Self Therapy by Jay Earley

Chapter 1: Personal Healing & Growth the IFS Way

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For use by client’s of James Fitzgerald Therapy PLLC, Strengthening Your Conscious Self.

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We humans sometimes have painful feelings or destructive impulses that cause difficulties in our lives. This is often the reason a person decides to seek help through psychotherapy. Let’s look at some examples: Joe frequently blows up at his wife, Maureen, over little things. A fight erupts and it escalates until he is yelling at her. She becomes frightened and ends up crying. Joe then feels terrible about himself: “How could I have done such a thing? I don’t want to hurt Maureen. I wasn’t myself.” Joe judges himself harshly for this behavior, but that doesn’t stop it from happening the next time.

Sometimes Meg finds herself having a difficult day. She gets in a little trouble at work; or her beloved dog gets sick. Then she sits down and eats an entire cake or a box of cookies. She doesn’t even think about what she is doing at the time, but right afterwards she feels horrible. “I have been trying to lose weight and this just makes matters worse. I feel so ashamed. What was going on that I stuffed myself like that?”

Many people, like Joe and Meg, are troubled by emotions or impulses that don’t make sense to them. They try to handle these irrational feelings by fighting with their impulses or criticizing their emotions. This might work for a little while, but in the long run, it is ineffective. And as I’ll explain, it actually backfires.

This book presents a new way of understanding how the mind works. It is based on a powerful form of psychotherapy called Internal Family System Therapy (IFS). When you comprehend the makeup of the human psyche from an IFS perspective, it opens up a whole new way of dealing with difficult feelings, which has proven to be highly successful with a wide range of people. These problematic emotions and desires really come from parts of us, sometimes called “subpersonalities.” These “parts,” as they are known in IFS, are like little people existing inside of us—each with its own unique feelings, motivations, and view of the world.

For example, Joe has an Angry Part that blows up at Maureen for a very specific reason. When they get into fights, she sometimes taunts Joe in a shaming way. This triggers a young child part of Joe who was humiliated as a kid, and that part starts to relive the childhood shame all over again. Then his Angry Part comes to the rescue. It gets enraged at Maureen as a way of protecting Joe from feeling that shame. If Joe took some time to get to know his Angry Part and the Ashamed Child it protects, he could shift this whole dynamic so he wouldn’t get enraged in these situations. When Meg’s boss criticizes her, she becomes very afraid for her job even though there really isn’t any chance of her losing it. This fear is much more intense than is warranted because her boss’s behavior reminds Meg of some scary events from her childhood. This current-day event triggers a Frightened Child Part in Meg that is holding onto a childhood fear from many years ago. Meg’s Overeater Part becomes concerned that Meg will be flooded by this fear. It causes her to stuff herself with food for comfort and to keep her from feeling the child’s fear.

Joe’s Angry Part and Meg’s Overeater are each trying to protect them from the pain of their child parts. These aren’t just irrational feelings or out-of-control impulses. They are like little persons inside of them who are doing the best they can to cope with discomfort and pain. When we understand this, we see that it doesn’t help to try to fight with these parts, or suppress them, or judge them. They are just trying to help and protect us in their own (distorted) ways. In fact, if we get into battles with our parts, they will fight back, and if we try to disown them, they will feel even more lonely and worthless than they already do. However, if we treat them like little beings inside of us who have our best interests at heart, we become open to a brand new way of relating to our feelings. We can get to know them, understand what drives them, and actually befriend them. When this happens, these parts will change, so they don’t have to overeat or flip out in rage anymore. They can relax and act sensibly.

We can also nurture and heal those wounded kid parts that are hidden behind the rage or overeating. When they feel accepted and loved by us, they can feel whole and good about themselves, and this will change our self-esteem in a profound way. I used to get very sad and lonely whenever my wife, Bonnie, was away for more than a day. If she traveled for a weekend or, God forbid, a week, I would feel bereft and depressed. Once I learned IFS, I realized that these feelings were coming from a Deprived Child Part of me who was left alone in an incubator for weeks after I was born prematurely, and then didn’t get enough nurturing from my mother.

