Wisdom Strategy Research Institute

One of the metaphors that we occasionally use is the metaphor of "Parts". That is the idea that we are to some extent fragmented or specialized in our consciousness. Various aspects of ourself are specialized to perform certain functions including breathing, running our immune system, spelling, making decisions, communicating, believing in whatever we believe in, and so forth.

It may initially sound kind of hokey to some people to talk about or to communicate with our "inner parts". If this happens, if it occurs for someone that the notion of "parts" is a little weird for them, we can use other words to refer to and accomplish the same things. This can be accomplished by words such as "aspects", ability, sub-personality, demon, angel, strategy, feeling, process, "place inside you that is...", half of self, portion, circuit, map, blue-print, core, etc.

The word doesn't matter. What matters is getting direct access to that something in our deep minds that we are dealing with. The access is the purpose of the word part.

Very often as people are describing their experience, even people that have never heard about NLP they will use the "parts" metaphor. Such as, "One part feels x, but another part of me feels Y." We hear this sort of thing all the time. I've seen it spontaneously happen without my ever bringing up any kind of reference to the word or concept of "parts" more times than I can remember - dozens.

That is one reason to use the metaphor, it is a match for a significant portion of our population.

The use of the parts metaphor came mainly from Virginia Satir, who would do "Parts Party's" and work in various ways with people's "parts". It has proven itself to be wildly effective most of the time.

The other place that the parts metaphor comes from is the sciences of Cybernetics, Systems theory, and Games theory. These fields all talk about

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