By, Chelsea Odhner

Read about Chelsea’s journey through anxiety, heart palpitations, and an ER visit which led her to recognize the aftereffects of trauma in her system. She tells the story of how she found the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model and was inspired by its similarities to Emanuel Swedenborg’s spiritual teachings. One outcome of this journey is a new book, Opening the Inner World: Spiritual Healing, Internal Family Systems, and Emanuel Swedenborg, to be published by the Swedenborg Foundation in 2025. The work brings together insights from IFS and Swedenborg’s writings, offering readers a unique perspective on psychological and spiritual healing.

A CAT-scan, an x-ray, an Ativan, bloodwork, and the result was: everything’s fine. It was likely a panic attack. “Anxiety,” the ER doctor said. “You’re healthy.” 

When I was released a couple of hours later and passed some of the same people still in the waiting room, I felt sorry for wasting everyone’s time with what had turned out to be “nothing.” 

The truth is, though, it wasn’t nothing. Having trauma stored in your body-mind-consciousness can be mystifying, and at certain points, utterly overwhelming. Collectively, the occurrence is so prevalent and so under-processed in our society that my experience is the norm: a body-mind-consciousness at war with itself trying to suppress the trauma in its system with no idea how to have it released. 

Jeremiah 30 talks about an incurable wound and an injury beyond healing; that is certainly what mental health in Western society has felt like. But perhaps we are at a crossroads where it is possible for the Lord’s declaration to become real: “I will restore you to health and heal your wounds . . . I will bring her near and she will come close to me” (17, 21). Jeremiah 30 continues:

See, the storm of the Lord will burst out in wrath, a driving wind swirling down on the heads of the wicked. A fierce anger of the Lord will not turn back until he fully accomplishes the purposes of his heart. In days to come you will understand this. (23-24)

Although cryptic in language, it is honestly a pretty succinct summary of the trauma healing experience. Heart palpitations that will not relent, that feel like they’re going to kill you, but actually turn out to be the key to understanding and healing your trauma; and once listened to, are the catalyst of your transformation. Sounds like God’s purpose in action to me.

Understanding Trauma: Beyond the Surface

Swedenborg doesn’t write about trauma. The term wasn’t used in his lifetime the way we understand it today. The conceptualization of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was included as a diagnosis in the DSM-III in 1980 only after a considerable amount of advocacy in the second half of the 20th century.¹ It’s easy to think that trauma is a term reserved for veterans coming home from war or people experiencing violence and disaster in other forms. It is much more common than that, with over 70 percent of adults in the U.S. experiencing some type of trauma over the course of their lives.”² 

The amount or kind of trauma does not dictate the impact; rather each individual’s system, both their internal and external environment, influences whether a person will develop PTSD from an experience.³ Trauma researchers and therapists are learning that seemingly innocuous moments in early childhood and infancy, for example a baby being left to cry alone, can create a state of traumatic stress in the child’s system.⁴ The mom comes and picks up the baby eventually, but then years later, the child expresses a self-perception that they don’t matter and no one loves them. You can correct this with loving attention and by bringing new awareness to the original experience, but if it goes uncorrected, it festers.

We can experience acute, chronic, and even vicarious trauma, which interweave and compound one another; with all of these influences it can be hard to recognize the impact of trauma in our lives.⁵ Author, therapist, and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem says it powerfully in the following way: 

Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. 
Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. 
Trauma in a people looks like culture.⁶

The effects of trauma on our physical and mental health is a reality that is difficult to wake up to because it is the air we breathe. The impact of trauma that we store in our systems is not only from our lifetimes either, but the lifetimes of our parents, grandparents, and lines going up and back for generations. The closest thing Swedenborg describes to this is what he calls “inherited evil.” A thought experiment is to substitute Swedenborg’s term with “intergenerational trauma” (see the research done by Brian G. Dias and Kerry J. Ressler which studies the effects of parental traumatic exposure in subsequent generations).⁷

After the visit to the ER, I redoubled my meditation and breathing practices, my yoga and walks to enjoy nature. The palpitations abated for a time, but the reprieve didn’t last. They began to happen stronger and closer together, like labor contractions nearing delivery. Only now they didn’t come alone: they were joined by a grief that refused to not be felt. Deep sadness combined with intense fear are an indomitable combination. 

If the heart palpitations were like someone knocking on the door to my consciousness, that person was now pounding, and everyone inside thought they’d be murdered by whoever was on the other side of that door (…the Lord will burst out in wrath, a driving wind swirling down on the heads of the wicked. A fierce anger of the Lord will not turn back…). I did what I usually did whenever I came to an impasse in my mental health: I found a therapist to work with. This time though, the therapist introduced me to an approach called Internal Family Systems. 

