The Game Changer That Fundamentally Changed My Life

Like many women, especially those of us who grew up in a religious home, I was indoctrinated at an early age to be a pleasing, compliant good girl who suppressed anger and practiced “unconditional love.” This meant I was supposed to have compassion for the people who perpetrated harm against me, because only hurt people hurt people.  I was also expected to let people who hurt me off the hook of accountability in the name of being a forgiving, gracious, expansively enlightened being, since the burden of forgiveness always seemed to land on victims, not perpetrators of abuse.

A whole host of spiritual beliefs locked the indoctrination into place to such a degree that, even after I left the church at 18, the beliefs stuck with me until July 4, 2014. It was on this day that I realized I had learned to tolerate even the most insufferable people, all in the name of unconditional love, compassion for people whose traumas cause them to do hurtful things, and generous-hearted forgiveness. What I had not learned how to do was protect myself.

I figured this out because several people had hurt me deeply, one after the other, and although I did protest the mistreatment, there was no real consequence for the people who mistreated me. I kept hearing a tiny voice inside of me piping up ever so slightly. It was asking, “Who’s got my back?”

It’s not that there weren’t people who cared about me or extended protective energies towards me. There were. But I would soon learn that it was a part of me that was upset because I did not have my own back, and that made me far too vulnerable to people who did not wish me well, people who used and exploited me, people who were very narcissistic and not at all remorseful for the ways they were treating me.

And yet, somehow, I believed I deserved a PhD in unconditional love, not realizing I was in kindergarten when it came to extending unconditional love to my own parts.

It all came to a head when I read Robert Augustus Masters book Spiritual Bypassing. I read the section about “blind compassion,” and I felt completely busted. 

“Blind compassion is rooted in the belief that we are all doing the best we can. When we are driven by blind compassion, we cut everyone far too much slack, making excuses for others’ behavior and making nice situations that require a forceful “no”, an unmistakable voicing of displeasure, or a firm setting and maintaining of boundaries. These things can, and often should be done out of love, but blind compassion keeps love too meek, sentenced to wearing a kind face.

Blind compassion is kindness rooted in fear, and not just fear of confrontation, but also fear of not coming across as a good or spiritual person. When we are engaged in blind compassion we rarely show anger, for we not only believe that compassion has to be gentle, we are also frightened of upsetting anyone, especially to the point of their confronting us. This is reinforced by our judgment about anger, especially in its more fiery forms, as something less spiritual; something that shouldn’t be there if we were being truly loving. Blind compassion reduces us to harmony junkies, entrapping us in unrelentingly positive expression.

With blind compassion, we don’t know how to – or won’t learn how to – say “no” with any real power, avoiding confrontation at all costs and, as a result, enabling unhealthy patterns to continue. Our “yes” is then anemic and impotent, devoid of the impact it could have if we were also able to access a clear, strong “no” that emanated from our core.

When we mute our essential voice, our openness is reduced to a permissive gap, an undiscerning embrace, a poorly boundaries receptivity, all of which indicate a lack of compassion for ourselves (in that we don’t adequately protect ourselves). Blind compassion confuses anger with aggression, forcefulness with violence, judgment with condemnation, caring with exaggerated tolerance, and more tolerance with spiritual correctness.” – Robert Augustus Masters, Spiritual Bypassing

After reading that, I felt flattened. I was confused, curious, and wondering about this part of me that thought I was so compassionate (in a very grandiose way), and yet, I was not extending that same compassion towards myself. Even considering doing so felt selfish, as if protecting myself, rather than only protecting my perpetrators, would somehow make me a bad or unloving person.

I’m not sure how I would have coped with that watershed moment in my personal growth had I not been exposed to Internal Family Systems (IFS) right at that moment, when it was finally time for me to stop spiritually bypassing and start doing the meat and bones of my real trauma healing work. IFS slid right in to offer a non-bypassing way of relating that helped me figure out how to be compassionate for both my own parts and other people. 

It’s the “how” of self-compassion, but not at the expense of being compassionate for others. It’s the “how” of shoring up your boundaries, protecting yourself and your more vulnerable “parts,” and holding others accountable when they cause you harm, while also extending loving compassion to yourself and others, while still holding yourself to account when you harm others too. It’s the “how” of both learning to love the parts of us that harm ourselves and others, while also doing the deep shadow work to really own- and learn to love and contain- the parts of us that cause self-harm or harm to others.

I had no idea at the time that my cousin Rebecca Ching introduced me to IFS that it would be such a game changer in my life in such a profound way. It changed everything about my personal and professional way of being in the world, and the IFS model continues to unfold as an ongoing learning process for me.

That’s why I’m finally saying “yes” to those of you who have been asking me to teach a class for beginners about the basics of Internal Family Systems. I use the IFS model in every single class I teach, in person and on Zoom, and it’s central to many things I write, including my latest book Relationsick, which will come out Spring 2026, and my Substack newsletter The Body Is A Trailhead, where I’m releasing two unpublished books about IFS, boundaries, and spiritual bypassing. But when I survey my students in class, 20-30% typically say they’re brand new to the IFS model.

So…IFS beginners, or anyone who wants a refresher course on the self-help and self-healing aspects of IFS, who does not need professional certification, we have a new 6-week offering for you.

Introducing IFS For Self-Healing!

Learn more and register here.

I’m sad because I had asked my dear colleagu, Ralph de la Rosa, who is a Buddhist meditation teacher, author, and IFS therapist, if he would consider making a special guest appearance in this class. And then he sadly died, way too young and unexpectedly. So I’m hoping to find another guest teacher, but nobody will replace Ralph. For those of you who knew and loved him, my heart goes out to us all. Ralph was the ultimate role model for spiritual teaching without spiritual bypassing.

I’ve taught 3 classes about spiritual bypassing recovery in the past, including one with IFS founder Dick Schwartz, but this will be the first comprehensive IFS course directed at trauma survivors or people who have been spiritually bypassing (and didn’t even realize we were doing so!). It’s for those who are not necessarily therapists in need of IFS training, although therapists are welcome to join us. 

This course will focus on healing, both in community, with guided IFS practices, but also with guidance in how to develop a lifelong self-healing practice with IFS, either by yourself, with a peer-to-peer parts processing partner, with an IFS therapist, or all of the above. I consider it a spiritual practice that is also a way to help heal trauma, rewire the traumatized nervous system with neuroplasticity, help heal chronic medical conditions via nervous system regulation, and improve your relationships, so you’re both compassionate but also protected, safe enough, and able to enjoy the benefits of co-regulation without undue nervous system dysregulation.

I’m excited to finally (after much pressure from many of you!) bring this next course to you all. I do not expect to do this more than once, since in the future, I’ll be able to offer the recording to people who are beginners. So if you are psyched to do this course live or just want to be the first to listen to the recording, please join us! We start the 6-week course on Zoom on Thursday, June 26th, 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm PST. And yes, we will be recording it if you can’t make it live. I hope to see you there!

Save $100 if you register for IFS For Self-Healing now