TRANSPERSONAL INTERNAL FAMILY SYSTEMS THERAPY (T-IFS)

A psycho-spiritual application of IFS to facilitate deep healing, harmony, embodiment, wholeness, mind-body-spirit integration and spiritual awakening.

“I’ve been working with Chris using IFS for a couple months. I have done all kinds of therapies in my life, but none has been as heart-centered as this. Identifying, communicating with and integrating these “parts” has been one of the most loving things I have done for myself. It is work finding these parts that are wounded, lonely, scared or angry. But it’s worth it. I feel more whole than ever. It has been such a self-love journey for me, finding these parts and giving them a new, safe, loving home. I highly recommend IFS, but I even more highly recommend Chris. He’s a compassionate and intuitive therapist who knows how to hold space for you when the work gets hard. As someone doing my best to walk a spiritual path, it’s a breath of fresh air to have someone to work with who is truly doing the same. I feel supported, heard and seen.” -S.B. Charlottesville, VA

[Personal Note: For good reason, IFS has become increasingly popular and adopted by all manner of helping professionals in recent years, especially since receiving a designation as an ‘evidence based’ therapy in 2014. As demand increases, concerns about quality control have been raised by some in the formal IFS community. In light of this, let me be clear that I’m an IFS-informed (heavily informed, bordering on obsessed) enthusiast and practitioner, but not a formally trained or ‘Certified IFS Therapist.’ Backstory: I resonated immediately with the groundbreaking premise of the model around 2006. For the longest time training in IFS wasn’t available online or anywhere near my area (nor could I have afforded the cost plus travel back then). I continued studying and applying it on my own through trial and error, dipping in and out of it as therapists often do with radically new approaches. Over the years I’ve watched the model mature and be expanded upon in creative and innovative ways. Even the formerly ignored or closeted spiritual aspects of what the model facilitates as a kind of ‘portal to the mystical’ is being embraced by the IFS community—a reflection of the consciousness shift at large. Inspired, I’ve been developing my style of incorporating it in accord with my evolving clinical and psycho-spiritual interests over time. IFS is increasingly relevant today due to the broader cultural acceptance of its paradigm-shifting core assumption about the natural multiplicity of the psyche/personality. Anyway, to date I’ve attended two live IFS workshops led by the founder, completed numerous master classes on IFS-related concepts and plan to continue doing so as a lifelong student of IFS, psychological and spiritual growth in general. I collect nearly every IFS-themed book published and work with my own parts in and out of personal therapy. Certified IFS therapists see me for therapy and I provide consultation and supervision to IFS enthusiastic therapists. All this to say, while I respect the training and certification pathway, for various reasons I feel the ship has sailed. I’m also not one to throw my hat in the ring of any institutionalized dominant paradigm anyway. If it’s important to you to have an IFS Institute-trained Certified IFS Therapist and/or someone who applies it ‘by the book,’ I may not be the best fit].

What Is Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy?

“To heal is to touch with love that which we previously touched with fear” —Stephen Levine

IFS is one of the fastest growing psychological models in the world. A revolutionary, comprehensive, intuitive, collaborative, non-pathologizing, inherently spiritual and shamanic-based therapy. Now nearly 40 years on IFS has organically evolved into a life/spiritual practice in its own right, and a global movement. In reframing difficult emotions, physical sensations, extreme reactions, beliefs, thoughts, impulses, and unsatisfying behavior or relational patterns as expressions of internal struggles between conflicting yet well-meaning parts of ourselves, IFS compassionately facilitates self-understanding and acceptance, wholeheartedness, healing and integration. The ultimate depth therapy, IFS allows us to safely reach the source of our problems—the most wounded nooks and crannies of our psyche—and heal the emotional burdens our parts carry with acceptance and love.

How Was IFS Developed?

IFS is the brainchild of Dr. Richard C. Schwartz, PhD. Originally trained as a family systems therapist in the 80’s while on the faculty of the psychiatry department of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Dr. Schwartz started out with a passion for traditional structural family therapy. But his confidence in the family dynamic-focused approach dissolved when an outcome study on families with bulimic members showed his efforts were not producing long-term gains.

Little did he know how invaluable the systems perspective would be to what he would go on to discover.

With curiosity and a passionate desire to ‘crack the code,’ Dr. Schwartz began by simply listening differently. His clients at the time, particular those with severe disordered eating patterns began talking about the different warring parts of themselves. As if they were autonomous, discrete personalities or voices. Some were desperate for change. Others were highly critical. There were parts that seemed invested in maintaining the problem behavior. And young, vulnerable parts seemingly stuck in the past carrying the brunt of old pain, and so on.

