395: Olivia A. revisits

🔸 Daughter: she has to show love to herself.

🔹 Parts:

• P: daughter manages everything and wants to get some self for herself. She thinks they’re her parts. Worried she is selfish, not comfy saying “I love myself” so she can’t love other parts unconditionally. “Good enough by self standards but not by my own”. Or else:
• P: body part continues squirming
• E: suffocating, drowning, what if I get trapped? Scared of death

🎓 What I'd like to do differently:

I could use some help on this one, this feels new. Perhaps I should have gone with: daughter has parts. I could probably just consider daughter to be Olivia, at least as my own mental shorthand. And maybe the only thing different here is the pronoun (she vs I). But that pronoun shift might be profound. Notice the shift (of pronoun and energy) back to "I" around minute 48. Yes I believe that is the Olivia I'm normally talking to. But the framing definitely challenges me, it's like we're separated by a couple angled mirrors, and I didn’t have the language or clarity to address it in the moment.

At one point I said “I think that she’s good” and she responded along the lines of “you don’t know me very well”, and I could have stayed with that a little longer, been more assertive, and responded that I think you’re good even though I don’t know you, but she had already expressed her frustration with that unearned respect. Would like to have spent more time there, demonstrating and explaining what my care/respect means, and where it originates from.

She’s says “she is narrating right now” so… the logic is kinda breaking my brain. She (the part) refers to herself as she? Navigating the pronouns used in IFS is complex enough already!

If daughter is Olivia, maybe Self is named Grace.

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