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Connection, Vulnerability, and Shame – Brene Brown’s Brilliance

March 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A friend just cued me on on the latest Brene Brown video. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Brown is extremely insightful about how important connection is, and how vulnerability and shame play such a huge role in our ability to connect with people and be happy. When I first started practicing Internal Family Systems, I was surprised by how so many peoples problems tied back into shame. People don’t generally come to counseling because of shame, at least they don’t think they do, but really, that’s what’s underneath for so many people. That basic sense, that we’re not good enough, or not worthy enough. I highly recommend having a look at Brown’s videos, and having counseling with us if you feel that you share the difficulties that she describes.

 


Schedule my Free Internal Family Systems Counseling Consultation >>

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How IFS Changed My Life

February 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I became a practitioner of IFS myself, because IFS changed my life.  It has changed my life in many ways, I feel less anxiety and shame than I used to, I’m more productive, and much more.  This particular story is the most dramatic.  I’m still shocked that a counseling session has had that much impact on my life.  Thank you Divia!!!

 

-Shannon Friedman

Find your passion.

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IFS Practice Group this Sunday: Observe the Non-Unitary Mind in Action

February 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Where: 850 Williams Way, Apt 4. Mountain View, CA 94040
When: Sunday, Feb 5, 4:30-7:00pm

This Sunday, we’re hosting a practice group where you can not only experience Internal Family Systems therapy, but learn to facilitate your friends. Experiencing IFS has lead to my becoming better, happier, and more productive :-) . If you’re interested, read more here: or here.

But I’ve learned as much if not more from leading others through the IFS process as I have from experiencing it myself. It’s led to:

  • Much greater social awareness

You get really attuned to observing subtle changes in the other person’s state. Now I get tons more data from body language, word choice, vocal inflection, and microexpressions. And it’s not abstract or theoretical. You’ll get real-time feedback about what you’re observing corresponds to, since you’re interacting with what you see.

  • Increased empathy

When you actually talk to an angry, complaining, or distracted part of a person, see that it’s trying to protect them from pain, and experience the memory of that pain alongside the person as they describe it, you cannot help but get better at understanding where other people are coming from. Shannon, who has been practicing Nonviolent Communication for years cites learning to practice IFS as something that greatly increased her ability to empathize with others.

  • Greater confidence

Once you can see the defensive and at first threatening parts of a person’s psyche become vulnerable and explain their protective role, you’ll never see an angry or uncommunicative person in quite the same way again. Most of my fears in life are social in nature, so when someone lets you see first-hand that they’re as crazy as you are and that they only seem scary because they’re scared of pain, you’ll feel more comfortable interacting. And you should feel more at ease, because you’ll have a better model of human psychology.

There’s a lot to learn about practicing IFS, but the basics are pretty easy to grasp. We’ll have lists of questions for everyone to work off of, and four experienced facilitators to prompt you when you get stuck and to give helpful feedback.

To all of you who’ll be coming, I promise an interesting and growthful experience.

Click here to check out the event on facebook.

Hope to see lots of you there!

If you’re curious about IFS but can’t make it to this, click here to sign up online for our free consultation.

 

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How to Deal With Embarrassment #2 – Use Curiosity and Observation

January 27, 2012 By 1 Comment

2.  How to observe yourself feeling embarrassed from a place of curiosity.  

 

Eastern philosophies and practices like Internal Family Systems teach you to see parts of yourself as distinct from the part of you that observes them.  When you feel embarrassed, you can have another part of yourself that feels compassion for the part of you that is embarrassed.

 

When I feel embarrassed and try separating my mind into an embarrassed part and a part observing the embarrassment, I instantly relax.  When I’m able to do it that is… it takes practice.  Practices that help include:

 

  • Meditation – Meditation can help speed up the process quite a bit.
  • Big Mind -  Big Mind is the first practice I ran into personally that is similar to IFS.
  • IFS – IFS is a practice of looking at your mind as separate parts that we use here at Positive Vector.
  • Reading about practices like Big Mind, IFS, and other techniques for disassociating from the part of your mind that is embarrassed, and talking to a friend practicing these techniques.

 

Its uncomfortable to feel embarrassed!  Let the part of you that feels embarrassed feel how much you sympathize with it.  It might sound weird at first.  When you practice, you will find that it works!  You can also be curious.  Ask yourself: Where do I feel the embarrassment in my body?  Is that my forehead scrunching?  Do I feel little lines in my brow?  What is that sensation in my eyes when they squeeze shut?  What images are going through my mind?  What is the first time I recall feeling this way?

 

When I do this, as I explore my embarrassment.  I become less embarrassed, because its so interesting!  The way my mind and body carry the emotion of embarrassment is fascinating.  When I feel embarrassment I’m brought back to a picture of the school yard when I was in preschool.  I see the sand of the playground.  I see shadows as my eyes squeeze shut.  I put my hand to my face and duck my chin.  I found this visualization when doing IFS, so now I have a visualization of one of the first times I felt embarrassed.  I find it much easier to disassociate from my embarrassment now that I can see it as something that this little girl developed.  People feel and display embarrassment in so many unique and fascinating ways!  Try to find yours.  If you want help, contact us!

 

Click here to return to How to Deal with Embarrassment.

- Shannon Friedman

Find your passion.

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How to Change Your Mind #3. Listen to Your Story.

