Introducing A New Season Of Podcasts: Use Your Internal Family To Move Forward

The best way to example the upcoming podcasts is with a personal anecdote. This example, I believe, highlights perfectly the internal struggle we all have daily when triggered, when overwhelmed, when ruminating and when trying to make a decision about our lives.

I was about ten years old when I remember being with my siblings in the garden. We were playing with the children in the neighbourhood and it was a fun day. Suddenly, my father appeared and scolded me for something he assumed I had done (in front of the others). I withdrew, angrily to the steps of a treehouse with my thoughts, feeling humiliated and hateful. I disliked my friends because they continued their fun.

“I hate my father, he hates me”, “I should run away”, “Why am I so bad, this always happens to me”, “ You should keep quiet, you are always in trouble”, “ You are a bad person, you are not ok” “ They are not your friends, you should keep away from them”.

What happened here? Did I simply just get angry? In that moment, I changed temporarily into a different person with a different set of feelings and thoughts and seeing the world. Indeed, my father and my friends were, in that moment different to me in the way I saw them. What happened to the person who was playing happily with his friends before the incident? Which one of these “people” was I really? Was I one of them or both? Or was I the person who was overcome with thoughts of guilt later or the one that obsessed about running away?

In the example above, we have seen four different personalities arise from one specific incident, all provoking a different view of the event, all advocating different behaviour, all competing to be the dominant view and the one that is taken most seriously. It is an internal conflict designed to stop the “host” feeling those deep feelings of rejection and hurt.

I believe in multiplicity in thought when an event like the one above occurs. The best way to describe this in terms of our mind being like a pinball machine…the trigger happens, the thought goes in and knocks on various pins. These pins are individual “thinking parts” that have developed from childhood protection measures and have been maintained.

In the upcoming series of podcasts, we will be looking at the following:

Podcast 1:

Bringing Awareness, Knowledge and Background To “Thinking Parts”.

Podcast 2:

How To Take Action: Negotiating And Promoting The Inner Champion

Podcast 3:

The “Thinking Parts” And Codependency

Originally published at http://boundariesofthesoul.com on May 3, 2019.