Why you can't settle on how you feel
You're made of different parts and they all want different things
Most people feel confused about what they want because they think they should have one clear answer. But the reality is you’re made of different parts with different needs, and they’re often in conflict.
What happens often is you end up fighting yourself instead of listening to what’s going on inside.
You’re made of conflicting wants
I discovered IFS (Internal Family Systems) years ago. It’s a therapeutic framework based on the idea that you have different parts inside you, each with its own needs.
For example, you have a part that wants safety and comfort. A part that wants to run away and have adventures. A part that worries about what people think. A part that wants to be left alone and experience solitude.
The challenge is that these speak at the same time. You feel relieved and sad. You feel excited and terrified. You feel free and lonely. All at once.
Your instinct is to pay attention to the loudest part (or the part that makes the most sense in the situation) and ignore the rest.
What happens inside you
Imagine your girlfriend unexpectedly breaks up with you. The relationship was healthy, deeply loving, and you thought she was the one.
If you were made of just one single piece, your emotional reality would be straightforward: pure heartbreak, devastation and grief.
And at first, that’s exactly how it feels. The sadness is so overwhelming it covers everything else. But as time passes and the weight gets a bit lighter, you start to notice something odd: you aren’t just sad any more. There’s something else there too, and it doesn’t fit with the grief.
If you pay close attention, you’ll notice what’s actually happening inside you:
A part of you grieves. It misses her and feels the weight of what you’ve lost. This is the part you expect to feel, and it’s the loudest one.
A part of you panics. You don’t know how to rebuild your life alone. You worry you’ll never feel this kind of love again and the future suddenly looks empty and frightening.
A part of you feels shame. You replay conversations and wonder what you could have done differently. You think about all the ways you failed to be the partner she needed.
A part of you feels resentment. You invested years into building a life together. You made sacrifices and now all of that effort and time just feels wasted. She gets to walk away while you’re left with nothing to show for it.
But there’s more happening inside you:
A part of you feels relief. You no longer have to manage her emotional needs or deal with her family. You have your own space and time back.
A part of you feels excited. You can reconnect with old friends you neglected. You can take up hobbies again and have freedom you forgot you wanted.
All of these are real and all of these are you. Not one after the other, but all at the same time.
The nature of internal conflict
We’re taught to think of ourselves as one single, unified person. We expect to have one clear feeling and one clear set of needs. But the human mind doesn’t actually work that way. Your mind is naturally made up of different parts. Some of these parts are active from the start, while others stay dormant, waiting for the right moment to show up.
When difficult things happen in your life, some of these parts become fixated on trying to protect you. The part that worries learns to imagine the worst because it thinks preparing for disaster keeps you safe. The part that cares what people think becomes overactive because it learnt that approval means survival. The part that wants freedom goes quiet because it wasn’t allowed to pursue what it wanted.
Each part developed a strategy that made sense at the time. But they don’t check in with each other. They just blindly react when a situation feels like a familiar threat or opportunity. The cautious part kicks in when there’s uncertainty. The people-pleaser activates when someone’s upset. The part that wants freedom activates when you feel trapped.
Having different parts is a pretty brilliant feature of your mind. It makes you flexible and adaptive, giving you different emotional resources depending on what a situation requires.
The problem comes when all these parts activate at once, which is what happens in a situation like a breakup.
Why each part needs what they need
The parts aren’t random. Each one is trying to protect you from something specific based on what it learnt in the past.
Take the breakup example:
The part that panics catastrophises about the future because it learnt that preparing for the worst keeps you safe. If you imagine every bad thing that could happen, nothing can catch you off guard.
The part that feels shame keeps replaying old conversations and blaming yourself because it believes punishment prevents future mistakes. It thinks if you punish yourself hard enough, you won’t make those errors again. You’ll be more careful next time.
The part that feels relief wants freedom and space because it has learnt that having these keeps you safe. And that’s a real and valid need. It’s just been waiting for this moment to remind you it exists.
The part that feels resentment holds onto what you’ve lost because it’s trying to make sure you don’t settle for less next time. It wants to protect you from investing in something that won’t work out again. It’s harsh and it hurts, but underneath, it’s trying to keep you from repeating a painful pattern.
Each of these strategies made sense at some point in your life. But they were built for old situations. They’re trying to solve today’s pain using yesterday’s survival tactics.
And when they all activate at the exact same time, pulling you in completely different directions, you feel torn apart.
How to understand your parts
The practice starts with noticing.
When you feel something strong, ask yourself: which part of me is feeling this?
This question creates distance between you and the feeling. You start to step back and look at it rather than being completely consumed by it.
Once you’ve named the part, get curious about it. Ask the part: what do you need right now?
Listen to the answer and don’t judge it or try to fix it. The panic might say it needs certainty about the future. The shame might say it needs to understand what went wrong. The relief might say it needs permission to enjoy your freedom.
Then go deeper. Ask: what are you protecting me from?
This might feel strange at first, like you’re talking to yourself. But that’s normal. Keep going!
If you ask the resentment what it’s protecting you from, it might say: I’m making sure we never get hurt like this again. The shame might say: I’m making sure you don’t repeat the same mistakes. The panic might say: I’m making sure nothing catches you off guard.
Now you see that the part isn’t trying to hurt you; it’s just using the only strategy it knows to keep you safe.
When you listen and get curious instead of fighting, the part relaxes because it feels heard. Once the internal fighting stops, your true needs become clear.
To go deeper into this work, there are three books that I find worth reading. “No Bad Parts” by Richard Schwartz is the best starting point. “Self-Therapy” by Jay Earley is a workbook if you want to practise on your own. And “Introduction to Internal Family Systems” by Richard Schwartz is a shorter overview if you want the essentials first.
Most of your confusion about what you want comes from ignoring parts of yourself for years. You’ve been listening to the loudest voice or the one that seems to make sense, and pushing the rest down.
But those dismissed parts don’t disappear. They just find ways to pull you in different directions. Once you stop dismissing them and actually listen, the noise quiets down. Not because the parts go away, but because they stop competing for your attention. And when that happens, you stop feeling stuck.