By doing IFS work with this part, I realized that I could take care of him and comfort him when Bonnie was gone. I even helped him to get in touch with what he really needed at those times. He needed love from me and encouragement to be in touch with his (my) body and its aliveness. After a while, this child part felt held, soothed, and connected to me, and he also felt in touch with his senses and his body. This completely resolved my loneliness issue. These days I no longer have those debilitating feelings when Bonnie is gone.

The human mind isn’t a unitary thing that sometimes has irrational feelings. It is a complex system of interacting parts, each with a mind of its own. It’s like an internal family–with wounded children, impulsive teenagers, rigid adults, hypercritical parents, caring friends, nurturing relatives, and so on. That’s why this new therapy approach is called Internal Family Systems Therapy. If you embrace all of these wounded and protective parts inside of you as “real beings” who deserve compassion, understanding, and love, you can transform your psyche and create the joyful life you have always wanted.

You don’t have to worry. I’m not suggesting that you are a multiple personality, like Sybil or Tara or others you may have seen on TV or in the movies. As you will see in this book, we are all multiples, but not in an extreme way that you might think. The human psyche is just naturally a family of subpersonalities.

IFS is not the first system of therapy to recognize this. Carl Jung saw it a century ago, and other therapy approaches have been built around this notion. In fact, recently there has been a spate of therapies popping up that work with subpersonalities. IFS is simply the latest and most sophisticated of these methods. And it has produced some amazing results for people who use it.

Let’s look at a more detailed example of parts. Sandy wanted to take on a creative video project, but she couldn’t seem to get started. First she had
to clean up her office, and that seemed to take forever. Then she found herself working out on the treadmill. Okay, she thought, now I’m ready to go.
But instead of going to her office, she headed for the kitchen. Half an hour later, she was preparing a three-course meal. After a few days like this, she
acknowledged to herself that she was avoiding the project. This procrastination made her feel vaguely negative about herself; she was undoubtedly
lethargic and stuck. Sandy had a long-standing pattern of procrastination and depression, and now it was back.

Self-help books were somewhat useful; they gave her tips on mobilizing herself, rallying support, making decisions, and thinking positively. But these approaches ignore the crux of the problem. There is a part of Sandy that doesn’t want to work on her video project. She calls it the Busy Part. It keeps her busy with other activities as a way to avoid the video project, even though that project is her highest priority. The Busy Part is unconscious but nevertheless has the power to stop her from succeeding. Actually, the Busy Part has such power because it is unconscious. Since Sandy doesn’t know about it, she has no way to interact with it. A hidden part has extra influence because it can’t be addressed. It is like someone speaking ill of you behind your back. Rumors begin to fly, but you don’t have any idea where they came from, so you can’t confront the source.

If Sandy went into conventional therapy, she would probably uncover the Busy Part, and she might try to convert it or overcome it. She would certainly see it as her enemy. However, this approach won’t work very well because it ignores the very real fears and motivations of this part. Sandy might explore where the Busy Part came from in her childhood, but this usually involves analytically understanding her history, and real change rarely comes from intellectual insight alone.

If we ask why the Busy Part operates the way it does, we see that several parts of Sandy are involved in her procrastination. Sandy was ridiculed by her peers at certain times in her childhood when she did something that made her publicly visible. Now whenever she attempts to accomplish something that could make her visible again, an Embarrassed Child part is triggered, like an echo from her past. The Busy Part is not really Sandy’s enemy at all. It is just trying to protect the Embarrassed Child; it is afraid she will be ridiculed again if Sandy tackles this video project. There is also another force at work here. A third part of Sandy pushes her to work hard and criticizes her when she doesn’t. It is constantly on her case to “get working and be productive.” All this self-criticism is grinding her down, making the child part feel hated and worthless. So the Busy Part starts rebelling against this Pushy/Critical Part. It doesn’t want Sandy to be dominated by harsh judgment, so it distracts her with other activities. However, she can’t enjoy them because this Pushy Part keeps yelling at her in the background, punishing her for not working on the project.

