Over the past year, I have been getting training in the Internal Family System (IFS) framework and integrating this approach into my spiritual direction. In doing so, it has allowed me and my directees to go into deeper territories, territories we could only talk about it before. One of the dynamics I have noticed is that most people have Protector parts within their soul that keep them from experiencing God's Presence and Spirit. In this blog, I want to share some insights about how to pray with Protectors which allow our relationship to the Divine to deepen. Before I explore the topic of prayer and Protectors, it is important that I briefly review some key aspects of IFS and the human soul. As I have described in previous blogs, Internal Family System perceives the soul having three aspects to it: Exiles, Protectors, and the Self. Exiles and Protectors Exiles are those parts within our soul that contain the pain and trauma of past experiences, often from our childhood, that are unresolved and need healing. These parts contain beliefs, emotions, and memories from these painful times. These parts are called Exiles because these parts are kept hidden away, sometimes so hidden that we are unconscious of these memories. It is important to realize that all of us have Exiles, parts within our soul that we don’t want to talk about or remember. Protectors are those parts within our soul that contain coping strategies that keep us from triggering or feeling the pain located within our Exile parts. Many of these Protectors are proactive in nature meaning that they seek to manage our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors such that the pain within our Exile parts is not triggered. Managing Protectors include staying in our thinking heads, emotional management strategies, numbing our bodies, relationship patterns, avoidance tendencies, distraction schemes, compulsions, etc. Other Protectors are reactive in nature, that is, as soon as significant pain arises, they take over and distract us from our pain. Examples of reactive protectors are fight, flight, and freeze responses, anger/rage, eating disorders, addictions, soothing through food, suicide ideation, sleepiness, impulsions, etc. Together, the Exile and Protector parts make up what Christians might call their fallen nature. I use the term fallen nature purposely because as IFS has discovered, these parts didn’t function like this in the beginning. No, each of these parts had a totally different role when we were born, one that was always life-giving to us and part of God’s design for our soul. However, due to the times of pain and stress we found ourselves experiencing, often in our younger years, these parts of our soul had to abandon these healthy roles and take on necessary, but fallen roles, for the stability of our soul system, either Exile roles or Protector roles. Thanks to IFS, I have come to see these fallen roles as the best life-giving option available at the time for our soul when the overwhelming incident occurred. Otherwise, another coping strategy would have been chosen. This coping pattern may be problematic now, like addiction or suicide ideation, but there was a time when this management tactic was truly a life-giving blessing to our psyche, an answer from God, one could say, to our prayer for help at the time so we could survive and somehow live. (Richard Schwartz's book "No Bad Parts" (2020) is a good place to explore this insight that all parts play an important role in our life. Richard Schwartz is the developer of IFS) Dynamics of the Divine Self I think we can all relate to having Exile and Protector structures in our soul. But IFS has discovered another aspect of our human soul, what it calls the Self with a capital “s”. The Diamond Approach calls IFS’s notion of Self as the Essential Nature or True Nature of the soul. Within Christianity, we would call it our Divine nature that all humans are born with and is the ground or foundational fabric of our soul. The Diamond Approach teaches that the True Nature of the human soul, when it is free of any ego structures like Exile parts and Protector parts, is where all the qualities of Essence or Spirit arise within us like compassion, joy, strength, will, love, truth, power, etc. IFS has a similar understanding of Self where curiosity, compassion, courage, connectedness, confidence, presence, playfulness, patience, perspective and many other spiritual qualities all can arise depending on what we are experiencing. As a Christian, this understanding of Essence or Self could be seen as the incarnation of the Christ-Self within our human soul, what some Christian mystics call the Indwelling Christ. Many times, the dynamics of the Indwelling Christ are also called the fruits, gifts, or works of God’s Holy Spirit. The Chameleon Nature of our Witnessing “I” There is one final soul dynamic that is crucial to understand before we move to the topic of “prayer and Protectors," namely the witnessing “I”. The concept of the witnessing “I” appears in many spiritual and psychological frameworks. Our witnessing “I” provides that sense of what we experience as “me” or “I”, that is, “this is who I am, what I am thinking, seeing, feeling, experiencing, and sensing in the present moment.” It is important to understand that our witnessing “I” is like a chameleon. It