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

I'm back to our No Bad Parts read-along together. This week, we are diving into Chapter Five on mapping our inner systems.

So thus far, we've started to learn a little bit about these internal parts that make up the system of us—that perhaps we're not just one individual mind, but an amalgamation of all the developmental experiences we've had in our lives that have created these different neural pathways, survival strategies, or parts, as they are called in Internal Family Systems.

Remembering as we go into exploring deeper these parts that this is a big paradigm shift from how many of us have been taught to see the world. And you can take in as much or as little as you'd like to or as feels available to you right now, knowing that whatever you uncover through this experience, all of these parts inside of us developed in pursuit of keeping us safe and keeping us in connection with the world around us.

We are biologically wired to stay in connection with our caregivers when we are young. And when we are able to, because of environmental ruptures, these protective parts emerge to try to keep us going—to try to keep us through the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn that comes up when it feels like our caregivers can't meet our needs. And so they might not make sense to you now as an adult, but they made sense at the time.

And first up are these parts Dr. Schwartz refers to as the exiles. These are often those much younger parts of us. And maybe you've heard of this idea of an inner child—that that could be those exile parts. And those young parts of us that hold all of the playfulness, the creativity, the fun, the trusting, the innocent, and the openness that we have when we're young children and we're exploring the world.

And they're also very, very sensitive parts because if you think about us as young children, we don't have the cognitive complexity to be able to think through and make sense out of things. And we haven't fully developed a sense of how to take care of ourselves and soothe ourselves in the world because we are children. And we rely on our caregivers and the people around us to co-regulate with us. So we are very sensitive when we are young. Things that are scary or hurtful, we feel that really, really strongly when we're young children.

And we'll often say that young children have tantrums or they have meltdowns. And what we know that's actually happening is they are very sensitive and they need co-regulation. And so it makes a lot of sense that they might have a quote-unquote meltdown or a big emotional experience when something happens.

And these are also the parts of us who hold those biggest burdens from the environmental ruptures, attachment ruptures, or traumas that we might experience when we're young. And when that happens, it shifts our young self from that fun, playful self to that wounded, terrified, maybe shut-down self.

And this is when some of those core beliefs start to change. And we might move into that, I am worthless, no one loves me, there's something wrong with me at my core, I don't deserve to be loved.

Then as adults now, when those parts blend with us, and for many of us, our exiles are blended with our self because of our lived experiences, then those beliefs, I don't deserve anyone to love me, that becomes the lens through which we see the world. That becomes our paradigm. And we are carrying around all of the time those deep, deep burdened emotions that those younger parts of us feel.

And that can really impact our ability to function in the world as a quote-unquote adult, as we are living in our adult bodies when we are holding the lens that there is something wrong with us and we don't deserve to be loved. And that can also create behaviors that might not make sense as an adult, but make a lot of sense for this burdened, terrified exile.

I want to remind you again that these beliefs or emotions that these younger parts of us hold don't always make sense to our adult selves, and that's because they happened in the mind of a child. And it doesn't always have to be a huge life-altering trauma that can create these burdened experiences.

An example that I use often is, again, think of if you had two parents who themselves were very rational people. They grew up in homes where emotions were not talked about. And so to them, emotions are somewhat forbidden. They don't go there. They don't really even have access to go tthere. They closed that part of them off a long time ago. Now they have this wonderful, fun, playful child who they love very much. But because children have big emotions, when you have a big emotion, even an exciting emotion like surprise or joy or playfulness or fear or whatever might happen when we're young children, their systems feel overwhelmed by that. They don't know what to do with that. And so they calm you down. They shut down your emotions. They distract you. They send you to your room until you can come back out and behave or be part of the family.

And no one is telling you in this scenario that they hate you or that they hate your emotions or that you're too much. But the felt sense experience is you can sense as a child, even if you're not consciously aware of it, that your parents' systems are shutting down when you feel emotions.

And when we're trying to stay in connection to those around us at all costs, then we will learn very quickly the pattern of, my parents, it seems that my parents love me more and that I can stay more in connection with them when I shut my emotions down. And that might be how we develop a quote-unquote intellectualization part.

And again, as part of our coping or being in the world is to try to push these parts of us away, that is again how we might move into an intellectualization, rationalization, people-pleasing, perfectionism—anything we can do to try to control our internal state and push away these hard emotions that these exile parts of us hold, we will do that.

That is part of the paradigm that we've learned, right? Where it's like, Just pick yourself up, move on, pick yourself up by your bootstraps, kind of get over it. Stop being so sensitive. We learn to do the same things to ourselves and then we collude with what was done to us, where then we as adults push these exile parts of us away. We push our emotions away. We push what makes us human away because it feels like too much. It feels too overwhelming.

And for many of us, the more we try to push those parts of us away, the more they try to come out. That's why strategies like perfectionism, for example, never work in the long run because you try really, really, really hard to be perfect and then this part of you that is holding all these really deep terrors that you can never be perfect and that you'll always mess things up, sees you pushing them away more and more. And so then they'll come out and then you'll make a mistake or you won't be perfect or you'll say something you didn't mean to say and you'll beat yourself up more. And that is how this cycle can unconsciously continue.

Dr. Schwartz talks about these sort of mysterious overreactions and really being unsure, like why do small things hit us so hard? Why does making a teeny little mistake feel like the end of the world? What I'll often say to people I'm working with is that if it feels disproportionate, it's likely there's something else going on there. Maybe you've seen a post that's often shared on social media that says, If it feels hysterical, it's probably historical. That's because it's that old pathway, that neural pathway, that predictive pattern, that vulnerable part of us coming up.

The more of these challenging experiences and environmental ruptures we had as a child, the more delicate things will feel in the present and the more dangerous because there's constantly an opportunity where it feels like we are making a mistake or messing something up or risking a connection, and that that is very triggering to these exile parts of us. And their behaviors can become quite extreme to try to protect us from these intense emotions, behaviors, impulses, and experiences that we hold.

When we have exiles, we will also have what is called in IFS, managers. And managers are protectors that are pressed into service, essentially. So you can think of them as our inner children who have been parentified or made to become faux adults, F-A-U-X, faux adults. Oftentimes when I talk about this idea of a faux sense of protection that comes from managers, people might get upset and think that I'm being offensive or saying that it's not a worthwhile tool. And that's not what I'm saying at all.

It gives us a faux sense of safety. And the reason why I say that is because perfectionism, for example, might keep us feeling safe and in control, but we can't be ourselves. We can't be authentic. We can't fully connect with those around us. And thus, it's not a real felt sense of safety that lets us be ourselves. It is a manager. It is a faux sense of safety that is taking on the role of trying to control absolutely everything inside you and in the world around you so that nothing triggering or activating happens that might scare the exile.

And so they might control our relationships, our appearance, our work performance. Every single aspect of our life, these parts will try to control. This is where the inner critic lives.

This is where the inner critic lives.

This is where the intellectualizer lives.

These parts are very, very convincing and often sound like the self or like in NARM, we call it the adult consciousness. And those of you who found me because of my work with intellectualizers know exactly what I mean.