Last week, I was walking and listening to music, as I’m prone to do. I’ve been walking again a lot lately, both to try to lose the weight I regained over the last couple of years and to clear my head a bit. The last few weeks have seen a lot of processing about everything going on in therapy. I admit to there being a lot of overthinking, as well.
As I’ve said before, the goal of the Internal Family Systems model of therapy is to reintegrate the subpersonalities that are formed as the result of traumatic events. No matter how dysfunctional their behavior may (or may not!) be, my subparts are trying their best to protect me from hurt and further damage. Some have very simple roles, while others are complex and nuanced in their approach to what they see as their role. They are such an integral part of me that I don’t always notice when one subpersonality is controlling in a situation. (Just think about any time you’ve ever gone off and yelled at someone, had a full-blown tantrum, maybe not even realizing how out of control you are until the moment passes and you’re able to reflect on it rationally. You were always you. You always knew you were you. You were just… not really yourself in that moment.) This part of my journey ends when each subpart is reconnected fully with my Self, which is able to make healthy choices without the need to call on the managers or the firefighters to protect the exiles, perpetually trapped by a moment of trauma.
As I was walking and listening, I had the realization that there is another subpersonality I hadn’t noticed before. In my mind, she looks like a child, though she isn’t. I tried to reach out to her and let her tell me about herself, having an internal dialogue with this deep part of myself. I realized the others had crafted her, had created her from their own bits and pieces. She knows everything each of the other subpersonalities knows, though they don’t each know everything she knows. She acts as sentry for Cissie, a strong last line of defense of the exile, able to protect her (and thus me) with the full knowledge of every other manager and firefighter subpart.
Every time a subpart experienced any kind of extreme emotion, it was transferred onto Pearl. Layer upon layer of hurt and damage, of ecstasy and deep love, grief and agony, irrepressible joy and unflagging hope—all built up slowly to create their own scapegoat, much in the way I created them.
And if I created them and they created her….
Yeah.
Pearl is, essentially, my muchness.
She is the figurative embodiment of everything I’ve lived for the last seven years. She is the angry rebellion against being shoved into a box and denied reciprocal affection. She is the wild abandon that led to not-always-healthy choices. She is the late-night drives with the windows down and the same song blaring for thirty miles. She is the trail of glitter left in my wake. She is the frustration at loving someone so much and not being able to be any more entwined with them.
She is the shame that comes from needing so badly to be loved. She is the uncontrollable, make-me-shake-with-the-sick-of-it-all fear of being emotionally abandoned. She is the overwhelming sorrow from not being able to think of one more thing, the just-the-right thing, to prove that I was worth their love.
Pearl takes those hits, because even the others aren’t always capable of doing it. So they—I—created her, coating both good and bad carefully on an amorphous form disguised as innocence. At the center of it all is the exact hurt and shame that they all fight like hell to protect Cissie from.
Even in the depths of my fucked-up psyche, I tried to make something beautiful from something ugly.
Queen Frostine and I talked at length about it all, as we are prone to do. She was surprised to realize how much of what I do is tied up with self-protection.
“All these things I think about when I think of you, I always just thought of them as personality traits. Now I’m seeing that they’re defense mechanisms, and that is so fucking weird to see.”
And it’s not just the unhealthier traits, like redrawing personal boundaries to accommodate men who refuse to do the same for me. It’s also the gregarious and seemingly-healthy ones, like my openness and willingness to put all of me out there no matter what others think.
Pearl came about as a last line of defense. She’s the general behind my own enemy lines, telling everyone else what to do. And she mimics my voice so well that I let her be in charge.
But she’s not the one who’s supposed to be in charge—I am. I’m the one who gets to make the decisions about what’s best for me, for us. I can have an internal dialogue with these persona, assigned by me as a way to catalog and contain my emotions, to make sense of it all.
The irony is that in dividing myself into these intricate parts, I have compartmentalized my own emotions, segmenting them and locking them away until I’m ready to deal with them—the very thing I hate most when others do it to me. To be ignored, to be dismissed, to be relegated to the dark and dusty recesses of someone’s heart until such time as I am convenient is enraging to me.
But I’m doing it to myself.
It’s time to let them out of their boxes, to remove the walls of compartment and allow them to wander free, talking to each other and to me. It’s time to let them out into the light and the fresh air, to experience my life fully and mindfully, able to see more than the limited view from the bottom of a box.
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