Quick Tips #3: Transitioning from healing to achieving

Question: In regards to the HAT model, in other words healing, achieving, transcendence, I had for a long time been wrapped up in the safety and the peace of the healing phase, which has emotional upheavals, but I am used to those, and they feel predictable for me now.

Recently though I have almost been flung into the achievement phase due to the prospect of a new job. This feeling of achievement is familiar from the days that I used to be super high achieving in my career, those days were associated with high levels of stress and constantly trying to prove my worth to others, all things I’ve worked so hard towards eliminating during my healing journey, and this is bringing me much anxiety now.

So, my suspicion is that my inner child no longer trusts the achievement phase; indeed neither does my inner parent or adult self. How do I explore the achievement phase while ensuring I still feel safe and also that all my healing work doesn’t fly out the window as I find myself reverting back to old patterns?

Firstly, I just want to say that the HAT model (healing, achieving and transcendence) is an awesome model, in that it allows you to step out of where you are at and into a bigger picture, and to look at where you are at, which journey you are at in this moment, whether it is a healing journey, an achieving journey, or a transcendence journey. Now, obviously the thing about any one of those journeys is that they do go hand in hand; you’re not ever just in one to the exclusion of the others. They intertwine as stuff comes up for you. Having said that, you (as in the question asker here) have been doing a lot of the healing work and you’ve been doing the inner parenting and it’s clear from your question that you’re aware of the inner child and the inner parent and the adult self, those different parts of you.

This is a great question because it starts to go a lot deeper into what challenges lie ahead when go from healing journey into a bit more of an achieving journey. Because the healing journey is very ‘hermity’ kind of journey, it is very much introverted and an inner journey. Whereas an achievement journey is very much an extroverted journey, so it’s very much out there. Now because this is INFx unveiled, I am just going to set the stage a little bit just so it’s clear. For both the INFx types, our inner parent is an extroverted type, and one of our inner children, the 10 year old, is an introverted type, and the other inner child, the 3 year old is an extroverted type. So your parenting style is an extroverted parenting style, so parenting the 10 year old, which is an introverted process, with an extroverted parenting style can be challenging. So basically what your inner parent needs to do as an extroverted type is to connect with both of those inner children individually, so that you don’t kind of plonk them altogether because they are two different people, and once you start doing that, the way to parent the introverted 10 year old is to start bringing them out of their introversion, out of the introverted loop, and the way to parent the extroverted 3 year old is to very much make it all about fun.

So now there’s the key to my actual answer to this question, the answer to your question which is, how do I not revert back into those old achievement patterns that are actually threatening the inner child and all parts of you, and how do you not throw everything out the window that you’ve just learned in your healing phase? Achievement through play is the key, make it into a game. Whether you’re an INFP or an INFJ it doesn’t matter, make it into a game. The extroverted inner parent process is great at making things into game, and so therefore learn your inner parenting skills by turning things into play and into games. There are different ways of doing it, for example, you might put a chart on the wall like a bingo and you put in the different achievement things but the preconception has to be that it’s all about play and fun, if it’s not fun you haven’t actually achieved that particular thing. So once you’ve put it the different things that you want to achieve to do with a bigger project into a bingo grid, if you’ve achieved something with play and fun, then you can mark it off. So you make it into that kind of a game. So that is something that I would really recommend in this case, and obviously there is going to be a lot more specific activities, but these are the quick tips so if you would like to do more specific and deeper work please get involved in any of our INFx projects is that you can get the specific kind of help that you need in the space where you are at. So that I hope that this answered your question, keep it light, keep it breezy, make a game out of it and have fun with it!

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