Doing The "YOU-Turn"

Excerpt from RELATIONSICK (To Be Published Spring 2026)

Today, you all are going to be the first to preview some content from my new book RELATIONSICK, co-written with my partner Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv! I always feel shy when I’m sharing new material, especially when it’s about something as sensitive as trauma, relationships, power, and how those three things impact medical illness.

What do we mean by “relationsick?” The way we’re defining it, “You’re relationsick when cumulative relational trauma leads to real physiological changes in the body, resulting in physical and mental health issues that your doctor may not link to traumatizing relationships. When you’re relationsick, your relationships, starting in childhood and escalating into adulthood, are causing so many conscious or unconscious triggers that your chronically dysregulated nervous system and your body can never adequately relax. Your endocrine system spirals into chronic repetitive stress responses. Your immune system is impaired, which puts you at higher risk for infections, cancers, and auto-immune disorders. This all leads to chronic inflammation, increasing your risk for almost every disabling and deadly disease out there, especially heart disease, cancer, diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, autoimmune diseases, and chronic pain disorders. All this impacts how your genes express themselves, how healthy your microbiome is, and whether your body can heal itself when things naturally break down and are in need of self-repair.

No matter how many medications or supplements you take, no matter how much healthy food you eat, no matter how many yoga classes or workouts you do, no matter how many high tech procedures or bio-hacking interventions you undergo, no matter how much you think positive or meditate on being healthy, if you’re relationsick, you’re unlikely to achieve an optimal health outcome. Unless you address the activating factor leading to all this illness-inducing physiology- your unbalanced or traumatizing relationships, past and present- the physical impacts of being relationsick are likely to outweigh any other positive health changes you might try, no matter how disciplined, motivated, and health conscious you try to be.”

When I started this Substack, I called it “The Body Is A Trailhead” because when we’re relationsick, our physical symptoms might be the first clue we get that something is in need of relational healing. But what do you do if you discover this kind of trailhead? One of the six interventions we’ll be teaching in Relationsick is doing the “YOU-Turn,” which I’ll be previewing for you all here. The book won’t be out until Spring 2026, published by BenBella Books, but that doesn’t mean we can’t start learning and growing together now!

So…without further ado, let’s talk about doing the YOU-Turn, and get nitty and gritty about how to actually practice Internal Family Systems as part of a comprehensive medical treatment plan if you or someone you love is relationsick. At the end of this excerpt from Relationsick, I’m sharing a 7 1/2 min YOU-Turn daily check in meditation I just recorded today for the students in my Mothering As Medicine class, which you can still sign up for until Wednesday, April 2. Sign up here. I hope you find the daily check in meditation helpful, as an anti-dote to spiritual bypassing and a vehicle for self-healing.

EXCERPT FROM RELATIONSICK, by Lissa Rankin, MD & Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv

A common problem we face in relationships is that we might have parts that want someone else to come in and rescue us, or we might have parts that think it’s their responsibility to rescue everyone else. In reality, the only person we can ever successfully rescue is ourselves. It’s impossible for someone else to give your young wounded parts what they need 100% of the time- because other people have their own hurt and protective parts, which means they’ll inevitably let you down when those parts take over.

Being someone else’s rescuer or expecting someone else to be yours is just too much pressure. Ultimately, taking care of your wounded parts is your responsibility. Someone else, like a partner or a therapist, might be the secondary caretaker of your parts, as you get to know them. This can be a beautiful, intimate journey, to navigate healing your parts with someone trustworthy enough to try to be the back up caregiver of your parts- and vice versa. But the key is that you have to be the primary caregiver of your own parts, so that when the other person inevitably fails your parts (everyone will in moments when they blend with their own parts,) your own parts are not freaked out and in crisis.

As described in Dick Schwartz’s book You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For, many of us have a tendency to preferentially seek out relationships with people who we hope will be our “redeemers,” taking care of us in ways that our parents or others who might have let us down or abused us or failed to meet our needs when we were growing up did not. The problem is that we seek out what is familiar, so typically, trauma survivors will choose partners and other people they let close who are similar to their original abusers and are at risk of recreating their childhood wounding in retraumatizing ways. When this happens, we have a natural tendency to want the other person to change. So we point the finger of blame at the other person who is hurting us, which is understandable! We want them to stop hurting our parts. We want them to have our backs and stop causing us to feel painful feelings.

But if we do the YOU-turn in those moments, we go inside and examine what’s happening in our own internal family systems. We can’t control what someone else is doing. But we can stand up for our own parts. We can say “Stop!” or “No.” We can set boundaries. We can withhold privileges if someone won’t respect our boundaries. We can call the police if need be.

