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An extract from the book Introduction to the Internal Family Systems Model by Richard Schwartz PhD

‘Courage

Clarence Darrow once said, “The most human thing we can do is comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” The Self has the courage to do both. One might think that the Self’s “it’s all okay” sense of grace would lead to a detached passivity and acceptance of the injustices of life, but that’s not the nature of the Self. The clarity of the Self makes it hard for people to deny injustice and ignore suffering. The compassion of the Self leads people to resist tyranny and fight for the oppressed. The words of the Self bring hope to the hopeless. The energy of the Self seeps into the cracks in the tyrant’s walls and gradually erodes them. Consequently, oppressors attack people whenever they show any signs of Self-leadership. Abusers know that this is the way to control people, which is why virtually all my clients who have been severely sexually abused report that any time they acted in a spirited, spontaneous, or independent way, they were either verbally or physically punished. As a result, they came to fear the Self and keep it out of their body. Thus, rather than making people passive, confidence and grace have the opposite effect. If we don’t fear attack because we aren’t as vulnerable, and if we trust that we can handle the consequences, courage is much more accessible to us. If we know that everyone is a wave in the same ocean, we will challenge injustice without judgment. While so far we have emphasized the compassionate, nurturing side of the Self, it is important to remember that the energy of the Self can also be forceful and protective. The martial arts cultivate this protective side of the Self. We can be forceful without judgment because we know that no matter how an oppressor behaves, he or she has a Self, and our goal is to elicit it, not to further burden him or her with our judgment. As Martin Luther King, Jr., expressed it, “We must realize that the evil deed of the enemy neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that he is. An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy.” Elsewhere he wrote:[Nonviolence] does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. . . . it avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent, but he also refuses to hate him. At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. . . . if I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate, I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in a broken community. I can only close the gap in a broken community by meeting hate with love’ (King, 1994, pp. 211–214)…… Courage is not only about being a voice for the disenfranchised. It often takes more courage to recognize the damage we do to others and try to make amends. Clarity helps us to see what we have done and, if we have confidence, to understand that mistakes don’t mean we are bad people. We will have the courage to listen to the other’s story with curiosity, apologize sincerely, and ask what can be done to repair the damage. The Self-led person not only has the courage to act but also the courage to be accountable for acting. As a client’s Self emerges, he or she increasingly demonstrates another aspect of courage—the willingness to go toward his or her pain and shame. Clients’ internal journeys often involve entering the most frightening places in their psyches. There they often wind up witnessing events in their pasts that they had tried to minimize the impact of or forget entirely. In turn, this witnessing often leads to a clearer view of key relationships in the outside world and the determination to change those relationships. These changes sometimes involve financial and emotional risk. It takes courage to look and courage to act on what we see….’ (available at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5205b3d1e4b08b89e5d18f2a/t/5493746be4b0980f00a35dfb/1418949739064/IFS+First+Two+Chapters.pdf) 

A quote on courage from The Fear Cure: Cultivating Courage as Medicine for the Body, Mind, and Soul) by Lissa Rankins MD, coach and author

“Courage is not about being fearless; it’s about letting fear transform you so you come into right relationship with uncertainty, make peace with impermanence, and wake up to who you really are”

Photo on the left was taken on a street corner in one of the more beautiful parts of the town as I stopped to check out the films playing at the cinema. The image of the red TV screen got my attention, and thus, the photo was taken.

 

And a video based on Roald Dahl’s Television Poem at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnRVfEL6178

 

Discovering your Self in language (Edited)

‘Discovering your Self in language is always an epiphany, even if finding the words to describe your inner reality can be an agonizing process. That is why I find Helen Keller’s account of how she was “born into language” so inspiring’ (From The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist whose work focuses on the interaction of attachment, neurobiology, and developmental aspects of trauma’s effects on people and is noted for his research in the area of post-traumatic stress since the 1970s).

Part of the process of this path I have been walking on for quite some time is finding and using my more authentic voice. I have recently been toying with the idea of creating audios as a necessary part of the visibility process and the right to expression. Another reason that I have been considering this is that I have not spoken English since 2011! I have been constantly writing in English, but I could say that the speaking aspect of self, if I may call it that, has felt silenced. So this longing has brought themes related to language and bilingualism to the foreground. As I consider all this, different layers of experience and thoughts rise to the surface and I wonder, for instance, how my voice is going to come across since I have been told that it does not carry… Through a brief search I have learnt that there are actually several factors that affect the volume of our voice. We are born with a different size larynx and vocal cords and some of us may have smaller lungs and so can’t generate as much airflow as people with deeper and louder voices. So, people with a bigger larynx and thicker vocal cords speak louder. Also, the depth and volume depends on testosterone levels and that is why men’s vocal cords grow longer and thicker.  Read more……………………….