Parts

We might be helping men wrong

Dating has never been a zone of genius for me.

For most of my life, I’ve been a serial monogamist. The current record holder [by a landslide], my wife Cristina, was hornswoggled by my charms some twenty years ago last month.

When I was in high school, there was a moment when I could’ve mastered the art of dating. Two girls had my attention, and I was earnestly trying to be a guy who could date, whatever that means at sixteen.

What was happening, as it seemed, was that a part of me was pulled toward one girl. Another part of me was pulled toward the other, mostly based on which was giving me attention at the moment.

Evidence of my destiny to monogamize, it didn’t take long for one to win out.

It was as if the winning girl somehow crowned the requisite part of me as the real Damon, and then I went on as if I was that part.

Obviously, that’s not really what happened. If anything, I crowned that part of me myself

Emergence

Parts are funny, both in their expression and as a concept. I think of them often. I also notice them, how they arise in others and in myself.

They’ve even taken a central role in my concerns specific to men lately, for reasons I’ll spell out in a second, but I think a little clarification about parts would be wise.

Even people familiar with the concept get a lot wrong.

When I first learned about this idea, I accepted the premise: We all have parts. It seemed obvious, perhaps because of situations like the one in high school, but also because we tend to think and talk about ourselves as parts.

We feel conflicted by what we might call “different voices” inside us, sometimes even drawn astray by them. We may take action that seems bizarre in the rearview, only explainable as a part of us.

More critically, we might view these actions as a result of that part’s decentralized motivations. This begs at least a few questions, like…

Am I nothing more than someone shifting from the perspective of one part to another? And if one’s really paying attention, who the hell is in charge of all these parts?

Let’s take a breath and not try to answer that one. Not yet.

Wait. What?

There’s an important distinction I’ve picked up recently, worth mentioning for clarity about the landscape.

What I tend to think of as “the Damon project” is not the sum of my parts. It’s also not the aggregate. It’s something a little deeper, and more than I want to surface in this essay, but I’ve talked about what I suspect it is in other essays.

Like here. And here.

I’m also starting to believe there’s something valuable in all of this for men, specifically with understanding our parts as a means to solving much of what ails us.

Aside: My friend Jim has written a whole series on the men in the middle, which I keep insisting is him pointing to this parts thing. This is my strong recommendation on Jim’s Substack if you’ve not yet tuned in.

But enough philosophy. Time for a more concrete example.

One of our easiest parts to reference, one shared across all gender expressions, is our critical part. I call it the one-trick pony of parts. Even though it speaks in the voices of many people: parents, mentors, bosses, and other influential people, it only knows one move.

It’s the one that says, “You know better, Damon.” It also says, “I can’t believe you have a critical part, Damon.”

Like I said, one-trick pony.

Our critical part is both easy to accept as something that exists, and often hard to see at the same time. It’s not, however, one of the parts I find most concerning as they pertain to men.

That title goes to parts like manipulative ones, tough guys, and even the just-be-nice parts. My concerns are less about the existence of these parts. These are time-honored parts that have been showing up since the beginning of human development.

No. It’s more about what happens to these otherwise annoying parts when they become confused about their role, or more precisely, when men become confused.

To get there, I need to back up a little.

The primary concern for someone working with parts, like a therapist or coach, is that parts, like people, want to feel seen and appreciated for what they do.

This remains true even if their actions are ultimately misguided.

We can imagine parts like children. They don’t tend to consider the larger ramifications of their actions. The big difference is, their actions show up in the bodies of adults.

All of which brings us to men, and my concerns with our parts, specifically as they relate to the good intentions of men’s work. Too many popular men’s programs, as well-intentioned as they may be, are simply emboldening the parts of the men who attend.

But that’s not all that’s worth our concern.

Coronation

Instead of making those parts feel seen and appreciated, these programs convince the men who attend them that they are their parts.

It’s not; I have a very resilient, tough guy part in me. It’s I AM that resilient tough guy.

Generally speaking, this is the opposite direction one wants to go when doing parts work. It’s not that parts can’t be useful, even functional. They super can be. It’s that there’s a caloric cost for operating from those parts as if they were the whole self.

There’s also a potential for harm caused to others. Perhaps too much, and simultaneously not enough ink has been spilled on that point.

The problem for us all is that our parts have a limited perspective on truth. Their relationships with nuance reflect those limitations, and nuance is such an integral aspect of adulthood.

Triggering, or what we might prefer to call emotional reactivity, can be evidence of parts. An inflexible boundary can be too, like one that considers zero exceptions. I say this as someone who advocates endlessly for men to manage their boundaries.

The opposite can also be true. A wide-open or unmanaged boundary can also be evidence that a part has shown up. (ref: just-be-nice parts)

It’s not only the emboldening of tough guy parts, but also our nice guy parts, and really any part.

Any part emboldened as the whole self is not a true representative of the whole, and it comes at a cost.

In the most charitable take, the cost is a perception that something is always missing. Because parts have limited perspectives, when we live from them, this is how life feels.

Incomplete

Even as we feel like we’ve figured something out—how to feel more confident, for example—we can’t shake the feeling that there is something missing.

For some men, this means they get trapped in the hamster wheel of self-improvement.

That’s where every revision of the plan to improve themselves is only temporarily satisfying. Because they’re operating from the perspective of a part, they keep coming back to the feeling that something is missing.

They keep trying to solve the problem of not-wholeness from a part, which is impossible.

It would be like trying to drive a car in the snow, with just a small patch of windshield cleared. That’s the best-case scenario. For some of us, it’s like that, but with bald tires and broken windshields at the same time.

Parts can’t help other parts solve this problem of what’s missing, not within ourselves, and not when that help comes from other people’s parts. Yet this is often what we try to do.

Help is best provided by someone not lost in the storm. In the language of parts, this would be someone not operating from the perspective of a part.

This is why people sometimes work with coaches like me to navigate this space.

That’s not to claim that coaches don’t have parts. Oh, I have’m. Lots’vm. As such, I’m currently working with more than one coach and a mentor to work with my own parts.

What’s lost

This is what matters most to me.

When parts do or say things that don’t groove with the larger story we’re telling ourselves about who we are—often just another part—reconciliation is the immediate lost opportunity.

Beyond reconciliation, there’s something like integration possible.

Integration is like bringing parts back into the whole. That shift can even be durable.

But.

In a world confused, operating from our parts, we surrender what’s possible, at least for now. What’s possible is a liberation-shaped world, where parts surface and deepen without confusing us.

As far as I can tell, we’re never really done with our parts. I don’t know for sure because I’m still somewhat new to this work.

What I understand so far is that, in time, we can stop feeling like there is something missing. Parts will still show up, but they don’t confound us as much.

At some point, I don’t know when, parts are just less sticky.

Thanks for being here.

Damon