There's a phrase that drives me absolutely bananas.

"Yeah, my four-year-old self got totally triggered."

It's the thing people say after a blowup with their partner, usually about something small — the dishwasher, the laundry, the way someone said goodnight. 

It means they've done real work and they know something old got activated. What it doesn't mean is that the work is finished. This is one of the most common things I see in therapeutic coaching online.

Naming the part and healing the part are two very different things.

As an international trauma therapist and coach, I recognize that anyone who says this has actually done some therapy or coaching. Unfortunately, they just haven’t finished the work. 

Naming the Parts Isn't the Same as Healing Them.

Plenty of clients have spent multiple sessions meeting their parts, learning the lingo, giving their inner child a name and a whole origin story.

What they don't have is integration. What they have is fragmentation with better vocabulary.

And that's arguably worse than not having done the work at all. Now the fragmentation has a name and a story, which makes it feel more real and more permanent, rather than something that was always meant to fold back into a whole self.

What Parts Work Is Actually Trying to Do

Here's the thing: we're not one unified self walking around.

We're a whole system of sub-selves, each one formed in response to a specific moment, relationship, or wound. We already talk this way without realizing it.

"Part of me wants to do this, but part of me is terrified" is the same intuition behind the inner critic, the inner child, the saboteur, IFS's managers and firefighters and exiles. Different disciplines, different vocabulary, same underlying phenomenon.

Every One of These Parts Formed to Protect You.

The harsh one, the avoidant one, the self-sabotaging one: none of them are flaws.

They're protectors running strategies that made complete sense when they formed, usually in childhood. They just haven't gotten the memo that we're adults now, with credit cards, car keys, and options our seven-year-old selves never had.

The real goal of parts work was never to name the parts.

It was always integration. Getting all those parts back on the same team, with our current adult self in the driver's seat.

Why Most Parts Work Doesn't Actually Work

Identification is fun. Insight-generating. Seductive. So that's where a lot of people camp out.

IFS gets everyone excited about naming the manager, spotting the firefighter, meeting the exile — and that part of the process is genuinely valuable, often producing real "aha" moments.

But identification was never the destination. It was the starting point. Integration is the step that actually heals anything, and it's the step almost nobody finishes.

When the work stops at identification, what's left behind is a permanent cast of characters. That's how someone ends up saying "sorry, my four-year-old got triggered" years into their process — not because anything is wrong with them, but because that chapter never got the ending it was supposed to have.

And here's the part that doesn't get said enough: unintegrated parts don't stay quietly contained inside us. They show up in our relationships. The inner child ends up at the dinner table, and a partner becomes the one reassuring it, managing it, tiptoeing around it. The firefighter speaks out of turn to a boss, and then there's relational cleanup to do afterward.

Couples therapist Terry Real, whose work has shaped a lot of how I think about this, puts it simply: it's completely boundary-less to foist your inner child off on somebody else to babysit. Not because anyone's doing anything wrong on purpose — just because the work never got finished.

Why It Can Potentially Make Things Worse

Parts formed around real trauma.

Which means touching them means we're doing trauma work, whether we meant to or not.

Without keeping the client grounded and in their body throughout the process, without tools to give the nervous system somewhere to discharge the distress instead of just reactivating it, this work carries real risk. We can end up flooding or retraumatizing someone rather than helping them heal.

We can open something in a client that we don't yet have the skill to close back down. And if a young, vulnerable, or self-harming part gets invited to speak without the adult self held firmly in the driver's seat, we're in genuinely delicate territory — amplifying that voice without the whole system present can make things more volatile, not less.

This is exactly why I'm direct about something like Dissociative Identity Disorder: it's a specialty that requires extended, specific training. Without trauma training, we might not even recognize it's there in front of us — and that's usually when harm happens, not because anyone meant for it to.

None of this is about gatekeeping who gets to do this work. It's about respecting how much weight these parts are carrying, and making sure we have the tools to hold it before we go looking for it.

How My Approach Is Different

The model I use at therapyjane is called Healing the Parts. It pulls from multiple parts theories, EMDR, energy psychology, and coaching, combined so the whole process moves faster, more gently, and more completely than any single model on its own.

