How to heal anxiety with IFS (Internal Family Systems) Therapy — Therapy with Alessio
Learn how IFS (Internal Family Systems) Therapy can give you the tools to deal with anxiety, procrastination and ambivalence by accessing your “inner system”
www.therapywithalessio.com
...One of the most difficult parts of psychotherapy, and of change in general, is “doing” and “applying” the lessons that we learn from parts of our Inner System.
For example, if your anxious parts are telling you that you should not drink that glass of milk because you are on a new diet, what are you going to do? Are you going to honour what this part is telling you? Or are you going to have the milk anyway? Maybe you do not have enough information to make a decision and you need to connect to your Inner System again.
One of the tools that IFS gives us is the idea of “peaceful decision making”.
Think of all the times you have decided to start a new exercise regime, or to introduce a new habit, and you did not do it. We call this procrastination or ambivalence.
IFS teaches us that the way to deal with procrastination or ambivalence is to look at how we make decisions.
Do you make decisions by imposing the will of one part of you over others? Do you silence parts of you and remain unaware that you have some resistance? Or are you able to negotiate with all parts of you and act in a way that is aligned with your Inner System and your values?
We are not used to having peace inside of us, and we are not taught how to bring harmony to all our parts. We might be under the impression that there is no way to make all parts of ourselves happy, and I can reassure you that, by listening carefully and kindly to all our parts, a way forward always exists. That way forward might not be what we wish for, and we might choose to discard the truths we find about ourselves, but this is a topic for another article...
