“When those aspects [of ourselves] that have been unconsciously refused are returned, when they are made conscious, accepted, tolerated or integrated, the self can then be at one, the need to maintain the self-conscious edifice disappears, and the force of compassion [is] automatically unleashed.”
(Epstein, 1995, p. 19)
As clients learn to speak the language of parts, increase their ability to unblend, and cultivate a dual awareness relationship characterized by curiosity rather than aversion, there is often a spontaneous settling of the nervous system, calming trauma-related parts. The habit of mindful noticing creates a little space between the young child and a wise adult who finds it much easier to be curious now that he or she is less overwhelmed. Cause-and-effect relationships become clearer. The client feels less “crazy” when “over-reactions” are reframed as normal reactions of traumatized children. Now, the client can observe the influence of the parts on their actions and reactions and practice being aware of impulses to blend and make a conscious choice: “If I blend with the despair of the depressed part, it will upset the little parts and trigger the suicidal part—maybe I don’t want to ‘give in’ to the feeling of hopelessness after all.” With a conscious, voluntary separation from trauma-related parts and a more regulated nervous system, clients begin to develop less aversion and more compassion for them—or at least perspective toward them. Particularly with clients with chronic high-risk symptoms, self-destructive behavior, substance-abuse, and/or eating disorders, stabilization is almost entirely dependent upon acquiring the ability to differentiate the aims and goals of a normal life versus those of a desperate flight or fight part more afraid of trauma-related vulnerability than of death. Traditional treatments for these issues typically focus on cessation of unsafe behavior, thereby alienating and polarizing the fight and flight parts and often jeopardizing stabilization. Similarly, shame, exhaustion, and self-doubt are most often treated as indications of chronic depression or low self-esteem, rather than understood as communications from parts who bear the burden of submission and humiliation. Worse yet, when client symptoms are chronic or treatment-resistant, they are often labeled as “personality disordered,” confirming already held beliefs in their defectiveness and not belonging. But stabilization of even the most dysregulated, dissociated clients can gradually be achieved with repeated practice of the following simple steps described in more detail in Chapters 4 and 5:
• Learning to recognize triggered emotional and somatic reactions as “triggering” and avoid interpreting them as here-and-now responses to the environment.
• Evoking curiosity by reframing these responses as “communications from parts.”
• Increasing client ability to mindfully notice moment-to-moment interactions between triggering stimuli and triggered parts.
• Differentiating the qualities of an observing normal life self with either the ability or desire for a life beyond trauma from the characteristic signs and symptoms of traumatically activated parts.
• Cultivating not only the ability to name the parts but growing compassion for their youth and ability to survive in the face of “what happened.”
• Learning to communicate internally, building trust, and making felt connections to the parts.
These simple initial tasks are the foundation upon which any deeper work must be built, and it is well worth the therapist taking the extra time to stabilize these abilities until the client can use them independently outside of therapy, not just with the therapist present. It is not helpful to clients to move ahead to “the deeper work,” only to discover in hindsight that the client was more dysregulated and more blended with his or her parts than the therapist realized and now is overwhelmed by emotions or traumatic memories.
Therapists (and sometimes their clients, too) put enormous pressure on themselves to accomplish therapeutic goals quickly. Often, the sense of urgency is driven by the client’s suffering and the empathic wish to relieve it, sometimes by the pressures of limited sessions and/or insurance coverage. Sometimes, we push ourselves because we believe or are led to believe that a particular method “should” work in just a short time, and we question ourselves rather than the method when it does not generate quick results. We also do not take into account the role of structural dissociation: structurally dissociated clients cannot integrate new information or tolerate emotional intensity, and they are also hindered by the internal conflicts between parts. Always in trauma work, the therapist’s motto should be, “Slower is faster.” Taking the time to build a foundation for each piece of work allows a steady progression toward resolution, rather than a great leap forward followed by two steps back—a pattern to which traumatized clients are all too prone.
In traditional phase-oriented treatment, stabilization is followed by a phase of “memory-processing” based on the assumption that unmetabolized memories of traumatic events are the active ingredient in post-traumatic stress. However, as discussed throughout this book, research suggests that the “active ingredients” underlying post-traumatic disorders are chronic autonomic dysregulation, situationally activated implicit memories without words, and fragmented parts that experience themselves as still in danger of annihilation or abandonment or both (Van der Kolk, 2014; Ogden et al., 2006). “Trauma processing” must therefore include the body and the parts, and it must focus on reorganizing the individual’s implicit memories and relationship to the traumatic past. For clients to transform their relationship to frightening, overwhelming, humiliating events necessitates acquiring the ability to be “on speaking terms” with the traumatic past without fear of being overwhelmed or humiliated. In Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Ogden et al., 2006), the litmus test for assessing client readiness to process memory is the question, “What happens when you just ‘think about thinking about it?’” I once asked that question of Annie, and the next week, she reported that she’d been having flashbacks all day and all night ever since. Clearly, the question was very premature.
To “process memory” requires preparation: learning to overcome the fear of emotional vulnerability, of the body, and of the parts, reduce sensitivity to traumatic triggering, and inhibit the automatic tendency to “self-defeating stories” or self-blame. While stabilization requires the ability to notice, identify, and differentiate one’s parts, the healing of traumatic wounds necessitates an additional step: making an emotional connection to the parts and providing reparative experiences that serve as antidotes to the past.
Developing compassionate relationships with parts who are hurt, lonely, consumed by rage, frightened, and ashamed is a challenging job, however. Because their emotions are so raw and overwhelming, welcoming them requires tolerating their traumatic activation, learning how to remain unblended despite the distraction of strong physical impulses, and regulating their over- or underwhelming affects. In practical terms, this means that the therapist must help clients maintain their ability to stay curious, despite the intense internal struggles, and cultivate enough compassion to communicate welcome to each part. Therapists will be challenged here by training that prioritizes the felt connection to strong emotions over other types of experience, but it is important to be patient. If the client feels “too much” for the parts, he or she will become flooded with their emotions. To the extent that the normal life self has been able to develop confidence in being able to stay present, has learned to recover from when flooded and “come back,” has slowly come to appreciate each part’s role in surviving the traumatic past, and has the ability to offer a healing or “loving presence” (Kurtz, 1990) to wounded selves, he or she will be prepared to offer reparative experiences to the parts. “Loving presence” is a state of being: warm, compassionate, curious, looking for what is right instead of what’s wrong, unconditionally accepting. Ron Kurtz emphasizes the importance of the therapist cultivating a “loving presence,” that is, finding something to “love” in all clients, even those who are stuck, resistant, devaluing, narcissistic, or demanding. In that state of consciousness, time slows down; our bodies relax; there is a feeling of warmth—all is “OK.” As important as this concept is in the therapeutic relationship, it is equally important in individuals’ relationships to their parts. They must find something to love about each one.
