u/Makermom14

It’s a book about parts that aren’t ours inside our system. There are a lot of different themes in this book, about how different cultures view “spirits” etc but the main idea is that the writer Robert Falconer studied people through an IFS framework (Richard Schwartz writes the intro, they are colleagues) for years and deduced that sometimes people have parts that did not originate from their own system.

It’s a mind bender of a book and very long but his accounts of people genuinely experiencing parts as being not of themselves really helped me.

I watched my ex have a psychotic break a few years ago and after that I went deep into IFS to make sense of my inner world. I found several parts in my system that were not mine and my therapist helped me remove them and return them to my ex.

Anyone else experience this or read this book?

I’ve been doing IFS for about 4 years, mostly with a therapist and for the past year on my own. I’ve revolutionized my inner world, created safe places for parts, elected managers for caring for different parts, really had some amazing experiences with Self.

During these years I’ve gone through a hellscape divorce with a mentally ill ex and found my ability to be ok with myself.

For the past few months, I have a part that shows me my mistakes. Every morning from the moment my eyes open, it’s a relentless movie of every stupid choice, dumb thing I said, bad relationship decisions, it’s all presented as “look at everything you did wrong”. It’s almost impossible to find Self in the conversation, I just feel bombarded by this picture of what a miserable disaster my life has been.

Lately I’ve been asking why are you showing me this, noticing there are other parts that are like “cut it out right now we are sick of this shit”, a part that feels really just wounded by this constant negativity.

I’m just open to any thoughts on this, how to address it, mostly I feel like I’m surviving it, and the only thing that helps somewhat is hugging my cat while he purrs and kind of leaving my body for a while.