Meet Your Inner Managers: Leading and Loving Your Protector Parts

Bring peace to the parts of you working overtime to prevent future pain.

You know those times when you’re lying in bed and your brain just will not stop worrying about the future?

Your thoughts are going around and around at break-neck speed — planning what you’re going to say tomorrow, planning what you’re going to do tomorrow, and going over every possible worst-case scenario.

That’s your manager parts in action.

In this article, you’re going to learn more about the real roles your manager parts are playing for you behind the scenes and how to bring them relief.

Let’s First Put Your Manager Parts Into Context

In this short article, I gave you an overview of all three different types of parts you have in your inner world: vulnerable parts, managers, and firefighters.

I also gave you this oversimplified map of how your parts organize themselves in your inner world.

You can see your vulnerable parts (which are the parts of you holding the raw pain of your trauma) are in the center. Then your firefighter parts (the last line of defense before getting overwhelmed by the pain of your vulnerable parts) are in the middle. And your manager parts — the one’s we’re going to dive in to today — are on the periphery.

The reason this is important to understand is that even though your manager parts are focused on the future, their fears and worries about the future are informed by the raw pain your vulnerable parts are carrying as well as the extreme behavior your firefighter parts can sometimes have.

In other words, your manager parts are trying to keep all your other parts in line while trying to prevent any future pain. (They’ll usually be the first to tell you they are absolutely exhausted).

With this basic understanding, let’s dive deeper into the roles of your manager parts.

(Psst — You can read more about your vulnerable parts here and more about your firefighter parts here.)

Meet Your Manager Parts

Your manager parts are the parts of you that are working overtime to ensure you don’t experience any more circumstances that cause you to feel the pain of your vulnerable parts.

Their motto is, “Never again.”

As in, “Never again will I get hurt like that. If I do all the right things, I’ll be able to protect us from experiencing any more pain.”

Manager parts are looking into the future, trying to figure out the best possible way to proceed without risking exposure of our vulnerable parts. They’re on the lookout for triggers and for things you need to do to avoid those triggers.

Manager parts may set very high standards for you and others — striving for perfection and achievement. It’s not uncommon for managers to be cautious, anxious, or risk-averse. They may spend a lot of their energy trying to avoid making mistakes and avoid taking risks.

Manager parts can be helpful in certain situations — for sure — but they can also become rigid or controlling. One of the many things manager parts work hard to control is how you present yourself to other people. (This is a huge one for my personal manager parts.)

Your managers might think, “If I can present myself in an acceptable — even admirable — way, maybe other people won’t criticize me and trigger the pain of the vulnerable part that’s carrying the burdens of rejection and shame.”

That’s understandable, right? But it can also lead to a lot of unnecessary stress.

Managers also try to control your inner world — such as your thoughts, emotions, and other parts of you. For my personal manager parts, they’ve told me it feels like they are running around in my inner world trying to get my other (absolutely unhinged) parts under control. They can get hyper-vigilant of my thoughts and emotions — even if they never end up leading to poor behavior.

It sounds exhausting being a manager part, right? But they’re afraid that if they stop, then you’ll be completely overcome with the raw pain of your vulnerable parts. So even though they are tired, they just keep going.

Examples Of Manager Parts

Here are some examples of different manager parts.

Perfectionist

A perfectionist manager tries to ensure that everything is done perfectly and sets very high standards for you. This part can be helpful in motivating you to do your best, but it can also become rigid and critical and lead to stress and burnout.

Controller

A controller manager tries to control situations and other people to avoid uncertainty and vulnerability. This part can be helpful in situations where there is a need for order and control, but also, once again, can become overly rigid and controlling which leads to difficulties in relationships.

A lot of times when you’re feeling stuck in something, it’s because a controller manager part of you is not willing to give up control and is therefore keeping you stuck.

Planner

A planner manager tries to plan and organize everything to ensure that things go smoothly and to avoid unwanted surprises.

This part can be helpful and even fun in situations where there is a need for structure and organization. Sometimes planning can be enjoyable — like planning a vacation or an exciting new structure for your business. But once again, these parts can also become very rigid and inflexible. Which leads to a real difficulty in adapting to change and connecting to your own creative flow.

