Overlapping Maps

An Integration of IFS, NVC, and PM Concepts

A note on this text

This text began as personal preparation for a one-month stay here at Avalonhuset, where I (Gaspar) joined Phase I of Regenera in May 2026. The core group has a strong background in Possibility Management (PM), a modality of personal and systemic transformation that was, until very recently, completely new to me.

I am a musician, educator, and Internal Family Systems (IFS) facilitator. Shortly before writing this, I worked as an interpreter at an International Intensive Training in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) — a modality I had been engaged with for years. That experience allowed me to see that IFS and NVC could deepen each other in ways that felt significant both for my own path and for my work with clients.

As I worked to understand PM in preparation for my stay, I found myself instinctively mapping its ideas onto those two frameworks — and noticing that the three fit together in ways that felt generative rather than forced. What started as personal orientation became something worth writing down.

I am genuinely new to PM, and this text was written before any immersive experience of it. It should be read as an outsider’s attempt at a map, not as an authoritative account. I am sharing it because possibilitator Aon Solarra read it and felt it was worth putting into the world. I am grateful for his generosity, enthusiasm, and trust.

The text will inevitably contain imprecisions, particularly in its rendering of PM concepts. I welcome contact from anyone who wants to discuss the ideas, point out where the map diverges from the territory, or take the integration further.

Brief introduction to the three frameworks

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a psychotherapeutic model developed by Richard Schwartz in the 1980s. It proposes that the mind is naturally multiple: we are each composed of a system of parts — distinct inner voices, feelings, and patterns of behavior — organized around a core Self that is not a part but a stable, undepletable source of presence and compassion. Psychological suffering arises when parts take on extreme roles in response to wounding; healing occurs when Self re-establishes a relationship of trust with those parts.

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a framework for awareness and communication developed by Marshall Rosenberg in the 1960s. Its foundational insight is that all human behavior is an attempt to meet universal needs, and that most interpersonal conflict arises from the strategies used to meet those needs rather than from the needs themselves. NVC offers a practice of distinguishing feelings from thoughts, and needs from the specific strategies used to meet them — cultivating a quality of attention and expression that tends toward connection rather than defense.

Possibility Management (PM) is a body of work developed by Clinton Callahan from the 1970s onward. It maps the structures of ordinary human culture — what it calls the Box — that limit experience, relationship, and collective possibility, and offers practices for operating beyond those structures. Central to PM is the distinction between feelings (present-tense signals arising in response to current conditions) and emotions (recycled states bound to unresolved past experience), a framework for radical responsibility, and a vision of next culture: communities organized around conscious presence and authentic contact.

An Integration of IFS, NVC, and PM Concepts

Basic assumptions

The optimal physiological state of human functioning corresponds to what IFS calls the Self — operating outside the Box, in full presence: a place of courage, compassion, clarity, connection, calm, creativity, curiosity, confidence, playfulness, perspective, patience, presence, persistence, and purpose; also love, gratitude, and choice. The Self corresponds to Awareness: a fluid state that assumes whatever qualities the situation requires — the state from which nonlinear space opens, where probability ceases to determine what is possible.

All our mental formations, feelings, and emotions come from our parts. It is through them that we bring Self-energy into the world: they are the ones who learn our skills and crafts, and who define our personality. They are shaped partly by genetics and partly by lived experience. When we bring Self-energy to a part, that part also connects with its own Self.

Parts maintain the homeostatic balance of our system by sending us signals — feelings and emotions — indicating whether our needs are being met or not. These needs are of three orders: physiological (air, food, sleep, sexual expression), relational (safety, attachment, connection), and individual (freedom/authenticity, creativity). The more fully they are met, the more naturally they make space for the Self. When they are not, parts occupy consciousness with uncomfortable signals — sadness, anger, shame, anxiety — pointing to that unmet need. When needs are met, on the other hand, parts can connect more with Self-energy and send us more comfortable signals, such as joy, gratitude, and relaxation.

