What it is is finding a qualitative gestalt within yourself, an array of sensations and feelings and thoughts, all conjured together in a sort of knot in your nervous system, contacting this gestalt, and doing Kum Nye with it: you contact the whole thing, enter into it, merge it with the breath, and expand it.
What I felt tonight doing my practice is that this part is inherently something that has had internal violence done to it, over and above the violence that created the initial traumatization.
Think about it: when something horrible happens, especially when you are a kid, and especially when it was done by cold and thoughtless, or even intentionally cruel parents or other people supposed to protect you, you still have to function. You still have to show up to life, even though it terrifies you. You have to go to school. You have to be a good boy or girl, and continue to do what you are told.
How do you do this? Push the pain back in the hole. This is violence. This is a separation made necessary by the need to survive.
You know what? That is exactly what Tom Waits is talking about here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw2MjRcVO4g
The Devil: he has a string in all of us that can be plucked, and it is a long time before it stops vibrating. For some, it never does.
Healing, then, is done with compassion. It involves communicating to this part that as imperfect as your psychological command and control structure is, as imperfect as agency necessarily is when dissociation is present, that you will do your best never to act out in anger to this part, and to include it in your thoughts and prayers, to take it with you wherever you go, and to spend time with it, talking.
I am in the final stages of this healing, and I’m trying to figure out how to approach it. This is what makes the most sense to me at the moment, and I thought I would share. I hope it does someone some good.