Love or Lava with your Java?
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski
“Embrace your inner woman!” I called to my husband as he left the house this morning. It’s international women’s day, after all.
Lately I’ve been intrigued by the idea that most human beings have multiple parts, even personalities operating within them.* I’m certain that competing parties are animating my mind in the morning. There’s the part that really wants to stay in bed, and then there’s that other part that wins over my muscles and gets me upright.
That cortisol wakeup wizard often finds effective to show me stress videos as I’m coming to. You see, my first task of the morning these days is insuring that my children get to school. So if it finds me lolling in bed, the wizard plays a short clip where I see the kids oversleeping. Then I see a few reels of children waking up late and angry.
If that clip doesn’t jolt me up in a fit of conflict avoidance, then I play a memory from “the morning we missed the bus” where I’m jabbing at my phone to reveal that Didi has a 45 minute wait. “Remember that?!” asks the wizard, “Isn’t that going to cause even more stress than the chill of getting out of the warm bed now?”
Yeah, I’m awake, feeling the adrenaline rush in, not liking it but I’m still horizontal, so the film rolls on: I’ve dropped off the mega-late kid(s) and I’m realizing I’m riding around town in pajamas and snow boots, frustration creeping in as I face being late for my own appointments for the rest of the day.
Meanwhile, I can hear the shaming judgments of school personnel. “Those poor children…I mean that mother…” More stress is flowing in and, oh Lord, did my imagined shame just get cut short by guilt with a clip of me scrolling the blue-lit screen under the covers the night before?
From a distant room in my mind, I hear a part softly calling out that it was really nice to have those undisturbed hours to myself last night, but there’s a wise aunt cackling and just shaking her head at my attempts to defy the physical requirement for sleep.
What if I were aware enough of the cortisol lava, and sufficiently trained in emotional regulatory practices to pause the reel and consciously flood the mind with gentler thoughts in the morning?
I might even allow my nurturing part to speak up the night before and suggest that it would be really pleasant for me feel well-rested when I wake, “so let’s leave the phone charging in the kitchen and lie down now, dear.” In the morning, I would notice that the wizard is stoking the flames, so I would deliberately switch to thoughts of how good it feels when the family is calm and on time.
Lo and behold, this morning, I did a bit of this and somehow got up quickly to walk away from the ambivalence of the warm bed. A rather nicely self-compassionate me had left the dirty dishes but set the breakfast table the night before.
I sat down at the table and thought about it being International Women’s Day and my mind settled on Ayi and all of her comrades who lighten others’ burdens and act as everyday cultural bridges between our communities. Not long afterward, my mind drifted back to myself, of course.
But to be fair, it was to the subject of the nurturing parts who sometimes show up, many of whom I identify as female: the unconditionally loving parent, the encouraging teacher, the all-comprehending friend. In the diversity of our human condition our parts take many forms and aren’t necessarily gendered.
This morning, however, I embraced the feminine ones, including the salty aunt, and without a word from outside, found myself feeling rather warm.
* For an introduction to Internal Family Systems Therapy, see *Internal Family Systems Therapy* by Richard C. Schwartz and Martha Sweezy, The Guilford Press; Second edition (September 20, 2019). Note that my example is inspired by Schwartz and his students but is in no way intended to represent the extensive and complex nature of IFS Therapy.
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