CHAPTER TEN
The Laws of Inner Physics
A Beautiful Mind—a movie about the famous
mathematician John Nash—begins with the
viewer not understanding that everything they’re seeing is
through the eyes of a paranoid part of the main character. It’s a
wonderful example of what people experience when protectors
thoroughly blend.
CHAPTER SIX
Healing and Transformation
What do we mean by healing and
transformation in IFS? As I stated earlier, our
culture (in general) and psychotherapy (specifically) have
made the terrible mistake of assuming that parts are the way
they seem.
Closing Thoughts
Your inner world is real. Parts are not imaginary
products or symbols of your psyche; nor are they
simply metaphors of deeper meaning. They are inner beings
who exist in inner families or societies, and what happens in
those inner realms makes a big difference in how you feel and
live your life.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Vision and Purpose
Generally speaking, as you get more access to Self
and become more Self-led, you also attain more
clarity about the vision you have for your life, which means
that your priorities may be quite different than they were when
your protectors were in charge. When we have lots of exiles,
our protectors have no choice but to be egotistic, hedonistic, or
dissociative.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Self in Action
By now you hopefully have a clear idea what the
Self is and what it means to be Self-led. In this
chapter, I want to take a closer look at how achieving Self-
leadership affects your life both inside and outside.
Developmental psychology and attachment theory have helped
us understand what children need from their caretakers as they
develop.
CHAPTER NINE
Life Lessons and Tor-Mentors
We are here to learn a particular set of life
lessons, and the lesson plan is already within
us. Each of us carries legacy burdens inherited from our
families and cultures, and each of us also accrues plenty of
personal burdens along the way. So our lesson plan begins
with unloading those burdens, and that sets the stage for the
most important lesson of all—finding out who we really are.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Embodiment
When your parts start to trust your Self, they
open more space for you to be in your body.
When that’s the case, you feel sensations and emotions more
and, consequently, you become increasingly interested in
keeping your body grounded and healthy. With this enhanced
sensitivity to your body’s feedback comes increased
knowledge about what foods or activities are beneficial and
which can be damaging. This leads to corresponding changes
in your behavior.
CHAPTER TWO
Why Parts Blend
In IFS, we use the term blended to describe the
phenomenon in which a part merges its perspective,
emotion, beliefs, and impulses with your Self. When that
happens, the qualities of your Self are obscured and seem to be
replaced by those of the part.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mapping Our Inner Systems
Now that you have several practices under your
belt and understand more about systems and the
paradigm shift we’re after here, I want to get into some of the
ways parts organize themselves and relate with each other
inside. I’ve already introduced the primary distinction between
exiles and protectors. Let’s look a little more into what those
parts are like.
CHAPTER FOUR
More on Systems
You may have noticed that as we proceed through
the book, we’re focusing less on each individual
part and more on their relationships with one another. I feel
blessed that when I first encountered the parts in my clients, I
was steeped in what’s called systems thinking, and that helped
me listen to them better, rather than being overwhelmed with
the complexity of it all.
CHAPTER THREE
This Changes Everything
In Christianity, the definition of sin is anything that
disconnects you from God and takes you off your path.
Burdens disconnect Self from parts and give them extreme
impulses. Burdened parts either don’t experience Self at all or
don’t listen to Self. So when parts are unburdened, it’s not
only that they immediately transform, but they also now have
much more connection to and trust for Self, which is the
second goal of IFS.
CHAPTER ONE
We’re All Multiple
We were all raised in what I’ll call the mono-
mind belief system—the idea that you have
one mind, out of which different thoughts and emotions and
impulses and urges emanate.
Introduction
As a psychotherapist, I’ve worked with many
people who came to me shortly after their lives
had crashed