Parts work therapy for adults with childhood trauma

If you experienced trauma in the childhood, you might recognize these moments: One part of you desperately wants intimacy while another part seems to sabotage every close relationship. You set a boundary, then immediately abandon it to please someone else. You feel rage at a minor inconvenience, but can’t access any anger when someone genuinely mistreats you.

These aren’t contradictions or signs of weakness. They’re different parts of you—each one developed to help you survive childhood trauma—now trying to navigate adult life with strategies that no longer serve you.

Parts work therapy offers a path to understand, heal, and integrate these fragmented parts of yourself.

What is parts work therapy for adults with childhood trauma?

Parts work therapy recognizes that humans naturally have different parts. Parts can be seen as different aspects of our personality, different emotional states, different responses to situations. This isn’t unique to trauma survivors; everyone has parts. Overall, the concept of parts work is a useful way to express the complexity of our human psyche.

But when you grow up with chronic trauma—abuse, neglect, frightening or frightened caregivers, household chaos, your brain splits into parts in order to help you survive. This concept is also known as the Theory of Structural Dissociations or inner fragmentation. The more layered and intense the traumatic experience was, the more elaborate your system needs to respond. These parts become fragmented, each carrying specific emotions, memories, or protective roles. Parts work therapy for adults with childhood trauma directly addresses and transforms the inner fragmentation.

When I found parts work as a client, it had been a major turning point in my healing journey from childhood trauma. It allowed me to reconnect and integrate those parts of me that got disconnected and lost in trauma.

There are many different approaches to parts work, such as:

• Internal Family Systems (IFS), developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz
• Dr. Janina Fisher‘s trauma-informed parts work methodology
• Inner child work, like Inner Bonding.
• Gestalt therapy concepts

While these approaches have different frameworks, they share a core insight: healing happens when you develop a healthy relationship with all parts of yourself, understand their needs and what they want to tell you, rather than trying to eliminate the ones you don’t like. While parts may exhibit behaviours we strongly dislike, they usually have reasons for them. Clients often find beautiful gifts in very complicated parts.

The parts that can develop from childhood trauma

Through the process of structural dissociation, specific protective parts often emerge in response to ongoing childhood trauma. You might recognize some or all of these:

Fight part: The fierce protector

This part emerged to defend you against threats. In childhood, it might have helped you stand up to an abuser, protect siblings, or assert yourself when possible.

How it shows up in adulthood:

• Hypervigilance and constant scanning for danger
• Sudden rage or aggressive responses to perceived threats
• Impulsive reactions
• Difficulty trusting others
• The impulse toward self-injury when overwhelmed

Its protective intention: Keeps you safe by being ready to fight off any threat, real or imagined.

Please note that healing doesn’t mean to blindly trust everyone. Healing means learning to trust your inner compass about who deserves your trust.

Flight part: The escape artist

This part ensured safety through escape and avoidance. In childhood, it helped you physically or mentally flee dangerous situations.

How it shows up in adulthood:

• Addictive behaviours (substances, work, shopping, sex)
• Disordered eating patterns
• Emotional distance in relationships
• Strong ambivalence—one foot always out the door
• Escape fantasies or dissociative daydreaming.
• Inability to stay present when things get difficult

Its protective intention: Keep you safe by ensuring you can always escape before getting hurt.

Please keep in mind that these parts sometimes have every reason to want to leave a relationship. So, if you have a strong flight part, it may mean just slowing down to find out what you really want and whether the relationship is worth saving.

Freeze part: The immobilizer

When fighting or fleeing wasn’t possible, this part helped you survive through immobilization—playing dead, going numb, disappearing inside yourself.

How it shows up in adulthood:

• Feeling paralyzed during conflict or stress
• Inability to speak when you need to advocate for yourself
• Panic attacks where your body locks up while your mind races
• High internal anxiety combined with external stillness
• Feeling terrified but unable to move or act

Its protective intention: Keep you safe by making you invisible, unthreatening, not worth hurting.

