TED talk on IFS

English captions available
A precise and honest introduction to IFS from the new French IFS trainer

Giving up hope for satisfaction outside yourself

 
‘Our life is always varying between happiness and unhappiness, or sometimes between relative happiness and relative unhappiness. It is shifting, changing, and we long for a bedrock of peace and stability. It is natural to do so, but most of us spend a lifetime seeking, seeking, seeking, for a bedrock we never find.
Can we find it? Yes—if we comprehend and deal with the problem involved. Until we do, we seek the bedrock outside of ourselves; we hunt with hope for the person or situation or belief system, which will supply us with that which we believe we lack. The illusions of romantic love, of the perfect (and nonexistent life) work or partner (or home or living situation) all beckon to us like the Sirens to Odysseus.
If we don’t understand, time after time our little ship will be shattered on hidden rock. But the other side of such disasters is the dawning recognition that each rough episode in life can be our true teacher; each difficulty is, as one sutra says, ‘the Buddha come to greet us.’
We slowly awaken to the knowledge that the spiritual bedrock we seek is not a life beyond disaster and pain, but the embracing of disaster and pain as they occur.
If we want a refreshing drink of water (of life), we cannot separate out the molecules that we think will be pleasing and tasty for us. If we do (or could) we would not be drinking water but a monstrosity of our own creation.
Similarly, if we refuse the direct, and sometimes painful, experience of this moment, we are left stewing around in our usual thinking muddle of blame, criticism, judgment, or avoidance.
To know the wholeness of life, we have to drink the whole glass of water; we have to experience the moment, as it is, not the distorted version of it that my mind can concoct.
Since the whole glass is nothing but the wholeness of each moment—unavoidable, ever present—when we are more willing to experience our fear and pain directly, the wholeness (bedrock) of our lives is revealed as the miracle it is.
Simple, yes. Easy, no. For most of us, this is practice for a lifetime. However, the bedrock (always there) is more and more known to us as being there. The good life.’  Joko Beck
 
‘The trapeze artist went on to say that the most important part of the trapeze action was something called the dead spot. The dead spot comes ‘at the end of the swing…when the swinging stops moving in one direction and starts moving in the other. Like when you’re highest on a playground swing. The whole idea is to use that change of momentum to create the trick. She explained that it is there, in that moment that the next trick is born.
 
The reporter noted that swinging on a trapeze is a lot like life – timing is all. But, as he also observed, ‘in life its hard to sit still and wait for the timing to reveal itself…life keeps moving and at predictable intervals there will be change. The pendulum will literally swing the other way. You can’t change that. You can only use it.
 
I like to expand the metaphor to include another aspect of trapeze swinging – the letting go between bars. I think of the dead spot as that place between swings, when the performer hangs at point zero before grabbing the next bar. It is the moment of nonaction and notknowing. The events of life offer all types of dead spots.
Our dead spots can take many forms. They can occur at the time of major events, like changing a relationship or profession. It can be the loss of a loved one or indecision over what action to take when faced with a job choice. Whatever it is, no matter how big or small, the dead spot appears when we cannot engage in our habitual way of holding and grasping for the bars, either because we are forced to let go or we wilfully launch ourselves into midair. Life pries our fingers loose and no matter how much we try to avoid it, we end up in the suspended moment, not knowing what comes next.
 
Our usual reaction to this type of situation is to grasp at whatever relief we can get. How we do this differs according to our systems of defence. For some it may be assuming the worse scenario. For others it may only be hoping for the best.
 
If approached with intelligence, the dead spot can be the key to understanding the reactionary behaviours spinning in the dream of self. We can learn how to work in that split second, when either there is no new bar for us to grasp or our usual favourites no longer work; we have the opportunity to know ourselves in a way that is open to whatever life brings our way.
 
When even for the briefest of moments we take pause in the dead spot, that moment of nonaction, before we react, we step through the door marked Enter Here and meet life just as it is, in just this moment. It is in the moment of Just This that the trapeze artist finds the most power and creativity. In Just This we meet the power and creativity to break away from our habitual thoughts, emotional matrix, body patterns, and energy that fuel and direct our reactions. So for example when someone insults us with practice can more quickly turn our awareness to our experience to thoughts like who does she think she is talking to ? We can breathe in the tightening in the shoulders and neck, the words wanting to form in outrage. Just this is exactly what the words suggest – there is only this right now. As one teacher has said, wherever you go, there you are. This is the core of our awareness practice – to challenge us to question our assumptions about what makes the world real to us.’ Diane Rizzetto

Inner Judge Speaks!

