What part of you is ambitious?
And when and why did it come into being?
Maybe you’re someone who, given the opportunity, defines yourself not necessarily by the work you do in the world but by how you do it. As in:
I’m a hard worker.
I’m super organized.
I’m ambitious.
But maybe you’re like me, and you’re aware that you’re a mash-up of all sorts of seemingly contradictory things—driven but also lazy, courageous but also fearful, efficient but also distractible. Some of these disparate parts complement each other and can team up to get things done, but others resent or despise each other and conspire to marginalize the parts they see as problematic or shameful.
Regardless of their function, every part of each of us has an origin story and a reason for being. At least that’s the theory at the heart of Internal Family Systems (IFS), a therapeutic model developed by therapist Richard Schwartz. Like external family systems, Schwartz argues that we have internal family systems— a whole network of parts of ourselves, “sub-personalities”, that have roles and relationships to each other.
The process of healing, of coming into a constructive experience of wholeness and integration, involves uncovering and naming our parts and understanding the system of relationships we’ve established between them. For those parts that grew out of trauma or painful experience, the goal is to come to some understanding of the role they played in our survival and safety. And perhaps the ways, in current times, their strategies to protect us no longer serve.
So, I’ll ask again. What part of you is ambitious? What motivates that part of you and when was it born?