I once read about the concept of having different parts of us in Shakti Gawain’s book, Awakenings, which I had browsed briefly whilst in my local library. I remember finding it deliciously different, and laughing over how wacky, and even absurd it sounded! She talks about getting in touch with your inner child, and your inner creative person, etc, to embrace all the inner parts of you, and when needed call a community meeting, lol. It was crazy, yet I felt she was onto something, there!
Soon after that episode, my NLP trainers, Dee and Paul mentioned Inner Teams briefly when I was down at New Oceans NLP in Herts doing some training. I remember smiling whilst remembering Shakti Gawain’s book.
Then one day, I went to see Dee in her sweet yellow (she saw it as white) home in Herts. I was having problems with my loved ones. It turned out that many close family members and friends thought I was far too strict and overbearing, and I was mortified. Imagine helping out so many women, transforming their marriages, and not being able to help out your own family! What was that all about! And how could I stop being so judgmental?
As I sat with Dee, in her kitchen in Hitchin, I told her all about how I was finding it hard to get into rapport with my friends and family. Dee listened, and then told me I was not getting rapport with someone much more important than my family and friends: I was not getting rapport with myself. I remember thinking, ‘How cliché. What’s that supposed to mean anyway?’
She asked me what I wanted, and told her I wanted to stop judging my family and friends.
She told me to call the part of me that judges her family and friends, and I identified that part of me to be masculine. He was wearing a suit and was awfully prim and proper. His sole purpose was to judge everyone! His name was: Judge.
Guided by Dee, I asked him what his positive intention was, and he told me that it was to make sure everyone followed the ‘rules’ and that they were Shariah compliant. (!) It was very important for him that everyone did the right thing. Without adherence to strict rules and standards, there would be social ruin. His positive intention was to create a healthy community: was there ever a more honorable intention than his?
Judge and Dee got talking, it emerged that Judge decided to start judging when Sara was about seven years old. It was a sad day when she saw some disturbing and hurtful scenes, and she was so hurt she had decided ‘This is wrong’. Understandably so!
That was then, and decades passed. Judge was now judging all the time, he was bringing discord into Sara’s life, a feeling that Sara was not happy with at all. She felt she couldn’t communicate with those around her, especially her most loved ones.
Judge was asked what was the best way he could help Sara most effectively, to which he replied, after a few moments of thought, ‘To only judge Sara and no one else. To make sure Sara stayed on the straight path obeying the rules Judge had made for her.’ He was confident in the rulings he applied on Sara’s life, as they mainly came from the Sacred rulings of her religion.
Once Judge has made this decision, he was asked to run it by Sara, and see what she thought of his new decision. Sara, who was a carefree sprite, was floating around the Blue Mosque in Istanbul at the time, and she declared that she was very relieved to have Judge take a back seat and just be in charge of her welfare and rather than the welfare of the whole community. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, also feeling a deep sense of relief.
He later went and changed his clothes into a long flowing robe – he had shoulder length hair, and looked very noble – his rigid lines had all vanished.
I told Dee afterwards that I really loved the concept of ‘inner teams’. She smiled, and she told me something along the lines of,
You are bus.
A bus?
That’s right, You’re a bus! You are also the driver.
I allowed that to sink in: I’m the bus, and also the driver.
Inside your bus, there are other passengers, who are also drivers.
‘Woah…’ I felt like Neo discovering the Matrix.
You have lots of drivers in there, inside you: the bus. At times, certain drivers may be best suited to be driving during that part of your journey. They have that expertise of that terrain. In other parts of the journey, you may need to ask a different driver to drive. The drivers form your inner team, and are all inside you, and you get to choose who drives.
Dee told me gently that I would probably feel a change in all the different parts of me who were being dominated by judge. I would be a changed sister, a changed friend, a changed mother, now that judge was not going to be there in these situations.
I remember coming back feeling like a total cliché.. I had gone to see my trainer and came back having identified my inner judge, lol. But something inside me had definitely shifted, and I was so moved by the experience. What I loved the most was that I didn’t have to stop judging! Instead of berating myself for being so judgmental, I could now embrace my inner judge, and appreciate that part of me that kept me in line with my own high morals and standards. I needed my inner judge, I could keep him, and I didn’t need to banish him to the high towers of the Blue Mosque.
The next day, whilst listening to children recite their Quran before going to school, I remember having my mind of other things…. so much so that I was miles away. Yet part of me was sat there listening to the children, and whenever they made a mistake, I impatiently shouted at them and told them off. As this carried on for a about 10 minutes I stopped dead in my tracks and thought ‘Hang on… who is this? Which part of me is this?!’ Am I a witch possessed?
I thought about the part that should have been there: the part of me who nurtures her children, has time, patience, love, sympathy, empathy. She is Mother Nurture. That’s who should have been driving. But she was nowhere to be found… after after further searching I realised that she was there somewhere, trapped inside of me!!!
So, who was this driving right now? I identified him to be Jazba, my ambition. The part of me that always wants to do new things, and has all my new ideas. I was always admired for having so much ambition, yet here he was taking over Mother Nurture’s driving seat!
However, after having identified Jazba, I felt like he was not alone in the driving seat. Feeling totally hijacked by my many different parts, I found Efficiency, who always wanted things to be done on time, to follow routines and was always on the go like a clockwork mouse! ‘Come on, hurry up!’ she would cry, ‘You’re going to be late!’. Poor little kids, this wasn’t what they needed at 7 in the morning.
I took a deep breath, kissed the children off to school, and decided to sit down in my little shiny house and identify the parts of me who were on-call today, who knew, perhaps I would need to make some redundancies?
Read More About NLP 'Parts Integration' here: https://www.2knowmyself.com/Resolving_inner_conflict/nlp_parts_integration_visual_squash https://www.satirworkshops.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/parts-party-teaser.pdf
