Learning to trust your Self with IFS Coaching

Why bother developing self-trust with IFS Coaching?

Well, for one, self-trust is the opposite of anxiety.

As a personal example, I used to be absolutely terrified of speaking in front of people.⁠ I would get digestive issues and have a pit in my stomach. My words refused to come out during the event, and I would constantly obsess over it and have nightmares for a good two weeks before the event.

At the core, I was afraid I would be revealed as not knowing enough to be up there. I was afraid I was secretly incompetent and this particular event would reveal my incompetence.⁠ So my coping mechanism was to became an expert on whatever I was speaking on. I would OBESSIVELY read and prepare to an unhealthy degree. I wanted to be ready for every question (which isn’t actually possible).

These days, I have mostly accepted that I don't have to know absolutely everything to be a good source of information. ⁠That it's okay to say "That's a great question, I don't know yet, but I'll find out."⁠

The more self-trust I build, the better this feels in my system.⁠ It applies to anything “in the future” that is uncertain. Self-trust means believing in your ability to handle anything that’s thrown at you. The unknown is a lot less scary when you don’t doubt that you’ll get through it, even if you’re not quite sure how yet.

Anxiety right here, right now, propels us into the future, attempting to pre-plan for every possible situation that might arise.⁠ What happens when we actually get to the future? Do we use our pre-planned scenarios?⁠

Maybe sometimes. But my guess is most of the time, no - we respond the way we need to in the moment because we gain new critical information that we didn't have in the past.⁠

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Trusting yourself opens up the possibility to tell your anxiety "We have handled everything before, and we will handle it again."⁠ Trusting yourself opens up the possibility to live in the current moment.⁠ And IFS Coaching is a proven, well documented way to build self-trust.

What does self-trust have to do with IFS Coaching?

I’ve talked about this before in a couple other posts, but IFS teaches us that we all have parts and a core inner wise leader, referred to as the Self. Your Self is present in the here and now - when you’re awash in Self-led thinking, you have access to your higher cognitive brainpower. This comes with all sorts of good stuff, like calm, clarity, and creativity. In IFS terminology, what we’re doing when we build self-trust is actually building trust between our Self and our parts. We’re creating links between parts of us that may be stuck in the past or always propelling themselves into the future to the Self that is always living in the present.

Consistently doing your internal parts work with IFS coaching (or therapy) means helping parts of you that have taken up safety-related burdens in your system to learn to set them down and pay attention to what’s actually happening right here, right now. In neurobiological terms, you’re using this metacognitive (thinking about thinking) model to observe your neural patterns and change them.

An example of the IFS Coaching process with a perfectionist part:

Many clients I work with in IFS coaching sessions have perfectionist parts (usually managing protectors). These parts pick up the burden of “never making a mistake” because they learn at some point during our lives that mistakes and imperfections are intolerable. It’s a safety adaptation - if a child is being abused, there’s a survival strategy in avoiding mistakes that set off volatile caretakers. Even when abuse isn’t present, a vulnerable child may learn that the best way to gain positive attention is through never getting anything wrong - because there are a lot of people with perfectionist parts in our society that may give them that message.

All adaptations (burdening of parts) make complete and total sense in the context they are developed in. If a child is dependent on a volatile caregiver for food and shelter, there is absolutely a necessity to do their best to avoid mistakes. It’s basic survival.

However, if we hit the fast forward button to a “happy ending” - the child has made it out. They are safe. They have access to their basic needs and more. They have a supportive community and a job they’re happy with. Despite this, their perfectionist part is still in overdrive, ensuring that no mistakes are ever made. It’s no longer a needed adaptation - the supportive community and job understand that people are human, and mistakes are part of being human. However, the client’s brain doesn’t know that. The brain is still wired that perfectionism = survival.

With IFS Coaching, we start to get to know that protector. We ask it about it’s hopes, fears, and where it picked up its burden. We ask what it worries would happen if it stopped doing it’s job (to ensure perfection). As we listen to parts, they start to relax. They start to believe they might not be alone. They might begin to recognize the chronological age of the client has changed. They tell us how exhausted they are - how much they would like to stop doing “their job”.

The process can vary here - but usually the perfectionist protector is covering up an exiled part. This is a part that holds a core wound, such as “I am not safe”, “I am not good at anything”, “Mistakes make me unlovable”. The perfectionist’s overtime work has been in service of keeping the exile from surfacing - because that belief is too activating to the system. When a protector trusts that it’s safe to reveal an exile, an IFS Coach can work with the client’s Self to witness and retrieve that exile (take it from an unsafe place where it has been stuck to a new, safe place). Once an exile feels safe, they are often ready to let go of those core wounded beliefs and embrace something new, transforming into an unburdened exile. Without an exile to protect, the perfectionist part is free to take on a new role in the system.

This process has shifted the internal landscape quite a bit. Two parts that had no trust in the client’s Self previously have now trusted that internal wise leader enough to let go of a long-held burden and belief, and the overall level of trust in the human system increases (this usually positively affects other parts in the system as well).

What does this shift externally?

More Self-trust, especially with a part that used to be perfectionistic, means more tolerance for mistakes. This radically changes the game with regard to willingness to take risks and play bigger. Paradoxically, the more risks you take, the more you are willing to take - and that’s often true whether you succeed or “fail”. If you succeed, it’s a positive reinforcement that risk leads to reward. If you “fail”, a high-trust mindset is able to reframe what happened as a learning opportunity - and to see that failure didn’t mean the world ended.

Taking risks is how we learn what we truly love. It’s how we do things like start businesses, start families, forge important connections, move across the globe, and so much more. On a smaller but still quite important scale, it’s what allows us to do things like go for a “reach” promotion at work or take on a new client that we know will be a stretch.

In short, IFS coaching is an evidence-based method for developing self trust and greatly lowering anxiety. Trusting yourself means a far greater chance of living the rich, full, and joyous life that you deeply want to live - right here, right now in the present.

If you’re curious about IFS Coaching, reach out here!