[Rachel Thor]

Summary post: In some ways I agree with Mandy’s summary, that it’s kind of hard to see what I learned in terms of working with parts above and beyond PW1. However my frame and understanding of what Partswork MEANS in the world is deepening…

I remember someone asking “do our parts change personality or approach based on the current context of the situation?” which essentially asks the question, “do our parts have parts?” For me, this is the quintessentially fractalular experience of consciousness.

We, each human, is one “part” of the human consciousness. we have desires, motives, and fears. we have allies and enemies. we have triggers and soothers and the more we connect to the “whole” of humanity, the more we find peace, compassion, and reconciliation.

They, each part, is one “part” of a mind’s consciousness. they have desires, notices, and fears. they have allies and enemies. they have triggers and soothers and the more we as coaches connect these parts to the “soul” of the person, the more they find peace, compassion, and reconciliation.

Basically, I use non-violent-communication and mediation often between couples or other relationships struggling to understand and trust each other. I also use NVC between parts. I’m starting to realize that some of my deepest gifts as a coach, in holding multiple perspectives and helping to locate understanding and integration, exists on multiple scales.

To understand neurobiologically that there are a multitude of differing personalities within each conscious mind starts to give real-life credence to a concept that ancient philosophers and mystics have been saying for some time, that I am in you and you are in me. What an utterly complex and beautiful and chaotic world we live in, especially as our minds become developed enough to self-reflect on it!

[Rachel Thor]

Mandy, so cool and inspiring! I love that you got a chance to really practice this first session plus listening deeply on the medicine walk for the long term map, and really felt so much empathy for your client’s experience! It strikes me as a “new” tool to do these medicine walks and offer what I might otherwise call “an agenda” up front, that has to do with the educational conversations you mentioned, and then weave it into a coaching practice that is all about being in the moment and letting the client guide. It’s cool to hear you say that adding this map has allowed you to deepen even further into the trusting process. I love when you said: I think these kind of educational conversations are so impactful for my clients. It takes the brain, their behavior and their way of being from something intangible and out of their control, to something they can understand and work with, taking back control over how they are in their lives. Bravo!

[Rachel Thor]

Initial Post:
My long term coaching session is with a client I’ve been seeing since last April. we spent a good 7 months mostly creating her Partswork mandala, and then we’ve had about 2 and half months apart while she traveled and had some other things happen in life.

I had a sense that we had completed a chapter of mapping together, and that the space occurred as needed for some integration to happen naturally. I brought up my feeling of our February session beginning a new chapter that might even look completely different than before, and really using this 90 min session together to celebrate what has happened and establish what wants to come next. She agreed.

I called in our counsels, spirit friends, and guides to support this next moment. She had laid out papers with reflections on them in each of the 4 directions and was ready for lots of creative modalities like movement as well. (we were over the phone.)

what arose for a while was Partswork, and after I reflect on it, it was in some ways a replaying of the Partswork we had been doing over our past 6 months, happening all in an hour. as in, these patterns we had been working now had a more familiar route through the new way, so they traveled more quickly and connected more.

The story of the parts went like this. She feels a super pregnant woman in the South, ready to give birth to a new offering (she’s working on developing a workshop), and she feels her 3 year old in the east crying. the 3yo says “I don’t know how to do it!” At first the cries reminded me of times in the past when she’s gotten lost in that part, but she actually brought herself out of it and was able to find another part to come in to soothe fairly quickly on her own! That itself is a big sign of progress to me because we have gotten stuck at that juncture a number of times before and it only lasted a minute today.

The mama says “oh honey you don’t need to know how to do anything. we are just going to be here.” Then 3yo changes, “I don’t know why they’re pointing at me but I don’t want to keep talking to the flowers while they are”. We bring soul in to learn more. A few other parts come to support the 3 year old (a colorful teenager who encourages her that her gift of hearing the voices of all living things is really cool, and a witchy woman who teaches her how to know which voices to trust – the ones who make you feel smooth and soothed and lit up – so you don’t get overwhelmed by all of them at once.)

Eventually we got to a point where she was feeling the fear from her child and the smoothness of acceptance and compassion from some of her adults at the same time, and we just stayed with that for a bit.