Although processing traumatic memory is not the objective of this work, often memories of specific events come up spontaneously as information is obtained about a part’s fears, doubts, and longings. Rather than being the “target” of the therapy, memories and images should be capitalized upon to provide a context for evoking compassion for the young child who felt the loneliness, fear, pain, or shattered faith in those he or she loved.
The most important therapeutic purpose of such memories is to deepen a heartfelt bond between a normal life self and the young child he or she once was. Transformation of the client’s relationship to the unfinished past often happens spontaneously when the normal life self suddenly connects to the felt experience of the child and immediately feels sadness or protectiveness. Tears spring up spontaneously; the chest or heart opens; the client’s arms feel the impulse to reach out to the child; words of compassion arise spontaneously. There is a feeling of welcome and attunement in the client’s body—the child in that memory can “come home” now. It’s safe. In my mind, these moments are what it means to “process” memory: the client can tolerate the memory when he or she observes it as “what happened” to the little part, and creating the new ending to that event transforms the experience. Now, it ends with the child safely in the arms of someone safe and caring. Both adult and child feel a warm and loving connection to each other.
If clients are helped to notice those moments, to identify how it feels emotionally and somatically to connect empathically to young parts, and then to focus on these new feelings for 30 seconds or more, the brain will begin to encode them as memory (Hanson, 2014; Ogden & Fisher, 2015). These new experiences are further deepened when new meaning is made of them: “Notice that when the parts feel your caring and protectiveness, they can relax a little bit. Ask them: do they feel safer when they feel heard and understood?” Asking child parts about their feelings in response to the adult self’s protectiveness is an intimate question, one that can only enhance the felt sense of closeness and attunement. When the child part says “Yes!” or even “I wish I could believe you,” clients experience a stronger felt sense of bonding and a felt sense of responsibility to stay present and protective.
Unable to unblend from parts afraid of leaving the house, Annie tried to go back to work by opening a tutoring business in her home. That way, she didn’t have to leave the house because children came to her for their lessons. Nonetheless, her ability to create lesson plans was constantly interrupted by inexplicable deletions of material from her computer, anxious predictions of failure (“You’ll be found out”), and a fear so intense she literally shook like a leaf before her student arrived.
Asking Annie to notice what the parts were trying to tell her, I asked, “What are they afraid of? Ask inside …”
After listening for a minute, Annie said: “A lot of things—making a mistake, not knowing enough, even just having someone in the house.”
ME: “Ask them: what did it mean in their home to make a mistake or not know enough?”
ANNIE: “They say it meant that you got punished—or you didn’t see things coming before it was too late.”
ME: “And what did it mean to have people in the house?”
Annie, after a pause: “It meant that they had come to take you somewhere bad or do something bad to you.” [Notice that events are validated but not explored to keep the emphasis on how such experiences would make a child feel.]
I try to translate the parts’ communication to help Annie “get” these fears at a more visceral level: “Annie, do you see what they’re saying? Your parts aren’t just worried about being embarrassed or ‘failing.’ They are worried about being killed. They just want to make it out alive! Is that right? Ask them if that’s true.”
ANNIE: “They say you’re right: they don’t think it’s safe out there. They don’t want to risk it. I didn’t realize what it meant from their point of view. I just thought they felt ashamed of me, so I tried to push through their objections and just get the job done.”
ME: “Ask them: what did it mean to them to be so scared and have their fears ignored?” [Annie pauses as if listening inside to the parts.]
ANNIE: “It means that they still aren’t safe if no one cares enough about them to listen.”
ME: “And how are you feeling toward them now as you ‘get’ that?”
ANNIE: “I feel badly. I didn’t mean to scare them.”
ME: “Let them know that—with your feelings and your body, not just your words. Let them know you feel badly that they were so scared.”
ANNIE: “It’s hard—I just feel their anxiety. When I try to feel for them, I just blend with them.”
The therapist now models an intervention for Annie to try out with her parts: “Ask them if you could have their full attention because you have an important announcement for them, a very serious announcement. See how they respond if you say it both with your words and with your body very emphatically, ‘I would never let anyone in this house who would hurt you—never. No one bad is ever allowed in this house.’ [I model the emphatic tone I want her to use.] Don’t say it if you don’t believe it, but I think that’s the rule you created years ago, even before you had children.”
Annie could feel her body relax a little, so I asked her to repeat the same words again: “I would never, ever let anyone in this house who would hurt you.” A calm began to settle in her body.
ANNIE: “I’ve spent so many years trying to ignore the parts or just being blended with them—I never thought about why they were so scared. It never occurred to me that they thought they were still in New Jersey.”
“See what happens,” her therapist suggested, “if each time you sit down at the computer or are expecting kids for lessons, you start by making the same announcement: ‘I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t safe. I will never allow anyone to enter this house who would hurt you. Never, ever.’”
When Annie remembered the meaning of her parts’ alarm reactions to her students and reassured them using the same words over and over again, the parts relaxed and more easily allowed her to do her job without interruption. When she forgot, lost connection to the felt sense of wanting to protect and reassure them, and automatically tried to push through their fears, she would immediately experience renewed difficulty once again. Pushing through their fears was necessary when she was young, but it was a cruel re-enactment of the traumatic past now.
Because traumatized and normal life parts share the same mind and body, because triggered responses activate the body and nervous system as a whole, most clients are accustomed to being blended with their parts, losing connection to their experiences of competency, mastery, or enjoyment of life. When Annie was asked, “Why might the parts have been afraid to do this then? Why would it have been frightening in New Jersey? In that house? With that family?” she was reminded that she, as an adult, now lived in another house with another family (her family of procreation), in a different state, even in a different decade. And when the parts reminded her that they lived under constant threat of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, she felt a sense of surprise. For the normal life part of Annie, the trauma was far away, a distant memory that she did not care to revisit or even think about. In her adulthood, she hadn’t stopped to ask herself, “Why don’t I want to revisit those memories?” She had been too busy raising children, tending to her home and garden, participating in the community, and being a surrogate parent to students and neighborhood children. Almost all of those activities involved some kind of repair of the traumatic past: giving her children and surrogate children the experiences of care and understanding she had never had, creating an environment in her home that communicated safety, keeping her home and yard well-tended (as unlike her neglected childhood family home as possible). At this stage of the work, it is particularly important for the therapist to challenge any “false self” assumptions that come up. Because the left brain normal life part is not connected to strong trauma-driven emotions, unless blended with them, and is fearful of overwhelm, it is easy for clients to feel a sense of being an empty shell just going through the motions of life and to conclude that their ability to function is a pseudo-self. Annie illustrates how unwise that conclusion can be: believing that she had created a false self, she failed to see how closely her values and priorities as an adult reflected her, how she had unconsciously made meaning of the past by creating a very healthy, creative, compassionate environment for her family of choice, very different from that of her family of origin.
