So you and/or the people you work with already have an established cycle tracking practice, and you have become blissfully aware that you have different needs and gifts at different phases of your cycle.

One of the greatest blessings of a cycle awareness includes acceptance and validation that we are not supposed to be the same all the time, and that its natural and actually helpful to experience these changing states throughout the menstrual month.

However, even though you have learned to anticipate the more vulnerable times, and go into them more gently, you still HURT at these points in your cycle, and you can feel stuck in patterns that don’t serve you.

You want to deepen your practice further, include the body, and specifically, the menstrual cycle as an aid to healing and self-development.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a psychotherapeutic model of the human psyche, developed by Richard Schwartz. Like MCA, IFS also rejects the idea that we are of “one mind”, and in fact celebrates “multiplicity” with the foundational principle that we are each made up of many “parts”.

IFS organizes parts into two main categories: EXILES – those often young parts who still carry the pain of what we experienced when our needs weren’t met, and PROTECTORS – who engage in strategies or patterns we have developed to avoid the pain overwhelming us. Perhaps most importantly, the IFS model also offers the concept of Self energy. Self-energy is an inner resource within us all, which has the potential to offer endless compassion, curiosity and calm and is a powerful, healing energy. IFS is evidence-based for use clinically, in trauma therapy, and is increasingly used more broadly in business and other coaching and personal development fields.

As a Clinical Psychologist and an IFS therapist, I am trained not only to apply these concepts to my clients as a way of understanding problems and patterns, and working with trauma, but also importantly to my own internal system. As I learned to track and witness my internal family, I came to see how natural and illuminating it was to align this awareness to my long established cycle tracking practice. Again and again, both in and outside of my therapy room, I see how beautifully these two practices complement and deepen each other.

Just as you might already track your shifting energy, mood, motivation and levels of creativity through the menstrual month, IFS supports you to track your “parts” as they shift and change with your body rhythms. It provides a simple guide for understanding the two key energy shifts many people experience cyclically, with an awareness of the presence of protector parts, versus younger, and more vulnerable, exile energies, placing them all of equal value and importance within the internal family.

Adding IFS into your MCA practice will give you a theoretical framework for:

  • Why things can feel so intense pre-menstrually
  • Learning to step aside from being IN pain to OBSERVE the pain as a part of you, with a story
  • How to turn a “trigger” into a “trailhead” for self-development
  • How this distress could actually be your body communicating what remains unprocessed
  • Why & how you “cope better” at other points in the cycle
  • What embodied healing is and feels like
  • The optimal body-led time and way to engage in healing work
  • A natural, intuitive, non-judgemental framework for attuning to the body’s rhythms and communications
  • Access to a compassionate, calm state of energy to guide your inner system

If working in this way appeals to you, then you can request a free consultation to consider what it might be like to work 1:1 with me, guiding your therapy from a genuine place of mind-body integration.

I have developed this framework in partnership with Dr Lara Owen, who is recognized internationally for her pioneering and continuing work on menstruation. Together later this year we are facilitating an experiential training retreat, where we will present these ideas and concepts in detail for the first time, to a small group, in a beautiful unspoiled countryside retreat.

The workshop sessions will be supported by a range of optional activities including swimming in the pool and lake, walks in the surrounding woodland, and restorative yoga, insuring that learning and self-discovery can occur in an optimal rested state. You can read more and book your space here: https://laraowen.com/trauma-and-the-menstrual-cycle/