Imagine yourself just being born. I mean just being born. And if you are not able to imagine you as a newborn, imagine another baby who has just been born.
What do you think of that baby?
Perfect? Unblemished? Untarnished? Intact?
When we use the IFS model and we think of individuals, we believe that every individual has that intact and unharmed part within us all. The IFS model calls this part within us all our “Self Energy” which has the following qualities: confidence, compassion, curiosity, calmness, creativity, clarity, connectedness, and courage. Sometimes I call it my “Wise Self”. Other people call it their “Adult Self”, or, as Tony Robbins calls it “The Power Within.”
Our Self Energy is always there, no matter what we’ve been through, but it can be clouded over by experiences that generate different thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, and feelings (in IFS, we call these “parts”).
In IFS, the therapist is a bit like a guide who helps the client be more in their Self Energy. The work can entail healing, unburdening, and transforming different parts. In IFS, the goal is for Self Energy to be a resource for the different parts and the different parts be a resource for the Self Energy.
I have found this work to be powerful and extremely useful, both personally and professionally. The model helps us access our strength within and get to understand ourselves better.
Here’s a guided meditation by Dick Schwartz, the founder of IFS, to give you a bit of a sense of IFS. This guided meditation, taken from the “IFS and Trauma” video series (available at www.IFSCA.ca) invites you to get to know a protective part of your system. It may be best listened to with eyes closed. There is no sound when he is not speaking.
