Ep 148: Internal Family Systems with Sara Povey

Beautiful, did you ever wonder why drinking became a coping strategy or why you feel triggered by life when logic says “everything is okay”?

Karolina talks with Marriage and Family Therapist Sara Povey to discover how our mind and body learn at a young age to navigate the world. For Sara, alcohol was the catalyst to her own healing journey and even inspired her career path as a holistic psychotherapist. In this episode, she shares how therapeutic techniques like Internal Family Studies and EMDR offer incredible support for understanding our psyche and ourselves!

Tune in to hear how you can heal your mind AND your body to live an embodied life.

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From self exploration to supporting others.

Sara Povey is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and the founder of Empower Marriage and Family Therapy. With training in trauma, she helps women unlearn and deconstruct old beliefs and ways of being in the world that have kept them stuck from unlocking their full potential.

Sara describes alcohol as the true catalyst to her own healing journey. She began drinking at a young age, and in college, found herself living a double life. Hiding how much she drank, her life appeared to be put together, while behind the scenes it was the complete opposite.

Signing up for a January term course to make sure she graduated on time, she went to Mexico on a wilderness retreat. Here, she stepped away from the world to ground into herself.

Sara started reading books like Women Who Run With the Wolves, went to therapy, and started self-care rituals like acupuncture and reiki. She actively participated in self-exploration, and it not only helped her heal, but it revealed her desire to help others as a holistic psychotherapist.

Anytime we awaken from alcohol, no matter our age, it's a chance for reimagining, reawakening, reinventing who we are and what we do. This is exactly what Sara did, and Beautiful, this same opportunity is here for you!

Healing our parts and our nervous system.

Two forms of therapy that Sara has been trained in are Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR). She uses these modalities to help women heal from trauma, shift out of survival mode, and live a more embodied authentic life.

Internal Family Systems is a model based in the belief that we all have different parts of ourselves which have evolved throughout our life, and each of them serves a purpose. These parts are categorized as the Self, Exiles, Managers, and Firefighters.

Our Self is the instinctual, centered, and compassionate part of ourselves. It is the true or higher self, and it views all the other parts with acceptance and trust.

Exiles are the fragile parts in each of us that have experienced trauma, whether that’s neglect, injuries, or boundary violations. This part is unconscious and hidden to us, but wants to be seen and comforted.

Managers are the high functioning, responsible, future-oriented, and risk-averse parts of us. They work to avoid the pain of our young, injured Exile parts. They do this well, until there’s a roadblock.

Firefighters come in as a second line of defense, jumping in to prevent pain from taking over. These are our survival-oriented parts, often more impulsive, compulsive, and rebellious.

Managers and Firefighters both aim to avoid pain, but tend to be at odds with each other. With alcohol, it might look like having a drink to relax at the end of the day, only to wake up tired the next day and feeling shame. This leads to drinking again that night. It becomes a cycle of running from the pain; running from the trauma.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is another super powerful modality for healing trauma. Using bilateral stimulation of the brain, it calms the nervous system while talking through a traumatic memory.

This allows your body to reprocess and move through trauma so it’s no longer stuck. It desensitizes us to a memory, so our nervous system stops being triggered by the past in the present.

Sara defines trauma as, “anything that happens to you that changes your relationship to yourself, and/or changes your relationship to the world and the way that you move through the world.”

It’s so incredible that we can heal our minds AND our bodies to live an embodied life!

Reintegrating the mind and the body.

The journey of healing is a powerful one. When we start peeling back the layers, we uncover the unsupportive beliefs that get us stuck and trapped in our subconscious.

Often, a person’s life may look incredible. They may even tell themselves that everything is exactly as they want - that they are worthy, enough, and loved, but deep down they struggle to truly believe it.

Doing trauma work and working with the body as an ally, through approaches like IFS and EMDR, will help us know our worth - not just logically, but somatically, on a deep body level.

You are worthy, deserving of love, and enough, I want you to truly, deep down, at your core, believe it!

“When women, specifically women, connect to their sense of self worth, and peel back these layers, and debunk the myths that they've told themselves all these years, they stop wanting to do these numbing behaviors and things that take them out of their presence and devalue their lives.” Sara Povey

LINKS/RESOURCES MENTIONED

Learn more about Sara and her practice through her website. You can also follow along on her Instagram for her words of encouragement and her latest updates.

Check out these highly recommended books from Sara: No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz, creator of Internal Family Studies and Getting Past Your Past by Francine Shapiro, the creator of EMDR therapy.

This episode is brought to you by Wild AF. If you’re looking for a deliciously authentic non-alcoholic wine that’s all natural, check out Wild AF Wine today, and give their Sparkling Rosé a try! Use code EuphoricAF30 to get 30% off. Try it today.

Karolina’s book is available in hardcover, Kindle, and as an audiobook. Be sure to get your copy of Euphoric: Ditch Alcohol and Gain a Happier, More Confident You today and leave your review.

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