Helping the Helpers: The Importance of Unblending from Managers
As an IFS facilitator, one of my main roles is to be relaxed in the process as it unfolds, knowing it is unfolding just fine, even if you have managers who are impatient, or managers who want to get to the exiles, or managers who want to heal more quickly, or managers who are concerned the work is not proceeding correctly.
It is okay to feel impatient! It is okay to want to get to the exiles! It is okay to want to heal more quickly! And it is okay to be concerned the work is not proceeding quickly or correctly! My role is to have the confidence to engage directly with your managers and help them receive SUPPORT for their discomfort, impatience, burnout and distress. My role is to stay in a place of profound peace with both your managers and MY managers who sometimes get alarmed that I’m not making your managers happy! Because my job is not to make your managers happy, my job is to help you unblend from your managers to allow Self energy to emerge, so that Self can address the manager’s concerns with honesty and respect.
I have four boxes of parts: a small one of exiles, a medium one of firefighters, and two large boxes of managers. In this culture most people have double the number of managers than other parts. So it makes sense it takes time to address their concerns, fears, judgements, criticisms, and polarizations.
I notice more and more that people who are committed to doing their inner work face the difficulty of accepting that we MUST PARTNER WITH the managers to do the work, not be BLENDED WITH the managers who want to do the work. The work can not be done by managers. They do not have the training or capacity to do it. Therefore they have to accept stepping back and allowing Self energy to do it. That is HARD WORK on the part of hard-working managers.
My pilates teacher tells me I need to use my core muscles, not my surface muscles, to do pilates. “What are my surface muscles supposed to do then?!” She replies, “They need to aggressively DO NOTHING.” It’s the same in IFS — the managers need to flex and build the muscle of self-restraint, of actively, aggressively NOT DOING in order to allow the Self to do what it needs to do.
The managers need to give up their position of leadership and turn it over to Self energy. Giving up their seat of power is not easy: it is difficult and takes work, trust and relationship building with the Self. So a lot of the work WILL BE unblending from the managers. It takes time. It is tough on the managers, who feel impatient, who criticize that it needs to be done, who try to think their way out of it, and who are not used to being vulnerable and being the ones who actually need some support and help instead of being the helpers.