What is Self-Energy in Internal Family Systems Therapy?

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One of the core ideas in internal family systems therapy is that we all have a Self – an inner resource of warmth, love and compassion that offers a powerful, healing energy if we can learn to access it. Dick Schwartz, the Founder of IFS, says the Self offers eight nourishing qualities (that all happen to begin with C):

• Compassion

• Courage

• Connectedness

• Curiosity

• Clarity

• Confidence

• Creativity

• Calm

We can all learn to access these qualities and tap into ‘Self-energy’ – which can be compared to the warm, life-giving energy of the sun. Doing so is a key component of IFS therapy and will help you heal from trauma, anxiety, stress, depression, addiction and any other problems you may be struggling with right now.

My latest guided meditation for Insight Timer, Accessing Healing Self-Energy, will give you a taste of this wonderful inner resource – you can listen right now, for free, by clicking on the button below.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan

You Are More Than Good Enough, Just as You Are

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I’m going to tell you a secret. You are completely, 100% likable, lovable and more than good enough, just as you are. Who you are, right now. Not next year, when you’ve had therapy and lost 10lb and met the love of your life and bought a big house. Exactly as you are today – with all your strengths and weaknesses, things you’re proud of and things you’re not, successes and failures... Perfect, with all your many imperfections.

Don’t believe me? I thought not. And here’s why – because most of us don’t believe that we are good enough, deep down. We think we’re not clever, thin, pretty, successful, popular, strong, resilient, academic – or whatever our personal sore point might be – enough. And that’s because many of us have a schema, called Defectiveness.

When I take a new client on for schema therapy, I identify which of the 18 schemas they have (we all have at least some of them, including the person who’s writing this). And most people score highly for Defectiveness. It’s so common, I call it the ‘common cold’ of schemas. And like all schemas, it’s a neural network in the brain made up of thoughts, memories, beliefs, emotional and physical responses. These networks develop when we’re young to help us cope with repeated stressful experiences. They are like a template for how to respond when we encounter similarly stressful experiences in our lives.

And Defectiveness often develops when someone tells us we are stupid, or lazy, or weak, or some other hurtful thing, over and over. Not just once, but day after day, week after week, year after year, throughout our childhoods. And so, of course, we start to believe it. We think, ‘Maybe I am stupid.’

Sometimes it’s not what we’re told, but what we intuit from a situation. So if we have a sister and our dad clearly loves her more than us, we might start to think, ‘What’s wrong with me? Why does he dote on her and treat me like a waste of space? Oh, maybe it’s because I’m not as smart as her. Or perhaps I’m just not as lovable as she is.’

So that schema starts forming, slowly at first, but getting more and more wired in as we struggle through a painful childhood. And then you find yourself, at 30 or 40 years old, feeling deep in your bones that you are stupid, rubbish, weak or a failure. I must stress at this point, that none of this is true. It’s just a story you have told yourself for so long that it seems like a 100% accurate description of reality.

Schemas can be healed

Another crucial point is that, just because schemas are strongly wired in to your brain (because you have been thinking those self-critical thoughts and telling yourself that negative story for so long), they are not set or fixed in any way. If you often read my posts, you will know how much I like the idea of neuroplasticity, which basically tells us that our brains are malleable and can be rewired at any moment in our lives.

For example, if you travel to a new city, in a new country, there is a huge amount of new information to absorb – new language, new food, new transport system, new city layout, new customs, new currency, and so on. And when you engage that miraculous supercomputer in your cranium to learn all this stuff, you create new neural architecture to hold all that information. That’s what we mean by rewiring the brain – creating new synaptic connections between the neurons to hold brand-new and important information.

This is how schemas are formed, in your young, fast-growing brain. And this is how schemas can be weakened (or healed, in schema therapy language) when you’re older. Schema healing is always possible, for any of us, at any time in our lives. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, of course – but it is always possible.

The practice

Tell yourself a different story

One of the ways you can start healing your schemas, right now, is by rewriting the story you have been telling yourself since you were, probably, around five years old. And one of the ways to do that is using a technique I learned from the brilliant psychologist Dr Paul Gilbert, founder of compassion-focused therapy. To paraphrase Dr Gilbert, his story goes something like this.

‘When you were about to be born, imagine you could have looked down on the Earth and seen all the potential families you could be born into. Some of those families were warm, loving, kind and stable; and others were full of conflict, unhappiness, anger and criticism. Would you have picked the unhappy one? No, of course not.

‘Did you choose your tricky brain, with its highly developed threat system that made you vulnerable to feeling stressed, anxious and unsafe? Of course you didn’t.

