Inner Child/fragment Work?

[LizBeth1]

Hi everyone,
Anyone doing work on old parts/fragments/inner children? These are all the parts that got split off during various traumas. My T says that while I do not have dissociative identity disorder, because I "always have one foot in the room when I dissociate," that there are a lot of old fragments we're trying to integrate now.

When I started trauma work last year, I was able to identify about 9 parts -- fragments that split off during traumas over the course of about 30 years. Recently, I've discovered more parts, so now, I'm trying to manage about 20 parts, all of whom have concerns and all of whom are speaking up more and more. It's basically old feelings that were frozen from childhood that are now 'melting.' I'm feeling emotions I haven't felt since I was 6 or 7. My inner parts (children) are all kind of 'keyed up' and aware that I am listening to them. So now they all want to be heard! So lately, if I'm triggered, they all come up at once like a powerful tsunami. I'm having physical symptoms when this happens -- never had that before. Things like limbs going numb, stomach pain, rapid heartbeat, nausea, etc. So there's a lot of charged material coming up and there are 20 kids of all ages wanting to be heard...

My T does visualizations w/me and we have them go into a "home base" that's safe, and we're figuring out a way to allow them to all be heard, while somehow handling this in an orderly fashion.

Sometimes this is overwhelming and exhausting. I spent 4 hours listening to an angry inner teenager today. It definitely helped, but it's just a lot to manage while holding down a job and things like that. I'm just wondering if there are others here who are managing a lot of inner children, and what kinds of strategies you use if there are a lot of them...

Thanks!!
LizBeth

 

[Lionheart]

Hi LizBeth,

I have had to manage a lot of inner children. One was so young that they had no voice or way to communicate, so I learned to be very gentle and reassuring with this particular child-self. It is the part of me that got hurt the most and suffered in silence because he had no words to describe his experiences. This child-self I call "Tiny". Tiny is the youngest and most afraid of all of my child selves. I bought Tiny a stuffed bear to hold onto whenever 'we' are feeling scared, upset, sick etc. Now Tiny has come to trust me to take care of things and I have become aware of things that make Tiny afraid.

Some parts of me didn't split-off but were instead developed in response to the abuse traumas and they have high functioning abilities. They are prematurely developed adult selves...One in particular, the over-responsible one, I call "Andre'"

All of the different child selves and overdeveloped adult selves are only different aspects of the one me and have all integrated since going through some much needed therapy. I don't really have any advise for you, as it has been along time ago since I integrated my child selves but thought that I would respond to your post anyway with the hope that you might find it helpful.

I am thinking of you and wishing you the best, and if anything else comes to mind I will definitely post another reply.

 

[Tinyflame]

LH- I sort of (well, totally) am 'lost' with this concept.
Does that mean, if you 'feel' that, that it is as you felt as a child?, (or) do you just feel that as an 'adult'? (-period, because of your nature?)
I had 'no words' to describe (the negative stuff) because I chose not to use any (say anything at all, about it/ stuff). Or maybe I didn't 'have any' that were 'appropriate'- who knows?

I guess what I mean is that (~part of your nature) supposed to 'go away', or is it 'just you' (your character?)
In some ways I feel like a child, but maybe I'm just a wound-up adult.

Sorry, this is clear-as-mud. As I said I'm lost! :confused:
I don't think I can ~figure this concept out, -eiy. I feel like deleting it- this is a mess.

Thanks LH, with or without reply- am so glad things are much better (in those ways) for you.
xox

 

[LizBeth1]

Thank you LH - just hearing this is very validating and encouraging. I'm glad you were able to integrate all of them. I'm sort of staring down the pike of doing this now. I can totally relate to your very young part (Tiny) and the 'premature adult' parts. I have similar things going on. Love the idea of the stuffed bear; I have one too, for a 2-yr-old very scared inner child. I also have an inner 'militant' part who's around 12, I think. This part was trying to absorb and emulate the behavior of my parents, believing that if I emulated how I felt my parents were treating me, that I could survive. So it was like that inner critic -- taking their sometimes militant parenting tendencies and having it operate internally... this militant part was the part that pushed me into doing dangerous behaviors in order to feel 'accepted' by peers later on in life.

My T and I are doing some unconscious work with these parts that seems to be causing some interesting changes. Now that they know the 'adult' me is listening to them, they're sort of 'organizing' and changing behavior a bit. I have some angry teenage parts/fragments that are now interacting with younger, frightened child parts in a constructive way... I'm learning that I don't necessarily have to be doing this work consciously 24/7 -- I can sort of set an intention or make a suggestion to them, i.e., "why don't you, you and you hang out together today and I'll check in with you later." An when I check in later, things have evolved. It's fascinating, like dream work. I checked in the other day and a few angry teen parts informed me that they'd apologized to the younger parts for 'dragging them into some unpleasant experiences' later in life. It was very moving, and unexpected, to feel this.

It's not DID but it's more like dissociative tendencies, while still having one foot in the present. Kind of an in between state.

Anyway, thank you much for relaying your experience - it's very encouraging.