For Sam, the sense of his “real self” was most connected to a young depressed boy part who just wanted to read and daydream and to a teenager whose mood depended on regular access to “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.” His normal life self was less palpable to him despite the evidence of his professional achievements, marriage, friends, and young son. He had a tendency to ignore adult commitments and minimize his normal life self as just a persona he needed to get through the day—mostly to humor others. As often happens, the minimizing of the normal life self increased the power of the younger parts to influence his decisions: rather than paying bills or taking the car to be serviced, the child part would pull him to read another chapter in his book or watch a movie on TV. Days passed in sexual fantasy or lost in the exploits of fictional characters.
Challenging “false self” assumptions requires the therapist to believe that the ability to function is just as important as the ability to feel emotion, an attitude not always taught in therapist training programs. Functioning and feeling each represent a different hemisphere of the brain: the left brain prioritizes order, sequence, organization, and good judgment, while the right brain is driven by emotional and survival imperatives. The left brain is more positive in outlook because it has access to facts, while the right brain, though deeply emotional, is also more focused on the negative and on threat (Hanson, 2014). Both sides of the brain and both priorities are necessary to living a full, rich life. Additionally, as I remind my clients, a false self is a physiological impossibility: even when different individuals emulate the same person or borrow the same verbal expressions or mannerisms, each will be unique. Each imitation will be molded by the individual’s own brain, body, and personality—which in turn reflects his or her unique developmental history. The therapist must help clients to appreciate how, lacking normal role models in the family, the normal life part nonetheless persevered. Borrowing role models from other families or imitating valued qualities missing in traumatic and neglectful environments was a manifestation of the normal life self’s determination to build a new life no matter how insurmountable the odds. Helping clients to appreciate the qualities and resources of their normal life selves and be more aware of their capacity for curiosity, compassion, clarity, creativity, confidence, and commitment is an important responsibility for the therapist. Without explicit attention to befriending the normal life “me now,” clients will continue to assume that the “me then” conveyed by their parts’ feelings and dysregulation is “who I am.”
To challenge entrenched cognitive schemas centered on her worthlessness and failure, I asked Gilda if we could work on the practice of “just owning” or acknowledging the facts of her adult life and normal life self. I made the first “thing to own” very factual and easy for her. “Just take a moment to ‘own’ that you are the mother of three children.” “They are the best thing that ever happened to me,” replied Gilda.
ME: “Yes, they feel like the best thing that’s ever happened to you—and just ‘own’ that feeling. Is that a good feeling?”
GILDA: “Yes, it is—I’m so proud of them. By the way, I’ve been helping out in my daughter’s class once a week. Those kids are so cute.”
ME: “They are, aren’t they? Such a cute age. So ‘own’ that, too. You love kids, and you like helping out in Julie’s class. I bet you never had a parent who’d have come to your first grade class!”
GILDA: (laughs) “That’s for sure, and I’m not sure I’d have wanted them to come. It would have been mortifying.”
ME: “But your daughter doesn’t have to feel that way, does she? I bet she likes it when you come. ‘Own’ that, too. You’ve been a parent whose daughter is proud to have helping out in her classroom.”
Owning the facts of one’s life is a left brain activity: gathering information and categorizing it. Gilda had been confused by her experience of the parts’ strong, right brain-related emotions coupled with an emotionally disconnected left brain functioning self. It made her feel fraudulent to feel so vulnerable and dysregulated at some times and to feel nothing at other times—a perception she held as a belief for many years without ever taking the time to orient to the facts of her history, her life now, and her environment. Though she worked as an accountant, a job for which her left brain was an asset, the overwhelming nature of the parts’ feelings made her normal life self feel “dead” inside. By being asked to “own” the pleasure she took in her daughter as well as her daughter’s friends and classmates, she could experience that her normal life left brain self did have emotions. She just hadn’t recognized them before because they were less intense and quite enjoyable—and because she had endorsed self-defeating story about herself without ever adding up the facts. Week after week, she noticed and practiced “owning” facts about herself, many of which surprised her. “You have been asked to host three weddings and a graduation party at your home—could you take a moment to ‘own’ that fact?” “Wow,” she said, “people must really love me or love my home or both … and now I can hear a part saying, ‘They are just using her, Gilda—face it,’ and the pleasure I just felt went away.”
I commented: “Well, I think you and I just got a glimpse into why it’s hard to own the facts of your life now—it brings up ‘too much’ pleasure to feel the richness of your chosen life, and your fight part gets alarmed.”
While continuing to identify their roles, resources, capacities, and daily activities as evidence of a strong normal life part, the therapist also repeatedly continues to remind clients to assume that day-to-day difficulties with feelings or functioning are an expression of parts being triggered by normal life trauma-related stimuli. Next, as the normal life self “listens” with curiosity or compassion or both to the dysregulated emotions being conveyed by parts, he or she is taught to respond to these communications by asking the parts to say more about their feelings: What are they worried about? Notice that the term “worried about” is consistently used in response to expressions of fear, shame, anger, sadness, even numbing and shutdown. The assumption is that all feeling responses represent a worry about something. “Worry” is a term familiar to children and adults alike. Perhaps more importantly, it is a word that does not threaten any of the parts: “anger” would be a threatening word for attach and submit; “scared” would be difficult for fight and flight parts to endorse. The expression, “What are you worried about if ______________,” can be used to gather more information about almost any situation therapist or client is likely to encounter. I can ask, “What is the little part worried about if I go on vacation?” “What is the ashamed part worried about if he gives up the shame and holds his head high?” “What is the hopeless part worried about if she were to be hopeful?” “What is the suicidal part worried about if Felicia makes a commitment to live?”
Usually, the worries initially expressed by parts are concrete or superficial: afraid of making a mistake, afraid of being hurt, afraid of being judged or rejected, afraid things will fall apart. Just like children, child parts tend to be more concrete and stimulus-bound. The next step is to inquire more deeply, just as we would with any child: What is he worried about if someone judges him? What is she worried about if she makes a mistake? Then the normal life self is asked to make a connection between the parts’ fears and the childhood environment in which the trauma occurred: why would a child be scared of being judged in that world? Why would he be terrified of making a mistake in that family? The purpose of this step is not to retrieve memory. Making a connection between past and present always reflects the goal of increasing empathic connections to the parts’ emotions and cultivating attunement. The memory is not explored in detail but serves as a vehicle for empathy: “No wonder the ashamed part won’t give up her shame—it kept her safe. Maybe you could let her know that it’s OK if she feels safer keeping it as long as she knows that it’s just a way to survive—it doesn’t mean it’s true.”
