I was talking to a friend who gave me permission to share her story in my upcoming book Relationsick about how over-giving, fawning, and people pleasing to an extreme degree led to depletion, burnout, and cancer. I had shared a book with her about how to discover what’s hidden in our shadow- and how to use IFS to get to know those shaded, in the dark parts. She felt busted as she read the book. Busted. Busted. And busted. I laughed. I had felt the same way when I read this particular book back in 2014.
We began talking about the kind of changes she might need to make in her marriage if she were to stay cancer-free, now that her treatment is done. She’d need to get more assertive. She’d need to be willing to let her partner down sometimes in order not to let down her own needy, scared, or vulnerable parts. She’d need to express anger when her boundaries were getting violated and make it clear with an expression of displeasure when she felt hurt by his behavior. She’d need to demand justice when her partner had unreasonably entitled and unjust expectations that bordered on exploitation.
She put a hand over her mastectomy scar and said her breast just started hurting when I was talking about that. “If I do that, my cancer will come back,” she said.
I wondered if that was true. I suspected maybe the opposite was true, that her cancer might come back if she didn’t change her behavior and start standing up for herself. But who am I to know? Nobody knows her parts better than she does.
It’s easy to get tricked by what we think is intuition or spiritual guidance. I can’t tell you how many times I thought I was following synchronicities, following what I thought was the path of Divine Will like Hansel and Gretel got lured into a trap with breadcrumbs. I’m not saying that there’s no such thing as intuition or spiritual guidance. I’m just saying that if we’re not hip to the trip some parts will pull in order to cause us to indulge secret desire or avoid secret- or not so secret- fears, we can get duped by our own parts, without even knowing that’s what’s happening.
We’d all like to believe that we are in control of our lives, or at least that some benevolent being has got a plan and can communicate to us. It’s so comforting to our parts to believe that we won’t make mistakes or get hurt or follow an unwise choice or that we can get everything we want- if only we follow our intuition or trust some Divine plan for our life.
But at least in my internal family, sometimes, what I’ve originally thought was my strong intuition or God’s guidance for my life sometimes turned out to be a magical thinking part masquerading as inner guidance- or a scared part trying to trick me into making sure I don’t get hurt again.
All of this sneaky trickery is easier to spot if we’re just a wee bit skeptical of making a reflexive interpretation of something like a suspiciously timed breast pain, an emotional reaction, or what appears to be a synchronicity that validates what we desire in what feels like a magical way.
How Easy Is It To Get Tricked By Intuition Or Spiritual Guidance
A friend of mine fell prey to getting hijacked by a part when she interpreted a con artist’s manipulation as God’s will for her. She was married but not entirely satisfied in her marriage, when a hot young guy she met at a spiritual retreat center started making the moves on her. But he didn’t hit on her like normal people do- “Hey, can I buy you a drink?”
No, he told her that he’d received a message from her spiritual mentor, who he named by name and who she hadn’t told him was her dead mentor. The mentor, we’ll just call him Guru, told the guy, who we’ll just call Jack, that Jack had been chosen by the Guru to be the messenger for my friend, who we’ll call Alice. Alice, as it turns out, was chosen to perform a grand mission of planetary importance, but she’d only be able to pull it off if the Guru from the other side used Jack as the conduit for her Divine instructions.
Alice was initially skeptical, but she asked Jack some questions about the Guru that she thought only she could know. He passed all the tests. Alice took this as a miraculous sign that not only was the Guru with her and choosing to work with her for an important planet-saving mission; this was also a sign that she should leave her husband and stick close to Jack, who she found herself fantasizing about.
After that, Alice was on the lookout for signs from the Universe to confirm her intuition, which told her Jack was her soulmate and that soulmate bonds and spiritual ethics overweigh earthly agreements like marriage and monogamy agreements. Over the next few days, she felt like her intuition was dictating instructions to her, which she wrote down and took as gospel truth. She also felt like her bodily intelligence was validating what she felt guided to do.
When she opened her front door and a photo of her Guru was on the floor in front of her- and she knew she hadn’t put it there herself, when her body broke out into full body goosebumps (her sign that it was “green light go” time- she knew what she had to do.
So she said yes when Jack came onto her that night, feeling blessed by the Guru and sanctioned by God’s will for them both.
She had no idea at the time that a magical thinking, grandiose part of her had hijacked the whole thing and tricked her into violating her ethics, cheating on her husband, and sadly, giving away all her money to the con artist, who didn’t seem like so much of a soul mate when he abandoned her, left her broke, and then did the same thing over again with his next new soul mate.
She had been so sure that she’s been following the aligned path. But parts can do that to us, if we don’t know how to work with them
In Part 2 of this blog, we’ll talk about how to discern if parts might be tricking us- and what to do instead. We’ll also be going deeper into this topic in a weekend Zoom workshop IFS For Self-Healing on October 4-5, where we’ll cover the basics of IFS, teach you how to work with your parts as a self-help practice, and support you with a community of practice as you learn.
Save $100 if you register for IFS For Self-Healing now.
When we practice IFS, we learn to bust ourselves when we’re getting tricked by adorably sneaky parts- with love and compassion, not shaming or condemnation, with clarity, critical thinking, and reality-checking, not magical thinking, manipulation, a bypassing of our ethics, or grandiosity. Remember, our parts always have good intentions, even if they’re sneaky and trying to manipulate us into following their agenda.
Because that’s the difference. Parts have agendas- to get something we secretly want but think we shouldn’t want, to avoid being vulnerable if we’ve been hurt by intimacy in the past, to fulfill secret fantasies and avoid what we’re afraid of. The agenda of Self, if there is any, has a much different flavor, which we’ll talk about in more detail in the workshop.
Was this friend with breast cancer really getting the message that she should stay small, passive, and conflict avoidant in order to improve her chances for the best cancer outcome? Or were some of her parts just really afraid to be more assertive because of something that happened in the past? In Part 2 of this series, we’ll talk about how to discern the answer to those questions- and what my friend might do instead of jumping ot snap judgments about what her breast pain does or does not mean.
As they say in IFS, “Just ask.”