These parts are all extreme and are in serious conflict with each other. Sandy feels like a ship in a storm, buffeted here and there, without a center from which to understand herself and move forward. What she needs is a way to integrate those parts into a caring, cooperative whole so she can feel good about herself and accomplish things. Even if all three parts were uncovered in traditional therapy, the change would need to come through a developing relationship with her therapist, which can be expensive and time-consuming to establish. Many people want to feel better but don’t want to spend a decade on a therapist’s couch to do it.

In this book, I will introduce you to Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), developed by psychologist Richard Schwartz. IFS is an approach that helps you find your center, pinpoint the parts of you that are causing difficulties, heal them, and unify them. IFS is not only a powerful form of therapy, it also lends itself especially well to self-therapy and peer counseling. This book shows you how to use IFS for self-healing. Using IFS, Sandy would learn how to access her true Self, which is a port in the storm, a place of strength and compassion, and the source of internal healing. Her Self would connect with each of Sandy’s three parts in a loving way that allowed them to trust her. Following the IFS procedure, she could help them release their fears and negative beliefs, allowing their natural strengths to flourish. They would learn to cooperate with each other and support the unfolding of her life in wholeness. She could then move ahead with her video project passionately and without reservations. Unlike many forms of therapy, IFS doesn’t pathologize people. When we have problems in life, IFS doesn’t see us as having a disease or deficit. It recognizes that we have the resources within us to solve our problems, though these resources may be blocked because of unconscious reactions to events in the past. IFS is designed to be self-led. It empowers you to take charge of your own growth because your true Self, not a therapist, is the agent of healing and wholeness. This makes IFS a natural vehicle for self-therapy.

IFS approaches the psyche with respect and acceptance. You learn to relate to yourself with compassion and caring. IFS has what you might call
a spiritual perspective, not because it subscribes to any religion or spiritual practice in particular, but because it embodies spiritual qualities such as
love, wisdom, and connectedness. IFS is also user friendly. Most people find it easy and natural to understand themselves as made up of various alive parts, and this gives them surprising insight into their psychological dynamics.

IFS provides a new and startling view of the human psyche. Mostly we think of ourselves as having sensible emotions and taking practical, rational actions. Of course, we recognize that occasionally irrational feelings like rage or fear pop up. We realize that sometimes we don’t act in our own best interest, like when we can’t discipline ourselves to live a healthy lifestyle. This kind of behavior upsets us because we see it as a deviation from what should be a unitary, sensible personality. When these aberrations happen a lot, we think there must be something wrong with us.

As I have explained, IFS sees human beings as complex systems of interacting “parts,” which are natural divisions of the personality. Suppose one part of you is trying to lose weight, and another part wants to wolf down a ton of sweets. When you crave that piece of cake late at night, it isn’t just a desire that comes up from time to time. There is an entity inside you that repeatedly needs a sense of sweet fullness. It has reasons why it feels it must have that dessert. It might need to push down anger or fill an unbearable sensation of emptiness. This part has memories that drive these needs—for example, feeling emotionally hungry as a child.

You may hear a different inner voice saying “Eat a piece of celery instead,” or “You should be a shamed of how you gorged yourself!” You may think of these as just thoughts that pop up, but they come from another part of you whose job is to control your eating. It could be concerned with your waistline or your health. It might believe that you won’t be loved if you aren’t thin. And it may have memories of being ridiculed for being overweight in grade school.

But these are simple concepts that only begin to touch on the richness and complexity of our inner life. Our inner family may include a lonely baby, a wise mentor, an angry child, a stern mother, a calm meditator, a magician, a happy animal, a closed-off protector, and so on.