Fawn Part: The people-pleaser

This part kept you safe by pleasing and appeasing others. As a child, you learned to anticipate an abuser’s needs, become overly helpful, or sacrifice your own needs entirely.

How it shows up in adulthood:

• Chronic people-pleasing and inability to say no
• Letting go of all boundaries to avoid conflict
• Co-dependent relationship patterns
• Self-sacrifice and putting everyone else’s needs first
• Deep shame and feelings of worthlessness
• Believing your needs don’t matter.

Its protective intention: Keep you safe by making others happy so they won’t hurt you.

When healed, this part can be valuable in keeping the balance between caring for yourself and caring for others.

Attach part: The desperate child

This part sought connection and rescue. It’s the part that cried out for help, longed for someone to see your pain, needed safety and protection.

How it shows up in adulthood:

• Intense fear of abandonment
• Feeling desperately lonely even in relationships
• Clinging to others or relationships
• Intense need for external validation
• Feeling like a lost, helpless child inside
• Begging others not to leave

Its protective intention: Keep you safe by getting someone to finally rescue you, see you, and help you.

Attach parts in their unhealed state can take you out of your boundaries and leave you overly dependent. However, a healed attach part can nurture healthy relationships.

I want to acknowledge that there is usually a reason a part appears in a specific relationship. While the intensity may be heightened due to past trauma, it often has a valuable message that something is off in the present moment, like a boundary violation or an unmet need. Parts work therapy for adults with childhood trauma facilitates the gentle reconnection between your adult self in the present and your parts. To dive deeper, tune into the podcast episode: Powerful healing: Understanding childhood trauma triggers in adulthood.

Parts work therapy for adults with childhood trauma: Why it matters

Traditional therapy often focuses on managing symptoms or changing thoughts. However, childhood trauma doesn’t only affect your thoughts: the impact is stored in your body and your emotions. Emotional parts often get hidden behind a wall, but they want to share their feelings, so they come out in the present because they want to be digested. Therefore, only focusing on your mind isn’t enough for healing childhood trauma as an adult. Your healing requires something deeper: reconnecting with the fragmented parts of yourself. While professional support can guide and facilitate, the only person who can do this is yourself. Your parts are waiting for you.

Here’s why parts work therapy for adults with childhood trauma is essential:

It validates your experience. Childhood trauma is often connected with your experience as a child being unvalidated, unseen, and unheard. When you understand that these contradictory feelings aren’t a character flaw but adaptive protective mechanisms, shame begins to lift. You’re not “crazy” or “broken,” you’re brilliantly fragmented. Each of your parts has a valuable message that deserves respect.

It separates behaviour from intention. Your fawn part’s people-pleasing protected you in your childhood, even if it is not helpful in your relationships now. Your fight part’s rage kept you alive, even if it damages connections now. Understanding the protective intention fosters self-respect and enables you to take action, such as working towards protecting your boundaries or asserting your needs. If you reconnect with your parts and they feel seen, you can shift from reacting to responding healthily and creating conscious choices for yourself.

It supports to heal nervous system dysregulation. These parts don’t just live in your mind—they live in your body. When a traumatized part gets activated, you suddenly find yourself outside your window of tolerance. Your adult self knows you’re safe, but a younger part feels the danger is happening now. Parts work can be a valuable addition to widen your window of tolerance.

It offers a path to integration. Healing doesn’t mean eliminating parts. It means that you, as the adult, have a connection with them, create trust with them, and give them the support they deserve and the protection they may never have experienced before. Over time, parts can unburden their wounds with your support (and appropriate professional support if necessary). This is a path to feel whole again.

How parts work therapy actually works

The process of parts work involves several key elements:

1. Developing your adult self

Before you can help your parts, you need to strengthen your adult self—the part of you that can observe, be curious, gentle, and responsible, and that can make conscious choices. This involves learning to separate from being fused with your parts and being able to identify when you are connected with your adult self.