However, initiating and sustaining an internal dialogue with parts autonomically activated by perceived threat is not always simple. It requires helping clients maintain dual awareness in the face of intrusive anxiety-provoking thoughts, shaking and jitters, elevated heart rate, tightness in the chest, sick feelings in the stomach, constriction in the throat, and impulses to run away, crawl under the covers, punch a wall, or claw at one’s own skin. These somatic reactions are challenging for most clients to tolerate and often exceed their ability to describe, much less regulate. As unaccustomed as they are to the vocabulary of emotion, traumatized individuals are even more at a loss for words when it comes to their bodies (Ogden & Fisher, 2015). Even the word “body” can be so triggering that it evokes more activation rather than less.
The therapist’s job is to assume that these challenges are just part of the work, not a risk to life or a “deal breaker.” Anytime we help clients learn a new skill outside of their current repertoire or try out a new approach, it is often triggering for the parts. As many clients describe it, “I know I can survive this way, but if I try something different, what if it doesn’t work? What if I can’t survive?” Clearly, these are the voices of parts anticipating attack or annihilation, but their strong reactions to change often paralyze both the therapist and the normal life self. The therapist asks: Is this new step or skill too much? Should the fears be ignored, acknowledged, or are they a sign that the client is not ready?
Therapists can be reassured by the research demonstrating that even as infants, the window of tolerance expands and resilience increases when infants are exposed to experiences or stimuli just slightly outside their comfort zone and then are soothed and re-regulated. (Tronick, 2007) In the attachment literature, this phenomenon is labeled “rupture and repair”: the child’s experience of discomfort is followed by some kind of repair (encouragement, soothing, reassurance, distraction) that reinstates attunement and facilitates positive feeling states. When these are repeated experiences, the body and mind begin to develop an expectation that repair will come: that someone will soothe the rupture, that good experiences will follow bad, and that fear will be reassured by safety.
When we as therapists assume that, as much as something new might be welcomed by the normal life self, it is likely to be threatening to trauma-related parts, we will be better prepared to help clients. When the parts “resist” our interventions, it is because they are afraid of change: after all, trauma is a sudden “change.” One minute, nothing was happening, and the next minute, it all changed. When the therapist helps the client notice the resistance as the parts’ understandable hesitation or hypervigilance, there is an opportunity for increasing internal compassion. When therapeutic work is complicated by the client’s hyper- or hypoarousal, by a narrow window of tolerance, or by parts triggered by the process occurring in the session, it is crucially important that the therapist attend more to helping the client regulate distress or dysregulation than to the content or focus of the session. Just as a parent often has to interrupt a conversation to attend to a child’s distress, the same goal also serves to build the bonds of attachment to the parts.
A very important principle of internal attachment work is that all difficulties that arise in the session become opportunities to increase compassion and acceptance and foster a repair of the past. If clients are having trouble maintaining dual awareness as parts intrude thoughts, images, and intense emotions, the therapist can help them regulate autonomic activation without losing focus on attachment issues. For example, a Sensorimotor Psychotherapy somatic intervention could be reframed as a way to support the parts: “See what happens if you feel your feet on the ground … like you are communicating to the freaked out parts that you are solid on your feet. Does it help if you also lengthen your spine? Try it—put a little space between the vertebrae in your lower back, and see what happens. Maybe then they can feel how tall you are and how strong your body is” (Ogden & Fisher, 2015). Notice that the interventions are explicitly worded to communicate that they are not being used to silence or stop the parts’ dysregulated input: the message is that all interventions are in the service of helping them as well as the normal life part.
Another way of helping clients regulate activation stemming from triggered parts is to use a technique drawn from Internal Family Systems (Schwartz, 2001): asking the parts to “step back” or “sit back.” In the IFS model, this technique can be used to get past parts defending the status quo in order to access deeply hidden exiled parts. In this instance, it is used to help the client maintain a window of tolerance and maintain an ongoing dialogue with all parts. As the client reports “too much activation,” “too much noise in my head,” “too many thoughts going too fast,” or “critical voices humiliating me,” the therapist asks her to see what happens if she asks the parts to “just sit back a little” or “sit back and make more room for you. Explain that you can help them better if they will sit back just a little.” Framed in this way, the parts are not threatened, and there is something in it for them—the availability of help. When clients report no response, they are instructed to be curious: “Ask the part: What is it afraid of if it does sit back?” Most often, parts reply, “If I sit back, I’ll be ignored—no one will hear me.” Often these responses reflect implicit memory of the past (of not having a voice, not being able to cry for help, not being heard), but often they are accurate reflections of past experience. The normal life part has been trying to ignore them, suppress their feelings, or deny hearing their voices. The therapist has to validate that fact: “You know, it’s true—not knowing that they were parts, not knowing they were young and frightened, most people do exactly what you did: try to ignore them. How sad, huh? Would you like to be the first person these parts have ever known to admit having hurt them? I know it would mean a lot to them …” By universalizing the description of what has happened (“most people,” “not knowing”), clients can hear these truths without the therapist triggering ashamed parts. Notice that the normal life self is always treated as a sane, competent, caring adult capable of learning and responsible for his or her actions; the parts are always described with empathy as children or adolescents whose magical thinking, fears, idealism, and traumatic wounding make them act impulsively and emotionally. Less is expected of them, but more is expected from the adult normal life self because, just as in biological adults, he or she has access to the prefrontal cortex, to states of curiosity and compassion, and has the functional abilities to take responsibility for the parts’ safety in the body and in the world.
Children and adults alike believe the reassuring words of others only if they feel “gotten”; that is, when they sense that they are believed, understood, cared about, or important to someone. Empty reassurances not only fail to comfort but are often a trigger, evoking emotional memories of abusers whose reassurances were a way of “grooming” the child. Clients can learn the right words to tell their parts, “You are safe now—no one can hurt you—this is now, not then,” but without empathic attunement, these clarifications literally fall on deaf ears. Even in therapeutic relationships, our ability to successfully reassure is directly proportional to our emotional resonance to the client’s feelings and fears. If the therapist can teach the client the ability to stay connected to states of curiosity and compassion without losing the sense of boundary differentiating parts from wise ‘self,” they can begin to offer their parts the “missing experiences” (Kurtz, 1990; Ogden & Fisher, 2015) that repair the past, elicit “the grief of relief,” and cultivate secure internal attachment.