Dr. Schwartz soon realized that his eating disordered clients had highly complex and conflicted internal systems and arrived at a hunch that, just like family members, each inner part may have a perspective; a story to tell. Likewise, each part appeared to have been cast into specific roles, performing unique functions in the inner system.

From there Dr. Schwartz began encouraging his clients to compassionately turn toward these parts with this same curiosity he himself embodied. To be with, speak to, and eventually for their parts.

Dr. Schwartz next noticed that even in those seemingly drowning in a cacophony of extreme parts, there was always an accessible, infinitely whole, undamaged essence within.

Referring to this healing essence as Self (aka Larger Self), he sensed that this core quality was not unlike what various spiritual traditions refer to as the untarnished soul, the seat of consciousness, or sundry other names. Albert Schweitzer famously called it ‘the doctor who resides within.’ Carl Jung initially referred to it as the ‘transcendent function,’ then the ‘God within us,’ and later, ‘the two-million-year-old man that is in all of us.’

The Self in IFS is the most authentic essence of who we are as spiritual beings. From an Indigenous spirituality perspective, the it’s who we really are, in wholeness and beauty, in oneness with Life itself.

Through a modern lens, the Self is who we would find if the five primary emotions of joy, anger, sadness, disgust and fear in the Pixar move Inside Out were to leave the control room!

Most importantly, Dr. Schwartz soon discovered that more than the therapist or any therapy technique, this Self was the true source of healing power and potential. This was the inception of IFS.

“I am large, I contain multitudes”

As he ventured on, Dr. Schwartz became aware that there was broad precedent for his findings. Earlier theorists like Carl Jung and Heinz Kohut, and psychological systems like Psychosynthesis, Psychodrama, Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Ego-State Therapy, Schema Therapy all worked with the idea of the psyche as plural.

Noted poets (Rilke, Walt Whitman, quoted above), philosophers (Nietzsche, Plato, Socrates), literary writers (Robert Lewis Stevenson, Hesse, Melville, Pessoa) religions (Islam, Hinduism), shamanism (‘Polypsychism’—a term actually coined by a French hypnotist named Joseph Pieree Durand de Gros), eastern spiritual concepts (I AM Presence, Rigpa, Atman, etc) theosophists and related esoteric teachers (Djwal Khul, Blavastsky, W.D. Yeats, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) and even modern anthropologists (Tanya Luhrmann) have all embraced the idea of a polycentric, non-unitary relational mind, or multiplicity of mind perspective—if not also the existence of an infinite, eternal, undamaged essence within.

There’s also remarkable agreement among scientists in the fields of modern neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology, cognitive and evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, and complexity theory (i.e. chaos theory) that the mind is naturally multiple. Yet this was a radical, countercultural notion when IFS emerged. As such, it received much resistance from the medical model-oriented psychological community, on steeped in pathologizing just about every aspect of human behavior. The subjective experience of many autonomous inner personalities was especially branded pathological, hence the psychiatric creation of Multiple Personality Disorder (now Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID).

In ‘Many Minds, One Self,’ author Robert Falconer notes: “While this view [DID] accurately reports one way in which parts reorganize after chronic trauma, it unfortunately pathologized multiplicity. The existence of parts became framed as a mental disorder. So if anyone noticed their parts, they feared they were crazy and kept it a secret.”

One thing I love about the IFS perspective is that we can take this or any other diagnosis in the DSM (psychiatric manual of ‘mental disorders’) and provide an alternative, non-pathologizing view of that condition, based simply on which parts dominate the system of the person. This echoes Dr. Dan Siegal’s view that each psychiatric diagnosis can be seen as examples of too much rigidity, too much chaos, or both.

What was not sufficiently understood when IFS began, and still isn’t wholly accepted, is that by all accounts psychic multiplicity appears to be our natural state. And the psyche’s further splitting off into separate, distinct ‘subpersonalities’ (term coined by Roberto Assagioli) appears to be a response to the slings and arrows of life; both acute and complex trauma. The more extreme or prolonged, the more fragmentation. And the more extreme and polarized (at odds) into various protective roles our parts become, is what Dr. Schwartz uniquely realized.

When the mind is seen as naturally multiple, there’s nothing ‘pathological’ about it. Differing mental and emotional states can be seen not as ABERRATION, or ‘mental disorder,’ but an adaptive attempt on the part of the psyche to divide the labor; to maintain cohesion, security, and balance.

