You Be Me (Part 2 of 2)

In Part 1 of this column, we described the shame-bond that can hold a couple together, when each partner hands the other a disowned Part to carry in what Martha Sweezy calls “you be me instead of me.” For an IFS practitioner, the opening here is not couples communication in the ordinary sense. You can teach Dana and Marcus to fight more fairly and still leave the engine running. The work is to help each of them recognize that the Part they cannot stand in their partner is a Part they are carrying too; they must each take ownership of and integrate their own projection.

The financial incompetence Dana despised in Marcus lived in her own exile. The cold control Marcus resented in Dana lived in his own manager, the one that white-knuckled his secret spending into something he could pretend was under control. The thing each was trying to make the other be was already inside them, waiting.

This is delicate and often slow work, because the shame-bond is held together by protectors who are convinced that feeling the shame directly would destroy the person. They are not wrong about how much it hurts. They are wrong that it cannot be survived. When a practitioner invites Dana to turn toward her helpless exile, her manager will usually object first, and it has good reasons, because that exile has been kept off the screen for decades precisely because it felt unbearable.

The work is not to override the protector but to earn its trust, slowly, until it is willing to let the Self come close. The only thing that actually unburdens shame is the steady presence of the person’s own Self, come near enough to witness the part and offer it what it never had. A partner cannot do that, no matter how loving, because the partner is not the Self the exile has been waiting most of a lifetime to feel.

What changed for Dana and Marcus was slow and unspectacular, nor did it occur on the same timeline for each of them. Dana began to notice that her urge to manage Marcus spiked at exactly the moments her own helpless Part was closest to the surface, and over many months she learned to turn toward that part instead of toward him. Marcus came to the work later and more reluctantly, and for a long stretch Dana was doing her own healing inside a marriage that had not yet changed. That is worth naming plainly, because this work does not always save the relationship.

Sometimes one partner takes back what they have been projecting and discovers there is little underneath the bond but the bond itself. In Dana and Marcus’s case the marriage held, but it held because two people slowly stopped needing each other to carry what was theirs, not because the technique guaranteed it.

When a couple arrives describing a problem that lives entirely in the other person, we suggest looking for the shame-bond underneath, and asking what each partner might be tossing to the other to carry. The answer is almost always something they cannot yet bear to hold themselves. The work is not to get the partner to carry it more gracefully but to help each person hold their own hot potato so it can cool—to bring their own Self close enough that the shame no longer needs a place to hide.

This is the slow undoing of “you be me instead of me.” Two people, who no longer trade wounds, can be available to each other at last.

By Rick Kahler, CFP®, CFT™, and Kristine Anthis, PhD

REFERENCE: Internal Family Systems Therapy for Shame and Guilt, by Martha Sweezy (Guilford Press, 2023)