Coming back into a relationship with our somatic experience is  a trauma informed, consent based process.  If we are disconnected  from our body’s sensations and feelings, there is always a good reason. Disconnection is a highly intelligent response to tolerating single or chronic overwhelming circumstances or events,  so it is important to move at every body’s unique pace . 

Having stuck energies and incomplete emotional and sensorimotor responses driving the nervous system state is a primary barrier to why  “understanding our pasts”, and “knowing what we should do” is often not enough to create sustainable change in our symptoms of stuckness. 

Additionally, when we understand HOW our bodies and nervous systems operate, we are far more able to effectively stay connected to ourselves. Being able to stay connected to ourselves in the present moment greatly enhances our ability to respond appropriately and powerfully to life’s inevitable challenges. 

Over time, and with great dedication to the process, challenging feelings and body states start to have a far less powerful grip over our choices, behaviors, perception of ourselves and our ability to move toward our dreams.

IFS is an evidence based, powerfully transformative therapeutic model and body healing modality that offers us a process for getting to know all aspects of ourselves in a deep and nuanced way.  Together we first get to know your inner system of specific parts involved in your presenting problems and symptoms. 

Due to prior negative experiences, early life attachment wounding, intergenerational trauma and systemic oppression we ALL develop specific and unique burdened beliefs, coping behaviors, and self protective ways of relating to other people and the circumstances around us. 

Parts often carry extreme qualities that were once adaptive and helpful in getting relational needs met , and/or tolerating environmental failures or overwhelming situations when we were younger and had no other option…yet, if these learned survival strategies and beliefs  continue to run our lives unconsciously in our adulthood,  we often find ourselves struggling to live from our authentic Self and feeling separate from the life we most deeply yearn for. 

Through a  gentle and compassionate guided inquiry process, I will teach you how to come into a more intimate, connected personal relationship with these individual parts inside of you. Oftentimes, when we have been in therapy, we access our stories and feelings from a more “removed”, or less directly present narrative space, talking ABOUT parts of us instead of talking and relating directly to  and “BEING WITH” them. 

Slowly,  by really getting to know and befriending  and our individual parts (and their associated body sensations), we can begin to  support, nurture and relate to them in much more helpful and generative and helpful ways .  The IFS process helps us build capacity to separate our awareness and  “witness” and be with these inner parts  in a powerful and gently transformative way. Over time, with great patience and consistency, inner safety becomes more accessible and extreme parts begin to shift and loosen around previously entrenched behaviors and beliefs. When this happens, our bodies can truly begin to respond to life from the truth of NOW, not our outdated survival software from our painful pasts. 

With a regulated nervous system, we are able to respond to life more skillfully and align with our core values and more easily access states like compassion, clarity,  courage, confidence and creativity.  IFS is also a particularly profound way of learning how to relate to and work with conflicting feelings we hold within. (See below some specific inner “ polarization”  examples.)