For that reason, internal communication aimed at “repairing” the trauma-related implicit memories of parts is always focused on eliciting just the right amount of emotional connection between the normal life self and the parts: not so much connection that the normal life self gets blended or flooded but enough that there is a growing emotional resonance. First, based on the assumption that the parts’ emotions, impulses, and behaviors are their “language,” the normal life part is asked to “hear” each channel of communication as a message from a young, wounded part and to remain interested and curious in their reaching out. The therapist’s responses to the part’s communications should reflect the child’s apparent age, feelings, and predicament. In normal life, adults rarely use the same “language” to talk to or about a 2-year-old as they would with a 16-year-old. When we communicate with little children, we use simple words, express concern not just verbally but with our body language, and we use words familiar to young children, such as “scary,” “bad people,” “mad,” “not fair.” With teenagers, the therapist has to be sufficiently connected to his or her own rebellious or adolescent self so his or her communications do not feel condescending or therapizing. “Oh shit, really?!” is far more effective with an adolescent, for example, than, “That must have been hard for you.” Then the normal life part is coached to respond compassionately and to convey understanding or, if he or she doesn’t understand, to ask the questions we would ask any child. As a next step, the normal life part is encouraged to explore the part’s feelings or reactions by inquiring, “What are you worried about? What’s scary? What makes you so sad?” Sometimes, parts reply with a traumatic or hurtful image, sometimes in words such as, “I’m bad—that’s why people are mean to me,” and sometimes with feelings like, “I need a friend—I’m lonely.” It can be helpful at this point for the therapist to encourage the normal life part to think: Why would it make sense for a child part to feel that way? What was happening at that point in my life that made him feel so ashamed?
As the normal life self takes in the fear, shame, confusion, anger, or vulnerability that lives on in the child part and seems to be making an emotional connection to the part, the therapist asks an IFS question, “How do you feel toward that part now?” (Schwartz, 2001). If clients have truly connected with the part, compassion and empathy are evoked spontaneously by that question, and the responses reflect the growing attachment to the young part: “I feel sad for her,” “I want to help him,” “I want to protect that little one.”
For internal attachment work to be successful, it is important to use the exact wording above. “How do you feel about?” is a different question than, “How do you feel toward?” “Feeling about” involves left brain information retrieval reflected in clients who reply, “I don’t know—let me think about it.” “How do you feel toward” accesses right brain intuitive responses that can be felt by the part as true and authentic. As “feeling toward” the part transforms the normal life self’s habitual alienation, the therapist guides the client’s normal life self to connect to feeling sad or protective or proud toward the child and to communicate that empathic connection back. Often, the part simply needs to hear, “I believe you” or, better yet, “I know how bad it was.”
Because communication involves reciprocity, an experience missing from the lives of most traumatized children, the therapist concentrates on the mutuality of the exchange: “What’s it like for the little boy to feel your sadness? He isn’t used to people feeling for him …” “What’s it like for her to hear that you want to protect her? Does that feel good or a little scary?” Most often, the child part expresses positive feelings, either in words or in emotions and body sensations. As the client is guided to ask, “What’s it like for the child part to hear us expressing concern about her feelings?” they often feel a spontaneous change in body experience: relaxation, warmth, a smile, a deep breath. The therapist, like a good family therapist, underscores all positive changes in family relationships: “Yes, she can breathe—knowing you want to protect her must be a relief, I think. Ask her if that’s correct.” “It feels good to him to feel that someone cares about his feelings, huh?”
Equally important is the question that should always follow, “And what’s it like for you to feel how much it means to him?” As mutuality is built interaction by interaction, just as it is in parent-child relationships, this dialogue can continue: “It feels very special and heartwarming to know he’s so touched … And what’s it like for him to hear you say it warms your heart to have this connection with him?” “When he says he wishes he could go home with you, what’s that like for you?” “OK, you’re ready to take him home?! That was immediate—you’re ‘on that’ right away, huh? How does he like that?”
Especially when the part has shown the normal life self an image or there is some connection to memory, the normal life self is asked to validate the part’s event-specific emotions: “I ‘get’ how afraid you are of leaving the house and being seen, and I understand it completely. It wasn’t a good idea then to have people watching you—it was creepy.” Or, “I completely understand—it wasn’t a good idea to try something new unless you were absolutely sure you knew what would happen.” When the parts feel the empathic “getting it” as an emotional communication, not just verbal one, there is relief and a building of trust in the normal life self.
The next step is to help clients stay connected to the reparative experience they are providing for a young traumatized child self, whether it is the felt sense of being understood, of being genuinely moved by the child’s hurt and fear, or the somatic experience of warmth, muscles relaxing, heart-rate slowing. Inner dialogues can deepen as trust builds between child and adult parts, but often, just at these moments of deepening, other parts intrude to cause distraction from the moments of attunement occurring between the normal life self and the wounded child. Threatened by the feelings of attunement, warmth, loving presence, softness, and vulnerability, the critical voices of fight parts often intervene, as do annoyed parts, confused parts, superior parts (“I don’t need to be here—I know all this”), or anxious parts. Generally, the normal life self is coached through these interruptions by the therapist: “Seems as if the critical part is not so comfortable with the closeness between you and the little part … Would you like to find out more about what the critical part worried about? Or would you rather ask the critical part to sit back while you finish talking to this young boy?” Notice that a choice is given as a way of supporting the new learning: when clients have to make a choice or initiate an action, they exercise weakened muscles. Having had to be passive, or to overcompensate by being impulsive, developing habits of intentionality and choice is an important part of recovery.
Many clients have the capacity for engaging in internal dialogues with their parts: those who are less dysregulated or dissociative, clients with a wider window of tolerance, those with more ability to be meditative or mindful. These individuals often benefit from the Meditation Circle technique (see Appendix B) in which they imagine a meditation circle with a place in it for each part and then wait in silence to observe each part as it arrives and takes its seat. Having a place in the circle, being asked to express their feelings and worries, hearing concern in the normal life part’s voice, even the experience of being able to count on a predictable way to be heard are all reparative experiences for young trauma-related parts and contribute to an increased feeling of safety inside. When parts feel safer and more trusting, their autonomic dysregulation settles, the window of tolerance expands, and with it, there is more activity in the prefrontal cortex, increasing the ability of the normal life self to be curious, creative, calm, compassionate, and hold onto perspective.
For clients who are more dysregulated, more phobic of their parts, or who have fight parts preoccupied with limiting the therapist’s power or attach parts focused on the therapist’s caring, being able to engage in a compassionate dialogue with parts is more challenging. With clients who cannot establish free-flowing inner communication or who are in the early stages of learning to do so, it is helpful to have a more structured internal dialogue that does not require as much capacity on the client’s part. The “Four Befriending Questions” address the need for a structured, easy-to-learn technique for carrying on internal conversation even in the context of dissociation or dysregulation. The name for this technique is a headline for its intent: to befriend the parts so they feel heard and welcome. The first three questions are all focused on understanding a part’s core fears, usually either the fear of harm and annihilation or the fear of abandonment. What prompts the use of the Four Befriending Questions is any feeling or issue that represents a communication from a part. I often use this dialoguing technique with clients who are getting hijacked in their daily lives as a way to intervene and re-establish stability. It is also helpful when their lives are being constricted by parts afraid of the day-to-day triggers. Here is an example:
As she is discussing whether or not to accept a birthday invitation from an old friend whom she hasn’t seen for many years, Annie is overcome with shame at the very thought of going. Invited to assume that this shame belongs to a part and to focus on the feelings as a message from that part, I coach her through the following steps:
• Ask this part that feels so ashamed what she’s worried about if you go to the party?
