Backstage in your own mind: Inside Out
Inside Out 1 has had all sorts of glowing reviews, no need for more here. What I want to say is that this isn’t any type of metaphor for the human mind. This is actually how it is. There actually are sub-personalities in relationship with each other, inside our heads. This film is real, real, real. [Inside Out 1 when the protagonist is little is much more fun that Inside Out 2 when she’s a young teenager – depending on your teenage years, this may need a trigger warning.]
Of course, we don’t all have the same fixed cast of Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness. That’s a dramatic convenience, each person has unique parts. But parts of some kind, in communication with each other or cut off from each other, every one of us has.
People are hugely varied, systems of parts work are many, anything shorter than a book is too simple. But to sketch how things are, here are a few possibilities:
- Inner child parts, that don’t know about the present. Imagine yourself as a small child. Now imagine that this small child travels through time and comes into the room you are in with you, as you read this. Please note: that’s not: imagine that you travel back to when you were little. Rather, imagine that your tiny self met Doctor Who and got time-travelled from then to now in the room you are in as well as you. Most likely, your small -child self has never been in the room you are in now, has almost certainly pictured themselves as being a grown-up and doesn’t know who you are,. In fact he or she doesn’t know a ton of things that you know. Often, in situations in life we live as that little kid, living without benefit of the wealth of experience and wisdom we’re gained at adults. So this is one common kind of part: the inner child who lives in the past not the present
- Very hurt inner child, and severe adult trauma, parts. If trauma is bad enough then a part of us cuts off completely and goes into a kind of internal hiding. This is an extreme version of the previous.
- Again related to the previous, shadow and projected energies.
- But the big one is – the left brain and the right brain. These are not hurt or out-of-touch parts, nor are theyshadow. The two halves of the brain relate as two separate people. It’s like two people in a rowing boat. They need each other in order to row – your two arms, your two legs, need each other. But does the boat go more where the left rower wants, or the right? Unless you’re careful, in therapy only one rower gets to even speak, and the whole key to healing is finding the way to let the other side be heard. Oftentimes in hypnosis when you meet “the unconscious mind”, what you’re meeting is less the unconscious (deeply buried memories and emotions), rather the less-vocal rower.
For more information on one particular system of inner parts, have a look at the Voice Dialogue website. It’s not the system I use but it is very good.
Simplest and best, if you’ve not seen Inside Out, go and see it. It’s the story of everybody’s life.