What is a “part”?
Recently, “parts” language has flooded how we talk about our experiences; we’ve all heard or said “part of me really thinks… but another part….” but what actually is a part?
A “part” is a useful way to describe the specific stories (thoughts) our brain tells in response to the signals it’s receiving from our nervous system and emotions.
Essentially, we receive feedback from our environment, which tells our brain which neurons to fire, and we perceive thoughts that are congruent with this experience. Most of the time, our “parts” (aka, neural pathways) communicate, coordinate, and work together to negotiate what happens and how we make decisions.
But when we’ve experienced childhood trauma, our parts may be less likely to recognize, respect, or work with each other. Instead, our parts may now subdivide to what Janina Fisher describes as the “going on with normal life” self and “emotional parts”.
The “going on with normal life” self, is is the part of our brain that knows how to function as an adult in the world.
This part typically corresponds to the left hemisphere of our brain; the part of our brain that is responsible for logic, planning, and preparation. This set of neural networks is responsible for things like going to therapy, paying rent, remembering appointments, doing homework, having a career, and so forth. This part can be incredibly successful, insightful, articulate, and well-balanced. It’s the part that enabled us to survive whatever circumstances were so dangerous in the first place by continuing to function and finding a way to ultimately get the fuck out of the dangerous situation.
On the other hand, we also have “emotional parts (EPs)” or, as I like to think of them, our inner system of family members (inner child, inner teenager, inner critical parent, etc).
“Emotional parts” correspond to neural networks in the right hemisphere of the brain and mirror nervous system responses: fight, flight, freeze, attach, and submit.
If we’ve experienced childhood trauma, we might find ourselves jumping between parts, letting one part take over for a while until another part jumps in.
For instance, you might become furious that your partner is late for dinner, again(!), and freeze them out throughout the dinner (fight part), only to get home at the end of the night and feel incredibly sad and terrified that you might lose your partner (attach part), only to wake up the next morning to have a really helpful conversation about what you need from your partner if they’re running late (going on with normal life self).
These protective responses help us to navigate and survive dangerous situations.
We develop these responses as children (remember, this is the part of our brain that relies on emotions and procedural or implicit memory to make sense of the world) and these networks are often activated unconsciously by our perception of danger or threat.
The more we can understand and recognize which “part” of ourself is telling the story, the more we can understand about our experience in the world. And what is needed for us to feel safe in the story that is happening right now.