Annie: “She says she’s worried people will see me.”
• Ask her what she’s worried about if people see her?
“They won’t like what they see. They’ll be grossed out.”
• “And what is she worried about if they don’t like what they see?”
“She says ‘They’ll reject me, and then I’ll be all alone.’” [The core fear.]
• And then the fourth and final question: “Ask her what she needs from you right here, right now to not be so afraid of being rejected and abandoned.” [It is important that this final question include the exact words of the part and clearly communicate that it is asking what the normal life self can do this in very minute to relieve those feelings and fears.]
Annie heard a voice inside saying sadly: “I need you not to be ashamed of me.” As Annie took in the words of this young girl, tears came up: “I feel so badly for her! She’s right—I have been ashamed of her, and I don’t want to do that to her anymore.”
• “Tell her that—let her know how badly you feel about having been ashamed of her all these years—and tell her with your body and your feelings so she knows you mean it …”
In the following weeks, Annie tried to remember to express support and reassurance to the 13-year-old part: to apologize for having made her feel more ashamed and to promise her that Annie would not abandon her or let anyone reject her. To her surprise, she felt strangely calm the day of the party. Rather than anxiously obsessing about how awful it was going to be or shaming herself in advance, she reminded herself (and the 13-year-old) that she didn’t have to stay but she could if she was enjoying herself.
The next week, she described her experience: “It was fun! Lynn was glad to see me, and, for the first time ever, I didn’t feel like I had to work hard to impress people. In fact, I listened a lot more than I normally would—I just spoke when I had something to say. I didn’t have to keep talking to make sure they couldn’t reject me.”
ME: “And what was that like for the 13-year-old to feel your ability to just be yourself, knowing you didn’t need to impress anyone? Ask her now …”
ANNIE: “She says it made her feel proud. If I belong, she belongs. If people accept me, she’s more confident they will accept her.”
ME: “Well, it probably helped that you were focused on her feeling comfortable instead of being ashamed! All the anxious parts who’d be coaching you and the critical part who’d be telling you that you were failing couldn’t get a word in edgewise because you were focused on her. She helped you out!”
Notice that the therapist leads her through the four Befriending Questions, step by step, and then helps her focus on the moment of repair with the 13-year-old: “Tell her how badly you feel … What is it like for her to feel someone’s distress over having hurt her?” In these moments, only the therapist will be able to fully grasp the meaning of each step: with the meta-awareness of the witness, the therapist can understand that Annie would feel badly for hurting any child but also understand that, for the 13-year-old, it is a yearned for but also very new and strange experience to matter to anyone or for anyone to feel badly about hurting her. Often, the child parts feel nourished, warmed, or “held” by the caring of the normal life self but then suddenly pause and hold back, anxious or hesitant, afraid to believe that it is true or unwilling to let themselves believe it to be true. How can they trust someone who cares when all they have known is a lack of caring?
The therapist will need to help clients capitalize on these moments by validating the part’s fears and lack of trust: “This is so new—ask her, does it feel good to know that you hurt for her? That you don’t like hurting her? Or is it a little uncomfortable?” The client’s normal life self might respond: “It feels like she wants to trust me—wants to believe I’ll be here for her—but she keeps relaxing and then stiffening again and pulling back.” The therapist may need to translate the child part’s responses in such a way that more compassion is evoked: “Maybe she’s pulling back because she wants to trust you … Ask her: would she like to trust you? Would she like to believe that you won’t leave and you won’t hurt her?”
When therapists begin guiding clients through repair work with their parts, they may feel uncomfortable “putting words in the client’s mouth” or assuming they know what the child part might be feeling. It is important to remember that, in trauma work, we provide psychoeducationally informed explanations for clients because they don’t have the words for their trauma responses: past and present are intertwined, the language spoken by the normal life self is a different language from that spoken by the child part, and we are faced with the choice of supplying words to make sense of their experience or leaving traumatized clients in confusion. Therapist bias or client over-compliance is counteracted by asking clients to observe the effects of each intervention (Ogden & Fisher, 2015) and by asking them to check in and ask the part if “that feels right.” With clients capable of tracking their emotions or body experience in more detail, the therapist can ask more detailed questions: “What happens to the tension (or fear, hypervigilance, or shakiness) when you tell her that you’re here now to protect her?” With clients whose ability to observe or feel is limited, the therapist may have to provide more language or more structure or both. A simple technique for ensuring that the therapist is not “leading the witness” to a harmful extent is to give clients a menu of possibilities (Ogden & Fisher, 2015): “Does she feel more tense or more relaxed? More guarded or more anxious? Does the fight part agree or disagree with your offering comfort to the little part?” The therapist can also offer a menu of emotions: “Is he more ashamed or more sad?” Or body responses: “Does the fight part’s anger feel more like energy? More like strength? Or does it want to do something?” We can even offer a menu of parts: “Does that sadness feel more connected to the attach part or to the depressed part?”
The importance of encouraging embodied communication cannot be stressed too much:
• “Let the little boy know with your feelings and your body that you completely understand why he feels that way.”
• “Use your feelings to tell her that you’re here now, and you mean to stay.”
• “Just hold him gently so he gets the message that he’s not alone.”
Often, in trying to educate clients about young parts and their need to be cared for, therapists offer generalizations, such as “the child parts will need you to take care of them” or “when you learn how to make them feel safe,” but psychoeducation such as this is frequently too abstract to grasp even by the normal life self: what does it actually mean to “take care of” or “make a child part feel safe?” Not only can those words intimidate the normal life self but can also be triggering for child parts, evoking fears of failure or beliefs that the therapist wants nothing to do with taking care of them. On the other hand, providing concrete suggestions for what exactly to say or do with young parts can be useful, especially when given in multiple choice or “menu” form (Ogden & Fisher, 2015): “You could tell him that you’re a grownup now—or that the bad people have gone away—or that you’re here to protect him so he doesn’t get hurt again.” By offering a set of choices, we can evoke the client’s intuitive sense of what this young part might need: for example, “I think I should start by telling him that I’m a grownup now—that I’m not little like he is anymore. That’s the only way he could believe I’m actually capable of protecting him.”
