Working with Internalized Oppression— An Experience
I was raised on a farm. I am the youngest of 10. The environment I was raised in was fundamentalist in its politic and faith. I know very little about my father’s side of the family, outside of the fact that they were very distant from each other and three of the six brothers had neurological conditions. My mother was first generation Italian and the political and religious force in the family. Through an oral history, I found out that my maternal grandfather admired Benito Mussolini and remained connected to Italian politics. The family system began to lose its bearings with the onset of my father’s illness. By high school, I was in rebellion and vowing that I would not inherit the “sickness” I was becoming aware of within my family. As with any oppressive system that is inherited it is challenging to know what is truly threatening and what isn’t. To know what your “true self” is and what is a representation of the farm and what you want the world to see.
With luck, providence, and good people being in the right place at the right time, I left the environment to go to University. On finishing school, the only thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want to go back to the farm. The curse of living within an oppressive system is the denial of growth, life options, and the increase of one’s own value. To stay away would leave me hamstrung, distrustful, and lacking support as toxic as it may be.
This decision was made for me by being in cycling accident where I fractured my skull and received a brain injury. Providence returned a myriad of times while in the hospital namely to clarify what once was and where I could go. I was being guided by unseen hands. On leaving the hospital it became clear to that while Western medicine is incredible at triage, it is clueless when it came to healing brain trauma.
Because of this I became involved in yoga.
The teacher I became involved with had an athletic style with somatic roots. Her basic approach was to establish a strong pranayama or breathing practice into the student quickly. Once learned focus on a specific injury or pain in your body and breathe into it throughout the length of the class. At some point the pain or injury will “release”: emotion, images, and deeply held pain. Breathing into the injury became a core focus of her style.
At around the same time I began to study with an old school healer who practiced laying-on-of-hands.
One evening she was speaking of the body’s chakra system and said,
“Each chakra has its own personality. That means that we are actually healthy if we are slightly schizophrenic.”
At that moment, a light went on in my head.
I continued to practice yoga and study healing and touch modalities. Everything I studied needed to be body based and not ideologically based.
In the mid-nineties, I had a somatic-inspired experience where I held the space as my partner processed feeling the historical “oppression of women” on her shoulders.
In the mid to late aughts and around the same time I was influenced by a visionary thinker and architect. Some of his basic premises hooked me. Among these include “There is enough to go around for everyone”, “you’re a tremendous bundle of experience” and “you can’t learn less”.
Because of this I began to question my “acting out” in the hardcore Catholic environment I was raised in and the guilt and shame I still felt over these transgressions that were considered sinful. I realized that these transgressions were necessary to move me from a toxic negative space in the direction of healing. As “aberrated” as my actions may seem, it was a movement for growth. My actions were “unshamed” and, instead, became a necessary adaptive strategy for survival that would someday become obsolete.
The weight of guilt on my shoulders immediately lifted. The focus shifted from burying these parts in a quest for purity to a befriending these parts in a quest for being human.
With the events that happened in 2016, I felt compelled to do research on authoritarianism. The ease with which people (including those who were relatively progressive) were convinced of the validity of “he who shall not be named” stimulated this curiosity. Based on my past experience, the knowledge of my maternal family’s political leanings and degree of faith, and my father’s leadership style. I realized that I was predisposed to authoritarian systems in times of vulnerability. This can be stimulated two ways. Through my own inherited programming of inherited badness through original sin and a false sense of scarcity. Or in a group environment where this sense is played to and the blended energy of the group overwhelms the integrity of my own.
For me, it came down to being curious about where authoritarianism is hidden (any system that personifies “purity” as the goal. I call these “purity traps) and that due to its original necessity (keeping groups together to survive in a world where there isn’t enough to go around) and its generational maintenance (high-stakes, hell-threatening, trans-national shaming systems such as organized religion, neo -liberalism, etc.) that this authoritarianism has been internalized by all of us. (critical paralyzing inner voices, addictions, obsessions for “oneness”) This distrust of self is heightened by the easy ability of social media to create purity traps and establish corrals that have no fences.
Authoritarianism relies on distrust of one’s own body and one’s self.
In 2020, I had a similar experience as my past partner. I felt how men were treated like animals in the early stages of civilization, emboldened the need to “punch down”, and how that is still held in our bodies (or at least mine)
On my acceptance to the Master of Psychology program it became clear to me that if I was going to make it through this program, I needed to find a modality that approached this internalization not to destroy, bury or transcend it but to treat it as the adaptive necessity it once was that was working for my best interest, befriend it so it can settle into a natural congruency and role as an ally.
For me, the Internal Family Systems modality validates and meets this need. Its basic premise is that there are “no bad parts “within us. IFS take the basic concepts of Family Systems Therapy and applies it inwardly. What are family members externally are “sub personalities” or “parts” internally. This model implies that there is a central “self” that can never be damaged. The “parts” that develop do so as adaptive strategies to survive and move forward. How I would describe it is that these parts work until they don’t. They’ve become obsolete. That’s when a system’s change becomes necessary. In this model, the change is to “tease” these parts apart, give them space to breathe, and guide them back to the way “Universe” functions…where nature does not cast shame or blame and where healing is innate.
IFS is also congruent with somatic work in that it relies on Felt Sense as an entry to discovering these interior parts. The parts manifest as physical symptoms and sensations. This goes back to my early yoga experience of breathing into a pain, sensation, or injury to discover what is being held there in that area. These parts are authoritarian as they have to be. Because of this, their “enmeshment” needs to be teased apart so these parts can breathe and shown of it’s necessity, it’s obsoleteness, and its value now of being a friend and ally
To bring it back to the movie of Maurice, if I am to return to school to truly learn, I want to tease this inner authoritarian apart…. and rather than build a case against others long term (non-game, non-play) instead stay in a space where I/we can breathe and learn.
This model also meets the effects of intergenerational trauma. These are parts of ourselves that take on roles passed through generations. This concept is known as legacy burdens and also shows through what we carry somatically.
Since there is a very strong emphasis on self-leadership in this model, the ethics required for an individual working with their parts are similar to a therapist working with a client. How the clients and parts work together are similar to the “yes, and” concept in improvisational comedy. Practicing in the directions of attunement and creating a safe space to the point of where congruency is achieved. This is similar to the involvement of the audience when the sketch or the improvised scene moves.
The ethics for creating a safe space in the IFS is as such
1) Find — Talking about the situation and what the challenge is, and then getting down which part of our body is affected by it.
2) Focus — Turn attention inward and focus on that part
3) Fleshing out — flesh out the part that we are focusing on by openly listening to its story and learning about it.
4) Feel Towards — How do you feel towards those parts. Common answers are: indifferent, anger and disdain, or Curiosity and openness
5) BeFriending — Real relationship begins between Self and part. Self learns about this part. They become friends.
6) Fears — Self asks what this part would fear if it would stop doing what it is doing. What would happen if it didn’t hold on so tight
These are the model ethics between therapist and client. Since self-leadership is the goal of IFS, these model ethics would apply between individual/Self and its own parts
