Closing Thoughts

Your inner world is real. Parts are not imaginary

products or symbols of your psyche; nor are they

simply metaphors of deeper meaning. They are inner beings

who exist in inner families or societies, and what happens in

those inner realms makes a big difference in how you feel and

live your life.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Embodiment

When your parts start to trust your Self, they

open more space for you to be in your body.

When that’s the case, you feel sensations and emotions more

and, consequently, you become increasingly interested in

keeping your body grounded and healthy. With this enhanced

sensitivity to your body’s feedback comes increased

knowledge about what foods or activities are beneficial and

which can be damaging. This leads to corresponding changes

in your behavior.

CHAPTER TEN

The Laws of Inner Physics

A Beautiful Mind—a movie about the famous

mathematician John Nash—begins with the

viewer not understanding that everything they’re seeing is

through the eyes of a paranoid part of the main character. It’s a

wonderful example of what people experience when protectors

thoroughly blend.

CHAPTER NINE

Life Lessons and Tor-Mentors

We are here to learn a particular set of life

lessons, and the lesson plan is already within

us. Each of us carries legacy burdens inherited from our

families and cultures, and each of us also accrues plenty of

personal burdens along the way. So our lesson plan begins

with unloading those burdens, and that sets the stage for the

most important lesson of all—finding out who we really are.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Vision and Purpose

Generally speaking, as you get more access to Self

and become more Self-led, you also attain more

clarity about the vision you have for your life, which means

that your priorities may be quite different than they were when

your protectors were in charge. When we have lots of exiles,

our protectors have no choice but to be egotistic, hedonistic, or

dissociative.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Self in Action

By now you hopefully have a clear idea what the

Self is and what it means to be Self-led. In this

chapter, I want to take a closer look at how achieving Self-

leadership affects your life both inside and outside.

Developmental psychology and attachment theory have helped

us understand what children need from their caretakers as they

develop.

CHAPTER SIX

Healing and Transformation

What do we mean by healing and

transformation in IFS? As I stated earlier, our

culture (in general) and psychotherapy (specifically) have

made the terrible mistake of assuming that parts are the way

they seem.

CHAPTER FIVE

Mapping Our Inner Systems

Now that you have several practices under your

belt and understand more about systems and the

paradigm shift we’re after here, I want to get into some of the

ways parts organize themselves and relate with each other

inside. I’ve already introduced the primary distinction between

exiles and protectors. Let’s look a little more into what those

parts are like.

CHAPTER FOUR

More on Systems

You may have noticed that as we proceed through

the book, we’re focusing less on each individual

part and more on their relationships with one another. I feel

blessed that when I first encountered the parts in my clients, I

was steeped in what’s called systems thinking, and that helped

me listen to them better, rather than being overwhelmed with

the complexity of it all.

CHAPTER THREE

This Changes Everything

In Christianity, the definition of sin is anything that

disconnects you from God and takes you off your path.

Burdens disconnect Self from parts and give them extreme

impulses. Burdened parts either don’t experience Self at all or

don’t listen to Self. So when parts are unburdened, it’s not

only that they immediately transform, but they also now have

much more connection to and trust for Self, which is the

second goal of IFS.