Let's start with the exiles. These are often the yonger ones that have frequently been called inner children in our culture. Before we get hurt, they are the delightful, playful, creative, trusting, innocent, and open parts of us that we love to be close to. They are also the most sensitive parts, so when someone hurts, betrays, shames, or scares us, they are the parts who take in the extreme beliefs and emotions (burdens) from those events the most.

After the trauma or attachment injury, the burdens these parts absorb shift them from their fun, playful states to chronically wounded inner children who are frozen in the past and have the ability to overwhelm us and pull us bac into those dreadful scenes. They move from feeling "I am loved" to "I am worthless" and "No one loves me", and when they blend with us, that belief becomes our paradigm and we feel all their burdened emotions. It feels unbearable to reexperience those emotions and to believe those things, and often, those burdens impair our ability to function in the world. I've had clients who, when their exiles took over, couldn't get out of bed for a week.

This is why we try our best to lock these parts away, thinking that we are simply moving on from bad memories, sensations, and emotions -- not realizing that we are disconnecting from our most precious resources just because they got hurt.

[...]

Even when they are exiled, their burdens can exert an unconscious effect on our self-esteem, choice of intimate partner, career, and so on. They're behind the overreactions that seem mysterious to us and leave us perplexed as to why certain small things hit us so hard.

— No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz, Alanis Morissette (Page 73 - 74)