Parts Work Therapy for Adults with Childhood Trauma

You’re not contradicting yourself — you have parts.

I once was dating somebody, it was early on, when I had just discovered parts work. I see my parts as animals. Generally, I am like a cat: independent, clear, not too attached to the outcome. But when I started dating them, I suddenly felt like a dog: I reached out more often than I wanted to, felt dependent on their responses and neglected my boundaries. I wasn’t quite like myself. And yet, I couldn’t quite stop.

Have you ever reacted in a way that just did not feel like you? Have you ever felt completely overwhelmed by an emotion that seemed bigger than the moment it appeared in? Have you ever stayed in a relationship or situation you knew wasn’t good for you — and couldn’t make yourself leave?

What are parts?

I had a coaching session over Skype once that changed something fundamental in how I understood myself.

I was trying to resolve an inner conflict I couldn’t logic my way out of. I wanted closeness, and I kept sabotaging it. I thought I was contradicting myself. My coach suggested I talk to the parts involved.

My independent part showed up as a galloping horse, courageous, unstoppable. I liked them.

Then there was another part. A part that wanted to be nice and always ended up pleasing too much. I had spent a year trying to find something useful in them and couldn’t. To me, they were a gray mouse, worthless, the reason I’d stayed too long in relationships that weren’t good for me. I didn’t just dislike this part. I hated them.

My coach asked me to connect with them anyway. I did — and what I found stopped me completely.

They were sad. They didn’t feel seen by me. They felt guilty. And underneath all of that, they just wanted to love someone and be loved. They had learned to please because that was the only way they knew how to connect.

I felt a rush of genuine care I hadn’t expected. They weren’t the problem. They were a child who had only ever known manipulative relationships, doing the best they could with what they had. I had abandoned them. They weren’t sabotaging me.

That was the moment I understood: healing isn’t about getting rid of the parts you hate. It’s about understanding why they exist and finding your way to genuine care.

I don’t tell my clients what their parts are. I explore with them what their inner world looks like. You know your experience better than I do.

Finding genuine care for the gray mouse didn’t mean letting them make my decisions. They still needed re-educating. The pleasing didn’t stop the moment I understood it, but I stopped being at war with the part that was doing it. That’s the difference between being overwhelmed by a part and being in a relationship with it.

That’s what I mean by core self. Not a state of permanent openness or vulnerability — that’s not always safe, and it’s not always wise. It means being assertive enough to set boundaries from a place of genuine care rather than shame or fear. It means the parts don’t get to override you. You get to choose.

Not every part is a wound

Most of what I was taught about parts focused on wounds. Every pattern is a protection. Every reaction is a trauma response. It didn’t match what I found inside myself — or what I kept hearing from clients who’d been in therapy for years and still felt like their entire inner world was a problem to be fixed.

It isn’t. Some parts aren’t wounds. Some emotions are just emotions. They belong to today, not to what happened when you were seven. The anger that’s telling you something true about a situation that actually is unfair. The grief that belongs to a real loss. The lifelong weight of being targeted by oppression, of stigma you didn’t choose and couldn’t escape; that grief is not a pathology.

Not everything inside you is an adaptive response. Some of it is just true. Learning to tell the difference, what belongs to today and what belongs to then, that’s yours to develop. Nobody can do that for you.

You can’t do that if everything gets treated as pathology.

Parts look different for everyone. Some people see animals. Some see people, or objects, or colours, or nothing visual at all — just a sensation or a voice. Some parts change their form with healing. The form doesn’t matter.

Here’s how I think about it.

Some parts aren’t connected to trauma at all. The wise part that holds the accumulated knowledge of your life. The intuitive part that knows something before you can explain why. The parts that once carried wounds and no longer do. These aren’t wounds. They’re yours.

