Internal Family Systems Therapy, First Edition (The Guilford Family Therapy)

Product Information

This is a good intro and I'd want more guidance--which would likely have to come in practicums and actual application with real people to practice with. Almost like a textbook style of writing, but not too academic so that most people who aren't necessarily studying psychology or therapy can absorb the concepts. I'm still a little uncertain how to get in touch with my parts and how to label them and talk to them or have them show me who the managers, protectors, and exiles are. I have an idea of how to go about it, but it seems like I'm "doing it wrong." I think in another book there's a practice on how to find your parts. Still, I understand the value of Internal Family System’s Therapy and want to find a way to make it easy for my clients to swallow and digestible for myself. This is what I came up with. Materialism: Produced in part by the economic and physical hardships suffered by immigrants to the American continent, it is no doubt made worse by the routine, threatening cycles of financial boom and bust that typify capitalist economies.” pg. 241 We believe that the following legacy burdens are linked and have been particularly instrumental in shaping the nature of exiling in this county.

Internal Family Systems Model (IFS) is model of psychotherapy that conceptualizes human psychology as a system of “parts” that can have differing agendas, and which can compete for dominance within the psyche of an individual. If no parts are involved with the symptom, guide the client to ask if any part has information about the symptom. You can imagine that when these three classes of characters gets going, the person feels very divided. The morning after the formerly obese woman goes to the bar, there are a whole slew of managers getting into the act, reprimanding her for being such a slut. This threatens to let lose some other Exiles and then, more Firemen to keep them wrapped up and more managers to repair the damage made by the Firemen. Despite IFST's intended goal of letting the self lead, the therapist is, ultimately, the judge of who the true self is. They encourage a certain aspect of being to become the arbiter of psychic arrangement. The language in this book is telling; at times, it's written like a management book. The self is a leader who unites the squabbling neurotics under its employ, towards the betterment of the whole system. This leader is perfect in every way, able to discern with objectivity its wants, as well as the wants of its underlings. It is the knowing subject who will bring balance to the market. What if destructive parts actually intended to help? What if they didn’t like the extreme roles they had been forced into? What if all of us in the field of mental health were mistakenly encouraging vicious cycles within clients and families? What if, the more we lectured, drugged, and tried to banish or control parts like this one, the harder they would fight to protect our clients? Maybe we were scapegoating impulsive, compulsive parts just the way my early teachers—the acting-out adolescents on the inpatient unit in Chicago—had been scapegoated in their families. What if we could simply help these parts with their fears? Could they be liberated from extreme roles in the same way adolescents were liberated in family therapy? Could the inner world of parts reflect the outer world of families and vice versa?” pg. 14-15

Internal Family Systems Therapy books

The Identifying Managers and Firefighters Using IFS Therapy worksheet helps identify manager and firefighter parts using the senses and asking a series of questions, including: We use this tool to help people cultivate self-compassion by developing an appreciation for common humanity in a group setting. The All Parts Are Welcome exercise was created by Schwartz and his team to help the client welcome all parts of their self, using their attention and a few simple questions (Anderson et al., 2017). The Six Fs The leader these Parts need is the Self. The true, rational, inner consciousness. Think of the Self as flow, mindfulness, groundedness. Confidence, Curiosity, Compassion, Calm. You know it when you feel it! According to Schwartz (2021, p. 6), thinking involves parts “talking to each other and to you constantly about things you have to do or debating the best course of action, and so on.”

I selected a few of the best IFS therapy books below, from the most practical to the more advanced. The best IFS practical book IFS asserts that Exile, Manager, Firefighter, and Core Self parts compete for dominance within the individual, and behave similar to a family system, which as we all know, can be VERY unpleasant and dysfunctional at times. If your protector did step to the side, you probably noticed a big shift” (Schwartz, 2021, p. 130). Repeating the exercise can help clients learn about the parts that protect and how vulnerable they have previously been. Not only that, it enables clients to unburden trauma, access self-energy, and form deeply satisfying relationships with themselves and others.The What the Self Is and Isn’t in IFS Therapy worksheet explores the eight Cs, encourages the client to notice the quality in themselves, and asks what each means to them: IFS® is frequently used as an evidence-based psychotherapy, helping people heal by accessing and healing their protective and wounded inner parts. IFS® creates inner and outer connectedness by helping people first access their Self and, from that core, come to understand and heal their parts.

Despite these efforts, the youngest most vulnerable members of the inner family are powerfully affected by traumatic events. They feel injury, abandonment, and betrayal acutely. When the stimulus is intense enough, vulnerable parts freeze in time and experience a kind of endless Groundhog Day repetition of the trauma, complete with all of its sensations and feelings. By contrast, if the Self can stay embodied and offer immediate assistance, the system’s trust in Self-leadership increases, building inner strength and opposing tendencies to polarize, all of which helps injured parts avoid being exiled and instead stay in the stream of time.” pg. 150 Self Leadership is when the Core Self part is in charge. IFS (more or less) attempts to strengthen and empower the Core Self.Where as empathy involves feeling with another person, compassion involves feeling for another person, which motivates concern and the desire to help. While exploring compassion and empathy, neuroscientist Tania Singer made a surprising discovery. Having expected to find that these two emotions use the same neuropathway in the brain, they found instead that compassion uses reward circuitry whereas empathy (the experience of feeling with) uses pain circuitry. Although empathy can therefore overwhelm us with pain, a proportional dose enriches compassion. As a result, in IFS we don’t ask parts to stop feeling strongly, but we do ask them to separate enough so that they don’t overwhelm us with their strong feelings. When we are not able to attend to our exiles, we find it hard to tolerate the suffering of others. But when our exiles separate and communicate rather than overwhelm, the Self is present, protectors don’t get activated, and we have compassion for our own parts as well as for other people who are suffering.” pg. 53 A highly accessible introduction to a therapeutic approach that brings our inner “parts” into harmony and allows our core Self to lead