Partsworkers of the World, Unite!
This workshop, proposed for the June 1 Parts Work Unconference, is a place to imagine new forms of community among IFS and allied practitioners.
This page accompanies a workshop I pre-proposed for the Parts Work Unconference on Saturday, June 1, online from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Central.
A workshop to imagine new forms of community among IFS and allied practitioners
Since the IFS Institute abruptly restricted its training courses to licensed mental health providers earlier this year, non-clinical practitioners have been talking a lot among ourselves about where to go from here.
- Some folks have deepened their commitment to the IFS Institute, organizing and advocating for change from within as program assistants, trainers, and members of the IFS community.
- Others of us have begun to explore how we might continue to practice the therapeutic methods we learned from IFS outside its institutional borders.
- Lots of practitioners in both camps are also venturing beyond IFS as individual practitioners, combining IFS with other healing disciplines to form unique practices all of their own.
- And many of us, at varying scales, are creating, imagining, and longing for communities of practice beyond IFS.
This workshop is a place for us to imagine new ways to work together with other practitioners, IFS-trained and otherwise, who share our approach to healing and liberation from the inside out.
I like to call us all “partsworkers,” but I imagine other folks have other words to describe what we have in common.
Questions we might talk over
- Do we have characteristics in common beyond our IFS training? If so, how might we find community around them?
- How have our practices have evolved significantly past “pure IFS,” however we conceive of that? Do these evolutions seem to form any patterns?
- What other communities of practice do we participate in? What can partsworkers learn from them?
- Do we agree on any common principles or ideas? How about any interesting diversities of opinion among us?
- What good might we be able to do outside IFS that we could not do inside it?
Things we might decide to do
- Spin up a way to keep the conversation going, like a Discord server or an email listserv
- Draft a manifesto calling for global solidarity among partsworkers
- Create a directory (formal or informal) so we can find each other and stay in low-key community
- Enjoy our time together for its own sake, without any particular expectation or destination
