The Day I Discovered My CEO Part Was Running My Life (And Why She Wouldn't Take a Break)

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • October 19, 2025

EMDR is a clinically supported therapy that helps your brain reprocess traumatic memories so they lose their overwhelming power over your emotions and body. It is not simply talk therapy or a technique to calm down; rather, it uses guided eye movements or other bilateral stimulation to help your nervous system shift stuck trauma into memories that feel manageable instead of threatening. This matters to you because if you’ve carried trauma beneath your success—held quietly but persistently—EMDR offers a way to loosen that grip, freeing you to function with less internal conflict. It’s not a magic cure or quick fix; it asks you to engage actively with your body’s natural healing process. For someone managing a nonstop internal CEO part, EMDR can create the safety needed to allow that part to finally step back and rest.

• You carry a relentless internal ‘CEO part’ that has been managing your life like a high-stakes business since childhood, refusing to rest because it’s protecting you from deeper relational wounds and unbearable emotional pain.
• Internal Family Systems (IFS) helps you recognize this CEO part as a protective, burden-bearing team member within your mind—not a tyrant—inviting you to meet her with curiosity and compassion rather than resistance or self-judgment.
• By combining EMDR trauma reprocessing with IFS parts work, you can gently loosen this CEO part’s grip, allowing her to take breaks without fear, which creates space for self-compassion, deeper healing, and a more integrated, less exhausting way of being.

Internal Family Systems is a therapeutic model that understands your mind as made up of different ‘parts,’ each with its own feelings, beliefs, and roles—like players on an internal team rather than just a messy mix of thoughts. It’s not about labeling you as ‘split’ or fractured, nor is it an invitation to ignore parts of yourself that cause discomfort; instead, it invites you to meet those parts with curiosity and compassion, even the ones that seem bossy or unreachable. This matters especially to you because if you’ve felt like you’re constantly managing an internal CEO who won’t rest, IFS offers a way to recognize that part’s protective intent while also giving it permission to step back, so you can finally feel less controlled and more whole. It’s about lowering the endless internal battle and building an internal leadership that includes rest, compassion, and complexity. This approach trusts that you can hold tough truths and tender care for yourself at the same time.

• You carry a relentless ‘CEO part’ inside you that’s been running your life like a business since childhood, refusing to rest because it’s trying to keep you safe from pain rooted in early relational trauma.
• You learn how combining EMDR’s trauma reprocessing with Internal Family Systems’ parts work helps you identify and gently engage with this protective CEO part, transforming its unyielding management into a source of compassionate self-leadership.
• You realize that when you allow this CEO part to finally take breaks without fear, you create space for deeper healing, self-compassion, and a more integrated, less exhausting way of being in your life.

I want to tell you about something that happened in my course of therapy in 2023 and 2024 when my EMDR therapist started weaving IFS into our work together.

1. When I First Heard About IFS and Parts
2. Finding My Parts in Therapy
3. The Boardroom Discovery
4. Explore More on Relational Trauma Recovery

When I First Heard About IFS and Parts

It was 2008, and I was 26, working at Esalen Institute as a work scholar (a place I’d go on to live and work at for nearly four years. Also met my husband there). If you haven’t been there, it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth—the home of the Human Potential Movement, 27 acres on the Big Sur coast where since the early 1960s people have been coming to do deep transformative personal growth work. The acres are among the most beautiful in the world with hot springs, organic food, and land that’s truly healing.

When I arrived in 2007, I felt pretty broken and was heavily decompensating as my childhood trauma started to catch up with me. My service in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan had initiated that decompensation—stories for another time. I’d come to Esalen hoping to put myself back together.

Back in those days, many of the big-name teachers we know today were teaching workshops there, and Richard Schwartz was one of them. He was teaching his framework on Internal Family Systems at the time, and though I wasn’t in his workshops, people would come out of them looking moved, softer, very impacted. I remember watching them walk into the Esalen Lodge where I was a work scholar working in the kitchens.

I never did end up taking a class with him there, only knew of his classes and ran into him several times in the Lodge. He was always so kind—I definitely remember that about him.

IFS was a philosophy I certainly knew about but didn’t study in graduate school, and it wasn’t part of my post-graduate training. But of course, the longer I was a trauma therapist, the more I heard about it—colleagues training in it, the power of it. I started to read about it but hadn’t really immersed myself in the topic.

Finding My Parts in Therapy

In 2023, I went back into my own EMDR therapy to work on new issues that were surfacing for me. I worked with a therapist who was highly trained in both EMDR and IFS. That’s where I really started to get introduced to the concept more deeply.

My stress, anxiety, and quite honestly, workaholism was at its peak when I was running my therapy center. My 3 AM wake-ups had become 2 AM, then 1 AM—full of anxiety about all the work I had to do, worries about keeping the center afloat, all of that. I knew I really needed to get a grip on this anxiety. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t normative. And honestly, it was torpedoing my mental health and my physical health.

That’s why I went into that round of therapy. And in the course of working with that part of me that was very workaholic and very panicked, my therapist started to weave in IFS content to help make sense of what was going on.

The Boardroom Discovery

I won’t go into all the clinical details, but what I ended up discovering was this full boardroom of my own exiles, manager, and firefighter parts. Putting categories and labels to them helped me make sense of certain patterns I had—maladaptive patterns—that I hadn’t really looked at quite so much before.

I was, to use an IFS term, blended with one of my primary manager parts—the workaholic, the one who couldn’t slow down at any cost, believing everything would collapse.

I did really rigorous work with my EMDR-IFS therapist to unblend so many of these parts, to invite dialogue between the firefighters, the exiles, and the managers. To get to know my internal boardroom, so to speak. To cultivate and develop my capital-S Self.

The work was extremely powerful in giving me this very concrete clinical change: more choicefulness around how much I work, the level of anxiety I have when I see numbers dip at the center, or when I feel completely overwhelmed by deadlines and obligations. Doing this work with all my parts helped me have a different relationship to work.

Other tangible impacts were seeing less reactivity among my firefighter parts when my manager parts would fail—when I couldn’t control every scenario, when things, as they always do in a company, go a little bit sideways.

If you’re ready to go deeper, I work one-on-one with driven, ambitious women through relational trauma recovery therapy and trauma-informed executive coaching. And if this essay resonated, there’s more where it came from — my Substack newsletter goes deeper every week on relational trauma, nervous system healing, and the inner lives of ambitious women. Subscribe for free — I can’t wait to be of support to you.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer