Years ago, I was talking to a client about what it truly means to be a Calm Mama. And she realized that the absence of yelling ≠ calm. There is something deeper that we’re working toward. An inner wisdom, inner peace, and knowing that you can handle anything that comes along. There might be a lot of chaos around you, but inside you are calm and steady.

Today, we begin a new 3-part series on Internal Family Systems (IFS) - a therapeutic model created by Richard Schwartz. One of the central concepts is that everything you need for deep healing and wisdom are already within you.

You’ll Learn:

• The 4 parts of Internal Family Systems and how they go together
• How we get stuck in past pain and trauma
• Examples of burdens you might be carrying from childhood (and how I’m working through some of my own)
• How to befriend your core Self

Listen to find out how IFS works and how you can use it to move into Self-led energy and feel more peace.

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Why Does Your Peace Matter?

We talk about this a lot on the podcast, but in case you’re new to my world (or need a quick refresher), there are a lot of reasons that being calm matters as a parent. The big picture is about raising our children in emotionally healthy families so that they grow up to be emotionally healthy adults.

This looks like:

• Letting our kids experience their negative emotions
• Being able to witness their emotional pain without getting upset about their big feelings or behaviors
• Communicating to your kid that they are going to be okay
• Letting your child know that they are safe and loved, no matter what is happening

When we try to prevent our kids from experiencing or expressing negative emotion by over-protecting, over-planning, over-organizing, or bypassing that emotion, we're actually creating little micro wounds in our kids. They are learning to shut down their own feelings, which is not what we want.

In order to be able to do the things our kids need for emotional health, we often need to reparent ourselves and heal our own emotional wounds. Maybe there were times when you were told that you weren’t good enough, or that you didn’t matter, or that the way you felt didn’t matter. In order to feel truly at peace, we have to believe that we are loved, safe, worthy, and that we’re going to be okay, too.

This is much easier said than done. So, how do we get to that place of deep, legit calm?

4 Parts of the Internal Family System

Feelings drive behavior. And when we don’t know what to do with our feelings, we act them out in behaviors or strategies that we think will protect us from pain or help us deal with pain when it comes up.

When we’re acting from our wounded parts, we act in ways that might hurt us or others. The goal is to act from our whole, healed, healthy parts - the Self. 

The Self is an embodied sense of who you are at your core - without any pain or wounds. We all come into this world pure and filled with joy, ready to experience all the things in life that come. At our core, what we want to feel is peace.

But then the world steps in. We experience all kinds of discomfort, and if we don’t get to express and process it, it can get stuck within us. 

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is an approach to healing that identifies the wounded parts of you, as well as the whole, not wounded parts of you. And it helps you to build a relationship between your core Self and those wounded parts so that they can heal, have a sense of wholeness and become what we call “unburdened”.

Imagine your internal family as your core Self, plus the other parts of you that are related to your Self and your pain (aka burden). There are unburdened parts that bring you lots of joy, goodness, and love. And there are also wounded parts that start to act in protective ways to help prevent pain or run from pain. 

In addition to the Self, there are 3 parts of the Internal Family System:

1. Exile: A part that is in pain
2. Manager: The part that is trying to prevent pain
3. Firefighter: The part that tries to run from pain or douse it if it shows up

Exile. When a part of you gets wounded, the manager and firefighter want to make sure that it doesn’t happen again, so they exile that part of you. There are also gifts and beautiful things about this part of you, but they don't know how to protect you from pain without exiling that entire part of yourself.

Your exiled parts carry your burdens. These come from events that happened in your childhood when you felt hurt, humiliated, or terrified. Burdens might sound like, “I am worthless,” “No one loves me,” “I’m not good enough,” “The world is not safe,” or “No one is there for me.”

We can also experience burdens from cultural trauma. If you’ve been marginalized in some way because of how you look, your religion, your relationship, etc., you may have exiles related to those experiences. 

The exile gets isolated, and it is not healed, so these thoughts and feelings become our normal paradigm. We start to live in a world where we think we’re vulnerable, worthless, alone. And we get stuck there.

Manager. The manager is in prevention mode. It works very, very hard to come up with a plan to keep the world safe for the exile, while also keeping the exile contained. The manager tries to keep you small and safe through behaviors like people pleasing, control, performance/achievement, rule following, and hypervigilance.

The manager often looks hardworking, dedicated, dependable, risk-averse, and seems to have the right answer for every situation. Managers tend to be perfectionists, organizers, highly critical and judgmental (of others and of themselves). They’re intellectual, constantly scanning for hazards, and can overindulge in caregiving in order to have a purpose and to control their environment.

Some of these traits can be good, but the manager often takes them to an extreme. 

And even a perfect manager can’t prevent pain all the time, because the world is out there triggering and activating us. There will always be things that are outside our control.

Firefighter. When pain can’t be prevented, or the exile pops up and starts having big feelings, the firefighter steps in. The intention of the firefighter is to numb, soothe, distract, and/or dissociate. And it’s willing to do anything it can to get away from the pain and not be vulnerable. 

Some strategies of the firefighter are retail therapy, addictions to food, drinking, sex, drugs, or gambling, numbing through social media or watching a lot of TV. Self harm can also be a strategy to prevent pain by focusing on different pain that is within your control. 

There is constant conflict between the manager and the firefighter because neither of them is working in a way that’s actually healing. It’s like a whack-a-mole of pain and problems. It pops up, you push it down, over and over again.

None of these parts are inherently bad. Your exiled parts also have interesting, fun, creative aspects to them that want to feel free. Your firefighter wants you to relax and have fun. And your manager helps you to get organized and take care of business. The problem is when they come up in these distorted, extreme roles. 

Self-Led Energy

I believe that the more we heal, the more peace we bring to the world and to our relationships (including our kids). 

The answer to getting out of the burdened pain cycle is connecting to your deeper core Self. The Self is meant to emerge as the natural leader of the system. It’s the eternal part of you - your essence, your wisdom, your intuition. It is pure and cannot be damaged. It is the source of your healing. 

When you’re connected to Self, it’s that feeling of wellbeing, of being enough, knowing that you’re safe and everything is going to be okay. 

You can also think of the 8 Cs as ways to know if you are in Self energy: Curiosity, Calm, Confidence, Compassion, Creativity, Clarity, Courage, and Connectedness.

This is something you can feel in your body. And it’s always there, ready and available to you.

You can connect with your core Self through a process called “befriending”, in which you talk to these different parts of yourself. It might feel a little awkward or silly, but you’ll find that your Self is ready to fall in love with all the other parts of you. As you get to know some of your parts, consider the following questions:

• How do they feel? 
• What are they afraid of? 
• What are they protecting you from? 
• What are the things that they're afraid will happen if they stop doing their job? 
• What is the original part that needs to be healed? 
• What would happen if that part got healed? 
• What would your manager part want to do instead? 

All the wisdom and healing you need is already within you and available to you. Your truest Self is ready to heal you of your wounds and pain and bring you to a more peaceful place. 

Throughout the next 2 episodes in this series, you’ll learn how to get in touch with your Self energy and heal yourself and how to do this with your children. Because when you learn how to heal yourself, you can heal your kids in real time when they have upsets. How powerful is that?

You’ll Learn:

• The 4 parts of Internal Family Systems and how they go together
• How we get stuck in past pain and trauma
• Examples of burdens you might be carrying from childhood (and how I’m working through some of my own)
• How to befriend your core Self

Resources:

• How To Heal series on the Become A Calm Mama podcast
• No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz

Get your copy of the Stop Yelling Cheat Sheet!

In this free guide you’ll discover:

✨ A simple tool to stop yelling once you’ve started (This one thing will get you calm.)

✨ 40 things to do instead of yelling. (You only need to pick one!)

✨ Exactly why you yell. (And how to stop yourself from starting.)

✨A script to say to your kids when you yell. (So they don't follow you around!)

Download the Stop Yelling Cheat Sheet here

Connect With Darlynn: 

• Book a complimentary session with Darlynn
• Learn about the different parenting programs at www.calmmamacoaching.com
• Follow me on Instagram @darlynnchildress for daily tips 
• Rate and review the podcast on Itunes

Welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host. I'm Darlyn Childress

and today on the podcast I'm introducing a three part

series where I'm going to teach you about self

led energy. And I'm using internal

family systems, which is a therapeutic model developed by

Richard Schwartz. And I'm going to, in this

episode talk to you about this model of internal family systems and,

and really highlight how it works and introduce you to the

concept of the self, the inner essence

of you that has all the wisdom and all of

the healing available to you. Already within

you. Already inside of you is a seat of

consciousness that is ready to heal you of your wounded areas and

your pain and bring you to a more whole and peaceful

place. When you think about the title of this podcast,

it's Become a Calm Mama. And I talk a lot about what it means

to be calm. And one of my clients a long time ago, she

said, oh, I understand that the

absence of yelling is not calm, that there is

legit calm. She called it like a deeper sense of calm

and peace. That this inner

wisdom, this inner peace, this inner calm that knows that you can

handle anything that comes, that you have the wisdom within

you to parent your children, to show up the way you

want to show up as a parent, to heal yourself of your childhood wounds

or your young adult wounds and really

become a legitimately calm person. That

there might be a storm outside and a lot of chaos

going on, but inside of you is a sense of peace,

internal peace and balance and emotional

regulation and emotional health. So we talk a lot about

that on the podcast and I share a lot of different resources

with you to help you get to an understanding of what it means to

be calm and why does that matter as a parent?

And it is because when you are raising your kids in

an emotionally healthy family, you want to be able to offer

to your children that the ability to

witness their emotional pain and to

not get upset about their behavior

strategies or their big feeling cycles or their sadness

or their overwhelm or the hard things that are going to come on in

their life. You want to be able to communicate to your

kids like it's going to be okay, you are going

to be okay, and I love you no matter what's

happening. Right? We want our kids to know that they're safe and they're loved

no matter what's happening. And so what we need to do as a parent

in order to create that environment, we have to actually reparent

ourselves in some ways and become able to Tell

ourselves everything's gonna be okay.

You are loved, you are safe, you are good enough,

you are worthy. So how do we

get to that place of that deep,

legit calm? How do we get there? I

did a series on the hierarchy of healing

a few months ago in February. It was a six

part how to heal series. And a lot of that was talking

about this getting in touch with

internal self love and this internalized

feeling of loving and accepting yourself.

So in this series I'm going to be teaching you about this concept of

self because how you access that love

is by accessing this internal self,

this seat of consciousness that is, I don't even want to say

seat of consciousness because I think it sounds airy and kind of like

woo woo, which I don't mind. But at the same time I

don't want to turn you off. I don't want you to think I'm talking about

some sort of pseudo spirituality. I'm actually just talking about

the like love that lives within you, that is

you. Like your core essence is good and

lovable and peaceful and wise.

And I'm like, as I'm saying this, I'm touching my heart and touching my belly

and pressing into it because I think of this as a really embodied

experience of deep, deep self love and self

acceptance. The more you can access that, the easier

it will be for you to heal the parts of you that are in pain

and the easier it will be for you to show up with your

kids in a way that doesn't create pain for them.

One of the things that creates pain for kids is when we

don't witness or validate or

let our children experience their negative emotion

and don't create space for that to be passed through.

We need to be able to give our kids a space where they can

actually just feel sad and feel hurt and

feel angry and feel worried. Those

are normal states. And when we suppress those or

we over protect our kids, we over plan,

we over organize, we try to bypass that emotion, we shut it

down, whatever it is. We're actually creating little micro wounds

in our kids and they are learning to shut down their own

feelings, which I know is not what you want. And many of you

listening may have had that experience as a child, yourself

or a society that told you you weren't good enough because

of the way you looked, because of your gender, because of your

sexuality, because of your, you know, how much money

you had or didn't have. You may have received messages

from the world that said you're not good enough. You're not

worthy. You don't matter. And you could have also

experienced those from your own parents or your caregivers growing up

where it was just your feelings don't matter. So

I've been teaching you for years now on this podcast that feelings drive

behavior, right? And the more we validate

emotion, we give kids better tools to process their feelings,

the. The less misbehavior they have. So going

back to this internal Family systems, really, when we

don't know what to do with our feelings, our feelings show

up. We act them out in behaviors,

and those behaviors, as an adult, we can

look at those behaviors and see them as strategies

that are there to protect us from pain, to prevent

pain, to protect us from pain, to deal with pain when it comes

up. So when we're acting from our wounded

parts, then we act in ways that maybe

hurt us or hurt others. So what we

want to be doing is acting from our whole, healed,

healthy parts, the part of us that is

wise and whole. And that's what we're going to call on this

episode in the next couple episodes, the self. So

the self is capital se. So

it's really a embodied sense of who you

are at your core without any pain, without any

woundedness. We all come into this

world pure and just, filled with

joy and sadness. And like everything, like we're an

embodied person, we can just experience all the things in

life that come. And what we are always wanting

is to feel peace. That's what we are at our

core. And then as the world kind of does a number on us, we

experience all sorts of discomfort. Discomfort is normal,

but it's when we don't get to process that discomfort, we don't

get to express it. It can get stuck within us.

So internal Family Systems is this

therapeutic model or this healing approach

that identifies the wounded parts of you and

identifies the part of you, the deep sense of self, of

you, that is not wounded. And it has

language to help us build a relationship

between your core self and those wounded parts

so that those wounded parts can heal, be what they call

unburdened, and have a sense of wholeness.

That sound great. So IFS is

what I'm going to call this. It's, you know, the acronym

for internal family Systems. A lot of people just refer to it as

ifs. And we think about the words internal family system.

It's not about your external family, your

role as a middle child or an only child, or, you know, your

parents are divorced or not, or you have step parents or all of those different

External relationships that would be like an external family

system in this model,

Dick Schwartz called it an internal family system. So

essentially you have a self and then

there's a bunch of parts that relate to that self and

that relate to your pain. So the parts of us that are

in us, right, they are there

to bring us lots of joy, to bring us lots of goodness, bring us

lots of love, right? Unburdened, healed. Whole, whole

parts of us are there. Their natural state

is one of beauty and love and creativity and compassion and

curiosity and all these wonderful traits. But when

we get hurt in our lives, then those parts

become wounded and those parts then start

to act in ways that are protective. So

they want to protect us from being in

pain or preventing us from pain or running from pain.

So in internal family systems, we talk about the three

parts of the system and then the self is a

separate part. So I'm going to break it down for you. I'm going to try

not to get super in the weeds here. You might want to take down

notes or you know, like listen to this, like kind of

like a masterclass. If you want, or if you want to just listen to it

while you're doing your walk, that's fine. I would recommend that you pick

up the book by Dick Schwartz called no Bad Parts.

His name is actually Richard Swartz, but everyone calls him Dick Schwartz

and his book is called no Bad Parts. Now I've read this

book several times and I'm currently taking

an online course with Dick Schwartz and his team.

And it's all about how to use internal family

systems in coaching. So I'm being trained in this

so that I can work more wholly and

thoroughly in a way that's very healthy for people who work with me.

So I'm sharing this from reading the book and then also taking this class.

Okay, so all that said, let's talk about the three

parts that are in internal family systems and

then what self led energy feels like. So

the first part I want to talk about is I want to introduce you to

the part that is in pain. Okay? So I said

there's a part that is in pain, a part that tries to prevent

pain, and a part that tries to run from pain.

Okay, so the part that's in pain is called an

exile. The part that tries to prevent

pain is a manager. And

the part part that tries to run from pain or douse

pain if it shows up is called a firefighter.

So I'm going to break these three parts down. We have an exile,

we have a Manager and we have a

firefighter. So you can start to think about how to

describe them. Right. An exile is the part that's in

pain. And in the internal family system

we, when a wounded part gets wounded,

then the managers and the firefighters want to prevent

that from ever happening again. So they take that wounded part

of you, the little girl that experienced the,

you know, trauma and they shun her away,

they exile her. They don't really want to exile her

and her gifts and all the things that she's beautiful, like all the

beautiful parts about her, but they do want to exile her pain and they don't

know how to do it right. They don't know how to protect

us from pain without exiling the entire part of ourselves.

So I have a part of me that experienced abandonment,

right. Because my dad left our family. Because my

dad left my family. My parents were divorced when I was almost five

and then my dad left when I was almost nine. And so

I have like this wounded nine year old part that

got abandoned and she is

exiled in my system. And I've done a lot of

work in internal family systems. I've met that exile,

I've named her, I've gotten to know her. I'm in the process of

having self heal her. And it's a slow process.

The internal family systems, well, it could be fast, but a lot of

times these parts that get exiled or these

manager parts and these firefighter parts, they are

so affected, afraid of the exile or like the

pain that they do anything they can to not acknowledge it.

So these exile parts tend to be the part that

carries the pain and

the pain is called a burden in this

model. And so the exile carries these

burdens of, you know, the thought that

happens or the feeling that happens at the time of the

wounded experience. So let me break this down.

I'm a nine year old girl and all of a sudden my

dad leaves our family. So I don't know what to make,

how to make sense of that. Because I'm a little child, nobody helped me

understand it. Literally no one in my family talked about this

to me. I did not have language for what was happening. I didn't know what

was happening at all. So this terrible thing happened in my

life and no one talked about it. Literally no one. Not my brother, not my

sister, not my mom, we didn't talk about it. And

I then had this internalized message

that the world wasn't safe, that people aren't

reliable, that no one is going

to keep showing up for you, that you're on your own, girl.

So I have this burden, this wounded part of me.

Now, I only share that because I want you to think about some of those

limiting beliefs or those extreme thoughts that you

have that you carry within you. A lot of times they

sound like I am worthless. No one loves me. I'm

not good enough. The world isn't safe. No one is there for

me. And these burdens, they come

from events that happen in our childhood

where we are hurt or humiliated or

terrified. And so when we have an experience like that,

maybe we are bullied and we have an experience of being hurt,

humiliated and terrified. Or we experience a parent

who isn't emotionally available because of

their own mental state. I had this severely depressed

mother. She was really not available to me. So I

experienced neglect. And when I was experiencing that

neglect, I then internalized. No one's there for me,

right? I'm on my own. So these are part of my burdens, my wounds.

And you have them too. So these burdens can come

because of neglect, because of attachment injuries like

you want to secure attachment with your parent and you disobey. And

then they say, you know, I only talk to girls who are nice,

and you feel pushed away. So that kind of

neglect or attachment

injury can create a burden. Boundary

violations, right? Someone doing something harmful to your body

or taking advantage of you or not being

kind to you, that can hurt us. Lack of attunement. So

we are having an emotional experience, like our pet has

passed away, and we're sad and we're crying, and our

parent tells us, don't worry about it. It's not that big of a deal.

I'm gonna get you a new cat. And the parent doesn't

attune to where you are. They want to shut down that feeling,

bypass that emotion, and just kind of get you to the

next emotional state. We can also experience

burdens from cultural trauma. Like I said, if we are experiencing

being marginalized in some way because of the way we look or the way that

our relationship relate to the dominant culture, if we're in a

predominantly white culture and we are a person of color, then we are

going to experience some trauma from trying to either

fit in or not, or being told we're not good enough or something like that.

So we all have different ways that we experience burdens.

And then the exile gets isolated,

gets exiled, right? Their burden, their pain gets pushed away.

And the extreme feeling state because it's not

healed, it becomes our normal paradigm. So

we then start to live in a world where we think we're vulnerable, where we're

anxious, where we think we're worthless, where we feel shame, where we feel loneliness,

where we feel emptiness. And that's become our

worldview. It's like we get stuck

in this experience and we are

exiled so we can't heal from it. And then that's our

paradigm. Now the protector parts, the

manager and the firefighter, they are there

primarily to prevent pain from being activated

or when it's activated, to shut it down. So they're there to keep

that exile exiled. Right? And they're doing it out of

really good intentions. Right. Their intention is to

make sure that everyone stays safe by keeping that pain away

from us, doing anything it can to avoid that pain.

So a manager does it like a prevention plan,

trying to prevent that pain from coming. So it's

the part that works very, very hard to keep the world

safe for the exile, but also by keeping the

exile contained. So it's working all the time. Managers

are those parts of us that are

keeping you small, making sure you stay safe, being in control, pleasing

everyone, following the rules, managing your appearance, making sure you perform

well, staying hyper vigilant. So the manager really looks

like hard working, dedicated, dependable, risk adverse,

you know, believes they have the right answer for every situation. They tend to be

perfectionists, organizers, really super critical,

judging others, judging yourself because they're always trying to keep score

to figure out if they're safe or not. They also can over indulge

in caregiving in order to have a purpose and to control the

environment. They're always scanning for hazards. They're hyper vigilant,

very intellectual, very much in their brain. So a

manager is, you know, really

just that good in some ways. We think of them as like a

really good mom or really good dad. Right? Really on top of it.

And for me, my managers are like I talked about it in

a couple of episodes ago, that fix it, fuck it model. My manager is

just in fix it mode. Boom, boom. Let's get organized, let's get a plan,

let's get a list, let's get, you know, check off some things,

figure it out, research. It's like a very

hyperactive, over

controlling part. And we

all have managers. That is what it

looks like to keep an exile away. Yours might not

be as extreme as mine, or it could be more

extreme, but we all have this part of us that tries to prevent

pain. Now even the perfect manager in the whole world

could still not prevent pain because the

world is out there and triggering, activating things happen.

And the exile could easily Start, start to have a big temper

tantrum or an emotional outburst or you know,

try to like be vulnerable and maybe talk about some of their pain

or, you know, try to express some of that. And all of a sudden

the firefighter is going to show up and just douse

that flame of emotion out as much as it can.

So that's my, in my model, the, the

fuck it model, right? I go from fix it, that's hyper manager and to the

fuck it model, which is where it's like, who cares? Throw it all

numb, distract, do anything I can to

get away from the pain and not be vulnerable and not get hurt.

So some of those strategies can look like retail therapy

addictions such as food, drinking, sex, drugs, gambling,

numbing through social media or just like watching the same shows

over and over or watching tv. Self harm can also be a

strategy to, you know, prevent pain by focusing on

different pain. So the intention of the

firefighter is to numb, to soothe, to distract,

to dissociate. It's a very, you know,

emotional experience. It's like your fight flight experience. But

it goes to just whatever it can to protect you

from feeling that pain. A lot of times this is the

part that we shame and we shut down and we criticize and

we're mean to the firefighter. And the firefighter is always

mad at the manager because it's like, relax so we can have some fun. And

there's like this conflict within us between these two

parts of ourselves because neither is really

working in a way that's actually healing.

It's just kind of whack a mole trying to get the problems

and the pain that's popping up, get it pushed down, get it pushed down,

keep it from popping up, get it pushed down, keep it from popping up and

it becomes its own feedback loop. And the

answer to get out of this model of having the

exile pushed away, the manager trying to prevent that pain, the

firefighter popping up and pushing down whenever that pain gets

activated is by coming into your

deeper core self, by

activating and getting into touch with that self

energy. So before I go on to self energy, I want

to talk about these parts real quick because we talking about them

as like how they, what they do in

order to protect us and like some of their maladaptive

strategies, right, that they are doing these things

to protect us, right? They, they are really

valuable and when they're

unburdened, they actually have a lot of

purpose. It is good for me to have a

part of me that wants to relax and have fun. And, like, connect

to joy or whatever. Simplicity. That's my firefighter, right?

It's good for me to have the part of me that's very organized and can

take care of business and can run a business and all of that stuff.

I like these parts of myself, but I don't like

them in these distorted, extreme roles.

I don't like that they're shoving parts of me, this burdened,

exiled part of me that actually wants to feel free

and that can offer to me and to my whole system

something really interesting and fun and creativity.

If I keep shoving all these parts away because I'm trying to

avoid pain, I'm actually avoiding some other good things that

could come. So there are these natural qualities and resources

that each of our parts has that were there at the beginning. They

were there before any of this pain started. And they are beautiful

parts of your personality. I love these parts of you, whatever

they are, however, they protect you, whatever they're

called. Right. They're in you, and they make you you,

and they make you perform in the world in a way that we need as

a society. We need all of us to be

actualized and healed and hold and

whole in order to do what we're here for, which I

think is, you know, to love deeply, to raise these beautiful children you're raising,

to be a good neighbor, to be a good citizen, to

be, you know, a person who is not striving to get what they

want all the time. And, you know, it's not that. Fix it, change it, stop

it. Energy. It's just this pure energy. Now, I don't mean to

be, you know, too Pollyanna here or like, too, you know, in

the pie in the sky, but I do think the more we heal,

the more peace we bring to the world. We bring peace to our

relationships, and it is incredible. So how

do we do that? We do that by accessing what

we're calling the self, what Dick Schwartz,

in no bad parts and in internal family systems, has identified

as capital S. Self. So the self

is meant to emerge as the natural leader of the

system. It's your essence, it's your wisdom, it's your

intuition. It's the part of you that is the

eternal part of you. That's how I think of it. It's the source of

healing for your emotional health. Just

like your body can heal a wound and, you

know, sew itself back up, which is incredible.

That's what the self is there for. It's like your

internal wound healer for your

emotional pain. It cannot be damaged. By trauma.

It is always been there and it is pure.

So some people call it a soul, some spiritual traditions call

it chi, the Holy Spirit, inner wisdom, your being,

your core, your essence. It's hard to put words to it right,

But I think you may have had experiences where

you might have been in this self led energy. It's those

periods of time where you feel at peace,

where you feel like there's a

sense of well being, that there's some

space within your heart and your mind and your body. You're not so busy

in your head, you're not feeling all that anxiousness in your body

you're feeling safe and there's nothing you need to do right now.

That feeling of well being, of being enough,

that feeling that everything is going to be okay. Some people feel it like a

vibrating energy. How I experience

it, I know I'm in self when I feel

a deep heaviness in my belly. It's

like my whole body relaxes and in

my core I feel like an

exhale of my core being and I

can sense it. Then everything else becomes light.

So you've probably experienced this feeling of

self. If you haven't, next episode I'm going to talk about how to

activate it and get into deeper levels of self.

Now how do you know if you're in self energy?

Some of the emotions and behaviors that are

associated with self are what we call the eight

Cs. So it's funny because whenever I have

talked about becoming calm or I've done like marketing

materials or trying to describe my programs, I end up using

compassion, connectedness, you know,

confidence, like I end up using C words. So it's funny to

me that maybe there is something to the C, you know, this

letter C. Because Dick Schwartz also calls

the self energy, the eight Cs. So let

me describe some of them and then you can kind of get an idea

of what we're talking about. So one of them is curiosity.

That's kind of where you begin of I wonder what's going on here,

why am I acting this way? And we're doing it from a very

open, calm place of curiosity.

Another aspect of the self led energy is feeling

calm like we talked about at the beginning of the episode, that deep sense of

rooted calm, feeling confident,

having compassion for yourself and for others, being able to be

creative, to think on the fly to, you know, find

solutions that maybe you weren't able to access before,

having clarity about what needs to happen next, being

courageous, being willing to take that radical action

and having that sense of connectedness to yourself, to your family,

to your friends, to your environment and, you know, to your community.

So again, those eight Cs, curiosity, calm,

confidence, compassion, creativity,

clarity, courage, and connectedness.

So this sense of self, it's a felt sense. It's an

embodied state of being. And what does embodied mean? It means you can feel

it within your body. Like you, you don't

observe self. It's the essence. You don't have to see it,

right? You see everything else. You don't see yourself because you

are the person who has the eyes. You

are embodied. It's your experience of

you, your essence. So I love

tapping into this sense of self. I love

being able to think about my sense of self and

that she's in there all the time, ready and

available to me. She's also ready and available

to you. You have your own sense of self. So why is

it that we have trouble accessing this strong sense of

self? So I want you to think about the sun,

right? Think about how the sun is always there, whether

we can see it or not. So even when the earth

turns and it's night, we know that the

sun still exists on another part of the earth,

right? The sun does not move. It is

there. And the planets rotate around the sun.

If you think about your parts as being planets and

moons that rotate around the sun, then you can kind

of get an idea of the sun. You think about clouds or

rainy days. And the truth is that the

sun is still there behind the clouds. I like to imagine being on

an airplane and you take off on a sunny, I mean a cloudy day and

you pull up above 30,000ft and all of a sudden the sun is out,

right? That is where your, your sense of self,

your self is always there.

Unfortunately, the

self, the sun of you can get

covered by protected parts of you in ifs. They

call that blending. Where you, the

sun and the moon, say during a solar eclipse, the moon

covers the sun and the other parts. Like

anyone on earth would think that the sun was gone and

just think that the moon was the leader of the world

at that point. And so when a part is covering

the self, it's like a solar eclipse

or a self eclipse. I kept thinking about that phrase.

I kind of made that up. I was like, oh, it's like a self eclipse.

Like I've eclipsed myself. Because my protector part is so

big and so, so loud that it has shut out all

the parts of me that want to relate to the sun.

Now when a part is covering the self, you

experience the World through that protector, their perspective.

So you experience the world not from that

sense of self, of calm, curious,

compassion, creativity, clarity. Those are the

feelings you want to have. And if you don't have those,

that means that there is a part that is blocking your sense of

self. And you then become experience the world

through their eyes instead of

the seat of consciousness eyes. So what

happens is you end up having

your part telling the rest of you, you

know, all the other parts of you what's what, like what's

true and what's not true, but that's skewed. The

perspective of that part is from woundedness, it's from a lack

of healing. And so it might be telling you the

world is unsafe, people don't like you, everyone is

mad at you, things aren't going to go well, the world is a

shitstorm. Like all these negative thoughts are going

to become true. You are going to believe,

believe your bullshit. You're going to believe the parts telling you

what they want you to believe in order to keep that exile

exiled. And so in this process

of tapping into self led energy, you are

allowing that sunshine to come through A little bit,

a little bit of hope, of a little

bit of peace, a little bit of that

things maybe aren't as bad as it seems. A little bit of

perspective that is not from the wounded part.

How this happens is when you get in touch with the core essence of

yourself. That is those Cs when you're able to tap into

your natural curiosity, your natural calm, your confidence,

all the things that are available to you at your core that your

protective parts are cover up. And

how we do that is through a process called befriending.

