These days, I feel deep compassion for the ways that I’ve faced hardship and soul loss as the result of being autistic, being a woman, and having an ancestral history shaped by colonialism.

But I wasn’t always so kind to myself.

If you’d run into me during my 20’s and 30’s and flashed a light around my inner world, you would have found a lot of self-loathing.

My healing journey required facing all the different ways I hated myself: for being disabled, for my femininity, and for being of Irish descent.

This dynamic showed up as polarizations within me, where some parts of me advocated for a life lived at a manageable pace, for women’s rights, and for peace and equality for all.

But other parts of me reacted strongly to those positions.

· I lived a slow life near the ocean with a lot of down time. But I observed my peers amassing fancy job titles, marriages, home purchases, and children, and internally, I berated myself for not keeping up with them.

· I “liked” Instagram memes celebrating late Supreme Court Justice and feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsberg. But I carried around a harsh, unexamined belief that whatever work I did, a man could do better.

· In yoga classes I chanted peaceful mantras. Yet I harbored anger about the distress I’d suffered growing up around alcoholism, which showed up as hatred toward my Irish heritage and judgment toward Irish people as lazy, belligerent drunks.

To heal, I needed to understand all the ways I’d absorbed the ableism, sexism, and colonialism outside me, and internalized them within me.

Working with an Internal Family Systems (IFS) practitioner allowed me the space to explore my inner world, and to identify these parts of me that hated me.

The parts of me who were at odds with the openhearted, kind person I wanted to be.

As I got to know these parts over a few years, I came to understand their position that hating me felt protective: a way to preempt the rejection that felt inevitable from the wider world.

The logic of my parts was that if I hated myself first, then maybe when others hated me, the pain wouldn’t hurt so badly.

Maybe I wouldn’t be caught off guard by it.

My parts let me know that it didn’t feel good to hate me. It felt awful, and depressing. But these young parts didn’t see any other way to survive such a hateful society.

They felt completely trapped.

The more my parts shared, the more I felt compassion for their plight.

As I turned with curiosity to the ones who judged and hated me, I asked them what they believed, and where these beliefs started. In my case, their beliefs weren’t even mine! They’d been handed down, often through generations, through legacy and culture.

***

Unburdening these legacy beliefs required some detective work on my end.

Unburdening ableism required learning about autism and allowing myself to grieve all the ways that my life had been hard. I needed education to understand why I faced the limitations I did and had the needs I had. The more I learned, the more sense it made to me that as an autistic person, I must give myself a lot of rest and time in wild places, and that my life trajectory might not look the same as peers, especially if they are not autistic.

This new information, plus exposure to the experiences of other autistic people, diffused compassion throughout my system.

I’d been carrying around a burdened belief that it wasn’t okay to have different needs and capacity than other people, but in this new holding environment of kindness and understanding, the belief dissolved like a fine mist giving way to the warmth and light of the sun.

Unburdening sexism required asking inside where the belief came from that men could do my job better than I could do it. What my parts told me was that the belief was accumulated from the avalanche of sexist and misogynistic messages I’d received from other people and from media throughout my life.

My parts showed me how much they were discouraged after absorbing messages that women have less value than men, through cultural events such as the disparagement of women like lawyer Anita Hill, pop star Britney Spears, and White House intern Monica Lewinsky. As I realized that the belief of men’s inherent superiority wasn’t even my own, but something that that society had inflicted on me, letting it go felt easy, and hugely relieving to my system.

Unburdening colonialism required turning with curiosity toward why my family had been affected by alcoholism.

I entered an intense period of studying and grieving the history of my ancestors’ suffering, during which a tragic story unfolded in front of me. I learned about the 800 years of British colonialism in Ireland, how my ancestors had their language and land stolen from them, how what was called the Potato Famine of 1848-50 was actually a genocide where the English withheld an abundant food supply from the native population.

I began to see how drinking had become a protective mechanism for so many in my ancestral line, to numb the unprocessed pain and shame. And I could see that this behavior had been handed down through the generations in lieu of any other means of processing the collective grief. As my compassion for my family line grew, the burdened belief that Irish people are lazy, drunk or somehow “less than” burned away, leaving in its place an intense pride for my heritage.

In the space these beliefs left behind, I called in more self-compassion, for the ways I’d struggled, and the ways my ancestors had suffered. I called in more self-love, for the beautiful quirks and differences that make me who I am.

***

Unburdening our inner oppressors helps us feel better.

But doing so also reduces the chances that we pass on our pain to others.

If we skip the step of unburdening the polarized parts within us, we risk seeing other people through the eyes of our burdened parts who hate and judge. The danger here is that these parts may be inclined to take extreme action in attempt to bring equilibrium to a system.

If we hate ourselves for being disabled, we might project that hate onto other disabled people. This could show up as feeling disgust at someone more disabled than we are, or shaming someone who talks openly about disability by telling them they’re not disabled enough to request accommodations.

If we hate ourselves for being a woman, we might project that hate onto other women. We might criticize another woman for her ambition at work, gossip about how much plastic surgery she’s gotten, or even vote for politicians with brazen agendas to curtail women’s rights.

If we hate ourselves for having an ancestral history of being colonized, we risk projecting our inner hate onto anyone whom we deem weak. We might develop a vicious critical tongue or even pick fights with anyone who seems smaller or more timid than we are. Or, to protect ourselves against feeling vulnerable, we might align with those who have more power than we do, such as how the Irish in the United States aligned themselves with White people rather than Black people in the eighteenth century, despite the common class struggle faced by both groups.

If we don’t tend to our vulnerable parts in the inner world, in the outer world, we risk becoming the violent, judgmental, oppressive bully we may claim to be better than.

***

We live in a dangerous, polarized time.

But a polarized society is only the sum of many individuals with burdened, polarized inner worlds.

When we turn inside and get to know the parts of us who are in pain, we do a great service not just to ourselves, but to the collective.

As our own systems become more calm, clear, and stable, we gain the capacity to interact with the world from this calm, clear, stable place.

We subtract ourselves from the energy of polarity and increase the collective energy of those who can hold the tension of opposites.

One of my favorite, most life-affirming sentiments comes from chemist and Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine, who said that "When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order.”

It’s no small thing for one person to bring compassion to their inner world.

Your efforts may have more far-reaching consequences than you know.

They might just carry humanity that much closer to a tipping point of greater cohesion and harmony for all of us.

To a place where, like birds in a murmuration, we move as one, looking out for the safety of each other.

If you’re interested in exploring your parts using an Internal Family Systems (IFS) - informed approach, you are very welcome to book a consult.

Transforming the inner oppressor

befriending the fawn