NHS recognises mindfulness is good for depression

 
(in the Guardian on the 26 Feb)
 
Mindfulness meditation has been shown to give patients control over their own depression and anxiety levels and levels of chronic pain, according to a paper published earlier this month in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Previous studies have found that mindfulness meditation can cut the recurrence of depression by 50%, and neuroimaging scans have shown significant positive change in brain activity of long-term meditators. But while scientists knew mindfulness was having an effect, they have not known how until now.
Catherine Kerr, lead author of the new study and director of translational neuroscience for the contemplative studies initiative at Brown University in Providence, in the US, says that when we are depressed, attention is “consumed by negative preoccupations, thoughts and worries”. Insteadnstead of disengaging and moving on, we find ourselves digging deeper into negative thought patterns.
Mindfulness gives patients control over this habitual chain via a “body scan” technique, where patients systematically engage and disengage with the sensations in each part of the body. As they do so, alpha rhythms, which organise the flow of sensory information in the brain, increase and decrease. Kerr describes this as a “sensory volume knob” and it is this flexible focusing skill which, the paper proposes, “regulates attention so that it does not become biased toward negative physical sensations and thoughts, as in depression”. Early Buddhists advanced a similar theory 2,500 years ago in a famous practice text called “Mindfulness of the body and breath”.
I came to mindfulness on a 10-day Buddhist meditation retreat in Thailand. Letting go of thought felt as impossible as tearing off a limb; particularly when the leg and back pains started from sitting cross-legged.
Years later, I came to see that it was unacknowledged emotions that gradually manifested as pain, on an emotional and sometimes physical level. Turning towards them, and accepting them fully, helped to resolve them.
Thankfully, the secular antidote that the NHS has rolled out is far easier than the one the Buddha taught. You don’t have to sit cross-legged, and the sessions, usually run by a clinical psychologist, take place once a week over a period of eight weeks.
Having recognised the health and cost benefits, some NHS trusts accept self-referrals, others accept referrals via GPs. The Mental Health Foundation, which has produced a list of some of the NHS-funded courses, estimates that as many as 30% of GPs now refer patients to mindfulness training.
However, these programmes are often bundled under “talking therapies” treatment, such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which is misleading since talking is exactly what mindfulness practitioners aren’t doing.

Bipolar and Internal Family Sytems therapy

Check out Peter Gerlach’s video on how to treat bipolar disorder with psychotherapy based on internal family systems.

freeing the mind itself

The mind, or the natural you cannot actually be split. As a zen poem says:
Like a sword that cuts, but cannot cut itself;
Like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself.
The illusion of the split comes from the mind’s attempt to be both itself and its idea of itself, from a fatal confusion of the map with the territory. To make an end of the illusion, the mind must stop trying to act upon itself, upon its stream of experiences, from the standpoint of the idea of itself which we call the ego. This is expressed in another Zen poem:
Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
What I do is help you see the ideas you have mistaken yourself for – as you see them rather than be them, you can make a relationship with them. If you’re not a Zen master they have a life of their own.

Zen and the Art of Psychotherapy

Sitting – recognising bare attention. It lights up. (Samadhi is prajna).
Asking, who – not so much to get an answer, but to cut off the possibility of getting lost in identity with passing thoughts.
Tung- Shan says
“Just avoid seeking from others,
Or you will be estranged from yourself.
I now go on alone; I meet Him everywhere –
I am not it, but it is all of me.
One must understand this way
In order to unite with thusness”
 
The freedom of not taking thoughts – or any of the machinery of consciousness – not to be self – is the doorway to being at large.
 
