Recognizing and Reconciling the Parts of Self

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Wellness Wednesday! I am being glared at by my dog Ralph because I took his bone just so that it wouldn't be super loud during this video, but I will show you him at the end of this video, so stick around! Hello everyone! So today, what did I want to talk about? Oh, I don't remember. I made a note of it, but it's on my phone. I have no idea what I wanted to talk about, but I'm just gonna start talking. Self, my favorite topic. Not myself per se, but just self in general. I wanted to do a quick video and loop back around to something I talked about a few weeks ago in the parts work video. Well, it was the self-worth video where I talked about parts work. Now, hi buddy. I'm just gonna get Ralph. I'm just gonna get him. Hold on. Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. Oh my goodness. Okay, so here's Ralph. Can you say hi? You can't because you're a dog. Okay, okay. So I'm just gonna have him sit right here. Oh my God, I hope this microphone is picking up on Ralph smelling it and licking it. Okay, so I wanted to talk more about parts work. Now, in the self-worth video, I began to talk about how we have different parts of self. Now, I'm beginning a training called— in something called IFS, which is Internal Family Systems structure. I don't know, I haven't actually started the training, but I just bought the course, and it's all about parts work. And I love parts work. I've been through it myself, like, in a therapeutic process with a therapist, and it has been absolutely life-changing. Now, if you are a client of mine, then you know something I always ask myself, or I— God, I'm so distracted because of Ralph. Something I often ask my clients is like, what part of you feels that way? Or what part of you is drawn to this relationship? What part of you, et cetera? And it's a really common narrative. I can't deal with Ralph. I know that if you're watching this video, you're probably not here for Ralph, but just— all right, I'm putting you down. I'm sorry, I love you so much. Okay, what a chaotic start to a video. Okay, so hello again. So if you're my client, you know about parts work. If you're not my client, you might not know about parts work. If you're in the therapy field, you may know about parts work. But basically the concept is that we all have different parts of self, um, and I'm sure I'm gonna learn so much more about this throughout the training, but we But what I've learned about it through my own personal experience is we have different parts of self that are stuck, that can be activated or triggered in certain situations. If you ever feel conflicted, if you ever make a decision and then are doubting yourself, you have difficulty trusting yourself, if you— if you're part of the human experience, right? You have different parts of self. And so what I just wanted to talk about was a brief rundown on how to tap into those parts. Highly recommend getting a therapist. Highly recommend doing this kind of work in a professional setting. But here are some prompts to just get you thinking about if this is something you want to talk about with your therapist or you want to explore more. So without further ado, self and parts work. Hmm, I don't really know where to go with this video except by saying that we— I'm just listening to Ralph— is that we have these different parts of self. And if you're conflicted in your relationship, just like I talked about in the video from a few weeks ago entitled Questions to Ask Yourself If You're Doubting Your Relationship, one main question to ask yourself is, what part of me wants to leave? Or what part of me wants to stay? You know, what part of me is attracted to this person? Is it the ideal self, or the capital S Self, your true authentic self? And you may be wondering, well, how do I know what that is? If you've ever been able to rely on your intuition or trust your gut, that gut feeling is really, for me, a big descriptor. Now, if you feel like you can't trust your gut feeling because your gut is often telling you to do things that are very self-sabotaging or self-destructive, then that's something to look into and talk about and process more. Parts can be ages, you know, like the 13-year-old part of me, the 20-year-old part of me, the 5-year-old part of me. At different ages, we learn different schemas, these worldviews that were either embedded in us or that we create. And so, you know, what your schema is about marriage or relationships or people, right? People are good, people are bad, um, etc. And so often it's not all of us that feels a certain way, all of self. It is appropriate, it is common, and it is normal to feel multiple feelings about the same thing. Like, I can really love and respect and care for someone and also resent them. Both can be true. It's not either/or. And so what part of me is resentful? What part of me is wounded? What part of me is drawn to this dynamic? What part of me is— etc. So we also have parts of selves that come out at work. If you've ever experienced imposter syndrome, and I have a whole video called Imposter Syndrome and Gratitude Shaming, it essentially illuminates that we have this disconnect in self. You know, there's our professional self and then our true self. And if the two feel like worlds apart, we often