It’s OK Not to Calm Down

I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.

- Helen Keller

When our kids were babies, I had very little problem letting them cry it out, whether it was for sleep training as babies or crying meltdowns as toddlers. Audra had a harder time with this, and I assumed it was a gender difference: the emotionally aloof father vs. the emotionally sensitive mother.

A few years ago in therapy, however, it dawned on me that in older childhood and adolescence, I experienced a different version of “crying it out” where, if my emotions were getting too big for my mother, she would withdraw, leaving me to emote it out on my own, so to speak.

Throughout therapy, coaching, trainings, and meditation, I’ve discovered young inner parts of me that had a lot of emotional pain that needed to be internally witnessed and expressed. In fact, there were a few months of therapy where I allowed these young parts to cry every week. I now see that having the presence of the therapist there to witness these tears was quite important for my young parts.

I haven’t cried that hard since then, and I’ve only come close in a few moments of grief for childhood cancer families we’ve worked with. I’ve felt like I expressed whatever those young parts were holding . . . until last week.

As an emotional health coach, I keep up with my own inner work through a number of practices (from daily meditation and various trainings to regular breathwork and of course seeing my own parts-work therapist [for a quick primer on parts-work, check out this past newsletter]). Last week in therapy, I connected with what felt like a really young part, maybe around one year old.

I could feel it in my stomach, it was upset and basically throwing a fit. As we do in parts work, I sat with this part and asked it questions. It wouldn’t respond. It felt like an upset baby or toddler who was just pissed. Maybe it didn’t have a nap or it had gas or its favorite toy was broken.

I had no idea. So I just held space for it.

What does it mean to “hold space”? It’s a phrase that, as far as I can tell, originated in men’s support groups as a way of guiding men to do the opposite of what they normally do: listen, don’t try to solve or fix anything, drop assumptions and judgments, practice unconditional kindness, and center the other person rather than yourself.

So I held space for this inner part that felt very young and very upset. And I thought I was doing a good job until I noticed that all my loving kindness wasn’t causing this part to calm down. I realized another inner part had come in with an agenda to get this young part to calm down. And this helper part was about to put the young part back in its crib and let it cry it out.

At the behest of my parts-work therapist, however, I instead asked that helper part to relax back and let me (my core true self) just sit and hold this part with no agenda. It can cry as long as it wants; I’m not going anywhere.

Suddenly I got this wordless message from the young, crying part that this is what it wanted all along: to know that it was worthy of love and care even if it didn’t calm down. It was testing me to see how real and unconditional my love was. And once I got that agenda-driven helper part to relax back, the unconditional love in my core could take over.

That very young part in my stomach cried a bit more, seemingly to make sure my care was for real. And then it stopped. In its place I felt a massive opening up, a feeling of oceanic expansion. This lasted quite a while and I just relaxed into it.

Why am I writing this? I certainly feel self-conscious about sharing it. But I think there might be something here for others. What parts of us learned as very young children that we were only worthy of love and care if we calmed down (or behaved, did the right thing, stayed small, performed a certain role, etc.)?

Even when we start to heal and turn our compassion inward, we often bring along protector parts that have agendas. This type of compassion comes with conditions: upset parts need to calm down; misbehaving parts need to behave, disordered parts need to get ordered, overly-ordered parts need to relax, and so on.

But the compassion in our core, essential, true self has ZERO conditions attached. It’s here for it all. And once our wounded parts are held with this kind of compassion, they can finally release the burdens they're carrying and begin the healing process.