Battling the Inner Enemy
by Kristan Sargeant
I’ve been privileged to work with Barry Michels for the last two years as a mentee, collaborator, and fellow nutcase for The Tools. During the pandemic, in early 2020, Barry and I started offering webinars to help people navigate extremely challenging circumstances. To our delight, as the urgency of the pandemic wore off, we discovered we had fallen in love with the community we were reaching and with the webinar format itself—a kind of virtual love letter knitting disparate people together through time and space.
So, we decided to keep it in 2021, and delivered our first webinar on February 6. At the beginning of that webinar, Barry made an offhanded comment that might be my favorite thing I’ve ever heard him say (and he says a lot of profound stuff!). He reassured participants that, despite knowing The Tools like the back of his hand, he’s just as fucked up as the rest of us. What a relief!
“Tools don’t immunize you from fear or vulnerability. They equip you to navigate the tides of your life effectively so you can experience the whole spectrum of your humanity with grace and agility.”
—KRISTAN SARGEANT
I could go on about how this humanizing statement rights a hundred years of false power dynamics between psychotherapists and patients, but the more important message—and a key tenet of The Tools philosophy—is that life never stops demanding growth (which feels like an ass-kicking) no matter who you are. We are all subject to the creative and destructive forces in this universe. Tools give us a way to navigate with grace and, with practice, win more battles than we lose.
PART X
Barry and I presented the first of a two-part webinar about Part X on March 21. (You can download it for free here.) Part X is one of the most fruitful, life-changing concepts in The Tools playbook. Phil Stutz assigned this name to the destructive force that lives in all of us, a force whose purpose is to thwart our potential and “X” us out. Whether leveraging anxiety, depression, negativity, or some other debilitating symptom, Part X’s signature move is to take a kernel of truth, exaggerate it wildly, and feed it to us with crushing and paralyzing certitude.
Let me illustrate.
Every time a webinar rolls around, I’m faced with the same fears: I’m going to be exposed as an idiot and fraud who will never measure up to the high bar of Barry’s genius. Luckily, I have a way to work with these fears and not let them get the best of me. For those familiar with The Tools, I’m referring to Shadow Work. During the weeks leading up to our last webinar, I poured copious love and attention into my Shadow—a figure who often shows up as a cyclops with a mental disability who’s chained in the basement of my psyche like the unseemly brother in the movie “The Goonies.” Instead of judging and abandoning this figure, I invited it in.
Despite my most sincere efforts, the day after the webinar I was hit with a wall of darkness. This wall was made up of intense self-criticism, an experience of heaviness bordering on paralysis, and a visceral sense of exposure that made my skin hurt. I had the divergent desires to crawl into a hole and never come out or do something mind-numbingly reckless. Despite the fact that the webinar went just fine by all reasonable accounts, this despair set in with the authority of truth.
WHEN PART X TAKES OVER
This is a Part X attack. Part X wedges its foot in the door with a sliver of truth that compels us to pay attention. Once in, X blankets us with half-truths and lies that prey on our worst fears with ingenious exactitude. Ten thoughts become one hundred in an instant. Soon feelings rush in and we’re done for. The only remaining question is how long will we be down for the count?
In my case, X’s barrage went something like this, “Your presentation of the Loss Processing Tool was mediocre. Barry is elegant and effortless. You’re dull by comparison and everyone sees it. You try too hard and think too much. You’re just not smart enough. Why do you put yourself through this? You should quit. You’re a dead weight. Why do you insist on bringing the Shadow up all the time? You don’t make any sense. If you had done better there would be more positive comments in the chat. You’ll never be good enough at this. You might as well give up.”
THE SOLUTION
I was stuck. To make matters worse, X piled on some bonus flagellation, telling me I should know better than to succumb to Part X and definitely not reach out to Barry for help. By some small miracle, I set my pride aside, admitted X had sunk me, and asked Barry how to regain my precious flow. Here is what he advised:
Use IGNORANCE. Ignorance means "I'm not smart enough to figure out my own value or come to any conclusions about anything. ANYTHING. Especially if it relates to my own worth. And it's arrogant to try."
When you are plagued with judgments and conclusions about yourself, forget about the content of the judgment. Don't even debate it in your head. Instead, take a step back and see the act of judging for what it is. It is X's attempt to reify you—to make you into a dead, definable object. It's like pinning a live butterfly to the wall. This is very important. Part X infuses you with thoughts that make you into a solid, easily defined object, rather than an ever-flowing spirit in constant evolution. YOU ARE NOT AN OBJECT. YOU ARE FLOW.
Once you remind yourself that Part X has made you into a solid object, dissolve yourself back into fluid—literally make yourself feel like sugar dissolved into water—and rejoin the ever-evolving world of spirit, which is the Flow World. If you’ve ever body-surfed, it’s a lot like that feeling you get when the wave takes over and you are propelled by something greater than you—you dissolve into the wave and become fluid yourself. That false sense of knowing who you are, that "objectification of self," whatever you want to call it, is the force that perpetrates the delusion that the material world is pre-eminent.
Of course, I heeded Barry’s advice and soon was back in possession of myself, signing up for more punishment by agreeing to write about my experience for you.
Tools don’t immunize you from fear or vulnerability. They equip you to navigate the tides of your life effectively so you can experience the whole spectrum of your humanity with grace and agility so you can live fully. They won’t stop being human or any less fucked up. But you’ll recognize when the enemy is attacking and have moves for fighting back. Like Cassius Clay facing Sonny Liston, you’ll learn to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.
I invite you to learn to identify and fight Part X in your own life. Cognition and intellectualization can only take you so far. Eventually, to prevail, you must become a street fighter against your own inner enemy.
Kristan Sargeant is a coach, therapist, and three-time TEDxWomen producer. She works with individuals around the globe, helping them find the courage, creativity, and willpower to realize their potential. She offers small Shadow Groups for adults and adolescent girls. You can learn more and contact her at kristansargeant.com.