Feelings are present-tense signals: they arise in unburdened parts, or in burdened parts held in Self-presence, and when allowed to complete their arc — arise, be felt, inform, dissolve — they leave clarity and orient action. Emotions are also signals, but bound to past experiences in which needs went unmet and the arc of feeling could not complete. They are carried by burdened parts. When we are blended with a burdened part, its emotion speaks through us directly — as reaction, story, or what PM calls low drama — with the charge and the logic of the original wound, regardless of present conditions. When we are with a burdened part but unblended from it, witnessing it from Self, the part’s past feelings can begin to complete their arc: the emotion becomes a doorway rather than a loop.

Everything we do is a strategy — more or less effective — for meeting our needs. Strategies can come from parts — which do not account for the whole system and are often attached to a specific course of action — or from a more Self-led place, which takes more parts of the system into account and has access to creativity, choice, and playfulness to generate and follow a wider range of strategies. Whether a strategy is effective for meeting our needs depends in large part on the gameworld it is played out in: the set of shared agreements, implicit rules, and narratives that define what is possible and permitted within a given relational field.

The Box, Bright Principles and shadow

The Box is constituted by the burdened parts of the system — those carrying legacy and cultural burdens, operating from survival strategies, and organised around the implicit rules of what must be exiled to maintain belonging. It is not the enemy — it is the adaptive structure the system built to survive. The work is not to destroy it but to develop the capacity to observe it from outside and, progressively, to heal its dynamics and to operate beyond them.

Each person carries Bright Principles — irreducible values or qualities that constitute their deepest nature, occupying the same ontological level as universal needs in NVC and Self qualities in IFS: the deepest layer, prior to all strategy. When a Bright Principle is exiled — because its expression threatened attachment or belonging in a particular gameworld — it does not disappear: it becomes shadow. Shadow is not absence but distortion: the Bright Principle expressing itself through layers of protection, unrecognisable to the person carrying it. A Bright Principle of fierce honesty, exiled because it threatened attachment, might become a manager that controls all speech and a firefighter that occasionally erupts in brutal bluntness — neither expressing the original Bright Principle cleanly.

The Gremlin is the system’s anti-change coalition: the subset of protector parts most invested in maintaining the current equilibrium. These parts are most active at the threshold between the Box and expanded possibility. The Gremlin includes the inner critic: a manager using shame and self-attack to prevent exile activation. Personifying the Gremlin allows direct engagement rather than abstract analysis — and attempting to eliminate it is one of its traps, because elimination is itself a Box strategy.

Development, attachment, and exiled parts

As children, we depend entirely on other human beings to meet our physiological and safety needs and to regulate our emotional states. Our internal systems are exquisitely designed to maintain attachment: our lives depend on it. The less attuned our caregivers are to our emotional state — the more disconnected from their own Self, blended with their own parts — the more extreme and desperate the strategies our parts learn in order to get our needs met.

When stress arises, the child looks to the adult. If the adult is regulated — Self-led, outside the Box — the situation integrates around the narrative “something difficult is happening, but I am safe,” and strategies are generated creatively to meet it. If the adult is not regulated, the narrative becomes “something bad is happening and I am not safe” or “something bad is happening and it is my fault.” The strategies the child’s parts develop are not calibrated to the actual magnitude of the situation — because the internally perceived magnitude is far greater — resulting in dysregulated behavior, acting out, intense shame, shutdown, or anxiety.

The caregiver, operating from their own parts, responds to the child’s strategies rather than the child’s state — to the behavior rather than the need. This is not an individual failure but the structural transmission of a gameworld that requires certain parts to be exiled in order to perpetuate itself. The child’s system exiles the parts whose expression threatens attachment — parts that frequently carry Bright Principles directly connected to the person’s deepest truth. Exiling them has serious and lasting consequences for their health and their capacity to operate from Self.

The needs for safety and authenticity are not intrinsically in conflict. The split occurs through what, across our lives — not only in childhood; adolescence is another crucial threshold — is welcomed or not within our attachment gameworlds.

