My Existential Rabbit Hole: Internal Family Systems (IFS)

Canva.com Magic Media AI Image Generator, 2024
(Image credit to Kristel Koukoua using Canva.com Magic Design AI Image Generator, 2024)

        I first encountered mention of Internal Family Systems (IFS) in the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk.  However, as the case study included in that chapter had a split personality disorder, I thought that it only applied to people with such issues, so I mostly skipped over it.  Then, when I started seeing a licensed therapist to help me navigate healing and processing trauma and triggers beyond what I was able to address on my own through research and self-study, he introduced me again to IFS and it has opened up an entire world of extra exploration for me: IFS is my new existential rabbit hole!

        I have come to the realization that God made all His creation good to begin with.  Indeed, it was very good.  Satan cannot create, as he was not created with imago dei as humans were.  Therefore, all he can do is take what is good and distort it.  I love when believers enter into creative and professional spaces and take back what was originally born of light and spreading hope in the spaces that those things had been snuffed out by the distortions of truth and life.  I feel the same way about dance...dance is SO therapeutic and life-giving...certainly not all dance is glorifying God, but it's a space that was God's first, and therefore, we have authority to move into them and reclaim art and expression for light, love, and truth.

        I had a conversation recently with a dear friend about how, while neither of us believe Buddhism is the way to life, the parts that bring goodness into some people's lives are actually based in God's preexisting Truth.  (Forgive my existential rabbit hole!)  There are several different levels of Buddhist enlightenment that actually remind me of our priorities as believers in Christ.  If Level 1 is to take refuge and take responsibility for oneself is the foundation, it sounds very much like acknowledge that God is the one true God and our shelter, and that we only have power to control and be responsible for our own actions.  Level 2...understanding the essential teachings....rather than of Buddha, of Christ.  Level 3...meditation...as I said before in my blog, not emptying our minds, but to fill them with simple truths and declarations of life and growth over ourselves.  Level 4 training...practicing and developing our gifts of the Spirit.  Level 5...instead of karma...Galatians 6:7.."God cannot be mocked.  A man reaps what he sows."  This step is important for us to realized that what we focus on and feed our minds, we will reap.  What we invest in our relationships, we will reap.  Level 6, renewing our motivation and minds to continue growing and not grow stagnant...continually returning to our First Love and remembering why we chose to follow Jesus in the first place.  Level 7, developing insight, maturity, and practicing the gifts of Spirit to encourage, edify, and take back authority from the Enemy that sin turned over to him in the things of this world.  Level 8 is to explore psychology...I truly think that we are called to explore and steward the things of creation...which includes understanding science and medicine, and how to grow and help others.  Then, in Level 9, rather than simply finding self-liberation by denying oneself all desires, I believe we find freedom and "enlightenment" when we find the love of Christ for ourselves, our enemies, the messiness of mankind...a pairing of grace and truth that removes us from the Judgment Seat and lets God the Father deal with that part, and we simply live out the greatest commandment by loving God and loving people in our day-to-day lives without adding to or taking away from the life and beauty that brings into our spaces. 

        White Americans by no means have the corner on the Truth market.  I believe every culture and every tongue across time has somehow demonstrated that imago dei...the exquisite diversity that is apparent in literally everything in creation.  I think that Japanese culture has a beautiful tradition of honor and respect for human life and the good of the community.  They exemplify excellence in self control, achievement, taking care of one's neighbor, and appreciating the beauty in nature.  Chinese culture has a strong sense of family and respect as well, and often teaches that if a person has not achieved excellence, it is simply because they have not worked at it hard or long enough.  Education is highly valued in both.  I think that anything that produces good fruit in our lives is from God, and belonged to him before it belonged to any one people group or teaching.  Similar to my thoughts on yoga.  I do not believe it is healthy to do poses that were by default positions designed to worship false gods and demons.  However, God designed our bodies to move and stretch, and cross over from one brain hemisphere to the other, to release stored stress and buried emotions.  So, therefore, I do not believe that all stretching is yoga, or that everyone who does yoga is inherently worshiping demons.  Meditation and affirmations/mantras I believe predate Buddhism and Asian culture; I believe that affirming truth in the mundane is truly what 1 Thessalonians 5:17 is talking about...how else can we pray without ceasing?  We breathe in Yah and exhale Weh (A. Johnson, personal communication, June 30, 2024) to fill our entire beings with God's presence, we look for him and listen for him in the novel and the mundane, and we grow and challenge the untruths in our lives by declaring truth into those spaces to reroute our neural pathways to align to the truth of God in us. 

