I experienced two hours of support nirvana today. We dove into a juicy, yet sobering IFS session, encountering a band of marginalized parts that called themselves “the unloved and abandoned.” Meeting them felt like stumbling into a cave of bastard children I’d forgotten I’d fathered.
Since quarantine started, I regularly experience suicidal ideation that voices itself through my system like a band of dissidents broadcasting on pirate radio. It’s heartbreaking, but at the same time easy enough to live with, because I have that felt sense that this voting bloc will never achieve the majority needed to pose a serious threat. But today felt like discovering the source of that radio signal, and putting faces to the voices I’d only ever heard spoken through me in somatic cries for help.
It quickly became clear that these parts were socialized to believe they were unacceptable. While other parts of me were loved and nourished—these parts were left to endure existence with little support. I learned to ignore them like the homeless, distancing myself in hopes of never ending up like them. Thinking that what they needed to do was to change to be more like the rest of us, instead of exploring the possibility that they never received the basic ingredients necessary to healthily mature and succeed in modern times.
While it’s a sad history that got these parts and me to where we are today, the experience of connecting and reconciling with these parts was quite beautiful. My support buddy teared up as I realized that my mission to create a world where anyone can make a living just by being themselves, felt strikingly similar to the creative potential these parts held for me. “They’re my mission,” I uttered. The work I was looking to do in the world was now presenting itself within me.
Reintegration will likely be a month long multi-session process; but I’m excited to dive deep and bring my full potential online, as I reclaim all the parts of me cast away by a society that wasn’t equipped to embrace the fullness of who I am.