Individuals’ parts typically harbor great mistrust for each other. Protective parts are generally polarized with other protective parts. The self-like manager, usually called “Me,” busily manages and controls various parts, experienced as different voices, impulses, behaviors, and other streams of energy and information that are often in conflict. At the same time, “Me” is often viewed as incapable of caring for vulnerable exiles and exiled protectors.
Mistrust extends outward, too. In a parallel process, “Me” and other protective parts have learned not to trust people to give them the understanding and support they need.
Parts protect vast areas of experience, sometimes fiercely. Reflecting significant generational and cultural burdens, large amounts of bodily experiences are disintegrated from right-brain awareness, starting from the earliest moments of life. Many other aspects of experience are actively suppressed because they have learned that others will ignore or react negatively to them.
Allan Shore, best known for articulating the neurobiological basis of attachment theory, differentiates between these two types of defenses.
More primitive defenses block the right brain from the brain stem’s representation of what’s happening in the body. As a result, the right brain’s ability to know and differentiate the body’s signals is compromised. At a higher level, the left brain defends against aspects of the body’s experience that are available to right-brain awareness but seen as unsafe.
Mistrust is healthy and necessary. Even so, parts don’t trust others to see their mistrust that way, and for good reasons. Parts expect others to take mistrust personally—to be angry, put off, or offended. Culturally, mistrust is seen as unfriendly, wrong, and antisocial.
As a result, parts can be brilliantly skilled at hiding their negative expectations that others are unavailable, unable, or unwilling to provide the support they need. Unfortunately, while parts work incredibly hard to regulate the self and get along in the world, they experience being largely unseen and unappreciated. Parts often live with a lifetime of misunderstanding and neglect.
When parts’ moves are noticed by other people or other internal parts, their reasons for mistrusting are broadly reinforced. Others tend to judge their protective, mistrustful stance rather than appreciate the good reasons for their presence. Parts often experience dismissal, judgment, or demands for change. Understandably, they may develop an attitude of defiance and contempt.
Acknowledging, appreciating, and supporting mistrust is essential to building trust. As parts feel welcomed in their mistrust, they become more alive and present.
When we embrace mistrust toward us as healers as part of the process, we strengthen the therapeutic alliance and create a safer and more powerful space for healing.
Photo by Aleksandra Dementeva on Unsplash.
