The Patchwork Path

Daily Acts of Reconnection for Real Healing

Self-Love Studio with Morgan

May 09, 2025

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Have you ever felt the discouragement after a big ah-ha moment or a transformational, healing experience, when the next day you find yourself back in your suffering again? As if that moment meant nothing? As if no real healing actually happened? - But healing did happen. Read on…

There was a time when I would wake up each morning with a kind of jolt, thrust out of the dreamworld as my eyes snapped open and I was confronted with all the worries and self-doubts I had to face once again.

All the efforts I might have made the day before to inch closer to real wellness and find some peace within myself – completely undone.

This is what being fragmented can feel like.

My sense of self had been so shattered by traumas that I couldn’t hold on to a lasting sense of who I was, what I wanted, or what mattered to me. It could all change so quickly from moment to moment that I sometimes felt whiplashed and disorientated.

The truth I didn’t know yet was that even after we’ve done a lot of very real healing, many of us still have to keep going with the daily work of gathering those pieces and reconnecting them, reclaiming all the parts of ourselves that were once lost, banished, or silenced.

The patchwork is the work itself.

At that time I was desperate to stitch the pieces of me together into something cohesive and solid, something I could trust. But I didn’t appreciate yet how much of that is about daily acts of loving reconnection, in addition to any therapy or personal growth or transcendent experiences.

Still, beneath it all there was actually something solid. There was always something that spoke of easier times to come - a voice that told me to keep going, keep seeking, keep healing in whatever ways I was able to. For some reason, I believed what that voice was saying.

I know now that this voice was my true Self.

Although I didn’t always feel anchored to it, I could sense it there at my core, and somehow it kept me going. Until after enough time, enough healing and releasing and reconstructing, it became more than an anchor.

Why do so many of us end up feeling disconnected from our true Selves and broken into pieces?

How do we end up forgetting the beautiful truth of who we really are, and lose touch with the brilliance and the joy of living authentically and wholeheartedly?

This is not news to many of you, I know, but bear with me:

Yes, it’s often about how we were met – and NOT met – when we were young; all the different ways our unique emotional needs may not have been supported or even tolerated, even if we had families who loved us and did their best with what they had, and what they knew.

This isn’t about blaming families for not being perfect. It’s simply that after too many experiences of mis-attunement, a child will assume they’re not safe to be who they are and to want what they want.

To develop a solid, cohesive sense of the true Self, we needed to feel fundamentally safe in our world. Which requires that our most important caregivers were there for us, consistently, in the particular ways we needed.

Our caregivers didn’t have to be infallible - they just had to be “good enough,” consistently and sufficiently meeting our basic needs for emotional stability and safety. Which enables our true Self to blossom.

And without that? We grow into adulthood with a sense of self that’s more shaky, more malleable. We learn that we must mold ourselves into versions deemed acceptable to those we depend on. We learn to exile the parts of us that could get us into trouble with the world around us, and we develop clever (usually unconscious) strategies to make sure those parts stay locked away.

Then when life throws us more challenges, as it does – we don’t have the resilience to weather those challenges without damage. A compounding effect where after each new trauma, we feel even more fractured and fragmented.

But I believe that the true Self is still there. It’s always there, no matter what kind of parenting we experienced or how many traumas we’ve endured.

The true Self can’t be damaged or destroyed – just obscured.

What do I mean by the true Self? I often mention it in my posts, referring to our Basic Goodness (a Buddhist term), our inherent worthiness, our divine nature…We’re born with it, it’s the essence of who we really are, the spirit of love and generosity, the innocent child before life’s insults do the damage and disconnect us from it.

So here I must talk about Internal Family Systems (IFS)1

(My post The Frantic Overthinker vs. the Free Spirit, IFS at Work in a Moment of Need gives a very brief summary of IFS and some extra resources).

In IFS, when we’re in contact with the true Self, we recognize it by its qualities, called the “eight C’s:” Calm, Curiosity, Clarity, Compassion, Confidence, Courage, Creativity, and Connectedness. Plus a few extras: Presence, Openness, and Awareness.

How do we increase our access to those wonderful qualities, our access to true Self?

It’s not by getting rid of the parts we know aren’t serving us. Instead, it’s by taking the time to really get to know all the parts that make up the whole of who we are and learning to appreciate and honor them - because despite how things play out, they all have good intentions aimed at helping us survive and get our needs met!

Sure, it might mean spending a while in therapy. But just as important as good therapy, we have to learn how to be our own “good-enough parents.” And that’s simpler than it sounds (although simple does not always mean easy). It happens by building the habit of responding to our emotions, our wants, our thoughts, our behaviors – those we like and those we really can’t stand – with compassion, patience, and as much love as we can muster.

Because healing doesn’t happen when we banish the parts of ourselves we don’t like. It happens when we relate to every part with curiosity and care. And healing is not a one-time event that you achieve and then move on.

Healing is not linear - it’s not a singular event with a finish line at the end. And healing doesn’t mean fixing something that’s broken.

Healing is a beautiful, continual process of getting to know our unique wounds and vulnerabilities and learning how to tend to those wounded parts with the utmost loving attention and meet the deepest needs of our hearts.

Healing is the reclaiming of all the parts of us that were lost, banished, or silenced.

So for me and for many of my clients, even after years of healing, it takes intentional, deliberate action every single day to keep the pieces stitched together.

For those of us where the disconnections were core-deep, we have to intentionally re-connect every day. We check in with our parts and tune in to the current of energy that restores our faith in ourselves and in the world around us. We remember that we are more than just our parts2 and that we belong to the whole universe.

The patchwork is the work itself. We stitch the pieces together. Every day. And that’s OK! Because we learn that the tuning in, the gathering, the re-connecting to true Self - it’s all an act of love, and it feels GOOD.

Can you cherish the part of you that refuses to give up? That brave, determined survivor!

Can you claim the things you’re already doing to connect to your true Self, even if they seem small?

And then can you magnify those things? Or add to them a bit, in ways that feel satisfying (not stressful!) when incorporated into each day?

With compassion for your struggles and with loving intentions, can you carve out just a little time to be present with the whole imperfect, beautiful, human mess of it all?

Whatever does it for you.

What connects me to my true Self and helps me find love and compassion for all my parts?

Any time in nature, even if that’s in my backyard or looking out the windows at all the life there. It reminds me that I’m part of the great circle of life and I’m much more than my stories.
Certain types of meditation – usually more structured or guided, with imagery and/or mantras, or a format. (More open type meditation can trigger anxiety in many of us.)
Art and creativity, especially Soul Collage (If you want to look into it, please do, it’s AMAZING and fun, and can be a lovely community. Perhaps it’s already happening near you: Soul Collage link.)
Journaling
One-on-one or small group time with close friends

It depends on the day, on how I’m feeling and what’s going on, and of course it depends on how much time I have. But each of those things are powerful tools that help me re-stitch the pieces of myself together into a whole that feels cohesive and solid.

Basic Goodness