Talking to part of a friend

Finding an authentic connection based on who you are now, not who you were in the past

The Empty Bottle, Théodule Ribot, ca 1876-1881

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1.

Last summer, two friends from high school visited the island where I live. When the second one arrived, we scaled the cliffs down to the sea where I sometimes find the carcasses of sheep that have fallen to their death. We sat late into the night talking.

When you meet old friends, there is sometimes a tendency to return to past versions of yourself, revisiting stale talking points, and reminiscing—and neither I nor my friends are particularly interested in that for more than an hour. This restlessness with the old gives our relationship the character of a puzzle. How are we going to make ourselves fit together this time? When we first met, we were in a similar space—we were kids in neighboring villages, roaming the forests, getting drunk, climbing to the top of grain storage silos, etc—so there was a natural affinity. But since we left school, our lives have followed diverging trajectories. And the puzzle we face is: how do we find a new and authentic connection based on who we are now, not who we were in the past?

The cliff I took them to is a nesting site for guillemots, seagulls, razorbills, starlings, and two peregrine falcons. In the dying, golden light, we could see the razorbills push out from the cliff and fall toward the ocean, pulling up a foot from the surface—sailing off. One of the guys had brought a bottle of gin (an old joke, referencing a video where someone asks Shane MacGowen if the pint he holds contains water, “No! It's gin!”). We shared the gin. The jokes became increasingly obscene and juvenile.

After an hour, one of the guys, perhaps feeling that the time had come to establish a deeper, more up-to-date connection between us, started talking about the breathwork he was using to manage his stress. He told us to find a secure position where we wouldn’t fall into the ocean if we got dizzy (”Seriously!”) and then instructed us to do an exercise that amounted to the most intense bout of hyperventilation I’ve experienced in a long while. My entire body filled with a stinging, bubbling sensation, and when I opened my eyes, the ocean looked impossibly rich—waves rising and falling, and on the waves, smaller waves rising and falling, and on them, smaller waves still.

2.

In Kafka’s parable “Abraham,” the Biblical patriarch finds that he can’t stand the uniformity of this world. But, as Kafka writes, “the world is known . . . to be uncommonly various, which can be verified at any time by taking a handful of world and looking at it closely. Thus this complaint at the uniformity of the world is really a complaint at not having been mixed profoundly enough with the diversity of the world.”

This is definitely true when the handful of world you examine is the brain of a friend. The patterns inside of our skulls are unfathombly complex—synapses firing, synchronized networks forming and dissolving, hormones pulsing—it is like the waves with waves on them. You can never fully grip it.

The storms in our brains are so complex we can only approach them through metaphor. Through simplified images that let us point toward truth. The most common metaphor we use for this inner complexity is “I.” It is so common that it doesn’t even feel like a metaphor. But it is a metaphor, a reductive and partly false image. What are the neural correlates of an I? This isn’t to say that it is a bad metaphor. Saying “I have a self” helps us orient ourselves in the world, gives us agency, and lets us take responsibility. We need metaphors like that.

Another common (and good) metaphor when talking about the internal soup is “consciousness,” and its sibling “the subconscious.” Again—we don’t really know how these metaphors relate to what actually happens in there. But it is a pair of images that allow us to notice useful things about our minds. “Maybe I should take a pause from this essay right now and let my subconscious process it for a while,” for instance.

One of my favorite interiority metaphors comes from internal family systems therapy (IFS).

IFS starts from the idea that what we have in there—in the darkness of our interiority—is a whole bunch of different human beings. You have a part who wants you to work harder, one who thinks you deserve more fun, and a third who is afraid that you will never truly be loved, and so on.

Thinking about “different parts of yourself” is a common enough metaphor, but IFS goes one step further and says it is useful to think of these parts as people. Instead of saying, “I need to stop being so stressed!!” You go, “Well, if stress was a human being, I wouldn’t want to just strangle them like that. I would be a bit more respectful. I’d talk with them and figure out what we could do.” Which is a useful stance to have toward your conflicting emotions and desires.

3.

I explained IFS to my friends and asked one of them if it was ok if I talked to some of his parts.

The sun was being swallowed by the sea. He thought for a moment before agreeing.

“You hesitated,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Do you think you can locate the part that feels uncomfortable with this, so I can see if they really are ok with it?”

“Mm, ok.”

We identified the part, and after talking for a while, I asked if it would be comfortable to go on a vacation for a few days, so we could get space to talk with some of the more shy voices within?

It said yes. A tacit part of the agreement was that I can’t talk about what we said after that, apart from noting that we got access to new parts of ourselves that had never talked to each other before.

Since IFS is a strange way of talking, my friend had to pull on his creativity to answer me—explaining how various emotions looked, what kinds of rooms they were in, what they wanted, and so on. It was beautiful to meet him in such an open, creative headspace. It was like entering a room in our relationship that I didn’t know existed, passing through an invisible door. It felt intimate, and then cathartic.

These types of conversations need to be handled with care. Strong emotions can be unleashed. This can be dangerous if the person you are talking to is unstable. Also, some people take the metaphor “I am made up of many parts” too seriously and go mad. These caveats aside, I find IFS an agile way of interacting with myself as well as others. It lets us reach levels of conversations that are hard to reach in other ways.

Sometimes, for instance, when my wife Johanna is irritated with me, I’ll tell myself that it is only a part of her that is irritated. When I go about it the normal way and rely on the more common metaphor “Johanna is irritated with me,” I tend to get anxious and passive-aggressive. But when I picture her irritation as only one part of her, I can unblend form the parts of me that are anxious and passive-aggressive and meet her irritation with the part of me that is curious. The tension melts away and we often learn something useful about each other.

It is as if thinking in terms of “you” and “I” is too clumsy when navigating hard and intimate terrain. A full self is a massive freight ship. Being able to subdivide it and travel in smaller, more nimble vehicles makes it possible to navigate more precisely—not only the waves but the waves upon the waves. I don’t always succeed in this mental maneuver, but when I do, I like it.

That night on the cliff with my high school friends—I had known them for almost twenty years at that point. They had been with me through all of my changes. Still, talking like this revealed that we had missed entire layers of each other's personalities.

We contemplated this while pouring ourselves some more gin. A seagull flew low against the cliff and right before colliding with the rock where we sat the upwinds pushed it straight up to its nest. Then we resumed saying the most outrageously, scandalously immature things we could think of.