And it really is kind of going into a quiet

mindful practice where you start to talk

to these parts of yourself and it feels kind of silly and it feels kind

of weird. And you know, it's really natural when you do it

with a therapist or a coach who's skilled in it because it's just a lot

of questions. But I've done a lot of it with my

therapist, but also with myself. And what that looks like is me

being in that self led space, just

activating, accessing just the tiniest bit of

inner peace and just looking around and being curious

about my parts, asking them

how they feel. What I noticed is that there's an exercise in

no bad parts called mapping your parts. And you close your

eyes and you just start to see who's there. And it's really

fun. And I've watched a lot of Demos and I've listened to a lot of

other people finding their parts and really

they come. You come to a place where your

sense of self, that embodied self,

falls in love with all these parts. It's like how a

parent feels about their child, how you feel

about your kid. When you're in your purest energy

and you just delight in them and you just find them so funny

and strange and like you want to get to know them. That

is what it's like when you, the internal parent,

for lack of better thought, is there

becoming a friend to all the parts of you.

So it's a relationship, a self to part

relationship. And when you are meeting your parts,

you're just getting to know them. How do they feel? What are they afraid of?

You know, what are they protecting you from? What are the things that they're afraid

will happen if they stop doing their job? What is

the original part that needs to be healed? What would happen if that part got

healed? What would your manager part want to do

instead? If she didn't have to work so hard at like

calendaring everything all the time and overthinking and over

planning and being overly productive. Maybe she'd like to read

a book. Maybe she'd like to learn how to paint.

I don't know, right? Maybe she'd like to take all those skills that she

has and put them towards volunteering

for something that she cares about. Like if you were whole and you

were healed, the parts of you that have been burdened would be

unburdened and be free to do something new. So

the relationship with self, that self energy,

that self healing, it creates

the experience that the part needs to feel safe and to release

itself from some of its extreme roles. So next

time I'm going to talk about self energy, what it feels like, how to

get in touch with it, why it's important. And then I'm going to talk

in the third part of this series about how to do

this with your children. Not parts work, but

how to be that self energy with

your kids, why that's so important. And so you have to

learn to tap in to your

own self energy and heal yourself. And

then you can be healing your children in real time when they

have upsets. But we really aren't able

to do that. When we think our kids are in pain, a lot of our

protective parts will come roaring up. But

if we're in self led energy, we can let our kids be in pain,

let them heal from that pain. Takes a while

sometimes. Like it might take a Day or a week or two, it's okay. If

kids are going through something hard, that's fine.

But self energy trusts that they are going to be okay.

So I want to help you tap into deeper levels of self energy

deep next week so that you can practice it with your kids using

that self energy. All of this is really what I call

calm. So in my program, in the Calm Mama process,

it's Calm connect limit set, Correct.

Calm is about our internal sense of self,

internal sense of well being. It's really tapping into

our internal self and being at peace,

true legit calm. And from calm we do

true legit connect, which is a

embodied sense of being okay. When our children are

struggling with emotion, being comfortable with their

discomfort. We only do that truthfully when

we're in a sense of peace about our own discomfort. When we know we can

handle any of our feelings, then we can handle any of our kids feelings.

So tapping into self will help you heal

some of your wounds and give you more and more access

to emotional coaching yourself,

allowing for feelings being okay, doing a lot of

good self talk, not being so mean to yourself and

feeling good in your life, which is really so powerful

for you, for your children, for all of us. So I hope this

episode was really not too dense. I hope it was helpful and gave you a

big overview of internal family systems. You may have heard about this

like on other podcasts. Dick Schwartz has been a lot of podcasts and

stuff. You can kind of dig deep into hearing him talk about it. But I

thought for all of you who listen to my podcast, maybe you don't want

to dive deep into it. You just want to like, what are they? What is

everyone talking about now? You know what ifs is? It's

a relationship within yourself that

yourself is in relationship to your exiled

parts of you that's your pain that you've exiled, your manager part

that's trying to prevent pain, and your firefighter that shuts

down pain whenever it shows up. So I'm sure I'll talk about more

about those specific parts in future episodes. But

next week, like I said, we're going to talk all about self energy and then

using self energy with your own children. All right, Mama,

I wishing you a really great week. I hope you're having a good summer. It's

almost over as this episode comes out, which is crazy.

But I hope it's been a good one and I will talk to you next

week.