Parts Work is a powerful tool designed to help us notice, name, give voice to, and understand the many parts operating within our minds and psyches (as Riley’s feelings in Inside Out were personified and operated in her).
Parts Work helps us to understand the rich, complex, and unique topography of our internal landscape. It can help us untangle habitually stuck patterns and conflicts that may be playing out in our lives. It’s an enlivening and useful tool that can be enormously helpful for bringing clarity to those situations in your relationships, work, and daily life that you just feel relentlessly stuck and confused about.
So keep reading and learn how you can explore and use Parts Work to support you in solving any sticky situations you may be facing.
What Exactly *Is* Parts Work?
Parts Work is a way of thinking that has roots and genesis in many schools of thought. Gestalt Therapy, Internal Family Systems, Voice Dialogue, and even Jungian Archetypal work.
Each school of thought has its own methodology. Parts Work, as I define it and use it in my therapy room, is a therapeutic lens that assumes that each of us has many different parts to our minds and psyches.
Each of these parts (or subpersonalities) has unique needs, wants, and beliefs. They may be conscious or unconsciously playing out, helping or harming us as we move through our days encountering different situations, triggers, and scenarios.
By bringing our awareness to these many different parts within us – giving each part a voice, learning what each part needs, wants, and fears and understanding when, how and why each part gets triggered – we are then more able to lovingly integrate (not eliminate!) the many aspects within us to create more choice, expand our capacity to creatively problem solve, and to give us a greater sense of wholeness and aliveness in our daily lives.
What Kind of Problems Can Parts Work Help With?
For example, let’s imagine that a young, 30-year old woman comes into therapy. She just can’t make up her mind about committing to marrying the guy she’s been dating. For the last several years.
She is depressed and feeling stuck and hopeless. Because she’s been wrestling with the question “Is He the One? Or Is He Not the One?” for ages. And she just can’t seem to get clear, but feels like her window to make this decision is closing.
