How My Relationship With My Mother Shaped My Inner Parts: A reflection through an Internal Family Systems lens
This is not a story about blaming my mother.
It is a story about understanding how trauma moves through relationships — and how a child’s inner world adapts in order to survive.
Through Internal Family Systems (IFS), we understand that trauma does not live only in memories. It lives in the parts of us that formed in response to what we needed, but did not receive.
When a Child Has to Adapt Instead of Being Held
As a child, I learned early that I needed to adjust — to moods, to emotional undercurrents, to unspoken expectations. There wasn’t enough space to simply be a child with needs, feelings, and limits of my own.
From an IFS perspective, this is where protective parts begin to form:
parts that stay alert
parts that quiet themselves to avoid conflict
parts that take responsibility too early
parts that suppress emotion to stay connected
These parts are not signs of weakness or dysfunction.
They are intelligent responses to an environment that didn’t feel consistently safe.
Trauma Isn’t Always Loud
Trauma doesn’t always come from obvious harm.
Often, it comes from what was missing: emotional attunement, consistency, or a sense of being held in someone else’s regulated presence.
When a parent carries unresolved trauma, a child often becomes the one who adapts. Over time, the nervous system learns that safety depends on vigilance, compliance, or emotional self-containment.
The Inner Child Who Learned to Hide
In IFS, we speak of exiled parts — younger parts that carry pain, fear, shame, or loneliness. These parts often remain hidden, protected by other parts whose job is to keep life functioning.
For me, those protectors worked hard.
They kept me capable, composed, and outwardly stable — while inside, tenderness and unmet needs remained quietly held.
Understanding My Mother Through an IFS Lens
From an Internal Family Systems perspective, my mother was not defined by a single way of being. Like all of us, she was shaped by her own history, losses, and unmet needs — and by the parts that developed to help her survive.
She carried strong protective parts that were oriented toward control, endurance, and emotional self-reliance. These parts had learned that vulnerability was dangerous, that emotions needed to be managed rather than felt, and that strength meant staying functional at all costs.
There were also anxious and hypervigilant parts — parts that scanned for threat, instability, or potential loss. When activated, these parts could become emotionally unavailable, critical, or overwhelmed, not out of cruelty, but out of fear and exhaustion.
At the same time, I sense that there were exiled parts in her system — younger parts holding grief, unmet attachment needs, and unprocessed pain. These parts rarely had space to be expressed safely. Instead, they remained hidden beneath layers of responsibility and survival.
From a child’s perspective, this meant that emotional attunement was inconsistent. Connection was possible, but often conditional. Care existed, but it came alongside unpredictability, emotional distance, or moments where my needs felt secondary to the demands of her inner world.
IFS helps me understand that this dynamic was not a failure of love — it was the result of a nervous system shaped by trauma, doing its best with the tools it had.
What This Meant for Me as a Child
In response, my system adapted.
I developed attuning parts that learned to read emotional shifts quickly.
I developed self-silencing parts that minimised my own needs to maintain closeness.
I developed competent, capable parts that took on responsibility early.
These parts helped me stay connected — but they also taught me that safety depended on managing myself, rather than being met.
Holding Complexity Without Blame
One of the most meaningful aspects of IFS is that it allows for complex truth:
My mother did the best she could with her internal resources.
And her unhealed parts shaped my nervous system in lasting ways.
Both can be true.
Healing, for me, has not meant rejecting my mother — but separating my inner world from hers. It has meant learning to offer my own parts the attunement, safety, and compassion that were not consistently available early on.
How These Patterns Follow Us Into Adulthood
Without awareness, these early adaptations can shape adult life:
difficulty setting boundaries
over-responsibility in relationships
guilt when prioritising oneself
a sense of needing to earn safety or connection
IFS therapy doesn’t try to eliminate these parts.
Instead, it helps us build a relationship with them — to understand what they learned, what they protect, and what they need now.
Integration Instead of Rejection
Healing, for me, has not been about rejecting my past or fixing something broken.
It has been about integration — allowing my inner child, my protective parts, my mother part, and my adult Self to exist in dialogue rather than conflict.
This is the heart of IFS work: creating enough internal safety that every part no longer has to fight for control.
A Different Kind of Relationship — With Yourself
When inner parts are met with curiosity instead of judgment, something shifts.
The system softens. The body exhales. Choice becomes possible.
This is the work I now offer others — a space where all parts are welcome, and where healing happens through understanding, not force.
