What does it mean to talk about "parts" of yourself?

Several therapeutic approaches — Internal Family Systems most explicitly — work with the idea that the mind naturally organizes into parts with different jobs. A part that gets angry quickly, a part that pushes people away, a part that works relentlessly. The approach treats these as protective rather than defective, which changes what you do with them.

Is anger really protecting something?

Very often, yes. Anger is frequently a secondary emotion sitting on top of hurt, fear, or shame — it is faster, it feels stronger, and it keeps the more vulnerable feeling out of view. That does not excuse what anger does when it is acted out, but it does explain why suppressing it rarely works. The underlying feeling is still there.

How is this different from just making excuses for bad behavior?

Understanding why a part behaves the way it does is not the same as endorsing what it does. The distinction matters: you can hold someone fully accountable for their behavior while still recognizing that suppression alone will not change it. In practice, people who understand what a part is protecting tend to be better at changing the behavior, not worse.

What kind of therapy works with this?

Internal Family Systems, parts-informed approaches, and trauma-focused work including EMDR and Brainspotting all engage with this territory. Several of our clinicians have training in these approaches. Free 30-minute consultation: 801.272.3420 or text 801.997.8760.

The Parts of You That Scare You

We tend to label the frightening or unacceptable parts of ourselves as bad rather than listening to what they protect. Many therapy approaches treat these parts as protective rather than pathological — anger guarding hurt, control guarding fear. Recognizing what a part is defending is often what allows it to settle.

Te Kā was never the villain

In Disney's Moana, the chief's daughter is chosen by the ocean to find Maui and return the heart of Te Fiti. On the way she has to face Te Kā — an angry, fiery lava monster standing between her and the goal.

It is only later that we learn Te Kā was Te Fiti all along. Not a separate enemy. The same being, with her heart taken from her.

If you did not know that, you would make an entirely reasonable mistake and read her as the villain of the film. She is frightening. She attacks. She stands directly in the way of everything the story wants.

But she was not attacking. She was furiously seeking to be healed and to have her heart returned. Her pain was so large that it frightened everyone around her, and so everyone concluded that they would have to fight her to resolve it.

We do this to ourselves

I think we all have parts of us that need to be heard and understood. And I think we spend a great deal of energy labeling the scary and unacceptable ones as bad, rather than listening to what they are trying to say.

The part of you that gets disproportionately angry. The part that goes cold and withdraws when someone gets close. The part that cannot stop working. The part that needs to control everything about the trip, the meal, the schedule. The part that sabotages the good thing right as it starts to matter.

Most people's instinct with these is suppression. Get rid of it. Be better than it. And that instinct is understandable, because these parts often do real damage to the people around us.

The trouble is that suppression is almost never what settles them down. Frequently it does the opposite — a part that feels condemned tends to work harder, not less.

What they are usually protecting

Ask instead what the part is defending, and the picture changes.

Anger is very often guarding hurt, because anger is faster and feels stronger and keeps the vulnerable thing out of sight. Withdrawal is often guarding against an abandonment that happened once already. Control is usually guarding against a chaos someone lived through and swore they would never be caught in again. Perfectionism is frequently guarding against a specific, remembered experience of not being enough.

None of that makes the behavior acceptable. A part with a good reason can still be doing genuine harm, and being understood is not the same as being excused.

But it does explain why willpower keeps failing. You cannot successfully fight off a part of yourself that is convinced it is the only thing keeping you safe. What tends to work is the other thing — understanding what it is protecting, and demonstrating over time that the protection is no longer needed in the same form.

The scene worth remembering

My favourite moment in the film is when Moana walks toward the giant, terrifying, living volcano and sings that she has crossed the horizon to find her, that she knows her name, that they have stolen the heart from inside her — but that this does not define her, that this is not who she is, and that she knows who she is.

She does not defeat Te Kā. She recognizes her.

That is a remarkably accurate picture of what therapy is often like. Those moments where something in you that has been treated as the enemy gets seen accurately for the first time, and softens, because it no longer has to shout to be noticed.

It is also worth noting that Moana could only do this after she had accepted the part of herself she had been suppressing for the entire film. That order is not incidental. People tend to become able to see this in others at roughly the pace they become able to see it in themselves.

If something in you feels like a monster

The parts of yourself you are most ashamed of are usually the ones carrying the most information about what happened to you.

Several therapeutic approaches work directly with this territory — Internal Family Systems, other parts-informed approaches, and trauma work including EMDR and Brainspotting. Several of our clinicians have training in these, and they work in Orem, Murray, and online across Utah.

Start with a free 30-minute consultation: 801.272.3420, text 801.997.8760, or book online.