I asked her what becomes possible as she holds these both at the same time, and her soul lit up, shining, ready to dance, move, create. so we did that (lyrical, spirals).
Then another part came in, organizer, wanting to understand what was going on and stop the unknown from flowing so she could keep everybody safe.

My client recognized that instead of getting rid of organizer so her soul could come through, something she’s lamented before, that she could hold them both, just like she had just done with the child and mama. so we spent some time holding the free flowing and the organizing, like holding a slinky from both sides and passing its weight back and forth between hands.

then we Brought soul in, to encompass and expand to hold all the parts that had shown up today. she felt that each part has its common ground in the soul itself. and remembered that during our parts work she had discovered her soul was the ground of the park, and each part was typically some tree emerging from it.

At that point something new continued to land. she didn’t have to keep working out conflicts between each part. She didn’t have to keep organizing and trying to figure everything out for it to be safe. She was already whole, and each part was integrated. she could feel the parts within the whole and the whole created by the parts. the moving, breathing, integrating system. and in this threshold of sorts, she really experienced that integration, holding all of it and seeing the individuals at the same time.

Her reflections coming out of the experience were that she wants to remember and practice checking in with her whole being, when she starts to feel anxiety from certain parts show up when she’s trying to make workshop decisions. she has some movements that help her reconnect to that place, like imagining the slinky and moving her hands with it. she also had an image of wings that both opened up and grounded down.

Of course the timing is uncanny as I just had a personal session yesterday all about learning to increase my window of tolerance for my screaming child by staying present with her (holding discomfort and soothing at the same time) and so when I asked her “what does that allow for” I was genuinely curious and felt relief in my own system to remember that holding both at once allows my soul to come through automatically and simply create whatever it is she wants to create at that moment.

Anyways, it’s my meaning-making out of this long term process that just like the slinky back and forth between two parts in this session, that’s what we’ve been doing throughout her whole system for 6 months. then there was breathing room, and now in our re-start, we kicked it off with an integration of all the work that had been done up to now. With a sense of “ahhhh here is how I can be with soul and each part, all at once, and feel the fluid connection between wholeness and pieces not being separate.”

With this tool and possibility now accessible, I believe her work will continue to open up and flow through her, in a pace resonant with her whole self and soul. and in the inevitable moments when parts arise, she has a built in practice for holding that part and its opposite, then returning to the whole soul in order to decide. I’m pumped to see where that practice takes her!

As far as long term coaching goes, her initial goal at the beginning of it all has been to figure out “what do I want”? That has been an issue for her because as soon as one part would voice its wants, other parts would jump in to yell, silence, argue, shame, etc. So it seems as though she has been needing this integration in order to be able to hold her wholeness- which includes all these parts, and trust the ground of her soul to respond to this question. I can see how it truly took this amount of time and these number of seeming rabbit holes away from that main goal in order to integrate enough to circle back and move forward with her whole self. It gives me a belief in the power of a 6 month package…. and a follow up integration session a few months later.

[Rachel Thor]

initial post:
I wouldn’t normally write a post about a session I received here, but it was so powerful and such a deep way of using parts work that I felt it would be relevant to share and learn from!

My friend A and I were receiving a dual-session in hopes to get at the root of an issue we had noticed show up between us but ultimately discovered was much deeper for us both. Basically, her and I have been interested in the same men a number of times, and usually one of us feels shame and shrinks back, while the other feels a bit more anger and frustration. We’ve been working consciously with this pattern for a WHILE now, able to laugh at it even and recognize that we were flip flopping between two sides of the same dilemma that we both shared at our cores… but what was the deeper need? 😉

What I came to realize was that this was NOT about men, and all about aliveness. If she felt good and alive, life force flowing and enjoying her life, and I felt cut off or blocked or stuck, then seeing her living openly would unconsciously make me angry and resentful, jealous really. Which would in turn trigger her fear of being rejected by a sister, turn into shame that she did something wrong, and ultimately a shut down of her life force. So then we’d both be shut down lol. The opposite would happen as well. (I’m so grateful to have friends in my life who can truly track relational patterns like this with me, in connection, and are so willing to work on them together, for the healing of us all)

ANYWAYS So Tobin first invites us to settle in, deep breaths into our sensation and experience, keep coming back to it. Then he brings a resource: he had us imagine we were in a temple, that we could really put down our heavy packs and rest with the phrase “we’ve made it” to help us continue sinking down.