Activated parts are sometimes solely about the past and often a combination of present-day experience and past trauma. They carry implicit or explicit memories, experience the danger as present even when it isn’t, or move to protect you from further wounding. They don’t only show up around childhood trauma; they can also show up around perfectionism, low self-esteem, or any pattern that has its roots in difficult experiences. Listen to: Childhood trauma triggers

Parts in trauma responses have nervous system dysregulation: the prefrontal cortex is offline or significantly diminished. They can fight, flight, freeze, fawn, attach, or be immobilized. This is why working with them requires different strategies than working with activated parts. You often need grounding and somatic tools first — to get back into your adult self before anything else is possible.

And some parts believe it was all your fault. This part developed for a reason: when we were children, believing the harm was our fault can feel safer than acknowledging that the people we depended on were dangerous. But in adulthood, this part can lead us to take on too much responsibility — in relationships, in conflicts, in situations where the harm genuinely belonged to someone else. Changing the thought won’t change the wound. What actually helps is separating your adult self enough from the part so that you can turn toward it: connect with it, reeducate it where necessary. Then heal the wound it carries. None of that happens overnight.

Dissociative parts are common and also have a protective function. If we meet dissociative parts with curiosity, we can explore what activated them and start building a relationship with them. If we push too hard to be in the body, the part that is scared may shut down.

The best distinction I can give you is intensity and whether the part overrides your capacity to function. The categories are a useful map. But lived experience doesn’t arrive labelled. Nobody thinks “my attachment part is activated.” They think “I can’t stop texting them” or “I feel like I’m dying if they don’t respond.” And the same behaviour can come from multiple parts at once: people-pleasing might be a fawn part trying to keep the peace, or an attach part desperately holding on to a connection, or freeze that can’t find its voice, or shame that believes it doesn’t deserve better. Often several simultaneously.

You don’t need to correctly identify which part is running the show. You just need to get curious about it. The categories are a starting point for curiosity, not a diagnostic checklist to get right. The question isn’t “is this my attach part or my fawn part?” It’s “what is this part trying to protect me from, and what does it need?”

Why do parts develop after trauma?

These parts developed because the environment you grew up in required your inner system to adapt in very specific ways — to survive, to stay connected to caregivers, to manage what was unmanageable alone. They didn’t appear because something was wrong with you. They appeared because something was required of you.

These patterns are still socially stigmatized. They are adaptations, your brain’s way of helping you survive circumstances that were genuinely overwhelming. They might currently be blocking or limiting your life. They aren’t a sign that you are flawed or broken.

Healing from this is real — not linear, not quick, but real.

If you want to understand more about how inner fragmentation develops: Signs of Childhood Trauma in Adults: When Your Inner World Feels Fragmented (coming soon)

Why parts work matters for healing childhood trauma

Many clients who come to me after talk therapy have this sense: I tried it, but it didn’t quite reach the deeper healing. This makes complete sense. Childhood trauma doesn’t only live in your thoughts. It’s stored in your body and results in inner fragmentation. Talk therapy reaches one side of that divide, the rational parts. Parts work reaches both, and that’s what childhood trauma needs.

Parts work therapy for adults with childhood trauma is not primarily a technique. It is a relationship between you as the adult and the parts that have been running things without your awareness.

The shift that makes everything else possible is deceptively simple. Instead of “I am angry,” you learn to say “a part of me is angry.” That gap — between you and the part — is where curiosity becomes possible. Where you stop being overwhelmed by the experience and start being able to get curious about it. Where healing actually begins.

Take anxiety. Most approaches treat anxiety as something to manage or reduce. Parts work asks a different question: what is this anxiety protecting you from? Anxiety is often a part that covers other emotions: grief that hasn’t been felt, an abandonment wound, and shame that feels too dangerous to approach directly. When we relate to anxiety as a part rather than a problem, we can begin to ask what’s underneath it. And what’s underneath it is usually what actually needs attention.

The same is true for boundaries. Difficulty setting boundaries isn’t one thing; it’s usually a set of parts pulling in different directions simultaneously. A part that wants to say no. A part that’s terrified of the conflict that might follow. A part that believes other people’s needs matter more than yours. A part that genuinely cares for the other person. They’re all there at once, which is why willpower alone never works. You can’t override a set of parts with a decision. You can only build a relationship with them.

