After meeting with and negotiating with a couple of my protector parts that often polarize because they have different ideas for how to keep me safe, I have felt a burst of energy and creativity. In today’s post, I’m sharing further insights about becoming self-led that have emerged from yesterday’s IFS session.

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100 Liminal Days is an experimental project of embracing my current transitional season after exiting my business by sharing an honest, real-time account of my self-initiation experience in daily posts. I’m using The Artist’s Way as a guiding tool, and sending shorter weekly recaps only via my newsletter. Visit Day 1/100 to learn more and sign up to get the weekly recaps delivered to your inbox.

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How I Neutralized Two Polarizing Parts

Working through an Internal Family Systems session and negotiating with two polarizing parts was a new and enlightening experience for me yesterday. I was feeling divided on what felt like the right thing for me to do with my time and it was causing a kind of decision paralysis.

In my mind, I felt as if I could do the work I had committed to doing (45 minutes of qigong, 21 minutes of meditation, 10 minutes of prayer, 30 minutes of working out, and writing my daily post) or I could just give up and take it easy for the rest of the afternoon.

The first choice – do all the things – was coming from the voice of a manager part of myself that loves tracking habits, being organized, creating structure and process. This part has helped me achieve a lot in my life already.

The second voice was that of a firefighter part that saw all of this work as a risk for burning out. Firefighter parts like my “Chill Out Part” snap into action and react to situations they see as threats to my wellness and safety. These type of parts often turn to substance abuse or other harmful habits and addictions to quickly “extinguish” the pain at all costs.

Manager parts like my “Disciplined Part” are proactive and try to prevent pain. Their go-to methods create a sense of control by setting standards and activating perfectionist tendencies.

Understanding the Extreme Behavior

When two parts with wildly different methods for protecting me get activated at the same time, it creates what in IFS is called polarization, and it requires some slow and intentional negotiation to help these parts step back and trust the Self to lead.

In the aftermath of this breakthrough of understanding the parts’ roles and getting their agreement to step back and let me try a 10-minute experiment before making a decision about whether to do my tasks or take the day off, I began to connect some other past challenges in my life to these parts and this polarization effect.

Day 17/100 was the first time I wrote about how I tend to gravitate towards the poles of extremes. I recalled some past behavior that I’ve called flip-flopping for many years of my life.

For example, in my 20s when I allowed myself to be free in my sexuality and accept that I am gay, I’d also engage in wildly irresponsible promiscuity and drug use. But then I’d feel guilty for all of it and flip to the other extreme where I’d cut off all of my LGBT relationships, go to church 2-3 times per week for hours on end, sometimes fast and pray for days, and go all in on a commitment to rigid rules and restrictions for myself. Eventually, I’d fail at adhering to the plan and go back to other end of the spectrum. Back and forth, back and forth. For decades of my life.

This same topic of living in the extremes came out in my writing on Days 28/100, 29/100, 30/100, and 33/100 as well! I hadn’t noticed how often I was thinking about this lately until I gained this clarity about why I find it so difficult to stand in a more balanced section of the spectrums. In my writing, especially in this little clump of days that it came up so frequently close together, I was questioning whether this 100 Liminal Days project is helping me grow or just a form of self flagellation.

Then on Day 33/100, a really cool synchronicity revealed itself to me. In my qigong teacher training, I learned that the neutral, standing meditation qigong pose called Wuji means “ultimate nothingness” and it is considered the space where everything else in existence emerges from. This is the space cultivating the existence of Yin and Yang (opposites that each contain an essence of the other, and together create the whole as well as balance order in the universe.)

In a mystical sense, standing in the Wuji stance is essentially embodying – becoming – the liminal space! When I connected those dots, I made a commitment to practice standing in Wuji both physically and metaphorically.

Learning to Stand in Wuji Translates to Becoming More Self-Led

I’ve been standing in Wuji for five minutes every day. It’s part of the assigned practice work for my qigong training. And here I am – just a week later – learning to use a very specific technique (IFS) to actively find the middle ground, the compromise, and to slowly exemplify to my parts that I, as my true Self, am becoming more capable of making good choices to take care of myself without their extreme actions and reactions.

This is a big takeaway. This feels like the lesson I am here in this liminal space to learn.

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