Our Inner Family

In my work with people, I almost always find myself talking about inner parts at some point. It is a subject that fascinates me immensely and becomes very visible when working with people. You can hear it when one part of someone is at the helm. When one part authoritatively determines the inner course. You can feel the minimal space that is available. The compression. The rigidity. You can often even see the frozen part reflected in the body. The same words and sentences are repeated. And thoughts about the self become a kind of negative mantra.

An anxious part in power? “Things are not going to work out for me.” “I’m not doing my job well enough and I’m probably going to lose it.” “I’m not likable enough for my friends; they’re going to leave me.” Or an inner critic at the head of the table, with the sole right to speak? “I can’t do anything right.” “I look absolutely terrible again today.” “Everyone is doing better than me.”

And it touches me personally. Because I, too, have inner parts that take up a lot of space. So much space that on some days I don’t even know whether there are any other parts of me left. Until space returns. Something changes that shifts the balance, for example a night of sleep in which my dreams restore and rebalance my psyche, physical movement, or hormonal changes, and somewhere in the background a little voice whispers: I’m still here too. Another part becomes quietly audible.

Because the fact that there are other parts — in me and in others — is a given. And what is even more of a given is that all the parts that exist within us want to be heard. No inner part can truly live with being locked away in a basement of our psyche. Without light, without fresh air, and most importantly: without our attention and love.

When I talk about inner parts, I often draw a comparison between our actual family and our inner family. Because as human beings, we tend to be better able to understand and make sense of things outside ourselves than the things that are happening deep within us. There is a family living inside us, too.

Some people have larger inner families than others. There are people in whom one inner family member has a say in everything, such as, as described earlier, a very anxious or perfectionistic family member, and there are people in whom four inner family members regularly have their say. There is just as much variation in inner families as there is variation in families in the outside world.

But what are we supposed to do with our inner family? Here I would rather draw a line to children and what a child needs in order to grow up healthy. Attention, recognition, space, and unconditional love. Staying with the pain that lives within you, just as you would stay with a child who is in pain.

Last weekend, I spent an entire night in ceremony. There were children present in the ceremony. And at one point, one little child, about six years old, began crying intensely. His mother held him, hugged him, and gently rocked him back and forth. I watched the situation and thought it looked loving. At the same time, I had the thought that at some point she would probably become angry or frustrated. After all, the child was crying throughout the ceremony. But all the stories I had created about the situation were disproven by this mother. She stayed. And as I write this, I am touched by it all over again. She stayed. Rocking him, hugging him, gently stroking his head. All the time that he cried loudly, which must have been about 45 minutes. No anger, no frustration, no impatience, but attention, recognition, space, and unconditional love. And he calmed down and went back to sleep.

That is what the inner parts within us need. Especially those parts that we have banished to the musty basement or dusty attic within ourselves. Those that, because they were not allowed to participate in us, have often remained very young and childlike there. Those that, when they emerge, can sometimes be screaming and stamping their feet inside us for 45 minutes. We can sit with our hands in our hair and become enormously frustrated ourselves, but just like the mother in the story above, we would rather do what every child and every part of us needs. We bring the part back into the light, into the living room of our psyche, where we can see it. We let it talk or rage or do whatever it needs to do, and then we say: “I hear you.” We give it as much space as it needs. And then we give it love.

Love is what every one of us needs. And therefore, so does every part within us.

Within Indigenous traditions, they often respond to something that is said and that touches them, something they also experience inwardly as truth, with the word “aho.” In the tradition in which I sat in ceremony last weekend, women use the variant: “haye.”

I hope this resonates with you. Thank you for reading.

Haye.