Parts Work Quotes

“I was transfixed by the way her internal mother had simply arrived and begun to tell her story in the sand.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“So much of what the self-love movement gets wrong is the result of viewing the self as some
kind of monolithic and singular entity. That’s how we’ve been taught to experience ourselves.
But when we put ourselves under the microscope, when we take a good look inside, that view
starts to unravel. We begin to experience our inner lives as fluid, dynamic, multifaceted, vast,
and surprising.”
― Ralph De La Rosa, Don't Tell Me to Relax: Emotional Resilience in the Age of Rage, Feels, and Freak-Outs

“There is a plurality to our being: We are one heart with many parts. We are one psyche holding
many minds and many psychologies. This opens doors, and they are doors that urgently need
opening... while we are not responsible for the conditioning that’s brought us where
we are now, we are indeed accountable for what we do with it.”
― Ralph De La Rosa

“We are not one-dimensional, and our multiple dimensions are not static. Just as our bodies are
made of many parts that form a dynamic, interwoven system that works together, so it is with
our psyches. We are more awake, alive, and complex than we know.”
― Ralph De La Rosa, Don't Tell Me to Relax: Emotional Resilience in the Age of Rage, Feels, and Freak-Outs

“When we touch curiosity, we graze the rim of infinite possibility.”
― Ralph De La Rosa, Don't Tell Me to Relax: Emotional Resilience in the Age of Rage, Feels, and Freak-Outs

“The polarities of personality often present as victim and oppressor, the haves and the have nots, rights and wrongs, and other seemingly persistent divisions in our society. These polarities are not the source of this tension, but when we relate with the polarities through a reactionary state of operation, we can easily divide ourselves along those lines. Us and them. The familiar and the other.

When we don't own our own wholeness, when we identity too much with something other than our core worth, we collapse into one pole, as in being with or against others. This othering process is myopic, in that it doesn't take into account that our own wholeness is dependent on reclaiming the alternate pole, the person we think we are not, the "other" within us.

When we are able to relate with each pole from a place of responsiveness, where we stand in recognition of our own innate wholeness, the experience of polarity can be one of expansion, flow, contrast and generative transformation, rather than division.

Once we reckon with the paradox of how the perceived other is both distinct, and a direct reflection of us, then we see ourselves in that mirror. We see everyone and everything as reflecting an aspect of ourself that we get to reclaim.

Those we might have judged become guideposts for our own liberation. Our triggers become welcomed signs that we have rejected something inside us.

The idea that you are either with us or against us is a limiting lens that perpetuates humanity's suffering. The recognition that you are us, that everyone is us, allows our self-love to humanize others into belonging.”
― Gareth Gwyn, You Are Us: How to Build Bridges in a Polarized World