142. A Kinder Way to Understand Ourselves with Amy Decker

We have not had a guest talk about internal family systems before.

No.

And I think it would be of great use if you could give us a bit of an overview.

And for those of you who have been on retreat with us, with me and Amy, like, you know how that works.

You've done a group sessions retreat before.

And so I wonder if you would share the overview of internal family systems.

If somebody is listening, how they can take something away and use it in their lives today even.

Oh, gosh.

You know, with 30 years of doing this work, it really is my favorite modality, working with individuals.

So I'm so grateful to Dick Sports and the whole IFS Institute and community of facilitators and trainers that continue to just bring this forward and bring this forward.

I remember, you know, Dick has worked this program for over 30 years.

It's been a real labor of love because it certainly wasn't easy for him.

But the premise of IFS is we all have that place in our center and whatever people want to call that, that core self, that center, that spirit, soul, shakti, dao, like that place in us that is the essence of our being.

And IFS, they call that self.

And so the awareness of the self and then the acknowledgement of our experience through our life and the conditioning and consequences that that causes, that affects.

So we have one self and we have many parts.

And the easiest way, well, the way I explain it to my clients is parts help us.

All parts have good intention for us.

and different ages and stages of parts.

And when we work with ourselves in that way of recognizing the essence of our being as self and acknowledging the many parts of us that are holding gifts, talents, traumas, conditioning, and working with that whole system in a kind and compassionate way.

To me, I've done a lot of training on self-compassion, but this model allows us to embody self-compassion And so when we work with this model, it is paying attention to the way that parts show up for us.

So parts can show up with memories of things or in or around our body and body sensations or feeling tones or images, lots of different ways that our parts connect with us or want to be seen and heard.

And when you think about that, of course, all parts want to be seen and heard.

But until we have a model like this to work from, we tend to be very dismissive of parts or judgmental of parts.

If we like a part, that's fine.