As therapists, we sit with complexity every day. Clients often describe feeling pulled in different directions. One part of them wants change, another holds back. One part longs for connection, another expects harm.
We are often witnessing a system of resource states. It is not resistance. These states do exactly what they have learned to do to manage and survive.
For me, Resource Therapy (RT) has offered a way of understanding this. It is not something to fix. It is something to listen to. My work has shaped how I understand the internal system.
It has also shaped how I respond to the present resource state. When we slow down, what becomes clear is this: every resource state has a story.
I’ve never been drawn to ways of working that centre heavily on diagnosis or pathologising. It’s not that understanding patterns isn’t important but framing people through what is “wrong” with them has never felt like it honours the depth of what they’ve lived through.
I’ve always been interested in understanding what’s happened to a person, how they’ve survived, and what has supported them to get through.
Importantly, what they are now wanting to shift so they can live from a place of their own choosing, rather than from responses that may no longer be serving them.
Resource Therapy aligns deeply with this.
Resource Therapy Diagnosis
While RT includes classification of resource states, I don’t experience this as labelling the person. Rather, classification helps guide the therapeutic process. It supports the therapist in understanding the function of the part. This knowledge helps to select appropriate RT therapeutic actions.
At its core, RT is concerned with understanding function, not assigning fault.
RT understands personality as a system of resource states. At any given time, one resource state is in the conscious, the part that is present and engaging. Each resource state holds its own experiences, responses, and role within the system.
Each part has a purpose. Parts outdated behaviours or heavy emotions can easily be understood in the context of what a person has lived through.
This has influenced the way I listen. Rather than moving too quickly toward change, I am listening for which state is in the conscious, and what that state is ready to change today.
In my opinion, one of the most meaningful moments in therapy is when a resource state feels understood.
Often, what presents is not just a thought or behaviour, but a lived internal experience that has been carried, at times, for many years.
A look, a tone, a moment of disconnection can activate something younger, perhaps a resource state holding the experience of not mattering, of being too much, or not enough.
A state that learned to retreat, fight to be heard, to stay quiet, or to hold everything inside.
When we offer compassionate responses, like saying, “That makes so much sense… this state has taken on this role, and has worked to protect in this way,” we can notice a shift.
The system may soften. The urgency may reduce. Shame appears to lessen. Not because anything has been “fixed,” but because something this part carries has been understood and acknowledged. This often leads to opening a doorway to deeper healing.
My Experience of this Parts Therapy
In my Clinical work as a therapist and supervisor of counsellors, I have had the privilege of hearing the stories of highly insightful clients who have understood their history. Many who could see the links between what has happened and how they respond now.
Yet, they have continued to seek more from their healing journey, but something hadn’t quite clicked.
What I have come to understand is that insight alone does not necessarily lead to change. Why? Because insight often comes from a different resource state, knowledge and not the part holding the distress and emotional pain.
Resource Therapy provides a way of working directly with the resource state holding the experience, which is where shifts may begin to occur.
This is a key component to therapeutic change.
This is especially vital in trauma work, where protective resource states are often strong. They may avoid, distract, control, or limit access to distressing material. From the outside, these may come across as barriers.
Within RT, they are understood as serving an important function. These states have developed for a reason. They are doing what they have learned to do, to protect the system.
In RT, we work with them in a trauma-informed manner. We seek to understand their role. We respect their function. We support the conditions for other resource states to come into the conscious when appropriate. This supports safety, pacing, and readiness within the work.
What this can feel like internally is not always easy to capture in clinical language. At times, it is better understood through the expressed lived experience held within a resource state.
Here is a poem written from my heart:
I have a need,
I ask for care.
I see your look,
and freeze mid-air.
I know that pain—
the silent sting,
“I’m inconvenient,
I don’t mean a thing.”
“Why don’t I matter?”
races through my mind.
I shrink, retreat,
no safe space to find.
A smile appears:
“hold your head up high,”
but inside echoes
the young one’s cry.
Healing whispers:
You can hold them now.
Call on your parts,
they will show you how.
To sit with pain,
release the shame,
to hold them close,
and speak their name.
Your worth is not
their gaze, their tone—
your feelings are valid,
they are your own.
Sitting quietly, strengthening inside,
finding the strength that was always mine,
Each breath a reminder,
each moment proof—
healing is living
your authentic truth.
Resource Therapy has deeply influenced the way I understand both people and the process of therapeutic change.
It has deepened my focus on listening to the system, to the resource state that is present, and to what may be needed in that moment.
We participate in this work by honouring the story of each Resource State. When that story is deeply heard, something can shift. There can be less shame, more compassion and a greater capacity for change. Not by overriding the system, but by working with it.
Written by Jaclyn Hall, Mental Health Professional
PACFA Accredited Clinical Counsellor and Supervisor
Advanced Clinical Resource Therapist and Trainer
EMDRAA Accredited EMDR Practitioner
Founder and Director: Calm, Connect & Heal Therapeutic Services (Click link for Jaclyn’s website)
Thanks, Jaclyn, we appreciate your sharing your vast experience and knowledge with this insightful guest article. We appreciate hearing from other therapists’ parts therapy adventures. Want to share yours? Reach out today.
Want to learn the latest developments in parts therapy? Join us at our next training, with online and hybrid options to suit your needs. Click here for Professional Parts Therapy workshops.