He gave space for our “parts” to arise and have voice, without explicitly going into Partswork. Then he did two things I found really unique and useful that can be applied to Partswork! He called forth the one in each of us who knows this is what we are here on the planet to do. who understands already why we have chosen these lessons to learn, and what is needed to move through them. the one in us that is regal, royal, and able to stay with discomfort for the greater good of the system. In essence, he called forth the soul, not by naming it, but by describing it. This feels like a powerful tool in itself because we can invoke “parts” from our clients simply through intention and description, without having to have built a full mandala or without them needing to know the name or resonate with the term “soul” or anything.

Next, rather than jumping right into conversation, he invited us to stay with these soul/priestess parts and had them connect to spirit, to higher calling, to resource for what seemed like a long time (it was very somatic/shamanic so I didn’t have a good track of time). This seems like another great tool to use with parts. inviting the part that’s most available for resourcing to come use or create it for the system in that moment, experientially.

Once our whole systems were filled with this resource, he VERY SOFTLY invited in the “blip”, the part of each of us that had been triggered by the most recent event, and gave us each a chance to speak from that part WHILE maintaining connection with the priestess/soul part. Basically instead of integrating through conversation, the integration happened by holding both FEELINGS of the parts simultaneously in the body.

As I felt that angry part of me arise (and then turn into dissociation, as per the pattern), he reminded me what he had said earlier, that this is what my soul came to this planet for (to be alive, to feel). It was enough of a representation that my soul/priestess part came online so strong and was able to breath/feel/be with the uncomfortable feeling for my smaller angry part. The same happened for my friend, AND as we each shared the perspective and the alchemy of our priestess with our smaller parts, we both viscerally experienced the healing of the “other side of the coin” as well. So even though I was working my soul with the anger side of the coin, she was working her soul with the shame side of the coin, I also received a deep transmission that integrated my shame side of the coin, and vice versa. Amazing!

So he invited us into what he called the “hot spot”, that excruciating place right in between the two sides of the coin, that as soon as it gets touched is what shoots us out to one or the other reaction in order to play out a drama to avoid the real pain of the hot spot. Ya know what I mean? So then TOGETHER, we both sat in that hot spot, embodying the resourcing of the priestess/soul parts.

And that’s the last tool I want to mention, is the idea of bringing Partswork into couples work or relational work, (something I’m SO interested in), perhaps using a whole group of people’s similar parts to invoke a certain kind of group field together (calling all souls…), or that parts and soul can actually cross-link between people. Fascinating ideas to me.

In my own experience, the most magical thing happened (also a pretty standard brain re-connection experience lol). I began traveling back through time, seeing all these memories of times where I had been torn down by other girls and women for being in my aliveness, or I had been resentful/angry and torn down other girls and women for them being in their aliveness. Each memory flashed, and instead of hearing what I used to hear “Rachel’s such a try hard…” they were replaced with those same people saying “thank you for reminding me where I want to show up more in my own life” and I saw myself saying that to the women I had hurt as well. So it felt like I got to viscerally experience an obvious reprogramming of the brain, so much so that my cells were all vibrating in a new way. When we finished I felt absolutely present, yet I had been so present that the part of me that keeps track of past/future could hardly remember what happened. It was like coming back from a deep medicine journey feeling profoundly changed.

And just as a follow up to this, it also felt like the deeper need/peak experience that gave me a vision for HOW I want to go about walking up that hill everyday moving forward. Which very much aligns with the vision I was leaving our last intensive with… How do I bring myself fully back to aliveness, to feeling, to embodiment, to movement, to power, everyday? How do I Let myself go without judgement, and lovingly nudge ever closer to a real sinking into presence, EVERY DAY, in order to stay connected with my soul on a more regular basis? So far I’ve continued to let myself feel my hurting parts (child) in a new way, with a stronger voice of parent. (I actually had FATHER come online during this experience. up til now I only had a mother part and hadn’t even considered he was missing from the mandala (probably bc that’s how life was for me)). So that’s amazing too, to discover and potentially feel for the first time a new part that had previously been just a missing gaping hole.

