Sean came to see me in an effort to clear his mind about what was happening to him and what he should do. He and his wife, Jennifer, had agreed to divorce and were separated within their large home, with each of them avoiding the space claimed by the other. He was 38 now and had been with his wife since high school. His score on the Dissociative Experiences Scale was an unremarkable 5.4, low average on the scale, which had a norm of 10. His life had been unmarked by significant trauma or other painful events of growing up. The couple had found companionship in their common interest in golfing during high school. They continued to date during college and married shortly after graduation. They had two children who were now approaching their teenage years. Golf was the center of the family’s life. On weekends, whenever time permitted, they golfed. They chose vacations in places with good golf courses, where they could experience new challenges. As their children grew and developed their physical skills, the couple signed them up with golf pros to improve their games. Over time, Sean became less interested in golf, while Jennifer’s interest became an obsession. She golfed during every moment of free time. She spent excessively on clothes for golfing and for her appearance during their country club’s events. She played in local tournaments and traveled to amateur events in other cities and locales. Sean said that Jennifer’s spending was so out of control, and her mismanagement of their finances was so great, that the IRS had seized their accounts a few months previously.
Sean marked the escalation of problems as having coincided with Jennifer’s raving about a new golf pro their club had hired about 18 months previously. She spent an inordinate amount of time with him and signed up their two children for lessons with him also. As time passed, Sean began to suspect an affair. Jennifer spent virtually no free time at home, leaving Sean with all the responsibilities for child and home care. Within the last few weeks his children, out with another family, ran into their mother and the golf pro apparently on a date. Three months previously, he had asked for a divorce from Jennifer. She accepted immediately, and the two of them began their at-home separation. But Sean was still confused about what to do. He didn’t know how to proceed from where he was. Should he see a lawyer? Should he try to do the paperwork himself? How could he protect his remaining assets from his wife’s excessive spending? With every thought about taking a given action, he also had conflicting thoughts that effectively made him take no action. He was trapped in indecision. “I’m angry,” he said of his wife. “I am frustrated to the point I can’t think. I hate her.” We ended the session with Sean’s observation that “At first I agreed to move out, but now I’ve told her she should move out. It’s inappropriate for her to be dating while we’re still married.”

In our second session, Sean said that he felt much better.” Just being able to express his frustration to someone had helped him to clear his mind. His greatest frustration centered on his wife’s spending habits. “I came from a poor family, but she came from wealth, although she didn’t have much herself, growing up. We didn’t have much money but she wanted to maintain the lifestyle of her family. She bought new clothes all the time, and she donated her old clothes every couple of weeks. She mismanaged our finances. She took out credit cards in both our names. I didn’t have any. Now the IRS has seized all our money accounts.
In the previous week, I had given Sean a handout describing some aspects of the personality’s organization into internal parts. I introduced him to his own work with parts in the second session. I asked him first to focus on the anger and hate he felt for his wife and to sit with those feelings for a moment and wait to see if an image formed to represent what he was feeling. Almost immediately, he visualized two internal parts. The first was green and reptilian, “like a dinosaur but smaller.” This was his angry part. At the same time, he noticed a second part, who looked like him but was older and was wearing a robe. The image struck Sean as “priest-like.”
When Sean spoke to the reptilian part, he found that the part was indeed angry, and especially angry over the wife’s financial activities. His name was Rex and he considered himself a male. His earliest memory dated to a time just after high school and before the couple was married. While still a girlfriend, Jennifer acquired “credit card debts behind my back.” Rex was angry with Jennifer, whom he did not see as his own wife, for her out-of-control spending, angry at her mother for “allowing her to be like this,” and angry with Sean himself “for permitting the spending to continue.”
