You might wonder if parts need names. It’s certainly a reasonable question. After all, how can you communicate with and cooperate with parts if you don’t know their names? Should you name them?
The short answer is no. Parts don’t have to have names. Or parts may all have the same name in some systems. For instance, if the body was named Joyce. The parts might all be named Joyce, but they may be Joyce at age 3, Joyce at age 4, Joyce at age 7, and so on. In that case, we would simply refer to 8 year old Joyce if we were wanting to talk to her.
But what about systems where there are parts who don’t have names? In those cases, we can still interact with them by referring to something about them. For instance, there might be an angry part, so we would talk to the angry part. Or there might be a young part, a scared part, and so on. In large and very large systems, it could be that you end up working with or talking to groups of parts, such as the angry parts or the young Joyces.
In general, therapists would discourage you from trying to name every part with people names. And if you have a therapist who wants to do this, that is a red flag.