Letters

The Part of Me That Thought I Was Five

By Billy Barnard, IFS informed practitioner · July 7, 2026

My chest went tight on the right side, one spot, not the whole chest. It happened mid session with Billy, the guide inside my own app. I got curious about it instead of pushing it away. It reached toward me. It felt like it was asking me to save it.

I stayed there. Billy asked what it was like to keep it company. Did it have a texture, a temperature, did it move or hold still. I didn't have a tidy answer. I just knew it was reaching, and something in me was hearing it, and I didn't flinch away this time.

I asked what it needed. It said protection. Protection from what? Punishment. What was it most afraid the punishment would do? That it would get abused.

That's the part. Not a metaphor or a technique. A real piece of me that's been standing guard this whole time, bracing against something that already happened a long time ago. IFS just calls it a part. It has a job, and the job is old.

Why do parts get stuck at a certain age?

Think of a smoke detector installed the week of a real fire, wired straight to that fire, never serviced since. Decades pass. The house gets rebuilt and sold to a version of you that can actually fight back if it has to. The detector doesn't know any of that. It only knows the wiring from that one week, so it screams at anything that resembles smoke, including steam from a shower. Nobody ever came back to check the batteries or tell it the fire went out years ago.

A five year old with no power in the room and no way to stop what was coming needed something to brace on his behalf. This part took the job. Somebody had to.

The cost is that it never clocked off. It's been running the same alarm for decades at a body that is now an adult, one who can walk out of a room, say no, call for help. The part doesn't know that. It's still guarding a five year old, because as far as it knows, that's still who lives here. Every ordinary Tuesday gets a little of that old fear taxed off the top. You never see the invoice. You just feel tight on the right side for no reason you can name.

What happens when a young part learns how old you really are?

Billy asked me straight. Does it know you're here with it now, as you are now, an adult? Of course it didn't. I'd never told it. So he told me to show it. Ask it how old it thinks you are.

I asked. It said five.

I showed it. I don't know exactly what showing looked like inside me. Something shifted the second it landed. He was overjoyed, like a person who's been told the war ended years ago and nobody came to get him. Then he started releasing what he'd been carrying, and I could feel it moving.

There was more underneath the abuse fear too, more he'd never put down, and I didn't need the inventory. I asked him to show me how he wanted to release it instead of making him list it for me. He chose to pour it out through my arm. It moved. It kept moving. Then it stopped, and I asked if that was all. He said yes.

A part found out how old I actually am, and it put down decades of watching for punishment that stopped coming a long time ago.

Once his hands were empty, Billy asked what he wanted to take in instead. Courage and confidence, I said. He told me to let him show me what that felt like in my body, not just say the words. It did feel like something. Courage itself, not just an idea of it, sitting there with weight and temperature the same way the tightness had. He picked where he wanted to live now. Right side of my chest. Same spot, just occupied by something else.

Try this on whatever part of you is tight or loud right now. Ask it one question. How old do you think I am? Then tell it the truth, your real age, the fact that you are not five anymore, or seven, or fifteen.

I did this inside Hearth, the app I built, talking to its guide Billy.

Hearth is informed by IFS and built by a guide trained through the IFS Online Circle who worked under a senior IFS practitioner. Not a licensed clinical therapist.

This comes from my own time in the app, never a client's session, and I'm glad to be open about where it's from.

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