Finish this
preparation step by experimenting and choosing a comfortable term for all your
sub-selves together. My Inner Family? My Team? My Motley Crew?
Clan? Family? Community? Committee? Squad? Gang? Troop?
Troup? Tribe? Crew? Band? your term should feel "right" to (all
of) you.
OK - now that you have an
initial sense of who your team is...
Pick Inspiring Guides or Hero/ines
Shift mental gears (and maybe
your body and breathing) now. Review your life to pick some clear examples
to inspire and lead you along the way. See who comes to mind after asking
"Who do I know who seems to have lived an exceptionally balanced,
serene, satisfying, productive life?"
The goal here is to identify a person who
lives with their true Self consistently
and their inner family is
usually calm and harmonious. You’re
seeking someone whom you instinctively know is clear on...
-
who they really
are (and aren’t),
-
what their personal gifts and life-mission are, and...
-
someone who seems deeply satisfied with who they are becoming, and how.
You may or may not need to pick someone of your gender. Be wary of
"having to choose" someone your parent/s or partner would
approve of. Also,
be cautious if some
subselves want you to pick unmatch-able super-heroes like Christ,
Buddha, Gandhi, Joan of Arc, St. Patrick, Mother Teresa, Lincoln, or a Pope. Perhaps you’d like to blend
the qualities of several hero/ines into a composite Guide or Hero/ine.
Once you envision one or more inspiring persons, see what happens inside
after saying something like "I will learn to be as serene, wise, joyous,
Self-satisfied, productive, confident, and wholistically healthy as (my hero/ine) seems to be, over
time."
If your whole inner crew cheers - great! More likely, you’ll hear
distrustful (scared) subselves declar-ing all the reasons this is a
brainless, stupid, impossible fantasy. Can your Self listen tolerantly, and
hold onto your hero/ine vision?
Recall - we're reviewing the preparation steps to applying "parts work"
toward increasing your inner harmony. Now shift gears again, and
...
Pick
an Effective-Team Model
Meditate on whether you’ve ever experienced being part of a truly harmonious adult
or adult-child group, with a clear common purpose, and a trusted, skilled,
motivated leader. If so, recall vividly what it felt like to be part of that
group. If not, describe in detail how you think it would feel.
Ask other people if they’ve
ever belonged to a group that consistently worked well together. Learn why it did,
and what participating in the group felt like to them. The group might be a
family, a competi-tive, creative, or investigative team, an artistic troupe or cast, a
business department or task force, a church or civic committee, a set of
neighbors, a class or seminar, a travel tour, ...
and/or vocally
describe your impressions in detail. Build an accessible, detailed vision of
the qualities and characteristics of a really harmonious, effective family
or team. Start to believe you can evolve your talented subselves into one. Imagine
each of your parts feeling about your Self and each other what you may have
felt about your real-life team, and it’s excellent leader.
Meditate on how it would feel to belong to a really unified, harmonious
group of adults and kids - for that’s what your inner family can become!
Get clear over time on
how such a group effectively handles conflict and
be-tween members, and how the leader facilitates resolving these. If
helpful, write these ideas down and highlight them in your parts-work journal. Ask
others their opinion on this and collect a rich sample.
As your parts work progresses, refine this vision of the
co-operative dedication to a common pur-pose your talented subselves can achieve.
If
inside says "I can never do that!" reassure them you
hear their disbelief, and that you’re setting out (anyway) to discover how
to do this thing that they (you) haven’t experienced yet in your life.
For a perceptive look at the process of team/community
building, I recommend Dr. M. Scott Peck's book
The
Different Drum - Community Making and Peace.
The next preparation step is to...
Pick
Inspiring
Nurturers
Significant parts work always
involves meeting, rescuing, and caring for your
scared, lonely, rageful, lost, sad, shamed inner kids
The good news is that we all
seem to have one or more sub-selves whose natural skill and motivation is to
nurture them and others in a healthy way - a
or
Loving Parent. If you’re not familiar with
that part of yourself at first, it can help to scan the people you know
and focus on one or several whom you see as really effective,
unconditionally-loving caregivers (vs. caretakers).
Hold them in your
consciousness as clearly as you can. Vividly imagine them comforting,
guiding, protecting, confronting, soothing, and loving. Notice what they do
and say, and how they look. Begin to realize clearly why you think they’re
effective nurturers. What makes them specially successful in this role? As
you get clearer on this...