The key difference from a lot of other parts theories: protector parts don't need an excavated origin story. I don't need to know their age, their backstory, or exactly when they formed. During therapeutic coaching, I just need to know they're there, because they're showing up in the person's life right now.

So instead of spending multiple sessions identifying every protector in detail, I welcome them and acknowledge what they were trying to do. Then I update them to the current time and place, and integrate them.

Traumatized Parts are Different. 

Those do need real attention to the specific event. They're stuck in an isolated piece of the nervous system that needs new pathways built back out to the rest of the brain.

That work I do with care and depth. But protectors don't require that same excavation, which is exactly what makes a lot of parts work take so long that most people never finish it.

The whole thing stays embodied throughout: tapping and a repeat-after-me format where I address the parts and the client repeats or corrects me. The adult self is always present and always in charge.

Integration is built into the process itself, not left as an optional final step that life gets in the way of completing.

What Good Parts Work Actually Feels Like

Not more insight. The absence of something.

A situation that used to send you into orbit just doesn't register the same way anymore.

You walk into a conversation that used to wreck you, and it's just calmer. Less charged. A relationship that felt loaded becomes steadier.

Eventually you stop making the separation at all. It's not "my inner child" anymore. It's just you — a little more whole, without the extra cost of energy it used to take to hold that part at arm's length.

That's the real marker. Not being able to recite a detailed cast list of your inner parts. Just being more yourself, more consistently, with less cleanup afterward.

Ready to Actually Finish the Work? Work With an International Trauma Therapist and Coach

Your four-year-old self doesn't need a spokesperson. They need a parent. And you're the only one who can get the job done. I'm an international trauma therapist and coach based in British Columbia, offering therapeutic coaching online at therapyjane to clients and training participants around the world. Whether you're looking to do your own parts work or learn how to guide others through it safely, there's a way in.

When you're ready, here's how we begin:

• Book a One-Time Healing Session: A one-time healing session is a great place to experience Healing the Parts for yourself. One session, one area of focus, and a chance to feel what integration actually feels like.
• Explore Courses and Trainings: My courses and trainings are for therapists and coaches who want to learn how to take their clients past identification and into actual integration, with continuing education credits included.
• Book Your Discovery Session: Ready for deeper therapeutic coaching online? Book a discovery session! This is where we map your history, identify the patterns, and build a personalized plan for the work ahead.
• Get to Know Me First: Not quite ready? Fair enough. Have a look at my about page, read a few more posts, and get a feel for who I am and how I work. I'll still be here when you're ready.

Other Ways to Work With Me

If this blog landed somewhere, the next step depends on which side of the work you are on at therapyjane.

If you are a coach or therapist who has been doing parts work with clients and wants the trauma foundation to do it safely and completely, the Live and On-Demand Courses teach exactly that — including the sequencing, the somatic grounding, and the integration step most training skips entirely.

For one-to-one guidance on a specific client whose parts work has opened something you are not sure how to close, Consulting and Mentoring is available for practitioners who want experienced support on exactly that.

If you are reading this as someone who recognises themselves in the still-stuck description, who has named the parts, knows the language, and hasn't yet reached integration, International Therapy and Coaching is where that finishing work happens.

For those who want to experience what completed parts work actually feels like before committing to a longer process, a One-Time Healing Session is the place to start.

And for patterns that seem to go deeper than your own history, Healing the Birth Story works at the developmental and ancestral level where some of the oldest parts were first formed.

Wherever you are in the process, there is a way to go further.

About the Author

Jane McCampbell Stuart is a Registered Clinical Counsellor, Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, Certified EMDR Therapist, and Certified Professional Co-active Coach based on an island in British Columbia, though her clients are scattered across the globe. With over 20 years of experience as a trauma therapist and having lived in four countries on two continents herself, she has a particular soft spot for the expats, executives, aid workers, and globally mobile humans who are brilliant at everything except sitting still. Her approach is deeply relational, clinically precise, and just a little bit magical. She gets in, gets to the root, and gets to work. And then she teaches you how to do it too.