Parts and the body in IFS therapy
There’s a young girl living in my gut. She speaks without words and sings her silent songs of movement and stillness. When she tells her wordless stories I listen with every fiber of my being and witness the pain she kept so long in the lonely tissue of my body.
As an IFS Therapist and a Family Therapist much of my training is deeply rooted in somatic awareness, the vagus nerve and the body story.
In my own little boble of what I know and what I don’t know yet, part of me is puzzled to hear other therapists ask: “How do we incorporate the body in therapy?” because in my understanding and experience, you can’t separate the body from the therapy. The body holds both trauma and wisdom, our sensations of the world we live in and of ourselves. How is any internal work done without the body?
And yet in our modern societies we focus only on the head: the brain that is.
— Until something is “wrong” with the body, in which case we use our smart brains to fix it and make it go away.
Body and mind (as two) is, in my understanding of the human being, fiction. As human beings of this world we are not body and mind, but bodymind together. Just like your head is not just something separate you carry on top of your body; it is your body just as much as your gut and your foot is your body.
Our emphasis on the brain as superior has taken us far away from ourselves and actually feeling alive and present in this world.
“I think therefore I am” is just one part of us talking and there is so much more to the internal systems of human beings. A much deeper knowledge that is inherent to all of us and accessible when we take ourselves and our lives seriously enough to find our way back home.
Truly knowing ourselves from the inside out and accepting and loving what we know, notice and feel, is (in my view) what healing, health and balance is.
The thought processes of our internal system is only a small part of this.
This doesn’t mean that thoughts are not important. Communicating with our parts through thoughts can bring much healing to the whole system when this is right for our parts.
One thing I often hear from people new to IFS is that they don’t know how to do it or if they can do it. — Communicate with their parts, that is.
In my experience this often comes from people who (always for good reason) are not in balanced contact with their bodies and physical sensations.
Truth is that you can’t really do it wrong (as a client). We start exactly where you are and if the part of you, that feels you are just making it up is most present, then we start there. If the part of you, that feels shame about “talking to yourself” is most present, then we start there.
If your therapist ask you if or how you notice a part in your body and you either don’t notice it in your body at all (it might be a thought, a voice, a feeling, an image or a body sensation — or it may be a combination) or you notice that you think the body in stead of feeling the body, that is absolutely fine (and an excellent observation).
Therapy and healing is not about trying to make anything happen, but being with exactly what is, at that given moment. And when we are able to start where we are, we can take those tiny little steps — remember slow is fast, especially in therapy and healing — and every little step you take creates new neural pathways in your whole body (not just the brain) and like a muscle exercised, your awareness of yourself and your parts becomes stronger, more integrated and fluent.
In Susan McConnell’s wonderful book “Somatic Internal Family Systems” she dives into many important areas of knowing and working with the body and our parts in the body.
And as she says it beautifully: “Awareness of the body creates awareness in the body” — thinking is for many of us the first step to body awareness and for others where the awareness is there, but in a chaotic and unstructured way, we start slowly making sense of what is and create the neural pathways that slowly slowly balances and heals the inner system.
Many of us have learned (to different degrees and in different ways) early on in life not to feel our bodies (interoception) and to block the movement of our internal system and muscles (proprioception). Likewise we learn in different ways that the way we read into and feel other people and the world (exteroception) is wrong or it gets distorted by trauma. Hence we must rely on our smart brains to figure out how we are supposed to feel, what the other person expects from us and how we can best protect ourselves and keep the relationship (and thereby our survival).
When we think our bodies instead of being or feeling our bodies, we are often looking for something:
“I am looking for the feeling of sadness in my body, but all I feel is emptiness, so that means that I feel nothing and that I am doing this wrong.”
Of course noticing your body and feeling emptiness, is not you doing it wrong or not feeling anything. It is you feeling exactly what is most present right now: the feeling and sensation of emptiness which is present for good reason.
What is in front of you is not blocking your way, it is the way.
“Can we stay with that a bit?… How are you aware of the sensation of emptiness?”
In her chapter of Somatic Awareness, Susan McConnell (among many other important aspects) tap into the distinction of the three different types of perception: Interoception, exteroception and proprioception (find her description from page 68 in her book).
