How to Begin to Heal From Your Emotional Trauma
If you’ve read some of my previous articles, you know that I often speak about us as having different “parts” or aspects of ourselves rather than being one fixed, singular personality.
One part of us may feel motivated, productive, and driven. Another part may feel exhausted and want to completely withdraw. One part may feel deeply caring and openhearted, while another feels defensive, critical, afraid, controlling, or reactive.
Most of us naturally speak this way already without even realizing it: “Part of me wants to do this, but another part of me is scared,” for example.
And learning how to understand these different parts of ourselves more compassionately can become an incredibly important part of emotional healing.
The internal family that lives inside of you
Inside you are a whole multitude of parts that have developed within you over the course of your life, and that today constitute what I (thanks in large part to the therapeutic Internal Family Systems model) like to call your internal family.
One fundamental way to think about the types of parts that you have in your personality is to consider that you have:
Vulnerable parts that feel hurt and pain, and
Parts that protect these vulnerable parts from feeling more hurt and pain
And often, especially when we’ve been hurt, overwhelmed, rejected, or emotionally unsafe in the past, it’s our protective parts that begin taking up the most space in our day-to-day lives.
Our protective parts mostly run our day-to-day life
One of the main types of parts that we have inside of us and that constitute our personality are those parts who protect our vulnerable parts from feeling more hurt and pain. They’re called protective parts or protectors in Internal Family Systems therapy (or IFS), which has deeply influenced both my personal healing work and the way I support others today.
The intention of these protective parts, just as it is for all of our parts, is a good one. Just like other parts of us that may seem more hurt or vulnerable, these protective parts developed when we were young. They learned either that they needed to criticize or guard us as a means of protecting us from other people (Does this sound familiar? Do you have an inner part of you that tends to criticize you?), or that they needed to keep us away from certain experiences as a means of protecting us from feeling emotions like fear, shame, and sadness.
And while these protective strategies often developed for understandable reasons, they can also create suffering, disconnection, rigidity, shame, anxiety, self-criticism, or relational difficulties later in life.
Take your inner critic for example. Your inner critic thinks that as long as it criticizes you into being who you’re supposed to be, you won’t get rejected or fail like you did in the past, and you won’t have to feel that horrible feeling of rejection again.
Or take your nurturer for example. Your nurturer or nurturing part prefers to take care of everyone around you, except you, and this works to keep you from feeling and being with your own emotions.
What are some of your protective parts? Do you have an inner critic who badgers you no matter what you try to do? Or a nurturing part who takes care of everyone but you so that you don’t have to feel your probably uncomfortable or unpleasant emotions? Or a mean part who protects you from getting hurt by other people by keeping them at bay? Or a controlling part who manages your life and all of the people in it so as to prevent things from going awry?
No matter what they are for you, it's these parts of your personality that helped you survive the painful, overwhelming, emotionally unsafe, or difficult experiences you lived through earlier in life and it’s these parts of you that need the most attention when you set out to do emotional healing work.
It's these parts of your personality that helped you the painful, overwhelming, emotionally unsafe, or difficult experiences you lived through earlier in life and it’s these parts of you that need the most attention.
Why Pressure and Self-Force Often Don’t Work
Much of the messaging we receive around healing and self-improvement teaches us to pressure ourselves into changing — to force ourselves to “push through,” toughen up, stay positive, or simply “just do it.”
But emotional healing often doesn’t work that way.
Our protective parts usually don’t soften through pressure, shame, force, or criticism. More often, they soften through feeling understood, acknowledged, listened to, and safe enough to loosen their grip over time. Our inner family of parts doesn’t want to be pressured to change; it wants to be acknowledged and understood just as it is right now.
Steps to Begin to Heal from Your Emotional Wounds
One of the first intentions in healing work, then, is learning how to become more aware of the protective parts we’ve accumulated over the course of our lives. Not to shame them or force them to disappear… but to begin understanding them more openly and compassionately.
And often, that begins simply by slowing down enough to genuinely listen.
To spend time with these parts of ourselves rather than only analyzing or intellectualizing our experience. To begin building a relationship with them. To understand them well enough that we can eventually feel genuine compassion and appreciation for the ways they tried to help us survive.
Here are the steps to start. I also take you through these one-by-one in depth in my course Happy from the Inside Out®.