        I am now up to a whopping 5 visits with my therapist, and he started me on Internal Family Systems (IFS).  I have been chewing on it a lot lately.  So, the secular world calls it a sense of Self, my therapist called it the imago dei in each of us that has never been touched by sin or pain and hurt.  It's the truth of who God made us to be, and because it is him in us, nothing we do or have happen to us touches the truth of it in our deepest beings.  There are different parts of us that ARE affected by our traumas, our own sin and choices, etc., but even those parts are designed for our GOOD.  He explained that there are no bad parts...they just sometimes get out of balance (maybe the original idea behind yin and yang?), and out of balance, they cause us harm and block healing and growth in their fullness of what is possible.  So, the first time my therapist described this to me, I got a picture of our imago dei being this crystal in our centers of pure, incorruptible light and truth.  I used Canva to capture it as best as I could in a few minutes of work (see attached IFS picture).  The other parts are swirling around us around that core crystal of many facets and beautiful diversity.  Whenever we meditate and/or speak the truth of that core over ourselves, it brings healing and life to our bodies, brains, and lives because it realigns the out-of-balance parts to work together with who God says we are and who he created us to be...the part of him he designed us to reflect to the world.  So, the other parts are the Exiles, the Managers, and the Firefighters.  While your case may not include betrayal trauma or fighting addiction, the following resource from Pure Desire Podcast does a really great job of describing IFS in two episodes, 216 and 217.

        The older I get in my walk with the Lord...the freer I become...and my metamorphoo is, in essence, me finding what that core is and speaking it to myself until I believe it and live it. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Intriguing Quotes From "The Shack"

I just finished reading "The Shack" by William P. Young, and have here included the parts that made me think the most. Perhaps they will make you think too... God's voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while educated Westerners' access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book. Especially an expensive one bound in leather with gilt edges, or was that guilt edges? Freedom is an incremental process. 95 Most birds were created to fly. Being grounded for them is a limitation within their ability to fly, not the other way around. You, on the other hand, were created to be loved. So for you to live as if you were unloved is a limitation, not the other way around. 97 All love an relationship is possible for you only
Read more

Los años del hambre (The Years of Hunger)

At the hand of the Dictator many souls died, And the poor noble Spaniards started losing their pride. So their children were kidnapped to an island offshore, Brainwashed to a fascist legend and lore. A few citizens fled to the hills to resist; For their efforts the soldiers refused to desist. The brave rebels attempted guerilla warfare, Often beaten by the forces found there. The same General was seen to be hero or damned, Depending on blessings or beatings men had. All Republicans ran and they fled for their lives, Had to burn all their papers and send off their wives. At the end of his reign, the country was torn, Ravaged by years of the ache it had borne. Countless War Children with no hope of home, And a country divided, the marrow from bone.
Read more

The Art of Ant Torture

When I was a child, I took great fiendish delight in burying ants. I remained steadily amused for several minutes dropping handfuls of dirt on poor, innocent ants, and chortling with delight as they would tunnel through the obstacle and break through to the sunlight…only to have me drop another trap on their unsuspecting heads. But I was discriminatory. I did not bury ants that were one solid color, or ones that were small and harmless. Oh no, I only buried the big smelly red ones with the black butts. They were my enemy. They were the ones that built gigantic ant mounds in my back yard, along the fences, in the fields along the irrigation ditches, the base of the trees I so liked to climb, and virtually everywhere a child roams. Their bites hurt. So I buried them until they gave up trying to tunnel out. If I was feeling particularly generous on any given day, I would award only the most persistent ant his life. He would struggle to freedom over and over again, dis
Read more

Starting Over

     My sketchpad sits on the shelf, untouched.  My journal, the constant companion of the last couple decades of my life, has dwindled to almost nothing.  I wrote my first letter in over a year just last week.  I don't actually remember the last time I made time to just sit and read something interesting that was unrelated to my job or my schooling.  I hear a lot of mothers say the same.  Difference is, I'm not a mother.  I had expectation that upon getting married, my life would change; I would no longer have to fill as many moments with hobbies or pastimes, because I would be able to do things with my husband, and/or I would get to spend more time building our marriage.  However, after the first few weeks of marriage, I instead have spent the past two years trying frantically to glue pieces of myself back together, hoping against hope that the rejection and unfaithfulness on his part would be replaced with repentance and a new start.  At the end of a 2-year battle to save my
Read more

