Finding Inner Peace for Our Many Parts (IFS)
Finding Inner Peace for Our Many Parts (IFS)
Source: Two selected resources below
Contributor: Selena Garcia
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“We’ve been taught to believe we have a single identity, and to feel fear or shame when we can’t control the inner voices that don’t match the ideal of who we think we should be.” — Richard Schwartz
Have you ever heard the saying, “You’re not the worst thing you ever did, nor are you the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” You are many things, made up of many “parts,” and integration is key.
Maybe you have trauma; maybe you don’t. Maybe you have some healing to do; maybe you don’t. Perhaps, you recognize behaviors that you don’t like, and you want to explore them. One incredible and powerful tool for that self-analysis is Internal Family Systems (IFS).
IFS is “a transformative, evidence-based psychotherapy that helps people heal by accessing and loving their protective and wounded inner parts.”
Here, we lift up two interviews and live demos with Dr. Richard Schwartz, Founder of IFS. One is with Tim Ferriss , and the other with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. They each share the significant impact it’s had in their lives. By going through the demos with them, you can begin to walk through it for yourself.
Who is Dr. Schwartz?
Sitting “on the faculty of the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Schwartz began his career as a systemic family therapist and an academic. Grounded in systems thinking, he developed Internal Family Systems (IFS) in response to clients’ descriptions of various parts within themselves.”
He points out in his book No Bad Parts that “we’ve been taught to believe we have a single identity, and to feel fear or shame when we can’t control the inner voices that don’t match the ideal of who we think we should be.”
Often, we start to seek resources when we’re at a breaking point and need support to rebuild. Wherever this finds you, may it show you what’s out there. Whether you need IFS now, place it in your pocket for later, or share it with a friend, it’s a powerful path toward self-exploration, understanding, and healing.
“The way that I’ve been able to finally find some compassion for myself and parts of myself, is to recognize that the things that we view in ourselves as totally f*cked up, totally self-destructive, totally fill in the blank pejorative term, very often are not maladaptive. They are perfectly adaptive. They’ve just outlived their usefulness or they’ve expired, but they still remain.” — Tim Ferriss
NOTE: This podcast touches on childhood sexual abuse and plant medicine.
Tim Ferriss: "IFS is an incredible system, and it really goes far beyond any type of trauma. It applies to, I would say, each and every one of us. It will help you work with your inner critic. It will help you to befriend inner voices. Not in the pathological sense. And at one point in this episode, I do a live demo as the patient with Richard of IFS. So, that is a real-life, real subject matter demo.
"One way to think about this is as a tool kit for reconciling parts of yourself that may have conflict amongst them or difficulties amongst them, parts of yourself that you've disavowed. And therefore, it is not limited to heavily traumatized patients in the psychotherapeutic context. So, what we're going to be talking about in this episode, I think, applies to just about everyone.
"My understanding and the way that I've been able to finally find some compassion for myself and parts of myself, is to recognize that the things that we view in ourselves as totally f*cked up, totally self-destructive, totally fill in the blank pejorative term, very often are not maladaptive. They are perfectly adaptive. They've just outlived their usefulness, or they've expired, but they still remain, if that makes any sense. And so the non-pathologizing and any piece of what I just said, I'd love to hear you respond to.”
Dr. Schwartz: "All the people using this around the world are finding that these things we thought were symptoms are maladapted in the sense that in our current context, they may not be needed, but they were definitely needed. They were like heroes… back when we were being hurt, and they get stuck back there. So, again, I'm a family therapist, so I'm trying to understand the context of all kinds of both external people's behavior and internal and the internal parts of behavior made total sense back when you were being hurt. And they think they still need to do it because they think you're still in the same kind of vulnerability."
NOTE: This video mentions eating disorders, suicide, and addiction.
DESCRIPTION: Dr. Chatterjee notes "this is potentially one of the most important episodes I've ever released on my podcast… (IFS) Giving people awareness where there might not have been awareness…Now that I have the awareness, it allows me to go in and do something."
(30:06) Dr. Schwartz: "You've heard the term inner children before. These are these young, very vulnerable, and sensitive parts of us who, when they're not hurt, give us all kinds of delight and creativity, joy and playfulness, and so on. But once they get hurt—and again, they're the most sensitive parts of us, so they get hurt the most, or terrified or shamed—they carry what I'm going to call burden of pain or fear or worthlessness.
“It's almost like during the trauma, the beliefs and emotions from the trauma enter the part almost like a virus and attach to the part and then drive the way it operates from that point on. So, parts contain burdens, but they aren't the burdens they carry. Those came into them from those experiences. So, these exile parts carry those particular burdens from being rejected or abandoned or neglected or actually physically abused and so on. And after they get hurt, they shift from their delightful state, and now they have the power to make us feel all that sort of perpetually. And they're frozen in time in that trauma—they can pull us back into those scenes.
“Our culture, at least in the U.S… we are told to lock all that away and just move on, don't look back, you can't change what happened, just move on. And in doing that, you're moving away from, you're exiling these very precious, young, vulnerable parts of us, simply because they got hurt and they carry those burdens. And when you get a lot of exiles, you feel a lot more delicate, and the world seems a lot more dangerous. Because so many things can trigger them, and when they get triggered, it's like these flames of emotions explode from those basements and threaten to make it so you can't function. Or make it, so you're just constantly feeling their feelings."
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