‘Did you choose to have painful schemas, or a harsh inner critic, or negative and self-loathing beliefs? Of course not.

‘Did you choose to have debilitating anxiety and worry, depression, or overwhelming feelings of shame and a lack of self-worth? Nobody would.

‘So, as you didn’t choose any of those things, the thoughts, feelings and moods you struggle with on a day-to-day basis can’t be your fault.

‘But, as an adult, it is your responsibility to do everything you can to try and heal from your painful childhood. Read self-help books and blogs like this one. Go to workshops and webinars held by teachers and healers you respect. Listen to podcasts. Get some therapy. Choose a partner who is kind and supportive. Exercise, sleep, eat nourishing food – all of those things are within your power and you can start doing them right this moment.’

I love this idea, because fault is entirely negative and self-blaming, whereas responsibility is positive, hopeful and leads to proactive problem-solving. If you would like to put this into practice, why not try journaling about your own life – telling yourself a different story about all the things that were out of your control, so you clearly didn’t choose and cannot have been your fault.

Think about the way that all those things, when put together, made you the person you are today. And hopefully this compassionate, non-blaming story will help you feel better about yourself and your life, however much of a struggle it may be for you.

I hope you find that helpful – and that you can tell yourself a different story, starting today. Remember: You are likable, lovable and more than good enough, just as you are.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Do You Worry That You're Not Good Enough?

Image by Ayo Ogunseinde

How do you feel about yourself, deep down? Do you like yourself? Feel good about your achievements? Think you are doing OK, day to day?

Or, like so many of us, do you feel that you’re not good enough – unworthy, not likeable, not achieving much with your life, or somehow bad or wrong at your core? If you do feel this way, you will probably lack confidence, perhaps struggling with low self-esteem. You might have a tough time with public speaking, or being assertive when you need to set limits or put your foot down.

You may also externalise this inner dislike, by not liking what you see in the mirror – your appearance, body or weight. This is especially common among my female clients, as are the eating disorders that often go with this way of thinking. So it may lead to restricting food, or even being bulimic, as you desperately try to achieve an – often impossibly demanding – ideal weight or body shape.

You are not alone

If you do feel this way, I want to reassure you that you’re definitely not alone. Most of my clients feel this way. In fact, most of the people in my life feel this way! It is so common, even in people who seem on the outside to be super-confident. Trust me, on the inside many of them feel very differently, but have just learned how to act like a confident person.

In schema therapy, we see this not-good-enough feeling stemming from a Defectiveness schema. This is the most common schema I see in my clients – almost all of them struggle with it (as do most of the therapists I know, including this one!). The schema usually forms when we are children, often as the result of trauma, abuse or neglect. It might be one or a series of big things, like being shouted at or spanked on a regular basis (spanking makes kids feel hurt, humiliated and powerless, which can easily lead to a Defectiveness schema).

Or it may be more subtle. Maybe your sister was really smart and high-achieving at school and you just couldn’t keep up, no matter how hard you tried. Or you had highly demanding, pushy parents, who called you names like ‘lazy’ or ‘bone-idle’, because you could never match their unreasonable expectations for you.

Schemas can be healed

Whatever the cause of your schema, it’s important to understand that it can be healed, because all schemas can. A schema is just a neural network in the brain and, because your brain is plastic (which means mouldable, like clay), with new learning and experience, you can weaken those unhelpful connections and build a new network. (If you’re interested in the science behind this, try reading books like The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge MD).

This is the basis of schema therapy – and all other forms of counselling and psychotherapy, even if they call the healing process something different. Over time, you can learn to think, feel and behave differently. We can help you with that public speaking problem, or get you to realise that your body is actually perfectly healthy and beautiful, just as it is.

It is never too late to do this, so please don’t think you are too old to change. Reading blogs like this one, or self-help books, having some form of therapy, finding a loving, supportive partner – these are all great ways to start healing those painful schemas. So why not start today?

Warm wishes,

Dan

How to Be Assertive – Even With the Most Difficult People

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Think of the most difficult person in your life. Now imagine you are in conflict with them and need to find a way of communicating that solves the problem. Sounds daunting, right? But there is a simple, easy-to-learn formula that will help you manage even the most challenging people in your life — it’s called ‘assertive communication’ and I will guide you through the simple steps involved so you can make assertiveness your new superpower.

