Hello IFS Friends!
This week I’m thinking about how we handle our parts in daily life, because inner conflict doesn’t wait for therapy or an IFS support group.
I believe the best ways to practice IFS on our own, between therapy or group sessions, are both proactive and reactive.
Proactively, developing times of the day when we check in with our parts can build Self-energy slowly through repetition and contact with our inner world. Of course, this sounds good on paper but can be MUCH more difficult to put into practice in real life.
I’ve been incorporating IFS into my daily rhythms for over two decades, so I have a LOT of ideas to share about it! One thing I know is that you rarely build deep trust with your parts during a crisis. You build trust before the crisis—so when things get hot, your parts already know you’re there.
I invite you to join me in a small, 5-person IFS practice and learning group on Tuesday, July 28 to explore “Stuck Points in Your Personal IFS Practice” from 3-5 pm Central on Zoom. Whether your stuck point is STARTING your personal practice, maintaining it, deepening it, or something else that gets in your way when you work with yourself, I have confidence this is going to be a practical gathering that improves how you do IFS on your own.
Reactively, we’ve all had experiences where someone triggered the living daylights out of us. A knot of parts react—bouncing off the walls of our mind like way too many pinballs in a pinball game. When we’re overwhelmed by parts, using IFS techniques on paper to simply start the untangling process can be extremely helpful. Some of the classics are: The Conference Table, Parts Mapping, and Parts Scribbling.
Another classic IFS technique for unblending a pile of parts is The Room Technique, where you put the triggering person in a room and then allow each part that’s reacting to that person to appear outside the room. This technique is usually a verbal technique, but I like to teach it as an exercise on paper, so that’s what we’ll be exploring and practicing this Saturday, July 18 from 11-1 pm Central time on Zoom.
As always, reach out if you’d like to join!
And if those dates/times don’t work for you, I do have some on-demand teaching videos about all the techniques I mentioned above which you can find here: athousandpaths.com/anytime
While they’re not the same as the experiential groups where you can practice and get your questions answered in real time, they’re still a way to learn the techniques and start using them on your own.
In whatever ways you connect to your parts, proactively or reactively, I wish you the ongoing joy of deep contact with who you are inside.
To cultivating more Self-energy, day by day,
Melissa
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