Infernal Family Systems

I spent most of the morning doing a deep dive into Internal Family Systems, also known as IFS. IFS is a type of therapy that asserts we are all made up of a family, an internal system, of multiple parts, and when we experience trauma, certain parts get stuck in protector mode and cause us dysregulation out of a mechanism of adaptive protection. Through developing a non judgmental relationship between your Self and your parts, you can execute healthy Self-leadership overall and thrive as a emotionally regulated person.

It's an interesting modality. One big mental stumbling block I have had to examine is that the developer of IFS, Dr. Richard Schwartz, is very collectivist in his world view. Every so often as I am working my way through his book, No Bad Parts, I am running into diatribe about part of the reason the world is full of so many dysregulated souls is due to the exploitive, meritocratic, growth-focused Capitalist Western ways that have driven the world for the last century and a half or so.

Now, I am not going to spin off into some pros an cons argument about any social or political ideology in this pensive blog post, but something that has been bothering me lately is all the if/then labels being slung around like guns in The Magnificent Seven. It's a bit disconcerting to be honest.

If there are No Bad Parts, why then are some parts of a system that has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system, well, bad? If you drive a Tesla you are "bad" to some people, whereas, if you have blue hair you are an existential horror to others. I have written about my disdain of divisionism before, and I truly do long for an enlightened time where we could both simultaneously like and dislike things about people while also being capable of not judging them on an atomic level, and gasp, perhaps even love them.

Which brings me back to my post title. The world feels like it is on fire emotionally. Every day, when I scan the feed for what's going on it feels a bit like a global episode of West Side Story. Everyone feels like they are ganging up and getting ready to square off, and if your ideology doesn't align exactly with the dominant, supposedly righteous, group you are committing "literal" violence on another group. At the same time, actual violence is happening, but there's a reverberating silence because perhaps acknowledging the violence would mean an examination of our biases and a collaboration towards actual, human-focused solutions that might not tick all our identity-politics boxes.

One thing that all of my therapist-in-training learning has taught me is that on a neuroscience level, almost everyone, at least those who have a smart phone on them, is in a state of agitation most of the time. A subtle fight response, a lingering malaise of developmental threat awareness, and when an entire tribe becomes agitated enough, what then, what's going to happen? You can't engage in advanced problem solving or frontal lobe processing if you are in fight, flight, or freeze, and you can't move out of that state if you are always agitated because of that heathen Elon Musk or demon Bernie Sanders (hello sarcasm!).

Here's the thing, I don't know any of those people, the one's I am supposed to despise. All I have to go by with most people is their actions, but even those can not be a reflection of the actual person due to mitigating developmental and/or traumatic factors or the fact that our media is not known for accurate fact portrayal. One thing that is becoming more apparent to me is that we are in quite a state as a species. I was joking around the other day with a friend and said that Sunday School taught the older generations executive functioning and social skills. My friend stopped and got all pensive looking for a minute before replying, "You're not wrong." Are we dealing with the end result of too much available information without social structure and socialization? I have no idea.

All I do know, is that I love to listen to people. Everyone has a story, and that story cannot be effectively delivered with accuracy in a rage inducing soundbite. Heck, it's hard enough for me to make a point in a few hundred word blog post, and that doesn't even come close to encompassing the magic of an actual sit down conversation between beings who share everything from pheromones to bacteria buddies. We are all interconnected in the sense that we are alive, but we are slowly losing threads in that beautiful tapestry that makes the painting that is humanity unique.

It's all rather infernally perplexing.