This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit trishawolfe.substack.com

Hi book club, and welcome back to our next little episode together exploring No Bad Parts.

I loved getting to read through all of your comments and hear your curiosities. Of course, you're more than welcome to post in the chat too, and if you don't feel like leaving a comment but you still want to ask the question, you can actually reply directly to this email and it'll come right to my inbox. I know there was a question about schedule, and I know typically a book club would have a pretty stringent schedule to stick to, but I'm sort of tentative about that. I know that might not fit with how some of you like to do things, but it’s because I really like to feel into as I'm recording the episode how much information starts to feel like enough or too much. And yes, that can differ from person to person. So I'm sort of relying on my own tracking of myself and my experience.

But I do have a lot of experience as a teacher and a therapist of trying to feel out what is a good amount of information for people without sending us into overwhelm. Those of us who like to intellectualize and really be up in our head - and I'm one of them- who might want a quicker pace - they want to take in the information, they want to really have it in. And that's okay. Everyone is welcome here. And I honor all of our different protector parts, but I'm a huge fan of slowing things down and slowing them down further and slowing them down further.

And you'll hear me say that a lot! Now my nervous system is the opposite and my nervous system wants to go fast, fast, fast, and learn everything. But I know that the language of our nervous system, when we are in our Self or our adult consciousness is actually slow. So we may do a chapter every time. We may do two chapters…We will find out together.

One more thing I want to mention briefly before we dive in is a lot of you really resonated with what I shared about environmental failures, and I'm so glad that maybe that's helping you see your experience in a little bit of a different light. Of course, we are never here to blame parents or caregivers, and this isn't really a catharsis process where we go back and rage against the people in your early life- teachers, caregivers, etc.- who may have had environmental failures with you, but rather it's an opportunity for us to be curious about what our own experience may have been and how that may impact us here in the present.

And again, it can be so subtle. Like, for example, maybe you were a gifted child and that didn't get seen. And so in school you often felt on the outside of things or bored and you might have gotten in trouble for being bored. Or maybe you didn't participate because you were so far ahead in the material, and it just created this sense of being on the outside, from your classmates and from your teacher. And you can understand that humans are made to be in connection to others, but particularly as children, we're developing that capacity of who we are and who we are in relationship to others, and what connection feels like with others. That can actually feel so, so scary. And so something as “simple” as that can create this need to protect ourselves, to keep our true self hidden away, because we realize that if we're ourselves, we might be considered unacceptable to others.

Now, as we left off last time, we did not explore the exercises together. And you heard me say, and you heard me say again, that I'm a huge fan of taking it slow. This first exercise here is an introduction to getting to know our parts and specifically our protector parts. So sort of similarly to a mindfulness practice where you're noticing what's happening and what is wanting your attention. And then just getting curious. When we are learning to track and observe ourselves, we have different pathways or doorways into our experience. That is often thoughts, emotions and body sensations, and sometimes those images, impulses and behaviors as well. You're going to hear us emphasize a lot this idea of observing and observing thoughts, emotions and body sensations. And when we say thought, we don't mean thinking or intellectualizing, but rather connecting with the story, the story that these different parts of us hold. So it's not something you can try to rationally or intellectually think your way into. And that can be frustrating to some of us, which is okay, because then we get the opportunity to notice the part of us that feels frustrated.

Remember, when you're trying out this exercise of getting to know a protector, what you're really doing is just noticing and observing. And that is what is really similar to the NARM model, where we're just being curious, we're noticing and observing. We're not trying to make anything happen. And literally just by sitting and trying to notice, you might have a part of you come out that doesn't want you to try and notice. And that's perfect because there is an opportunity to observe a different part of you.

As you'll see from this exercise, IFS offers an opportunity to communicate with these parts and ask these parts what it might want you to know, or what it might need from you. And if you're just diving into this book for the first time, this might feel like a lot. It might feel silly, it might feel hard. It might feel activating. All of those things are okay. I want to give you permission to know that you don't have to do these exercises exactly as they're described here right now. In fact, it's okay to wait until we get more into the book before you even try this exercise in the first chapter at all. It's okay if it feels clunky or weird or stressful or anxiety producing. If you start to notice some activation, you can see if you have enough of yourself or observer online to notice the part that is activated. And when you do that, you're invoking the IFS principle of unblending, where you're a little bit separate from that part for a moment because you're noticing it, you're observing it from yourself, and maybe you observe it for a split second, and then you feel like you go into anxiety or shutdown or freeze or disconnection or intellectualization. That's okay. That's actually really good information for you to notice and pause and see if you can, as I call it, dip a pinky back into the present to find yourself.

