Michaela Crandell | Meet Your Inner World: Internal Family Systems Therapy & Biofield Tuning
Michaela Crandell is an Internal Family Systems therapist and Biofield Tuner. In this episode, we explore both modalities and how they intersect, including discussion on how the parts of our psyche can fragment, the categories of these pieces, and how to contact them to find resolution and wholeness. Michaela also guides me through a mini-session as a demonstration of how IFS works.
In the Plus+ Extension, we talk more about tuning, how stuck parts of self exist in our energy fields, the importance of understanding how your birth story might condition you, ancestors in IFS and the aura, non-self entities (guides and negative beings), Michaela's toolkit and process, and much more.
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In this episode
Core themes
Two Modalities Under One Roof
Chance Garton opens by framing the show as mixed mental arts and introduces Michaela Crandell of AuthenticPathHealing.com, a practitioner who pairs internal family systems therapy with biofield tuning. He leans on the Carl Jung line posted on her site, that until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Michaela explains she arrived as a client roughly six years ago, describing a body, mind and spirit that were a mess, and found her way to IFS through synchronicity and to Eileen and biofield tuning through YouTube videos.
Why the Physical Fix Was Not Enough
Michaela describes starting with natural healing and diet because she was averse to mental and emotional work, then discovering that changing her body alone did not touch her emotional health. Checking the physical items off her list left the psyche and the energy field standing out as the real priorities. She offers an example from her own life of an emotional and spiritual issue showing up physically. Chance adds the idea of excess weight as armoring, with a tear shed for every pound lost, and Michaela agrees that removing the armor exposes the beliefs underneath.
How Richard Schwartz Found Parts
Michaela traces internal family systems to Dick Schwartz, who was doing clinical research with teenagers who had eating disorders inside a family constellations framework that tried to heal an individual by changing the external family. He kept hearing patients say one part of me wants to eat and another part makes me purge, briefly wondered whether they were schizophrenic, then recognized the same conflicting voices in himself. The model that grew from that says we are all naturally multifaceted, that there are no bad parts, only misguided ones, and that compassion and curiosity, not control, produce change.
Protectors, Exiles and Self Energy
Michaela lays out the working anatomy of a session. Exiled parts sit deep in the unconscious and get pushed back down by protectors the moment they surface, so building trust with the protector is usually the slowest part of the work. Contact happens with eyes closed in a light hypnotic state, through body sensation, inner words or plain sensing. Above the parts sits self energy, which she calls soul energy, never damaged by trauma and only ever covered up. Chance connects it to holding presence rather than feeding clients your own light and burning yourself out.
A Real Session, Live on the Show
Chance volunteers to play client and Michaela guides him through an unscripted demonstration of the method. Starting from an emotion he says he tends to shield himself from, he meets what shows up with curiosity rather than control, learns what job a protective part has been doing, and follows it to a younger part that wants to be somewhere else. Michaela walks him through each step, from making contact to letting the part know it can call on him again. Afterward Chance says none of it felt controlled or made up, and compares it to shamanic journey work.
Quotes
“So I, as it says on my site, I started as a client in these modalities and really it was about five or six years ago and I gotta say my life was a mess. My body, mind, spirit were all disjointed in a huge mess. I felt like crap all the time.”
“That's a good example of how weight, excess weight operates as a type of armoring because once it's off, you start to feel vulnerable again, and I've even heard it said that like, a tear shed for every pound lost, that there's emotions in the extra body mass that you can't get rid of one without dealing with the other”
“We all have parts and it's just through these life experiences that these parts become disjointed that there's no bad parts of ourselves, but there's just misguided parts. So maybe a part of you, they got stuck in childhood because of a traumatic experience. You did not have the capacity to process what happened.”
“It sounds like imagination to maybe the uninitiated, not this audience, but your imagination is as real as it gets. And that's a perfectly valid way to help heal those parts and help make them feel what they needed.”
“Yeah, and self energy is in the IFS model is essentially soul energy. It's not a part, but it exists within every individual and it is that piece of you that is never damaged by trauma. It's never fragmented. It's only ever covered up.”
“Energy doesn't lie. And one of the mantras I often end up leaving people with in sessions is if it isn't a hell yes, it's a hell no.”
“And the thing I would love to leave people with is that you have more power than the world has led you to believe. And there's magic inside you if you are just willing to take a moment, observe, be present and be with yourself.”
“I know that this type of thing might be foreign to people that don't necessarily consider their imaginal realm to have some kind of concrete existence of its own, but it does and you can explore the inner verse.”
Michaela Crandell is an Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapist and Biofield Tuner who works at the intersection of parts-work psychology and sound-based energy healing to help resolve psychological fragmentation.
See all Michaela episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
