When I was introduced to Internal Family Systems (IFS) and my “parts” a decade ago, one of the first parts that stepped up to meet me was my writing part. Typically, IFS practitioners do Self-to-parts connection with a therapist or in their inner world solo. But I had a hard time focusing on my parts in the beginning, so writing about them helped me give them the love and attention they needed.
Looking back, it makes sense that my parts wanted to ally with my writing part to get to know me. Like pen pals, but even more tender. First, my Self (who my parts called my “Inner Pilot Light”) started writing sweet love notes to my parts, which I began publishing as a daily email called The Daily Flame, and which were published as a daybook of love letters from Self called The Daily Flame: 365 Love Letters From Your Inner Pilot Light.
Then my writing part started to honor other parts by helping them tell their stories. [Master IFS trainer Frank Anderson, MD and I are going to be teaching Write To Heal: IFS + Memoir Writing to teach you writing practices you can do to deepen your own writing practice and trauma healing. Learn more & register here.
Let me give you an example of a bit of memoir writing I wrote on the day the Russia/Ukraine war broke out, which I found out about while I was driving early in the morning to the airport to fly to Boston to see my partner Jeff. I could feel that I was on the trailhead of an exile, and the timing wasn’t ideal, since I couldn’t reach out to my therapist or even my daily parts processing partner Emma. So I leveraged my writing parts to help me deal with the terror I was feeling while everyone in the security line was muttering about World War III.
My apologies in advance for how confusing, messy, and chaotic my inner world of parts can sometimes be. If anyone’s curious about the boundaries of this, I did get consent from Jeff to share about some of his history and our personal dynamic in this piece. It’s vulnerable and feels a little scary to some of my parts to share it, but that’s how much memoir material feels- exposing. My reason for sharing it is to show you what really happens in the inner world of parts. It can be wild and raw and mysterious in there. But it also really does help us heal. I thought it might be helpful just to share my inner process – which I usually write only for myself and maybe my therapist- just to give you a window on what IFS work can look like in someone else.
Here’s what I wrote on the plane on February 22, 2022.
An IFS Unburdening
I woke up this morning, preparing to fly to Boston to see Jeff. Because of the pandemic, this would be only my third flight in over two years, so I was already a bit anxious. Then I checked the news and saw that Russia was attacking Ukraine, which left a part of me feeling extremely unsettled. By the time I got to the security line at the airport, a part was scared and crying. That part wanted me to turn around and go back home, to hide away from all the scary people and the scary stories they were telling about the Big War. That part just wanted to hide under the covers in my safe little coastal Northern California town.
My adorable music-loving DJ Zaza part, the part that soothes me with music, put on the song Slow Down by Nicole Nordeman and Pepper Ingram and played it on repeat while other parts went through the motions of all things airport. The sweet little boy’s plea for everything to just slow down comforted that scared part, but the tears kept coming.
I made it through security, feeling quite irrationally terrified of all the people around me. I knew this part was being unreasonable, so I suspected this paranoia was probably about more than just flying in a pandemic or the threat of a global war. Whenever I can tell I’m overreacting, I know I’m probably getting close to a vulnerable exile. When I checked in with this terrified part, she said she was scared of Jeff and didn’t feel like he could protect her in the midst of a potential global war. She said Jeff was too much like her passive father- not strong enough to protect her from bullies and abusers during uncertain or unsafe times.
She wanted to stay away from Jeff and go back home. She was really pressuring me to abort the trip to Boston. I thanked the protector who wanted me to go home, and when I asked her how she was protecting me and what she was afraid of, she told me she was scared of Jeff’s lack of discernment- and all the abusive women in his sphere who he neurotically tolerated, rather than boundarying against. She was afraid these scary women might come after her if she got too close to Jeff and allied with him or took his side.
She didn’t trust that Jeff could protect her from all the women who treat him so terribly. He was too much like this little one’s father, who couldn’t protect some of my most tender parts from my bullying mother. I asked who this part that didn’t want me to go see Jeff was protecting and what it was afraid would happen if it didn’t tell me to go back home and avoid Jeff. This part kept crying and wouldn’t stop, even during boarding, so I played more music.
As I was boarding the plane, another part was listening to the Slow Down song, wanting me to listen to the words, to slow down. She felt unsteady and not ready for life to return to the pre-pandemic pace of rush rush rush. There were too many people for this part- too much noise, too much stimulation. This part liked the pandemic’s slow pace and was scared of more rushing.
