{"id":7960,"date":"2023-09-19T19:16:59","date_gmt":"2023-09-19T23:16:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7960"},"modified":"2024-01-01T14:28:58","modified_gmt":"2024-01-01T19:28:58","slug":"early-work-with-younger-parts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7960","title":{"rendered":"Early Work with Younger “Parts”"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Written in June 2004)<\/p>\n

In a session of the \u201cWave Work<\/a>\u201d at Kripalu<\/a>: there was a confusing struggle with my body\u2019s tendency to cramp up (esp left hand) and kick, shake, jump.\u00a0 Finally I let it shrivel up into a crippled, spastic child (I could see the starving baby from my collage book<\/a>) \u2014 and it felt, not exactly good, but valid, solid, like this is who I really am.\u00a0 I stayed with it for a while, feeling huge compassion for that shriveled, spastic, starving baby.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

written in January 2006:<\/p>\n

Somewhere in here, I had an experience of committing myself to the traumatized baby. I didn\u2019t write it down so I don\u2019t know exactly when it happened.\u00a0 I was imagining a war zone, wrecked buildings, burning cars, dead bodies, a few people wandering dazedly around, smoke drifting, colors all grey and black except for the fires.\u00a0 I see a shriveled dark grey baby lying on a garbage can<\/a>.\u00a0 I think of picking her up, but I realize the orphanage has been bombed.\u00a0 There\u2019s nowhere to take her.\u00a0 If I pick her up I\u2019m stuck with her for the rest of my life.\u00a0 I spend a moment wondering if I really do want to take on this task.\u00a0 Then I pick her up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Written in June 2009:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m reading The Shell Seekers<\/a>, and it brings home to me how barren my life is.\u00a0 Good healthy loving supportive relationships between mothers & daughters.\u00a0 Wonderful loving sexual relationships.\u00a0 People who can cook and garden.\u00a0 Sadness at the loss of real relationships.\u00a0 Although I notice that they don\u2019t let themselves cry, it\u2019s seen as admirable not to cry.<\/p>\n

I sat in Karen\u2019s office and cried for half an hour with no idea what it was about.\u00a0 \u201cYou don\u2019t need to know,\u201d says Karen.\u00a0 But I think I have to justify it.
\nI don\u2019t have to know what it was about.
\nI don\u2019t have to know what to do about it.
\nI only have to be there for it, be there with it.\u00a0 This is the traumatized baby I picked up from the garbage can<\/a> and she has a right to her grief.<\/p>\n

I think this grief must be from a very non-verbal place.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s coming up now because I have healed enough so that the baby feels safe having her feelings.\u00a0 I have to remind myself to keep her safe, to allow her to grieve (even though I don\u2019t know where it\u2019s coming from \u2014 I can guess at how barren and stony was her infancy) to allow her to grieve and to soften around her and hold her in her grief.\u00a0 There, there, dear, you have a right to grieve.\u00a0 You deserved to be cherished, loved, comforted, supported and guided, have your real self be seen and mirrored back to you.\u00a0 What you got was a mother whose narcissistic wounds did not allow her to love, or even see another person accurately.\u00a0 You were expected to love her, make everything OK for her, and she projected her self-hate on to you and treated you like you were someone you weren\u2019t at all.\u00a0 You never developed a real sense of your strengths and weaknesses, you grew up believing that you were unlovable and that you had disappointed your parents.\u00a0 You\u2019ve spent your life trying to prove that you deserve to live.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What’s truly astonishing about these three entries is I’m describing Inner Family Systems<\/a> work, I’m aware of a baby part of me. \u00a0It will be years before I start working formally with this technique.<\/p>\n

The first two writings were posted in July 2010, parts of a longer post<\/a>. \u00a0Possibly the “Wave Work” helped me begin to get the idea of an inner baby.<\/p>\n

The third writing, from June 2009, was part of a longer post<\/a>. \u00a0I just went back to read all of that longer post and found an astounding piece of writing where I commit myself to this work, writing in January 2006:<\/p>\n

\n

I had seen that the heart was shielded because it needed to heal, and then the heart needed to connect with the baby, not turn outward again.\u00a0 Then it came to me \u2014 the baby is in the heart!\u00a0 That\u2019s why the heart is all grey like the baby was.\u00a0 That was very exciting \u2014 it\u2019s not the grey of stuckness, degeneration and death, it\u2019s the grey of a frozen traumatized baby.\u00a0 Even writing it down I can feel the shift \u2014 from being angry at myself for waking scared again to compassion for the terrified frozen baby, and willingness to stay with it as long as it takes.
\nAnd if it takes the rest of my life, I\u2019m willing to do that.\u00a0 It\u2019s amazing that I care so much about this baby, who is me, as though the baby were the earth, or all the babies traumatized by war, and not Jenny who I\u2019ve never thought was worth that much focus and effort.\u00a0 But the baby doesn\u2019t seem like \u201cme\u201d, more like the task I\u2019ve been given and I\u2019m willing to take it on.\u00a0 My work to heal this traumatized fragment of the universe is meaningful.\u00a0 And I think one thing that\u2019s helped this shift is Sharon Salzberg quoting the Buddha as saying there\u2019s no one more worthy of your love in the whole universe than yourself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Written in June 2004) In a session of the \u201cWave Work\u201d at Kripalu: there was a confusing struggle with my body\u2019s tendency to cramp up (esp left hand) and kick, shake, jump.\u00a0 Finally I let it shrivel up into a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","category-trauma","category-work-with-parts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7960\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}