Because this is a book, and not an individual therapy session, it goes more quickly than I typically would with clients, which is why- again, I know I'm a broken record-there's an invitation to slow things down and notice that maybe now's not the time for this exercise. Similarly, with the second exercise, maybe it's the time that you can be curious about mapping some of these parts and following a trailhead, as Richard Schwartz calls it- where you're just noticing and following the different sensations and experiences that come up. Again, though, if you're here and you're curious about this book, it's very possible that you've had some trauma sometime in your life, even if your trauma was just, “an environmental failure” or several environmental failures as children. And that means that we need to go slow, as much as we might want to resist that. I would really encourage you to allow yourself to just be in the information and trust your instinct to know that the time to do these exercises will become clear to you.

Now as we dive into chapter two. We're coming back into that term of blending and exploring why parts might blend. When blending happens, essentially that part of us, or that neural pathway in our brain that is predicting what is happening in the present, and the emotions, thoughts, stories, impulses and body sensations that go along with that part or that pathway in our brain take over.

That becomes the primary pathway in our brain; that becomes the primary part, which sort of obscures our capital s Self. We don't feel separateness from that part in that moment. Instead, we become that part. In those moments, we are not in our self, but rather in that old experience. So we could have that overwhelming fear, that anger, the freeze, the disconnection, the apathy, all of that will come on and feel as if it's happening right in the present moment. This happens again because our brain is trying to predict what's going to happen in the present, based on the past. So if something happens in the present that makes our brain think the same thing is going to happen, then our brain is going to execute that pattern to say, okay, this is what we needed to do in the past. And so that part steps forward.

Let's say that when you were a child, your home was very tense and there was a lot of arguing and a lot of fighting, and it was really terrifying for you as a child. So you start to feel anxious and scared, and your heart would be pounding, and you would either have to freeze and shut down and run and hide, or maybe you became extra sweet and extra kind and extra good and tried to make everything okay between your parents. Then let's say you're in the present and you're out to dinner with some friends. They have a good relationship, but you can tell that things are tense between them. Maybe they had a little bit of a disagreement. Everything's safe. You're not responsible for these people. You're an adult. But the pathway in your brain is saying, oh my gosh, that same unsafe thing is happening. I need to freeze and shut down, or I need to be super on and make everything okay so that they'll be happy with each other and I'll be okay.

And that part is the part of us that becomes active instead of the Self. So that threat feels like it's happening right in the moment so that hypervigilance is there, the freeze or dissociation is there, the “people pleasing” or inner critic or shame is there. That is blending. It's important. You know that blending can happen in crisis moments, but it can also just happen subtly in a daily experience. Maybe part of your day to day experience is the perfectionist part of you is always there feeling like you have to work constantly to avoid failure. So you always have this little undercurrent of hypervigilance and perfectionism. But then when something occurs that can trigger you, like for example, some feedback, then you might feel a surge of the emotions related to that part of rage or panic or shame and not really feel sure, where that's coming from.

But it's important to know that in those moments the Self is not gone. It can be obscured like the sun during an eclipse, but it's still there. It's still present. We know that when we're able to observe and be curious and un-blend, our Self or our adult part will be there again.

Blended parts play a huge role in how we view the world. And again, if you want to envision this with me as a part that takes over or as a neural pathway, it makes a lot of sense that when we're in those parts, it's as if we're experiencing the world as if we are those parts. And oftentimes those parts have developed in our younger childhood experiences, which is why in NARM we call that the child consciousness experience. And so when we are blended with those parts, we're experiencing the world as if we are a younger part of us, which is why things will feel like a threat to our lives that are not actually a threat to our lives as adults.

So, for example, if as a child, we felt we had to be perfect to keep the peace in our home, then any potential for messing something up or not getting a A+ was an opportunity for a threat to our connection to our family, and thus a threat to connection to our life. Being voted off the island was what was at stake. So then in our adult experience, when we get feedback that might sting a little bit, instead of feeling as an adult. Well, I can work on this or I can discuss this or it's okay to make a mistake. I can learn and grow from this. Instead, when we blend with that younger part of us, it feels again as if there was an actual threat to our life, which is why we might feel the deep terror or rage.

It's important to remember that these protective parts of us are only focused on keeping us safe. They don't care if we're happy. They don't care if we're in connection. They cannot recognize the thing, the nuance of things that are happening around us.