When we do the YOU-Turn, we realize we have more power than we might have realized. We can ask ourselves why are we tolerating this behavior and letting someone else get away with being so mean to our parts? Why are we not standing up for our own parts, setting boundaries, and enforcing consequences if someone else refuses to stop behaving abusively? Why are we staying this close if someone else keeps hurting us? Why are we not being more assertive and more self-protective?

The answers to those questions will often lead us to meet protectors that are fawning, passive, accommodating, conflict avoidant, spiritually bypassing, or lacking in assertiveness, parts that are causing us not to have our own backs. If we get to know those protectors, they will lead us to the wounded parts inside that are usually terrified to rock the boat, for fear of narcissistic rage, abandonment, or not getting core survival needs met, like financial needs or a place to live.

Doing a YOU-turn is not about blaming yourself when someone else is being abusive. It’s not about saying “How did I create this situation” or “How can I hold myself responsible for what someone else is doing?” Some unethical and narcissistic spiritual leaders, cultic leaders, and self-help gurus will try to coerce and indoctrinate you into thinking that way, as if you’re responsible for everything that happens to you, even when someone else is doing something hurtful.

It’s more like asking yourself “When is the first time I felt this way?” or “What part of me is getting activated, so I can get to know it, protect it, soothe it, and help it heal?” Sometimes the answer is “Never” and “There’s no part from the past.” You’re just having a totally natural and understandable reaction to something happening in the present. But when a present moment trigger lights up a part that was hurt in a similar way in the past, it can escalate the pain beyond the present moment trigger.

Let me give you a personal example to demonstrate what I mean. My partner and I were visiting a fancy hotel in Boston that was far beyond our pay grade. We couldn’t afford to stay there or even eat a full meal there, but we decided to split two appetizers at the posh bar and pretend we were among the elite there, just for hedonistic fun. We ordered the pear salad and a sizzling shrimp something-or-nother and the salad arrived while I was telling my partner a story about something that happened earlier that day.

By the time I finished the story just a few minutes later, I realized the salad was all gone. Tears filled my eyes faster than I could understand why and I could tell I was on the verge of an embarrassing meltdown. So I told my partner I needed to go check in with my parts- and that I would be right back.

That’s when I did the YOU-Turn. I took myself to the restroom, locked myself in a stall, let the tears flow, and went inside to find out who was having such a strong reaction to an empty plate of salad. This is what my YOU-Turn revealed. (If you read to the end, you’ll get access to the YOU-Turn audio meditation that can help facilitate you through your own YOU-Turn process.)

A part jumped forward right away, a part that’s always attuning to everyone else’s needs, paying attention and making sure everyone else is happy. This part wanted my partner to do the same for her, to attune to her needs and grant her the same respect and sensitivity this part tries to extend to everyone else. But instead of feeling cared for, she felt like her needs were ignored, her hunger wasn’t considered, she wasn’t prioritized, and her partner had put his needs ahead of her own.

This part was very young- about 4. She had figured out real early how to please others by attuning to their needs and making sure the grown ups and her younger siblings were happy and getting their needs met. She had everybody else’s back, but she protected a part that never got to have her own needs considered. The pain of not having her young needs considered or attuned to rushed the gates the minute the salad was gone.

Older parts knew it was no big deal. My partner is a 6’4” man with a metabolism like a teenage boy who can become very hungry sometimes. She knew he’d be willing to buy her another salad. But that wasn’t the point. She wanted him to be the redeemer for this part that didn’t get her needs considered when she was little. She didn’t want to have to ask him to buy her another salad. She wanted him to be considerate, to consider her, to make her needs equal to his own. This part thought he was selfish.

Underneath, there was an exiled part that was young, vulnerable, helpless, sad, needy, and neglected, whose needs hadn’t mattered because all the focus was on the needs of my very needy young mother, who had been ripped from her family because my father was in medical training in California, when all of her family was in Florida. This part didn’t understand why everyone else’s needs mattered more than hers, and her grief had jumped up to fill my eyes with tears when my partner had wolfed down the salad without considering her.

I felt tender towards this part and was able to comfort her and let her know I had her back. Doing the YOU-Turn helped me get clear on what was so upsetting about something relatively trivial. I was able to comfort my own parts, let them know I heard them, give myself a hug, wipe the dripping mascara off my face, and go back to the fancy bar. I let my partner know what I had discovered inside, and he was instantly apologetic, feeling terrible about what had happened. As I expected, he bought me another $30 salad to make it up to me and expressed regret for his impulsive eating. We also made a plan for the future. If we were going to split something, we’d divide it on two plates before either of us started eating. Problem solved. And now I had the trailhead to take this young part to therapy and get to know her better, so she’d maybe be less reactive in the future.

