Reparenting Our Inner Poker Parts

There are no bad parts of you, just misunderstood ones.

– No Bad Parts

The concept of reparenting yourself as a strategy for improving your bottom line at the poker table may sound unconventional, but it offers a powerful framework for understanding and managing the emotional turmoil that high-variance competition so often breeds.

According to a school of psychology called Internal Family Systems (IFS), when dealing with feelings of extreme emotional discomfort, such as the ones we face constantly in poker, the goal is to treat the triggering activity as an opportunity to go inward and turn toward the part of you that is reacting to it most strongly. The part that feels most enraged. Or destructive. Or hopeless.

When you do, says IFS, you’re likely to find an intricate world of “parts” (think: inner children) that influence pretty much everything you say and do. And like a good parent would, when one of those inner children is dealing with some big feelings or emotional strife, the aim is to guide them back to a homeostatic state.

The way in which we accomplish this when it comes to our big poker feelings is going to be highly individualized, but here is the best process I’ve come up with through my many trials and errors parenting both my real-life son and my own inner poker children – all of whom I now speak to in this exact same way.

• Grounding + Inquiry: I can tell from your breathing that you’re feeling super upset. Why don’t you tell me what happened?
• Validation: That’s super frustrating, I’d be mad getting aces cracked twice in a row too!
• Reflection: You know, I read somewhere that behind every angry feeling is actually fear. If you had to guess, what fear is hiding behind this anger?
• More Validation + Reframing: I agree, not being able to provide for my family used to make me really scared too! But when that feeling comes to visit now, I just thank it for what it’s actually trying to do – which is motivate me to improve – and remind it that the best way for us to achieve our shared goal of taking care of our family is to remain calm and focused on growth and consistency over a long period of time.
• Regrounding + Soft Landing: Looks like your breathing is back to normal, good job weathering that storm of emotions! Let’s take a break to get a snack and maybe we can think about if there was anything in those two hands we want to do differently next time.