Closing Thoughts Your inner world is real. Parts are not imaginary products or symbols of your psyche; nor are they simply metaphors of deeper meaning. They are inner beings who exist in inner families or societies, and what happens in those inner realms makes a big difference in how you feel and live your life.
CHAPTER ELEVEN Embodiment When your parts start to trust your Self, they open more space for you to be in your body. When that’s the case, you feel sensations and emotions more and, consequently, you become increasingly interested in keeping your body grounded and healthy. With this enhanced sensitivity to your body’s feedback comes increased knowledge about what foods or activities are beneficial and which can be damaging. This leads to corresponding changes in your behavior.
CHAPTER TEN The Laws of Inner Physics A Beautiful Mind—a movie about the famous mathematician John Nash—begins with the viewer not understanding that everything they’re seeing is through the eyes of a paranoid part of the main character. It’s a wonderful example of what people experience when protectors thoroughly blend.
CHAPTER NINE Life Lessons and Tor-Mentors We are here to learn a particular set of life lessons, and the lesson plan is already within us. Each of us carries legacy burdens inherited from our families and cultures, and each of us also accrues plenty of personal burdens along the way. So our lesson plan begins with unloading those burdens, and that sets the stage for the most important lesson of all—finding out who we really are.
CHAPTER EIGHT Vision and Purpose Generally speaking, as you get more access to Self and become more Self-led, you also attain more clarity about the vision you have for your life, which means that your priorities may be quite different than they were when your protectors were in charge. When we have lots of exiles, our protectors have no choice but to be egotistic, hedonistic, or dissociative.
CHAPTER SEVEN The Self in Action By now you hopefully have a clear idea what the Self is and what it means to be Self-led. In this chapter, I want to take a closer look at how achieving Self- leadership affects your life both inside and outside. Developmental psychology and attachment theory have helped us understand what children need from their caretakers as they develop.
CHAPTER SIX Healing and Transformation What do we mean by healing and transformation in IFS? As I stated earlier, our culture (in general) and psychotherapy (specifically) have made the terrible mistake of assuming that parts are the way they seem.
CHAPTER FIVE Mapping Our Inner Systems Now that you have several practices under your belt and understand more about systems and the paradigm shift we’re after here, I want to get into some of the ways parts organize themselves and relate with each other inside. I’ve already introduced the primary distinction between exiles and protectors. Let’s look a little more into what those parts are like.
CHAPTER FOUR More on Systems You may have noticed that as we proceed through the book, we’re focusing less on each individual part and more on their relationships with one another. I feel blessed that when I first encountered the parts in my clients, I was steeped in what’s called systems thinking, and that helped me listen to them better, rather than being overwhelmed with the complexity of it all.
CHAPTER THREE This Changes Everything In Christianity, the definition of sin is anything that disconnects you from God and takes you off your path. Burdens disconnect Self from parts and give them extreme impulses. Burdened parts either don’t experience Self at all or don’t listen to Self. So when parts are unburdened, it’s not only that they immediately transform, but they also now have much more connection to and trust for Self, which is the second goal of IFS.
CHAPTER TWO Why Parts Blend In IFS, we use the term blended to describe the phenomenon in which a part merges its perspective, emotion, beliefs, and impulses with your Self. When that happens, the qualities of your Self are obscured and seem to be replaced by those of the part.
CHAPTER ONE We’re All Multiple We were all raised in what I’ll call the mono- mind belief system—the idea that you have one mind, out of which different thoughts and emotions and impulses and urges emanate.
Introduction As a psychotherapist, I’ve worked with many people who came to me shortly after their lives had crashed