How Does Internal Family Systems Therapy Help You Heal?
IFS (Internal Family Systems)-based trauma therapy offers an approach that goes a little deeper than “just talking.” But what does that actually mean? It’s kind of like looking at you as a story with several tangled characters: your characters have had to relate to each other in a certain, intricate way to make the incredible story you are today. But how does it unfold?
Every part of you is welcome, exactly as you are.
In the real world, you’re successful, perfect, taking care of everyone else, on top of the world. In secret, you’re having meltdowns. You want to scream and cry. You feel intolerable. You don’t want anyone else to see your anger and sadness.
In Between Cultures and Lonely
For adult daughters of immigrants, part of what gives rise to feeling “too much” or “not enough” comes from the messages received from growing up in a culture outside of our heritage cultures.
Being in a new culture may have been born out of both hope and sacrifice. Your families were focused on survival, safety, finding a better life, and through these journeys, community, cultural, and family togetherness may have been fragmented.
From Bad Daughter to Cycle Breaker
You’re the bad daughter. That’s what they tell you anyway—your family, your community. You can hear it in their judgment and see it on their disappointed faces. You know that’s what they discuss in their whispers and behind your back. If you are not showing up exactly the way they want you to and exactly as the version they expect, you are cast aside. The black sheep. The outsider.
Sound familiar?
My Family Is Perfectly Normal, so Why Am I SO Anxious to See Them for the Holidays?
The holidays are coming up. You’re supposed to be excited about the warmth and good times, but you are feeling dread.
It’s a lonely feeling. Family is expecting to see you and those expectations are packed with additional pressure. And if you’re the only one feeling this way, or if you have been told it is culturally unacceptable to not spend time with family, you are left feeling confused and bewildered. On the other hand, have you ever given yourself the space to consider what is at the root of your dread?
What Exactly is People-Pleasing? Let’s Get Into it.
People pleasing is a threat/survival response called the fawn response. Just like fight, flight, and freeze, fawn helps you to survive when you feel threatened. You usually use this response to placate a threat, make the threat feel calm and happy, to diminish the threat and to preserve yourself.
Therapist in Colchester, CT on Why Can’t I Set Boundaries?
Here’s the thing about starting to set boundaries when it’s a new practice…you get this felt sense of: what if that person gets mad at ME? That impending and anticipatory sense of dread, doom, and fear can really hold you back or make you double-down, going back on whatever boundary you were holding.