A frequent deterrent to restoring a sense of hope and safety to child parts comes from either skeptical, hypervigilent parts or from young parts afraid to trust that they are now finally getting what they have most desired. It would make sense that fight and flight parts might manifest as suspicious, mistrustful, cynical, or sabotaging parts. It would be understandable that the protector parts of some clients (e.g., those whose abusers were exceptionally sadistic, manipulative, or malevolent) would be more vigilant in armoring themselves against taking in anything positive or allowing vulnerable parts to let down their guard. This phenomenon is particularly common in clients with dissociative disorders (see Chapter 8) but also occurs in clients whose parts are more integrated and less dissociatively compartmentalized. The internal distrust of protector parts manifests very differently from that of vulnerable parts. For example, when the normal life part asks a question inside and gets no response, he or she is generally encouraged to ask the question again or to change the words slightly. But when the result is still the same, the best assumption is that the silence is a communication. It could mean, “I’m not talking to you,” or “I’m afraid to talk to you,” or “I don’t know who you are.” Or there might be a response that appears silent at first because it comes without words. The client might notice an emotion, such as anxiety or sadness or anger, or a body response, for example, tensing, going numb, a change in heartbeat or breathing. Sometimes, when the emotion is sadness and there is a physical sense of vulnerability, these communications without words are coming from a preverbal child part. In that case, the therapist coaches the normal life part to communicate just the way an adult would with any infant or toddler and to use the part’s nonverbal responses to gauge the success or failure of repair.
But if the normal life self asks inside, “What is this part worried about?” and the answer is silence coupled with anger, muscle tension, or numbing, it is safest to assume that this is a message from a hypervigilant or angry part: “Perhaps there is a part communicating that it doesn’t trust you.” Often, it is helpful at this point to externalize the part by asking the normal life self to imagine a similar scenario and notice his intuitive sense about the silent part: “If you had just adopted a traumatized child, and he wasn’t talking to you when you tried to get closer to him, what would you make of that?” Most clients in their normal life parts immediately respond: “He doesn’t trust me yet, of course.” “And what would you do next?” “I’d tell him that I understand—how could he trust me this quickly? I’d tell him he can take his time and get to know me before he makes up his mind.” Even clients who insist that they don’t know how to understand or what to do about a child part very quickly access “expertise” when asked to imagine being the foster parent of traumatized children and teenagers or the director of a group home for traumatized youth.
The therapist can support the client’s intuition and insight by helping the normal life self share them with the part: “That makes total sense—now, can you communicate this same message to the part that’s not speaking to you right now? Let him know that it’s up to him—there’s no pressure coming from you—you understand why it’s hard for him to trust anyone.” Using the client’s report of body and emotional responses to interpret the part’s reaction, clients can be encouraged to just keep talking to the “silent part” and to experiment with different approaches. Perhaps the silent part could be asked, “What would you need from me [the normal life self] to be willing to tell me more?” Or the client could affirm the part’s caution: “I want the silent part to know that I appreciate his cautiousness. Better to say less than say more until you know who you’re talking to.” Often, when protector parts are given respect and greater control, they are more willing to engage in a dialogue.
It became clear in Jennifer’s therapy that her protector part shut down everything it perceived as threatening. She could be in mid-sentence when a voice would interrupt with: “And what is the point of this? Why are we talking about it? Where are we going?” When asked, “What are you worried about if we talk about this?” the part fell silent. I suggested that her “evaluator part” was obviously concerned about wasting time in therapy and had correctly perceived that she and Jennifer jumped around from topic to topic quite frequently. Jennifer was asked to thank the evaluator part for its efforts—still silence. Then I suggested that Jennifer propose a topic to discuss and ask the evaluator part if it was OK to talk about it. To her surprise, Jennifer heard an “OK” from inside. Each time she wanted to explore something more deeply or change the subject, she was encouraged to ask the evaluator part if it was OK. Both she and I began to see that the evaluator was almost always willing to OK the request, and when it didn’t, there was often a useful reason. A reparative dialogue had begun: the evaluator had been unable to protect her from parents who manipulated her little girl part’s attachment strivings, but this part could protect her now—as long as Jennifer remembered to give it a place in her life.
When protector parts are given power and control consciously and voluntarily by the client’s normal life self, there are many positive benefits. A better balance of vulnerability versus feelings of mastery is achieved; protector parts are more willing to allow access to young wounded or innocent parts; internal communication improves; and the client receives help in becoming more resourced, self-protective, and better boundaried—all from an unlikely source, his or her own fight and flight parts. The most frequent mistake likely to be made by the therapist is to give up in the face of the protector’s silence, resistance, or devaluing of the client or the therapy, rather than reframing these responses as natural, normal, and protective in intent. The other common error results when client, therapist, or both “demonize” the protector parts: that is, see them as an interference in therapy rather than as part of the work. When the therapist urges the client to push through the objections of the fight parts or try to ignore them, it further polarizes them and reinforces their distrust. When the therapist expresses respect, gratitude, and understanding of the fight and flight parts’ actions and reactions, and encourages the client to do the same, protector parts begin to be more open to collaboration. And as client and therapist persist in their efforts to make contact with the fight part, no matter how often rebuffed, it sends an important nonverbal message, one that might make even the most hypervigilant protector more curious, that they are committed and willing to have that commitment tested.
Researchers have noted that one of the characteristics of mothers who promote secure attachment in their children is the ability to resonate to the baby’s state, modulate their own states to avert infant distress or enhance positive affect, and simultaneously mirror both states back to the child (Kim et al., 2014). The mirroring of the infant’s state along with the mother’s corresponding feelings of concern, enjoyment, empathy, or warmth seems to have the effect of communicating “I understand” but also “and I can help.” If the mother simply mirrors the infant’s state, both appear stuck in the same distress. They “blend” as does the normal life self with parts in distress. If the mother reflects back only her different, more positive state, there is no comforting sense of being “gotten.” It is more like an empty reassurance: “I don’t get it, but don’t worry—you’ll feel better soon.”
The literature on secure attachment suggests that both resonance and repair are equally important aspects of what has been called “attunement.” This concept can be applied to the relationship between parts and normal life self. Just as with mothers and infants, “blending” with the feelings of a part simply leaves that child alone with the distressing emotions, as do disembodied words of reassurance or hope. Not only is it crucial for parts to feel a visceral sense that the normal life “gets” how scared, ashamed, angry, or hurt they are but also to feel the effect of the latter’s curiosity, compassion, calm, strength, and protectiveness. But because these are traumatized parts, the need for an adult self to consistently provide “attunement” in this sense will take time and persistence.
Mason was eager to work on the issue of his phobia of getting sick, which led him to hyper-focus on avoiding “germs”—creating a chronic anxiety that distracted him from being able to enjoy an otherwise satisfying life beyond trauma. As he tuned in to the fear in his body and the sinking feeling that he was getting sick, he noticed the intrusive thoughts that kept coming up (“Why did you touch the door knob? Didn’t you notice that man blowing his nose?”), and a childhood image spontaneously arose. He was in a second grade classroom watching a cartoon on germs and hand washing: in each frame, there were flashes of red as the film showed examples of where germs lurked in a child’s life, and the voiceover kept saying, “Watch out for germs! Wash your hands after touching surfaces—stay away from sneezing and coughing.” He could see his 7-year-old self in the memory becoming more and more panicky, and he could feel the heightened anxiety in his body. As Mason remained mindful and curious about the intensity of this fear, I translated the boy’s experience into trauma-related terms: “He has so many bad things happening at home, and now he’s being told that there are more bad things to watch out for. No wonder he’s scared! But to him, a bad thing is really bad—really traumatic. He must be terrified, huh? How do you feel toward him as you sense how scared he is?”
