What happens to parts once we contact them? Read on…
A Reader writes:
I appreciated hearing you talk about Inner Relationship Focusing, and working with parts. Could you talk about the idea of integrating parts once they are identified, understood, and known?
Dear Reader:
I have never seen the need to integrate parts!
“But wait,” you ask— “Does that mean that parts remain as they are, as parts, unintegrated in the whole self?”
Not at all! When we create the environment and give them the relationship they need, parts evolve. They don’t stay the same. And one of the ways they can evolve is a kind of dissolving of the parts into the whole self.
“Isn’t that integrating parts?”
Not really. Oh, parts may integrate (although we don’t use that word). But we don’t integrate them. Do you see the difference?
One of the main principles of Inner Relationship Focusing is that we don’t do anything TO our process. We don’t move it around, we don’t send it light, we don’t explain to it that it can feel another way.
We are simply present with what is in a compassionate way. With radical acceptance of everything.
Why does presence with acceptance facilitate change? Because everything alive is in process—including our parts. Everything is on its way to what comes next.
We don’t give parts names. We don’t expect to meet the same parts in every session. Parts evolve when they are treated with compassion. We can trust them to. We can trust the process.
