Parts Therapy: Finding Worth

Therapy has been...interesting lately, to say the least.  This "parts" therapy is kind of weird to get used too.  It starts off with a breathing exercise to kind of "center" myself.  Then I'm asked to visualize some of the parts we've identified.  The first session we really did this, we started off with the depressed part.  I've always visualized my depression as a raging, threatening, thunderstorm with tornadoes.  I was supposed to visualize myself separate from the part, and we talked to it.  It was really kind of weird at first, I felt crazy, honestly.  As we've talked to some of my parts, we've discovered other parts in the background.  A lot of my parts seem to have some sort of connection to trying to keep me from getting hurt.  My depressed part tries to keep me from being around other people and situations, my self-critical part keeps me from trying to succeed because it's afraid of failing and not being good enough for the people around me, it also thinks that by repeatedly telling me I'm worthless that it'll hurt less when other people say it.  We discovered another part recently that we've been calling the "dark" part.  This part seems to collect all triggering images I've seen (like from movies and tv shows) and holds on to them, it's also where the suicidal thinking and self-harm seems to reside.  Then, in my darkest moments, it likes to bring them up because apparently it 1.) thinks it's helping my lonely part by trying to tell me I'm not alone in what I feel, and 2.) it feels it's protecting me by showing me a solution to how I feel.  The questions seems to think why does it that would be protecting me.  There's a quote I found quite some time ago by David Foster Wallace that I've used a few times to help explain how I feel, and I think that maybe this is the idea that this "dark" part has-

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

This "dark" part is more afraid  of the darkness (aka the flames).  Since starting therapy, and since my medication dosage increased, my okay days have increased, which I'm grateful for.  But I'm still having plenty of rough days and days.  Since talking to the dark part in therapy this week, it's actually been very active, and it's very difficult to deal with.

Besides all that, another big thing we've been working on is trying to find worth in myself.  My therapist had me visualize "letting go" of the thought that I am worthless, and find ways to replace it.  So I've been doing my best to focus on the positive things that my friends around me say.  I have a folder filled with cards and letters from friends and I've even written down some really sweet texts they've sent and I keep it all together for me to remind myself of often.  Now I'm trying to find the same worth in myself.