Avoider

An avoider manager will try to avoid situations or emotions that are perceived as painful or uncomfortable.

The avoider manager can be helpful in avoiding situations that are harmful or overwhelming, for sure. But also they can become avoidant of important tasks or hard conversations that lead to missed opportunities and a lack of growth.

In the inner world, psychoanalysis is a fantastic way your managers may try to avoid your emotions. Because as long as you’re analyzing your emotions, you’re not actually feeling them. So that’s another way your avoider manager shows up — through avoiding intimacy with even yourself by staying stuck in psychoanalysis mode.

Inner Critic

I’m sure you’ve already heard a lot about the concept of an inner critic.

Inner critic managers are the parts that think, “If I can criticize you first in the inner world, then maybe you won’t actually get criticized in the outer world.”

These managers are looking ahead at future criticism you could receive from others, and then they criticize you first in an attempt to protect you from actual criticism from the outside world.

The inner critic usually carries the energy of the people that criticized you growing up. It uses their voice to criticize you. So when you’re hearing the voice of your mother or father or that asshole teacher who humiliated you— that isn’t actually that person in your head. That is a part of you that is mimicking that person as a means to try and protect you from getting criticized by them or someone like them again in the outer world.

This is a great example of a part of us having a helpful intention, but not a helpful outcome. Your inner critics have the intention to protect you from outside criticism. But what they really end up doing is have you experiencing a life with near-constant criticism, even if it is from the inside.

The Thing Your Manager Parts Wish You Understood

If there is one thing you manager parts whish you understood, it is this:

“I’m tired!”

Your manager parts are tired as fuck.

What I hear when I get in a conversation with so many of my client’s manager parts — even their inner critics — is that they’ll usually admit how tired they are of doing their job but their just afraid of what would happen if they stopped.

Your manager parts believe they have to keep doing their job otherwise your whole inner world will be overrun by emotional pain and chaos. That’s the stakes that your manager parts are playing on — and sometimes they aren’t actually 100% wrong about that.

Sometimes it is true that without the help and hard work of your managers, your vulnerable parts and firefighters would take over and burn everything down — and you along with it. Nobody wants that.

You need your managers. But if you’re like me, you also want to consciously support them so they don’t have to be so exhausted and stressed out all the time, yeah?

How To Bring Relief To Your Manger Parts

The hope for your manager parts is twofold…

You Can Bring Healing To Your Vulnerable Parts

The most powerful way you can bring relief to your managers is through helping your vulnerable parts release their pain and return to safety and wholeness. This makes it so your manager parts won’t have to work so hard to prevent their pain from overwhelming you, because it’s simply not there anymore.

(Yes, this absolutely is possible. And yes, it will absolutely change your entire experience of life. If you want this for yourself, definitely continue learning about parts work and consider getting support. You can learn more about what parts work support looks like on my website.)

You Can Bring Inner Support To Your Managers

Another path to bringing relief to your manager parts is through establishing your Essence as your inner leader, because your Essence is capable of leading you through whatever life throws at you. Once your managers come to trust your Essence, they will feel like they don’t have to do their job alone anymore and that they are competently supported.

Your Essence can also support your managers in teaching them how to work together instead of fighting against one another as they so often do.

Rethinking The “Ego”

The last thing I want to say about your manager parts is tying it to the concept of your “ego”.

Many spiritual traditions love to talk about how terrible your ego is and say that your ego is something that you need to get rid of or transcend. But I like to think about it in a different way. And I’d like to invite you to hold a different conversation around your ego…

What if your ego is just your manager parts, doing their very best to try to help you stay safe and get love?

And what if you don’t need to get rid of your ego parts?

What if you actually need to learn how to love, support, and lead them better?

What if that’s all your parts (ego) ever really needed? To feel safe enough to soften back into the arms of love.

Meet Your First Part

Ready to meet your first manager part?

Well you’re in luck because I’ve created something that will make that super simple for you.

It’s called the Meet A Part Of You Worksheet and it will walk you through identifying and having an entire conversation with a part of you step-by-step. By the end you’ll have so much clarity, you’ll want to fill it out again for another part of you.

You can download the free worksheet right here.

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

More Parts Work, Please!

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