This Internal Family Systems practice has really helped me navigate my grief!This skill is all about giving grief a name. This is a therapeutic practice that has helped me with SO many things. The idea is to see your grief as it’s own part of you, like a person. What is their name? What do they look like? And most importantly, what do they need? By separating YOU from your grief, you can start to honor it, process it, and accept it without identifying with it. The idea is to allow grief to exist and hold it’s hand until it’s ready to go, not abandon it, abolish it, or become it. I also give a book recommendation at the end, so watch the whole video to see that part.
Grief is not something that we just experience when somebody dies. One thing that I've found really helpful with grief is an internal family systems practice. By naming and identifying the grief, we're honoring it. And we stay separate from it, and we can remain our true self.
If you're struggling with grief or letting go, this video is for you. This is my fourth of a four part series on navigating grief. And I really believe that grief is not something that we just experience when somebody dies. It's something we experience when we end a relationship, when we move to a new city, when we start a new job, when we go back to school, when we change right? When we go through therapy, and we let go of certain behaviors or ways of being, when we go through recovery and we let go of an identity we maybe had or an attachment we had to a certain diagnosis or behaviors of that diagnosis.
Grief is so present in our day to day lives, and I think oftentimes we don't recognize that what we're experiencing is grief. We might experience it as anxiety or having a hard time letting go or attachment. And a lot of times that is our grief. One thing that I've found really helpful with grief is an internal family systems practice. And the idea is to basically give parts of yourselves a name and to honor them and allow them to be and start to have dialogue and relationship with them. So we do this.
We can do this with our grief, right? A lot of times we either try to push our grief away, we try to suppress it or ignore it or shame it and say, I really don't want you here, so I want you gone. Or we identify with it and the grief becomes up us and we become a grieving person or a person who is always mourning. And neither of those are actually allowing us to process the grief and move forward as our true selves. So by naming and identifying the grief, we're honoring it and saying, I see you existed.
I'm witnessing you, and I know you're here. And we stay separate from it, and we can remain our true self. So now I, Rachel, can interact with this grief and say, I see you. What do you need? I see you. What do you want to tell me? I see you. And I'm going to help you process through this. And right now, it's okay for you to take a rest, and I'm going to go about my day here, and I'm going to come back and visit you when I have time. So we start to build a relationship with our grief, rather than trying to suppress it, push it away, or become it.
You can also do this with any other emotion or part of yourself or thought patterns that you have. Internal family systems is such a beautiful practice. If you want a recommendation for a book, this one is phenomenal. It's called no bad parts. This book is really helping me so much right now. I wish that I could say this is a paid ad, but it's not. I just really love this book. So this kind of has also exercises inside to kind of walk you through identifying parts of self. So I highly recommend this one as well.
Okay my loves, I hope that was helpful and I will see you next time.
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