These parts inside us are frequently shifting and changing. One of them takes over for a while, and we act and feel a certain way. Then we enter a new situation, and another character comes to the fore. Usually we view these changes as no more than slight shifts in mood or perspective, but, in fact, each shift marks the emergence of an entirely new subpersonality. Each part gets activated at certain times. When I am in a large group of strangers, a part of me feels shy and wants to withdraw. When a supervisor criticizes you, a part of you may be thrown off balance and feel utterly incompetent. When Jill’s husband acts arrogant, a part of her wants to strangle him. When you get rejected by a lover, a part of you may feel devastated, like an abandoned child. When you feel threatened by a powerful person, a headache may come on because a part is clamping down on the muscles in your head to defend against terror. Any feeling reaction, thought sequence, behavior pattern, or body sensation can indicate the presence of a part.

Some of our parts are in pain, and others want to protect us from feeling that pain. Some try to manage how we interact with people. Some are locked in battles with each other. And all this is going on largely outside our awareness. All we know is that sometimes we feel content and sometimes we are anxious, depressed, frustrated, or confused, and we don’t know why. We hold a simplistic view of ourselves that can’t penetrate to the richness and turmoil within.

Many people spend their whole lives thinking that this surface view is all there is to them. They never taste the juice or sit with the pain, and they don’t plumb the depths of themselves. Underlying this cast of characters, every human being has a true Self that is wise, deep, open, and loving. This is who we truly are when we aren’t being hijacked by painful or defensive voices. The Self is the key to healing and integrating our disparate parts through its compassion, curiosity, and connectedness. It is also the natural leader of our inner family, a guide through the adventures of life. Yet if the Self is truly at the center of each of us, you may be asking, why don’t we know it better? Because over the years we have experienced hurts, trauma, and grief, which have burdened us with shame, fear, and negative beliefs. These events have prompted some of our inner characters to take over in a desperate bid to protect us from harm. They blot out our pain, and, in the process, the light of the Self gets dimmed or lost. We don’t see what’s really happening because they cover over much of their activity as they construct a conventional life for us.

IFS can help you access your Self, and from that place of strength and love you can connect with your troubled parts and heal them. Your parts are naturally endowed with qualities such as joy, freedom, perceptiveness, and creativity, but these have been lost because of childhood wounds. The Self can help heal these wounds and allow these parts to reclaim their natural strengths and goodness. They can come to trust you to lead, if you do it from Self. They can learn to work together with each other as a harmonious inner family that supports your flowering in the world.

When you really understand this view of the psyche, you see yourself in a whole new light. You perceive your depth and beauty. You reclaim your true nature as a garden of healthy, effective, vital plants growing in the deep, rich soil of the Self. This perspective also changes how you see other people and the world. You realize that even the most destructive person is driven by parts that are doing their best to protect him or her. You see that everyone has a loving Self, even if it is deeply buried. You understand that at our deepest level we are all connected, and peace and harmony may indeed be possible in the world.

Experience with IFS shows that every part has a positive intent for you. A part may want to protect you from harm or help you feel good about yourself. It may want to keep you from feeling pain or make other people like you. Every part of you is trying to help you feel good and avoid pain. This is how we are constructed biologically, and our psyches work the same way. Since some parts keep us stuck in negative patterns and have a destructive impact on our lives, it may be hard to imagine how they could be trying to help. The answer is that despite their best intentions, these parts don’t always act wisely; they take extreme stances or behave in clumsy and primitive ways. However, if you look under the surface, you discover that they are always doing what they think is best for you. They may have a distorted perception of situations and an exaggerated sense of danger, but their intent is always positive.

For example, Joe has a part that makes him close his heart and lose interest in women whenever a relationship turns intimate and moves toward commitment. At first, he didn’t approve of this Closed-Hearted Part of himself and wanted to get rid of it because it was preventing him from finding love. However, when he looked deeper through IFS therapy, Joe found that this part was trying to look out for him. It was terrified that he would be taken over by a woman and lose himself, which is exactly what happened with his mother. When he was a child, being close to a female meant being controlled by her. So this part protected him in the only way it knew how, by withdrawing. It said, “I just want to keep you safe. I don’t want this to happen to you again.” Joe’s Closed-Hearted Part shut him down because it saw danger that wasn’t there. It distorted the present based on the past. Even if a part sees the present accurately, it may have a faulty strategy for helping you.

