PERSONAL GROWTH

Parts Work: Who's Sitting Around Your Inner Conference Table?

PARTS WORK • July 12, 2015

I finally saw Inside Out — the Pixar film that’s become something of a cultural touchstone among therapists — and for good reason.

As a Bay Area therapist, I may be a little biased but I really liked it.

I liked it not only for the fact that it’s about feelings and that it’s set here in San Francisco but also because it made visible a concept I use almost daily in my therapy room: Parts Work.

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?

In my work with clients, I see Parts Work help with exactly the kinds of situations that are hard to logic your way out of. The moments when you know what you want to do but can’t seem to do it. When you keep having the same fight in different relationships. When you succeed at everything except feeling okay.

Here’s what I mean. Camille is a 38-year-old senior director at a tech company. She’s been in back-to-back leadership roles for a decade. She came to me because she’d wake up at 3 AM flooded with dread, running through every possible way Tuesday’s board presentation could go wrong. Her striving part had kept her employed, promoted, and impressive. But that same part had no off switch — and was running her straight into the ground.

In Parts Work, we didn’t try to eliminate her striving. We got curious about what it was protecting. What we found was a much younger part underneath — one who had learned that her worth was entirely conditional on her performance. Giving that part a voice changed everything for Camille. The striving didn’t disappear, but it stopped being the only voice at the table.

Elena’s situation looked different. She’s a 42-year-old physician who described herself as “great at work and a disaster at home.” She could hold impossible levels of stress in the hospital, but the moment she walked through her front door, she’d shut down emotionally. Her partner felt like they were living with a ghost. Elena was bewildered by this — she didn’t want to disconnect, she just couldn’t seem to stop.

In my work with Elena, Parts Work helped us identify a powerful protector part that had learned, very early, that closeness meant danger. At work, the rules were clear and the intimacy was bounded. At home, there were no such guardrails — and that protector went on high alert every time she walked in. Understanding this didn’t immediately fix her relationship, but it gave her compassion for herself that she’d never been able to access before. And that compassion was the beginning of real change.

In giving a voice to this other part and working with it over time, this young woman may feel a sense of relief and access to different perspectives, allowing her to generate new, creative solutions and expand her potential for working through and possibly solving this problem she’s facing.

So How Do I Know What Parts Are In Me?

The discovery of your own unique parts is a lifelong journey unique to every individual.

No one can tell you exactly what your own Parts Work process or results will look like (though a good therapist can skillfully help you access this), but I personally do believe that virtually all of us have at least three key, archetypal Parts within us that take on unique forms and identities: The Inner Critic, the Inner Champion, and the Inner Child.

I want to offer up some inquiries to help you get in touch with these three key parts:

The Inner Critic:

The Inner Critic, as I define it, is the part of us that’s responsible for our feelings of worthlessness. Everyone’s inner critic (or critics) looks different so to get to know yours, ask yourself:

• What do you catch yourself saying to yourself when you feel sad or ashamed?
• Whose voice does this remind you of? Is it a male or female voice?
• Does your inner critic have a shape? A name? An age? What are they dressed like? If you were to draw a picture of it, what would it look like?
• What do you know makes your inner critic louder? What situations, locations, and people trigger your Inner Critic and make him/her come to life?
• If you were to take a guess, what does your Inner Critic need and want? What are they most afraid of?

The Inner Child:

The Inner Child, as I define it, is the aspect of your psyche that’s very young and childlike, a part that embodies the experiences (both good and bad) that happened to you before puberty. So what do you know about this Inner Child Part (or Parts) in you?

• How old is the inner child in you? What are they wearing? Are they holding anything?
• What does your inner child look and feel like? Are they happy? Sad? Scared?
• When do you notice your Inner Child Part the most often? What situations really seem to trigger your inner child?
• What is this Inner Child afraid of? What does this part of you most need?
• How can you take loving, gentle care of this Inner Child in a way that would feel good and safe to them?

The Inner Champion:

The Inner Champion, I believe, is the wise, grounded, expansive aspect of us that believes in our inherent worthiness, potential, and reconnects us to our true nature. How well do you know your Inner Champion(s)?