Discovering Internal Family Systems (IFS)

I was never able to effectively process the traumatic memories behind these physical symptoms until I found Internal Family Systems. It is difficult to help something if your concept of what that thing is is inherently flawed, and that’s the case for our cultural understanding of the nature of the mind. The flaw? We think of it as an isolated, singular thing. Dick Schwartz, founder of IFS, calls this concept the mono-mind. In his book No Bad Parts he describes it as “the idea that you have one mind, out of which different thoughts and emotions and impulses and urges emanate.”⁸ The notion of the mono-mind forces us to “fear our parts and view them as pathological” until we “identify with [our] weaknesses, assuming that who [we] really are is defective and that if other people saw the real [us], they’d be repulsed.”⁹ Scholar Tanya Luhrmann has called this the “citadel” model of mind—the idea that our consciousness is entirely private and separate from others.¹⁰ Swedenborg was pointing out the inaccuracy of this paradigm to whomever would listen back in the 1700s. 

Through all of my years of therapy up to this point I had felt like I was poking at a featureless expanse of darkness inside. The perspective of IFS suddenly gave it dimension. In contrast to the mono-mind, IFS sees us as inherently multiple inwardly. Over the decades of its development, Dick Schwartz and other IFS therapists and practitioners have refined a model for engaging with this natural multiplicity.¹¹ By applying the ideas of the model to my experience, the sight of my inner eye was opened. Inside there were landscapes, people, relationships. And I was there, as the witness, with a compassionate interest to understand each part’s story.

One of the key questions you ask when getting to know a part of you in IFS is “Where do you experience this part in or around your body? How does it make itself known?” We know our parts intrinsically in relationship to our being. This practice is just like how Swedenborg would identify where in and around his body he felt the inflow of spirits. 

It took some time for me to gain the trust of the related parts in my system. It was only then that they allowed me to get to know the parts directly connected to my heart palpitations. When they did, I got to befriend a protector in me who invoked my heart palpitations like a train passenger pulling the emergency alarm. Thirty years he’d been pulling that chain, only now I was here to listen. I could stop running.

Western society is only just beginning to learn what heals trauma, how to release it in our nervous system and attend to the parts who hold it and who protect us. Swedenborg writes that it’s possible for us to change the trajectory of inherited evil, for us to undergo the transformation required so that future generations aren’t burdened in the same way we were, through a process he calls regeneration. He posits that this happens on an individual and collective scale. When we heal our own trauma in our lifetimes, the impact is not only personal. As author Glennon Doyle said in her conversation with Brené Brown on the Unlocking Us podcast, “There is no such thing as one-way liberation.”¹²

Integration and Liberation: Swedenborg and IFS Come Together

After a year and a half studying and practicing Internal Family Systems I came across Robert Falconer (Bob) and his new book The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession. As I worked with the IFS model I noticed all the similarities between it and Swedenborg’s experiences. I started to wonder how to make sense of the IFS “parts” and Swedenborg’s “spirits.” Our parts are intrinsic to our identity, and spirits, according to Swedenborg, are associated with us, can take on our memory, influence us, and more. They are certainly intrinsic to our existence—we could not live without the connection—and yet spirits are not us; we are each our own unique spirit. 

Furthermore, my experience of the Internal Family Systems model was demonstrating to me the reality of the holographic nature of the spiritual realm. Swedenborg writes that all of heaven is like a single human being in the Lord’s eyes. Each community is like a single person; every married couple is like a single person. In the same way, within our own personal system, we are a multiplicity of parts: all of heaven is mapped onto us, Swedenborg writes. IFS makes this practical. I have met my parts and whole communities of parts. 

But IFS doesn’t talk about spirits. How spirits intersect with the IFS model was a persistent wonder for me until I saw a YouTube video of Bob doing a session with a woman who had in her what they called an “unattached burden” (UB). The way Bob interacted with this “part,” that was not a part of the woman’s personal system, was exactly as Swedenborg described interacting with certain types of spirits in his own system. I watched as Bob helped her release the UB, to the extreme relief of her parts. It had been in her, tormenting her for several months, and now it was gone. 

I wrote to Bob right away. I ordered his book and found that indeed, he had studied Swedenborg enough to include a section on him, as well as a section on Wilson Van Dusen, and on Jerry Marzkinsky (who has appeared on several Off The Left Eye YouTube videos). Bob was enthusiastic about the prospect of collaborating on a book that explored IFS and Swedenborg. He was most excited by the thought that this book could have the potential to re-spiritualize psychotherapy. 

He made the suggestion for us to base our book on recorded conversations, and I made the suggestion that we include NCE translator Jonathan S. Rose. We would record the dialogue and witness first-hand what arose as the waters of these two rivers met: Jonathan as a Swedenborg scholar with minimal exposure to Internal Family Systems and Bob, a senior IFS therapist who had learned some about Swedenborg but had not had the opportunity to study his teachings in depth. I would serve as a bridge and facilitator as someone with a foot in both.

