Not Everyone Likes Me, and Apparently That's OK

If you’ve never been to IFS therapy (interfamily systems), then a session sounds nuts. It sounded crazy the first time I went. “I feel like I’m making it up,” I told my therapist.

“So?” she said.

In IFS, we try to identify feelings or urges as “parts” (or “peeps,” as my mom says) with names, personalities, ages, purposes, and desires that may conflict with each other. (Think Inside Out.) As a rule, no matter what a part’s job is or how destructive their work is becoming, they’re there to help. My anger is there to protect me. My sadness lets me know what I value. My tired tells me to rest. But they’re all a part, and it’s my job as the Self to be the whole. I’m the grownup, and I have to help them realize when their job is done or redirect their energy when they’re being hurtful.

Like I said, it’s kind of trippy, but there are a couple of advantages to this for me:

It helps me make sense of why I experience so many conflicting things at once and helps me figure out what the root causes of those feelings are, what I should do in the face of them, and how I can help this part calm down even if I can’t give them what they want.
It gives me some distance from my very big feelings. When I encounter parts this way, they don’t have to overwhelm me.
I’m not always good at being nice to me, but I’m usually pretty good at being nice to other people. So once I conceive of a part as separate from me, I’m much more likely to be patient and kind with it instead of trying to push it back to wherever it came from. Which, in turn, is likely to help it calm down.

In a therapy session, I’m essentially trained on how to interact with my parts. I’m learning to be curious and compassionate when I encounter them, and they’re learning to trust me. I’ve been doing this for two and a half years now, and I’m getting pretty good at doing it on my own. Like, in my last session (which is actually the point of this post, it just required a lot of context), most of the appointment I sat there with my eyes closed and did the work on my own, with only occasional interjections from my therapist.

In my session, I went to find a part that had been bringing up some dreams lately. All the dreams are essentially the same: I encounter someone I used to be close with, and I wake up with anxiety about whether or not they approve of my life. I spend my day assessing it from their point of view which, unsurprisingly, doesn’t make me super happy.

I was surprised by how young the part was. I was expecting her to be in high school, because that’s where the first used-to-be-tight-don’t-talk-anymore person was from, but she wasn’t. She was eight or nine, walking down Moana St., where I used to live.

We walked together for a while, and I asked her how she was. “Not everyone likes me,” she said, once we’d settled down on a low wall that may or may not still be on Kulanui Street. She was confused by this and a little sad.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Weirdos.”

“Weirdos?”

“For sure,” I said. “Not everyone has to like you, and you don’t have to like everyone, but you’re very likable. It’s weird that they don’t like you.”

"Oh,” she said. She was young, and she believed me easily. My parts trust me now more than they used to.

“What do you think we should do about these people who don’t like you?” I asked her.

“I think we should try to make them like me,” Like Me said.

I sat next to her for a minute, trying to figure out a good way to respond to that. I find, when my parts are young, they need me to talk to them like they’re young. I wasn’t sure how to explain to a nine year old why that would make us (not to mention everyone else) unhappy. Finally I said, “What do you think dad would say to that?”

It was her turn to sit on the wall and think. “He’d say our job is to see people, not to be seen by people. We should love them without worrying about them loving us too much.” She didn’t love that idea, but she’d grown up with it, and she knew it was right. We sat there and thought about it together. “What do you think we should do about it?” she asked.

“I think we should let them go,” I told her. “Sometimes you have to let people go, and that’s OK.”

So we went to the beach. Temple Beach is where I was baptized, and it’s a short walk from my house. Down towards the end it curves and turns into Hukilau beach, and my little Like Me part ran down to that curve and drew a line in the sand just where the beach changed. When she got back, I’d gathered all the people we love who don’t talk to us much anymore, the people who’d been popping up in my dreams, the people I feel a little rejected by.

“OK,” I said. “Say bye.”

She went over and hugged the first one. She told him everything she liked about him, how wonderful it’d been to have him in our life. She told him how happy we are that he seems to be doing well and how much we hope that keeps being true. Then she held my hand and we waved at him until he walked past the line in the sand and disappeared into Hukilau.

We did the same thing five more times with five more people. She hugged them (except for one, who scared her; she waved at her), told them what she liked about them, and wished them well with fervency and specificity. And then we waved until they walked around the corner.

“I might have to do this a few more times,” she said, as we watched the last one go beyond our horizon

I squeezed her hand. Sometimes these things don’t stick, and we have to go back to our ritual. “We can do this as many times as you need. How do you feel?”

“Alone,” she said. But then we turned around, and there were people who stayed. My family and friends who give me love well and wisely still. Austin picked her up and swung her around, and then he held my hand when she walked up to Jesus. "Do you like me?” she asked Him. She was crying. It had hurt her to let those people go.

He knelt down and gathered her up. “I do,” He promised her.

At the end of my conversations with these parts of my past, I always try and take them somewhere safe. Sometimes they go to my parents’s house, sometimes to a hike in Utah I like or a lake in Maine that I love. Sometimes they want to stay and hang out with me. When I asked Like Me where she wanted to go, she asked if she could go with Jesus. “Is that OK?” I asked Him.

“Yeah,” He said. “I’ve got her.” They walked away together, and I walked away with Austin.

The best part of it, the part that made me cry as I told my therapist about it, was that I liked her. Little Like Me was so nice. She only wanted good things for those people as they walked away from her. She was nice to me. She was little, and she wanted to be loved. How could I possibly blame her for that? I didn’t need the approval of the people walking away as much because I liked her. I liked me.

I’ve already had to go back to the beach with Like Me again. But our little ritual is always shorter and less sad now. I remind her that the person is beyond our horizon, no longer our kuleana. I tell her that I love her, and, when necessary, Jesus tells her He loves her too. She always calms down then.