• What messages do you tell yourself that makes you feel good? What voice do you speak kindly to yourself with? Does this voice feel familiar? Whose voice does it remind you of?
• What does your Inner Champion look like? A human? An animal? Something else? How do you feel coming into contact with your Inner Champion?
• What is your Inner Champion passionate about? What do they believe is possible for you? What situations, events, books, music, and experiences nourish your Inner Champion?
• What does your Inner Champion like to do for you? What are they just brilliant at providing/creating/doing for you?

Two Tools & Exercises To Use With Parts Work:

After bringing awareness to and giving voice to your inner Parts, we could then imagine utilizing this self-awareness to help you problem solve and work through issues you face in your daily life.

You can begin to work with parts that you identify alone or with a therapist through the following exercises:

Pillow Work:

Once we’ve identified some part in you (whether that’s one of the three above parts or not), we can begin to make greater contact with this part by externalizing it and literally or metaphorically “putting it on the pillow.”

Let’s go back to the example I mentioned earlier in the post about the young woman who can’t decide about whether to stay with or breakup with her boyfriend.

In her example, we would use pillow work by either having her sit on a pillow on the floor and speaking to me from this place as the part of her that believes “time is running out” and/or (if she doesn’t want to sit on the pillow herself), we’d put a pillow down on the floor and have this represent that aspect of her and have her speak from this place.

It’s amazing what can happen when we externalize our parts and give them space to speak from the pillow.

Sometimes that’s really all our parts want: room to speak. We can continue giving them this space in the next exercise, too.

Conference Table Dialogue:

Using this same example of the young woman, let’s imagine that we’ve gotten further in our work and have identified several other parts of this young woman – maybe her Inner Champion, etc.

We use the tool of Conference Table Dialogue to imagine her various parts sitting around a conference table (or kitchen table or picnic table – pick whichever feels best – I personally love conference tables) and then we facilitate a meeting and dialogue between these parts where they can each share their perspective on the issue at hand – whatever it is you want to work through.

We would pay attention to who’s piping up most at the meeting, welcome all perspectives, and invite the different parts to speak to each other to create a rich, expansive conversation where more creative, previously inaccessible solutions might be found.

The Both/And of Parts Work

One of the most liberating shifts Parts Work can offer is moving from either/or thinking to both/and thinking. And I say this because so many of the women I work with — driven, ambitious women who are genuinely good at solving problems — get stuck in a bind: they believe that to heal one part of themselves, they have to eliminate another.

They think: I can be ambitious OR I can be at peace. I can be strong OR I can be vulnerable. I can succeed OR I can slow down. Parts Work offers a different framework entirely.

In my work with clients, I see this clearly. Priya is a 35-year-old attorney who came to me convinced that her drive was the problem — that if she could just turn down the volume on her striving, she’d finally feel okay. But what we found together was that her striving part and her exhausted part weren’t enemies. They were two parts of the same person, both trying to help her. The striving part wanted safety through achievement. The exhausted part wanted safety through rest. Both were right. Both were needed. The goal wasn’t to choose between them — it was to help them coexist.

This is the both/and of Parts Work. You can be deeply capable and deeply tired. You can want to rise professionally and want more slowness in your life. You can love someone and need a lot of space from them. Parts Work doesn’t ask you to resolve these tensions by cutting off half of yourself. It asks you to give every part a seat at the table — and to let your wisest, most grounded Self lead the meeting.

The Systemic Lens: Why Parts Form in the First Place

I want to offer something that’s easy to miss in conversations about Parts Work: your parts didn’t form in a vacuum. They formed in a context — a family, a culture, a set of relational dynamics that shaped what was safe to feel, safe to want, and safe to be.

This is what I think of as the systemic lens. And it matters enormously for the women I work with.

Many of the driven, ambitious women I see in therapy and coaching developed their striving parts in families where love was conditional on performance. Or in cultures where women were rewarded for being capable and punished for being “too much.” Or in workplaces where vulnerability was career-limiting. The parts that formed weren’t random — they were adaptive responses to real relational and social environments.

In my work with clients, I’ve seen this pattern again and again. Maya is a 40-year-old entrepreneur who had a fierce inner critic that never let up. It took months of Parts Work before we understood that the critic had originally formed to help her survive a mother who was deeply critical and emotionally unpredictable. The inner critic had learned: if I criticize myself first and harshly enough, I can stay one step ahead of her. It wasn’t Maya’s flaw. It was a brilliant adaptation to a difficult system.