MASON: “I feel sad for him—he never had a safe place or a safe person in his world.” [Mason is beginning to mirror both the boy’s anxiety and his own empathy.]
ME: “Yes, he never, ever had a safe place or a safe person … and when you feel the sadness for him, what impulse do you have? To come closer to him? To just let him know you’re there?”
MASON: “I just want to pick him up and hold him—but I can sense that he doesn’t trust me.” [His mirroring gets more attuned, communicating both his wish to hold and comfort and his sensitivity to the boy’s fears of being too close.]
ME: “How could he trust any grownup? He never met an adult like you … Maybe just let him know you’re there and you want to help …”
MASON: “I can feel he wants to trust me, but he’s afraid to let down his guard.”
ME: “Ask him if you’re right—would he like it if he could trust you?”
MASON: “Yes, he’s saying that he has to pay attention to bad things like germs—he has to be watchful—he can’t relax.”
ME: “Tell him you could help him with that—assuming you’re willing, of course. Ask him if it would be OK if you took over the job of watching out for him—just for a few minutes to see if maybe it helps him out …” [She demonstrated the action of carefully scanning the environment a full 180 degrees to take in the whole room.]
Mason began to turn his head and neck very slowly and carefully, demonstrating for the 7-year-old how thorough and watchful he could be.
“How did I do?” he asked inside.
“Not as good as me but pretty good,” the boy responded.
“Show me how you would do it,” Mason said inside to the 7-year-old. He could immediately feel his concentration heighten and his gaze seek out spots like doorknobs so prominent in the film. Then he tried intentionally to duplicate the same deliberate focusing of the child: “How was that?” he asked the boy.
He could feel a sense of the boy moving closer to him, a slight relaxation of bodily tension, and then a wave of fatigue hit him. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me—I just want to go to sleep,” he said.
Again I translated, “Maybe this little boy can relax now because you’re watching out for him, and you’re doing it just the way he needed … He must be exhausted from all that hypervigilance.”
“I can feel him leaning up against me—he is tired. I just keep saying, ‘You can rest—I’m watching out for you—you don’t have to do it anymore.” Tears came to Mason’s eyes as he heard his own words, and his son came to mind: “My son has never had to watch out for himself—no 7-year-old should have to.”
ME: “That’s right—and that’s why it’s important not to forget this boy, just as you don’t forget about your son even if he’s quiet. Let’s think about how you’re going to keep an eye out for this little boy and how you can keep letting him know you’re there …”
In this example, therapist and client had to become creative because the child part didn’t want just proximity and comfort; he wanted protection. Simply reassuring the little boy that Mason would be there for him would have communicated that the normal life self had failed to understand his fundamental concern: once he had seen the film in class, no place was safe anymore. He had to watch out for abusive grownups at home and watch out for dangerous germs outside the home. Notice the importance of my translating the child part’s communication which facilitated the suggestion of “taking over” the boy’s hypervigilance (Ogden & Fisher, 2015), allowing him to rest. Each child part will be different: each will have different needs for repair of traumatic wounding based on age, developmental stage, experiences of trauma and/or neglect, and the animal defense to which they are connected. For example, a fight part might need a sense of purpose, control, and mastery; an attach part yearns to feel protected, loved, and safe from abandonment; a freeze or fear part could simply crave safety from harm or threat of death; submit parts need to feel worth, autonomy, and initiative; and a flight part might wish freedom from entrapment.
In the next chapter, we will address how the work of emotional connection, communication, and repair of dysregulated memory states can become something even more fundamental to children and adults of all ages, whether they are parts of an individual or his or her children. Through repeated experiences of sessions like these and the practice of these same techniques at home, we can help clients “grow” secure attachment—just as attuned parents “grow” attachment bonds with their infants. Each time, the adult self of the client attunes to the child part’s unmet need, fear, or painful emotion and “repairs” the distressing experience, attachment bonds are built, piece by piece, experience by experience. With infants, it is the baby’s calming and relaxing into the parent’s arms that generates a shared felt sense of closeness, safety, and warmth that we label “attunement.” As the parent feels the blissful feeling of the infant’s little body “melting into” her arms, in turn relaxing her body and engendering feelings of warmth and loving presence, the shared sense of closeness communicates itself back to the infant, enhancing the child’s experience, and deepening the parent’s sense of well-being and intimacy. The transmission back and forth of the feelings and body sensations that convey “secure attachment” deepens their shared experience, lingers on it so that it can be encoded and internalized as a somatic memory of what it means to feel “safe and welcome.”
When repeated experiences of “safe and welcome” are shared by a compassionate, caring normal life self and a wounded child part, the client experiences the deep sensory and emotional connection evoked by their mutual attunement as a bodily state. Although it is now many years later, the young child at last feels securely held and the client’s sense of resilience more stable, just as it is in individuals whose secure attachment experiences happened at the developmentally appropriate times. The client has encoded a bodily and emotional state that conveys love and safety, the certainty of feeling cherished, and the comfort of a warm felt presence of another. At the worst of times, we can “be there” for our selves—like a parent to whom one can turn at any age or stage of life.
“Earned secure attachment” is a concept that has been discussed for many years in the literature and refers to the unique ability of human beings to heal their own wounds by evoking healing experiences that have been missing from their lives. Regardless of our early attachment experiences, we have an opportunity as adults to “earn” the secure attachment that was not available to us when we were young and dependent for a sense of safety on the attachment status of our parents.
When our adult selves provide attuned experience of secure attachment to our younger parts, though, there is an added benefit, just as there is for parents who nurture secure attachment in their children. Not only do the child selves feel the safety and loving presence of a securely attached adult but so does that adult. Both are nourished and comforted—both can relax into the moments of attunement—the hearts of both can open.
Hanson, R. (2014). Hardwiring happiness: the new brain science of contentment, calm, and confidence. New York: Harmony Publications.
Kim, S., Fonagy, P., Allen, J., Martinez, S., Iyengar, U., & Strathearn, L. (2014). Mothers who are securely attached in pregnancy show more attuned infant mirroring 7 months postpartum. Infant Behavior and Development, 37(4), 491–504.
Kurtz, R. (1990). Body-centered psychotherapy: the Hakomi method. Updated edition. Mendocino, CA: Life Rhythm.
Ogden, P. & Fisher, J. (2015). Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: interventions for trauma and attachment. New York: W.W. Norton.
Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: a sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. New York: W.W. Norton.