Internal Family Systems: I am trained! And what that means from a Baltimore trauma therapist

I have exciting news to share: I just graduated from my Internal Family Systems training!

I’ve spent the last 5 months and over 100 hours in this beautiful and intensive training. Because of this graduation milestone, I’m pausing the trauma blog series to talk more about what this means. 

IFS is an evidence-based therapy that heals trauma from deep within the body. Through this process, we get to know and befriend each of your parts – the parts that hold the wounds, the parts that try to avoid feeling bad, and the parts desperate to stop the pain. 

As we get to know each part, we learn that each and every one of your parts that makes up who you are has good intentions. Even the destructive parts that cut, binge, explode, get anxious and depressed and numb – each part is doing what it can, how it can, to help you cope. 

By getting to know them from a place of compassionate curiosity, we can help your parts to unburden. Heal. Let go of their ways of helping that are no longer serving so that they can instead help you to flourish.

During training, we learned how to work with each part and how we can work together to heal them. We took part of our own experientials, during which I got to know many of my own parts, the ways that they work in my system, and start my healing journeys. 

I am very excited to be able to fully partake in the IFS work. To not only help you learn about the parts as I could before, but to go to the most wounded, those parts within us that hold our pain, and help them to see your light.

Because – here’s my favorite thing about IFS – it sees the world, and each person in it, as I do. We all have a bright light within us. We are all good inside. As we see our parts as they are, that’s what they become – parts of us, not all of us. And that makes space for us to encounter that deep goodness within. That is where the magic of true healing happens.