My 19-Year-Old Exile
If you are not familiar with the Internal Family Systems Therapy Model, an unhealthy "Exile" is an "Inner Child" that carries pain, shame, fear, trauma, or other difficult or negative feelings usually from childhood. Healthy Exiles are freed from these burdens and act as supercharged energizers of your inner world system. But unhealthy ones can wreak havoc on your life until they are heard, rescued, and healed. Other categories of parts are Managers and Firefighters which try to exile these other parts from consciousness to prevent pain or other difficult emotions from coming into awareness. OK, enough with the didactics. If you want to learn more, look up Internal Family Systems, or better yet, go to a workshop or conference. It's a system that's best learned through experience rather than theory.
So. To say this 19-year-old was miserable is an understatement. This girl, apart from the unkempt eyebrows, the complete lack of hair style, the tent-like drab clothing and the somber expression was also weighing in at nearly 170 pounds. Even at five-foot-eight that is too much weight. She was an overachiever who found herself in a mid-life-crisis 20 years too early. After growing up in Chicago and attending public schools, this teen found herself at Yale University in Connecticut immersed in the political correctness and ego-driven interactions of that world. She experienced so much cognitive dissonance because the rhetoric around her was such a fanciful disconnect from reality, and yet she was completely devoid of the confidence that would have allowed her to calmly articulate (and, even better, to embody) the truth that she felt and experienced because it went so against the grain of the community in which she existed.
Then, when she reached out for help, there was nobody who could do anything for her. Not because people didn't care, or because they didn't try. Rather, for the most part the society at the school was lost in left-brained masturbation. Theoretical everything was widespread and available, but when it came to be a broken-hearted, suicidal, disillusioned girl there was nothing on offer. Apart from pharmaceutical drugs and talk therapy - but her talking fell on deaf ears and a brain that was programmed to just prescribe chemicals. What she needed was someone to help her sort through the impact of the very real dysfunction of the institution in which she was immersed. Even she knew that the drugs were not the solution, and so she stopped going to that therapist after one visit. She left school for a semester, hoping to get the clarity and the perspective she needed. She went as far away as possible, to the land from which her mother came: Australia. This allowed for some distance but unfortunately did not unravel the deep, dark knots that were so deeply entangled in her wiring and framework. A couple years later she dove head-first into yoga. That unravelled a lot. It helped release the physical weight and build up strength. It helped with discipline, focus, and turning inward instead of just reacting to the external world.
But even the world of yoga wasn’t enough…because it treated the emotional body like a problem to suppress or exile. Many years later, she found Internal Family Systems Therapy. And that truly allowed the Protectors who were interested in Self-Deleting to be understood. And loved. And to release the pain of the Ones behind those Protectors who were at the root of the pain body…. It also provided the means to help her whole system shift - developing trust in the HIGHER SELF and eventually allowing that SELF to lead the show. And THAT was the ultimate MEDICINE that she needed. <3