What Is The “YOU-Turn”

Doing the YOU-Turn doesn’t mean you don’t hold someone else accountable. It just means that, before you do, you do an inner check in. This is how you stand up for your parts without overreacting or blaming someone else unnecessarily. It’s your responsibility to attune to your own needs first, to have your own back, to be the one you’ve been waiting for, to first give yourself the love, affection, comfort, and protection that you might not have gotten when you were little, and then to get to know what your parts need-so you can return to the scene with someone else and be a loving spokesperson for the needs of your parts.

For example, let’s say someone in your life is being controlling, aggressive, abusive, and crossing your boundaries, just like Mom or Dad or someone else from childhood did. How do you respond? Maybe you do nothing, helplessly tolerating this person’s abuse, forgiving them over and over without a word of protest. Maybe you notice seething resentment building up, but you keep your mouth shut and just get jaw pain. Or you keep expanding to try to accommodate even more, way beyond the point you can actually tolerate in a healthy way. Why would you do this self-sabotaging, self-negating kind of accommodating? Maybe someone convinced you that continuing to expand and accommodate- no matter what- is what good or spiritual or loving people do: They turn the other cheek and keep trying harder to love the person who is abusing you.

Or maybe you block them, protesting and crying foul, which is fair enough. You say “Stop!” Set boundaries. Say no. Protest. But if you wind up protesting over and over- and nothing changes- then when you do the YOU-turn, you might examine why you keep letting the perpetrator off the hook. Maybe you’re even enabling this abuse by not holding your abuser accountable, by not taking away privileges the perpetrator might feel entitled to but isn’t, or by forgiving these behaviors beyond what your mind, body, and spirit can comfortably handle.

When you do the YOU-turn, you might even go a few more steps, getting to know the parts of you that stay silent and figuring out when they learned not to speak up and protect you from someone who is mistreating you, because maybe it wasn’t safe to do so when you were little. You might discover a part that learned early on to appease people who are mistreating you, as a way to help you survive. You might discover parts that freeze and take away your voice and your power. You might find a caretaking part that puts all your energy into helping other people, even if it means abandoning your own needs or maybe even not knowing what you need at all. You might even find a part that gets your body sick, just to give you a good reason to start receiving care- from doctors, nurses, and maybe even the people in your family who you’ve been caretaking, instead of you being the only one giving care to others.

If you continue on and go deeper into your IFS work, ideally with the help of a trained therapist, you might discover parts that are even more vulnerable and hurting, like hurt young child parts who didn’t get to have needs, get his or her needs met, receive comfort, love, support, and nurturing, and be parented in a healthy way so you could stay a child, rather than a tiny little adult, also called a “parentified child,” with way too much responsibility far too soon.

Those young parts often carry burdens that include heavy emotions like terror, loneliness, hopelessness, helplessness, powerlessness, and sadness, as well as painful sensations in the body, memories of traumatic moments, and beliefs about yourself, other people, and the world because of what happened back then. Those parts might believe you’re not worthy of receiving care and nurture, unless you’re giving more than you’re receiving. You might have taken on beliefs, like “There are two sets of double standard rules in the world- one set for other people who get love and care and help and another set for you, who just gets deprived.” Those parts can’t see that you might be the one creating those two sets of rules by not standing up for your parts to protect them enough. If your mantra inside is “I’ve got everyone else’s back, but who’s got mine?” it’s probably way past time for a YOU-turn. You’ve got to be the one to have your own back, to love and care for your parts the way others might have never done.

To be capable of protecting yourself, you’re going to need to retrieve your hurt wounded parts from their inner prisons, which we call “unburdening the exiles.” Unless we can go back into the scenes of those hurt inner children, our protectors are likely to keep behaving in ways that might make you vulnerable to unbalanced power dynamics. Or you’re going to start isolating, so frightened of people that you just start avoiding relationships altogether. Because healthy relationships are so essential to optimal health, ongoing betrayal and abuse, as well as social isolation and avoidance, can put you at greater risk of illness.

To help you get core needs met, some of your protectors might hijack your body in ways that can make you chronically ill, as a way to force you to slow down, stop over-giving, and start receiving the rest, care, and tending you might desperately need.

