"Self has no power not granted by parts" - why I dont expect my clients to "be in Self"
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.พ. 2025
- In this video, I discuss potential issues with inviting clients to “be in Self” from the beginning of a session and share my experiences along with alternative approaches.
▬ Contents of this video ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
0:00 - Intro
0:10 - Why I don’t invite clients to be in Self Energy
0:55 - Problems it can bring inviting clients to be in Self
4:40 - Slowing down
5:10 - Unblending and Noticing
5:50 - When to bring the “feel towards”-question
7:07 - Inviting to be in Self Energy - for whom it might be helpful
▬ About Stephanie and Connection Heals ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
Stephanie Mitchell is a Certified Level 3 IFS Therapist working in private practice in Australia.
Stephanie is Level 3 trained IFS therapist, trainer, group therapist, and supervisor working in private practice. She specializes in working with complex trauma and has undertaken extensive training in the IFS model including 100+ hours with Richard Schwartz. She is passionate about understanding the nuance of IFS and bringing that to her practice and teachings.
▬ More ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
► Facebook: / stephaniemitchelltherapy
► TH-cam: / @connectionheals
► Instagram: / stephanie.ifslife
► LinkedIn: / stephanie-mitchell-ifs
► Website: www.stephaniem...
This is such an important point - and one that, IMO, is not discussed enough! I’m reminded of Pam Krause’s excellent discussion on “the weaponization of Self” on the IFS Talks podcast (highly recommend if you haven’t listened!). She talks about how we can get so hyper focused on “getting into and staying in Self” that it can become almost an ‘emotional bypass’ when we try to force parts away by constantly asking them to “step back” in a session. Anyway, thanks so much for sharing this - I always appreciate your insights!
Thanks Kcargen1
I have heard Pams podcast on IFS talks and Ive done her LA training on SLP. She is one of my greatest teachers and a role model of Self in our community. I LOVE her work
Im so happy to hear that my videos are helpful to you 💗
Thank you that resonates with a lot of my experience even with trauma therapists as well.
I agree with what was said - such an important point. And a bit of healing in itself. Thanks for this!
Hi, thank you so much for this video. I really love how you have helped to remove the hierarchy of parts vs self. & yes to so much love & respect to our parts, they have worked so hard, in such an hostile environment, endlessly misunderstood, their good intentions doubted, their work dismissed as laziness.
& thanks to my parts, who show up as the IFS Parts Players because we like to Play to Slay! Because writing that paragraph above is the message I needed to hear about how my family treated me, and how much pain it caused to not just be not seen, but my good turned to bad because I was surrounded by a lot of people with paranoid controlling diminishing parts. & then I see I did that to myself too, & I am so sorry & understand why it has been such a hard slog through life with such multi-level abandonment. Which is now being played out in a brutal family scapegoating of my adopted family while I also am dealing with my birth mother’s trauma - which is another strong tributary feeding into my river of self-abandonment.
Things have never been more apocalyptic & yet I am better with my own fine self than never before. I am overwhelmed & in functional freeze, yet also getting so free. I have always escaped into my imagination & have been using when I disassociate to also heal myself. I can’t wait until I feel safe, because the healing train left the station. There really can’t be rules
about healing ‘right’ other than if they are grounded in the Self-y iest Self, of I love you, I trust you.
Because the more I live the IFS life the more I just look for the softest, easiest, most harm-reduction way to connect with myself. Because I have that trust. I know that I will lose contact with that trust too, and am starting to be more relaxed even about that. Because of the way that I know I can time travel back & give myself comfort & really receive it, I feel like I don’t have to white knuckle my way through.
To find comfort & solace within is the bees knees & the most wonderous feeling, more expansive than I could ever have imagined, and yet often quite ordinary & prosaic.
Thanks again!
Beautifully said. Yes we trust and have connection in moments and it is lost in the next and we trust even that .... and what Im finding is that the more I heal the shorter the time in disconnection and more time in a beautiful communication and connection with my parts. Whether they feel happy, sad, angry, disillusioned, confused... they finally let me be with them much more quickly than they did in the past.
Its is so unbelievably profound. I never thought I would experience such deep groundedness and sense of safety in my own skin
Thankyou for the words you have shared 💝
Thank you for this very important point!
Thank you so much for sharing this 💯 true for me and this advice came at exactly the right time time too
Im so glad to hear this !
After 2.5 years of IFS I’m at the lowest point in my life because my parts would NOT allow enough self on a consistent enough basis to get to a place where parts trusted self… and thus it created a feedback loop of parts getting disappointed and frustrated. Now I’m blended 24/7 and constantly passively suicidal. Very disillusioned.
I understand that experience. I spoke to Dick about it in 2020 and he said "keep going it gets better"
It took my parts 5 years to trust my Self and I was fortunate to have a very experienced and Self led IFS Practitioner who knew I would get there eventually.
Personally I believe parts take us on the healing journey they want us to experience and for shame saturated systems like mine it got worse before it got better because my parts really wanted me to get how bad it was back then.
Im curious if you worked with an experienced and Self led IFS Practitioner in those 2.5 years?
My own healing has led me on a path of wanting to understand why its so difficult for some of us. My own experience and the reading Ive done tells me it is about shame and protectors who dont want us to know certain things because they believe the things we were told back then about our worthlessness etc.
I hope you find healing and your parts are able to be straight forward with you about why they need to keep you passively suicidal and what managers as well as fire fighters are part of that stuckness
In my journey, I find that many parts are done with having to be a certain way. I've been trying to be different for 58 years, and no more. Right now, I have a 13-year-old exile who freezes every time she thinks she has to do something. So, I solemnly swear every time before I go in that I am just going to sit with her. Also, I don't know who sits with her. Maybe it's Self, probably not, but that's not an issue, too. I just hang with her on her bed and watch her lighting candles and writing terrible poetry. And I don't mind if I have to do this for months because that's what she needs, and that is all that matters.
So, maybe you need some time off. Don't try to heal your parts for a while. Hopefully, you can find a loving and caring part that wants to act like an inner parent. That's enough because that's already a significant change for your system.
I wish you all the best from the Netherlands 🌷
@@carmenl163 I feel very moved by your committement to your parts, thank you for sharing!
This is true.
I didn't learn to start a session by looking for Self, did others?
@zanzabird7612 no I didn't either but people are coming to my trainings and supervision and are telling me they start sessions with a meditation to help access Self energy, or getting focused on making parts step back too quickly without listening to them adequately. This felt like an important thing to address as it is quite common in the IFS community now. There is so much blending of different models that people are losing the core of the model.
And a lot of folks are not doing their own IFS work so are not aware that their managers who want to feel like competent therapists are leading the push for the client to "be in Self"