Stories from My Professional Work: Opening the Door to My Work with Therapy Clients
He had asked to come to therapy himself. I’ll call him Nathan.
That matters. Most teenagers don’t ask. They’re referred, brought in by a parent or a school or a court. Nathan had said he needed help. That alone told me something about who he was.
He had a boy-next-door look about him. Not what you’d expect from a kid carrying that much anger.
Nathan came in talking about anger. During and after sporting events, when he felt he hadn’t performed well enough, something inside him would erupt. Throwing a bat. Yelling at other players. Beating himself up afterward. Being angry for hours after it was over. He couldn’t always control what came next. And he knew it.
He also knew where it came from. His father had anger too. Nathan had watched his dad take it out on his mom. And he had decided, at sixteen years old, that he did not want to repeat that.
More courage than many adults I’ve worked with.
In our sessions we started talking about Nathan’s angry part. The part that erupted when the pressure became too much and the performance wasn’t what he needed it to be. We used an IFS parts card as a reference: a vivid image of something fierce and fiery, and
Nathan drew his own version of it. His angry part, in his own hand.
Nathan learned that his angry part was just a part, not all of him. That distinction gave him something he hadn’t had before: compassion toward himself. He wasn’t a bad person. He was a person with a part that was working very hard.
We used his drawing in our sessions. It was a tool. Something to make the concept tangible.
Then one day Nathan told me he had taken a photo of it and kept it on his phone.
I felt it in my chest before I could name what I was feeling. Proud. Humbled. Emotional. Nathan was carrying his angry part with him. Not to feed it, but to know it. To recognize it when it showed up. To have something to look at in the moments that used to end in explosion.
Nathan told me about one of those moments. A sporting event that hadn’t gone the way he wanted. The familiar heat rising. And instead of letting it take over, he looked at the card.
He chose something different.
I sat with that for a moment. Nathan, on his own, in a real moment of real pressure, had reached for something we had built together in a therapy room. And it had worked.
In Internal Family Systems, this is what we are working toward. Not the absence of the angry part, but the ability to recognize it. To listen to it. To understand what it was protecting. For Nathan, the fear of not being good enough. To pause. To make a choice from a calmer, more centered place: what IFS calls Self energy. Nathan was doing that. He was doing it on a phone screen in a parking lot, a dugout, or a locker room, wherever he was standing when the heat came.
And he told me about it with a shy smile.
I have never forgotten that smile.
Nathan went further. He connected his angry part to his father’s anger, to his grandmother, to a pattern that had moved through his family for generations. He said he didn’t want to bring it into his own relationships. Nathan was thinking about a past girlfriend, about the kind of person he wanted to be.
That’s what naming a part can do for a sixteen-year-old who wants to do something different.
When a young person learns to name and notice a part early enough, they don’t just change their own story. They have a chance to stop something that has been moving through a family for a very long time.
This is why the Lava doorknob exists in The Hallway of Doorknobs. Not because of one moment, but because of every moment like it I have ever witnessed.
It’s for every person I’ve worked with across every setting, from the probation units to therapy offices to group homes for people with intellectual disabilities. The part that erupts when the pressure is too much, when shame or fear or helplessness takes over.
Reflection Questions
- Think of a part of yourself that tends to erupt under pressure. What is it protecting?
- Is there a pattern in your family that you have decided you don’t want to carry forward? What would it take to interrupt it?
- What would it mean to carry a reminder of your parts with you, the way Nathan carried his drawing?
This post is part of my series, Stories from My Professional Work, exploring protector parts through the lens of Internal Family Systems (IFS). IFS was developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, whose work continues to shape how I teach, write, and understand the protective parts we all carry.
- The Teen Who Carried the Card - July 20, 2026
- The Kid Who Made Herself Invisible - July 13, 2026
- Christmas Around the World: The Kid Who Froze - July 6, 2026
I love this, and I want to use it in my work as a therapist. I want to use this exact story and these exact questions. I work with someone who recently shared a story about his own anger, how it erupted, and how it made him feel like he wasn’t even himself. He experienced intense anger at himself. The fact that this story has a young man in it, explores his anger, and shows how he used what he learned to have compassion for himself is exactly what I am hoping for the young man I work with.