Transformation- Transformación

Image
An echoing thunder torments the corridors of my mind My senses awake, I feel the coming downpour As a mouse feels the lurking talons of the  Feathered shadow, hovering, thrumming. Hovering, thrumming, strumming the poignant chords Reverberating on the thin strings of the chest  Cavity.  I sense a change, I feel the Stirring of a new and unequaled challenge. A new and unequaled sunrise marks the  Arrival of a day fraught with  Unexpected, the unfathomable possibilities Discovered among the rich sands of adventure. Sands of adventure obscure my eyes a And I fight to clear them.  I want to  See clearly now, and forever, avoiding All traps that lie in wait for the unguarded. My heart was supposedly impenetrable and guarded, Believing the best and reckless in abandon, But a thief tiptoed in with promises of strength, Promises of beauty and a pact of forever. The shattered shards of that pact of forever Fell one by painful one into the wee
Read more

Candid Cadets and Glamorous Gowns

Image
1/20/06 Have I ever mentioned how much I love accents and languages? I am sitting in the airport in Minneapolis . I’m not hearing anything but the TV at the moment, but on the flight here, I was delighted to be in the same vicinity as several Bostonians. They don’t say their “r’s”! Fantastic, really. To recap a bit, I’m on my way to Ne w York . Last night, I sang with the somewhat reduced worship team. Alex, Jen, and Matt were there. The rest of the team is in Colorado or something. I left after practice to pack. I took a shower and continued getting ready. Chuck called to finalize details, and Dad also called. I finished sewing velvet over the snaps on the halter part of my dress and Melissa helped me check my flight and such things. I didn’t get to sleep very early. I slept for a few hours and my alarm reminded me I had to get up. Melissa drove me to the airport at 6:30 AM. It was more simple than I had imagined it would be. I read more of the arti
Read more

Freedom to Thrive

Image
The book of Philemon is a letter from Paul and Timothy to a house church in Colossae (modern southwest Turkey). Paul addresses the letter to three influential believers who had some leading role in the church: Philemon, the wealthy homeowner, Apphia, believed by some to be his wife while other scholars/historians believe she was more likely to be a deacon like Phoebe (Mowczko, 2016) , and Archippus was a minister of some sort within the body of believers there. Colossae was a city known for its syncretism (HarperChristian Resources, 2022), which is the blending of incompatible religious beliefs or worldviews. Verse 6 of Philemon states that Paul and Timothy are eager for the believers in that church to have “fellowship that would lead to quote faith [becoming] effective through the knowledge of every good thing which is in [them] for Christ's sake” (NASB, 1995). This letter to Philemon has some background history. Onesimus had stolen from his master Philemon and then had run awa
Read more

El fin del año en Honduras

Once again, I was blogeligent , and therefore am WAY behind in my entries. I pity your poor eyes. Only read if you have a super good cup 'o something tasty and are seated very comfortably. :-) Here we go.... Entry from 11-12-10 If 7 weeks seemed like too short a time, then 9 days might very well kill me. Way back in October, I spent Natasha's last day here climbing the water tower, making cookies that mostly never made it to cookie status, and drinking large quantities of tea. The next day, I escaped early from a delightful dinner with the Rumbaughs ' and practiced violin for almost an hour with practically no one in Staff Housing, (they were all still at the Rumbaughs '). I played fútbol three days in a row that weekend, had a great movie night/chat with Samuel, and moved out into the community with Joelle. She and Christine asked to take care of Rigo's and Christy's house until they get back in January. Christine was still in the States, though, an
Read more

Who We Become

Lately, I feel as though I have somehow lost focus on who I was on my way to being. Do you ever find yourself in such a place? I am a firm believer that life is a journey, a process of continual transformation. Each decision I make, every day, impacts who I am becoming and how I will respond to life situations in the future. I do not believe life is about sitting on my derriere and waiting for the transformation to just happen, so I can wake up tomorrow with my wings totally unfurled, dried out, and ready to test the air currents. I desire to have a continual divine discontent...discontent with dulled consciousness of life and existence; I want to burn with passion in joyful expectancy of my destiny, and be living it along the path to reaching it. I will never reach it if I am not moving toward somewhere. I can't wake up one morning and expect to have suddenly arrived at my destiny. We're not designed that way. True contentment is having that joyful expectancy, with f
Read more