This radical premise has been “a hard sell,” as Dr. Schwartz has said. But nearly 40 years on, there’s an increasing acceptance of the idea and the model. Some of the worlds leading trauma experts (Bessel Van Der Kolk, and others) have endorsed and embraced IFS as truly revolutionary.

Ultimately, the profound healing so many have experienced speaks for itself.

intuitive model, UNIVERsAL APPLICATION

“When you say, ‘A part of me feels that…’ you have already embraced the basic idea of IFS, whether you’re aware of it or not.”

-Jon Schwartz and Bill Brennan

Consider how you talk to yourself and others during hard times, or where you feel conflicted or confused. Ever find yourself saying or even just thinking: “Part of me feels like ____, but another part feels ____?” This is natural as we’re all intuitively aware of being a complex sum of parts. As this is the very foundation of IFS, virtually anyone can easily grasp the basis of the approach. Even young children instinctively get that they have different parts!

For those of us having experienced any sort of trauma, attachment wounds, major losses, sudden painful changes, core shame, anxiety, chronic or recurring pain, health problems slow to respond to medical treatment, or persistent inadequacies, addictive tendencies, and other unwanted emotional and relational patterns, IFS allows us to access and help the parts carrying these wounds, to learn to trust our larger Self, and update their roles in the system.

As such, IFS has become a recognized trauma-informed, evidence-based therapy used by clinicians worldwide to resond to a variety of mental, emotional, and relational blocks, patterns and challenges.

But IFS is not a static therapy. An ever-evolving model, IFS is being expanded upon in new and creative ways all the time, including therapeutic facilitation of psychedelic medicine research and the integration process in psychedelic-assisted therapy. As the multiplicity paradigm concept has gained acceptance, IFS has transformed from therapeutic approach to a life and spiritual practice all its own. Because it does far more than just address symptoms. IFS promotes the deepest healing, wholeness, integration, connectedness and expansion on every level of experience—cognitive, somatic, emotional, physiological, neuropsychological, relational, and spiritual.

How Does ifs Work?

There’s an old saying: “No one arrives at adulthood completely whole.” This acknowledges that we all experience distress early on that has the potential to fragment our inner system.

By now you’re probably understanding that IFS is founded on this implicit assumption that such fragmentations become parts that take on critical roles and functions in our psyche.

Some of these parts are our front line protectors (called ‘managers’ in IFS). They’re proactive in their efforts to protect both the Self, and our younger, more vulnerable parts. These young, vulnerable, sensitive parts who hold our deepest pain are referred to as ‘exiles.’ These are the parts of us who felt rejected, shamed, exploited, scapegoated, misunderstood, abused or abandoned in external relationships earlier in life. They typically carry loneliness and worthlessness, and a longing to be retrieved. When these parts are successfully witnessed, understood, validated and loved (by the Self), they can quickly go from believing I am bad (unlovable, defective, etc) to understanding that something bad happened to me.

Other parts (‘firefighters’) are our reactive protectors. Their job is to initiate immediate, often extreme action (dissociating/numbing-out, raging, food binging, inebriation, self-harm, etc) when the pain of our younger parts threaten to overwhelm protectors and the entire system. In contradistinction to protectors who try to shut out exiled parts, reactive firefighters quickly find something to calm, appease, and distract. As a result, protectors and firefighters are strange, uncomfortable bedfellows often in conflict with one another (what in IFS we call ‘polarizations’).

IFS makes loving space for all of this, guiding us in safely turning toward our parts from a stance of curiosity and compassion.

In the view of IFS, our Self—the ever-present, infinitely whole, undamaged healing essence within us —is a fundamentally calm and wise state where there is no urgency or no agenda (such as to ‘fix’ or ‘change’) apart from calmly facilitating healing and wholeness within the system.

Self is marked further by profound sense of ‘okayness' where everything just is, an understanding that nothing's really created or destroyed, and this vast unfolding, a surrender to something larger than ourselves. An expansive sensation of feeling interconnected with everything, often described as a profound sense of love or connection to The All. This is Self-Energy; a state also marked by the felt-presence of the following qualities, known in IFS as the “8C’s”:

• Calmness

• Curiosity

• Compassion

• Creativity

• Connectedness

• Clarity

• Courage

• Confidence

Through a mindful inquiry guided by a therapist working from their own Self, and embodying the “5P’s” (Presence, Patience, Persistence, Playfulness, Perspective), a traditional IFS session begins by focusing attention inward to look for what we call trailheads. These can be somatic sensations, feelings, impulses, emotional ‘hot spots’ in or around the body, images or memories in the mind’s eye—all potential signals of a part or parts of us in distress and ready to engage.

