Are you Self-led or are you being rewarded for your appeasement strategies?
Parts work and the Good Sister
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Parts work is a type of therapy that assumes that all people have different parts of their personality, and that these parts can have conflicting strategies, wants, and fears. Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a popular type of parts work. Janina Fisher puts forward another modality of parts work in her book Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors that draws upon IFS, the theory of structural dissociation, and other modalities, and is directed at people with varying degrees of structural dissociation due to trauma. Structural dissociation means that the parts of the personality have become increasingly separate, differentiated, and dissociated from each other.
Both IFS and Fisher’s model posit that each person has a self that is less fragmented, more whole. In IFS this is called the Self. In Fisher’s model she calls it the Going On With Normal Life part. An important distinction between the two frameworks is that IFS assumes that the Self “knows what to do.” When you are in Self, you will feel open and kind toward the parts, and you will have an intuitive sense of how to interact with them. While IFS posits that the Self has inherent traits that exist inside everyone, Fisher’s model assumes only the potential for those traits. Because Fisher’s model is directed at people with complex developmental trauma, she allows for the reality that many people have not actually developed these traits even in their Going On With Normal Life part because they did not receive the basic parenting needed to activate those qualities.
Both IFS and Fisher’s model have a concept called unblending. We are “blended” with a part when we identify with the part and experience the part’s emotions and perspectives as “ours.” A huge component of parts work is developing dual awareness: being aware of the part’s feelings and perspective while staying grounded in the Self (or Going On With Normal Life part — I’m going to mostly use “Self” from now on for ease). When we are blended with a part we are hijacked by the part’s intense emotions and our prefrontal cortexes are not active. When we unblend and ground in the Self, our prefrontal cortexes wake up and we are able to compassionately listen to the parts without being hijacked by or identifying with the part’s intense emotions. Because the parts and the Self share the same body, and because we have spent so much of our lives blended with parts, it can be very difficult to discern when we are in a part and when we are grounded in the Self. In order to build the skill of unblending we must be able to tell the difference between Self and parts.
In IFS the difference between Self and parts is presented as fairly obvious. IFS has a concept called the 8 C’s of Self: compassion, curiosity, courage, clarity, creativity, connection, confidence, calm. When these traits are present, IFS makes the assumption that we are in Self. Fisher’s model complicates this a bit because she does not assume that traumatized people have necessarily been able to develop the full expression of Self. She distinguishes between the Going On With Normal Life part and what she calls Wise Mind. Wise Mind is more closely correlated with the IFS idea of Self and the Wise Mind qualities may be more or less present when the Going On With Normal Life part is driving.
In incestuous or otherwise abusive families, there is a very common dissociative split based on the fundamental dilemma for children in those families. Gabor Maté argues that the often irreconcilable choice between attachment and authenticity is at the heart of dysfunction in our world. In order to maintain attachment relationships, we are expected to suppress our authenticity. This dilemma is particularly pronounced for abused children who rely on their attachment relationships to caregivers for survival, and who will be punished or neglected for authentic expressions of fear, disgust, anger, or sadness, both in general, and in particular, in response to the abuse. The child has an unsolvable problem: she must maintain closeness and win the favour of her abusers in order to have her basic needs met, but she must fight, flee, or shut off awareness and sensation in order to survive the abuse. The answer to this unsolvable problem is dissociation. Parts of her will be in charge of maintaining attachment, and parts of her will hold the exiled “animal defence drives” of fight, flight, freeze, and collapse. Parts of her will work hard to love and empathize with her abusers and parts of her will reject her need for attachment and insist that she “doesn’t need anyone.” I call this classic dissociative split the “Good Sister / Bad Sister” split, after the Hole song by that name. (Obviously this split happens to boy children too, though the gendered socialization which encourages girls and women to identify with “Good Sister” strategies adds a layer of complexity.)
Both Good Sister and Bad Sister strategies are dissociative strategies. Neither set of strategies flows from Self. Good Sister strategies include: people pleasing, empathy with no boundaries, endless inexhaustible compassion, extreme feelings of guilt and shame for having or wanting basic boundaries, being parentified, predicting and adapting to other people’s mood and emotions, repressing internal sensations, emotions, needs, and boundaries, and over responsibility. Bad sister strategies include: rage, extreme emotions, “splitting,” shutting off empathy, “acting out,”drinking, drugs, self-injury, compulsive sexuality, and suicidality, suppressing attachment needs, hyper independence, numbing and sensation seeking behaviours, anti-social behaviours, cruelty, and violence. Look at both of these lists and tell me: Which set of strategies is more likely to be perceived as healthy? Which set of strategies is more rewarded in society? Which set of strategies is more expected of women? Which set of strategies is more likely to be identified as a part and which set of strategies is more likely to be confused with the Self?
