Self-Therapy: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Wholeness and Healing Your Inner Child Using IFS, A New, Cutting-Edge Psychotherapy

IFS is designed to be self-led. It empowers you to take charge of your own growth because your true Self, not a therapist, is the agent of healing and wholeness. This makes IFS a natural vehicle for self-therapy.

These parts inside us are frequently shifting and changing. One of them takes over for a while, and we act and feel a certain way. Then we enter a new situation, and another character comes to the fore. Usually we view these changes as no more than slight shifts in mood or perspective, but, in fact, each shift marks the emergence of an entirely new

Parts provide a lot. They offer you the capacities and insights you need in any particular situation—spontaneity, humor, organization, perseverance, for example. But on their own, they lack a larger sense of direction. The Self provides that.

Being primitive and immature, your parts had to protect you in extreme ways because that was all they were capable of. You didn’t have the experience and the inner resources of an adult, so your parts had to do what they could—shut you down completely, throw a tantrum, become overly pleasing—whatever seemed to work. In this way the Self got eclipse

Exercise: Learning about Protectors

Some try to make you into a loveable person so people will like you; that way they won’t hurt or abandon you.

The job of protectors[1] is to protect you from feeling pain.

Exercise: Identifying the Parts at a Trailhead

Every part of you is trying to help you feel good and avoid pain.