why we do it incrementally. We start with small little pieces.
So maybe instead of saying, I'm not going to pick up my phone and scroll in the morning ever again, you could just start by saying, when I wake up and I first open my eyes, I'll take 30 seconds and I'll just look around the space or I'll sit up or I'll do a little mindfulness practice for 30 seconds or
Maybe I'll just get up and stand up for a second and even if I want to sit back down in bed and scroll, that's fine.
But then you can link together those incremental stages and incremental choices that you're making to start building a new pathway towards the jungle.
And so for me, as I'm working on my exams, I am having to dedicate a lot of time and energy that normally would be used for resting, self-care, doing other work like cooking and cleaning to write. And it's a big change from not doing that. I haven't been in classes for a little while to doing that.
And so if I said, I'm going to sit down every day and spend three hours reading and writing, I know for myself that I would never do that.
But if I set a little goal for myself to say, I'll just sit down and look at this for 15 minutes, and when the 15 minutes are up, I can keep going if I want to, or I can stop.
And I do that a couple times a day, I find that without the pressure, I can get going and oftentimes spend 30, 45, 60 minutes and not feel fatigued.
Another thing I do for myself is I let myself take a day off.
It's stressful. I'm under a time crunch. I only have 10 weeks to do this. But my brain is also adjusting to a big change in my routine.
And I know that if I want to produce good quality work without burning myself out, I have to allow my brain to adjust by taking things slowly and not shocking my brain.
And so that's why perseverance or tiny sparks or little incremental steps towards building a new pathway in your brain are much more effective than relying on big bursts of motivation where you might try to make a huge change and make it last for a few days or a few weeks and then not stick to it.
So if you have something you're trying to change or a little thing you're curious about moving towards - let me know! Let me know how it's going for you.
And maybe consider if there's a way you can break it into small steps, and not even small steps, but tiny steps, remembering that your brain is trying to keep you safe by resisting those big changes.
And so you can either fight your brain and feel pretty miserable, or you can say, I'm going to be on the same team as my brain and just allow my brain to feel supported in making tiny sparks this week.
So have a great week.
Thanks for being here with me, and I'll see you again in two weeks.
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I decided to try something a little different this week with a short podcast on how our brains support us in moving toward more goodness. Wishing you lots of gentle moments as we wrap us this year and look toward 2024. Thanks for joining me here - and please see the transcript below for those of you who donât prefer an audio medium.
For all of my Michigan readers (or elsewhere who donât mind traveling!), I hope youâll join me at blossom, my retreat to gently greet the new year and connect to our vision.
Weâll have the opportunity to go on a quest together to connect with our values and our vision - finding what we uniquely want for ourselves. Along the way, weâll pause and find moments to strengthen our internal resilience. At the end of our journey, youâll be in the flow of your authenticity, able to swim around any obstacles that may arise as you float down the current gently, welcoming 2024 with ease. I would love to see you there.
I was baking cookies this week leading up to Christmas and just having a low key Christmas this year where it's just me and my husband and my dog, our first year in our new house.
And I normally do cookie boxes every year where I bake a bunch of different varieties and mail them to everybody that I know and love.
But I felt overwhelmed this year moving into a new house and all that goes along with that, that it just felt like too much.
But I still wanted to mark the season with some cookies.
So I decided to make a few small batches just for us to have.
And immediately, as I started making the dough, putting them into the oven, smelling the different scents, I started thinking about all the different times that I've made cookies in my life with my grandma, all my family there, with my mom, with my dad, all the different houses that I've baked cookies and decorated cookies in.
Cut Out Cookies and Smelled Cookies.
And it made me think how I talk a lot on here about the difficult parts of nervous system regulation, but I also wanted to talk about some of the ways that our brain does help us to access nervous system regulation.
And one of those ways is through this idea of memory templates.
If you've ever
created a resume from Microsoft Word.
Then I think, you know what I mean when I say a template where it's sort of like a prebuilt wireframe and something really cool about our brain is that it creates these templates as well in our memory.
And it's part of our memory working together to help our brain be more efficient and hold on to things that are important.
We can't possibly hold on to every single thing that ever happens to us.
but when something is meaningful or impactful or hard or difficult, our brain wants to make it so we can respond faster next time.
So this part of our brain called the hippocampus creates a little template to say, okay, I know what's happening here.
When this happens, then this comes next.
And then it can send messages to our amygdala, which is a part of our brain that feels emotions and also where our survival system lives.
I got to thinking about this with the way my body immediately felt this really warm, regulating connection just through this simple act of making cookies.
I started thinking about that memory template in my brain around
the scent of cookies and Christmas and family and connection and there wasn't anything I had to do in that moment to try to make myself feel regulated or to make myself feel good.
I didn't even consciously try to think about all the times I'd made cookies in the past but my brain
my sweet little brain had that little template filed away.
But even though this year I didn't get to bake cookies with my mom or my dad or my friends or my grandma or my great grandma, even though I didn't get to do that, my brain said, I remember this scent.
I remember this experiment.
I remember this time spent with others.
And it was as if it was happening right in that moment.
just a warmth, a sweetness, and just an overall softening in my body.
And I just wanted to share that with you so that maybe if this time of year is hard or wonderful or lonely or amazing or exhausting or stressful or connecting or all of the above, that maybe you can notice if you have some of those little
pleasant, joyful, even neutral memory templates in your brain.
And if not, if the templates around this time of year feel difficult for you, as they do for many people, maybe you can start to create a little template for yourself.
Like maybe you can go outside and you start to build this little template in your brain that says, Oh, I know this.
I know the trees and
the smell of them, the sound of the birds.
And I can file that away.
When I hear that, I know that I'm connected.
I'm not alone.
I'm at peace, or I have more safety or more neutrality.
Or maybe it's starting your own tradition of making cookies or baking a little meal, even if it's just for you or
taking a walk with your pet or calling a friend or making a little craft, little Christmas craft or Hanukkah craft or Kwanzaa craft, whatever you celebrate.
And just starting to build in your brain safety in this moment that your brain can file away and access later without you having to try so hard.
So I'm wishing you a gentle end to this year and a soft, warm welcome to the next year.
And thanks for taking a few minutes with me.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit trishawolfe.substack.com/subscribe
