Australia Resource Therapy Institute
Discover the Power of Parts Therapy
Have you ever noticed this happen in your therapy sessions –
A client speaks with clarity. They know what matters. They describe their patterns with clarity, and precision. And then, in a heartbeat, the weather changes.
Continue reading “The Myth of the “Difficult Client” .”
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.
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 Parts outdated behaviours or heavy emotions can easily be understood in the context of what a person has lived through.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.
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.
Sometimes we can read a story long before we have the inner resources to understand what it stirs in us.
I recently went to see The Magic Faraway Tree with a friend. Popcorn, nostalgia, and that gentle sense of stepping into another world. But what stayed with me wasn’t just the film.
It was the memory of the books by Enid Blyton that I read as a child.
I was a strong reader for my age. I could read the story easily. But understanding it is something quite different.
If I am honest, parts of it felt slightly unsettling, a little unpredictable, even a bit scary at times.
Not in a dramatic way, but in that quiet sense of “this does not quite make sense, but something about it lands in me”.
Sitting there now, I realised why.
As children, we often encounter emotional worlds before we have the inner resources to fully make sense of them. We can follow the story, but we cannot always process the experience.
So something gets held.
Watching the film again as an adult, and as a psychologist, I saw something else entirely.
The tree. The different levels. The ever-changing lands. The shifts in mood and experience depending on where you are.
It felt like a map of the inner world.
Through a Resource Therapy parts lens, we understand that we are not one fixed self. We are made up of different parts, or Resource States, each with their own feelings, needs, and roles.
At any given moment, one part is more present. One part is, in a sense, “at the top of the tree”.
And when that part shifts, our whole experience can shift with it.
What might look like avoidance, inconsistency, overreaction, or shutdown often is not dysfunction.
It is a part responding to something that feels too much, too fast, or too familiar.
And when we begin to see this, the question changes.
From “What is wrong here?”
To “Which part is here right now?”
That small shift opens up something important. Because instead of judging the reaction, we start to understand the response.
The Faraway Tree, with its many levels and ever-changing lands, feels like a beautiful metaphor for the personality.
In Resource Therapy, we understand that we are not one fixed self.
We are made up of different parts – Resource States – each with their own role, feelings, and needs.
Just like the tree:
And depending on the moment… a different part takes the lead.
As the characters move through the lands at the top of the tree, there are shifts in mood. We also observe changes in behaviour and perspective.
From a parts lens, this is familiar.
We might recognise:
None are wrong.
Each is trying, in its own way, to help.
That childhood sense of unease I felt reading the books now makes sense.
It was not that something was wrong. It was that some part of me was encountering something I did not yet have the capacity to understand.
And like so many experiences, it was simply held until I did.
This is something we see often in therapy.
When experiences cannot be fully processed, parts of us hold them.
Sometimes quietly. Sometimes protectively. Sometimes in ways that only make sense much later.
What I appreciated most about revisiting this story was the change in perspective.
As a child, it felt confusing.
As an adult, it feels understandable.
And that is the work we do.
We return to experiences that once felt unclear or overwhelming. This time, we have more internal parts. We also have more understanding and more compassion for those parts of us.
For therapists, this is where the work becomes clearer.
When we can recognise which part is present, we can work directly with it. Not around it. Not about it. With it.
This is where Resource Therapy offers a clear and practical framework for working with parts in a structured, attachment-informed way.
Resource Therapy is a parts-based and trauma-informed approach to psychotherapy. It works directly with the part of the personality holding the problem.
Resource Therapy does more than focus only on thoughts or behaviour. It helps identify and work with specific parts, our Resource States. These carry fear, rejection, confusion, or disappointment.
It offers:
If you would like to learn more, you can explore more about Resource Therapy here.
What is Resource Therapy?
Resource Therapy is a parts-based, trauma-informed approach that works directly with the part of the personality holding distress.
What are parts in therapy?
Parts refer to different aspects of the personality that hold emotions, memories, and responses shaped by life experiences.
Why do childhood experiences feel confusing later?
We often experience emotional events before we have the capacity to fully process them. Parts of us hold those experiences until we can.
You can learn more about how Resource Therapy works in practice here.
Which part of me has been most present lately?
Which part might be needing more care, more understanding, or more space to be heard?
Insight
Sometimes insight comes from unexpected places.
Even a story we once read as a child.
If this way of understanding our inner selves resonates, you can explore more about Resource Therapy.
Parts Therapy training is available through the Australia Resource Therapy Institute next workshops here.