A Guide to Doing Parts-work Without a Therapist
Powerful self-healing without blowing up your brain.
Most people who embark on a dedicated effort to “work on themselves” appear to spend 90% of their effort trying things that never really move the needle.
This is especially true for traditional therapy and “self-help” practices in general. In my experience, most of these methods tend to be somewhat useful, but noticeable progress in everyday life is painfully slow and expensive.
Your mind is your main tool for navigating the world, so the potential value of having a more effective system for “working on yourself” is huge.
I’ve found 2 reliable methods for becoming dramatically happier, smarter and more resilient: meditation and parts work.
There’s plenty of information on the internet about how to get started with a meditation practice, but there’s limited guidance for starting a safe and effective parts work practice.
If you ask an IFS therapist (the most well-known parts-work method) there's a 99% chance they will tell you never to do it alone because it’s too dangerous. If you can’t pay $250 per session out of pocket, you’re apparently out of luck for healing your screwed up childhood - sorry!
In my experience though, parts-work is an extremely effective and reliable method for reprogramming the mind. Lots of people on the internet are having the same experience, and these approaches are rapidly gaining traction, especially as “solo” practices- without a professional therapist as a guide.
This is great! But doing parts work on your own can be challenging and risky.
So, I’m going to lay out what I’ve learned about building a safe and effective solo parts-work practice that you can do on your own, for free. Your mileage may vary.
What are parts?
Broadly, Parts work is a therapeutic approach that involves recognizing and working with different subpersonalities or "parts” within one’s mind.
These subpersonalities, or parts, are mainly created as a protective response to an emotionally overwhelming experience that happened in the past. During an overwhelming experience, your mind separates a part from your main conscious experience as a way of protecting you from it. Usually parts are created in key developmental phases of life- early and late childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, etc.
The separated parts become independent subpersonalities that run in the background of your experience, usually outside of your attention, or subconsciously. Generally, these parts are trying to protect you from overwhelming experiences by rejecting or hiding aspects of your memories, emotions, attention and the world around you.
By the time you’re an adult, these parts have been built on top of and around each other in ways that lead to complex emotional responses, blockages, special talents, and all other manner of stuff we call our “personality”.
Let’s go through an example.
We can imagine a part that was created in response to not getting enough attention as a child. This part might have learned that throwing a tantrum caused it to get the attention it was starving for. The “tantrum” part becomes a permanent, fixed part of your mental furniture, responding to lack-of-attention situations with a similar response: Throw a tantrum to get attention!
This process also repeats as you get older. So, as you grow up, you might also realize that tantrums sometimes get you left out of friend groups, and you might develop another part to manage / block / interfere with the tantrum part. This goes on for as long as you don’t resolve the initial issue, creating more and more complex internal dynamics.
Practically this means a tantrum at 30 years old looks very different from a 2 year old tantrum. But, however professional your 30 year old “my boss didn’t give me a promotion” tantrum might be, it’s ultimately caused by the same root part, trying to get the same need met in perpetuity.
This is just a made up situation, but the point is that the system of parts (ie your personality) gets more complicated over time and evolves in response to itself and in response to your changing environment.
Why parts-work works
So, the relationships between these many subpersonalities come to drive your mental patterns and personality as a whole. Based on what I’ve heard from others doing this work, the average adult tends to have in the range of 30-50 parts stuck at different stages of development, driving them in different directions all the time.
No wonder most of us adults are such a jumbled mess of contradictory goals and impulses!
When you “do” parts work with some of these parts, you engage in memory reconsolidation.
Basically, by paying attention to these parts you've been avoiding, you can get them to update.
Updating these old personality fragments makes you (and your parts) capable of taking on new situations with new sets of skills. You practice these new ways of thinking, feeling and acting, and eventually your parts grow and find new ways of getting their needs met. People tend to call this “integration”.
This leads you to more constructive thought patterns and behaviors. So, instead of throwing a tantrum at not getting a promotion, you work with your parts to find other ways of getting attention and feeling acknowledgement. Maybe you double down on your most important friendships and take an honest assessment of why you got passed up for the promotion. You suffer less, avoid self-sabotage, and your life gets easier, not harder.
This is why parts-work works: it focuses on identifying the root cause of some mental pattern and reorganizing the deep mental structures that are causing the pattern. Using “parts” as interfaces to deep mental structures allows you to work on and improve these structures directly.
How to “Do” parts-work
The next logical question is: how do you actually do it?
A good analogy is helping a child navigate a complex situation they don’t quite have the ability to understand fully. With solo parts work, you’re the kid and the caretaker at the same time.
