When we go into severe mental health crisis, it can feel like a civil war inside, with various voices, demons, or other entities engaged in battle with each other. When the chaos is great, the idea that we might ever come back together might seem unbelievable.
One thing that can help though is recognizing that even when things are going smoothly, we still have different parts inside. And even when things are at their worst, we still have the ability to access something inside us that can guide us toward healing.
This is a subject that was explored in a webinar titled “Internal Family Systems (IFS) and the Inner World in Non-Ordinary States” that took place on Friday, Aug 6, 2021.
This webinar explored how IFS understands and works with people experiencing voices, visions, paranoia, and other non-ordinary states.
IFS posits that there is no such thing as a ‘Unitary mind’, indeed the mind is made up of multiple ‘parts’ who interact internally in the same way that we interact in external relationships. These parts can become wounded by life’s adversities, and take on extreme roles in order to protect the person from further wounding. Each of these inner parts holds its own unique feelings, thoughts, experiences and core beliefs.
A core tenet of IFS is that every part has a positive intent no matter how extreme their actions to protect the person.
IFS believes that under all these parts is a person’s ‘core Self’ and this Self cannot be damaged by life’s adversities and contains qualities of compassion and wisdom. Self is the natural leader of the system once parts are unburdened and trust Self’s leadership.
The IFS method promotes internal harmony by befriending parts and bringing healing to the parts who have been wounded.
About the presenter:
Stephanie Mitchell is a Level 3 trained IFS practitioner, psychotherapist, trainer and supervisor in private practice in Adelaide Australia. She specialises in working with complex trauma and experiences which often get labelled as ‘mental illness’. She is interested in how healing and change occur in the human to human relationship, within spaces of safety and acceptance and outside the constructs of diagnostic labels. Stephanie has almost a decade working in Mental Health settings including 3 years co-facilitating a Hearing Voices group.