Sean described the second part as an “older, wiser me in a robe, a monk’s version of me.” His name was Gregor and his age was “between 60 and 80.” Gregor felt sad toward Rex and wanted him to “forgive [Jennifer] and move forward for a better life.” Rex responded to Gregor by saying that maybe he could become “smaller” and learn to “forgive.” Both parts agreed, however, that Sean needed to take a stand. He had to stop being so passive and to take a stand against the wife’s control. At this point in the conversation another internal part appeared. It was, said Sean, “a stronger version of me.” He wore a suit without a tie, and his age was the same as Sean’s. His name was Mike. Sean agreed that he wanted Mike to take a stand. Mike said that was why he was there.
When asked why he hadn’t previously taken a stand, Sean was unable to provide an explanation, except that “maybe” he was afraid Jennifer would leave him. He acknowledged that there was a “weak” part of himself. When he focused upon this feeling of weakness and followed it to its source, he found “a small version of myself, pink, mouse-like.” The part knew who Sean was and said its name was Mouse. He was 10 years old. His earliest memory was of the loneliness he felt when he began middle school. “I was alone a lot,” Sean said. He remembered struggling a lot without guidance, and “learning how to survive.” His parents had divorced when he was young and his father wasn’t around. His mother worked to support the family, and so he rarely had companionship. He had school acquaintances, but no friends. He was shy and afraid. Sean suggested that maybe those experiences were the reason he had never confronted Jennifer on her behavior. Mouse rated his painful middle school experiences as an 8.5 on the 0-10 SUD (Subjective Units of Disturbance) scale. Sean readily accepted the idea of unburdening his Mouse part, and so did Mouse. Sean used three different metaphors to unburden the complex of negative emotions associated with his years in middle school. He chose a waterfall to dissolve his ache over the lack of parental guidance to help him with his struggles through adolescence. He chose a wind intervention to scatter his remembered loneliness into the distant sky. And he disposed of his fear by discarding it into a bonfire. Following these three visualized interventions, Mouse rated his continuing distress at a SUD level of two. This had to do with the slow and difficult learning process he had experienced as he found his way through the most difficult part of growing up, becoming somewhat of a social person. He agreed to relinquish this last portion of pain but wanted to keep it nearby. “He wants to put it in his pocket,” Sean spoke for Mouse. “He said he needs to feel what it’s like, the learning.”
We were at the end of our session as we finished our work with Mouse, and so we closed with the intention of meeting in the following week. Sean believed we had accomplished a lot. He felt the confidence of Mike, the more powerful version of himself, and he had largely healed the weaker Mouse version of himself. He was ready to organize his life in a way that left him in control rather than feeling he was at the mercy of the whims of his wife.

Our third and final session was delayed a week, but we met again two weeks later. Sean came to the session expressing pleasure over how his life had progressed during the previous break. Our previous session had been a “breakthrough” for him. He said that he had left the session smiling, while he had arrived in fear. He was now feeling “less stressed, more hopeful. I’m feeling good about myself. Even my kids and my friends have noticed I’m different.” He added that Jennifer seemed also to be surprised by how much he had taken charge of his life. During the intervening two weeks, Sean had contacted an attorney and developed an equitable plan for the division and distribution of assets and debts. He had also suggested an even split in time shared with the children for their custody. To his surprise, Jennifer agreed with all of his proposals, and even suggested that she would not get an attorney of her own.
He had only one remaining concern. He had been scratching his head so much that many places on his scalp had scabbed over. His barber wanted him to see a dermatologist. In the days since Jennifer agreed to his divorce plans, his head scratching had increased dramatically. Sean recalled that he had scratched his head frequently over many years, so much so that it bothered Jennifer, who would say, “Stop that! You look stupid.” I asked Sean to reach up to his head as if he were going to scratch it, but to keep his fingers a few inches away from his scalp. He did so, and reported that he felt a mixture of pain and itch as he held his fingers there. I asked him to speak to this scalp sensation and ask it to give him a picture of itself, but there was no response to his request. Sean then checked with the part, Rex, to see if he might know the source of the sensation. Rex did, and agreed to connect Sean with the part involved. The part was yellow and “spider-like.” It “ran into a corner to get away.” As he connected to this part, Sean reported “a sense of spite, of revenge,” with Jennifer as the focus. The part, he said, had the thought, “I’ll show her!” When Sean spoke directly with the part, it reported its age as five years old, but Sean doubted this because it seemed “much more sophisticated” than that. His name was Seth. He knew who Jennifer was, but he said he was not really acquainted with her. She had not hurt him, personally. Seth’s job was “to make me scratch,” Sean said. “He’s there to show [Jennifer] I can do all I want to do. I can scratch if I want. His job is to irritate me so I prove I can do what I want, when I want.”