Like all new skills, assertiveness is not easy to learn — and even harder to put into practice. But think of it like learning a musical instrument, or driving a car. At first, it’s really hard and clunky. It takes huge amounts of concentration and you still make tons of mistakes every time you try. But, over time, it gets a bit easier each time you strum that guitar or park in a tight spot.

And then, one day, as if by magic, you try again and it just works. You can play that Beatles tune easily and it actually sounds right. Or you can drive to the supermarket smoothly and confidently, without scaring the life out of your dad in the passenger seat.

We think of this as muscle memory but actually, it’s the development of a neural network in your brain called a ‘schema’. This is a blueprint for how to play the guitar or drive your car that fires up every time you do it. It’s something your brain develops so that it can save energy for oft-repeated tasks (your brain is constantly looking for ways to conserve energy, as it has a vast number of tasks to perform for every second of your existence with only finite energy resources).

The same goes for being assertive. Just practice over and over — starting with the easiest people and situations, before progressing on to the tough ones — and before you know it you have nailed it. Critical partner, undermining boss, negative friend — whoever the difficult people in your life are, you will find relationships with them a whole lot easier and more pleasurable.

Why is it so hard to be assertive?

Before I teach you how to be assertive, we need to ponder why so many of us find this simple skill so daunting. In my therapy practice, I work with many people every week who are unassertive, letting themselves be bullied or steamrollered by more confident, pushy folk. And many of my clients have been bullied as kids, either in the family, at school or both.

This sapped their confidence, making them feel helpless and weak. As I often tell my clients, think of a three-year-old girl being shouted at by her dad. What can that little kid do? She is tiny and her dad is huge. He is much stronger, smarter, more cognitively and verbally skilled than her. She feels scared and under threat — so the threat system in her brain fires up and triggers the fight-flight-freeze response.

She can’t fight, as he is much bigger and stronger. She can’t flee, as it’s her home and she has nowhere else to go. So the only option is freeze — think of a deer in the headlights, muscles quivering with tension but frozen in terror. That’s what happens to us when our freeze response is triggered.

How maladaptive schemas sap your strength

If this happens over and over — as it did for many of my clients — we develop those schemas I mentioned earlier. But these are not helpful schemas, they are what we call ‘early maladaptive schemas’, in this context maladaptive meaning unhelpful.

That poor little girl will probably develop a Subjugation schema, which makes her feel powerless, subjugating her own needs, wants and desires to strong, dominant people like her dad. She may also develop a Mistrust/Abuse schema because she was verbally and emotionally abused throughout her childhood. And maybe a Vulnerability schema, because she feels vulnerable and under threat in the world.

As an adult, these schemas fire up whenever she feels stressed and threatened by someone who reminds her of her angry, bullying dad. She will probably be especially triggered by male authority figures, so a nasty male boss will be like Kryptonite for her. And when those schemas get triggered, she feels intense emotions like anxiety, bodily sensations like a plunging in her stomach, breathlessness and a racing heart.

Even though she is a smart, capable 40-year-old lawyer, mum, wife and activist, in those moments she is three again, powerless to fight back against the critical, angry man who is shouting her down.

Demystifying assertive communication

Luckily, even if we have experienced a destructive, disempowering childhood, as adults we can learn to heal those schemas and deal with difficult people in a more confident, assertive manner. There is a simple model for having difficult conversations that I have taught to hundreds of clients — and used many times with the challenging folk in my own life. Here’s how it goes.

Let’s say you have a tricky coworker, Nancy. She seems to enjoy putting you down and belittling you in front of colleagues, even though you treat her well and she has no reason to attack you. It’s just how she is with everyone (assuming they let her get away with it). In a meeting, when you presented your idea for boosting sales of a new product, Nancy interrupted you, said it was a stupid idea and would never work.

This was, of course, hurtful and humiliating. For the rest of the meeting, you sat there fuming, angry thoughts and feelings churning away inside you like a toxic cocktail in a blender. Normally, that’s where the anger would stay — eating away at you inside, while you thought of a thousand witty putdowns that remained resolutely unsaid.

But not today. Because yesterday you worked with me on a new way of handling the Nancys of this world — using assertive communication to stand your ground and say what you needed to, even if that led to the conflict you so desperately try to avoid. So after the meeting, you (Sarah) march into Nancy’s office, sit across from her and get assertive.

Sarah: ‘Nancy, can I speak to you about the meeting.’

Nancy: ‘Oh, I don’t have time for that Sarah, I’m swamped!’

S: ‘This will only take a minute (refusing to be dismissed). I just want to tell you that when you interrupted me and shot my idea down like that, I really thought it was rude and disrespectful (step 1). Also, it made me look bad and feel embarrassed in front of the team (step 2). So in future, I would appreciate it if you would let me finish and respond in a more respectful manner (step 3).’