The Basic Method
At its core, parts-work involves applying a simple process:
Identify a "trailhead" - a feeling, thought, or recurring perception that seems significant.
Cultivate a mindset of wholesome intent
Use this trailhead to initiate an internal dialogue with a fragment of your mind (a "Part").
Ask questions and interact with the Part, allowing for responses in various forms (feelings, memories, images, etc.).
Release pent up feelings (crying, shaking, shouting, etc.)
Work with the part to establish new patterns, approaches and ways of seeing the world
Close a session (thanks, figure out next steps, etc.)
This process might sound straightforward, but it can lead to intense experiences. I previously wrote about my early experience with parts work as “like being put on a rocket into my own unconscious."
Example Session
Here's a simplified example of how a parts-work session might unfold:
You notice a recurring feeling of anxiety when thinking about social situations (trailhead).
You focus on this feeling and ask internally, "Is there a part of me that's causing this anxiety?"
You might experience a response - perhaps a tightness in your chest or a mental image of a scared child.
You engage with this part: "Where did you come from? What are you afraid of? What do you need?"
You might receive responses through language, emotions, memories, or intuitive insights.
A particular phrase or memory may cause intense feelings to come up, and you might cry or release in some other way.
You continue this dialogue, offering reassurance and exploring the part's origins and needs.
Over time, you work with this part to find new ways of handling situations that meet its needs for safety while allowing for growth.
While the process itself is very simple, each step involves building subtle skills and practices in order to make good progress and stay sane.
Practice Makes Perfect
Or at least less likely to mess yourself up real bad…
Just like learning any new skill, building a really effective parts-work practice relies on mastering the basics. Unlike learning a music instrument or how to do gardening though, with partswork there’s a big emphasis on safety because you can easily retraumatise yourself. With solo parts work in particular, you’re basically learning to do a kind of psychic brain surgery on yourself.
To start off on the right foot, you want to go in with a clear idea of what to expect, get really good at a few basic skills, and know ahead of time how to deal with some common challenges that you’re likely to run into.
What to Expect
Parts work can be incredibly powerful. You're essentially diving headfirst into the dark soup of your subconscious and saying, "Hey, scary things in my mind I can't really deal with yet, come at me!" Doing parts-work solo means you’re usually on your own when things get intense.
When you ask your subconscious parts what's going on under the surface, they respond - often in surprising and overwhelming ways. They might:
Scream, cry, or curse at you
Fight and thrash, causing you to clench, shake, lash out or scream
Cause physical pain or other sensations
Threaten you or each other
Overwhelm you with gigantic feelings
Resurface memories you wanted to forget
Demand your full attention indefinitely
Beg you to stop
Try to distract you
Refuse to talk
And more!
These effects can last well beyond a given session and can be destabilizing.
The most important thing is to build your way up to more intense / powerful parts over time. As you gain more skills and confidence, your ability to process all of these strong reactions grows as well.
Basic Skills for Solo-parts Work
Core Skill | Right Mindset
Be nice to yourself
When engaging in parts-work, it’s important to constantly keep tabs on your mindset and intention. You’re going to want to learn to summon and hold a wholesome mindset and intent before and during sessions.
This wholesome vibe should include (but not be limited to):
Open-mindedness: A sense of curiosity without judgment.
Patience: A feeling of unhurried restfulness.
Self-compassion: A sense that you are worthy and doing your best.
Capability: A feeling like “I have the skills to handle whatever comes up”
I know, I know, this all sounds really vanilla, but I can’t tell you how many times just pausing and revisiting my mindset and intent has completely unlocked a new level of insight.
IFS folks often talk about “Self-energy” which captures the positive intent thing pretty well. If that concept works for you, that's great. If not, try some different ways of cultivating wholesome intent and do what works for you.
If at any point in your practice one or more of these feel unavailable, you may want to turn your parts work or other personal practices towards figuring out why this is the case.
Core Skill | Concentration
Learn to focus, even on uncomfortable feelings
Parts work involves paying close attention to subtle internal stuff. When you start working with a new part you’ll often have to spend lots of time with confusing feelings, wisps of memory, parts insisting hurtful things, and more. Understandably, your attention will want to drift away from this unsettling material.
In order to work through issues fully and reap the best results possible you’ll have to learn to keep your focus on tough material for quite a while in each sitting. If you get good at this, it pays off, because there’s often some catharsis to look forward to at the end of a session. However, if you can’t focus on the bad feelings long enough to get to the resolution, you’re gonna have a bad time.
