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Today’s guest blogger is Adrienne Glasser, LCSW, RDMT. She is a wonderfully insightful, dynamic and compassionate clinician, certified in working with Internal Family Systems and mindfulness techniques. Her practice is based in NYC.
Adrienne writes:
We all have feelings or internal parts. They talk to us all day long. We hear them at home, at work; each moment is peppered with this, sometimes very opinionated, chatter. Often, our instinct is to shut them up. From our earliest days, we are taught that feelings are untrustworthy, make us weak and are best, in many situations, dealt with by dismissing them.
If we think of the mind as if it were a ship, many of us treat its parts, our feelings, like mutinous crewmembers that are trying to usurp the true captain’s power. We do not trust them or give them their due.
But who controls where our mind goes? Which part of us makes the final decisions? Are parts aligned with specific feelings? Or is there some larger aspect of us that references a broader perspective, an appreciative and compassionate way of seeing things?
Pixar’s new film, Inside Out, addresses our relationship to our feelings in a surprisingly sophisticated way. Amy Poehler, playing the role of Joy inhabits the inner world of a young girl named Riley. Joy is a quality of Riley, that relates to many other parts of her. The story turns on the ways in which Riley’s internal world is organized and ways in which it changes. Joy is the aspect of Riley that understands and appreciates the function of each of the other feelings or parts of Riley. Primarily, Joy exudes compassion. She accepts the other parts and embraces their value and purpose.
For example, when Joy describes the character named Disgust, another internal part of Riley, she confirms Disgust’s positive function. Even though this other part is critical and judgmental, Joy recognizes that these seemingly negative traits, criticism and judgment, are used in the service of protecting Riley.
Inside Out shows us, through use of a clever and charming story and visuals, that, the more we understand of even our most challenging feelings, the more integrated our internal worlds become.
Current psychotherapies such as Internal Family Systems (IFS) and the therapy that I practice Active Insight (IFS plus meditation) integrate the idea that we all have multiple internal parts that need compassion for healing. It seems that western psychology is absorbing what Buddhists have known since ancient times: that through the cultivation of compassion towards our own feelings, we can eventually find a path to enlightenment—relief from our suffering. Once we become capable of compassion for all parts of ourselves, we can also have compassion for others and treat them lovingly. We can accept our own and others’ defensiveness as normal and human without blame or judgment. We can move towards mindful acceptance of ourselves and others in their entirety.
Inside Out helps broaden the conversation about feelings in our pop culture. It offers a view of subjective reality that is complex and provocative; a cut above much other child-oriented fare that lives or dies on special effects and a one-dimensional psychological perspectives. Without knowing it. you might say the writers of Inside Out bring perspectives similar to those depicted in Internal Family Systems, Active Insight, or Meditation to the general public in a way that is fresh and novel. And that’s a very good thing.
Adrienne Glasser is the Director of Services at the Experience Wellness Group. http://www.experiencewellnessgroup.com/ She has been helping clients to find their intuitive path towards healing for over15 years. She also leads intensive weekends and trainings for professionals in which she teaches Active Insight and Experiential Therapy theory and techniques.