Begin to imagine (regularly)
how it would feel to have one or more such Nurturers always available within
you to gladly and tirelessly minister to your needy or upset young parts. As you
begin to get in touch with your inner "Good Mom / Dad / Parent,"
learn appreciatively how that part reacts when they see your inner kids
"act out." As your parts work progresses, stay alert for inner and
outer examples of what unconditional caregiving looks, feels, and sounds
like. When you can verbally describe these in some detail - you’ve got the
foundation laid.
OK.
You have a rough draft of
many of your parts; and clear, inspiring models of ...
-
a wholistically-healthy,
Self-led "hero/ine";
-
a consistently harmonious,
dedicated, well-led
or family; and...
-
one or more gifted nurturers.
The next parts-work preparation step is to ...
Clarify Relevant Beliefs and
Attitudes
Identify and validate or edit the core beliefs and attitudes that will
surely shape your parts-work ex-perience and outcomes. Do you know how to do
that? How would you define a belief and an attitude to
an average 9-year-old? Premises...
A belief is an
observation about life on Earth that you accept as "true" without
question ("Dogs and mice don't sing, pray, or speak Portuguese.") From
new experiences, infor-mation, and/or new reasoning, (some) beliefs can
gradually or suddenly.
An attitude
is a subjective opinion about something's nature, like good/bad,
right/wrong. pleasurable/painful, healthy/unhealthy, etc. Given life
experience, new information, and new environmental conditions, attitudes
can change permanently also. ("I used to think people who prayed were
superstitious wimps. Now I don't.")
See how your beliefs compare to
these: "I believe that...
-
...normal personalities like mine are
composed of talented, interactive subselves or parts;
-
...I have a resident
true Self, whose natural talent
is highly-effective leadership of my other subselves in all situations -
if they trust her/him;
-
...that my Self can negotiate with other
subselves to cause useful internal and behavioral changes over
time;
-
...I may (or do) have psychological
which significantly degrade my
and relationships, and potentially
to the young people in my life; and I believe that...
-
...I can
and
my Self to guide and harmonize using an appropriate form of 'parts work'
(inner-family therapy)."
And compare your attitudes to
these...
-
Intentionally cultivating self and mutual
awareness is healthy and good.
-
People (and/or parents) aren't bad, stupid,
or selfish - they're wounded and unaware.
-
Ranking my health, welfare, and comfort
equal to those of every other person is good for us all.
-
Asking for appropriate help in harmonizing
my subselves is healthy and good.
Note
the theme of these sample beliefs and attitudes, as you review your
own in preparation for doing parts work.
Clarify Your Parts-work
Goals
To provide purpose and
direction to your explorations, invest time identifying
specifically what you’re trying to do for yourself. My experience is that initial
parts workers’ objectives are vague, very general, or very narrow. That’s OK! There’s a wide range of inner-family goals available to you. For example:
"I’ll try parts work
out, and see what happens."
"I want to change my whole attitude about
life. Have I been (controlled by) a false self for all these years?"
"I want to find out what
to do with my life."
"I want to understand
why I do the things I do..."
"I want to be less
depressed."
"I want to have more
fun!"
Whatever your initial
parts-work goals, (a) write them down; (b) say them
out loud, and see what thoughts or feelings bloom; and (c) choose an
attitude of "My goal/s can change along the way."
Work patiently over time to refine your first harmonizing
targets into
simpler, concrete, specific objectives. For
example, an initial goal of "I want to have more good friends" can
evolve into "I want to significantly increase my confidences about
dancing, being assertive, dealing with authority figures, and interpersonal
conflict." That can evolve into "I want to find, meet, rescue, and free
my self-doubting and anxious parts, and redirect their Guardians to other
inner-family roles."
Experts in designing
effective inner
suggest that
we’re often better motivated by
using posi-tive assertions or goals rather than negative ones. Positive statements
focus on building, healing, and in-creasing things, rather than reducing,
destroying, "fighting", or limiting. Notice whether it feels better
to say "I have to stop being so pessimistic and negative," or
"I’m steadily learning to be more genuinely opti-mistic and
hopeful."
Your choice of words counts
in defining your inner-family-building goals. Black and white impera-tives ("I must be
happier!") tend to be limiting, and can raise your subselves’
"performance anxiety" and doubt. See how simple, clear, positive-action,
here-and-now goal statements work for you, like: "I'm now learning to
feel more balanced,
and joyous, at a pace that’s just right for
me." (Can you get into that one?)
Omitting or
minimizing this initial goal-setting step risks "riding off in
all directions" and concluding that parts work isn't effective for you or
others. Setting your parts-work aims is an ongoing process, not an event.
Continue your
parts-work preparations on page
4. Do you need a break first?
The Web address of this
series is http://sfhelp.org/01/ifs1-intro.htm