 
 

Healing …

To the degree that struggle and tension exist in a personality, the various aspects of
consciousness will be at odds with one another. You who are unaware of the meaning of the
struggle are trying to identify with one or several of these aspects of consciousness without knowing
what the true self is, where it is located, or how it can be found in this maze of discord. You
wonder if you are your best qualities, or if you are your over-severe conscience which annihilates you
for your negative traits. Or are you perhaps the destructive demon within you? Which is your best
self? Is it your rage at the demon in you or your total negation of its existence? Whether individuals
know it or not, this inner struggle and search is ongoing, and the more conscious the struggle is, the
better. Any path of self-development must sooner or later come to terms with these questions —
with the deep problem of self-identity.
It is a human distortion to identify with any of the above-mentioned aspects. You are neither
your negative traits nor your self-punishing superimposed conscience, nor even your positive traits.
Even though you have managed to integrate the latter into the fullness of your being, this is not the
same as identifying with them. It is more accurate to say that you are that part of you which
managed this integration by determining, deciding, acting, thinking, and willing, so that you could
absorb into your self what was previously an appendage. Each aspect of consciousness possesses a
will of its own, as those of you who do the pathwork know. As long as you are blindly involved in
the struggle and therefore submerged in it, each of these various aspects will control you in turn
because the real self that could determine your identification differently has not yet found its power.
Your blind involvement enslaves you and inactivates your creative energy. This missing sense of self
leads to despair.

IFS in the news..

Internal family systems  (IFS)  (The Sunday Times  7/8/2011)
 
This fast-growing therapy sees the human psyche as organized into a collection of sub personalities or “parts”, like an internalized family. IFS groups these parts into types: managers, exiles and firefighters. Managers are protective and try to keep us functional and safe. Exiles are the vulnerable parts that have been “exiled” by managers. When a person has been hurt or shamed in the past, they will have parts that still carry these emotions. Managers want to keep these feelings out of consciousness, so they lock up exiles in “inner closets”. When managers fail  and one of the exiles is upset to the point that it may flood the person its extreme feelings, firefighters jump into action. Highly impulsive, they seek stimulation that will override the exile’s feelings – commonly bingeing on drugs or alcohol.
IFS also believes that everyone has a core self with leadership qualities such as perspective, confidence, compassion and acceptance. The therapists’ job is to help clients access this sense of self and to gain control over the reactions of their impulsive parts.
“Addiction represents a battle between firefighters and exiles”, says the psychologist Stephanie Moorsom. “IFS draws a clients attention to the purpose their addiction is serving for their internal systems. Rather than being judged as bad, these ‘dangerous’ parts are conceptualized as attempting, however misguidedly, to protect a person. If they are treated with respect and compassion, these extreme aspects of our personalities can drop their destructive masks and become life-affirming instead.”

IFS takes off..

IFS seems to be expanding now, lots of practitioners and trainings and a certain “hey this works” buzz gathering around it. I can’t remember how I heard about it, but I’m very glad I did. I’ve always been interested in therapies which employ the concept of “parts”, “subpersonalities”,
“ego states”, but have never felt I got beyond a certain point with the concept. IFS has, so far, proven to be the missing key I needed. It takes parts therapy past anything else I’ve tried for dynamic psychological self discovery and healing.
Jay Earley’s book is for the beginner who wants to practice IFS, including completely alone, which is highly feasible. As such it goes slowly, explains carefully, and contains a lot of encouragement for the initially unsure. It is however far from lacking in experienced wisdom, and I will testify you can do wonderful stuff with it and nothing else.
The system is incredibly user-friendly but it’s also extremely deep. It gets you right inside the issues and, unlike so many of the more cognitively-based therapies that are popular now, it really does surprise. You know you are dealing with the real stuff of the psyche — the sudden shifts, the realizations, the sheer off-the-cuff creativity, the insights given by each part painting a truly personal and dynamic picture, yet fully in control. I soon realized that I had been attempting to do similar things to this many times before, and that when I had succeeded in healing trauma in myself, the method had been similar to this, but lacking the overall concept. Yes, I really would say IFS has managed to come up with the right systems-based, loose-but-accurate formula to induce such experiences deliberately, yet organically, without any hint of being mechanical or stiff. Something I particularly appreciate is the complete lack of any *combat*. You never *overcome* resistance — you *honour* it. (None of this ‘breaking down the ego’ crap.)
The main thing about IFS is that it works, and works by honouring systemic processes and knowing just what to do with them, after having plainly worked very hard to arrive at this ingenious and soulful understanding. I really do recommend it to anyone who wants to work on themselves in a deep yet safe manner, because I think you’ll find it effective, and fascinating. This excellent book will form a great gateway. I have never been more impressed with any therapy system. –  Jason Wingate