Letters
Panic Wants Company
By Billy Barnard, IFS informed practitioner · July 14, 2026
The news landed on an ordinary weekday morning. I'd probably lost a client. The panic arrived before the thought finished forming, straight into my shoulders and upper chest, a clamp so tight the coffee lost its taste.
My first move was the one every working person knows. Fix this now. I opened the laptop, started a list of people to reach, drafted the first line of an outreach message, and the clamp tightened with every word. The plan was supposed to burn off the panic. The panic read the plan and grew.
Under all that planning sat the real material. I felt rejected, and the thought of walking back out into the world to hunt for a new client scared me more than the loss itself.
So I stopped and sat down with the panic, the way I've learned to in parts work, the practice informed by IFS. This is a real session, my own, told the way it went. Here's what I typed while the panic was still loud: they are really scared. I potentially lost a client today so they are very scared and feel rejected and scared to go out in the world and have to look for a client again.
Then came the surprise. When I turned toward the panicking parts and looked at them, they had no idea I was there. From where they sat, the alarm was ringing through an empty house, so they pushed the panic as loud as they could and hoped somebody would hear. Every plan I'd drafted that morning had reached them as more noise from nowhere.
I set the problem-solving down and offered the one thing missing all morning. Company. I'm here, I told them, watching this with you, in no hurry to fix anything.
The shift took minutes. The clamp on my chest eased. The parts turned curious about me, the way a scared kid turns curious once a parent walks into the room, and curiosity slid into cooperation.
Near the end, the session turned to pictures, the way parts work often does. The parts released what they called big boulders of fears into a fire, then asked to invite confidence, courage, and persistence into the space the boulders left. It's a strange thing to feel room open where the panic sat an hour before.
I call the move company first. Panic is often a part of you that still thinks the house is empty.
A plan slides right off a part like that. A plan needs somebody home to run the plan, and the part has yet to meet the somebody.
Presence lands first. Show the part that somebody's home and the whole posture of the system changes. Cooperation follows on its own. Strategy comes last, and strategy written in cooperation reads nothing like strategy typed in panic.
Yours likely works the same way, whether it's money, or a message you keep rereading at midnight.
Try company first tonight, the next time the alarm goes off.
1. Find where the panic's sitting in your body. Chest, shoulders, throat, gut.
2. Tell that spot, out loud if you can, that you're here and watching with it. Skip the plan for now.
3. Wait for a change, a softening or a question, and only then talk next steps together.
I ran this session inside Hearth, the app that holds space for a panicking part until it's ready to talk. First week's free.