IFS THERAPY: POWERFUL HEALING FOR ADULT CHILDREN OF EMOTIONALLY IMMATURE PARENTS
I genuinely wake up everyday grateful for the deep and privileged work that I get to do.
In recent years, I have also gained a new clarity about my clients that has forever altered the trajectory of my work’s priorities, focus, passion and planning for the decades to come; I became aware that a significant number of my clients, with no deliberate attempt on my part to find them, exhibited the same patterns, had experienced similar difficult events and came with similar goals to work on during our weekly or fortnightly sessions together.
Over and over again, I would observe that these highly accomplished people were grappling with the same worries and insecurities about their achievement, their enoughness and why they felt so anxious and heavy a lot of the time.
First as an executive coach and later as a therapist, I have met hundreds of introspective, hard-working, kind and dedicated clients. I saw repeated needs and confusions expressed, that there were so many commonalities with the ‘parts’ of them that came along with them to their sessions, that informed their lives and that challenged them in ways (sometimes extreme) they could not understand.
I came to see how many of these high-achieving and wonderful clients had suffered at the hands of emotionally immature parents (EIPs; you can read more in Lindsay C Gibson’s books here) and had endured incredibly stressful, shaming and overwhelming childhoods (even though many clients still say things like “my childhood wasn’t so bad” and “I didn’t experience trauma in my younger years”, often also expressing confusion because “my parents did a lot of good stuff for me”).
LEARN MORE ABOUT HEALING FROM EIPS
Despite all of this adversity in their families of origin, they landed on my virtual doorstep with a list of accolades, courageous acts and accomplishments as long as their arms. But often these same humans were clearly lacking the positive self-image that one might assume would go alongside that level of success and achievement. They came expressing anxieties, fears, relationship difficulties and crippling self doubts. Instead of self-compassion and self love at their core, their prevailing driving forces would reveal to be staunch inner critics, perfectionist and people-pleasing tendencies, imposter feelings and a complete aversion to being a drain or cause of bother to anyone else.
I discovered, almost simultaneously to this realisation, the power and the vitality of the psychotherapeutic model of Internal Family Systems (IFS). I began to weave the principals into my practice, to replace positive psychology coaching and a heart-felt but untethered call-to-action around self-compassion, with the IFS protocols and ideas.
In doing so, I became utterly bowled over by how my clients responded to this radically compassionate approach to healing, that I turned my entire work, practice and training on its head and set about turning myself into a laser-focused and fully-committed IFS therapist and practitioner.
IFS and working with the traumatic upbringing caused by EIPs makes a potent and incredible pairing as a modality and a presenting problem.
When I work with Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (ACEIP), I use the powerful IFS model to help my clients:
Identify and understand the issues that arise when raised by EIPs.
Learn how to apply IFS as an ACEIP in welcoming, loving and unburdening the parts of us that became extreme in the face of stressful childhoods
Transform their futures with self-led, sustainable and, at times, mind-blowing healing.
Many ACEIPs attend therapy rooms, Zooms and couches all over the world. They buy self-help books in the millions and seek personal development to find crucial answers to how they experience the world. They are ‘internalisers’ and introspective, most having experienced severe emotional loneliness as children. They both desire change and are committed to doing the hard work to get it.
ACEIPs are the ones trying so hard to make sense of a world as adults that did not make sense to them at all as children.
If any of this post resonates with you and you’d like to know more about working with me, harnessing the IFS model with an Institute-trained practitioner and making sense of, as Bruce J Perry would say, “what happened to you?’ then please reach out to me here.
I’d love to hold space for you as you embark on your healing journey, begin the process of daring to be you and learn the magic of accessing your authentic self in a safe and supportive container.
Warmest wishes,
Lucy Orton, IFS-trained Therapist/Coach