The Work

Byron Katie's The Work is a process of inquiry. We question thoughts that create stress. We look at how you react when you believe a thought. We look at what your thought brings up in your imagination from the past and future. We look at how your thoughts create stressful sensations and feelings, and what your life would be like without that thought. Then we look at the opposite of your thought from different angles and how these are as true or even more true than your original thought.

The Work is not therapy because it is a series of questions meant to open the mind and help clients see their part in any upset. The focus is on you and your process. It's about your part and your reactions to any person or situation. In this way, it is very focused. 

Doing The Work can bring mentally clarity to any situation. It can deepen your ability to be present, speak your truth and navigate your world effectively.

Internal Family Systems

Internal Family Systems or IFS is a very effective way to navigate the different parts of our personalities. Most of us recognize that we have different personality traits and even character at different times. In IFS this is considered normal and not a problem. The IFS the research says that most of us have between 10 and 30 sub personalities, or parts.

In IFS there are 2 types of parts, protectors and exiles. Exiles are the parts of us that we relegate to the basement. These are the parts that feel threatening to us, and so we avoid them in various ways. Protector parts are the parts that protect us from experiencing our exiled parts.

Here’s a simple example of how this works. You’re 12 years old and you experience a hurtful situation at school. You are bullied. A group of kids makes fun of you. You come home from school, and your parents are unavailable for whatever reason. Maybe this is simply the way it is, or maybe there’s a crisis in their lives. What do you do with those feelings? If you don’t have an adult in your life that can help you process difficult feelings, chances are you are going to find a way to repress that experience. You start telling yourself to buck up, get over it, something that you learned from your father. Or you tell yourself to be happy and cheerful, something you learned from your grandmother. The feelings from the event go underground, and the strategies that you learned from your father and grandmother become protector parts. Every time that a similar situation comes up that triggers the exiled feelings from that age, you “buck up” and “try to be cheerful”. Protector parts doing their job.

The challenge is that these protector parts can remain unevolved and ineffective in our adult lives. Our children or friends come to us with problems, and we find ourselves telling them the same things that our father or grandmother did. On some level, we know something is not right, but we feel stuck. And, we treat ourselves the same way. These are protector parts stuck in old patterns, and an exiled part that has not been given the opportunity to unburden itself. Unburden is the term used in IFS when we help an exiled part process through an old trauma or emotional upset.

In IFS the goal is to unburden exiles, but helping protector parts can also be effective in treatment.