What Gets in The Way is The Way
How to Befriend and Believe in the Challenging, Destructive, & Addictive Parts of You
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke
A Word Before We Begin: This post is inspired by a question that an Instagram follower asked on my stories. If you would like to submit a question on parts work to be expanded upon for a post, submit it in a comment on this post or head to my Insta stories every Monday (sometimes I get excited and answer them in short form in real time 🤓)! And if you need some context for parts work and IFS, check out the IFS Glossary .
Q: How do I work with addictive parts that pose a health risk?
A: See below.
What if the parts of you that seemed to perpetually “get in the way” were actually invitations to heed some overlooked wisdom that your inner world holds?
One of the foundational principles of Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) is that all of your parts hold intelligence and make sense as they are.
This principle is inclusive and feel-good in theory. Most of us want to accept ourselves as we are and be fully authentic. Most of us want to practice inner compassion and be in rhythm with ourselves. Most of us want to love ourselves unconditionally and embrace our dark edges.
Yet for those of us with challenging, destructive, and addictive tendencies, our relationship with ourselves is often a fraught and fractured thing.
How can we reconcile the parts of us that sabotage and hurt ourselves with the desire to practice self-love and acceptance?
Here’s a little-known fact about me:
I am a person in long-term addiction recovery, come from a family with addiction issues, and have worked in the field of addictions for almost a decade. This year, I celebrated 15 years clean and sober and earned my long overdue LCADC (Licensed Clinical Alcohol and Drug Counselor) credential. Addiction has always been a part of my life and I have explored it through many lenses.
I know firsthand how challenging it is to work with addictive and destructive parts when it feels like these parts are literally trying to kill you.
I know how challenging it is to stand by helplessly and watch a loved one implode their life, destroy their mental faculties, and die tragically of an overdose.
And I know how challenging it is for people in recovery to get curious about these addictive parts when the entire treatment model is based on shaming and ostracizing them.
What I’ve learned from both personal and professional experience is that addiction is an adaptive strategy to meeting some unmet need inside. Extreme behaviors like self-destruction rarely materialize out of thin air. Gabor Mate says we should ask “Why the pain?” instead of “Why the addiction?”, and get curious about how addiction addresses emotional pain.
The more intense the emotional pain, the more powerful the protective strategy.
Protector parts employ protective strategies like addiction to safeguard against the pain that exiles, or the vulnerable parts of the internal system, hold. Exiles hold memories, beliefs, and emotions that were “exiled” from conscious awareness for two main reasons:
They were not safe to be expressed in the dominant culture and resulted in attack, punishment, or shame.
Their pain hurt or put other parts at risk inside.
Working with countless addicts, something I have heard consistently that might surprise people who don’t struggle with addiction is this:
Addicts often feel like their addiction saved their lives.
Addiction is often the protector we find in front of the very last protector, which is a part that feels suicidal or is in extreme agony. The exiles that addiction distracts from are in intense pain. They are trapped in scenes of trauma and suffering that feel inescapable. We need to take them seriously and appreciate how good of a job addiction does from keeping these parts out of our awareness.
Addiction enters the system or takes off when trauma threatens to knock the entire system off balance. Addicted parts are unsung heroes in this respect. They take on a job that is misunderstood by other parts and shamed by society. Without this job of numbing and dissociating through the addiction, we might have been sucked into an even more self-destructive spiral by succumbing to the terror, powerlessness, and emotional agony that traumatized exiles experience.
From working with my own system intentionally and patiently, I can now acknowledge how my addiction gave me an outlet from the burdens of unlovability and powerlessness that my exiles held as they navigated family chaos, loss, and trauma. If I never discovered how to numb myself with drugs and alcohol, I might have suffered from something worse than addiction. I don’t know if I would still be here. And while my addiction gave me a whole host of challenges that I spent my twenties recuperating from, I can still appreciate how effective addiction was at erasing pain in the moment.
Acknowledging how addiction is functioning in the internal system is not the same thing as rationalizing it. Addictive parts hurt other parts in the inner world. They also hurt real people in real life. We need to name this on the path of addiction recovery. But by acknowledging the role of addictive parts, we take a step toward relating to and negotiating with the addiction. This is very different than pretending that addiction doesn’t create pain or piss off other parts of you.
From my own experience, I can tell you that none of the strategies my other parts employed actually worked when it came to keeping me clean and sober. Shaming, fear-mongering, explaining, cajoling, ignoring, shutting up, or frightening my addiction — none of it worked. Addiction is usually too powerful for other parts to manage. But when we explore why the addiction needs to be this powerful, we gain traction with this misunderstood protector.
Addiction is a brilliant and adaptive protector, adept at attuning to emotional pain and providing an effective outlet (until it no longer is effective).
Like Gabor Mate’s question, not “Why the addiction?” but “Why the pain?”, I would encourage anyone who struggles with addictive parts to refrain from asking “How do I stop the addiction?” and instead get curious about these questions:
What is the addictive part getting right?
What is the addictive part protecting me from?
What is the addictive part scared might happen if the addiction were to stop?
These questions are not just exercises in paradoxical inquiry. They build curiosity and shine clarity on the dynamics of addiction in the inner world. They highlight the positive intention that addictive parts carry and shine light on the exiles they distract from. This then gives us a template to befriend the addictive parts and unburden the exiles that they stand in front of.
When we feel like parts are “getting in our way”, we can do battle with these parts, trying to fix and control them, which rarely works.
Or we can seek to understand and explore them, trusting that their manifestations point us toward the way of healing.
About Me:
Hi, I’m Sarah.
I am an IFS trauma therapist, parts work mentor, writer, yoga teacher, wife, and mother. I help you become who you needed when you were younger with parts work and inner parenting. My mission is to help people embody the wisdom of their whole self after trauma and parentification. You can find me on Instagram, where I share musings on complex trauma recovery and integrated motherhood with over 100,000 followers, as well as on my Substack journals Whole Self and Integrated Motherhood.
Apart from my professional work, I know what it’s like to walk the nonlinear path of trauma and addiction recvoery. I offer understanding and support to those living lives and creating families that contradict childhoods where they felt unsafe and unseen.
My journey of post-traumatic growth has shown me the power of getting into relationship with my parts rather than trying to change them, and developing curiosity and kinship with my inner world as I integrate all the parts to be found there. As you navigate your journey of parts work and trauma recovery, remember that healing is always possible for your parts, and your parts make perfect sense and love you fiercely.
~S
I wish more people thought about addiction like you do.
Thank you
❤️