Under that protector, I could sense a part that was very, very young, a newborn baby part. Once on board, I went inside and found the feeling in my forehead. The exile came quickly- a one month old who looked emaciated- all skin and bones. She was terrified- horrified is the word she used. She let me get close right away and showed me that when my mother nursed me, instead of milk coming in through her nipple to nourish me, my mother was energetically sucking this yellow fluid out of me through her nipple, vampirically sucking off this little newborn. An in utero part told me that this is why my mother’s labor was so protracted- because mother didn’t want to lose her permanent connection to this baby’s life force. She didn’t want to let that part be born into a body that was separate than hers. That way, she could always control this creature, because it was part of her own body.
The one month old was so scared because she did not know how to get this leech-like predatory human off her mouth. Instead of milk coming into her, all the yellow blood was coming out of her mouth, right where her mouth attached to the nipple, but she couldn’t pull herself away. She thought she was going to die. She was dying, she told me.
She didn’t know why her father wouldn’t protect her, pull her mother off her mouth, make her stop sucking the yellow blood. But her father was nowhere to be found. The few times he’d see her nursing, he didn’t realize she was being devoured and didn’t pull the leech mother off her mouth. At that point in my exile unburdening process, a judgey protector jumped in to say her father was worthless. No good. Weak. Cowardly. Ineffectual. Pointless. Just like Jeff with all the vampiric women who sucked off him. This protector was angry at Dad -and Jeff -for not being strong enough to make the vampiric women stop sucking- on her, on themselves.
The judgey angry protector’s job was to make sure the exiles didn’t attach too strongly to weak, passive men who couldn’t keep the exiles safe from abusive, bullying, dominating women. The anger kept Dad and Jeff at a safe enough distance so they couldn’t hurt her even more by enabling the blood-sucking leeches, by literally feeding her to them, almost as bait to lure the bloodsuckers away from themselves. Dad especially. Mom would have sucked off him even more if he hadn’t kept his distance from all of us. But he threw this little one to the leeches instead of saving her from them. The angry part wanted him to see how desperate this little one was.
I stepped in to update that protector, to remind her that Dad was dead. The angry part said that’s because Mom killed him, by sucking him dry. I also updated the part, reminding it that Jeff is about to be 60, that Jeff is standing up for himself with his mother and some of the other abusive women. I told her Jeff is not dead. None of the leeches have killed him- yet. They’ve tried, but he’s just now starting to fight for his life, to pull the leeches off him. I reminded this part how old I am too, told her I’m here, asked her to step back, to let me in Self handle this situation. She wanted to stay close because she was afraid another part would come in and spiritually bypass or side with Dad or Jeff, but she said I could take a shot at it, as long as she could watch.
When I went back to the baby getting devoured, she was terrified. She showed me scenes like from a sci fi movie of robots draining humans of their life force, like in The Matrix. She felt all alone with zero protection, completely vulnerable. She wanted Dennis, my friend in Amsterdam. She referenced another part that I’ve met before, a part that thinks Dennis was her vanishing twin in utero- who might have died before anyone knew Mom was pregnant with twins. (This was before ultrasound, says a part.)
This baby wanted her twin, who got devoured by the mother before he was even born. She was grieving and very very sad. He was her only safe love- and the mother had killed him. He had reincarnated in another body 5 years later, this part believed. His birthday is coming up- March 5- another part chimed in. He was going to be 48 in this life.
This little exile was scared of the vampiric breast suckers and grieving for her twin brother and angry at her father, who wouldn’t save her from this hellscape. She was sharing a lot of her feelings with me, and I could feel her moving to my solar plexus. I asked if I could come into the scene and she wanted me to come in right away- no hesitation.
I asked her what she wanted, and first thing, she wanted me to pull her off the nipple of the scary blood-sucker, so I did. Then she wanted me to give her a special kind of banana bag and transfuse her with whatever that yellow stuff was that the leech was sucking out of her. (Another part remembered that this had worked well when my friend Ed was in an IFS session with Dick Schwartz, resuscitating his exile with a banana bag and thought that was a good plan.) I put an IV into her scrawny arm and pumped it in until she plumped up and told me I could stop. Then she wanted to nurse from my breast, so I let her.
