What can shamanism offer IFS work?

Can IFS reach a part that has left? #

Not by dialogue alone, because the part is no longer there to talk to. IFS works with parts that are still present, however hidden or exiled. Shamanism adds that some parts go. Sometimes, when soul loss happens, a lost soul partSoul-part. A small-s, middle-world part of the self that can be lost (sent away) and can be retrieved. Not the capital-S Soul. Read the full answer is not in the room to be dialogued with: it is not just repressed but has left altogether. This is when shamanism comes into its own, because shamanism can find the parts that have left altogether.

A part can leave because “we may send part of our self away, part of our own soul, in order to ‘fit in’.”¹ Shamanic soul retrieval goes to find such a part and, with the help of the Guides, brings it back. IFS skills then come into their own in welcoming the returned part and helping the protectors to accept it. See What is soul retrieval? and What can Internal Family Systems (IFS) offer shamanic work?

Is everything inside us a part of us? #

No, and IFS itself recognises that not everything met in this work is a part. Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS, writes that people sometimes meet voices or images that are “more two-dimensional than parts”, which IFS calls “unattached burdens because they seem like internalised pieces of hatred or evil that never attached to a part”. He likens them to what some psychodynamic therapists call introjectsIntroject. A foreign belief, message or story swallowed whole (often in childhood) and lodged inside as if it were our own; a type of intrusion. More about this.²

Shamanism has always known that some things inside a person do not belong to them, and it has the skills to deal with them. It also knows the danger of getting it wrong in either direction. If a client’s demons are real beings, a therapist who treats them as parts to be dialogued with and integrated “would unwittingly be helping the demons possess the client further.” But if they are disowned parts, calling them demons does harm too: “inner ‘demons’ need facing, embracing and integrating, not further demonisation.” And “some of a client’s demons are real, and some of them are not.”³

So the shamanic rule is to discern before acting, and never to remove what belongs. “ExtractionExtraction. Drawing a foreign body (an intrusion) out of a person and packing the hole with something healthy. The iron rule: only ever foreign bodies, never a part of the self: extracting a genuine part of self creates soul-loss. More about this work should only ever be about removing foreign bodies or entities”,⁴ never what belongs to the person, because “Taking away a part of someone is to create soul-loss and leave a hole in them that an intrusionIntrusion. Something lodged in us that should not be there, having entered through the holes soul-loss and Power-loss leave. Four broad types: unhelpful thought-forms, introjects, foreign-body energetic intrusions, and entity possessions. More about this (or worse) could then get into.”⁵ See What is an intrusion, and what is extraction?

What can shamanism offer when the dead are involved? #

A clear understanding of who the dead are, and where they belong. The unquiet deadUnquiet dead. The middle-world self become ghost: the ego that, having no body left to anchor it, lingers among the living instead of moving on to the Land of the Dead. Unhealthy for the living, and moved on by psychopomping. More about this are middle-world souls that have not passed over to the Land of the Dead, but are “instead hanging around the land of the living.”⁶ The hunter-gatherer tribes shown in an exhibition on how different peoples treated their dead “all saw the dead as being dangerous to the living”.⁷ Shamans do not see the dead as helpful spirits to work with.⁸ The shamanic tradition of psychopomping, escorting the dead to the Land of the DeadLand of the Dead. The middle-world human place where the middle-world self belongs after death. Not the Lower-World, and not hell. More about this, is not something IFS teaches. See Who are the unquiet dead, and are ghosts real?

How does shamanism understand legacy burdens and the Ancestors? #

In terms close to IFS, with a wider frame. Schwartz writes that “Each of us carries legacy burdens inherited from our families and cultures”,⁹ and in a later book he and the teacher Thomas Hübl write that such burdens can block our access to “the wisdom and assistance of ancestors and other spiritual guides”.¹⁰ Therapeutic Shamanism calls these ancestral burdensAncestral burdens. Unresolved grief, shame, anger and trauma passed down the family line: never ours to begin with, but shaping us. Healed through recapitulation and disentanglement, becoming a ‘link-breaker’ so the burden stops here. Read the full answer, and distinguishes our own dead from the Ancestors. The ancestors, with a small a, are “our individual biological ancestors who are no longer living”. The Ancestors, with a capital A, are “not a single twig but a whole branch”, the Human Oversoul.¹¹ See What is the difference between an ancestor and an Ancestor? and How do we recognise and work with ancestral burdens?

Is the Soul the same as the IFS Self? #

They share something, but they are not the same. Schwartz writes that “the Self cannot be damaged, the Self doesn’t have to develop, and the Self possesses its own wisdom about how to heal”.¹² The Lower-World Soul is much the same: it is not something we lose, but something we have to find. What shamanism adds is where the Soul is found. The Soul is part of nature; part of Human, of Animal, a sibling to Plant and Stone, and a child of Mother Earth.¹³ It is found in the Lower-World, with the help of the Animal, Plant and Stone People, not only by looking inward. See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?

The body belongs in the inner tribe too. In our culture we tend to think of the body “as not us, but something that we inhabit; a “vehicle” for the soul”.¹⁴ In Therapeutic Shamanism the body is a member of the tribe in its own right.