Olivier Courret on Why the Part of You That Won't Behave Isn't Broken

Every so often a client tells me about a reaction they can't fully explain. They know it was disproportionate, they know it wasn't really about what was in front of them, and afterward they think, that wasn't me. I have my own version of that. So when I sat down with Olivier Courret, a clinical hypnotherapist and psychotherapist practising a few minutes from my own office in Sheung Wan, I told him about mine, and he offered to check it live, on camera.

Olivier works at the intersection of clinical hypnotherapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS) and neuro-linguistic programming. About twenty minutes into explaining what a “part” actually is, he turned the conversation on me. He named, out loud, the part of me that didn't want to look at what I'd just described, then the part that was already gearing up to deflect it with a joke. I laughed, on cue, exactly as predicted, before I could catch myself doing it. That's the difference between understanding a pattern and watching it happen in real time, which is more or less what this whole conversation turned out to be about.

Here's what he walked me through.

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A part is a version of yourself that is responding to a particular trigger, but it's usually not working in isolation.

Olivier Courret, clinical hypnotherapist and psychotherapist

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The angry part that isn't really about your partner

Olivier starts with a definition most people already half know without naming it. A “part” is something you can observe inside yourself, the version of you that shows up automatically when a specific trigger hits. You already talk this way. “A part of me is furious about this.” “The part of me that avoids conflict.” You know these parts. You just haven't asked what they're actually doing.

He walked through a real example. A client comes in angry at their partner, who interrupted a brutal day with a dinner invitation. On the surface it looks like irritation at bad timing. But when Olivier keeps asking what made the anger happen, the client eventually lands on the real sentence: “I barely can manage.” Underneath the anger is a manager part working overtime to keep everything from falling apart, and underneath that is a fear of being a failure. The anger isn't a random overreaction. It's a boundary-protecting part stepping in the moment the managing part can't hold the line anymore.

“A part is a version of yourself that is responding to a particular trigger,” Olivier told me, “but it's usually not working in isolation.” That single idea does most of the work in this conversation. Every reaction you can't explain is connected to a system underneath it, not floating free.

Where the program gets written

These parts get built in childhood, and they get built for good reason. Olivier's example is almost uncomfortably ordinary. A kid whose parents are stretched thin, working constantly, doing their genuine best to provide. The kid doesn't experience “mum and dad are busy.” The kid experiences “my emotional needs aren't being met,” and from there the meaning-making starts: maybe I'm not important, maybe I'm not enough. From that meaning, a protective part gets built. Maybe it's a part that performs and achieves, because good grades bought attention. Maybe it's a part that acts out, because even negative attention beat being invisible, since, as Olivier put it, loneliness is often worse than conflict with mum and dad.

The part that should make you sit up: these patterns compartmentalize. You can recognize a pattern in your relationships, rooted in whether you felt loved as a kid, and never see the same root show up at work, because work runs on a completely different currency: external validation, the promotion, the “good job” from the boss. Same wound, two completely different-looking symptoms. That's why so many people fix one area of their life and still feel stuck somewhere else entirely. If any of this sounds familiar, it's worth reading what I've written about beliefs vs ideas, which covers the same territory from a slightly different angle.

What not to do when a part takes over

What Olivier explicitly told me not to do is try to shut the part down. “You are really annoying me, stop that right now” doesn't work on a part any more than it works on an actual child, because the part is frozen at the age it was formed. What works instead is curiosity: stay with the discomfort, notice where it lives in the body, a tension in the chest, a squeeze in the stomach, a lump in the throat, and ask the part directly what it's trying to do for you. Not why you're doing something. What it's protecting you from.

That's what happened to me live in that conversation. I wasn't performing discomfort for the interview. I was watching a pattern I already knew intellectually get named in real time, before I could get ahead of it. Recognition in hindsight is common; recognition in the moment is the actual skill, and it's usually built with a therapist rather than alone.

The soldier who fought a war that had already ended

Olivier told me a true story to make the point land. A Japanese soldier named Onoda was ordered in 1944 to defend an island at all costs. The war ended in 1945. He kept fighting until 1974, almost thirty years later, because every attempt to tell him the war was over looked, to him, like a trick to lure him out and kill him. He wasn't irrational. He was loyal to the last order he trusted, from the last source he trusted, and nobody had reached him at the level he could actually hear.

What finally worked wasn't a louder announcement. It was a man named Suzuki, who found him, waited, and had a conversation aimed at understanding his story rather than demanding he surrender. Only after that did Onoda agree to go home, and only once his actual former commanding officer personally relieved him of the order. Your parts are doing the same thing. They are not sabotaging you. They are still executing an order that made complete sense when a much younger version of you issued it, and they have not been formally relieved of that order since.

Self-parenting: building a new relationship with the part

Once a part has been understood rather than fought, Olivier moves toward what he calls self-parenting. Not suppressing the part, and not indulging it either, but relating to it the way a good parent relates to a child who's acting out: with curiosity about what it needs rather than a demand that it stop. In session, this often becomes an actual sentence, spoken directly to the part: “I am sorry that I left you alone so long. I didn't realize you were there to help me and to protect me. I'm here for you now. What is it that you want to share?”

This is also where hypnotherapy earns its place in the process, rather than sitting beside it as a separate technique. It gives access to the state where the original threat still lives, so the part can be told, directly and convincingly, that the threat is over. Talking about a core belief, “I'm not enough,” “I'm unworthy,” “I will always be lonely,” in the ordinary waking state often isn't enough to move it. Reaching it at the level it was formed usually is.

The four steps, and why skipping ahead is violence

Olivier's process runs in four stages: access the part and understand what it's actually doing, build a new relationship with it, heal the original wound it's still protecting, and only then integrate the update. Skip straight to “just stop doing that” without the first three, and Olivier's word for it is blunt: violence. You're forcing a part to change before it has any reason to trust you.

This is also his answer to the client who's done years of therapy, fully understands their pattern, and still can't shift it. The cognitive understanding of a problem is important, he says, but it isn't enough on its own. If a pattern is still running despite you knowing exactly where it came from, it usually means the actual wounded part underneath it has never been reached and spoken to directly, at the level it can understand, rather than just described about in a therapy session. This is a version of what I've written about anger as a signal rather than the real problem: the surface behaviour is rarely the thing that needs treating.

My own takeaway, walking out of that conversation: every part that's currently making your life harder was, at some point, the smartest available option a much younger version of you had. It did its job, probably well. The work isn't punishing it or arguing it out of existence. It's getting curious enough to ask what it's actually protecting you from, and building a relationship with it that finally lets it stand down.

Olivier Courret practices in person in Sheung Wan and online. You can find him at mindyourbrain.education.

If you've done the insight work already and you're still stuck, that's not a sign you're bad at therapy. It usually means the part actually running the show hasn't been spoken to yet. If that sounds like where you are, book a free consultation and let's actually work with it.