December 3, 2011 By 1 Comment

You might find yourself telling yourself that you should just suck it up, and just do it.  And yet you don’t.  This means that there is some part of you that doesn’t want to do it.  Ignoring this part and telling it that its wrong hasn’t been working for you.  That’s what you’ve been doing for all of this time, and it hasn’t been working, right?  

Sometimes what will work, is to listen to what that part that says you don’t want to do it has to say.  You probably don’t want to listen to it.  You might resent, or even hate that part.  But it is controlling you, and if you want it to stop controlling you, you need to get its cooperation.  

The first step to gaining this part’s cooperation is to listen to it.  Ask it to tell you its story.  Ask it how what its doing is helping you, from its perspective.  Internal Family Systems facilitation can help with this.  Email contact@positivevector.com for more information. 

When you ask this part to tell you its story, try to listen as sympathetically as you can.  Try to understand what its like from this part’s point of view, when it feels the rest of you trying to shut it down telling it that its bad and should be shut down and made to go away.  Let it know that you truly want to hear it, completely.  

Once this part is heard, you may feel some release.  It won’t feel like its message to you is as urgent as it did before it felt heard.  

To complete the process of really changing yourself through listening to this part, go through the sequence of Internal Family Systems, where you learn to guide this part into helping you in more effective ways.  

 

-Shannon Friedman

 

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Reminder: IFS Training Tomorrow November 27th

November 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Folks look at some of the changes I’ve made in my life and have a tendency to comment, “Oh, that’s Adam. He just modifies quickly. I’m not sure I could do that.”

There is nothing special about me. I’ve been fortunate to find a lot of amazing tools to help me change. Anyone can use the same techniques to get similar results. There was a time when I was a devout introvert. I was also miserable. The traits associated with happiness were obvious after a little observation and research, but actually internalizing them was a huge challenge. Even after several years of painful experimenting it was difficult to see the profound change I wanted. Within months of practicing IFS I began to experience remarkably rapid growth towards things like enjoyable extroversion. My life now reflects the science of being happy. This tool can be applied to almost any change you want to make.

Come join Shannon Friedman and me, Adam Widmer, to learn more about how to use the Internal Family Systems model in your own life tomorrow, Sunday, November 27th at 2pm at our HQ in Mountain View. Check out our post on the last meeting for more information.

Send me an email to RSVP: adam.widmer@positivevector.com

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IFS Practice Group this Sunday (Nov 5): Make Friends with the Voices in Your Head

November 5, 2011 By 1 Comment

The exact time is this Saturday, November 5th from 3:00pm-6:00pm.

You should join us if:

  • You find yourself thinking, “Part of me wants X, but part of me wants Y”
  • You feel stuck because it seems as though you’re being pulled in multiple directions at the same time
  • You’re sure about what you should do, but you “just can’t” get yourself to act
  • You see yourself acting out the same destructive pattern over and over again (i.e. lying awake at night worrying intsead of going to sleep)
  • You want to overcome emotional blocks to becoming the sort of person you want to be (see item #4 from Alicorn’s polyhacking post)

Suffering happens when you you’re fighting with yourself. For a more detailed description, I’d recommend Kaj’s Less Wrong post, Suffering as attentional allocation conflict. And that means that by turning your attention to each voice in turn and hearing it out, so that it’s fully and clearly communicated what it needs you to know, you can reliably resolve suffering.

I can’t fix all your internal conflicts in one afternoon—though I keep reading, learning, and practicing to get better and faster because I have A Sense That More is Possible—but I can promise some movement for you on an area where you currently feel stuck. You may not have it all worked out, but you will have a sense that something inside you has relaxed or loosened, and that you have increased clarity.

I know you’re all excellent at intellectual understanding and analysis, but research has shown that the greastest change comes when people are in a high experiencing level state. Read this excerpt to see what I mean:

It’s almost like … it kind of feels like … sitting here looking through a photo album. And, like each picture of me in there is one of my achievements. And, I think [inaud] because I wasn’t achieving for me. I was always achieving for … someone else so they’d think I was good enough. It’s like it feels right to me to say … that … I don’t know quite how to say it … It’s like the feeling is there, but l can’t quite put words on it. It feels right somehow to say it’s like I’ve chosen this man as my challenge … knowing that I’d be defeated. That this person wouldn’t respond to me in the same way. So that I could kind of buy right back into the photo album being flipped through. I didn’t have what it took (T: Uhhum) to get what I wanted. Which is kind of…

Anyone who has meditated knows how mind-altering observing yourself (thoughts, feelings, sense of self) can be, and with my own personal growth work I have come to trust Bill Harris’s assertion that:

You can do something destructive to yourself (feelings, beliefs, values, behaviors, etc.) over and over as long as you do it unconsciously (without continuous conscious awareness). But once you begin to do the non-resourceful feeling, behavior, belief, value, etc. consciously, it will begin to fall away. You just cannot do something that is not good for you and also do it consciously.

Give me three hours of your time, and I’ll get you into a high experiencing level state, exactly where you need to be to introspect in a way that produces immediate behavioral change in yourself.

On Saturday, I will give everyone walkthrough handouts about how to lead an IFS process, and I’ll circulate, stepping in whenever anyone gets stuck.]

If you want more details about IFS works so you can make see how it will work for you and, check out this description from Jay Earley, author of Self Therapy.

It matters to me to give everyone who attends the best experience, so once you know that you’re coming, please email me and let me know whether you’re coming to mostly work on your own issues and get movement there, or whether you want to learn how to use IFS skills on your own too. Knowing what your motivations are will help me meet your needs.

RSVP to divia.melwani@positivevector.com

 

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