Altogether You: Experiencing personal and spiritual transformation with Internal Family Systems therapy by Jenna Riemersma

Author:Jenna Riemersma [Riemersma, Jenna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pivotal Press
Published: 2020-05-24T07:00:00+00:00

•Which of the firefighters listed in this chapter can you most identify with?

•Which are most upsetting to you?

•How does learning that firefighters have good intentions affect your attitude toward the way they act out in your life?

•What is it like for you to consider that firefighters are trying to help us with pain, but that doesn’t make their behavior okay? How do you make sense of that?

•Why do firefighters tend to win out over managers?

FIREFIGHTERS GONE WILD

Three solutions for firefighter chaos

You’ve noticed a common and heartbreaking theme with our firefighters: They are trying to manage pain in the best way they know how, yet they often don’t see the damaging, frightening, and dangerous consequences of their actions. Driving their behavior is the pain of the exiles, which they will go to any lengths to extinguish.

So, what does this mean for us practically? Are we supposed to feel sorry for these parts and allow them to drink and drug and rage and kill people? Are we saying that because they mean well, we should “turn the other cheek” and ignore the pain and devastation they inflict?

No, friends, not at all. As with managers in the previous section, to know and embrace your troublesome parts is not the same thing as saying anything goes.

Becoming aware of firefighters’ intent allows us to make sense of their behavior, which allows us to respond to them more effectively. Not to condone or excuse their actions, but to be wise in our responses and to actually give them the greatest possibility of change.

CASE STUDIES IN FIRE PREVENTION

If we boil it down, there are three situations in which we typically encounter firefighters, each of which invites a different response. We can describe the situations as:

1.Limited relationship

2.Significant relationship

3.Oh dear, those little buggers are mine

Situation Number One: Limited Relationship

When I am in limited relationship with someone whose firefighter doesn’t significantly impact me—let’s say, the raging driver on the freeway who cuts me off, or the aggressive lady in the ten-items-or-less line who has five hundred items. What to do?

Big picture: It is helpful to simply hold respectful awareness of what might be going on in that person and what’s coming up in me. I stay in God Image and avoid my own protector meltdown, and that allows me to respond with calm wisdom when others are out of control. It also invites me deeper into my own healing.

But let’s look at things in more detail.

Let’s say the lady pulls into the checkout line and starts, with angry entitlement, unloading her entire cart of groceries when the sign clearly says ten items or fewer. I’m sure you are much more compassionate than me, but typically in that situation my Irritable/Judging/Controlling parts show up and start telling me terrible things about this lady and her evil heart. My Irritable part might start clearing my throat and exchanging frustrated glances with the other ten-item customers and looking intently at the ten-item sign when she glances in my direction. My judging part is

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