Rogue and Mortal Danger, and Trauma Work (TW)

(Parts Work: An Illustrated Guide to Your Inner Life by Tom Holmes (2011)

The book, Parts Work, describes our inner psychological world with drawings which are moving, thought-provoking, sometimes humorous and often poignant. The book shows how we can disentangle ourselves from the problematic habitual patterns in which we get stuck, and offers ways of positively using our particular talents and style for a fuller life.)

I've recently been exploring a different modality for dealing with my trauma history, and it rears its head in my day-to-day life. The funny thing about trauma is that when you're out of the original traumatic situation(s), whenever you encounter a situation that in the smallest bit relates to the original trauma, or in the slightest way triggers a stress response, you aren't dealing with the bitchy email from your boss, but instead your father screaming that hes going to kill the MF behind the counter, and you're just not sure if he is or not.

Anyway, so the above book is my new adventure...and adventure into Parts. Parts, and how and where the individual Part (or Part Alliances) engage with various situations, stressors, and people. (Let me just make a quick disclaimer that I know very little about the subject, this is just my experience of the work/exploration I have done thus far. If you have some stuck spots you might order the book for yourself, and/or find a therapist who has trained in this work.) Here are a couple of take-aways to get us started: We all have multiple parts that interact with different situations (consider that you are probably a different person with your mother than you are with your boss), we develop different parts in response to life situations and innate personality traits, and most importantly; NO PART IS BAD...Parts as they originated may no longer serve us so they may needs to learn some new skills or be paired with an ally, but they aren't bad nor do they need to be destroyed.

The reason I bring up the Parts work is that I have written before about the experience in which I had to extricate myself from Albert the Perverted Ranch Hand (https://cowgirl71.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-gun-under-my-pillow.html), and for me what stands out from this experience was the moment where I thought to myself "I'm going to have to get my pistol and shoot him, otherwise he is going to kill me." (Spoiler alert: I got away from him and nobody got shot). Something that has troubled me is that there are experiences where I have been able to fight my way free (like with Albert), and others where I just froze. So I beat myself up with the judgments and comparisons, and struggle to make sense of why some situations turned out better than others. Enter Parts work...

I've created a stack of Parts "tarot" from what I've been able to identify so far, and because I'm a big nerd, some of them are named for Dungeons & Dragons character classes as appropriate. The most recent one is Rogue...she's not a front-line fighter, but if she's in Mortal Danger, she's a little scrapper who will get shit done. MORTAL DANGER. 

Curiously, in thinking about the many uncomfortable situations I've encountered, the one with Albert was the first where I thought, "oh fuck! I'm going to die if...(I don't get the gun  first)" (mortal danger). And that was where Rogue entered the Realm, or at least the first time I can identify her stepping into a not-so-pleasant experience to save the day. And once I was able to identify Rogue, I could see that she has stepped into the fray in other situations, and that she did so because we/I perceived that I was in MORTAL DANGER. 

By identifying that the key in the situations where I was able to fight my way out was Mortal Danger (Seriously, the literal fear-for-my life), I'm able to free myself from some judgement of when I wasn't able to do so. Rogue has a specific task; to save my life, and if she doesn't see Us as being in Mortal Danger, she's going to hang back and let someone else deal with the trolls. In seeing this I have freed myself of a troll of my own making.