1. Get into a space of openness, kindness, and curiosity. The steps to come are somewhat of an inner dialogue that takes place between you and you, and it’s all about communicating with, understanding, and building a relationship with a part of you that has taken on a protective role in your inner family. And just like people in the external world, the people or parts in your internal world are much more likely to share and open up to you if they are approached with openness and kindness.
Find a comfortable space for yourself to be. Take a few slow breaths. Relax your shoulders if you can. And see if you can bring a little openness, gentleness, curiosity, or compassion toward yourself before beginning.
2. Get in touch with a protective part of you that you’re aware of. When I’m working with a client, what I typically do is ask them to notice how and where this part shows up in their body and mind. Ask yourself, “What thoughts, emotions, sensations, or impulses accompany it as it arises?” This is a great way to engage somatic or body-centered awareness and give parts of us who want to intellectualize or analyze our experience a break.
3. Get to know what this part does for you. Every protective part develops for a reason. Usually, these parts are trying to help, protect, support, soothe, manage pain, or keep us emotionally safe in some way — even if the strategies they use create suffering later on. So, get curious about how this protective part helps you. What does it do for you, and how?
Go ahead and ask it, for example, “What do you do for [Sophia]? How do you protect her?” [Insert your own name; I use my own here merely as an example]. Then, listen mindfully. Really hear what it does for you. Remember, you’re building a relationship with this part of you and mindful listening is a critical part of a healthy relational foundation— whether it’s between you and your romantic partner or between you and a part of you.
4. Uncover what happened that drove it into its role. It’s important to know that this protective part of you does what it does not because it’s its first choice to do this, but because it was driven into doing this based on something that happened in the past. At the time, this protective strategy may have genuinely felt necessary or adaptive. There is a need it is trying to fulfill for you and this is the way it learned to do it. And so, it helps us to find out what happened that led this part of you— whether your inner critic, your mean part, or your controlling part— to take on its extreme role.
So go on and ask it, “What happened that led you to adopt this role that you now have?” Again, listen intently and compassionately. Really hear what its history is and what led it to do what it does. If you feel genuinely inspired to do so, offer it understanding and compassion through words, gestures, or anything else that feels good to it and to you. Use this period of connection and communication to lay a foundation of trust between you and this part of you. Often, the more trust and safety we build internally, the more grounded and balanced our movement through life can begin to feel externally too.
5. Understand what fear keeps it in its role. Ask this part of you, “What are you afraid would happen if you didn’t do this job or perform this role for [Sophia]?” By asking this question, you are getting to the core of why this part exists in the first place and bringing understanding to what continues to drive its behavior through this very day. When we can understand a fear that our part holds and can truly “get it” and empathize with it, we can truly support it in reaching a meaningful resolution.
6. Continue to build trust. Oftentimes parts of us get stuck in the past and as such, they don’t know that there is now a wiser, caring adult self available to help support the younger, hurt parts they’ve been protecting. To see if this might be the case with the protective part you’re spending time with right now, ask this part of you, “How old do you think [Sophia] is?” Then, you’ll know if you need to update it on your current age or if you can proceed to offer a supportive resolution of some sort (the next and last step, for now).
7. See if the protective part of you would be open to changing its behavior. Find out what change would be possible if this part of you knew that the hurt, vulnerable part/s of you that it’s been protecting were being taken care of, that their emotional burdens were being tended to by you. Usually our protective parts have no idea that they can support it in a different way than they have been. They’re tired of how they’ve been doing it, yet they don’t know that there’s another way.
So we’ve got to suggest to them that there might, in fact, be another way. Ask it, for example, “If [Sophia] were able to help the hurt part/s of her that you protect, would you rather help in another way?” Knowing that s/he doesn’t need to criticize and demean you into being a perfect person who avoids failure, maybe your inner critic wants to do something else like be an inner coach or advisor instead?
Healing often begins more simply than we think.
Sometimes it starts just by turning toward a protective part of ourselves and saying: “I see you. I know you’ve been trying to help me somehow.”
A lot of what I guide people through inside my course Happy from the Inside Out® revolves around this process of building a more compassionate relationship with our inner world and learning how to move through life with greater awareness, self-connection, and emotional honesty.
And if this reflection touches something more personal in your own life, this is also deeply connected to the kind of work I support people with one-on-one.
Note: This article was originally written several years ago and has been lightly updated to reflect my current work and offerings.
