Meeting my juggling and worrying parts.
In my personal practice session today, I began with a headache caused by my familiar juggling and worrying parts. These protectors were exhausted from trying to manage my life’s “problems,” and though they both wanted to retire from their roles in my system, they also did not want me to normalize my problems. They also feared that if they weren’t doing their jobs that I might look foolish. This fear of social judgment, “looking like a fool,” was actually an old, heavy-handed legacy, rooted in my childhood where being seen as a failure, or foolish or silly, meant risking social rejection and even banishment.
Embracing my Silly Exile
I then spent time with an exile who had taken on a whole persona of silliness to get attention, but then felt like a failure when that silliness didn’t work. This little guy felt desperate to be seen and afraid of vaporizing into oblivion if he wasn’t constantly performing some attention-getting-act. By offering him compassion and acknowledging the pain of not being attuned to as a child, he felt more understood, and started to feel my care and became calmer. We moved through a brief but intense wave of “too little (attention), too late” anger, which finally transitioned–after spending more time with it–into this part integrating into my body. The session ended with a realization that this part’s silliness was not just foolish behavior, but also an expression of creativity and non-rational playfulness, which could disrupt the “normalcy and seriousness” I had attributed to life as I felt my parents had portrayed it.
These posts are personal reflections on my own n=1 experiment with IFS and somatic inquiry. They are shared for educational purposes and are not intended as medical or psychological advice.