Letters
Nobody Wins a Seesaw
By Billy Barnard, IFS informed practitioner · July 14, 2026
There's a message you know you should send. One voice in you says send it today. Another says leave it alone. And you, the one they're arguing about, you've spent forty minutes scrolling in the gap between them.
That gap eats afternoons. You open the task, feel both voices tighten, and reach for your phone. The phone's easy and the deadlock's hard. Then you call yourself lazy. That's the strange part, because two voices in you have been working flat out the whole time.
I met my two voices as a stuck heaviness in my chest and back. I sat with the feeling and found a tug of war underneath. Here's how I put it that day: "one wants me to not send messages, afraid of me getting hurt, the other one is telling me I will get in trouble if I don't send messages."
Read that twice. Both voices were afraid for me. The stop voice wanted to spare me pain. The go voice wanted to spare me trouble. Two voices guarding one person, pulling opposite ways with all their strength, while the person they guarded sat frozen in the middle.
My first instinct was to work out which voice was right. That question sounds sensible.
Asking which voice is right is asking which end of a seesaw is winning. The two voices are the two seats, and both seats bolt to the same plank. When one end rises, the other end paid for the ride, and the plank stays right where it's always been.
Referees skip playgrounds for a reason: a seesaw is two riders on one plank, and the plank settles only when both riders come down together.
Parts work informed by IFS gave me a different move entirely. Both voices are protectors. Each took a job years ago, each believes the job keeps me safe, and each pulls harder whenever the other pulls. The way through the deadlock is for both of them to see you, the person they protect, awake in the middle.
So I turned toward mine, one at a time. What happened next still surprises me: the moment they caught me noticing them, both went curious. The rope slackened. Each voice, once heard, pointed me further down, toward older and more tired places in me that had been waiting years for somebody to keep them company. Over the sessions that followed, both voices set their jobs down.
I call the move the Two Hellos, and it's ten minutes, start to finish.
1. Find each voice in your body. Mine sat in my chest and my back. Yours might live in your jaw, or low in your gut.
2. Greet each one separately, out loud or on paper, and ask each the same plain question: what are you afraid will happen to me? Let the answer arrive in the voice's own words, however young the words sound.
3. Thank both voices and stay off the rope. You're there to meet them, and meeting them is the whole job.
I met my two voices inside Hearth, the app I built so this kind of sitting down has a home. Hearth walks you through the same hellos, one plain question at a time, at whatever pace feels safe. Your first week's free.
Next time you're stuck between do and delay, skip the debate and run the Two Hellos before the scroll starts.
One thing keeps circling back to me. The deadlock broke only when winning came off the table for both voices. I set out to end a fight, and the fight ended because I'd stopped trying to end anything. Hold that one loosely on your way down from the seesaw.