Parts Work in Therapy: The New Trend

You have said it a hundred times without thinking about it. Part of me wants to go to the thing on Saturday and part of me wants to cancel. Part of me knew he was lying the whole time. Part of me is still angry about it, and I thought I had dealt with that. It is one of the most ordinary sentences in the language, and nobody who says it thinks he is confessing to a psychiatric condition.

And then someone takes the sentence at its word. A therapist, or a friend who has been reading, asks what the part that wants to cancel is worried about, and something in you pulls back hard. I am not several people, that was a figure of speech, I have mixed feelings the way everyone does, and I would rather not be handed a cast of characters to go with them.

I understand the recoil, and most of the objection is fair. Internal Family Systems, now one of the dominant languages in my field, talks about parts and managers and firefighters and exiles, and Catholics in particular have learned to be wary of any system that hands them a map of themselves. But the plural was yours before it was the model’s. It heard you use it and decided to take you seriously, and the people who find that hardest to bear are, in my experience, the ones who have already explained themselves completely, and almost never the ones who are falling apart.

The one who does the talking

A man comes in and tells me about his father, the leaving, the years of silence, the phone call at the end, in the tone of someone reading a weather report. He has read the right books, and he can tell me, accurately, how it shaped the way he chooses women and why he cannot let his own son lose at anything. It is a good account, probably a true one, and it changes nothing, because it has been true for fifteen years and here he is.

Every clinician knows this person, and I say that as a man whose profession is explaining people, who can produce a clean account of himself faster than anyone he treats. Insight and change are different things: you can understand exactly why you do a thing and go on doing it, and the understanding is usually correct. The trouble is that the understanding belongs to one member of the household, and that member has appointed itself spokesman for everyone else.

The explainer is a part too, and it took the job young, usually in a house where feeling something out loud was dangerous or useless, and it reached a conclusion that has served it well ever since: if I can understand this, it cannot get me. Everything since has been run through that office, and the dread before the phone call, the flash of rage at a five-year-old over nothing, the tears at a commercial on a Tuesday afternoon, none of it gets the floor, because none of it has a paragraph.

The internet has only stocked that office better, and a man can now tell you his attachment style and the clinical name for what he does at eleven at night, each another brick in the wall the words were supposed to take down. That is what people mean when they say someone lives in his head: the rest of him is all still there, and one part is editing the minutes.

When the account stops working

The account holds for years, and then one day it does not. Something ordinary sets it off, his son crying in a particular register, a boss who goes silent the way his father went silent, and the past comes back without asking the office first. It arrives in the body, which keeps no paragraphs, so the hands go cold, the breath shortens, the heart runs as though he had taken the stairs, and he finds himself crying in a parked car outside a grocery store with no idea why. That is the one condition the explainer took the job to prevent, and usually what brings a man to me.

Am I crazy is the question that comes next, and I get it often, in nearly those words, from people disturbed and confused by what has started to move in them, mixed feelings where settled ones used to be, feelings strong enough to seem like someone else’s. They are asking in earnest, because they have run everything through that office their whole lives and the office has just reported something in the building it cannot identify.

Sometimes the answer really is something else, and telling the difference is my work. Far more often, though, what feels like madness is something old coming up out of the place it was actually stored, because his account of his father was always accurate and his nervous system has never read it.

The Christian tradition has never asked anyone to pretend he is of one mind. “I do not understand my own actions,” Paul writes. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom 7:15), and that is a man reporting a house with more than one occupant. Augustine, torn between two wills before his conversion, refuses the conclusion that he was therefore two people, because it was one man who willed and the same man who would not (Confessions VIII.10). He held the unity of the soul as firmly as the Church has always held it, and he still could not tell his story honestly in a single voice.

What the word part gives a man in that week is room, because he can say a part of me is terrified and still be one man saying it, where I am losing my mind is a verdict. The word makes no claim about what he is, and it is a courtesy extended to the truth, which for a man who has explained himself for fifteen years is the whole difference, because a total statement cannot be managed and a part of him can. It is a door, and nobody lives in a doorway. People who begin by saying a part of me is grieving end, months later, by saying I am grieving, in their own voice, with their chest.

Not on trial

When a feeling shows up that does not fit the account, the reflex is to prosecute it, and I have watched devout people make this mistake with special intensity: that is irrational, I should not feel this way about my mother, I have forgiven her.

The law being enforced is older than the feeling and was never written down. Sadness is not allowed, because it is too frightening and too lonely and it opens onto what was meant to stay shut, so he gets busy or gets clever the moment it starts. Anger is not acceptable, because anger belonged to someone else in that house and everyone saw what it did, and the devout edition adds that anger is a sin and sadness ingratitude.

The feeling is charged under one of those statutes, tried, convicted, and told to leave, and it never goes. It falls quiet for a week and then it is back at the same hour saying the same thing, because you cannot argue a seven-year-old out of a conclusion by being smarter than it, and you cannot shame something out of a house it believes it is protecting.

What the parts language gives that person is a different question. The explainer’s question is why am I like this, and it always ends in a paragraph. The better questions are what is this doing for me, and how old is it, and what does it think will happen if it stops. None of those can be answered from the office, only by the thing itself, and the thing itself will only speak if it is fairly sure it is not about to be sentenced.

The father in Mark’s Gospel brings his son to Jesus and says, in one breath, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mk 9:24), and anyone who has prayed knows both halves can be true of one man at once. He says both, without editing the second one out, to the one Person who could do something about it, and Jesus does not correct his grammar. He heals the boy.

The rest of you

I asked the man with the weather-report voice what happened in his chest when he said the phone call at the end. He started to give me the paragraph, and then he stopped, and there was a silence that went on long enough that I thought he might get up and leave, and then something that did not sound like the man who had walked in said, very quietly, that he had not wanted to answer it.

That was the truest thing he had said in an hour. It had been true for fifteen years with nobody allowed to say it, because saying it would have meant that the boy who did not want to answer was still in the house and had never been told the call was over.

The soul is one, the Church is right about that, and so is every honest person who has ever felt torn. But you have never once experienced yourself as a single uncontested voice, and the insistence that you have is usually the work of whichever part learned to keep the others quiet. You do not become whole by becoming fewer. You become whole by letting the rest of you into the room, and by finding out, before you sentence any of it, what it was trying to do for you and how old it was when it started.

If this gave words to something you have been carrying, share it with someone who needs it.

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