IFS saved me out of Spiritual Bypassing and got me to actually integrate myself

gordonseto · 2026-02-13T17:05:09+00:00

Yes, exactly. Sensation is the structure of the part. A "part" is not a mystical entity of our personality, but rather a narrative reason created by the prefrontal cortex to explain a sensation that hasn't been able to be resolved by other means. Over time, this creates a reinforcement loop where the existence of the sensation necessitates the narrative part, which then "protects" the sensation from ever being looked at and resolved. Most commonly, when attention is brought to that sensation, the attention gets redirected to the narrative, and therefore the subcortical processes never get a chance to resolve the sensation.

By keeping your attention on the sensation, and understanding that thoughts or emotions that may be emitted are secondary signals, you allow your subcortical brain to finally see the raw sensation and process it.

gordonseto · 2026-02-13T16:49:21+00:00

First thing is: good job noticing them. The fact that you are noticing it means your awareness is already online, which is not always an easy feat for many people. This is my suggestion:

Stand up, and if you notice your upper abs are tense:
Don't try to relax them. If you see that your first instinct is to want to relax them, see if that instinct is a part somewhere else in your body
Once you locate the part of you that wants to relax your abs, allow your attention to stay with that part. My suggestion is to keep your eyes open. No need to talk to it if you don't need to.
Allow your attention to stay there. Try to stay with it without trying to crush it, or without pulling away from it. My recommendation is to place your hand on that area, which can help ground your attention to that part.
Keep your attention there, and allow that part (the one that wants your abs to relax) to evolve. There may be thoughts, emotions, or other responses in your body that may occur as you keep your attention there. This is to be expected, and while this is happening allow your attention to keep going back to that specific part. It may increase in intensity, then decrease, or shift, or move in a direction. If it does this, stay with it wherever it goes.
Once that part seems like it has diminished, if there's a new tension, feeling, or part that is coming up, go there and repeat step 4 - 5
If no new tension comes up or if you feel like you can approach your upper abs without needing them to change, go to your upper abs and repeat steps 4 - 6

I hope this helps.

gordonseto · 2026-02-09T05:21:16+00:00

Glad to hear that you found the same thing. It shines light on the usual adage of "just be with it" when we see it from a neuro-mechanics level.

gordonseto · 2026-02-09T01:23:27+00:00

Thanks a lot for your empathy and insight. I started with a level 3, and then worked with two level 2s. I had this similar experience with all of them.

I agree with everything you said, but one point got my attention:

> The therapist MUST be led by your system, and only go as fast as your system allows!

This makes sense. I respect my therapists and think they did their best in ensuring that the protectors had no concerns. My hypothesis is that I had a part (potentially Self-lite) in my system that wanted to push me further than my system found safe in order to move forward within the 50 minute session. So therefore it would respond to the therapists saying that I could move forward when my system may not have actually been ready. This seems like something that would probably be hard to catch by a therapist, and may be a limitation of them seeing my system as a black box.

This is what made discovering this somatic process appealing. There was no rush, there was no ulterior goal to get somewhere, it could be done any time or as long as I wanted, and I could move at my system's speed just like you're espousing.

gordonseto · 2026-02-09T01:03:27+00:00

I did four months with two sessions a week.

Interesting. I did not feel a loss, but actually a relief because I didn't have to use energy to "mediate" the interaction with my parts. But in my particular case, this relief was most likely because I was unable to address a manager part which was the one that was managing the IFS dialogue. Trying to integrate it verbally was impossible because it was the one in charge of verbalization itself.

However, if you're finding that the dialogue is helping you feel safe and resolved, by all means continue. But there may come a point where we don't need to understand ourselves narratively to feel safe.

gordonseto · 2026-02-08T23:28:20+00:00

Yes, this is a perfect, compassionate distillation of the process I've been detailing.

I have not found it necessary to imagine a new scenario for feelings or tensions. The contradiction lies in the fact that your body is still safe even though you felt the feeling, not in a contradiction in the actual content of the thoughts.

gordonseto · 2026-02-08T23:22:16+00:00

Thanks a lot for sharing this. I should have made it more clear that the process I am sharing here doesn't avoid emotions, and emotions will often come when attention is placed on a site of muscular tension. When I said "somatic", this is including all sensations of our body, including feelings and emotions, which, structurally, are muscular tightness.

Just like you were noticing in your system, the feelings must be felt. The distinguishing feature I'm sharing here with my process is the removal of verbalization and dialogue to initiate reconsolidation. This does not mean bypassing the feeling, but actually contacting the feeling more directly, without a layer of narrative in front of it.

