Self Help
I saw Gabrielle Bernstein’s book Self Help on the New Releases shelf at Target and something told me to put it into my cart.
I discovered her work almost a decade ago, when she wasn’t nearly as well-known as she is today, because I was a student of A Course in Miracles (ACIM). For those who don’t know, ACIM is a metaphysical text that Bernstein was a teacher of. I used the principles that the course taught me to expand my horizons and find my way out of PTSD that had come back during this period of my life. It was extremely debilitating and it led me to make a change in my business and to start working as a business coach and astrology reader. This work gave me the gift of confidence, fulfillment, and connection, at a time when I needed it most. I was able to gain enough confidence to find a way to change my life and create miracles that led me to a more stable full-time role in marketing and a new life in New York City. In fact, I even went to one of Gabby’s live talks at a church in the Lower East Side, that coincided with one of her book releases in 2017.
As time went on, I found myself more personally devastated than ever and scared to connect to anything or anyone for years. I went through a series of troubled dating experiences and three sexual assaults in a short period of time, on top of a merger at my company that caused me to have to chose between walking away from or losing my job. I was also dealing with housing insecurity, as I raked up credit card debt admit this personal financial crisis, that made it impossible to get anything beyond a month-to-month lease. All of this, as well as a global pandemic, caused me to spiral further and further downwards, until an apartment fire in 2022 led to the ultimate rock bottom.
A series of fate-like circumstances then led me to meet my husband and get married to him within weeks of meeting, a fairy-tale romance that led me to a new life in Connecticut that was everything I’d been wanting, dreaming of, and hoping for for many years. I finally had love in my life, and real love: not breadcrumbs, not held out hopes, and not misgivings or a connection I was forcing, but actual love, forged through vulnerability. I also finally had achieved a better standard of living that didn’t come with strings attached or terms and conditions. I was able to leave the life I had cobbled together through piecemeal and become a housewife who creates art, cooks, writes, and pursues her interests, rather than a slave to cooperate America.
Going from so little to so much on all fronts (even if it wasn’t actually ‘a lot’) was overwhelming, in the best way. However, it also brought out many of the struggles I had been facing, since you take yourself with you wherever you go. I found myself often reverting to impulsive anger, when I felt out of control or emotionally distressed. I pushed people away out of fear and anxiety that I would be judged and ridiculed, if they new the real story of my life. Once people knew that I wasn’t working, that I was just a housewife of a disabled man, they would think I was stupid at best, a gold digger at worst.
I leaned into many of the self-soothing and dissociative parts of myself, which developed coping mechanisms that had long kept me away from the painful feelings and memories that were tied up into feeling unlovable or incapable. I gained weight through binge eating, I leaned into Netflix, painting, and reading. I kept my mind busy to avoid the pain in my heart.
At the same time, I also was blossoming. I continued to work on my relationship to self, exploring and challenging my own beliefs and behaviors. I found support, I worked on my relationship with my mother, and I started to live authentically, without letting fear get in the way. I grew stronger in my marriage, as I learned how to be a better partner to my husband, as well as a more connected space of security for myself.
Over the past year, I’ve grown in so many ways and seen the progress of my growth. With one of the providers I work with, I periodically complete questionaries that track my depression and anxiety symptoms, which I decided to look at last week. In 15 months, I’ve dramatically become less anxious and have a more firm grasp on my depression symptoms, when they arise. Both depression and anxiety play pivotal roles in PTSD, which is the root of almost all of my physical, mental, and emotional health problems. I see how I feel much less on-edge on a day-to-day basis, because I’ve been able and willing to prioritize my health in ways I couldn’t afford to in the past.
Bringing this back to Gabby Bernstein, I had decided to unfollow her on Instagram some three years ago, because I no longer felt connected to her message. I also felt that the reliance on words like ‘manifesting’ were problematic and I didn’t want to be told how I could change my life by becoming more joyful, at a time in my life where I had so much on my shoulders and so little emotional capacity for joy. It was hard to find the joy in living out of five suitcases, as I moved from sublet to sublet after my apartment was inhospitable. It was hard to find the joy in poverty and devastation, in battling trauma and addictions.
I opened Self Help on the second day of the Caribbean cruise my husband and I just took. As the warm ocean breeze enveloped me, and just coming off of a petty disagreement with my husband, something told me to start reading. I had been feeling disconnected from my Self the past few days, which, ironically, this book was about.
Gabby had been practicing Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy for over a decade and felt compelled to bring this work to her audience. Working with the creator of IFS, Dr. Richards C. Schwartz, she created a self-guided process that one can use to get to know their internal parts and to stop the manager/protector parts from getting in one’s own way.
I was already very familiar with IFS, as several therapists I’ve worked with have used parts of this model in their treatment. As a voracious reader and psychology nerd, I also read many books about IFS, included Dr. Schwartz’ own works. He created this model based on his work as a family therapist, which he had come to believe was the cornerstone of therapeutic change, as he could work with different parts or people in the system, to understand how they were impacting the family system as a whole. He had the idea to use this model in individual therapy, which is how IFS was born.
Without getting too technical, the model essentially looks at individuals as having parts, which can step up or back depending on the circumstances. These parts mostly evolve to protect or keep ourselves away from trauma, immense pain, or unprocessed experiences in our childhood, which are called Exiles. Our mind creates Manager and Firefighter parts to keep ourselves safe and this pain hidden in our unconscious, through patterns of disassociation, distraction, overachieving, affective expression, creativity, substance use, anxiety, depression, compulsions, addiction, and the list goes on.
I never fully connected to this model nor understood how to connect to my parts in a way that was safe and grounded, that prevented them from feeling merged with me. IFS also believes that we all have a core Self that we can always connect to, which the is the core of a person's identity, and it's the part of a person that's always calm, curious, and compassionate. It’s not something you need to create, but more something you need to dig through your layers of defense to access.
Something about the way she presented these concepts deeply resonated with me. Since I already ‘knew’ a lot of the information in the book, it was really her own application and experience of IFS that touched me. I saw through her how I could also connect to my parts and realized that I wasn’t broken, I was merely needing to reconnect with my Self.
I was able to access the inner strength and security I already had, instead of seeking it elsewhere.
I immediately saw a change in my demeanor, as did my husband. Gabby wrote about how she often struggled to be as free and vulnerable with her own husband, despite being able to do it so easily in front of audiences. Her journey to being able to show up more fully in her marriage was exactly what I needed to read, to remind me that I could do the same in mine.
I felt myself come full circle, through this book. More than anything, it was a reminder that I already knew what to do and who and how I wanted to be. I had already done so much of the work, I now just needed to believe that I was able to apply it. I had to see myself as my Self and it was really that simple.