Parts Work Therapy
You know those moments when you feel five years old again. It’s not always in the middle of a huge blow up either, sometimes it’s smaller than that. You notice the dishes still aren’t done and your partner is due home any minute, and something in you goes tight before you’ve even worked out why. Your throat closes, the words are right there and you cannot get a single one out.
You know you’re an adult. You know exactly how old you are, but in that second, you don’t feel it. Something younger is standing where you should be.
It doesn’t only show up in the big moments. Sometimes it’s something as small as deciding whether to say you’d rather cook than get takeaway, and somehow that turns into a full conversation with yourself about whether you’re even allowed to want that.
That’s a part of you, not all of you. A part that learned a long time ago it wasn’t safe to speak, or to want things, or to take up room. It stepped in to protect you once and it’s still stepping in now, even in rooms that are actually safe.
Parts work is how you get to know that part instead of being run by it. It changes how you see your reactions, your thoughts, and the beliefs you didn’t know you were still carrying.
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What changes first
- You can name the part that just took over, instead of only feeling ambushed by it afterwards
- The five-year-old reactions stop running the show in rooms that are actually safe
- Self-sabotage stops feeling random and starts making sense
- The full-blown arguments you have with yourself lose their grip
- Old fear stops feeling like today’s fear
- You stop freezing and stay in the moment instead of leaving it
- If EMDR keeps stalling in the same place, this is often why
What is parts work?
Parts work is a way of understanding yourself as more than one voice. You have parts that manages, parts that protects, a part that still reacts like it’s five years old in a room that’s perfectly safe.
There are a few types names of therapy styles that parts work comes under – IFS, ego state therapy, schema therapy, resource therapy. The label matters less than what happens once we’re in the room together.
Parts work isn’t something where you talk about a part and I nod along. We work with the part directly, in session, while it’s actually present. We work with the body, the mind and whats unconscious.
For CPTSD from childhood sexual abuse, there usually isn’t one part to get to know, there are several, formed at different ages, each still carrying something nobody’s helped them put down yet. This is deep work, and it takes the time it takes.
Frozen in time
Childhood trauma (including childhood sexual abuse) rarely happens once, and even when it does, it happens to a child who has to keep growing up around it. That means the part of you carrying it doesn’t get to grow up either. It stays exactly the age it was when nobody came to help or support you, you’re left bracing for the same thing to happen again, today, as an adult.
This is why a raised voice over the dishes can put you back in a five year old’s body decades later. The part isn’t confused. It’s doing its job, using information that was true once, in a body that reacts faster than logic can catch up.
For CPTSD specifically, there’s rarely just one part. There are several parts, at several ages, each one still holding what happened in and at that event. That’s the reason this takes longer than six sessions. Not because progress is slow, but because there’s more than one part waiting to be found, heard, and seen.
If you are interested in how parts show up in the therapy room, you can read a bit about it in this blog “EMDR and Hidden Parts“.
What about Emdr?
We don’t run parts work and EMDR as two separate things you book separately. As EMDR therapists, parts work is often the groundwork that makes EMDR possible at all. Before a memory can be processed, the part protecting it has to trust that it’s safe to let you get close. Skip that step with CPTSD and EMDR either stalls or doesn’t stick. You can read more about EMDR here.
Sound familiar?
How often can you see yourself in these?
- Needing to be early everywhere, just so you’re never the one caught off guard
- Not being able to relax until you know exactly how the night’s going to end
- Saying “I’m fine” before anyone’s even asked what’s wrong
- Cleaning the whole kitchen at 11pm because your body needed something to do with itself
- Rehearsing a conversation in the shower that never actually happens
- Being the calm one in the room while you’re the one falling apart
- Not being able to leave a text unanswered for more than a few minutes
- Packing for every possible version of a trip that’s only two days long
- Laughing at something that wasn’t funny, just to keep the room easy
- Needing an exit planned before you can actually enjoy being somewhere
- Apologising for something before anyone’s said a word about it
- Not being able to sit down properly until every job in the house is done
- Avoiding going to bed with your partner as you know you may have to be intimate
- Cannot get off the couch all day
- Going blank in the middle of a conversation that was important to you
- Anger appears out of nowhere over the smallest of things, and often directed at those who didn’t cause it or deserve it
Keep an eye on our blogs, we go deeper into these.
A different way of doing therapy
Parts work is popular right now, and it’s not hard to see why. It goes somewhere talk therapy alone often can’t, because you stop only seeing the parts making your life hard and start seeing all of you, including what those parts have been trying to do for you the whole time.
Your parts have been carrying this alongside you for a long time. They’re not broken and they’re not the enemy, they just need help putting down what they were never meant to carry this long.
Fees
$205 (60 min) / $285 (90 min) – Individual Sessions
$320 (90 mins) – Couple Sessions
Intensive sessions of 4-5 hours available, contact for pricing and more information
Private health rebates may apply.
In-person in Perth and online Australia Wide.
Choose your therapist
Fees
$205 (60 min) / $285 (90 min) – Individual Sessions
$320 (90 mins) – Couple Sessions
Intensive sessions of 4-5 hours available, contact for pricing and more information
Private health rebates may apply.
In-person in Perth and online Australia Wide.
Choose your therapist