Well I hope sharing this experience is helpful to others. I’d love to hear any other creative ways you’ve seen Partswork being used, or used it yourself! much love

[Rachel Thor]

Summary Post:

In some ways, this felt like one of the “less technical” teachings… because Julie so highly emphasized just being with the client as they need it. I am imagining she might give more specific tools to people who are being trained as therapists, but I’m not sure. However, from what I know of the flow and gestalt of life and healing, it’s no surprise to me that grief is in some ways, simply another big energy that has gotten stuck and needs safety, permission, and compassion to sequence. Simply put, our coaching presence, attuned reflection, and acceptance of our clients’ process. I am so grateful (and was so rocked) by going through a grief process of my own during this intensive, and I love getting a chance to write my summary post a few months later, after that grief has passed and the wheel of life has continued to turn. I am proud of myself for fully feeling what I needed to at this time, as well as seeking out embodied support (qi gong grief forms series).

As Julie so aptly stated, “If you take the time it takes, it’ll take less time.” Life. moving. <3

[Rachel Thor]

Summary Post:

When living “in the moment” with clients and knowing these brain strategies, they can feel almost magical (especially the RAS) and mythic. I love the interplay between the experiential living through change and the educational component that goes into helping a client understand their own process (especially in a way that de-mystifies and makes them more receptive to their experience).

I was lucky enough to offer some purpose-based career coaching sessions where I developed a worksheet that explains the RAS and a few psychological studies that have been done on the best ways people make complex decisions! Long story short, it’s best to use your conscious mind to take in all the info you can, then distract yourself while your sub-conscious gets to work sorting all the variables. After you’ve let both parts of your brain use their strengths, you trust the intuitive answer that you feel. it’s the message from the sub-conscious computer. You all probably intuitively know this, but if you’re interested in the studies or my write up, let me know 🙂

[Rachel Thor]

Initial Post
I had a new client who did a trade with me – I got my hair cut 😉 – who was great practice and interesting because she immediately let me know that she “just spent a year feeling all her feelings with her therapist and did NOT want to deal with emotions in our session.” Lol.
I was very curious to work with her and we established that she wanted to start eating healthy again pretty immediately. As we started digging, I learned she had a history of swinging between extreme-healthy eating, almost to the point of disorder, and total disregard for health, and this time around she wanted to find some kind of middle road. So that was the first level of the issue that she was trying to integrate. In some ways, she was in the process of change, and had built a pattern of relapse, because she always tried to change her behavior without changing her beliefs underneath.
When we looked at what triggered each swing and what mental patterns showed up with them, she found that when she was extreme dieting, she was often beating herself up, trying to be perfect so she could be loved, and when she was eating junk food she was checked out, wanting to escape the mental attack and belief that she couldn’t be loved. It so often comes down to that, doesn’t it?
Well, because she didn’t want to go toward the feeling/experiential (which is also one of her parts/coping tools to check out), I got to spend more time explaining how the brain works.
I got to bring her attention to the root belief underneath both sides of her food swings, a desire to be loved by others and a fear that she won’t be. She also brought up her smoking habit and people pleasing tendencies and began to see how those behaviors fit the same mental pattern of beating herself up and checking out underneath.
I told her how we could come up with a food plan that fits the middle road she’s looking for, but that if she attempts to beat herself into submission to that plan, she’ll actually just be replaying her swing toward the extreme side. She agreed that we should focus on integrating the underlying mental pattern in order to find the way forward through action (deeper need).
She felt frustrated at this, because “the answer is self-love” felt so cliche and annoying. Looking further, I saw that she actually didn’t know HOW to self-love. She didn’t have great models or examples to pull from.
So we started making lists of her common pattern loops. What are the thoughts you have about yourself? What are the actions you take? What triggers those patterns? For each one she wrote down the specific common thought (ex: you’re such a loser) and the action she would take after it (ex: eat a pint of ice cream and binge watch TV). And then I asked her, if she could flip those loops to a positive loop, what would each step flip to? For example, she wants to flip “eat a pint of ice cream” to “cook myself a healthy meal”. When we got to flipping the mental scripts, this is where she really didn’t know what a loving opposite of “you never do enough” could be.
This is where I asked her if she wanted some examples, and she was really excited about that. So I started brainstorming with her. “I never do enough” could flip to “I go at the pace that keeps me healthy”. “You’re fucking up again (when smoking a cigarette)” could flip to “I’m doing the best I can right now”. etc. and so I’d offer a suggestion and she would tweak it to fit.
What was amazing is that once we started brainstorming these script flips, they WERE the deeper need, and when she heard many of them, she had visceral reactions for the first time, tears of joy and possibility that she could feel loved from within.
She kept wanting to take these and run with them. Make big giant changes all at once. But since that has been her pattern in the past, I kept inviting her to remember her want, of baby steps and sustainable change. She settled eventually on practicing script flipping when she caught herself in specific instances that are common for her, and rather than setting up a diet plan, to choose to cook one meal per week for herself while saying the self-love affirmations, and not worrying about the other behaviors yet. When we check in next time we are going to see how that’s going and possibly add more, but my guess is that her inner critic is still quite strong and we will need to spend some time nurturing a new pathway.
I get the sense that she spent a long time with her therapist learning about her “issues and patterns” and feeling shitty about them. It feels so important to bring people all the way through to feeling the deeper need so they have vision of what the pain can turn into.