 

[Lionheart]

Junebug,

I will try to explain as best I can, with my limited understanding....we all have childselves because we were all once children of different ages; we were age 2 once, age 3 once, age 4 once, and so on up until we are an adult. So we have a 3 yr old child self, 4 year old child self etc.... With trauma sometimes these childselves split-off from the core self and/or they become 'frozen' in time along with the emotions that predominated us at that particular age.

For me, "Tiny" experienced my pain and fear as a 3 year old and became frozen in time and in that sense was split off from my core self. So that when I am triggered with emotional pain and/or fear I will emotionally and psychologically revert back to the age of a 3 year old. As an adult, I can comfort that part of me, but I cannot go back in time and give that childself the love and comfort he needed then...and that is why he is "frozen' in time. He can only have the comfort that I can give him in the here and now.

Because I have recognized and acknowledged that childself, I have integrated it back into the core self (which is the adult that I am now). This childself is now just an aspect of who I am and is not an entity unto itself. the ideal is to integrate the childself with the adult self and to "parent" this part of ourselves so that it doesn't dominate our personality.

I am sorry if I am not doing a very good job of explaining this, I am not a professional trauma therapist by any stretch of the imagination and this is a complicated concept to grasp. Perhaps someone with more professional knowledge of the childself can explain it better.

 

[NutritionNerd]

"Internal Family Systems" was developed by Richard C. Schwartz, Ph.D. (he has some cool materials at his website) It is pretty new and based on the theory that we all are not a single personality but rather parts. An example of a part would be how you think act and feel when you are being a parent vs how you think, act, feel when you are at work or with a lover. My doc calls these ego states.

Janina Fisher, PhD's website has some free pdfs related to trauma. In her paper "Dissociative Phenomena in the Everyday Lives of Trauma Survivors" she explains how a traumatized child develops a system of selves to cope with daily life. She says a "part" can be created by a single incident.

Because most all the parts share some memory space it feels like you are one person. Once you become aware of the possibility and watch for it you can see the sometimes very drastic differences in how you act, look, perceive when you are in various ego states or parts. For me the child part is particularly vulnerable because she believes she is helpless so I forget I can do or ask for help.

 

[LizBeth1]

Hi Junebug,
It is a complicated concept, I agree!

I think that the inner children may be best described as feeling states that come and go. These feeling states are the emotions you feel when you're triggered by various things. So those emotions that come up belong to past split-off fragments of yourself. It's as though you are re-experiencing in present time the same emotions that happened at the time of a trauma in the past. So the therapist refers to this as 'an inner child/part coming up' or 'this inner fragment needs to speak to you now, needs to be heard.' So your adult self, the self you know yourself to be right now, is still there the whole time and is hearing/feeling these old emotions come up - these split-off inner child parts (overwhelming emotions belonging to these child parts) that really did have to go underground in order for you to survive the trauma and still be able to function in day to day life.

So now it's as though those emotions -- which belong to those old split-off parts -- are coming to the surface after years of being buried. So now they need to be integrated with the adult "you" that you know yourself to be every day. I use various analogies... sometimes it feels like I am temporarily running an orphanage with little versions of 'me' walking around. Sometimes I feel like I'm walking around town like Miss Clavel from the Madeleine books, with 2 lines of little girls walking around behind me. I'm in charge. Eventually we will all morph into one being, but right now we are still kind of separate.

I hope this makes some kind of sense !! I know how esoteric this all sounds...
LB

 

[LizBeth1]

Thank you NN - the Janina Fisher article is fantastic. Here is a quick link to it:
http://www.janinafisher.com/pdfs/dissociation.pdf

 

[Tinyflame]

Thank you LH and LizBeth1, I am trying to grasp this, in so far as I am sure it's a 'replay' (at the worst times- or better stated my 'worst' reactions), in so far as cognitively I can think : "I'm not a child now, but an adult- (remember) I have adult resources", so I'm sure there is some connection.

Conversely, when I feel at peace and happy and not hypervigilant/ guard is down (which I can't engineer, but am working on it), I just feel (also) more childlike, so maybe those relate back to good memories.
I guess it's the closest thing I can imagine to a "pre-ptsd identity".

-Thanks so much for your help-
xoxox

(P.S- Lizbeth, that's so funny- I always wanted to run a (terrific) orphanage- not for 'myself', however, lol :oops: :rolleyes: )

 

[LizBeth1]

No problem Junebug - it's not easy to distinguish these things at times, that is for sure.

It's wonderful that you are having times of peace and happiness and I totally hear you about not quite engineering it at the moment. Do you do any art or music? Just drawing, making stuff with clay, collage, singing, dancing, or any other kind of "playing" is great for accessing positive childlike experiences, which for most of us didn't happen enough. Great way to do "inner parenting" without the pressure of doing something "right." It just kind of "is" and I think it works on the unconscious in a unique and freeing way. And it makes inner children feel happy and loved ;)

Hee hee - I know, I've often had the urge to do one of those volunteer trips to work in an orphanage in a third world country. When I reaized I had my own inner orphanage, that was a whole new animal!!

Wishing you peaceful cohesion!
LB

 

[Tinyflame]

Thank you LB, -you too. :)

Yes I could dance till I dropped and haven't painted for years.
(not singing though- :eek: :p ,lol)

 

[BloomInWinter]

This thread is very informative and brings me hope. Thank you!!!