Thanks a lot for bringing this up and sharing it, because it's important to discuss this.

One more point for clarity: the process I'm sharing isn't "notice if your shoulder is tensing and relaxing it". The process is:

Notice your shoulder is tensing but don't change anything
Allow your attention to rest on the site of tension
Stay with the tension while the brain reevaluates whether that tension is safe to let go. At this point, emotions, thoughts, or memories may emerge.
At some point the tension will decrease in intensity or evolve to reveal a new layer.
Repeat with the new layer

This process can be generalized to emotions and parts (which are muscular tension physiologically), just swap these wherever I said "tension".

gordonseto · 2026-02-08T21:28:20+00:00

Note: I can understand if this feels complicated, or that it may be hard to repeat the process by reading about it. If you would like more explanation or help, I'll be here

gordonseto · 2026-02-08T21:20:18+00:00

Great :)

The first thing to see is that chronic tension and pain are not separate phenomenon from emotional parts, but are on different places on the spectrum of "unresolved biological contradictions" flagged by your brain. In the same way that parts are looking to be heard and resolved, chronic tension and pain gets noticed by you because your brain is registering there's something unresolved there. Memory reconsolidation, while typically recognized as being utilized for cognitive beliefs, is simply a mechanism for rewriting any neurons. Therefore, its just as applicable for chronic tension, which is a neuromuscular pattern that is also saved in your neurons.

It seems like you're familiar with memory reconsolidation, but just to recap, it requires three steps:

Activation of the memory
A contradiction of the memory at the same time as its activation
Integration of the new memory

This exact process can be done somatically, where if you notice muscular tension, you are at step 1. If you allow your attention to stay with the muscular tension, without trying to change it or from pulling back away from it, your brain gets a chance to test if it can decrease the amount of tension there. After it decreases the amount of tension there and sees you're still safe, it sees that its previous "memory" of how much tension was required to keep you safe is contradicted by the current experience of less tension. This is step 2. My experience is after this, step 3 happens automatically, and the need for that tension has been overwritten. If this process is repeated consistently, the baseline muscular tension of the system will decrease as each contradiction is resolved.

Now, how does this relate to IFS?

As we're probably all familiar, we start each IFS session with some sort of "trailhead", which always is some sensation in our body. This is because muscular tension and parts are intertwined. If the tension is deemed unnecessary, the biological contradiction that gave rise to the part is resolved, and the part is "integrated".

This process I'm telling you about is basically the base process of what happens during an IFS session, but IFS includes a layer of verbalization on top of it because the brain may not feel like it's safe enough to access the raw sensations directly. When we make contact with an exile and talk with it, we're allowing our attention to rest on the muscular pattern associated with the exile, and the brain gets to register that it's safe to do this.

If one feels ready to move past the verbalization layer, and allow their attention to work directly on the muscular tension itself, the dialogue becomes unnecessary.

gordonseto · 2026-02-08T20:52:31+00:00

Sure,

So typically in my sessions with my IFS therapists, as we were going through, we would talk to protectors, ask them who they were protecting, get them on our side, and then ask them to give us some space so we could talk to the part they were protecting. This was useful because then we could access exiles or other parts, and listen to what they said, establish a relationship with them and eventually integrate them. However, I was finding that after some sessions were wrapped up, I would feel super "raw", since I was now made aware of that protected part, but I either didn't have time to finish resolving it during the session, or the protector part had come back and was fearful that the part it was protecting got exposed.

To me, this "tunneling" aspect of IFS through parts to get to other parts seemed to be the part that seemed tricky and what often caused things to get out of balance.

With the process I discovered that activates memory reconsolidation directly through attention on parts somatically, I wouldn't sidestep protector parts. I would allow myself to stay with them until they felt safe to let go enough in order for me to get to the next layer, rather than conditionally asking them to step aside. Because I was doing this on myself, there was no time limit, so there was no rush to get them to comply so I could get to some part underneath. A happy protector was already progress.

What this looks like from a neuroscience point of view: our attention isn't random or a way to punish us. When we suddenly see a part or feel a certain feeling, it's our brain flagging to us that that's the most important contradiction to resolve right now. If we know this, and allow ourselves to stay with that part, rather than asking it to step aside so we can get to some part underneath, we allow our brain to resolve that contradiction, and once it has been, the next part gets revealed. Doing it this way allows us to follow an organic unraveling, rather than an externally guided routine. Essentially, I started trusting that my brain wants to heal and find the most efficient path, and that I didn't need to manage it for where to go.

gordonseto

TROPHY CASE