Meeting an internal sub-personality changes my view on psychology

I met one of my internal sub-personalities (one of my “parts”) in an Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy session the other day, that changed my understanding of psychology.

I was working with my very excellent Level III IFS practitioner who lives in England, and we were moving towards a really massive trauma from my early childhood that I’ve never gotten close to before.

This trauma manifests consciously as one of my “worst fears” around money, betrayal, not being cared for when I was helpless, and possibly worse.

I don’t know what it’s about exactly—not YET—but the feeling of terror around it is pretty intense, and my psyche has a lot of structures built around that terror to keep it “safely” locked away from my conscious mind, as much as possible.

In order to get close to the terror, to heal it, we’re having to move slowly and do a lot of work on the structures that hide the terror.

One of those structures is this interesting sub-personality (“part”) I met on Monday. She was not happy with me trying to look at the terror trauma that is locked deep inside, because she is one of the parts that helps keep it locked there.

She told me that her job is “to keep the babies from crying.” Those babies are other parts of my psyche. Terrified and helpless parts, from early childhood.

She also called it “the menagerie,” which is a word I had to look up, since I wasn’t sure I knew the exact definition. It means a place where wild animals are kept in confinement.

So this part works like a nanny, to keep other parts of my “Internal Family System” quiet and asleep, as much as possible. In her point of view, it is dangerous for the babies to cry, because that attracts negative attention from people outside (probably caregivers in my early childhood who yelled at me for crying, or did other things to try to force me to stop, when I was an infant.)

This internal nanny part didn’t want me to go poking around in my deeper system, to release the trauma, because she knew that doing that would cause a massive change in my psyche. It would rewire my entire personality, from the bottom up—which is exactly what I want to do, because releasing that trauma, being free from it, would be an amazing liberation for me.

Here is the fascinating revelation that is changing my understanding of human psychology.

This nanny part was trying to prevent me from healing the trauma, because if I healed it, then she was worried SHE WOULD BE OUT OF A JOB.

She directly told me that, and I found it kind of ridiculous at first.

Why did an internal part of my psyche “need a job?” Did she have bills and rent to pay??

But when I told my therapist this, she said it was very common for “manager” parts like this one to worry about losing the job they’re doing in the psyche.

This nanny part had developed great skill over the years, keeping my internal menagerie quietly sleeping, so they didn’t attract negative attention, and she was proud of her skill.

She did it very well, and it gave her existence purpose and meaning. She didn’t want me to heal because she didn’t know what she would do if that job wasn’t needed anymore. She was worried she would lose her reason for existing…

So I had to reassure her that we would find an even better role for her. For example, she would be excellent at gardening, since she’s so good at tending to individual little parts. She could do that with plants, because I love plants and gardening!

This didn’t fully satisfy her, and we had to close the session before we found a resolution, so I’m going to pick it up with her again next session.

But the ramifications of this interaction are pretty massive…

The more I think about it, the more it’s transforming how I see people, their behavior and motivations, and the ways we get stuck.

I do believe that we all have buried traumas, and I’m seeing more and more clearly that we all have internal parts fighting to keep them buried.

I’m seeing more clearly that it’s not just “external burdens” (aka, negative spiritual entities) fighting to keep us stuck, and preventing us from healing our traumas, we also have internal parts that do it too (maybe with some encouragement and coaching from negative entities… not sure yet to what extent that might be happening.)

I find it so interesting that we have parts that fight to keep our system locked down, to prevent it from changing, because they’re scared of losing their job!

Imagine that for a moment. It’s just like bureaucrats in government, fighting to keep pointless jobs that waste taxpayer money.

We see this exact same dynamic all over the place in society!

And it happens right inside of us too.

Wow…

Hmm, it’s almost like the inner and the outer are connected somehow….

Next time you’re lamenting not having enough love in your life, or enough money, or enough fun, or whatever, look inside and see who would be out of a job if you did have those things?

They might be actively blocking you from getting them!