N (looking shocked): ‘Oh… um… well… I didn’t mean to upset you. I just come off a bit snappy sometimes. But your idea was a bit lame…’

S: ‘You are entitled to your opinion, of course. But again, in future, I am asking you not to interrupt me or speak to me in that rude way. Are we clear?’

N: ‘Um… I guess. Sorry.’

S: ‘No problem. I really appreciate your apology.’

Take-home points

Did you notice the way you refused to be dismissed and stuck to your guns? Also, that you used a three-step formula: ‘When you said/did A, I really felt B, and in future, I would appreciate it if you did/didn’t do C’

Simple, no? And that’s the point. When you’re being assertive, keep it short and simple. Don’t be tempted to add lots of words, or dress it up nicely. Be polite but firm. You don’t need to be rude or aggressive. Just say what you need to clearly and directly — that’s incredibly powerful.

And even though there is no guarantee that the other person will respond well, they usually do. Also, remember this isn’t a one-hit scenario. If Nancy does it again in the next meeting, you say the same thing again: ‘Nancy, remember when I asked you…’ Sometimes it takes a few reminders for people to get it, but they eventually do.

So, please do try this at home. Start with someone easy and a minor situation, to practice. Then work your way up to the toughest people, one step at a time. You will be amazed at how effective it is.

Good luck! I hope you enjoy your new superpower — and the newfound strength, confidence and self-worth that will start flourishing every time you use it.

Warm wishes,

Dan

How to Improve Your Self-Esteem

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If you had to describe yourself in a few words to someone you had never met, what would you say? Would you use words like smart, funny and lovable? Or stupid, useless and pathetic? Sadly, if you have low self-esteem, you are far more likely to opt for the latter three – even if they bear no relation to your true self, or the words your friends would use to describe you.

At its simplest, self-esteem is the extent to which we respect and value ourselves. If the way you perceive yourself is critical or unkind, your self-esteem is likely to be low, causing a host of problems – from a lack of confidence and self-belief to depression, anxiety, underachievement, addiction, problems with anger and self-destructive behaviour.

Developing self-esteem

Self-esteem – or the lack of it – is inextricably linked to our childhood and family dynamic. Along with keeping us clean, safe and fed, it’s our parents’ job to make us feel lovable and worthwhile. Especially when we are infants (because that’s when our sense of self, as a separate entity to our mother, is developing), they do this by giving us lots of physical affection, playing with and singing/reading to us.

As we grow they reinforce this by taking an interest in and praising us, both telling and showing us how much we are loved, wanted and important to them. If we are lucky enough to get this kind of parenting, we will emerge into adulthood with an strong set of interconnected beliefs that we are worthwhile and deserve all the good this world can offer us.

Problems with self-esteem in childhood

But you, like many other children, may not have been so lucky. Your parents might have been distant or emotionally unavailable. They might have criticised rather than praising you. They may have had mental health problems, been addicted to alcohol or drugs, or punished you overly harshly.

If so, you would have been profoundly hurt and confused. Why were they treating you this way? It must have been, you concluded, because there was something fundamentally bad or wrong about you.

As you grew up, if that treatment persisted – and perhaps was echoed in the wider family or at school – your sense of self would have been affected. And as an adult, if you believe you are a bad person and deserve bad things to happen to you, it’s incredibly hard to be positive and outgoing; to forge loving relationships or find lasting success.

You are likely to see the world through grey-tinted glasses, seeing only the bad in it and yourself. It’s hardly surprising that low self-esteem is at the root of many forms of mental distress.

Low self-esteem can be unlearned

But it doesn’t have to be this way. As low self-esteem is learned, so it can be unlearned. Cognitive therapy is an effective treatment for low self-esteem, because it helps you challenge and modify the negative, self-critical thoughts and beliefs that keep you feeling bad about yourself long after your cold or neglectful parents, nasty teachers and school bullies have faded out of your life.

I strongly recommend Overcoming Low Self-Esteem: A Self-Help Guide Using Cognitive Behavioral Techniques, by Melanie Fennell. The books in the Overcoming… series are all excellent, but this is one of the best. If you have low self-esteem, it explains how this developed and how your adult thinking and behaviour stops you from shrugging off negative early experiences and embracing life.

Most importantly, it gives you simple, effective techniques you can use every day to feel better about yourself, boost your mood and increase your self-confidence.

Warm wishes,

Dan