There are a few moments of magic in healing that pop to mind. The first time that IFS clicked for me is one of them. With my therapist, I went in super blended with a part and I walked out and was like: Woah. The world looks completely different than when I walked in. There was a peace I hadn’t felt in so long. It’s constantly happened with my IFS therapist.

Another moment of magic was the first time I did Aletheia. I felt all consuming love and a non-selfness that I had only experienced through MDMA or psychedelics. And I realized it wasn’t the psychedelics – it was me. I was redefining what that feeling was in my system.

Another one was the first time I did an anger release through Art of Accomplishment Great Decisions Course. I felt so much energy and joy come back into my system. There was a safeness in the anger. Like, there wasn’t shame or the danger kind of feeling that almost always came with it before.

I did CBT for a little bit. I went to a therapist, and did classic talk therapy. I was like, this is not working. I show up, I talk, and I feel like I’m just going in circles.

I came across the concept of IFS through Ava’s Book Bear Express newsletter. She wrote about it, and I had never considered that the thoughts and stories in my head weren’t me. That they could be parts of me and not my core self. It created this shift in identity that introduced the potential for so much more compassion. I was able to see the parts of myself and the voices from the frame of: Oh, you’re just scared. You’re really, really hurt. And there’s a good reason. Like, there are No Bad Parts (from the book). And it just seemed so radical at the time.

My usual response would be to repress these parts, or think that they’re wrong. There’s this morality that they’re not meeting, so they need to be put into this dungeon.

It was four years ago that I came across IFS. I had also come across Michael Singer’s Untethered Soul at the time, and started reading stuff around the idea of: You are not the voice in your head. In fact, you have no head. You’re not where you think you are – like, shifting the locus of self-identity. I honestly think that that’s the biggest first shift and the start to my healing journey. It created the ability to unblend and look at myself and then maybe look at myself with love, with the help of a therapist.

When I think back, there was so much shame in my system. There was a lot of compartmentalizing – thinking that parts were not fit for human consumption, or even for my friends. There were a lot of parts fighting each other. I would often be blended with the protective parts who had a lot of fear and wanted to be a good person. That was a really big core fear: That I’m not a good person, I’m bad.

That was a big script that was running among my parts for a long time. It’s almost hard to put into words the way it evolved, but the best way to describe it is that there’s just way more love and trust.

There was a lot of distrust because of the way they’d been put in a dungeon or dismissed. And now there’s more okayness and a safeness when I go in. Like, one might be throwing a tantrum, but there’s not a fire alarm red alert where it feels like everything in my life needs to go down in flames.

I remember the very tangible feeling when I used to do parts work, and the parts wouldn’t talk to me or they’d hide away and I couldn’t access them – there was this feeling of mistrust. And now they’re a lot more like, oh, you’re here. I’m fucking pissed at you. And it’s like, awww, sweet little parts.

I got so lucky. I found my therapist at the time through EMDR, because I wanted to do that, but it turned out to be too intense for me. I did a few sessions. EMDR raises the entropy. Like, you go back into the trauma and everything’s happening again. I just didn’t have that safety and okayness inside me to handle that. And it actually resulted in relapsing into old patterns even more strongly – like, it was more destabilizing. And I don’t think I really reached a resolution in those sessions with my therapist. We tried less intense sessions and it just ended up being something that wasn’t helpful for me. I could see it being really powerful for someone because it is so entropy-creating – kind of like psychedelics.

Some people’s systems that are upregulated a lot, and some are down regulated a lot. Like, there are some systems where there’s too much activity, a lot of anxiety, and adding more chaos is not helpful. And there are those that by default are more repressed and feeling numb, and then adding more chaos can open things.

Not to go into astrology, but I have a lot of air signs and so I’ve realized over the years that grounding is really good for me, and things that add up more energy are not so good.

I’ve recommended my parts work therapist to so many people. She’s amazing, incredible, I feel so lucky that I found her. I found IFS through the newsletter, then I forwarded her the newsletter and she said she was trained in it. So we started trying that. I’ve been doing it on and off for four years, almost every week. It’s a stable relationship – the most stable relationship I’ve had in my life. Like, longer than any romantic relationship.

She has this presence that is so safe and so tender. And I really, really needed that. Trusting that that would be there and I could text her to schedule a session was really helpful during this one period where I was going in between survival states.

She’s also never given me advice. Like, she never says “Oh this isn’t good for you” or like, “You should do this”. It’s always leading me to my own wisdom and leading me to a place where I’m in Self and then being like, “What do you think? What do you want to give this part? What do you need?”. For me, I’m very much like, don’t tell me what to do. So that’s exactly what I needed.

I think it’s important for me to talk about psychedelics because that was a really big part of my journey and I think I over-relied on it for a period to come back to this presence and feeling of love and Self.

I had a really challenging DMT experience that made it not possible to do psychedelics – it just didn’t feel good. Aletheia was the first time I felt anything similar to those states, but completely sober.

That was what blew my mind, like, it was another identity shift. I had a positive projection onto psychedelics that I can only get to this place through these substances. And this made me realize that it’s actually me. If I’m attuned enough to myself, this is is the core of who I am. And that just opened up the possibility of like, oh, I am love.

Aletheia is very spiritual. They take a lot of inspiration from Taoism and Buddism, and for some people that’s a huge plus.

My coach Michael, we’ve developed a relationship where the spiritual is a really big emphasis. And from being in Aletheia training, I know that there’s a lot of other coaches too where that’s not the core of what they’re focused on. There’s a lot of structure and stuff around wanting to improve, but it kind of flips the paradigm of self-improvement on its head while still improving in a paradoxical way.

Aletheia got me to these love states by – it seems so simple but it’s very hard to do by myself because we’ve been conditioned not to – but just by welcoming what is there. Whatever you see in this moment, you’re like, that is allowed to be here. And it’s okay. And if it’s not okay, that’s okay too. And just keep doing that over and over and over again. Welcoming and loving everything that comes up. Apparently when you do that, crazy stuff happens.

For so long, I had an intellectual understanding of my feelings. Even in therapy, I’m kind of just sitting there and not really moving. I’m aware of what’s happening, but there isn’t an expression. There’ve been times where I’ve been like, I feel like I need to shake or do stuff and it felt like the wrong container to do that in.

There’s something about having a facilitator there and you’re just talking, yelling and them, and bringing your full body. For me, there’s a blockage in the throat and speaking is a really big thing. And so being able to speak it out and say things that don’t make sense and feel unenlightened, but are just the part saying what it needs, is so helpful. Afterwards, they do this thing where you open your body and look around and see the other people in the room seeing you and how much love they have for your anger, and see that you’re safe in your body.

It kind of rewired something where I was like, anger doesn’t have to be terrifying or feel like I’m in danger or in trouble and everything is going to be chaotic and broken. There’s this sacredness to it and there can be so much joy in that as well.

Art of Accomplishment is very practical. They give you the tools that you can implement in your daily life. It’s not like talk therapy where you talk about things and try to figure them out, it’s on the other end of that spectrum. It’s very live and experiential. During a connection course you’re looking at someone and running exercises and seeing how it changes things in your body. It’s very embodied, experiential. At first, it felt very subtle and I couldn’t see the impact. And then a month later, I’m like, oh, it created a new option when I’m in a certain scenario. Role playing and trying the experiment creates the sense that I can do something different. It really snowballs in that way, and you can feel the transformation over time.