The Child Who Missed Midnight

Shadow Work, IFS, and the Parts of Ourselves We Exile

The New Year was drawing near, and I was finally old enough to grasp the significance of the holiday. I was only a child, but I desperately wanted to stay awake until midnight on New Year's Eve. I wanted to see the moment arrive. One year passing into the next.

Time still felt mysterious. Experiencing the most important midnight of the year felt like access to something. The grown-up world, meaning, magic.

My parents made me an agreement. If I put on my pajamas and went to bed at my proper bedtime, they would wake me up in time for midnight. I made them promise me. I made them double-promise. They assured me I wouldn’t miss it.

I woke the next morning to sunlight. The house was quiet. I had missed it.

My parents met my defeat with blank faces. They said they tried to wake me, but I had fallen back asleep. I had no reason to think they were lying, but why didn’t they try harder? Worse yet, why were they trying to move past my enormous sadness? I felt small and forgotten and cheated.  

I cried all day at the empty dining room table.

I thought the story was about me feeling cheated out of midnight. I was about to get another clue to the real story in all this, which is what happened to difficult feelings in my family—self-protection and burial.

Around lunchtime, my father came home from work. He scooped me up and started tickling me and tossing me around playfully. Eventually I gave him a smile or a laugh, not because he had changed my mood, but because I couldn’t bring myself to spoil his attempt.

I don't think he was trying to dismiss my sadness, so much as he was trying to rescue me from it. But in doing so, he never really met it. Perhaps I didn’t either.

My father was a Baptist pastor, but he was not loud or bombastic. He unlocked the food closet for the needy. Started the coffee makers in church classrooms before teachers and parishioners began arriving. He prayed with the sick and dying. He was kind, dependable, and steady. There was peace in our home.

But there was also avoidance. Years later, I began to understand why.

My father grew up in a home filled with instability. His own father was absent, unpredictable, and abusive. My dad spent his childhood worried that his family might fall apart. Anger meant danger. Conflict meant instability. Strong emotions meant uncertainty. When he became a father himself, he wanted to build a different kind of household. Stable, peaceful, not given to strong emotions.  

My parents never fought or cried. This was modeled as strength. Our family had language for our version of "emotionally stable," and I think we quietly registered that stability as superiority. If someone else raged and we didn't, we were stronger. If someone cried and we didn't, we were steadier. More mature. More spiritually balanced.

Sadness existed in our house, but grieving did not. Vulnerability of any kind felt uncomfortable.

Feelings got managed rather than met.

As a result, I learned early not to express difficult feelings, because they weren't really going to be received deeply or engaged with curiosity. They would be moved past.

And because I grew up inside religion, the feelings I encountered often arrived pre-processed.

Why be angry when scripture prescribed self-control? Why sit with grief when theology has already explained suffering?

In looking back, I can see the parts of myself that I swallowed, hid, or buried. Needy parts looking for solidarity and affection, curious parts raising difficult questions. Creative parts itching to explore beauty and mystery.

Through discipline, shame, theology, positivity, or sheer force of will, I exiled parts of myself that were unwelcome.

Shadow work asks: What parts of myself have I disowned?

Internal Family Systems (IFS) asks: What parts of myself are trying to protect me?

While the parts we exile may go underground, they do not disappear. Eventually they return in any number of ways (anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, exhaustion, addiction, longing, spiritual crisis, etc.).

What if these hidden parts are not enemies to defeat?

What if they are wounded parts of ourselves carrying pain, protection, and unmet needs?

IFS teaches that beneath all of these parts is something deeper—a centered presence called the Self. A place marked by curiosity, compassion, courage, creativity, and connection.

I may have missed midnight, but one thing I was afforded as the oldest and only boy in my family was my own room. A room with a closed door. And behind that closed door lived all kinds of things that did not fully fit inside emotional stability.

In books and music and art I became fascinated with flawed characters and emotional worlds larger than the ones available to me. I drew, I wrote stories, I performed to an audience of no one. I made inventions and altered clothes. I watched Twilight Zone marathons on a tiny black and white TV with broken knobs, like I was searching for clues at the edges of reality. At the time, I probably thought I was just entertaining myself. Now I think parts of me were trying to survive. The lonely parts. The grieving parts. The curious parts. The creative parts. The parts that wanted to be seen and understood and wanted to ask hard questions. The parts that wanted more from the world.

I think many of us learn very early which parts of ourselves are welcome in the room, and which are not. We send the unwanted parts underground. Not gone. Just waiting. The child crying on New Year's Day, the teenager afraid to admit a classroom crush or show tears. The adult terrified of disappointing people.

What I am slowly learning is that healing does not come from banishing these parts of ourselves. It may come from greeting them compassionately at the door and listening to what they might have to say.

The poet Rumi writes:

"The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in."

What if the parts we exile are not interruptions to our spiritual life, but invitations? Perhaps this is the invitation of Shadow Work and Internal Family Systems: not to become less ourselves, but finally willing to come into relationship with all the selves who have been waiting patiently for us to notice them.

This Saturday, join Kelly Deutsch for a live, experiential workshop on Shadow Work and IFS—with guided practices you can take home and actually use.

Together we'll explore:

• What "shadow work" really means (beyond the buzzword)

• How our wounded parts often try to protect us

• Why hurt people hurt people—and how healed people can heal people

• What contemplative spirituality and IFS surprisingly have in common

• How this inner work moves us toward wholeness—and makes us less likely to project our unexamined pain onto others

"If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it."- Richard Rohr

REGISTER HERE

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David Drury began his career as a night janitor in a church and has been circling that same mystery ever since. A speaker, writer, notorious card counter, and author of twelve books, his work blends spiritual depth with humor and a deep curiosity about what it means to be human. His essays and stories have appeared on NPR, CNN, and in Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Kathy.