Who are you Today? How Parts Work in EMDR Could Transform Your Life
This blog is an updated version of a blog I posted on an earlier version of my website.
Have you ever wondered why at times you feel conflicted? Like there are different voices in your head you but you don’t understand why?
Well, it can be helpful to think that at times there are different parts of us, saying different – contradictory – things. And we’re not necessarily consciously aware of it.
One approach that I integrate within EMDR therapy is parts work, an effective tool in healing childhood trauma.
Read on to learn more about parts, how they might show up in your everyday life and how you can become aware of them.
What are parts?
Imagine your inner world as a house. The house has many rooms each representing a different part of you. Some rooms are sunny and inviting, filled with warmth and laughter.
Others are locked up, dark and neglected – there but not pleasant to visit.
Parts work is about exploring the house, understanding and befriending all the rooms (or parts) so that the neglected ones can become part of an integrated, harmonious home where every part is given a voice to feel seen, heard, and valued.
Exploring parts in therapy can be transformative, but I want to say more about the different parts themselves.
Parts in conflict
There are various approaches and ways of thinking about parts. For instance, IFS (Internal Family Systems) is based on parts.
But a simpler way of understanding different parts is seeing them in terms of our day-to-day thinking, feeling, and behaviours and whether these reflect the past or the present.
“In the here and now we’re adults. If we understand this we can lessen the impact of history.”
Who are you today: parent, adult or child?
At times thoughts, feelings and behaviours might come from behaviour and beliefs that we copied and got instilled in us by our parents, caregivers or other authority figures during childhood.
If you ever catch yourself telling off your child in the exact same way that you were told off, then you’re most likely acting out your parent in that moment.
At other times, you might (without realising it) be behaving, thinking, and feeling in ways that you did as a child. These might reflect how you needed to adapt to survive.
And they become patterns of relating that get triggered in situations that mimic your childhood experience.
The case of Sam
Whenever Sam (a fictional client) speaks up for herself, she’s plagued by doubtful thoughts and feelings of fear. She doesn’t understand why she feels this way. But, as an 8-year-old child, Sam’s critical mother responded angrily whenever she questioned something or shared her point of view. Sam would flee to her room where she felt safer. Her feelings of fear and doubt reflect this childhood history and not the present reality where she’s now an adult who doesn’t need to fear her mother.
Hopefully you can see how Sam is responding to the present in a way that repeats her history. Our feelings don’t always tell us the truth about what’s happening now.
In the here and now we’re adults. And if we can become aware enough to respond to situations in ways that reflect this reality, we can lessen the impact of our history.
Conflict and confusion can happen when parts get suppressed but nevertheless show up as they get triggered.
Remember the house? The door to that neglected room we’d rather forget about, gets unlocked.
Re-connecting the disconnected
Another reason why our personality can split into parts is due to trauma, which makes it necessary to compartmentalise.
This is referred to as structural dissociation and is evidenced within a neuroscientific approach to working with trauma.
Corresponding to the left and right hemispheres of the brain, the left brain allows us to get on with daily life while the right side holds the traumatic experiences (the locked room).
A person may function well at work but be flooded by emotion when they are triggered by things which (out of awareness) remind them of past trauma.
And depending on your experience, there may be other parts too.
How do conflicted parts show up in your life?
Parts can show up in different ways. Here are three ways that parts can manifest in your life.
Remember the case of Sam above? The child within you, that adapted to survive, gets triggered regularly. At these times you might feel scared and young, even though you’re now an adult.
Self-sabotaging behaviour - this can manifest as unhealthy coping behaviours which contradict what the adult part of you actually wants and needs.
Feeling disconnected and not ‘present’ - the part of you that tries to get on with life wants to avoid thinking about the past, but the traumatised parts are fearful or sad and constantly focused on potential danger.
Parts & EMDR Therapy
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy is a trauma-focused therapy that, when combined with parts work, becomes even more powerful.
As EMDR expert Laurel Parnell explains, childhood experiences create memory networks that affect how we see ourselves today. The memory networks hold unresolved trauma.
EMDR therapy helps to gently guide you to process thoughts, feelings and, physical sensations associated with these memory networks.
During the processing of these memories in EMDR, younger parts associated with them may appear, because EMDR has activated them. So, in bringing these parts to light and working through them, EMDR honours what you experienced. And the wounded parts can be soothed, protected, and nurtured.
Gradually, as memories are processed, the hurt child parts learn that the trauma is over, and the adult parts of you get more control over your life. This is what integration looks like.
How can you help yourself
In my practice, I work with clients to help them unlock and reconnect the different parts of themselves so that over time, it’s not so scary to acknowledge the past.
But here are some ways that you can help yourself:
Educate yourself about the impacts of trauma – there are some good self-help books you can use to learn about how your experiences may have affected you. This helps to build awareness, which can lessen the confusion and sense that there’s ‘something wrong with you’.
The book by Janina Fisher called: Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma is written for clients and a good place to start.
Try differentiating between the different parts of yourself and understanding what happens with each. For example, there may be some activities associated with an adult, ‘going on with life’ part of yourself. How are you here, versus when you get triggered into feeling helpless, small or younger? It may be possible to link those feelings to past trauma.
If you can identify the adult part of yourself and separate it from more vulnerable parts that get triggered, you can try to nurture those (wounded) child parts through self-care and compassion, rather than self-blame.
In a nutshell, parts work honours that we’re all complex with different parts that might sometimes be in conflict.
But by exploring, processing, and accepting parts, therapy offers a path to understanding, self-compassion, and integration.
You can help yourself by learning about trauma and trying to identify how your own parts show up in your life.
I’ve experienced first-hand how empowering it is for clients to realise that they’re not broken, but beautifully multi-faceted.
Healing isn’t about erasing parts of yourself but about inviting every part to the table and hearing they have to say.
If you’re curious about parts work and EMDR therapy or wondering if this approach could help you then please feel free to contact me.