On my blog entry entitled Can an Adult Create an Alter Part?, a reader posted the following comment:
But other than to create a helper part or to survive the unbearable, not sure why you’d want to create more parts. Think the only way to really heal is to accept everything that happened and really feel the emotions connected to it, and re-associate all our dissociated parts, either through integration or through developing co-consciousness, making new parts would run contrary to that, I think. ~ Bay
A couple of years ago, I would have agreed with Bay 100% on this topic. However, I have more recently come to recognize that I can, in fact, use alter parts to help meet my needs in a very loving way that does not involve rejecting a part of myself.
I agree with Bay that the parts that have been separate since childhood are separate due to distancing myself from them – from their memories, emotions, etc. So, the foundation of those alter parts is based upon a form of self-rejection, which is ultimately unhealthy for me now that the abuse has ended. I need to love and accept each part as “me.” Loving them back into my core is a very loving and healing thing to do for myself.
However, the good mother alter part I discussed in this blog entry is not created out of self-rejection but out of self-love. There is not one part of myself that rejects her. I love her deeply, and her love for me is very much a reflection of the self-love that I have developed.
To use a metaphor to describe the difference, I see my core as a pond and the alter parts from childhood as pieces of ice that were frozen in time through self-rejection. I need to melt the ice through the warmth of self-love and invite them back into the pond. However, the good mother alter part that I created was not created through “freezing her out.” Instead, she was molded out of the warm water, perhaps like putting the water in a cup temporarily because the temporary separation is healing for me. She feels different, probably because I have never rejected her and she has never rejected me.
I am not sure if I am explaining this well. She just feels different. It’s like I have the gift of creating “forms” temporarily to help meet my own needs in a loving way, and it is very different from the “freezing out” method I used in childhood. The best part is that the good mother and other alter parts created in love are fluid and pour themselves back into the core whenever I don’t need them to be separate. Does that make sense?
Photo credit: Hekatekris
Blooming Lotus 