Sometimes we experience emotions and behaviors we don’t like and don’t understand. When we begin to become aware of these situations, we often ask ourselves why this happens.
Most of us have some rigid behaviors in our lives, we are almost obsessed with some specific ways of doing things.
We have difficulty doing things differently, we are afraid of change and not open to new possibilities.
Sometimes it seems that our safety or survival depends on maintaining these patterns of behavior, as if they work like a safety net that we cannot do without.
Traumas and Protectors
Often these behaviors originate from the traumas we suffer throughout our lives. They represent or result from the way we found at the time to deal with them. These patterns and emotions had and still have a function that has to be recognized in order to be resolved.
When we try to modify these behaviors and access the source of these situations, it seems that we feel resistance within us.
Dr. Richard C. Schwartz explains that we have within us some figures - which he calls Protectors - who play this role. They are figures who try to protect us from situations that they know have hurt us.
The “Internal Family Systems”
For the founder of “Internal Family Systems”, the better strategy is not to break down these barriers but to seek access, with the help of these Protectors, to the situations they are protecting. Then, with his permission, he seeks to heal the vulnerabilities that these traumas have left us.
In this session of “Wisdom 2.0 - The Power of Connection“, Dr. Richard Schwartz demonstrated how his method works with the collaboration of the presenter of the session.
Departing from the present, they make a journey of reunion to a more difficult period of the presenter’s adolescence. They try to understand and pacify the emotions that were trapped in that period and understand their connections with current behaviors.
“(…) we did a whole healing with that boy which involves three main steps:
one is for you to witness what he went through and feel how bad it was for him
(…) then to literally get him out of where he’s stuck in the past to a safe place
(…) then to what we call unburden to release the emotions and beliefs he got from that
(…) then we bring in the protector to see he doesn’t have to do that anymore
(…) you’re not so vulnerable anymore”
A very interesting and revealing session. A demonstration that, with kindness and softness, it is possible to find more inner peace.
It is possible to understand and resolve some of the themes and traumas that we carry with us since childhood and youth. We just need some help and to give ourselves that permission and that opportunity.
The full talk is available here:
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