When the Therapist Has Parts, Too: Reflections from Trauma Work
Trusting the system, releasing control, and supporting the process
There are moments in trauma work when what’s happening in the room isn’t just about the client. Something tightens. Something leans forward. Something wants to fix, to get it right, to move the work along, or, just as quickly, to pull back. These moments are easy to override in the name of being “a good therapist.” We’re trained to stay focused, to follow the model, to track the client. From a parts-based perspective, these internal shifts are not distractions—they are key to the work. Therapists have parts, too. And in the presence of activation, those parts will show up. That is their purpose after all.
There are also parts of the therapist that act as quiet gatekeepers to trauma work. These are the parts that, often outside of awareness, need the client to feel “stable enough,” “resourced enough,” or “ready enough” before the work can deepen. On the surface, this can look like good clinical judgment and at times, it is. But there are moments when something more subtle is happening. A part of the therapist may be scanning for safety not only for the client, but for themselves.
It may need reassurance that the client won’t become overwhelmed, won’t dysregulate beyond what feels manageable, or won’t enter territory that feels too uncertain or intense. And so, the therapist may begin requiring the client to demonstrate a certain level of control, coherence, or readiness before moving forward. The client, in turn, may present as more regulated than they actually are by holding back the parts of their experience that feel less organized or acceptable. The work can become subtly shaped by the therapist’s parts as they try to maintain safety, but in doing so, we may unknowingly limit access to what needs care and attention.
My approach has always been to meet the client where they are. Not where I think they should be. Not where a model says they need to be. But where they actually are in this moment. This has meant continually asking: How do I adapt to what this person needs right now? For the most part, this approach has worked, but it hasn’t been abstract. It’s been shaped in environments where there is no illusion of control or ideal conditions: maximum security prisons, psychiatric hospitals, systems where safety is inconsistent and unpredictability is part of the landscape. In those spaces, the idea of waiting for perfect “readiness” doesn’t hold. Clients don’t arrive fully resourced. They don’t present as neatly regulated or clearly organized. Often, they are doing the best they can within institutions that actively work against their sense of safety. If I were to require a certain level of stability before engaging the work, I would miss them entirely.
This is where I’ve had to confront my own parts. The parts that want things to feel contained in a way that I can track and manage. The parts that quietly ask: Is this too much? Are they ready? Am I ready? These questions matter, but I’ve had to learn to differentiate between what is clinically necessary and what is coming from my own need for safety.
Because sometimes, what looks like “clinical caution” is actually a protective part of the therapist asking the client to organize themselves in a way that feels more manageable for us. To be more regulated. More coherent. Less intense. To take care of our own internal worlds so that we can stay in the work without feeling too much responsibility.
Meeting the client where they are means something different. It means being willing to sit with what is not yet organized, not yet resourced, not yet “ready” in the ways we might prefer. It means trusting that connection, attunement, and pacing can be built within the work. If I tiptoed around the elephant in the room, I began to realize I was missing something important. An opportunity to address something that the client lives with often on a daily basis. Has it always been appropriate to move toward it? Absolutely not. I’ve learned to develop trust in my ability to discern when to move forward and when to step back.
My parts have come to understand this as a form of faith over time. A faith in the client’s system: its intelligence, timing, capacity to lead us into what has been held, often for a very long time. At some point, these responses helped the person survive what they were living through.The more clients experience me trusting their system, their pace, their internal leadership, the more their own parts begin to shift. Their system begins to build trust in me, but even more importantly in themselves and the leader that they are steadily becoming.
In complex trauma, the internal world is often fragmented. Parts carry experiences that have been split off, each holding pieces of a story that has never been fully integrated. These parts exist in isolation, organized around protection and survival. My work is not simply about symptom reduction or even linear processing. It is about helping the client reconnect with these parts. To witness them. To unburden what they have been carrying for a very long time. My role is to support that process. To help create the conditions where a part can emerge, be seen, and begin to release what it no longer needs to hold. And then to support the integration of that part back into the system in a way that honors not just that part, but the needs of the whole.
We are not just working with trauma. We are helping to weave something back together. A story that has been interrupted, a narrative held in pieces, an identity. As those parts reconnect, something shifts. The client is no longer organized around fragmentation alone, but around a growing sense of leadership, coherence, and wholeness. And perhaps this is where the work deepens. Not in doing more, but in trusting more. Trusting the system. Trusting the process. And trusting that, when given the right conditions, the psyche already knows how to heal and how to bring its story back into continuity. Modeling trust has become one of the most effective tools for my therapeutic practice.
