In this third article on our series on the theme of wanting well, I want to explore the movement toward wholeness that happens through thoughtful exploration of our emotional landscape. I find the that the image of gardening and its related verbs like tending, weeding, and cultivating create a helpful picture of moving towards wholeness.
Once we heal from our wounds, explored in the previous article, we can tend to the garden of our soul through vulnerable relationships in community, different forms of psychotherapy, mindfulness, and spiritual encounters. This watched and cultivated garden can produce goodness both within us and overflowing to those around us. We can experience empathy and emotional self-regulation and control. We can develop skills in effective conflict management. Instead of fighting the weeds of reactionary and habitual but unhelpful emotional responses, we can engage people with thoughtful and life-giving strategies.
But gardening is difficult. Physical gardening requires studies of soil chemistry, sunlight exposure, thirst management, and plain old tedious work. The “garden” of our inner life is similar: work is required to understand the emotional chemistry of our hearts and the conditions under which we can flourish. I need to pay attention to what I’m paying attention to in order to feed my inner being with things that are good and beneficial. I need vigilance in order to spot things growing that may overshadow or compete for the resources needed for healthy growth.
Wanting from Wholeness
I believe that this work will pay off, both for me and for the significant relationships around me. But this work will only be useful once I’ve addressed losses as I described previously. While tempting to skip this step on the journey of wanting well and mastering self-leadership, any such attempt will hinder future growth. A garden can’t grow in unhealthy, rocky, uncultivated soil. But when the soil is ready, we can begin the third step of wanting well: wanting from wholeness.
When we want from wholeness, our desires come from a place of completeness and balance within. We strive less for what we see through others (wanting from windows) and what comes from the broken and unhealed places (wanting from wounds).
A few years ago, after having done about five years of talk therapy, I stumbled across a podcast where the head of a neuroscience lab at MIT mentioned how he found a new psychotherapy approach called IFS very helpful.
I was curious so I searched online and found a guided IFS meditation on YouTube and as I did the meditation, it was almost as if different conflicting parts of me all started having an argument in front of me. I was floored by this and walked away saying: “What did I just discover?”
This provoked an immediate search for someone who could help me explore what the meditation had awakened. I eventually connected with multiple effective therapists who practiced IFS, or Internal Family Systems.
What Did IFS Discover?
Fundamentally, I believe IFS presents one of the most accurate models of how our subconscious is structured, and what I’ve experienced over and over through the help of IFS therapists and my own practice is a robust movement from emotional dysregulation towards wholeness.
To borrow from our garden analogy, IFS teaches that we each have a seed with attributes of wholeness that are embedded in the human psyche. We all have an emotional ecosystem with ready access to these attributes and we are predisposed to possess and display goodness. However, the weeds—the untruths of our past experiences, traumas, losses, or even unhelpful aspects of our family of origin—have taken the light needed for the tender plants. Our work in IFS and other therapeutic approaches is to understand and pull away the smothering weeds and allow our deepest selves, and the ecosystem they enable, to flourish and be restored.
While IFS is better experienced than explained, I want to give a picture of some of its elements.
Identifying and Working With Parts
Dr. Richard Schwartz, founder of the IFS model, discovered this way of exploring the subconscious and what’s going on underneath the surface of our emotions and experiences: We all have psychological “parts” (e.g. an inner child or a critic) that are active and “doing things” according to their own reason. By doing “parts work,” mapping and connecting the parts, we are able to experience our full selves and remove what occludes wholeness. We can learn what the “parts” are saying to us and which ones need attention, which need their volume turned down, or which may be providing valuable but quiet insight. When we pay attention to and learn from our parts, we can experience wholeness (You can explore his book here or hear Dr. Schwartz talk about IFS on this podcast.)
The Eight “C’s” and Five “P’s”
Practitioners of IFS help clients reveal and experience the following foundational qualities that contribute to our emotional wholeness. They are often called the “8 C’s” and “5 P’s”:
EQ Is The Fruit, Foundational Qualities Are the Root
There is a direct connection between inner emotional health and outer emotional engagement, described as emotional intelligence (EQ or EI). High levels of EQ correlate with a steady experience of 8 C’s and 5 P’s. This grid, derived from a Harvard Business Review article on emotional intelligence, put alongside the foundational qualities of self, shows the fruit we can produce if we’ve got an emotionally healthy root system.
This framework makes a difference. If I’m dealing with conflict and able to express perspective and clarity, that leads to a healthier form of conflict engagement.
How We Grow: Wholeness Over Time
Our path of growth towards wholeness is not a straight line. In my experience there have been two dimensions of change: 1) the average expression of wholeness and 2) the recovery time from loss and dysregulation.
In times of healthy growth, the expression of wholeness increases and recovery time decreases. The arc of growth looks kind of like this:
Over time, I leave the valleys of emotional unhealth more quickly, rebounding towards wholeness. I have been amazed at the increasing freedom, calm, and clarity I’ve possessed as I’ve grown in this journey. As the graph shows this isn’t without difficulty or loss or moments of dysregulation (of which there are many) but the trend is positive on both dimensions.
Take a moment to consider your own story:
- Are there certain people or scenarios which contribute to emotional dysregulation again and again?
- How thrown off are you, and for how long, in experiences of loss or disappointment?
- How practiced are you in moving away from bitterness towards forgiveness?
- Can you think of people or past events that still cause dysregulation today when you think of them?
- How would significant others in your life describe their experience of you? How much of it and how frequently would it be one of the 8C’s and 5P’s?
“Do I really need to explore therapy?”
I recently spoke with an acquaintance about my journey with IFS and he said, “I genuinely feel really happy…I don’t have much to unpack. Do I really need to explore therapy?”
This is a fair question. While I have found therapy essential to unlocking and healing the broken parts of me, therapy can be just one of many tools to increase emotional intelligence and produce beneficial behaviors and experiences. Other helpful approaches I’ve used in tandem with therapy include
- Vulnerable Relationships in Community
- Different Forms of Psychotherapy
- Prayer and Meditation
- Silent Retreats
- Coaching and Mentoring
- Religious and Spiritual Experience
Each strategy offers collective connections, wisdom, and resources that elevate not only our own well-being, but also the well-being of those around us whom we love, work with, and live with. This is unquestionably valuable to me. Is it to you?
I hope you’ll join me on this step of wanting well.