Many parts know only one way to act, which may be something that worked fairly well in your family forty years ago when you were a child. However, in today’s adult world, this strategy is ineffective, short-sighted, or immature. A protective part often has no finesse or flexibility. It only knows how to do one thing, regardless of the situation. Like the proverbial man with the hammer who sees everything as a nail, a part only knows how to pound on things.

Bill has a part that is judgmental and competitive with other people in a way that is not consistent with his true values. He always felt that this part was reprehensible and ought to be locked away. However, once he got to know it, he discovered that it was actually trying to do its best for him. It wanted to protect him from feeling worthless and help him feel valuable and important instead. The part tried to achieve this in the only way it knew—by feeling superior to others. It didn’t realize that there could be other ways for Bill to feel valuable—by connecting with others, by valuing himself, by doing meaningful things in the world. It knew only one strategy—judging others as inferior.

We are often afraid to get to know our parts or embrace them because we fear that this will give them power to sabotage our lives. What if they take over and cause even more problems? Joe was afraid that if he got to know his Closed-Hearted Part, it would take over and he would have no chance of loving a woman. However, with IFS he got to know this part and understand its positive intent without letting it take over. In fact, embracing a part is a step toward healing it.

This approach is fundamentally different from the way we ordinarily relate to our parts. Usually when we become aware of a part (or a feeling or behavior pattern), the first thing we do is evaluate it. Is it good or bad for us? If we decide it is good, we embrace it and act from it. If we decide it is bad, we try to get rid of it. We tell it to go away or attempt to bury it. However, this approach doesn’t work. You can’t get rid of a part of your psyche. You can only push it into the unconscious, where it will continue to affect you without your awareness.

In IFS, we do something altogether different and radical. We welcome all our parts with curiosity and compassion. We seek to understand each one and
appreciate its efforts to help us, without losing sight of the ways it is causing problems. We develop a relationship of caring and trust with each part, and
then take steps to heal it so it can function in a healthy way. We can relate to our parts in this way because we all have a true Self that is open, curious, and compassionate.

The entire IFS approach is based on working with your parts from this place. When we approach our parts with curiosity and the desire to know who they truly are, they reveal themselves to us. When we relate to our parts with compassion, they trust that we care about them, and they open up even their deepest places of pain and shame for healing. However, you may not trust that you can do this. You may ask, “What if I don’t feel curiosity and compassion toward my parts?” And frequently we don’t at first. However, IFS has innovative methods for accessing Self, with its qualities of curiosity and compassion, and returning to it when we become sidetracked.

In my experience, IFS is not only incredibly effective but also quite efficient in helping people change. When clients come to me for relief from specific psychological problems, we can often accomplish this in a month or two, sometimes even in a couple of sessions. These are a few of the issues that were solved in a brief time using IFS: depression over aging and being alone, difficulty in asserting oneself at work, a tendency to fly off the handle in marital disputes, anxiety about meeting new people.

If you have psychological issues that are deep seated or if you want comprehensive personality transformation, the work will take longer—possibly a year or two. However, in that time, you can make profound changes in matters that deeply affect your life: how you feel about yourself, how you relate to people, and the way you function in the world. Here is one client’s story.

When Robert first came to me for IFS therapy, he felt very alone in the world. He had had only one experience of love in his life, but that girlfriend had rejected him a couple of years before, and he was still yearning for her. He longed for intimacy and a deep sensual connection with a woman but believed he could never have it again. He felt desperately lonely and unlovable. He wanted to have friends and community in his life, yet he experienced himself as an outsider in groups and organizations. It seemed that everyone else was included and he was always left out. He thought he was incapable of relating to others in a way that would make a genuine connection. Deep inside he believed that there was something so fundamentally wrong with him that people wouldn’t be interested in being close to him. Consequently he shied away from contact with people and stayed walled off in his room most of the time.