Understanding the systemic origins of your parts doesn’t excuse the harm those parts may cause in your present life. But it changes your relationship to them. You stop fighting yourself and start understanding yourself. And that shift — from self-war to self-compassion — is where real healing begins.

If you’re reading this and recognizing your own patterns in these descriptions, you’re not broken. You’re shaped. And shaped things can be reshaped — with the right support, the right tools, and a little more tenderness than you may have been given so far.

My Invitation To You.

If you’ve made it this far, something in this post has landed for you. Maybe you recognized yourself in Camille’s 3 AM dread, or in Elena’s emotional shutdown at the door, or in Priya’s exhausted striving, or in Maya’s relentless inner critic. Maybe you just felt a flicker of recognition — the sense that yes, there really are different voices in here, and they don’t always agree.

That recognition is the beginning. Parts Work isn’t a quick fix and it isn’t always easy. But it’s one of the most profound ways I know to stop fighting yourself and start genuinely understanding yourself — maybe for the first time.

You don’t have one self that’s failing to get it together. You have many parts — some of them very young, some of them very tired, some of them genuinely trying to protect you in the only way they know how. Parts Work is how you start meeting them with curiosity instead of judgment.

And when you do that — when you actually sit down at your own inner conference table and listen — something shifts. Not overnight. But for real.

I hope this post has been useful. If you’d like to explore Parts Work in your own life, I’d love to support you in that — whether through therapy, coaching, or simply through the resources here. You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks.

Warmly,

Annie

• For more information on Voice Dialogue work: Embracing Ourselves: The Voice Dialogue Manual by Drs Hal and Sidra Stone.*

Frequently Asked Questions

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

References

• Schwartz, R. C. (1995). Internal Family Systems Therapy. The Guilford Press.
• Schwartz, R. C., & Sweezy, M. (2019). Internal Family Systems Therapy: New Dimensions. The Guilford Press.
• Stone, H., & Stone, S. (1993). Embracing Ourselves: The Voice Dialogue Manual. New World Library.
• Gilbert, P. (2009). The Compassionate Mind: A New Approach to Life’s Challenges. New Harbinger Publications.
• Whitfield, C. L. (1991). Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families. Health Communications, Inc..
• Gilbert, P. (2010). The Compassionate Mind: A New Approach to Life’s Challenges. New Harbinger Publications.
• van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.

Both/And: Honoring Every Part While Leading from the Self

In my clinical work, the most common misconception I encounter about parts work is the belief that healing means silencing the difficult parts — the inner critic, the anxious planner, the part that numbs.

Elena, a 41-year-old chief medical officer at a telehealth startup, initially came to therapy wanting to “get rid of” her perfectionist part. “She’s exhausting,” Elena told me. “She keeps me up at night reviewing every email I sent that day.” But as we mapped Elena’s internal system, something shifted. That perfectionist part had kept her safe through a childhood where mistakes meant her father’s rage. It wasn’t the enemy. It was an overworked protector.

The both/and is this: you can acknowledge that a part’s strategy is no longer serving you — and you can honor the fact that it kept you alive when nothing else could. Both realities coexist. Healing isn’t about winning an internal war. It’s about convening the conference table with curiosity instead of contempt.

The Systemic Lens: Why We Aren’t Taught About the Multiplicity of Self

Western culture has a deep investment in the idea of a singular, coherent self. “Be yourself.” “Stay true to who you are.” “Know thyself.” These phrases assume there’s one self to know — and if you experience internal contradiction, something is wrong with you.

But the reality, as Richard Schwartz, PhD, and decades of clinical research have demonstrated, is that multiplicity is the norm. Every human being contains multiple parts, each with its own agenda, its own fear, its own way of protecting the system. This isn’t pathology. It’s architecture.

The systemic issue is this: by insisting on a monolithic self, our culture leaves people without a framework for understanding their internal conflicts. Driven women, in particular, often experience this as a personal failure — “Why can’t I just be consistent?” — when in fact they’re navigating a perfectly normal internal ecosystem that no one ever taught them to map.

You might also find it helpful to read my A trauma therapist reviews the Inside Out movie.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

Medical Disclaimer