have imposter syndrome when we feel like, oh my God, I don't know what I'm doing. If these people even— if these people found out that I didn't know what I'm doing, etc. And we can feel like unworthy of a job or unqualified, et cetera. And the reality is most, most people that I've met at least have experienced imposter syndrome on some level at some point in their lives, often with work, sometimes with parenting, maybe even being in a relationship or being married. It's this feeling of like, do I know what I'm doing or am I qualified for this? And so there can be a part of us that has low self-worth and there can be a part of us that has tons of self-worth. And that's really confusing to reconcile. In Alcoholics Anonymous, often people say things like, you know, I was an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. And that's not that uncommon, right? Because a part of you may feel awesome about yourself, like, yes, I am confident and competent and good at what I do or worthy of love. And then there could be another part of you that feels like I'm a piece of shit, I don't deserve anything, etc. Now that part of you is often rooted in trauma, emotional pain, attachment trauma. Like, what are the messages that you received from your primary caregivers? Was there secure attachment? Was there inconsistent or dysregulated attachment? Um, you know, so it's worth, again, like in a therapeutic setting, really getting curious about and exploring the parts of self. The goal is not to eradicate certain parts and get rid of certain parts. The goal is to reconcile that they all exist in you Notice when they're activated, greet them and nurture them instead of treat parts of selves the way they were treated. Like, if I have a wounded part of myself that feels like I'm not seen and I'm not heard and I'm not validated, the worst thing I can do to that part of myself is shove it down and not see it and not nurture it and not validate it, because I'm reenacting attachment trauma, if that makes sense. I mean, I know it makes sense, but I hope it makes sense in this video. Um, so identifying what part of you feels a certain way is absolutely incredibly necessary and helpful in figuring out how we feel and why we feel a certain way. And again, it's really common and normal to feel multiple feelings, and then that's confusing. And sometimes instead of talking about it and exploring it more, we can shame ourselves. So if you're in a relationship and you're questioning it but you feel like you shouldn't be, we may shame ourselves and that part that's questioning it is going to still exist, but you're just shoving it down further and that's when we'll see things like infidelity or self-sabotage or pushing someone away because we can't just cut out certain emotions and say this doesn't exist. We have to explore them and walk through them or like my new artwork says, grow through what you go through, which I got on Etsy. And I love that because it's like, I can't go around, I can't go the other way, I have to go through it, whatever it is, and I can grow through it if I choose to, and I have to be intentional about it. And so when someone asks me, how do I have self-esteem, how do I have self-worth, how do I work on that self, we have to look at all these different parts of self. Now this is obviously a very brief rundown of self and parts work, but noticing, well, what parts of me are there? You know, write down a list of different parts of you, the perfectionist in you, the chaos attractor in you, the— again, like you can do ages, you can bring kind of titles or labels to different parts of you, but just noticing. And if we can kind of reconcile all those parts and look at what and where our ideal self is, and what parts of us need healing, and what parts of us are healed, and how to pull on that and rather heal those. It's incredibly beneficial, not just to our quality of life, but to our quality of relationships. And, um, it's really awesome. It's really empowering because far too often I hear narratives about people who feel like they are completely powerless over their emotions and thus their actions and their thoughts. And it's just like an unmanageable mess. And we have so much more power over our quality of life than we think we do, because as cliché as it is, it's not about what happens to us. It's about how we grow through it. How we go through it, how we choose to respond and react and grow. And that is something that every single person is capable of doing. And I believe it starts with self-work, not working on all the outside stuff. Sometimes, I mean, if you're like in a dangerous situation, like obviously, but if we don't figure out our own internal shit, and not just up in our own heads but through a therapeutic, ideally healing process, then we bring our toxic parts into all areas of our lives, and then we feel hopeless because we tell ourselves things like, well, this is just how I am, or this is who I am, this is what I do. And that is not true. Just like I talked about in my most recent video, which is about reframing negative self-talk, so we all do have the capacity for growth and change. And so I encourage you to look into parts work, look into IFS, ask your therapist about it. It's hella lit. Okay. Also, here is Ralph. Ralph! Hi! Is that my sock? No, it's not. Okay. All right, bye everyone!