Healing Inner and Outer Systems

I had a few sessions last week that really inspired me, and reminded me of the truth that if we hope to heal the outer systems, we have to heal our inner systems first.

Internal Family Systems is based on systems theory, and one of the key insights I’ve learned is that systems parallel one another.

A person’s internal psychological system parallels their family system.

A family system parallels the culture it’s embedded in.

A cultural system parallels the particular country and era its embedded in.

Changes to a system at one level affect systems above and below it.

I’ve intellectually understood this for a while now, but as I continue to do my work with clients, I’ve actually begun to see the domino effect that healing can have. Just like helping one psychological “part” inside of one person can help the whole inner system, I’ve seen how helping one person can help their whole family, and even their whole organization. - and that ripples outward to the families of those people, too.

It is incredibly humbling and hope-inspiring for me to see and feel that even though we may have a relatively small influence, our healing and love really does ripple outward through the lives of those we touch.

And this emphasis on love is not surface-level sweetness to cover up more “serious” economic, political, or sociological mechanics. On the contrary, love is the essential medicine by which human systems—internal, familial, or societal, civilizational—change for the better.

The only ways I have seen my clients heal is when both I—and they—engage with deep pain and wounds from a place of openness and love. Everything else leads to more tangles. More knots. More “karma,” or doing.

Love in this sense is undoing.