takes on the qualities that it is centred in. If our witnessing “I” becomes merged with aspects of our fallen nature, we become lost in all the thoughts, emotions, memories, and strong sensations like anxiety and pain associated with that part of our fallen nature. When this happens, our sense of “I” feels trapped and oppressed by the structured nature of this fallen part. However, when our witnessing “I” becomes centred in our Divine nature, our sense of “me” becomes very spacious and free and we discover the spiritual fruit of self-awareness. From this centre in Self, we are now able to notice all the dynamics happening in our souls, both the dynamics of our fallen nature, but also the dynamics of our Divine nature arising in response to what we are experiencing. Having this IFS background in place, let us now explore the theme, “Prayer and our Protectors.” 1. Prayerful interaction with God only happens when we are self-aware, that is, our witnessing “I” is centred in Self. One truth we soon realized with this IFS model is that we are rarely centred in God/Self, even Christians. Instead, we find themselves blending from one part to another part to another part to another part within our soul throughout our whole day. Moments of Being where self-awareness can begin to arise for any period is an uncommon experience for most people. In fact, even for religious people who try to practice prayer or meditation, the experience of self-awareness and Being/Presence may be there for a few moments but it is soon gone. Our sense of “I” soon blends with our thoughts or feelings or memories and we are no longer praying. When this happens, we are merged with one of our Protectors and thus become lost in our mind or experience, even during our times that we have set aside to pray. Why is this blending happening? The Christian response is that it is because of our fallen nature, a nature that no longer is aligned with the will and purposes of God There is truth in that description but it is not helpful for it does not recognize why this blending is happening. Remember an IFS truth I shared earlier: all aspects of our fallen nature were, in the beginning, a life-survival strategy, a blessing that kept us alive. So this begs the questions, how was this distraction pattern a helpful pattern at one time in our lives, maybe still is? 2. Our Protectors keeps us from entering into a prayerful state. To these Protectors, prayer is a dangerous activity. Prayer, a dangerous activity, how can this be? Just think about what happens when prayer is truly experienced, from an IFS perspective: our sense of “me” unblends from our many Protector parts and now rests in a place of vulnerability in the presence of Self or God. This creates much fear and anxiety to many of our Protectors. To understand the significance of this fear of vulnerability, I want you to consider when this Protector part was formed. Most of our Protectors have their roots in our childhood where the ability for God/Self to manifest in our souls was very restricted due to the developmental limitations of our young physical bodies, hearts and minds. As children, we were totally dependent on how well the dynamics of Self/God were manifesting in parents, teachers, pastors, and other caregivers in our lives. When they fail to protect us during these vulnerable times and we experienced intense pain, we developed Protector structures in our soul whose goal was to protect the wounded little boy and girl parts within us from ever experiencing that type of pain again…through mental distraction, through fighting, fleeing, freezing, avoidance, numbing oneself, and many more coping styles. Now you know why Protectors don’t trust Self/God protecting us when we enter a place of vulnerability, which is what prayer is, a time of vulnerability with Self/God. Seeing this trust issue with our Protectors, how can we help our Protectors trust God/Self more so we can pray and enter a deeper place of vulnerability where we can have a more intimate relationship with God? 3: Unblending from our Protectors allows us to form a prayerful relationship with them where we are rooted in God/Self. As I explained earlier, prayer can only happen when our sense of “I” is not blended with any part of our soul, included our Protectors. When this happens, space opens up between our sense of “I” and our Protectors, and now we can develop a prayerful relationship with our Protector. To help you understand what it means to unblend from our Protectors, let me first help you see what blending with our Protectors might look like when we do centering prayer or meditation. There are many Protectors that arise that keep us from entering that place of being with our experience in the Present Moment where we can sense God’s Presence. A common Protector is that of sleepiness, where we fall asleep during our time of prayer. Another Protector believes that centering prayer is boring and so looks for ways to stimulate or distract ourselves which often leads to the condition of what Buddhism calls “monkey mind.” As soon as you start thinking about anything, we often become lost in our thoughts and are no longer aware of our experience in the Present Moment. Many times during these times of prayer we find ourselves stewing or worrying about something that is happening in our lives or our children's