I mentioned I had quite a few revelations last week want to hear what they were?
What a week. I thought I would share some of what happened so you could see the power of IFS
I’ve been working on my book. Although I should say I’ve been trying to work on my book. No matter my good intentions though, I always seemed to find ways and reasons to procrastinate. So i decided to explore why using IFS. I discovered two interesting things. One was that there was a part, a protector, that was afraid of being judged so it didn’t want me to get any closer to publishing my book because then people would read it and decide it was horrible and therefore I was horrible. This was a young part that was criticized harshly as a kid. What my “self” (the inner calm and compassionate me) had to do was remind it that we aren’t anywhere near that point yet AND that we’d done it before without harm. This was such a strongly injured part that a second protector was there to back up the procrastinator. It was the part
that dropped a heavy fog of sleepiness over me trying to prevent me from either recognizing the issue or relieving the wounded parts pain. After working with these parts I spent the entire day yesterday working on the book. That was the first time I’ve ever been that productive.
An even more significant discovery was that there is a little boy (parts don’t have to be the same gender as you) who would give me daily headaches every time something good happened. It turns out he was trying to hold me back from any joy or celebration because he felt I should feel guilty about my little brother’s death when I was only 14 months old – he died of SIDS when
My mother put him down for a nap to feed me. This part said if I hadn’t had to eat, he wouldn’t have died. Remember that’s very young Child’s reasoning. I was able to show him that I hadn’t forgotten my brother (a big fear of its) and we examined the fact that my mother probably had more guilt than either of us could imagine. He was in pain because both his mother and his brother left him in the dark. My mother was emotionally unavailable at that point. All he wanted was attention, both to him and to my baby brother.
And to end today’s session, I had been very upset and jealous of the attention someone was getting that I thought I should have some of. It was really getting to me. So once again I knew it was a part but I didn’t t know what it was from. Turns out it had nothing to do with the people. It was a desperate little child who just wanted attention because it equated attention with love. That also made plenty of sense given my childhood experience that I just mentioned and the rest of my childhood too.
There is one other thing from last week too. I went on a 3 day retreat with a friend and it was the absolute best time of my life. I spent that time just with her and didn’t once in 3 days become upset, disappointed, hurt nor did I overreact. If you knew me even 4 years ago, you would not have believed I was the same person.
That’s the power of IFS
