Internal Family Systems (IFS) Counseling
Loren is a highly gifted and exceptional clinician. She has the ability and skills to guide the process respectfully, gently and deeply, creating lasting change. With her, I feel the safest I have ever felt when working with a clinician, enabling me to go deep into my inner world, to hear and listen to my inner voice. Loren is a gifted communicator, using words which truly reflect my internal experience - It is as if she “ sees” your internal world moment by moment. Having done a substantial amount of work previously in therapy, I have found working with Loren in two short years has evoked deeper processing and tremendous personal growth which has instilled in me a new calm and secure confidence which I now tap into to move through life. ~AK.
How IFS aids the healing process:
- By focusing on certain blocks, beliefs or patterns, we come to understand these energies as “parts” of us, and disidentify from their hold on all of us
- By way of this differentiation process, we develop relationship with these challenging parts from a larger sense of Self that can hear the fears, needs and hopes of these parts
- As these wounded parts come more to the surface, we support an unburdening of their beliefs and suffering, such that they can offer their gifts and become more connected to our larger sense of Self
- Less consumed by our wounded beliefs and patterns, we can live more fully from ‘who we really are’
As I’ve traversed the journey of my own healing, and that of my clients, my greatest sense is that our wounds arise out of one common fundamental source of pain--the pain of separation. We experience pain, loss, fear and resultant trauma when we are separated from feelings of connection, love, feeling seen, safe & understood. When we experience this initial separation from the caregivers who were meant to be our sources of connection, love etc., internal "parts" of us, in turn, become separated from our wholeness and exiled into survival and protection in an attempt to not have to remain vulnerable to the circumstances that originally hurt them. Over time, these most vulnerable parts and the parts that rally around to protect them, come to form our survival patterns, our belief systems and our sense of self. However, this is not the end of the story…
IFS continues the story of our psychological wounding, to say--alongside our small self, which overtime becomes fragmented into our wounds and the strategies that protect them, is a Source within us that is not wounded, fragmented or damaged.
This Self (with a big “S”) is the way in which the larger intelligence which animates all things, flows into us, and as such, it is our interconnection with all that is, our birthright. When we connect directly with a felt-sense and a knowing of this in-dwelling presence, we re-discover, at the level of direct experience, the wholeness of our authentic being--inherently interconnected, unconditionally loving, present and safe.
As we tap this dimension of our being, we can naturally extend its healing qualities to our wounded parts in support of their healing. Thus, with IFS, I witness through my client’s journeys, not only a healing of wounds, and their related defenses and belief systems, but equally importantly, a gradual awakening of their capacity to access connection to this Source as a Self from which they can live and express openly, authentically and fully.