lives or other people’s lives. When this happens, our sense of “I” has merged with this worrying Protector. Finally, for many people, centering prayer can be a time when we try to pray by thinking about God or talking to God during this silence. But if we never move into a place of receiving when we sit in silence waiting for God to respond to our words or thoughts, then we know that our Protector is the one doing the praying, not our sense of “me”. Prayer involves an intimate interaction between ourselves and God in the Present Moment, and anytime we disengage from this vulnerable place, we know our sense of “me” has merged with a Protector. Seeing how easy it is to blend, what does it means to unblend from our Protectors during centring prayer? Let me play with an example. Let say that we struggle with a lot of sleepiness during centring prayer. That tells us that our sense of “I” often blends with our Sleepy Protector. When this happens, we experience life, in this case, centring prayer through this sub-personality that contains all the beliefs, feelings, body sensations, and memories associated with this sleepiness. What does it mean to unblend from this Sleepy Protector so that we can pray with it? (please see Endnote to see other explanations for why sleep may happening during centring prayer and meditation) For most of us, if we have a problem that we are struggling with, like falling asleep in centring prayer, we ask God to take away our problem. When God does not answer our prayer, we often feel angry at our problem, a sign that our witnessing “I” has now blended with another Protector, an anger Protector that is angry at God for not answering our prayer or angry at ourselves for not being strong enough to rise above our problem, in this case sleepiness in prayer. The result of this prayer is that we become angry or disillusioned with God for not answering our prayer, and become even more stuck with our issue.. Let me propose another way to approach prayer with our Protector, in this case, a sleepy Protector. Instead of praying for God to take away our Sleepy Protector, we ask God first to help us unblend from this part so that we can form a prayerful relationship with it. When we are merged with our Sleepy part, we become our sleepiness and fall asleep; we have no relationship with it. For us to enter in this prayerful place, we need to find ways to unblend when we feel sleepiness coming on so that we can form a relationship with this Sleepy Protector from a place of self-awareness. To help us enter into this prayerful unblended state of self-awareness, we can ask our Sleepy Protector the following questions:
4. Deepening our relationship with our Protectors allows them to experience the Presence of God/Self through our sense of “me”. One of first signs of Self/Spirit arising in us is that we often begin to feel curiosity toward our Protector, in our example, our Sleepy Protector. This curiosity is the beginning of a relationship forming with this Protector. This curiosity causes us to wonder, how could this Sleepy part be a Protector? How is it protecting me by causing me to become sleepy? We might begin to wonder, are there other times this Sleepy Protector arises in our life, outside of times where we are trying to do centring prayer? Maybe we notice that we become sleepy every time we are in a place of quiet, where there is little activity or mental stimulation. A key IFS question to eventually ask this Protector is the following: What does it fear will happen if it does not make us sleepy? Don’t allow your mind to quickly answer that question but allow your Sleepy part within your body to answer that question instead. The responses that come provide hints into why this Sleepy part is protecting us. We may feel some anxiety arising, a sign of another part emerging, and if so, we want to be prayerfully curious why that anxiety part is there. IFS teaches us that below every Protector is an Exile part that is waiting to be seen, heard, validated, and cared for, but our Protector is keeping it from our awareness. Knowing this, it is important for us to understand what our Protector fears will happen if it allows us to be with our Exile part or parts now. It may fear that we will become overwhelmed, that that our emotions will be too painful, too much for us to handle, that God/Self will abandon us again. There is truth to this fear for when this painful childhood experience happened, it was too much for us, as a child, to handle and God/Self didn’t stop it from happening. As we prayerfully explore, with God’s help, the why behind our Sleepy part protecting us, we will often begin to feel appreciation toward this part, another sign of God’s spirit arising in our soul. This appreciation is also a sign that our relationship with our Sleepy Protector is deepening. Just because we come to appreciate how our Protector has protected us in the past does not mean that we don't see how this coping pattern also has caused us lots of issues at time. For example, we see how our Sleepy Protector interferes with our ability to trust and deepen our relationship with God and possibly other people in our life. And yet this frustrating realization is tempered by grace as we see more clearly how this Sleepy Protectors has kept us from getting hurt again by becoming vulnerable. One