[Rachel Thor]

Me too! Actually I took this concept and have been melding it with something Katie Asmus taught us…. one of our resourcing tools she gave us was to imagine a person or animal who really cared for us being right there with us. Perhaps they said loving things or were just there as a calming presence. I realized this is totally the same thing as invoking (maybe even creating!? I don’t know?!) a resourced part.

One of my clients has spent her whole life in extremely abusive relationships, and she is freshly out of a physiologically manipulative experience and has very low self esteem. I’m working with her on building up her internal and external resources.

One day on the phone some part of her was speaking very unkindly, and I asked if she could imagine a friend or pet who really cared about her… she found a friend in mind, Alice. I then asked her to imagine Alice sitting on the couch with her and saying “I really care about you”. she did and she started crying and laughing and feeling immediately better. It’s still hard for her to say “I care about you” to herself, so she brings “Alice” with her to work, to be with her during the hard times at night alone, and even into meditation… Invoking this part has been quite a resource for her and it’s a pathway in toward compassion that is accessible for her.

[Rachel Thor]

Reflecting again on your post, I can see even more the helpfulness of providing a map and a pathway forward. I’ve been starting to consider again what would a program look like for me to offer… and it’s essentially doing this medicine walk for my “ideal client” and posing to all of them the essentially same map and long term plan. it would get to involve community potentially, in a way that 1-1 coaching doesn’t as much, as part of the plan. I’ve noticed with some of my relationship coaching clients that taking the time to understand the issue and then provide them with an assessment 1. helps them trust that I understand their situation 2. helps them trust that I am the right fit to help them reach their goals. this sets up a container for us to flow in the moment more freely. knowing where we are headed. I hope to take these long term coaching principles into a program.

[Rachel Thor]

Summary post: What a beautiful summary Mandy… “Being able to hold a client’s growth within a long term process is like moving outwards in the fractal, looking down from an eagle eye view, holding an entire process (6 months or a year) through the same lens as one solitary session, mapping through severance, threshold, incorporation, grounding, resourcing, titration, expanding window of tolerance, and coming back through again.”

I feel your poetry and keen perspective here… and much like integrating two opposites, the poetry seems to get closer to inseparable from the perspective.

I love the concept that actually we are always titrating, or perhaps even, inhaling and exhaling, breathing…. through pain and pleasure, through trauma and resource, through maintenance and relapse, through challenge and celebration.

To zoom out with an eagle eye view as your summary post has just encouraged me to do, and to really see the natural intelligence in the constant titration of everything gives me 1. more compassion for every experience (of mine and of clients and in life) 2. more trust in that it’s okay where it is (even if “it’s holding the breath”) and 3. that bringing awareness and intention to the titration (or breathing process) is a fundamentally simple way to encourage the breath to continue moving, for life to keep flowing.

