My Journey of Understanding & Appreciating My Parts

Growing up I always felt like I needed to be perfect. Whether it was at school, playing sports or in everyday conversation, I’d consider myself a failure if I didn’t have the highest grades, wasn’t the captain of the team, or didn’t sense someone was truly impressed by me after a conversation. This behavior became increasingly problematic for me as time progressed. Sometimes I would achieve what I thought was perfect but would lead to a belief that I had a reputation to uphold for those around me. It would also become problematic because if I didn’t achieve perfection, I’d tell myself that I was a failure – constantly. Always striving for perfection was exhausting, painful and impacted my wellness in many different ways. After many honest conversations with myself I realized that I always felt like I was unworthy and that being perfect meant that I was worthy of others’ praise, attention and love. It was during this time when I also understood that I needed to know I was worthy of praise, attention and love before anything else. 

I always had a sense that I was made up of thoughts/feelings/opinions, but that they didn’t make up who I truly was. When I learned about parts work (and specifically Internal Family Systems (IFS)) I was provided with a framework that truly spoke to me: as human beings we consist of many different parts – all with their own unique thoughts/concerns – but at our core exists our inherently loving and kind Self. For my experience, there was a part of me burdened with feeling that I am unworthy. I also had another part that managed my day-to-day life by appearing perfect to everyone around me. Taking some time to understand why it was important for this part to appear perfect allowed me to realize that this part was protecting the part of me that felt unworthy. This created space for me to explore and better appreciate how/when/why this part took on this feeling of unworthiness. After some more time, I came to learn that I was allowing my true, kind Self to engage with these parts of me. Understanding this dynamic in my psyche brought not only clarity, but the healing that I needed to do for myself. 

Like all other human beings, I’m a work-in-progress and continue to explore me and how to be kind to myself. Understanding and appreciating all of my parts has been so, so helpful in my journey. What a ride so far!