Unwittingly, Robert contributed to his own isolation by the way he related to people. When he did interact with someone, he did it in a dour, wooden, intellectual manner that came from a part of him that expected to be rejected. This part kept him in his head and away from his emotions in an unconscious attempt to protect him from being hurt when he was snubbed. He also thought that his intellect was the only thing he had to offer people. Of course, this closed-off approach only contributed to making people less interested in him, thereby confirming his fears.

After a year and a half of IFS work, all that has changed. He became aware of how he was keeping people away through distancing and intellectualizing, and he has now changed the way he relates to others. His sense of humor comes out frequently, and he can smile and connect with people in a friendly way. He has begun to feel like an integral part of groups he is involved with. Through our work, he healed the part that believed he was unlovable. Now he basically feels good about himself, and he expects most people to respond to him positively. He started dating his old girlfriend again, and she was so delighted with the way he had changed that she was eager to rekindle their relationship. They are now happily connected and planning to get married.

This book is designed to help you learn the following:

1. How to understand your psyche from the IFS perspective.

What drives your behavior? What makes you avoid people or situations? Where do your emotional reactions come from? What is the nature of your inner conflicts? What are your parts? What impact do they have on your life? How do they relate to you and each other? You will end up with a detailed map of your psyche.

2. How to work with and relate to your parts on a daily basis as they get activated in your life.

How to recognize when a part is activated. How to connect with it and help it relax. This will help you to deal with situations in a calm, effective, open way. It will also foster more internal cooperation and integration.

3. How to do an IFS session with yourself in order to explore yourself, understand and connect with your parts, discover their history, and heal them.

4. How to be a more effective client when working with an IFS therapist or when doing IFS peer counseling with a friend who is also reading this book.

5. If you are a therapist, how to use IFS in your work with people.

Since IFS uses a structured method for therapy, it is easy to teach as a step-by-step procedure in this book. We illustrate each step with a transcript of an IFS session so you can see how it actually works in vivo.

You can learn much about yourself by just reading the book, even if you don’t choose to do the exercises. When you really understand what it
means to be a loving Self surrounded by a system of parts, it transforms the way you understand yourself and other people. Whenever you run
into a technical term that you don’t understand, consult Appendix C for its definition. However, if you do the exercises as you read the book, this will ground the concepts in your direct experience of your inner family. This takes it out of the intellectual realm and connects to your feelings, your body, and your imagination.

To get the full benefit of this book, I recommend you do IFS practice sessions on a regular basis. This will teach you to do self-therapy in a deep and transforming way. These can be done on your own, but most people find it easier to do these sessions working with a partner in peer counseling, especially at first. So after you have read enough of the book to be ready to dive into the work, find a friend who will also read the book and hopefully become serious about learning the method. The two of you can schedule times to do IFS practice sessions as you read. You take turns with one of you acting as listener/facilitator while the other one works on himself or herself. Your ability to do self-therapy will be enhanced by all that you learn from working with a partner.

Being in IFS therapy is a profoundly life-changing event for most people. This book can’t be a complete substitute for that experience because nothing can replace the connection with and guidance from a competent, caring professional who is an expert in IFS. However, this book teaches the IFS model in enough detail to do full IFS sessions on yourself, especially with the support of a sensitive friend. In this way, you can gain many of the benefits of this powerful model. How far you will be able to go in this direction depends on many factors—your previous experience working on yourself, your degree of openness and creativity, and your dedication to the practice.

However, even if you don’t engage in full IFS self-therapy sessions, you can still gain a great deal through understanding your psyche from the IFS perspective, learning to connect with your parts, and grasping how psychological healing occurs.

If you fit one of the following groups, Self-Therapy might be helpful to you.

