Further Reading on Relational Trauma

Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.

• Narcissistic Abuse & Recovery Guide
• Childhood Emotional Neglect Guide
• Attachment Styles Guide
• Complex PTSD Guide
• EMDR Therapy for Women
• Inner Child Work Guide
• Trauma and the Nervous System
• Intergenerational Trauma

Both/And: All Your Parts Belong to You

One of the most important principles in IFS-informed work is this: there are no bad parts. Every part of you — the inner critic, the part that shuts down, the part that overworks, the part that catastrophizes — developed for a reason. It was trying to protect you. And the parts that seem most destructive or painful are often the ones that have been working the hardest, the longest, in service of your survival.

This is the Both/And truth at the heart of parts work: your critic part that drives you relentlessly is both harmful in its current expression and deeply loyal to the original goal of keeping you safe and valued. The part that numbs out when relationships get too close is both creating disconnection now and protecting the part of you that was once genuinely hurt by intimacy. You don’t have to choose between “this part is bad” and “this part is good.” Every part carries both.

I work with Camille, a senior partner at a law firm, who discovered through this kind of work that the part of her driving her to overwork wasn’t, at its core, ambitious — it was terrified. It believed, based on childhood experience, that being productive was the only way to justify her place in the room. “I always thought the workaholic part was the real me,” she said. “It turns out it’s a scared kid in a power suit.” When she began to understand that part’s fear rather than just resenting it, she could start to work with it rather than against it.

Parts work doesn’t ask you to eliminate or override your difficult parts. It asks you to get curious about them — to understand them well enough that they don’t have to run the show from the unconscious. In that shift, genuine choice becomes available.

The Systemic Lens: Why Parts Work Matters for Women Navigating Professional Demands

When we bring a systemic lens to parts work, we have to ask: why are so many of the driven women I work with carrying parts in such intense internal conflict? Part of the answer lies in the demands of the systems these women navigate — systems that frequently require them to split off and suppress significant portions of their authentic experience.

Professional environments, especially high-stakes ones — law firms, tech companies, medicine, finance — are generally organized around the premise of a unified, consistent, rational professional self. There’s limited space for the part that’s exhausted, the part that questions whether this was the right path, the part that grieves what was lost on the way up. The professional persona that earns respect in these environments is often built through suppression: the parts that don’t fit the professional narrative get managed, hidden, put away.

For women who carry relational trauma, this suppression has an additional layer. Many of the parts that get exiled — the sad part, the angry part, the part that wants to be taken care of — were already marginalized in childhood, already given the message that they were too much, too needy, too difficult. Professional culture adds institutional reinforcement to a dynamic that was already active.

Parts work, in this context, isn’t just a personal healing modality — it’s a way of reclaiming the parts of yourself that professional and cultural systems have designated inconvenient. The angry part you learned to suppress because it made people uncomfortable is allowed to exist. The part that needs rest isn’t a weakness to be managed. The part that wants connection and intimacy isn’t unprofessional. All of your parts belong to your whole self, and the most sustainable professional performance comes from a self that isn’t constantly at war with its own interior.

If you’re curious about working with your parts more intentionally, individual therapy can provide a safe container for that exploration. The work of meeting your parts is some of the most fundamentally transformative work available to women who are ready to stop managing their inner experience and start actually relating to it.

A Guided Practice: Beginning to Meet Your Parts

If you want to begin the process of meeting your parts, here is a simple practice drawn from IFS-informed approaches. You can do this in a journal, in meditation, or simply as a quiet internal inquiry.

Step 1: Notice what’s activated. Is there a particular emotional state, behavioral pattern, or physical sensation that’s been prominent for you lately? A familiar tension in your shoulders when a deadline approaches. A sudden urge to check your phone whenever you sit with your spouse. A voice that starts cataloguing everything you haven’t done when you lie down to sleep. These are often the entry points for meeting a part.

Step 2: Get curious rather than critical. Instead of trying to stop or fix the sensation, try asking: “What is this? What is this part feeling or trying to do?” This shift from management to curiosity is the foundation of parts work. You’re not trying to negotiate with the part or talk it out of its position — you’re simply making space to understand it.

Step 3: Acknowledge its function. Ask the part: “What are you worried would happen if you stopped doing what you’re doing?” The answers are often illuminating. The critic that never lets you rest is often terrified that if you slow down, you’ll be exposed as unworthy. The part that numbs out in relationships is often protecting an early wound that hasn’t healed. Acknowledging this — out loud, in writing, or with a therapist — begins the relationship.

Step 4: Offer some compassion. You don’t have to agree with the part’s tactics to have empathy for what it’s trying to protect. “I see you’ve been working so hard,” is something you might say to a part that has been exhausting you for decades. “Thank you for trying to take care of me. I want to find a way to let you rest.”

This practice won’t resolve everything in one sitting. Parts work is a process, often most powerful when held in the context of ongoing support. But beginning to meet your parts — with curiosity rather than judgment — is the beginning of a more integrated, compassionate relationship with yourself.

The Most Common Parts You’ll Meet (and What They Need)

In my work with driven women, certain parts appear with remarkable consistency. Not because these women are all the same, but because certain family dynamics create certain adaptive responses, and those responses produce recognizable parts. Here are some of the parts I encounter most frequently — and what I’ve learned about what they need.

