Years ago, I was talking to a client about what it truly means to be a Calm Mama. And she realized that the absence of yelling ≠ calm. There is something deeper that we’re working toward. An inner wisdom, inner peace, and knowing that you can handle anything that comes along. There might be a lot of chaos around you, but inside you are calm and steady.
Today, we begin a new 3-part series on Internal Family Systems (IFS) - a therapeutic model created by Richard Schwartz. One of the central concepts is that everything you need for deep healing and wisdom are already within you.
You’ll Learn:
Listen to find out how IFS works and how you can use it to move into Self-led energy and feel more peace.
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We talk about this a lot on the podcast, but in case you’re new to my world (or need a quick refresher), there are a lot of reasons that being calm matters as a parent. The big picture is about raising our children in emotionally healthy families so that they grow up to be emotionally healthy adults.
This looks like:
When we try to prevent our kids from experiencing or expressing negative emotion by over-protecting, over-planning, over-organizing, or bypassing that emotion, we're actually creating little micro wounds in our kids. They are learning to shut down their own feelings, which is not what we want.
In order to be able to do the things our kids need for emotional health, we often need to reparent ourselves and heal our own emotional wounds. Maybe there were times when you were told that you weren’t good enough, or that you didn’t matter, or that the way you felt didn’t matter. In order to feel truly at peace, we have to believe that we are loved, safe, worthy, and that we’re going to be okay, too.
This is much easier said than done. So, how do we get to that place of deep, legit calm?
Feelings drive behavior. And when we don’t know what to do with our feelings, we act them out in behaviors or strategies that we think will protect us from pain or help us deal with pain when it comes up.
When we’re acting from our wounded parts, we act in ways that might hurt us or others. The goal is to act from our whole, healed, healthy parts - the Self.
The Self is an embodied sense of who you are at your core - without any pain or wounds. We all come into this world pure and filled with joy, ready to experience all the things in life that come. At our core, what we want to feel is peace.
But then the world steps in. We experience all kinds of discomfort, and if we don’t get to express and process it, it can get stuck within us.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is an approach to healing that identifies the wounded parts of you, as well as the whole, not wounded parts of you. And it helps you to build a relationship between your core Self and those wounded parts so that they can heal, have a sense of wholeness and become what we call “unburdened”.
Imagine your internal family as your core Self, plus the other parts of you that are related to your Self and your pain (aka burden). There are...
