Need A Peer To Peer IFS Parts Processing Partner?
We'll Teach You How To Deepen Your IFS Practice With Peer Support
On Monday, August 11, we’ll be teaching our LOVE SCHOOL participants how to do peer to peer parts processing with Internal Family Systems, as a way to deepen your personal self-help practice of IFS, either on your own, with peer support, or between IFS therapy sessions.
I’ve been doing peer to peer IFS parts processing with my partner Emma for about eight years now, and I cannot overstate enough how transformational it can be. Yes, it’s a commitment. It will become one of the most intimate relationships you have, because your parts processing partner will get to know, alongside you, some of your most vulnerable parts, and even parts some of your parts might feel ashamed about, like your firefighters that act out and either self harm or harm others. Having another person who is not your partner, your friend, or your business colleague hold that kind of compassionate space for your is powerful beyond measure when you do it safely enough.
Of course, the ideal way to practice the IFS model is with a trained licensed therapist. But in my experience, 50 minutes per week is not enough. And we pay $300/hr for our therapist! So peer support is much more affordable and accessible for many people. I can honestly say I’ve made more progress with my parts processing with Emma than I have with any of my therapists, but that’s partly because Emma and I are so careful to do this right. It’s not something I recommend doing without learning how to do it skillfully and safely enough. You can really hurt someone if you can’t hold empathic space for someone else’s most sensitive parts. And you can really get hurt if someone can’t reciprocate that for your parts.
Our next LOVE SCHOOL session will focus on teaching our students how to do peer to peer parts processing with a partner, so they can practice with each other and hopefully pair up with someone else from LOVE SCHOOL to get started with their own peer support practice.
This sort of peer support is kind of like a sponsor/ sponsee relationship within 12 step programs, but without the hierarchy. Your peer support person will be your equal, not “one up,” not “one down.” Even if you’re not at exactly the same place in your healing journey, you will be peers to one another. Ideally, your peer support person will be at a similar level of experience with IFS- beginners with beginners, advanced practitioners with advanced practitioners, etc. And ideally, you’re at a similar life stage, although that’s not 100% necessary. But nobody is “above” the other, even if one of you has been in therapy for many years longer.
There’s definitely a “how” to peer to peer parts processing that takes some practice, but we’ll be teaching the basics of the “how” in our next LOVE SCHOOL. If you’ve been on the fence about joining LOVE SCHOOL and you’d like to find a peer support partner to deepen your IFS practice, now is the time to join us!
Do any of you have any experience with peer support and IFS? I'd love to hear about it! My health equity parts are so invested in helping people find peer support. It's so much more affordable than one on one therapy and marries well with IFS therapy for those who can access and afford it. If you have clients who you think would benefit from learning how to benefit from peer support, feel free to refer them. We'll do our best to help keep them safe while learning to trust practicing IFS with another peer. Obviously, it works best for someone with at least some degree of access to Self energy. But even those who struggle to access Self can benefit if their peer support partner has enough Self to model what compassionate witnessing can be like.
We have a 13 page instruction manual we've created to help keep it safe enough, and we'll be adding to that as our students give up feedback and help us hone the method. Your feedback is welcome, as always!