But when Self is in charge- and we all have a Self- then parts can be “Self-led,” as if the wise, mature bus driver can listen to all the unruly children in the back of the bus without letting any of them grab the wheel and steer the bus off the road. When those kiddos hijack the bus, we call it “blending.” Blending is IFS language for what happens when you get overtaken by a part, such that you become that part, without the leadership of Self or the input from other parts.

For example, if you blend with a fawning part that puts everyone else’s needs in front of the needs of your own parts, then you might grow resentful over time until you hit a threshold and blend with an angry part that blows a gasket. If the person you’ve been caretaking fails to appreciate your efforts or takes one liberty too many, passive aggressive parts might shift into full on aggressive firefighters who suddenly throw a dish across the room. Or you might blend with an abandoning part that just walks out on your partner with no warning, leaving them confused and devastated. Maybe you lose your temper or go on a drinking binge or feel suddenly suicidal or threaten to abruptly cut someone off financially or lock yourself in a room and refuse to come out. Or you might have an exacerbation of your medical condition. Those would be reactive firefighter parts, hidden just beneath the surface of more socially acceptable manager parts. Whether they’re managers pushing down feelings or firefighters exploding into destructive behaviors so you don’t feel more vulnerable feelings, protector parts will do anything to prevent you from feeling the pain of your most vulnerable parts.

Until there is some degree of Self-leadership, these protectors are acting as autonomous little sub-personalities inside whose only goal is to make sure you don’t get overwhelmed by painful feelings, beliefs, sensations, and memories from the burdened, hurting, locked away inner children who have been exiled to interior dungeons, far away from your conscious awareness. No matter how idyllic you think your childhood was, we all have vulnerable wounded exiles. No one is exempt from the “burdens” these exiles carry. Our exiles might have different stories and different wounding, but they tend to have the same painful feelings—worthlessness, unlovability, “not enough-ness,” shame, powerlessness, helplessness, feeling damaged or broken or thinking we are fundamentally flawed.

Because your protector parts don’t like the feelings these exiled parts evoke, and because they don’t like how it feels when these exiles believe the limiting beliefs they tend to cling to, protectors unwittingly exacerbate the problems, locking these exiles in a kind of inner prison, so they’re crying and screaming and begging for your attention all the time.

The more traumatic the wounding, the more the exiles will pull out all the stops to get your attention, so the more powerful the protectors must become. The proactive managers might be able to keep things under control for a while, but over time, as the exiles get more unruly and the managers fail to keep the exiles under wraps, the reactive firefighters might be needed to further shut down the feelings of these intensely wounded parts.

All the exiled parts want is your love, your care, your nurturing, your understanding, and your validation of why they feel the way they do. They want you to listen to how much pain they experienced, witness the memories of what they went through, and empathize with the emotional and physical heaviness they carry inside. They want you to remember and validate what happened to them and acknowledge them, rather than pushing their feelings, memories and extreme beliefs away. They want an ally who will stand up for them and love them, not a jailkeeper who locks them up and silences them. They want YOU to have their back, rather than betraying them because you’re got someone else’s back over theirs.

If we do the YOU-Turn and check in with our parts every morning, with as much discipline as we might put towards a meditation or yoga practice, checking in with our parts about big and small decisions and core needs regarding relationships, health habits and self care regimens, creative dreams and goals, and how we choose to engage with what matters in the outer world, including political and activist parts that stand for our integrity, our parts begin to trust Self to do a decent job leading. They realize that when parts cooperate together under the guidance and leadership of Self, things go more smoothly, there’s less drama, there’s more inner harmony, relationships improve, our bodies feel better, and decision making is more clear.

When we work with our parts on the inside and help our protectors relax so we can heal our exiles, we liberate copious amounts of energy. All that energy your protectors expend trying to keep the exiles under wraps can then be channeled towards healing the body. It makes sense that freeing up these exiles through the IFS “unburdening process” liberates all that trapped energy and functions as a kind of energy healing or shamanic soul retrieval, freeing up all that extra life force so the life force can work its magic in other aspects of your life.

As my gift to you all and my thank you for subscribing, let me share this brief YOU-Turn IFS meditation I recorded for the Mothering As Medicine class we just started today for mom-identifying people interested in learning IFS and other relationship-building skills to help their kiddos (and themselves) heal, grow, and thrive. (You can still join the class and listen to our first class if you register before our next class on Wednesday, April 2. Sign up here.) This is a general check in, meant to be a daily morning meditation. But you can also use it to guide you inside if something is upsetting you or you wonder if a part of you is involved in getting activated in present time.

If you feel inspired to do so, please share how this lands for you and what parts arise when you go inside. If you know anyone else who might benefit from learning to do the YOU-Turn, feel free to gift this to someone you love.