I read a little story once about a beach that was covered in hundreds of starfish that had washed up with the tide. A young person was walking along the shore, picking up each starfish one by one and tossing them back into the ocean. An old man watched the young person do this for quite some time before finally going up to them and saying, “Do you really think you’re helping here? Look how many starfish there are. How can you possibly make a difference?” The young person just smiled, picked up another starfish, and tossed it back to the water. They shrugged at the old man and said, “It made a difference to that one.”

To my recollection, that’s where the story ended, but I like to think as a postscript that the old man was sufficiently moved by the young person’s response that he stooped down and started helping the starfish too.

I’ve been seeing my current therapist for almost eight years. I think it was early on in my time with her, within the first year, where we started parsing out my understanding of my traumatized psyche as different versions of myself, at different ages or points in my life at which I experienced trauma and part of me got sort of frozen there. These different versions of me inside my head are often in conflict with each other and/or with my present-day self. She told me this approach is rooted in a psychological model called Internal Family Systems, and while not all models and approaches work for everyone, this one really works well for me. (I can appreciate that it sounds like Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder, but having thoroughly discussed this with my therapist, I can say with some confidence that it isn’t the same and is not my diagnosis. For people with DID, the different versions of themselves have become very distinctly separated from each other and from the present-day self. My selves all are still rubbing elbows very uncomfortably.) The IFS model suggests that everyone has multiple versions of themselves (we all like to talk nostalgically about our “inner child”, for instance!), but unprocessed trauma can cause these versions to become dysfunctional and impairing.*

One strategy that my therapist and I established years ago was for me to visualize a place where I could feel safe and peaceful, and to imagine myself there — all versions of myself. So for example, my present-day self would be there, and if I needed to process some trauma I experienced at say, ten years old, or nineteen years old, I would picture ten-year-old me or nineteen-year-old me there too. It was in this safe place that I could find the level of comfort and emotional security to tease out the pain that part of me was dealing with, and work on healing it. It was a no-brainer to me that the safe place I chose to visualize was a beach — not just any beach, but the beach I used to go to as a child on the Cape.

I’ve literally been doing this work for years, and at this point it’s a skill I’ve honed that helps me recognize where my emotions are truly coming from a lot of the time. Perspective and context are important in trauma recovery, because it’s literally the nature of C-PTSD to struggle with the line between traumatic memory and reality that becomes extremely blurred.

In following the IFS model and working to heal all the traumatized parts of myself, it feels a lot like picking up those starfish and returning them to the ocean where they belong. I have been at it so long that I really thought I’d made great headway, thought I’d made it to a really good place. That’s probably not untrue.

But, recently, I turned around and saw that behind me are thirty-five years worth of washed up starfish that still need rescuing. Miles and miles of starfish, as far as the mind’s eye can see. So to speak.

So many fucking starfish.

It’s daunting. It’s hard. It’s painful as hell. But the work is worth it. It does make a difference. One starfish at a time.

*I am neither a clinical psychologist nor an expert in Internal Family Systems, and my representation of it in this post is purely as I’ve come to understand it from extensive therapy sessions. I want to acknowledge that what I’ve discussed about it here is purely in terms of how it makes sense to me, and how I have found it helpful. You should never take my (or anyone’s!) anecdotal writing as clinical advice. Feel free to write a comment to me if you are interested in more information about Internal Family Systems, and I can check with my therapist to offer some quality resources accordingly. As always, thanks for reading.