Systematizing My Internal Family
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women are merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
I've started Internal Family Systems therapy! Also the official workbook. This is also inspired, in part, by Clementine Morrigan's article "I'm not bipolar — I have a split personality."
Article linked with standard "I don't agree with everything she's ever said." In fact, I have beef with much of what she has said. Other inspirations include the paper she linked, systems I'm close with, and age regression. I'm not plural myself, but I've found it helpful to name these players and will continue to do so as they come up. My intention for going on this IFS journey is: Integration and balance between one extremely dominant part and the rest.
Dramatic personae!
Unnamed 1: A little girl in a birthday hat. Cries often. Making other people feel bad makes her feel bad. Hates Terminal for ruining everything.
Terminal: Rage. A chimpanzee in a drill instructor's uniform. An abyss that lies below the other states. Self-like as a result. Believes itself to be the most fundamental truth of me, to the point of asserting that there is no higher Self. Only it exists. It is by far the loudest part of my mind. Approaching it feels like it has to happen at a slant, or else lightning strikes endlessly in my brain and I get very tired. It is also very tired. Wants everything to be tallied and balanced, so it can disappear and rest.
- Fixated on memory and fairness. It records what happens to me. It preserves my dignity. It preserves my Self. Without it, everything goes unrecorded and as a result disappears. The Golden Rule. Acknowledging this helps with the rage.
- Sees violence and suffering as a currency, starting with mine. Embarrassed at its own helplessness and naivete. A juvenile rigidity mixed with a geriatric world-weariness.
- Asserts that it is not loved, but does not need to be. Other parts dislike it. After it is in charge, I will lapse into a thought spiral for 30 minutes to an hour, where I can only think of violence and rot. It's possible it exists to keep these lapses at bay.
White Blank Page: Customer service personality. Infinitely patient and passive. Quiet, but able to talk. The persona I wear at work. Don't think it's so much a part as a mask that everyone has, but eh.
Unnamed 2: Where the tattered remains of my self esteem reside. Megalomaniacal. Convinced of its own genius, beauty, and eternal martyrdom. Believes I could figure out any problem, adapt to any career, or learn any skill. The only one that's chrono-age appropriate, if perhaps a little younger than me.
CPT Completed!
Just completed a 12-session course of CPT. CPT is based on CBT, which rightfully gets a bad rep. But I got a lot out of CPT.
Consciously, I have a lot of "correct" beliefs about trauma. But when it comes to my subconscious ideology, I struggle.
The manual is free. It's here.
It's long, but don't worry about it! The process isn't too-too complicated.
I picked a trauma. The manual seems to say it has to be the worst one, my therapist said it didn't have to be. I picked my most formative one. I wrote a page about why I think it happened. Not the logical, conscious chain of causality. But the whispers in the back of the mind. It happened because I was mature for my age. It happened because I sinned. It happened because I was drunk, et cetera. I kept it around 100-200 words, but some traumas are complex or long-lasting and need more space.
With the help of my therapist, I sifted out what I wrote to find "Stuck Points." Stuck Points are beliefs about yourself, others, and the world. Not facts or feelings, but beliefs. I called it a trauma ideology for short. Someone who grew up in a sex-negative culture might have "sex is shameful" as part of their trauma ideology, for example. Ideally they're short, and focused on a singular element of the trauma.
I ran the Stuck Points through a gamut of questions, including how they made me feel, whether I had evidence for it, whether I had evidence against it, the nature of the evidence, and so on. This takes up the bulk of the time. Do these points hold up under scrutiny? It's okay if parts of them do. That was the case with me. A pebble of truth wrapped in a pearl of cognitive distortions and self-blame.
There's a fillable PDF here, which helps. If this doesn't work, I'd advise printing the worksheet and filling it out by hand. Even reading the question out loud and recording your response in a voice note! Trying to copy these questions down into a Word document and then answer them clogged up my thinking, so any way of avoiding that is good.
I then replaced the Stuck Point with another belief. Something balanced, provably true, reassuring. Then, you try to alter your pattern of thinking to default to that newer, more balanced belief instead of the old one. I found coming up with a new belief to be the most difficult part. If help is available, I'd advise it here. One of mine was "Maturity was irrelevant to the situation."
Every time I would think about the trauma, I would try to replace my instinctual Stuck Points with the new belief. It didn't happen right away. It would be weird if it did. But they became part of the narrative, a part that held more and more weight over time. Overall, I found this very helpful. I even untangled some old threads from the trauma and found myself with more questions. A lot of my PTSD around the event was self-inflicted, which imo is what this form of therapy is best for. It didn't affect my lack-of-support trauma, or simple association between benign elements and the traumatic event, but it did affect the internal structures of justification I built around them and allowed me to see myself in a kinder light.