Often what we access first are our protective parts. And we’re wise to get to know them, because they’ve worked hard to shield the Self from the pain of our young, vulnerable parts. Protectors are usually proud of their jobs, but often feel unrecognized, and express being exhausted. IFS teaches us to show them genuine appreciation and encourage trusting the Self. This can take time, so we move at their pace.

But once protectors get a sense of and learn to trust the Self to lead, they more easily step back and let the Self meet with our young, vulnerable parts with love and healing energy. This is a big part of IFS—accessing, working with, and ultimately relieving our young, vulnerable parts of the wounds and extreme beliefs they’ve carried (referred to collectively as ‘burdens’).

The unburdening process is a beautiful, shamanic-inspired process— akin to ‘ceremony’— of unloading the burdens to one of the elements—light, air, water, fire, earth.

We can then retrieve exiled parts from the past and bring them into the now-time present to be with the Self. They can then invite in new qualities and new roles to play. Often these are the things children typically want to feel and do (joy, playfulness, creativity, etc) but couldn’t due to being stuck and burdened by the wounds of the past. Once their protectors see this was successful, they also typically want to unburden and move out of their old jobs as well.

Ultimately, all parts of us will gratefully choose or return to preferred roles once they find that doing so is safe.

Through IFS, as we heal our parts, we embody more of the capacities of Self, gain increasing access to what we call Self-Energy (akin to prana or qi in eastern traditions) and naturally move in the direction of the 8C’s, increasing peace, expansiveness, wholeness, fulfillment, and the capacity to just be.

How Is IFS Different From Other Therapeutic Models?

Unlike other therapeutic or even spiritual approaches, IFS doesn’t aspire to ‘fix,’ ‘get rid of,’ ‘transcend,’ ‘reject,’ or forcefully change anything. It also doesn’t demonize thoughts, perceptions, emotions or behavior, or negatively label, pathologize, or suppress symptoms. And it does not share the still popular spiritual view of the ego as an inherently sabotaging, destructive force, or a ‘monstrous parasite,’ as one revered spiritual teacher espouses.

IFS compassionately and wisely reframes the ego as a collection of protective parts, which like all parts, have inherent value and positive underlying intent. These parts work hard to help us make it in the world and therefore deserve our compassion, not disdain. Ironically, once they receive our recognition and compassion, the ‘tyranny of the ego’ usually relaxes. These parts then no longer sabotage, or seem like the enemy.

in seeing all parts as fundamentally valuable and resourceful, the IFS rallying cry is “all parts are welcome.’ that includes the seemingly destructive ones— for they too have value— a function they believe they must perform for us. and as always, positive underlying intent.

As the title of Dr. Schwartz’ latest book boldly asserts, there are “No Bad Parts.”

No other approach I know of takes this fundamentally life-affirming, compassionate and loving stance toward our psyche, coupled with the capacity to facilitate healing, wholeness, and transformation on the deepest level. And no other approach is as effective at guiding us in how to accesses and cultivate the qualities of the Larger Self quite like IFS.

Intuively-Guided, Transpersonal IFS

My conventional graduate education grounded me in the fundamentals of human development, and a variety of psychotherapeutic schools of thought. I’m grateful for that, for my years in clinics and counseling centers, and the nearly 20 years spent doing therapy in more or less traditional ways. Yet, I knew early on that there had to be more holistic, integrative and innovative ways of understanding and working with people on the mind, body and spirit/soul level, beyond the constraints of standard talk, cognitive, or intellectual analytic therapy.

When I stumbled upon IFS around 2006, though I circled around it for some time, I was immediately hooked by its revolutionary premise and commonalities with the essence of many ancient spiritual, esoteric, wisdom, and philosophical and traditions.

In fact, I see IFS as heir to a multi thousand-year spiritual tradition represented by shamanism, Christianity, Judaism, Taoism, Buddhism, Perennial Philosophy, gnostic, esoteric and mystery school knowledge.

As such, in addition to other ‘outside the box’ methods, I’ve been honing my proficiency at IFS over time, watching it grow and evolve into the life practice and psychospiritual pathway I always felt it was at heart. And as a universally applicable, intuitive, evidence-based, trauma-informed model, IFS is highly complementary with other methods.

