I spent a lot of the last week or so listening to a couple of podcasts about Internal Family Systems, about how and why the personality becomes segmented and how it’s possible to reconnect with each subpersonality and integrate the segments with a healthy Self. Look, I know from the outside it seems like a ludicrous idea of having a fragmented personality, with slivers of varying sizes and abilities vying for opportunity to help the person manage and live their life. But what I also know is that what I was doing wasn’t working well. Making the opportunity to listen to my emotions as they come up, to hear and feel without recrimination what each offer and to mindfully consider that specific point of view, has been eye opening.
I can be mercurial. I can move quickly from one emotion to another, be blissfully joyous in a moment and then respond in an extreme flash to come perceived hurt or threat. In the IFS model, that is one subpart responding and then another. Sometimes they not only battle the world around me, they battle with one another. But each has a job. Each has specific skills and methods to protect and help me, even though they’re not always as effective or healthy as would be best. Because their abilities are limited by only select experience and memory, none has a full range of tools at their disposal, but they do the best they can.
One thing that kept coming up this week was the idea of triggers. The word “trigger” itself can be met with an eyeroll or irritation at its overuse in recent years, especially in pop journalism and often in regard to social justice issues. But emotional and psychological triggers are a real thing. [I’m no psychologist or neurobiologist, and my explanations and understandings here come as a paraphrased interpretation of what I have been learning in regard to my own work.] As I understand it, experience is processed by the body and through the mind’s eye, imprinted on the brain and maintained in the prefrontal cortex, which is sometimes referred to as the “mammalian” part of the brain because it controls less instinctual functions. However, when there is trauma, the memory is imprinted in the amygdala, or the “reptilian” brain. This part engages during stressful moments, when protection becomes instinctual. That angry, extreme outburst during an argument, when you just can’t disengage from the emotion and scream and say terrible things you might not mean when you’re calm—that comes from the amygdala. The brain thinks we’re under attack and chooses fight over flight.
Triggers are created in the amygdala. When some later situation occurs that feels similar to those memories, fight-or-flight is engaged again. Not only does the perception in the moment seem like a very real threat, memories of previous, similar moments seem like additional threats. Anxiety and agitation, even fear and panic, can ensue, and we do what we can to protect ourselves from those threats. Again, maybe we are able to disengage and flee the moment. Often, people who have experienced trauma will fight, sometimes in ways that seem bizarre or non-sensical, both to others and to themselves. Unless there is healing of the trauma, the hurt can be triggered over and over. Without healing, the hurt is continually reinflicted—at least it seems that way to the brain—and the damage is deepened every time it’s reopened.
In the same way scars serve to protect a vulnerable space that has been damaged, the subparts of personality that are born of trauma act as protectors. In some ways, they are psychic scars, doing their best to heal a hurt and keep it from causing more pain, closing a wound to keep it from festering. But sometimes the scar tissue itself causes problems, sensitive from nerves that didn’t heal fully and pulling against healthy tissue painfully. When something in a moment triggers a traumatic memory, the subparts work to soothe the pain. They’ll twist and turn to pull the person away from hurt—like an emotional flinch—or they’ll engage it fully to stop the hurt from happening at all—swatting away an insect that is about to sting or bite. Born in the amygdala, the subpersonalities function instinctually, often without our conscious knowledge of how they work.
The goal of IFS, and currently my own therapeutic goal, is to identify and connect with each subpersonality, to understand its specific functions and motivations, and to teach it healthier ways to function, eventually allowing for an integrated, healthy Self. This is not the extremity of The United State of Tara or Sybil. There may be days in which it seems like I’m living The Three Faces of Stephanie, but I don’t have a dozen extreme personalities trapped inside me, fighting to get out. Not like that.
But taking the time to listen for them and hear what they say, breathing through an emotion or moment of extreme thought and examining how that connects to my Self, has been both wonderful and emotionally draining. I’ve been able to be less reactionary to some pretty difficult situations. I’ve reined in anger and avoided unnecessary outburst. I handled some particularly stressful engagements with some exes quite calmly and healthfully.
I also spoke about my molestation this week, verbalizing and articulating the logistics of my sexual abuse in ways I never have. It took 40 years for me to feel safe enough to say out loud specifically what had happened (at least in part). It was frightening, conjuring those memories into my present, feeling like adult Stephanie was watching them happen while simultaneously feeling what Cissie felt in those moments. I am incredibly thankful to have an amazing therapist who I (we) trust enough to ask her to help me with those feelings.
That night, I remembered a dream I had when I was very young, maybe 3 or 4. I’ve always remembered the dream, a nightmare that terrified me. Because of that dream, I fell asleep with the lights on until I was a teenager. I still tend to sleep with my blankets drawn tightly up around my neck because of it. While it would sound innocuous and maybe even silly to describe it now, I realized it was taken from what was happening around me while I was being molested. It was the distraction from what was happening, and my tiny, young subconscious turned it into a nightmare that haunted me for a decade.
There was no sudden healing that came with this realization. But there was connection with that part. There was understanding that allowed me to connect with Cissie, who was the target of the earliest trauma. To understand her is to show her that I can be trusted, that I will protect her and love her, no matter what, that I am a capable adult who can handle it for all of us. She doesn’t have to be left in the care of teenaged babysitters with their limited knowledge and capabilities.
I have spent years in a constant state of fight-or-flight, hypersensitive to perceived threat. Sometimes those perceptions have been wrong, and I have misinterpreted experience through the filters of my own agitation. Sometimes the voices of those subparts have chattered and whispered chaotically, warning me of what they see, and I have accepted their perceptions as truth. They’re not always wrong. They are, however, always singular and myopic in what they can see from their standpoint in the past.
There will be people who feel discomfited reading this. My words will make some people uncomfortable. At times, they make me uncomfortable. But the secrecy and shame that came with sexual trauma should never have been mine. Cissie should never have felt afraid and ashamed by what was done to her, without her consent and without her love. Stephie and Quinn should never have felt the need to protect her. While I have created a façade of transformation over the last seven years, there has still been a constant turmoil inside of me. The discomfort of a reader can never compare to the discomfort I have felt inside for my entire life.
I will not hide behind someone else’s shame again.
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