Interoception is the awareness of our inner body sensations (or noticing the parts in our body) and understanding the messages of our inner sensations, the feelings related to those sensations and how to self-regulate.
Through the vagus nerve our internal organs and the sensations and neurons in our gut and around the heart sends information up to the brain. As Peter Levine, creator of Somatic Experiencing, tells us; intuition or gut feeling is not some mysterious idea, it is very simply information sent by our vagus nerve from our internal organs to the brain, to be processed.
When we don’t feel in contact with our bodies it is because we have (for the sake of our survival) blocked what the body is telling us. But that does not mean that the body stopped talking. In fact it will speak louder and louder until we listen.
When we treat only our symptoms, we yet again take action to silence our own inner voice. Our own truth.
The symptoms are never the problem, but a signal for help.
When I started my journey into the field of psychotherapy I had a sense of feeling nothing neck down. I felt emptiness and nothingness.
The first step for me was a cognitive understanding of the development of neuropathways through childhood. To know that there is always a good reason for what we feel and what we don’t feel. There are no right and wrong people, but connectedness and lack thereof for the sake of survival, because of what happened to us.
As Oprah said it so beautifully after speaking with one of my favorit people, Bruce D. Perry (author of “The boy who was raised as a dog”):
“It is not what’s wrong with you, but what happened to you?”
For me this newfound knowledge of human beings (and thereby of myself) took away the heaviest amount of shame and moved me out of being stuck and in shutdown. It helped me open up to being able to see myself and learn more. What was stuck was finally able to move a little.
We start where we are.
Our Exteroception is how we learn to be in the world. Through our senses we open up to and meet the outside world and receive information through our skin, our ears, eyes, nose and mouth. We touch and we taste and learn about what we can receive and where we can lean out. We learn of being safe and of not being safe.
We learn to give meaning to what we sense from the people and the world around us. We learn who we can be, with whom, and what parts of us are not welcome, if we are to feel loved and accepted, and thereby safe.
As therapists we use interoception when we focus inwards and notice our own states and parts in relation to the states and parts of our clients and we use exteroception as we are aware of the noticeable changes in skincolor, voice and all the changes and expressions of face- and body language in our clients.
Through our exteroception the space between you and I— the relational space — in the safe therapy room creates openings from rigidity to movement. It creates change.
Proprioception is our bodily awareness through the sensory receptors in our skin, muscle and joints. Our felt sense in the room or space around us, our coordination of movement depends on our proprioception.
In our tissue and muscle we store untold stories of what wanted to happen, what our bodies needed us to do and didn’t get to do. And we store the (unwitnessed) wisdom of what the body did do to protect us and keep us alive in the face of danger.
These untold stories of what wanted to happen and what did happen is logged in our tissue and is able to be told and witnessed through aware acceptance and movement in and of the body.
The body speaks in a voice that doesn’t need words. When we calm our busy heads, we are able to listen and to speak the language of movement and sensation.
Therefore incorporating the body in therapy is, in my understanding, not the issue. The body of the therapist and the body of the client is present in every step of the healing. Bringing awareness to what is already present and happening is, in my view, the issue.
As human beings we are our bodies and we are in our bodies. When we speak, we use the voices of our bodies, when we breath and ground ourselves, it is the body breathing the outside in and the inside out, when we feel the sorrow of our parts, the eyes of the body weep and release some of that tension from inside of our bodies, and when we feel anger the muscles of the body tightens up, telling their own story without us having to utter a word.
When thinking, reading, talking, exercising our brains and learning new things, it is the brain (and other areas) of the body that is doing so.
Body language is a language we already speak. As we listen to each other, the actual words accounts for a very small part of what we take in. The tone of voice and the body language accounts for much more of what we “hear” as someone tells us their story.
Awareness in this, is what matters.
Go to the theatre and just watch as a whole story of of love and sorrow is being portrayed through ballet without a single word being uttered.
Notice what happens in you, as you watch bodies talking, up on that stage; What parts of you are present? What moves in you and what tenses up?
What happens in you, as you notice that this is a language you already know and speak? A language that is always present in the therapy room and in your life.
Body and mind as separate entities is an illusion and when we bring awareness to what is already present in ourselves and in each other, we open up to our own inherent wisdom.