Instead of “I am angry,” you learn to say “A part of me feels angry.” This simple shift creates space for curiosity rather than being overwhelmed. Working with your window of tolerance can help you feel more connected to your adult self. Furthermore, you can learn tools for managing activated parts.

2. Learning parts language

You begin to identify and name your parts. Some people use ages (“my three-year-old part”), roles (“my protector part”), descriptors (“my fierce part”), animals, colours, or objects. There’s no right way—only what resonates for you.

3. Creating a relationship with parts

This is where the real healing happens. You learn to:

• Notice when a part is activated
• Ask what it needs
• Validate its protective role
• Understand what it’s afraid will happen if it stops its protective behaviour
• Offer it a different role that serves your adult life

4. Healing the wounds that parts carry

Many parts are stuck at the age when trauma happened, still experiencing that danger as if it’s happening now. Through therapeutic techniques like EMDR, somatic work, or parts work, you can help these parts process the traumatic memories they’ve been holding.

5. Integration and transformation

As parts heal, they transform. A healed fight part becomes healthy assertiveness and the ability to protect yourself appropriately. A healed fawn part learns balanced compassion that includes oneself. A healed freeze part becomes the ability to pause thoughtfully rather than shut down reactively.

Starting your own parts work journey

You can begin parts work on your own through journaling and self-reflection, though working with a mental healthy professional trained in trauma and parts work is ideal for deeper healing.

A simple practice to start:

Reflect on a recent situation where you felt conflicted or reactive. Ask yourself:

• What different parts of me showed up?
• What was each part trying to protect me from? What was it afraid of?
• How old does this part feel?
• What does this part need to hear from my adult self? Hint: If nothing comes to mind, try: “I am here for you,” “It was not your fault,” “I believe you.”

Connect with your adult self through grounding (feel your feet on the floor, notice your breath, lengthen your spine). Then, with curiosity rather than judgment, ask a part what it wants you to know.

Treat this like a conversation with a frightened child or a protective friend. Listen. Validate. Offer care.

If parts work feels overwhelming:

• Slow down and take it step by step.
• Increase your inner resources with embodied resilience practices or hand-on-heart practices (Learn more in the episode: Five trauma counselling techniques that actually help)
• Start with the less emotionally intense parts.
• Take breaks and use grounding techniques.
• Work with a mental health professional specializing in healing childhood trauma as an adult.
• Be patient—this is a gradual process, not a quick fix.

The goal: wholeness, not perfection

Parts work therapy doesn’t promise you’ll never have activated parts again. It’s about embracing all the parts that belong to you. They have survived extremely difficult circumstances, which shows they have resilience. Parts work is about creating inner aliveness. Especially at the beginning, parts can be very polarized; however, the inner conflicts usually ease as the healing journey deepens.

The goal isn’t perfection or the absence of parts. The goal is integration—developing a healthy relationship between your adult self and all your parts.

Like the Japanese art of kintsugi, which mends broken pottery with gold, parts work helps you rejoin fragmented pieces into something more beautiful and valuable than before. Every part contributes to who you are—the wounded parts, the healing process, and the wisdom gained along the way.

When your parts feel heard, validated, and understood, inner turmoil settles into calm. The stormy sea inside becomes quieter. You develop the capacity to hold complexity: being both strong and vulnerable, both self-protective and open to connection, both honouring your past and choosing your future.

You are not broken into pieces that need fixing. You are adaptively fragmented—and those fragments can come together into a stronger, more integrated whole.

Overall, parts work therapy for adults with childhood trauma is a powerful tool to empower your healing journey and transform your life. 

Continue your healing journey

• Understanding Why You Feel Fragmented After Childhood Trauma – Coming soon
• Window of Tolerance for Adults with Childhood Trauma – Coming soon
• Creating Safety After Childhood Trauma as an Adult – Build the foundation your parts need to begin healing
• EMDR for Childhood Trauma – Explore how EMDR can help heal the wounds your parts carry

Sources