A Book is Born: Opening the Inner World

In 2025 you will be able to read the result of our coming together: Opening the Inner World: Spiritual Healing, Internal Family Systems, and Emanuel Swedenborg. Collected over nine different sessions, Bob, Jonathan, and I turn over stones and explore the forest of psychology and spirituality from the perspectives of IFS and Swedenborg’s teachings. Read more here to get a window into the specific topics we cover. The outcome is a conversational and practical guide to the inner realm and the spiritual domain of healing. You don’t need a familiarity with either IFS or Swedenborg to benefit from the book as we introduce the basics of both. 

Meeting the parts connected to my heart palpitations opened up inner portals in my psyche, allowing me to retrieve parts that were frozen in the time and the feelings of traumatic moments of the past. As I have integrated these tender parts into my system, bringing them into the present and reuniting them with the joy and freedom of their true nature, the hardworking protector who relentlessly wanted to make sure the little ones in me would be okay has been able to relax. He no longer needs to pull that alarm. I am here, awake to them all and listening. 

I am excited to share the outcome of this journey with readers. Swedenborg’s spirituality adds a powerful dimension to Internal Family Systems, and together, they shine a light on new possibilities of healing. As Bob says in the book, “I think all healing is fundamentally spiritual.” Swedenborg’s recorded experiences of the spiritual world offer a universally applicable set of principles for navigating the inner realm, and IFS operationalizes them. Together, the result can be life changing. At its core, the healing journey is entirely personal and at the same time deeply interconnected, between our parts and Self, our connection to the spiritual world, this world, and to each other. It’s something we must support each other on. I’ve shared here how finding IFS and connecting it to Swedenborg has helped me on my journey, and I hope this work serves you on yours. 

Stay Updated

We invite you to stay connected with us for more updates on this book project. Join our email list and be the first to know about the book’s progress, release date, and exclusive previews. 

Chelsea Odhner
A lifelong student of Swedenborg’s teachings, Chelsea has extensive professional experience synthesizing Swedenborg’s teachings into content for a global audience through her work previously as the Director of Content Strategy for Off the Left Eye and now as the Vice President of Publishing for the Swedenborg Foundation. Combined with her work as a bodyworker, and an IFS practitioner and coach, Chelsea brings a unique and informed perspective to integrating IFS therapy with the system of the spiritual world that Swedenborg describes. She is co-author and editor of the Swedenborg Foundation’s upcoming work Opening the Inner World: Spiritual Healing, Internal Family Systems, and Emanuel Swedenborg, alongside Robert Falconer and Jonathan S. Rose.

References

1. Matthew J. Friedman, “History of PTSD in Veterans: Civil War to DSM-5,” PTSD: National Center for PTSD, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/what/history_ptsd.asp, accessed September 16, 2024. ↩︎
2. Gina Cavalier and Amelia Kelley, Surviving Suicidal Ideation: From Therapy to Spirituality and the Lived Experience (Royersford: Swedenborg Foundation, 2024), 31. ↩︎
3. Cavalier and Kelley, Surviving Suicidal Ideation, 32. ↩︎
4. CBC Radio, “Are we mislabeling our trauma? Why Dr. Gabor Maté believes we need to change the way we think about pain,” The Next Chapter Q&A, November 25, 2022, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thenextchapter/are-we-mislabeling-our-trauma-why-dr-gabor-mat%C3%A9-believes-we-need-to-change-the-way-we-think-about-pain-1.6661540, accessed September 17, 2024. ↩︎
5. Peter Attia, “Paul Conti, M.D.: How to heal from trauma and break the cycle of shame,” The Peter Attia Drive, January 10, 2022, https://peterattiamd.com/paulconti3/. ↩︎
6. Krista Tippett, “Resmaa Menakem: Notice the Rage; Notice the Silence,” On Being with Krista Tippett, https://onbeing.org/programs/resmaa-menakem-notice-the-rage-notice-the-silence. ↩︎
7. Brian G. Dias and Kerry J. Ressler, “Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations,” Nature Neuroscience 17, no. 1 (2014). ↩︎
8. Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model (Boulder, Sounds True: 2021), 7. ↩︎
9. Schwartz, No Bad Parts, 8, 9. ↩︎
10. Robert Falconer, The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession (Great Mystery Press: 2023), 262. ↩︎
11. A pilot effectiveness study has shown positive results for using IFS to treat PTSD. See Hilary B. Hodgdon, Frank G. Anderson, Elizabeth Southwell, Wendy Hrubec, and Richard Schwartz, “Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among Survivors of Multiple Childhood Trauma: A Pilot Effectiveness Study,” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 31 (1): 22–43 (2021). ↩︎
12. Brené Brown, “Glennon Doyle and Brené on Untamed,” Unlocking Us with Brené Brown, VoxMedia, March 24, 2020, https://brenebrown.com/podcast/glennon-doyle-brene-on-untamed/. ↩︎