At this point Sean and Seth had a silent dialog, some of which Sean later summarized. Seth said that it was not he who was resentful of the wife; instead, it was Sean who was resentful. “I work for you,” said Seth. When asked if there might be other ways for Seth to help Sean do what he wanted without using the lever of resentment, the part agreed to change. His form metamorphosed into the image of “a dashing young man, an adventurer. He likes fun things. He’s courageous.” In his new form, Seth presented as age 26. “He will help me go out and do the things I want to do. Nobody telling me no or stop.”
Sean seemed to have successfully altered the way Seth would help him. Instead of scratching his head as a means of symbolically asserting his independence from Jennifer, Sean would now seek out opportunities to express the urges he had suppressed during the years of his marriage. Seth’s function would be to encourage him to take positive actions of adventure rather than the passive-aggressive actions of resentfully scratching his head in opposition to his wife.
There remained, however, some final work to do on resentment. Since Sean and Jennifer had agreed to an amicable divorce, and Sean wanted to maintain good relations with her for the good of their children, feeling resentful of her would not be helpful in the future. But what part held the resentment? Seth indicated that it wasn’t he who was resentful; he merely acted on the resentment on Sean’s behalf. It wasn’t Sean’s core self because the self does not carry such negative energy. We chose to look for the resentful part with the help of Seth. The technique is useful when the patient cannot easily differentiate the blending part. Sean asked Seth to notice the resentment he perceived in Sean and to speak to it, asking it to step away from Sean. When Seth did so, Sean said he could then see Mouse standing up in fear, but he wasn’t alone. Rex also showed himself, acknowledged that he too was resentful, and wanted to show Jennifer that he could do what he wanted. Sean went on to say that Seth seemed to have been “spawned” out of Rex. However, with the changes Sean had made in his life, and especially with his new take-charge attitude, Rex no longer saw a purpose in irritating Sean with head scratching, Spontaneously, Rex offered up his resentment for unburdening. Sean described Rex as walking over to the fire and burning up his resentment, allowing the wind to blow away the ashes, and then washing his hands in water.
Now, said Sean, Rex was “ready when I need him, when it’s appropriate to be angry. It’s like a car parked in the garage. Ready when I need him.” Sean went on to describe the physical changes that seemed to have taken place in Rex’s appearance. “He had hands now and not claws. He’s more like an alligator than a dinosaur. He’s more civilized now. He has a mouthful of teeth, but his mouth is closed, waiting.”
As we prepared to end the session, Sean said that Mouse was looking nervously around at the assembled group of Rex, Seth, Gregor, and Mike. “He’s afraid he won’t be needed,” Sean said. Sean and I then discussed the positive value in feeling fear in certain situations; in particular, when there is just enough fear to cause a person to take protective action. Sean assured Mouse that he would always be needed, and this resulted in certain physical changes in Mouse: “He’s perking up. He was kinda slimy before, now he’s more furry, a lab mouse type. He’s one hundred percent clean now.” Sean then described how he visualized his inner parts: “They are all lined up and ready to go.” That is, they were ready to work with him as he rebuilt his life.
This was our last of three sessions. Sean felt that he had no outstanding issues. He was in control of his domestic life and no longer resentful of Jennifer. He had plans to either buy out his wife’s share of the house, or to allow her to buy him out and he would purchase another nearby so that the children would not have to change schools. He felt no desire to scratch his head.