1. People who want to work through a wide variety of troubling personal issues—low self-esteem, procrastination, anxiety, shyness, depression, isolation, and so on. Any problem that is psychological in origin can be transformed using this approach.

2. People looking for personal growth of various kinds. It can help you increase confidence, accelerate your career success, deepen your ability to relate to others, enhance your intimacy, and develop your spiritual awareness.

3. People who are considering entering therapy. This book will acquaint you with the IFS approach so you can decide whether to choose an IFS therapist to work with.

4. People who have had bad experiences in psychotherapy and are reluctant to try again. There are many different forms of therapy. Even though your previous therapy wasn’t effective, you can still be successful with the right approach and therapist. This book will give you an idea of how powerful therapy can be with IFS. If it feels like a fit, you can choose to engage in self-therapy or find an IFS therapist to work with.

5. People who can’t be in therapy. Is it hard to find a good therapist nearby? Is it difficult for you to afford therapy? Are there other reasons why therapy doesn’t work for you? This book will permit you to get some of the benefits of therapy by working on your own and with a partner.

6. People who are in therapy with an IFS therapist. This book will give you a detailed understanding of the IFS model, which will enhance your ability to work in sessions and give you the capacity to do IFS sessions on yourself at home. This will make you more effective as a client, speed up your therapy, and help you become more Self-led in your life. I have found this to be true for those clients of mine who have taken my IFS classes, so I recommend the classes to all my clients. Since this book is based on my classes, it should serve the same function.

7. Psychotherapists. Even though the book is written for the general public, it contains a wealth of information useful to clinicians. A detailed description of the IFS approach will permit you to experiment with using IFS in your practice, either by itself or as a complement to the approaches you currently employ. The book is so detailed that it constitutes a manual for the IFS method. If you fall in love with it, as I did, you may want to get professional training in the model.

8. IFS therapists. This book contains a review of what you have learned in your IFS training but organized in a somewhat different way. The details of the procedure outlined in the book may help you to deepen your understanding of the model. The many transcripts may enhance your comprehension of how IFS works. You may also want to encourage your clients to read this book to enhance their ability to do IFS work.

The IFS model is very respectful of the pain or trauma that we all carry. Despite the fact that IFS goes deep into the psyche in powerful ways, it never tries to barge past defenses or dive quickly into deep issues. It is respectful of the parts of us that protect us from pain and only works with our deep issues after getting permission from all relevant protective parts. Therefore, it is fairly safe to use on your own. Most people can do the exercises in this book and the practice sessions without problems.

However, this book is not a substitute for psychotherapy. Some people have experienced so much pain and trauma in their lives that their internal systems are sensitive, reactive, chaotic, unstable, or strongly conflicted. If you have this kind of internal family, doing IFS work could trigger intense emotional or physical reactions. You could become panicked or depressed when trying to work with your parts. The work could activate headaches, allergies, or other psychosomatic reactions. It could prompt you to engage in addictive or dangerous behavior. You might feel spaced out and confused in the middle of a session or afterwards.

If you sense that responses like this could happen to you, it probably isn’t safe for you to use IFS without the guidance of a psychotherapist. If you aren’t sure, you can try the work in this book very carefully to find out, but if you have any unusual or intense reactions, it is a sign that you should be working with a therapist. Don’t take this lightly by trying to push on. Take care of yourself and wait until you can do this work with professional guidance. A psychotherapist can help you to approach the work in a safe way and can provide the support you need to be successful. If any difficult reactions crop up, your therapist will know how to handle them. If you are dependent on a parent, guardian, or spouse who couldn’t tolerate your changing the way you relate to him or her, doing IFS work on your own might not be advisable. It would be better for you to do IFS under the guidance of a therapist, who could also work with important people in your life.

In this chapter, you learned about the power of the IFS perspective on the human mind and how our psyches are made up of parts, each one doing its best for our welfare. You know about the true Self, the place of grounded compassion that is the agent of internal healing in IFS. You have seen how to use the book and who can benefit from it. In Chapter 2, we explore these ideas in more detail.