Parts Therapy Saturday IFS Call

Hi, all. This Saturday, there will be another in the series of phone (or skype) call ins to discuss TMS in relation to Internal Family Systems self-therapy. Anyone who would like to join us is welcome. We always have a topic prepared but will put it on hold if you have something you'd like to discuss.

Never recorded and use any name you like for complete privacy and security. THIS CALL IS FOR YOU!

If you are in the US or Canada phone or Skype (201) 479-4595 and when prompted enter meeting number, 18311499, followed by the # key.

If you are in the UK phone or Skype 2081969800 and when prompted enter meeting number, 18311499, followed by the # key.

Other nations can find connection numbers here.

 

Hi njoy,
I thought yesterday was Saturday and I missed the call (friends invited me over). I just noticed (my son should be back Sunday) that today is Saturday and not Sunday. 2014 really confused me!
Leonor

 

I am always like that at the beginning of a new year! We missed you but we had a good time. anyway. I hope you will be able to call in soon or post. Practically everyone has a few Inner Critics and we are always interested in hearing how other people are trying to cope with theirs.

 

I enjoyed the call-in yesterday and learning about IFS and Parts Therapy, and hearing Matthew's story.
How when he had problems with his girlfriend, but apologized, his pain went away.
Forgiveness, apology, reconciliation have been working great for me in TMS healing.
Few things can make us feel better than making up with someone we've been distanced from.

My mother always said, "Never let the sun set on an argument."
She was right, even though she didn't practice that with her sisters.
A case of motherly "Do as I say, not as I do." haha

 

It was good to have you there, Walt. I thought that was fascinating, as well. He looked up his symptom in Louise Hay's book You Can Heal Your Life and read her suggestions about the emotions that might be involved. He corrected the situation and the pain disappeared!

A bit far out there for me. Still, my rule is "if it works, take a deeper look".

I have the book so I looked up type II diabetes which appeared very suddenly for me in the mid-1990s. Louise says this may be the result of life having lost its sweetness. Well, it's true that was a very bitter time for me. Usually I would have reacted with plenty of sweet revenge but decided not to because of certain circumstances. The bitterness of those days is, for sure, still inside me.

Doesn't prove anything, of course, but very interesting.

I'd better have a chat with some of my parts, eh? There is an Exile (wounded inner child part) that had a similar experience when my father suddenly stopped being interested in me when I was three or four. I had no idea what to do and life changed from sweet to something quite sad and bitter.

The incident in the 90s was different, of course, but had a similar meaning for me. Loss of something I thought I could trust and rely on. The drive for revenge was, perhaps, a Protector part helping me to feel less powerless. I knew revenge (actually, just making an issue of what happened, exposing it to the light of day) would make me feel better! But I chose not be go there based on another another part's opinion that exposure was not permissible.

Wow. I just realized that the other part wasn't me. It was someone I trusted, a third party to all this, whose advice I took. So the feeling of betrayal goes even deeper. The organization betrayed my trust, my friend's advice felt like a betrayal at the time, I betrayed myself when I rejected my "revenge" protector's solution in favor of a part of me that, perhaps too quickly, accepted my friend's advice and I probably betrayed wiser solutions that I just wasn't ready for.

Now, with IFS process, I could put faces and/or names on all these concerned parts and probably discover more! I definitely had an impulse to forgive and let go of anger but that got betrayed when the bitter, "life is not sweet" part took control.

Now, I (real Self, caring, calm, compassionate, curious) can call a meeting. All my parts, including my friend's part that gave me the advice, are invited. Maybe I could even include the parts of the organization that felt it needed to cover up what happened. Why the heck not? This would work because what we think we see in others is really just a part of our own self!

I have always had a chaotic mind and as I get to know what's going on, I'm less and less surprised that my parts sometimes panic and take over. It's like a pack of dogs in there! If there's no leader, they feel they must fight with each other to restore some kind of order. Real Self is just performing the function that Cesar Milan teaches to human owners: be the pack leader.

To put it another way: real Self needs to become aware-of-itself so it can rise to the challenges of leadership in the otherwise chaotic inner family system.

 

I have the Hay book and need to read it all. I read a little of it, but got sidetracked with other books.
But forgiving has always been a part of my life. If we expect to be forgiven, by others and God
as well as by ourselves, we have to be willing to forgive those who "trespass against us."

I'm the pack leader in my house, but my darling dog doesn't mind.
She knows it's her house, anyway, and she lets me live in it with her.

 

I've never been able to figure out exactly what forgiveness means. There are so many ways to look at it, both psychologically and from a religious perspective. There's a good article on that, here. My problem seems to be deciding whether I have a responsibility to "let it go" for the greater good OR "do something about it" for the same reason! If it's just me, that's one thing. But if the same thing is clearly going to happen to others, doesn't that change the situation?

It's good to hear that you and your doggy have sorted out the power issues at your house. My husband and I both feel the other gets his/her way about 80% of the time. Not quite "fair" but we can live with it.