I asked if she wanted anything else, and she said that now that she was safe with me, nursing, she wanted her father to come in and take care of me so I could focus exclusively on her and not have to watch my back to see if any of the other blood-suckers might come hurt us. She wanted me to be able to fully focus on her without scanning the environment to see if it was safe.
So I brought my Dad into the scene and put up a force field so no blood suckers could penetrate. Dad held me while I held her, and together, we felt safe. I asked if she wanted anything done with the mother, and she didn’t care about her, now that the force field was put in place. She just wanted me and Dad.
I asked if there was anything else or if she wanted to get out of there, and she did. When I asked where she wanted to go, she said she wanted to go to the top deck of the Martha’s Vineyard ferry. I warned her it might be very cold up there, and she said she didn’t mind, that Jeff would keep her warm once Dad and I left. She showed me the scene when Jeff and I were coming back from Martha’s Vineyard and we were outside in the cold, and Jeff was holding me inside his jacket, and I felt safe and warm and didn’t need to look around to see if I was safe.
Another part warned me that Jeff almost let us get locked onto the ferry and miss the bus, but another part came in to remind me that didn’t actually happen. That we did get off the ferry and made it home just fine, that Jeff had taken good care of me in actuality.
On the ferry with me, Dad, and Jeff, I asked this baby if she was willing to let go of any burdens she was carrying- all that terror and grief and any beliefs or sensations, and she was more than happy to let it go. I asked how she wanted it to go and she showed me my forehead turning into a sprinkler shooting snow out from the plane I’m on now and showering all the way across the US, landing on the ground, which as I look outside is covered with snow all the way from California to Boston. When I asked if she wanted to let any qualities come in, she said she wanted to know what it was like to really feel safe, to be able to relax and let someone else take care of her, to get some space from the caregiving protectors and just get to be nurtured, so we let that feeling of safety come into her body and she plumped up some more.
I told her it was time to move into the outer world and asked if she wanted to stay on the Martha’s Vineyard Ferry or go someplace warmer, like the Esalen hot spring. She wanted to stay on the ferry. She said I could go and she’d stay with Dad and Jeff as long as I’d come back and check on her soon.
I had a part scared to let this very young part stay with Jeff if I left. I had another part really scared to let an exile attach any more to Jeff, given how painful it was for some of my exiles to let me say goodbye to him in December. They don’t want to feel that way when we leave again in a week. They want the baby part to stay only with Dad- or me- or Emma. We checked in with the exile, and the baby really wanted Jeff.
Dad said he would stay with the part and keep an eye on Jeff and make sure everything was okay and that the exile stayed warm and fed. Dad promised to feed her with a bottle if there was no breast around to feed her. He kept the force field in place. So we let her stay and I promised to come back tomorrow and move her off the cold ferry or get rid of Jeff if need be. She looked happy, all plumped up from the yellow blood and full of breast milk from me and sleeping in Jeff’s arms with Dad sitting next to her, looking around to make sure everything was safe around her and Jeff. It was time to say goodbye.
I asked if she needed me to do anything in the outer world, and she just wanted me to update Jeff about her when I got to Boston and to tell Emma, Nancy, and Dick what we had done – just Self with my parts- without Emma or Nancy or Dick on the other side. She wanted my writing part to write it down, so I wouldn’t forget.
So I had the part scared of the pandemic and WWIII come in and check things out. I had the part that wanted me to go back home come in and check on her. I had the part that was scared of Jeff come in. I had the part that didn’t want to leave her with Jeff come in. They all saw that the little baby was no longer crying, no longer terrified or horrified, no longer starving, no longer sad that Dennis was gone- because I just got to see Dennis last night. She said I could go- and the other parts said I could go to Boston and felt excited to see Jeff and no longer scared of him. But she wanted me to get a banana bag first. She was worried I got too drained taking care of her. So I hooked myself up to a bag of the yellow blood and let it infuse into me.
Then I took off my N95 and fed myself the duck rillettes Ed sent me off with…nourishment. And I put on the Dear Evan Hansen movie.
TSW= This Shit Works.
If you’d like to learn more about how to use writing to heal- and how to use healing to write memoir material, please join me and Frank Anderson for WRITE TO HEAL: IFS + Memoir Writing.
