Not all therapy is created equal.

Life is hard enough without the stigma of a disorder to compound daily struggles. You may be aware of the classic therapy modalities like CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), talk therapy, ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention), Behavior Therapy, or EMDR where the person must embrace a technique or practice to experience change. In some instances the client relies heavily on the counselor to teach or coach him into strategies for betterment. Ministry approaches like SOZO, Theophostic or Wellspring have been integral in helping Christians bring balance to the mind, body and spirit but they also employ “works” to ensure payoff. Internal Family Systems (IFS) is set apart from all other models because this psychotherapy turns you back to you.

Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), connects emotional parts within your psyche, to past memory or early experiences in order to gain understanding about why you do what you do. This approach is to help you gain love and acceptance for all of your parts that work together much like a family. Each part is a brain pathway that came in during a moment in history where it could not rely on you to make a decision. To the degree of trauma or suffering that this part believed it had to help you navigate through, is how hard it has been working ever since. Parts jump in with behaviors fueled by emotions which aide you during difficult times because they do not trust you are in control. Some respond with flight or fight impulses and others usurp your daily decision making, but the important thing to remember is that they are stuck in perceived pain that they want you to avoid. Parts hold the scene or experience in the brain like a compartment, much like a square in a waffle. Whatever you experienced gets isolated in its own box with a barrier on all sides to keep the anguish contained. It would be the same as your sibling or parent not acknowledging your truth so each family member closes their bedroom door and locks themselves away. You may emerge the next day and ignore the circumstance, but it still happened. Each family member will engage with his own parts in order to move on, some will deny and others will act out.

Emotional parts believe that without their ability to step in and save the day, you would become anxious, depressed, suicidal or even die. These are links back to the source and origin of abuse, in-utero rejection, accident, assault, disaster or any other scenario that threatened your well-being or identity. They carry the weight of their own personalities that were making a judgment call on your behalf and still express themselves when you encounter humiliation, bullying or suffering that closely resembles when it first onset.

Our brains are so complex that these brain pathways we call parts, will eventually grow tired of their negative reaction and long to respond positively. When we reach stagnancy in traditional therapy approaches, it is usually time to embrace Internal Family Systems (IFS) and bring understanding and grace to the deep emotional parts within. Understanding for the parts you dislike about yourself and those parts you judge, will allow for them to stop living through cyclical patterns and choose to do something different. This will be a challenge for some because you will have a conversation with the part like you would a friend. It has to be this close and personal in order for you to engage the emotion that is trapped within the part. The miracle occurs inside of you when the part resembles you as a child, or a favorite character, a color, a feeling, a sensation or thought. When that personal connection bridges the gap between your imagination and your history, the present is healed. You will be able to gauge your own progress in therapy because after meeting these parts within you, they trust you to decide what is best for the whole internal family. The cyclical patterns will stop playing out, the issues with men will balance, the issues with women will soften or you may be able to kick that disorder to the curb once and for all. It is my job as an IFS Practitioner to sit back and watch the transformation of your inside world, share the answers to life’s questions that have always been inside of you.

To gain a glimpse of further understanding, refer to the tab below.