“Could calling something a part lead to not taking it seriously enough?”
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A Reader writes: “Isn’t there a risk, if we always put our inner self into parts, that we sometimes don’t take very important feelings or issues seriously enough?
“For example: I recently spent some time with my ex-partner, having not seen him for a long time. I realized that I still have a deep love for him, despite being aware of the things that didn’t work out very well when we were together. I am now in a new relationship and I feel its very difficult to assess how much I should ‘follow’ these feelings of love for my ex-partner, and what they mean for my living forward.
“If I now do Focusing and go to these feelings and just say: ‘Oh, there is a part of me that is very sad when it thinks that I am not together with my ex-partner’ then I would probably not hold these feelings as important as if I would say: ‘I am so sad, that I can’t be with him anymore.’
“So I am wondering if putting it in only a part could make me feel more distant to it and could even lead to a wrong decision.”
Dear Reader,
There are a lot of layers in your question! You are asking whether calling something “a part of me” leads to not taking the feelings of that part seriously enough. You are also asking about the place of Focusing (and feelings) in a decision-making process. I’m going to talk about the second issue first.
I think it is important to “un-link” feelings and actions. There is no feeling that leads inevitably to some action. We have choice in our actions, not so much in our feelings.
When you bring up the question of whether a feeling is “important,” it sounds like you mean, “Is it something I want to act on?” To me, that question is based on many factors, and I would do Focusing many times, along with any other process I know, before I decided whether I wanted to take life-changing action. That would include spending time with the feeling of “sad,” sensing what kind of sad it is, getting to know what especially makes it so sad.
“Something in me is sad about not being with my ex-partner…”
I don’t recommend the phrase “a part of me.” The phrase that I recommend is “something in me.” Many people find that the phrase “a part of me” feels belittling or dismissing in just the way you are concerned about. This “something in me” way of speaking is not intended to belittle or dismiss the feeling — on the contrary. It is intended as a way of bringing the feeling into focus, welcoming it, so you can sit down with it to get to know it better.
You CAN use the phrase “something in me” (or “a part of me”) to push away your feelings, but that was never the intention. The intention is to get curious, to find out more, to explore, to discover and allow more of yourself to form and be felt. This getting-to-know process will do more than just give you information — it will actually be your body process living forward in new ways.
There is “something” about the ex-partner — and you — that brings this feeling of sad. There is no way to know more until you sit with it and sense freshly what is under and behind all that. There is no way to know in advance what will happen … just that there are possibilities waiting for you, that you haven’t fully known before.