That relationship develops gradually. You learn to notice when a part is activated. You get curious about what it’s protecting you from. You connect with it as you would in a healthy friendship — without being controlled by it. You negotiate with them. You set boundaries. Over time, parts that once ran everything begin to trust that you — the adult — can handle what they’ve been carrying. And in that trust, something shifts. Not dramatically. But genuinely.

Our therapeutic relationship can help you get started—and work with parts that feel too big to connect with on your own. But the goal is that you gradually become able to do this work yourself. Not dependency. Interdependence.

EMDR and parts work

Within the Integrative Trauma Recovery Model™, I combine parts work with EMDR — because for childhood trauma, neither approach alone is enough.

EMDR for trauma recovery, as a standalone, can be too overwhelming and doesn’t address the relational dimension of childhood trauma. But integrated with parts work, it can reach what talking alone cannot.

Many adults with childhood trauma don’t remember specific events. What they have instead are body sensations, overwhelming emotions, and automatic reactions that arrive without context. EMDR works directly with what the body and nervous system are holding, which makes it especially useful when there are no explicit memories to work with. It can reach those implicit memories and help parts process what they’ve been holding in the body — without needing a clear narrative. Read more: Healing childhood trauma as an adult.

The key is timing. EMDR before a client has enough relationship with a part can destabilize the nervous system rather than settle it. If that happens, the next step is to return to parts work to slow things down. Generally, EMDR accelerates, and parts work slows. If your symptoms get worse, the pacing is likely too fast.

If you want to understand more about how EMDR works specifically for childhood trauma: EMDR for childhood trauma: Why I use an integrative approach

Try it as an experiment

Start with a moment from last week that had an emotional charge. Not the most painful thing — just something you noticed. Write about it as if you’re talking to a friend. What happened? What did you feel in your body? What might that part have been protecting you from?

Or write to a part directly. Take a piece of paper and ask: “Anxious part, what do you want to tell me?” “What’s going on for you?” Write whatever comes — without editing, without judging. Then reflect back what you heard. “I hear that you’re scared. I hear that you’ve been carrying this for a long time.”

You don’t need to get it right. Just turn toward it.

If parts work feels overwhelming or you find yourself getting flooded — slow down, use grounding, and reach out. That’s what I’m here for.

Book a free consultation online — let’s explore whether working together makes sense

You are not broken into pieces that need fixing. You are adaptively fragmented.

I want to tell you about a moment that has stayed with me.

I was sitting on a wooden box in my new apartment in Spain. I had just moved — left everything familiar behind, started again in a country where my father couldn’t find me, where there were no names next to the doorbells, where I had checked in summer that I would finally be safe.

I sat there and massaged my shoulders. I felt small and young and tired. And then — underneath all of that — I felt something I had never felt before in my life.

Safe.

Tears started running down my face. I didn’t try to stop them.

And then a small voice inside me spoke. My inner child. It said:

Finally, you kept your promise. You have kept me waiting for such a long time.

I had made myself this promise as a child. I had always wanted to go away — to be free, to be safe. But for years, I had put everyone else’s needs before my own. My grandfather. My partner. The relationships I stayed in too long. The people I tried to save instead of saving myself.

I answered them silently:

I’m sorry I waited so long. I’m sorry I ignored you. I’m glad I finally did it.

Tears fell — tears for the pain of what had happened, and tears of gratitude for where I was right now.

I had given up everything. And I had won myself.

I’m sharing this because moments like this are real. Not metaphors. Not therapy-speak. Real — felt in the body, arrived at gradually, earned through the slow and unglamorous work of turning toward yourself instead of away.

Healing is not a dramatic transformation. It’s a series of small choices — to stay curious about your inner world instead of distracting, to turn toward a part of yourself instead of wishing it were gone, to finally do the thing you promised yourself you would do.

Not as a destination. As a direction.

If you want to explore whether trauma-focused parts work is right for you, book a free consultation.

Book a free consultation online — let’s explore whether working together makes sense

FAQs: Parts work therapy for adults with childhood trauma

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