What is an Internal Family System?
When our emotions are so powerful we can have a hard time determining the best way to respond to life’s challenges.
Often these parts are tasked with keeping us in old roles, familiar patterns, and fearful of the unknown. Developing self leadership is a way to relieve these parts of these old ways of being and feel empowered to break out of anxiety, shame, and self-doubt.
Internal Family Systems is a method that looks at these parts as whole parts that make up who we are.
Dude, That’s Wild
Totally!
It can definitely feel odd to consider the multiplicity of the mind. It took me several years of consideration before I even tried it.
Some think multiplicity is an outcome of fracturing or breaking. We end up ignoring, hiding, or discipling our parts out of the fear of being broken or ashamed of the impulses of doing what we want to do in our lives. Then we are further shamed by a culture that often believes there is only one way, because we are unable to control them.
As I practiced and trained in IFS, I felt more than anything that it wasn’t about trusting IFS, or my therapist - it was about listening to myself on a depth I have never been able to before.
Here’s what I love about it:
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Versions of IFS can be found in many traditions of people of the global majority.
Many Black, Brown, and Indigenous practitioners report finding a sense of familiarity and find ways to integrate IFS into their personal culture, philosophy, and spirituality.
When I consider my lineages and see that pre-colonial spirituality, psychology, and traditions involved multiples were reduced to a single or trinity after colonialism.
🤲🏽
With IFS, healing is in our hands.
We develop deep and meaningful self leadership by responding to our parts and directing the pace, focus, and depth at which we process inner conflict.
Your healing and learning are not limited by other’s understanding of you or their ability to heal and grow. It never has been.
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It resists western pathology.
Still today gender, neurotype, and sexuality that are not normative are considered disorders in the DSM. In IFS these qualities are an integral part of self, the life force at the core of who we are.
White supremacy and colonialism pathologizes and punishes multiplicity, many ways of being, and thinking of the mind as a singular entity may be a construct to align with a specific set of values.
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