key insight IFS has found is that our Protectors are working very hard to keep us safe and away from possible painful experiences of our Exiles. Some of our Protectors are hypervigilant, always watching to make sure we are safe. Seeing this, we can now understand why our Protectors are so active during prayer times, especially prayers like centring prayer where the whole purpose of this prayer is to become vulnerable to God in the Present Moment. But there is a downside to all this working, from the Protector’s point of view. They are often very tired for it takes a lot of energy to keep our body and soul in a protected, contracted state, and this is also true with the Sleepy Protector. Our Sleepy Protector has to contract our mind, heart, gut, and body so that all stimulation is blocked and we feel sleepy. This type of sleepiness is not restful like the sleep that happens at night as we allow ourselves to relax and fall asleep. (see end footnote around sleep in centering prayer) When we see how hard our Protector has been working to protect us, we often begin to feel compassion toward our Protector, another sign of God’s spirit appearing in us. When that happens, it is important that we express this compassion to our Protectors telling them how much we appreciate what they are trying to do and how hard and tiring it is to do their protective work. Upon hearing those compassionate and understanding words from us, our Protectors will often soften, become less suspicious of us, and trust us more. There is one more IFS question that is helpful to ask our Protector, one that is based on the fact that this Protector is a fallen part; it is not actually doing what it was designed to do in our life. In the case of our Sleepy Protector, we could ask, “If a miracle were to happened and you no longer had to do this protective role in my life, what would you rather do?” Again, don’t allow your mind to answer this question too quickly but instead allow your Sleepy Protector to respond. IFS has found the people are often surprised what comes. Sometimes the Protector just wants to rest and do nothing. Other times, it actually wants to have a role that is almost opposite to what it is currently doing. Upon hearing this answer, we can offer our Protector hope that someday soon, with the help of God/Self, we can learn from the Protector how to protect this Exile part, as it has done so for many years now, but also care for it with the possibility of healing our young Exile part. Through this time of prayerfully interacting with our Protector, our relationship with it has changed. Instead of judging our Protector as problematic and sinful, we instead now:
One final but shocking observation There is something else that is important for us to notice, and this is a little shocking for us to realize. Our Protectors see us, when our sense of “I” is centred in Self/God as Self/God, the very Self/God who they felt betrayed by in our younger years when our Protectors were formed. When we see our Protectors in a curious way, our Protectors experience Self/God seeing them with that same curiosity. When we sense appreciation and compassion flowing from us to our Protectors, they experience this appreciation and compassion as coming through us from Self/God. In other words, when we are centred in Self/God, our Protectors and our Exiles experience us as conduits of God’s Sprit or Self, what could be seen as incarnations of God in human form. As our Protectors have more positive experiences with us praying for them and with them, their relationship with God/Self begins to change. They start to trust God/Self more to protect our Exile parts, and thus allows us to spend more and longer times in this place of vulnerability in our prayer times with God. There is still the important topic how we prayerfully let God/Self care for our Exile parts so that our Protectors no longer need to be hypervigilant in protecting our younger Exile parts. But that is for future blogs to explore. Endnote: I should note that a restful form of sleep can also happen in centering prayer for it happens often for me. I used to think that this sleep was due to my Sleeping Protector but don't think this is true any more because of my work in palliative care. Within palliative care, we talk about two types of sleeping. One type of sleep happens when we feel ourselves getting tired, like what happens at night in bed, and then we fall asleep. In this case, when we wake up from this sleep in the morning, we feel tired and groggy, but we slowly wake up. The other type of sleep is very different. You don’t feel yourself falling asleep. You are instantly gone, and then when you wake up, you are not tired but instantly here, alert, very refresh, and ready to go. This second form of sleep is really a person going in and out unconsciousness, and this type of sleep is more refreshing than normal sleep. I see this type of sleep often in Hospice. Many times in centering prayer I experience something like this unconscious state. Some might not call this meditative state a sleep state but rather a state of no mental activity, and so your sense of self-awareness disappears. I no longer see this meditative state as a Sleepy Protector but rather a gift from God that happens for me in prayer. Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
0 Comments
|