[Rachel Thor]

Mandy I always love reading about your sessions. Great job working with parts as they arise. My favorite was when you noticed her state change and she was able to identify the therapist part (which itself became a resource). It was cool to in some ways externalize that part and have her see what she does for herself to step into that part before seeing clients, and get to mindfully practice doing that for herself!

I like the edge for you and the question of do I “push” a little harder for what I think will benefit the client, or continue putting out fires and staying with what she brings? While I don’t know the answer, I did have a client once who regularly fell into a really weepy and hopeless part. for many sessions I followed that part and we worked with it together. After a while, once when that part came up, I was able to name “I’m noticing the pattern of this weepy part coming up whenever we begin talking about actions. Would you like to stay with this part now, or try something different?” I can’t remember how I worded it, but she was able to catch herself from then on, reparent that part quickly, and move on with our session after it was more clearly seen… Perhaps that middle ground for you is somewhere in naming your noticing to her, rather than holding back or telling her what should happen?

[Rachel Thor]

Mandy,

so many things struck me in your post. First, I love you (And Kaity) both named how grief ends up being somewhat simple, in that mostly we (and our clients) just need permission to be and feel as they are. and it sounds like when they’re ready to know, they know it’s happening with some reflection.
Also, I love that you tracked her compounding grief from her parents. I can only imagine how that big of a loss in young age would resurface now. So awesome you are holding space for the twists and turns of integrating both.

[Rachel Thor]

Wow Kaity amazing session!

You said “There was no coaching. No real defined threshold or incorporation, just space to feel. I suppose this space was a threshold for her in itself.” and I TOTALLY agree it was a massive threshold, and definitely coaching! For you to be willing to put any plans or “traditional” coaching aside and be with your client in her unfelt grief strikes me as something she needed modeling, permission, and connection to fully do. Sounds like your coaching presence and trust with her finally allowed this to move. I’m feeling very inspired.

[Rachel Thor]

Hi Daniel!

I like your 4 part process you mentioned…
1. Become aware of the “story” or low-road thinking and programming in the mind (i.e. thoughts or beliefs of myself or the world that are no longer serving me)
2. Acknowledge that I am “skiing” down a mental rut that no longer serves me. It is important to acknowledge this is happening without judging myself or beating myself up
3. Practice a 4 sided breath (breathe in, pause, breathe out, pause) in order to re-calibrate and center the nervous system
4. Shift my focus toward a “story” or belief or thought that will serve me towards my goal and vision for my life

Based on my understanding of what we’ve discussed, “low road” is not just “old programming” in terms of a habituated belief or worldview, but limbic system fight or flight override. Are you using it here to mean old programming?

My version of step #1-2 with a highly activated nervous system sounds more like “You’re safe. You’re here now. That was then and that is different than now.” More of a somatic trauma informed approach. Or maybe those are steps that have to occur before your steps 1 and 2, which would be add-ons for the “lowest” road options. And then Step 3 of this highly activated system may Also include, besides breathing, nervous system shaking or soft tears to help the system reset.

Curious anyone else’s takes – wondering if that difference is a matter of degree (working with stronger or lesser charge in a situation) or even if it’s a bigger pattern in wiring (like the people I work with, like me, FEEL everything stronger, while other people don’t need as much feeling steps bc their wiring is more mental)? And even curious people’s thoughts on if those differences have to do with men vs women, or just individual differences.

[Rachel Thor]

Elizabeth, Re: He’s also postulating, based on the research of an Oxford physicist and Elon Musk’s team, that it’s highly likely we’re living in a simulated reality.

I’ve heard those stats from Elon and I actually find it fascinating to wonder about. While “simulated reality” is a phrase that feels weird or confusing, as soon as I think about ONE version of the way people think we’re living, it makes sense…

I know a lot of folks who believe that we have eternal souls that exist elsewhere, and come to earth (or other planets) to learn and grow, play and love. I myself am open to that. Coming here to try out a life is totally the bio-spiritual version of simulating reality. Sometimes I imaging my soul or higher self putting on goggles or going into a trance to have this earth experience. The gap between Elon’s new science and old religions are not far apart if you consider the raw experience!

Essentially, what Eastern practices have been calling reincarnation would be like… starting a new simulation. Interesting and fun to ponder for me too 😉