Intro to IFS: Understanding Your Inner System - Focus On Addictions

Intro to IFS: Understanding Your Inner System — Focus on Addictions
This workshop looks at addiction through an IFS lens. Rather than treating a compulsive behavior as the problem to be eliminated, IFS asks what the part doing it is protecting — and what it is afraid would happen if it stopped. Firefighters, in IFS language, are the parts that rush in when pain breaks through, and they are doing a job nobody else was willing to do.

What the workshop covers

• Self and parts. The Self leads; parts play roles. Parts are not to be suppressed but understood.
• Two metaphors that make it concrete. The orchestra — Self as conductor, parts as musicians. And the equilateral triangle — Managers and Firefighters both protecting Exiles.
• Blending and unblending. Learning to notice when a part is speaking, versus when you are in Self-energy.
• Working with parts. Curiosity and patience rather than resistance or judgment.
• Healing Exiles. When core wounds are addressed, Managers and Firefighters no longer need to act out as intensely — which is the whole shift addiction work depends on.

What's included

• A written Introduction to IFS, about eight pages — the model explained from the beginning, in plain language, yours to keep and re-read.
• Key learnings and next action steps from the workshop, including the Five F's: Find, Focus, Feel, Find Out More, and Feel Towards.
• Ways to keep going — the practice groups and classes where this work continues.

This course is the written material from a live workshop. There is no video recording of the session.