Meet Your Inner Exiles: Bringing Happiness to Your Vulnerable Parts

Explore the safe and respectful approach to healing your vulnerable parts, setting the stage for inner transformation.

Rage, grief, terror, chronic negative beliefs, extreme feelings of unworthiness, a pervasive fear of abandonment — these are all types of burdens your most vulnerable parts could be carrying deep inside your inner world.

This article will help you better understand the most vulnerable (and often exiled) parts of you as well as help you bring them the relief they need the most.

(For an overview of all three different types of parts you have in your inner world, check out this short article).

Meet Your Vulnerable Parts

Your vulnerable parts are the parts of you that took on the raw pain of the emotions and extreme beliefs that you experienced in your trauma (whether it was one big event or chronic trauma — it doesn’t matter — your vulnerable parts hold the raw pain of it all).

Your vulnerable parts are also referred to as your exiled parts because they are usually exiled from your conscious awareness due to how overwhelming their pain is. If you were to be aware of their pain all the time, it would be impossible to function as a human being in our society.

That’s why you also have protector parts that work hard to keep your vulnerable parts and their pain in exile.

As a result, your vulnerable parts often feel overwhelmed, alone, and completely isolated.

When you find them in your inner world, it’s not uncommon to meet them in dark, scary places such as caves or in complete darkness. I’ve met some of mine in black holes and stuck in traumatic memories.

Your Inner Children

When you meet a vulnerable part in your inner world, they often appear as a young child or teenager because your parts get stuck at the age in which they took on the emotional pain and negative beliefs about themselves.

You’ve likely heard of your “inner child” and doing “inner child work.” That kind of work is just one way to work with your vulnerable parts.

It’s likely you have multiple vulnerable parts in exile, and as you start exploring your inner world more, you may begin to experience yourself as having multiple “inner children.”

Parts Work is the safest, most helpful, and straightforward way that I have found to practice inner child work. Because the main focus of Parts Work is to help your vulnerable parts come out of the scary place they are stuck in and into the present moment, release their pain, and return to their innocence and wholeness.

The Wounds Of Your Vulnerable Parts

Your vulnerable parts can hold different types of wounds depending on your experiences and your history. Here are some examples of wounds that your exiled parts or vulnerable parts might hold:

Abandonment

A vulnerable part may hold the pain of feeling abandoned, neglected, or rejected by others. This could be the result of a parent leaving or being absent, a relationship ending, or feeling left out by our friends or peers.

The wound of abandonment can lead to feelings of loneliness, isolation, fear of being alone.

Let’s be honest: abandonment is the worst. It really sucks. (I’m speaking as somebody whose vulnerable parts used to carry a lot of abandonment wounds).

If this is a wound you hold, I am sorry you have to experience it and I hope you keep learning more about Parts Work so you can help your vulnerable parts release that pain.

Betrayal

(Yep, I got this one too.)

A vulnerable part may hold the pain of being betrayed by someone they trusted, especially someone that was supposed to represent love to them.

It can be as brutal as the feeling of being betrayed by love itself. That perception can be really, really hard for our parts. And it’s a huge reason why Parts Work helps us reconnect these parts to the actual love inside of us so they can receive the love they never got back then but desperately needed.

Rejection

A vulnerable part may hold the pain of feeling rejected or not accepted by other people. This could have looked like being excluded from a group, being bullied or teased, or a chronic feeling like they don’t fit in.

The wound of rejection is rough because it can lead to feelings of shame, low self-esteem, fear of being judged or criticized.

Extreme & Chronic Shame

Speaking of shame, a vulnerable part may hold the pain of feeling deeply ashamed of themselves and like they are inherently unworthy. This could be the result of being told that you were bad or that there was something wrong with you, or experiencing a traumatic event that you blamed yourself for.

The wound of shame can lead to feelings of unworthiness, self-criticism, and for sure, a reluctance to share your true self with other people.

These Wounds Were Caused In Relationship

Please notice that all of these wounds are caused in relationship with others. Abandonment, betrayal, and rejection are phenomenon that require the participation of another person in your life.

You might have heard this before:

What gets harmed in relationship gets healed in relationship.

This is a huge idea that must be understood in order to heal your vulnerable parts effectively. In order to heal them, you must first learn the skill of being in relationship with them (as opposed to psychoanalyzing them or trying to “fix” them).

This is the biggest reason why I am taking this time to emphasize the importance of getting you back into right relationship with yourself because that is what these vulnerable parts need more than anything.

Your vulnerable parts don’t need a logical explanation about what happened to them and why. They don’t need you to fix them. They don’t even need you to “heal” them. They need you to hold them. And it is through that holding that they will heal.

They need love. They need the real kind of love — a safe kind of love.

And Parts Work is the most effective and safest way I’ve found to enter into the places inside of you where your vulnerable parts are frozen, bring them out of that frozen state — out of that painful, scary memory — and release all that pain so they can return to their innocence.

Through reestablishing a relationship of love with your vulnerable parts, they will get to be happy and whole little kids again. There is hope.

When you get to experience a vulnerable part of you releasing its pain and coming back into its natural qualities, the tenderest tears you have ever cried will be shed — mark my words. It really is such a beautiful experience.

How To Heal Your Vulnerable Parts

The last thing I want to say about this is that we have got to do this work with our vulnerable parts in the right way. In a safe way.

There is such a thing as going directly to your vulnerable parts way too quickly and in a way that is disrespectful of the parts of you that are protecting it. You may have already experienced the “backlash” of going too deep too fast in an inner child meditation or with modalities like EMDR.

Sometimes your protector parts can get extra agitated and lash out or shut you down out if they feel like you’re trying to bully past them.

For that reason, the best place for you to start healing your vulnerable parts is actually by first getting to know the parts of you that are protecting them.

I wrote two articles about the two different kinds of protector parts: managers and firefighters. You can check them out here:

Meet Your First Part

You can get started with meeting your first protector part by downloading my free Meet A Part Of You Worksheet. It will walk you through the process of identifying a part of you and having your first conversation with it step-by-step.

You can download the free worksheet right here.

(Some folks have said this worksheet has completely transformed the way they experience themselves so…be prepared).

More Parts Work, Please!

You got it! Here are more helpful Parts Work articles: