ALL PARTS WELCOME
Internal Family SystemsDeepen your healing with Internal Family Systems – a supportive, gentle path for self-inquiry and personal change.
IFS can help you:
- Deepen your self-understanding
- Overcome self-defeating behaviors
- Heal from trauma
- Recover from loss
- Ease anxiety
- Soften your inner critic
- Access more calm and clarity
- Increase your self-confidence
- Feel more spiritually connected
- Integrate plant medicine experiences
- Overcome feelings of stuckness
- Know yourself in a powerful new way
- And so much more
How it Works
With Internal Family Systems therapy, we establish a safe, sacred space to get to know the many parts of you.
Parts who jump in to protect you when times got rough.
Parts who swoop in to distract when wounds get triggered.
Protective parts can be intense. Sometimes, these might actually be parts of you you don’t like too much.
But when you look under the surface, you learn that protective parts have positive intent.
It might go something like this:
Where you felt undervalued by your family of origin, a high achieving part took on the role of excelling in everything so that you’d never have to feel worthless again.
Where your emotional needs went unmet, an independent part took on the role of keeping people at arms length to prevent you from getting hurt again.
Protective parts did what they had to do to help you survive the things you went through. Then, over time, those strategies hardened into entrenched patterns that it can be hard to interrupt.
There’s a good reason for that. Your protective parts’ strategies are learned survival strategies that were necessary once upon a time.
While you were growing up, your protectors had to step into the drivers seat to get you through what you went through.
But in your present life, if protective parts continue to run the show, they can drastically limit your capacity to engage wholeheartedly and reciprocally in life.
So, why do protective parts of us continue to run the show?
It’s a good question! You’re grown up! The emotional unsafety you faced as a child is passed. And yet, you might notice that the protective parts of you still seem to be driving the bus.
There’s a reason for that too, and it goes something like this.
When a protective part steps in to get us through a rough patch, another, more vulnerable part takes on the burden of that hurt. And because hurting is uncomfortable, rather than making the space to tend and befriend those feelings, we tend to shut them away. Like children, tucked away in secret corners of our psyches, those exiled feelings live a shadowy existence. Beyond the reach of conscious awareness, those young parts with their hurt and unmet needs are the deep reason behind our unease, and our protective parts work overtime to protect them.
Fortunately, it is possible to shift these dynamics!
IFS offers a pathway by which to get to know all the different parts of you, to tend to those wounded inner children, and recalibrate your inner system to experience so much more harmony and peace.
Because beyond these parts lies something else – something within you that, in spite of all you went through, could never be broken.
A key to healing
It’s been called by many names. Your higher self. Divine essence. The “you that is not a part”. In IFS, we call it “Self Energy.”
Self energy is the capacity for calm, care, curiosity, and other nurturing qualities that, in our best moments, we all have the potential to embody.
Sometimes you might feel very in touch with your Self Energy, and sometimes you might not feel it at all. That’s how it is for most of us. We move in and out of our capacity to self-regulate, and with that, our connection to our own Self Energy can seem to come and go.
But always, under everything, it is there. With practice, we can deepen our capacity to tap into it.
IFS provides the container to do this. In IFS, we work with the power of Self Energy to help the parts of you that need that help.
More about IFS
Internal Family Systems is a therapeutic healing modality created by the psychologist Dick Schwartz. Psychological research has proven its effectiveness, earning it the status of an evidence based therapy. As a spiritual counseling modality, IFS is accessible to persons of all faith traditions, as well as those who do not identify within a faith tradition.
As an IFS informed practitioner, I have completed 96 hours of training and supervision with IFSCA, supported by personal IFS therapy of my own. I further bring to this work seven years of training and experience as a spiritual counselor in the healing modalities of Depth Hypnosis and Applied Shamanic Counseling. For a more comprehensive description of my background and training, go here.
I might like to try this…
What’s my next step?
If you’d like to explore working together, don’t hesitate to reach out.
To see whether what I offer is a fit for you, I offer a free fifteen minute call.
I look forward to connecting with you!