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Creating Change 

Psychotherapy offers a unique way for a person to create healing and or change in their lives. By engaging with a psychotherapist in an act of digging into problems or issues you want to improve or change, you are bringing in a helper into your inner world. People are often not able to make changes or healing happen by themselves, when you can its great. But when you cannot, bringing in a helper can be a very powerful tool. All of a sudden you are able to access places in yourself you could not before, you are able to go to new places and take actions that you were not able to before. There is a magic that happens when we have someone completely on our side to help us with our toughest struggles. This is the magic we human beings bring and give to each other with our presence and support.

Internal Family Systems Theory

Internal Family Systems theory (IFS) is a system of doing psychotherapy that is becoming more popular in the field of psychotherapy.  Basically it says that each person is made up of a number of parts and a Self, and the Self is the spiritual essence of a person.  In some other models the Self is analogous to the Adult self, the part of us that is kind, loving and caring for our parts.  And there is a distinction in IFS that the Self is not a part, it’s different, it doesn’t get hurt by trauma, and it’s always there and can come in to help, although sometimes parts won’t let it, or do not trust it.  

IFS says there are 2 kinds of parts, protector parts and exiled parts.  Protector parts are the parts that protect us from dangers or perceived dangers of life and do a lot of managing of our lives, and exiled parts are parts of us that have been locked away because they’ve been wounded or traumatized, and protector parts are afraid that if they were left exposed they would destabilize the system.  In the realm of protector parts there are managers, protectors and firefighter parts.  The managers and protector parts do their best daily to manage and protect you in the day to day challenges of life.  The firefighter parts are there to put out any emotional fires that appear to destabilize the system; they are similar to real firefighters in that they don’t care if they do some damage, their job as they see it is to do whatever it takes to put out the fire, squash an emotional upheaval that seems like it could shake up the person too much.  Firefighter behaviors are usually extreme and include drug and alcohol use, overeating, sexual behavior sometimes extreme, over exercise, cutting etc,.  And usually the exiled parts are what the protector and firefighter parts are worried about, they are worried that if the exiled parts get too triggered or exposed, too much emotion, pain, wounding will come up, so they want to keep these exiled parts hidden away so your system stays in balance.  

In using IFS in therapy, the ultimate goal is to heal the exiled parts.  But usually first we need to work with the protector parts to make sure they feel that it’s safe enough to do this work, to let the work proceed.  For example, there might be a part of a person that feels very afraid to let a therapist and the client work on an old trauma because the protector part believes that the trauma coming up would be too much for the client to handle and process.  So we work with that protector part to reassure it and do whatever helps it feel safe enough to let the trauma work proceed.  Once the protector parts feel OK about doing the deeper work to heal an exiled part I do that work, sometimes the IFS work does it and sometimes regular EMDR processing (of trauma) does the healing.  This part of IFS work is very important, healing the wounded part or parts. It can take time, and it takes time to work with the changes that we help parts make to help the changes stay in place - become integrated. After the healing of a wounded part, it’s then important to work with the protector parts to help them let go of roles they were playing, as those roles are no longer needed. This can be challenging because often it’s all these protector parts know how to be.