A basic way to practice this kind of thing is just sitting for a while, noticing and naming your feelings. When you find a pleasant or unpleasant feeling, keep your focus on it for a while and pay attention to how it evolves and changes.
Core Skill | Self-regulation
Get good at re-stabilizing yourself
If you’re making progress in solo parts work, you’re going to eventually go too far down the rabbit hole and destabilize yourself. This is why all the IFS therapists are warning you not to do this alone in the first place.
Usually this looks like an intense and persistent negative feeling sticking with you after a session. Woops!
You’re going to want to have a list of what kinds of things you can do to bring yourself back down to a baseline sense of okayness. This might be working out, or playing video games, or talking to friends. Figure out what works for restabilizing yourself BEFORE you do intensive parts work. When you get into trouble, do the things on the list first and then re-evaluate what your next steps should be.
You have to actually practice (and a side note on meditation)
These 3 skills are the absolute basics for an effective parts work practice.
Note that you can (and should) practice these skills outside of your dedicated parts work sessions. Certain other practices like loving-kindness meditation can help you get better at all three at once, so consider doing that or something similar alongside your partswork sessions.
How not to blow up your own mind (Safety Tips)
1. Pace Yourself
Once you start seeing progress with a parts work approach, it can become all-consuming. It’s normal to have a strong desire to make progress on things that have been hurting you or holding you back.
It's important to go at a pace your parts and your life can handle. If you move too fast, you’re likely to destabilize or retraumatize yourself. Your parts have spent years in their patterns and sometimes can only adjust and update so quickly.
Be patient and allow parts to reveal themselves in their own time. When they do show up, respect the pace at which parts are willing to engage and change.
This can be frustrating if you’re trying really hard and feeling like your progress is slow. That’s a good sign to check on your intent and figure out why you think you need to drive the process faster than a part is ready to go.
Oftentimes if a part is only comfortable moving slowly, making a lateral move and focusing on something else is the most effective way forward. Don’t force it or you’re likely to do more harm than good.
2. Stay in Stretch Zone vs. Panic Zone
In parts-work, it's important to challenge yourself, but not to the point of overwhelm.
Think of it in terms of:
Stretch Zone: This is where growth happens. You're uncomfortable, but still able to engage productively.
Panic Zone: This is where you're too overwhelmed to progress effectively. It can lead to retraumatization or regression.
Aim to stay in your stretch zone during sessions. If you find yourself in the panic zone, it's time to pause and ground yourself. Go for a walk, connect with friends, workout, meditate, or whatever helps you get back towards a state of normalcy and stabilization.
If you find yourself constantly going into a panic zone and not able to engage in parts work in the stretch zone, you may need to change your focus and work on establishing a baseline sense of safety in your every-day life. Fix your relationship, get a new job, build a better sleep routine, whatever.
3. Aim for Resolution
You want to avoid digging up the most painful parts of your mind and then not taking the process to some kind of resolution. Aim for some kind of resolution in each session, even if it’s only partial.
Practically, this often looks like saying something at the end of a session to all parts involved like “thanks for hanging out. You’re great. That stuff we went through was messed up. Thanks for helping me. I need to go do something. Let's connect again soon.”
Getting good at ending a session well is an important aspect of safety because it allows you to end a session if it’s getting too intense without leaving a lingering feeling of incompleteness.
4. Get Lots of Rest
Doing intensive parts work is exhausting.
Make sure you get a lot of rest. You’re rewriting your memory and personality structures and sleep and rest is where the magic happens. I normally sleep 7 hours and feel great, but when I’m doing intensive parts-work sometimes I’ll need 10+ hours of sleep to process everything.
I think of parts work like strength training for your mind and feelings. You MUST rest in order to come back stronger for the next sessions.
Tending the Garden of Your Mind
Imagine your mind as a vast, wild garden. Parts work is like learning to be a skilled gardener in this internal landscape. A wild garden has all kinds of plants - some flowering, some thorny, some hidden beneath the soil. Like the garden, your mind has many different parts, each with its own story, desires, aversions and purposes.
You don't need expensive tools or a professional landscaper to start tending this garden. You do need patience, curiosity, and a gentle touch though.
Sometimes you'll encounter weeds that seem stubborn or flowers that are slow to bloom. That's okay - it's all part of the process. As you practice, you'll develop a green thumb. You'll learn when to water, when to prune, and when to simply observe. Some days, you might feel like you're fighting an overgrown jungle. Other days, you'll discover beautiful, hidden corners of your psyche you never knew existed.
With some time and practice, you can cultivate your mental garden into a space you love being in and that rewards you for your efforts.