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All | ifs | mindfulness | Trauma | Addiction & Habits | Couples
Healing Complex Trauma with Internal Family Systems (IFS)
As a trauma specialist, people interested in therapy and coaching with me tend to have three primary modes:
I know I’ve got some stuff from the past to work through, and I’m ready to get into it!
I think I’ve got some stuff from the past to work through, and I’ll do it if I have to. (Are you sure there’s no other way…?)
I just want to feel better now - let's leave the past out of it.
The vast majority show up in one of the first two modes. They have some understanding of trauma, recognizing that some kind of past experience might be at the root of their current struggles. But even as they want to “face their past,” they…
The Two Things We All Need In Relationships
“It just feels like you can’t be alone! Like you always need me to be doing something with you, or you just freak out. It’s like I can never have just a minute of space to myself to even think.”
“But it doesn’t matter how much ‘space’ I give you or whether I ask you to do things when you say it’s better for you - you just never want to spend time with me! You’d rather just watch TV or stare at your phone.”
I jump in to pause the back-and-forth between this (hypothetical) couple…
Working With Dissociation
My frustration boiled over halfway into my third two-week meditation retreat. As training for my mindfulness-based graduate psychology program, I had now been meditating regularly for a year and a half and attended multiple retreats - yet I still felt just as completely flat and disconnected as I did when I started. Disconnected from myself, from my emotions, from the picturesque Rocky Mountain winter landscape that surrounded me. From pretty much everything.
The end of undergrad had brought with it…
What is Internal Family Systems (IFS)? Part II: Self & Self-Leadership
Most of us come to therapy or coaching with the goal of feeling better, reducing negative habits, healing trauma, etc.
The good news is that all of that is possible.
But. It isn’t possible in the ways we usually try to get there, which is some version of waging a war on the parts of us we think are “problems” and trying to control or get rid of them.
That isn’t the goal in IFS.
As I mentioned in the last post, we can’t get rid of parts of us even if we wanted to. And I recommend that you take with a grain of salt any therapy or coaching work that says otherwise.
The really, really good news is that the actual goal of IFS therapy is…
What is Internal Family Systems (IFS)? Part I: The Parts of Us
In a world where we are often instructed to “be our true selves” and to “be authentic,” we can often feel very lost when we look inside and notice that there is a lot going on in there. And that a lot of it is conflicting. There usually isn’t just one thing that we are nor one part of us that is more authentic than the other.
It can be completely true that I have the desire to stay in the city where I currently live but also feel pulled to move to a more quiet, rural area. I can want to go out with my friends tonight and also really like the idea of ordering delivery and watching Netflix.
No impulse is more true than the other, though I obviously can’t do two opposite things at once. It is true, though, that…
