Michael Elkin: Befriending Addiction and Suicide with IFS

The Soul of Life

Most of us have been conditioned our whole life to have strong moral judgments against things like addictions or suicide. Right? Aren’t these just categorically bad things that we have to fight against?

This is really what is so mind-bending and revolutionary about the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of psychology.

Michael Elkin has a reputation within the IFS community for enthusiasm teaching about what IFS calls our Firefighter parts of us—the protective parts of your personality that typically show up as extreme beliefs or behaviors like anger, addictions, compulsions, or suicidality.

"Your willpower and your conscious decisions have very little to do with what you wind up actually doing."

We talk about how this state of mind that IFS calls Self (all of our core spiritual qualities) has the power to heal and transform any parts of you that have become extreme or unhealthy or unbalanced. I have to say this is NOT what typical psychology or typical theology offers.

Traditional psychological and religious teaching usually tells people to constrain their bad thoughts or behaviors. Manage your anger. Fight your depression. Overcome your addiction.

But these management tactics require constant vigilance, and like a virus mutating in response to survival pressure, there’s a hardening or resistance to change: We discuss how, instead of fighting and resisting so-called “bad” parts of you, it’s far more productive to become curious and explore the motivations behind behavior or feelings that aren’t in your best interest.

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Learn about Mindful Marriage, my live, online, 7-week mindfulness-based stress reduction and basic IFS course for couples: https://souloflifeshow.com/mindful-marriage

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