Since my other approaches aim to similarly unify the unconscious or dissociated parts of us, IFS can be applied interchangeably along with my Integrative Counseling, my Subconscious Heal and Release® energy psychology-based method, my Support for Extraordinary Experience® and my 100% Spirit-Guided Multidimensional Divine Light Transmission (MDLT) Spirit Healing offering.

calling in/upon spirit

Mirroring my own spiritual and professional growth processes, my experience of IFS has expanded headlong into the esoteric, mystical and transpersonal (‘Beyond the Self’), supercharging the IFS experience for myself and my clients. In utilizing both my own higher guidance (claircognizance/clairsentience/clairgnosis) to guide me in what’s what, in discernment along crucial ‘choice points,’ and in connecting to the higher realms/collective consciousness each day and during my sessions, my Transpersonal-IFS work has taken on a unique life of its own.

at times, my ‘Outside the Box’ ifs approach acts as a gateway; a portal to a more expansive, multidimensional, spiritually beneficial experience for my clients.

By simply taking a few breaths and entering into a calm state of mindful awareness—the imaginal-but-real shamanic-like inner realms—we set the stage by establishing sacred space and formally, reverently inviting in/calling upon (invoking) the Divine/Godhead; Supreme Beings/Highest and Holiest emissaries—the Holy/Illumined Ones, masters, saints, sages, angels, seraphim, archangels, spirit guides, ancestors, departed loves ones, elementals, shamanic spirit/power/totem animals, etc. We simply request their presence and guidance in any way that’s in the highest good. This often results in spontaneous, sometimes mid-session appearances of Higher Sources who come to lend energy, hold space, or even directly assist in ceremonial unburdening and retreival of young exiled parts into the present. And more. Much more sometimes.

Yes, this is direct contact with the vast array of help in the invisible/non-material world. Help that’s always available to us…for the asking. [Ask-Believe-Receive].

As such, many of my clients are receiving direct assistance from Inner Spirit Helpers (ISH), spirit guides, and various emissaries of the divine realms, as well as after-death contact (ADC’s) with crossed-over loved ones, ancestors, even higher self to higher self contact with living ‘twin souls.’

If that’s not non-ordinary enough for you…

Occasionally, we also encounter what IFS calls unattached burdens. These are foreign energies that are not an organic part of us, nor are they generational/ancestral (i.e. legacy burdens in IFS). They’re more like free-floating burdens—akin to what in shamanic and some spiritual circles might be considered entities, tricksters, egregores, earthbound discarnate souls, or lower astral-based gobbledygook :>

One theory is that these energies find an opening during times of acute trauma, profound loneliness/disconnection, dark spells, hospital surgeries, or near-death experiences (NDEs). According to lead IFS trainer and specialist in this phenomenon, Robert Falconer, author of The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession, they appear during extremely vulnerable times offering (the illusion of) power to the powerless. Or companionship in times of profound and prolonged loneliness or abandonment, especially in childhood. Some part of us (non-consciously) accepts the offer and grants entrance.

Here’s the good news: As long as we do not fear these things, they can do no harm. Because what we do not fear inside us, whether organic to us or not, has no power over us. In some cases, when they realize this, they release on their own, or become amenable to persuasion to do so.

Although my experience with IFS, higher guidance capacity, and my personal spiritual initiation odyssey combined equips me to effectively handle the unexpected and non-ordinary in therapy and beyond, I’m also incorporating some aspects of a shamanic spirit-release method called compassionate depossession to broaden my skill set in dealing with these ‘critters.’ If and when something like this is detected, we can also set up a dedicated Multidimensional Divine Light Transmission (MDLT) session to resolve it with the loving assistance of a Holy/Supreme Being or Ascended Master, (Mother Mary usually elects to do the heavy lifting in such cases). Her success rate to date is 100% at compassionately removing and sending on these foreign energies, with no fanfare, and no backlash.

I consider this the penultimate compassionate unburdening.

To receive Divine assistance in any form is miraculous. Expanding and accelerating the healing power and potential for my clients through my Transpersonal approach to IFS is a tremendously rewarding aspect of my work. 

Who knows where it will go from here? As long as the outcomes are positive, and brings about healing, I’m game.

Revolutionize your approach to HEALING

If you’re struggling with psychological pain, fear or shame--based patterns of thought and belief, emotional or spiritual disconnection, and/or the weight of collective/ancestral trauma—especially if the core concepts of the undamaged healing essence within, multiplicity of mind, and a compassionate, non-pathologizing approach to healing and wholeness resonates, my Transpersonal Internal Family Systems (T-IFS) Therapy approach might be worth considering.

Reach out now by calling (615) 430-2778 or by contacting me.

Feel Free To Reach Out Today

Phone: (615)-430-2778

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