The Manager: This part plans, organizes, controls, and keeps everything running so that vulnerable material never gets close enough to be touched. In driven, ambitious women, the Manager often presents as the most “adult,” competent, and impressive part — the one that shows up for performance reviews, that holds the household together, that never drops a ball. Beneath the Manager’s activity is often a terror: if I stop managing, something terrible will happen. This part needs to be shown, slowly and repeatedly, that other parts of you are also capable of keeping the system safe — that the Manager doesn’t have to do it all alone.

The Inner Critic: Often a protective part that developed to pre-emptively criticize you before others could. If I notice everything wrong with myself first, the external criticism will be less devastating. In families where criticism was chronic and unpredictable, the inner critic was a form of preparation. This part needs to understand that you are no longer in the environment that required its constant vigilance — that the threats it was protecting against are no longer the landscape.

The Exile: The exile carries the original wound — the hurt, scared, or ashamed child part that the protective parts are working so hard to keep away from consciousness. Exiles often hold the grief, the loneliness, the unmet need for love or safety. In IFS language, the goal of therapy is not to eliminate or contain the exile, but to give it the witness and the care it didn’t receive originally. This is the most tender work, and it requires a foundation of safety to approach.

The Firefighter: Firefighters activate when exile material threatens to break through — when something triggers the underlying wound and the system is at risk of flooding. Firefighter responses can include binge behaviors, dissociation, rage, compulsive work, or any activity that effectively numbs or distracts. These parts aren’t bad; they’re emergency responders doing their best with the tools available. Understanding them with compassion, rather than judging them as failures of will, is essential to working with them effectively.

Beginning the Practice: The Parts Journal

One of the most accessible ways to begin working with your parts outside of formal therapy is a parts journal. This is a simple practice, but it can generate significant insight over time.

The practice works like this: when you notice a strong reaction — a disproportionate emotional response, a behavioral pattern you’ve been trying to change, a physical sensation that carries emotional charge — you stop and write to the part that seems to be running the show. You write as if you’re in conversation with it, not analyzing it from above. You ask it questions. You listen, in writing, for what comes back.

Some prompts to start:

“I notice you (describe the behavior or feeling). What are you afraid would happen if you didn’t do this?” / “How long have you been working this hard? When did you start?” / “What are you protecting? What would I see if you stepped back?” / “What do you need from me right now?”

The answers that emerge — the images, memories, sensations, or internal dialogue that surfaces — are not definitive truths. They’re invitations to get curious, to build a relationship with the interior, to begin to know yourself at a depth that strategic self-improvement alone can’t reach.

This practice is most powerful when supported by actual therapeutic work — ideally with a therapist trained in parts-based approaches like IFS, EMDR, or somatic experiencing. But as a beginning, as a way of starting to meet what’s inside you with something other than management or judgment, it is remarkably useful. Reach out if you’d like to explore this work more deeply.

Parts Work in Action: What Changes When You Meet Yourself

One of the questions I’m asked most often about IFS-informed work is: what actually changes? When you start meeting your parts, understanding them, building internal relationships with them — what does that shift, practically, in your life?

The change that I see most consistently is a reduction in what I call internal war. Before parts work, many driven women experience their inner lives as a constant conflict between opposing forces: the part that wants to push harder and the part that is exhausted; the part that needs connection and the part that shuts down when intimacy gets too close; the part that craves recognition and the part that shrinks from visibility. These parts battle each other constantly, each one’s activation triggering another’s counter-response, creating a kind of perpetual internal turbulence that masquerades as self-motivation but is actually just suffering.

When you begin to relate to these parts rather than simply being run by them, the internal war loses some of its charge. Not immediately. Not completely. But you develop what IFS calls “Self-energy” — a quality of clear, compassionate, curious presence that is available to relate to all your parts without being hijacked by any one of them. From that place, you can hear the critic without collapsing into its verdict. You can feel the exhausted part without having to immediately fix it or override it. You can let the vulnerable part be present without the protectors sounding full alarm.

Camille, the attorney I mentioned earlier, described it this way a year into our work together: “I used to have a screeching noise in my head all the time. Like a car alarm that I’d gotten so used to I thought it was just… the sound of being me. Now it’s quieter. Not quiet. But quieter. And I can actually hear myself think underneath it.” That quiet — the emergence of Self beneath the noise of competing parts — is one of the most recognizable markers of this work taking hold.

If you want to bring this kind of work into your life, there are several paths. Individual therapy with a parts-informed therapist can provide a relational container for the deep work. The Fixing the Foundations course offers a structured framework for healing relational trauma that incorporates parts awareness throughout. And this workbook — the simple practice of writing to your parts — is available to you anytime, as a first step or an ongoing companion.

Meeting your parts isn’t a project with a finish line. It’s a practice — an ongoing, gradually deepening relationship with your own interior. But it is one of the most foundational things you can do for your wellbeing, your relationships, and the quality of your inner life. You deserve that kind of self-knowledge. And you deserve the peace that comes, slowly, from no longer being at war with yourself.

This week’s workbook is an invitation to begin. Not to complete the journey — that takes years, and it is ongoing. Just to begin. To meet one part that has been managing or protecting or hurting, and to offer it something it may not have received in a long time: your genuine, curious, compassionate attention. That attention, offered consistently over time, changes everything.

The parts you’ll meet in this work have been waiting, many of them, for a very long time. They have been managing and protecting and exhausting themselves on your behalf. Meeting them — with curiosity, with compassion, without judgment — is an act of profound self-respect. It is, in my experience, one of the most significant forms of healing available to driven women who are ready to stop managing their inner life and start truly inhabiting it.