Trauma and implicit memory

By adulthood, we carry parts with adaptive strategies connected to the present, and parts with strategies that no longer are — strategies that were once the most adaptive our system could generate, but that no longer function in our adult lives and bodies. The latter attempt to meet the needs of parts exiled in implicit memory: parts from the past whose needs were situationally (acute trauma) or chronically (complex trauma) unmet. Meeting those past needs in the present is ephemeral: until we access the implicit memory and heal the wound through reconsolidation, our parts will be like hungry ghosts — seeking to satisfy deeply unmet needs from our history in present circumstances that cannot actually provide them.

This is the structure of recycled emotion: not a response to the present but the activation of an implicit memory. Resentment does not inform about what is happening now — it signals an anger wound that never completed its arc. Anxiety does not navigate the future — it loops a past fear that never had space to be felt cleanly.

When we pay attention to our feelings and emotions and how they manifest in the body, our parts begin to feel seen. When we discover the needs behind those signals, we understand why the part does what it does — what Bright Principle it is trying to express, even in distorted form — and that opens creativity to find, from greater connection with Self, a wider range of strategies to meet that need.

Relational dynamics: from low to high drama

In the relational field, parts do not operate in isolation: systems activate each other. The low drama triangle describes what happens when systems operate from parts rather than from Self: Victim, Rescuer, Persecutor — three roles in a parts-to-parts dynamic where one person’s exile activates another’s manager or firefighter, which activates the first person’s exile again. The relational system becomes a closed loop: unmet needs generating tragic strategies that keep those needs unmet.

High drama is the alternative: genuine, high-intensity contact where clean feelings are in play and outcomes are uncertain. This is Self-to-Self or Self-to-part contact — the regulated presence of one person stellating the other’s capacity for Self. It is the mechanism of empathic listening in NVC and of being with in IFS: not managing or resolving but being present with what is, creating the conditions for the other system to reorganize itself.

The distinction between responsible for and responsible to operates here with precision: I am responsible for my state, my feelings, my strategies and their impact. I am responsible to others through my commitments and my word. I am not responsible for another’s feelings or experience — assuming that responsibility is a protective strategy that forecloses genuine contact. In NVC terms: I can contribute to meeting another’s needs but if I take them as my own I will do violence to the other person and myself.

Sourcing — generating one’s state from within rather than depending on external conditions — is the Self’s capacity to offer parts what they need without first requiring the external world to provide it. Not independence from the world, but the difference between parts seeking outside what they have not received inside, and a system that can find that contact internally and from there relate to the exterior from choice.

An internal feedback loop with external consequences

All of this forms a positive feedback loop: connected with Self — outside the Box, in presence — we are aware of the signals our parts send us about whether our needs are being met or not, and we can develop effective strategies to maintain optimal homeostatic balance. The more fully needs are met, the less parts need to blend, and the more space there is for Self ro emerge. This also operates outward: we choose strategies in the external world that meet our needs more deeply, say no to those that do not, and our gameworlds change accordingly.

The loop can reverse: blended with burdened parts, we stop listening to other parts, needs go unmet, there is less space for Self and more autopilot — one part after another taking over, or a single part maintaining equilibrium by disconnecting us from the present and from life. The dominant external systems — patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, the good/bad paradigm, power-over structures — actively tend to keep us inside the Box, because their own homeostasis depends on it. They generate cultural and transgenerational burdens — inherited gameworlds that determine which parts we must exile to belong — shaping our system’s configuration before we have any capacity for conscious choice.

There are three leverage points for inner transformation, operating at different scales and timescales: (1) at the behavioral level: bringing more presence and Self to our internal sensations, identifying clean feelings and the needs behind them, widening the strategy repertoire; (2) at the level of internal restructuring: healing past wounds so our parts respond to present needs rather than historical deficits, making more space for Self and allowing exiled Bright Principles to return to the system; (3) at the external level: changing the environments and gameworlds we participate in — surrounding ourselves with more Self-connected people, maintaining contact with the natural world, reducing structural stressors, and actively building next culture gameworlds that sustain connection with Self rather than requiring its suppression.

Being connected with our needs from Self means being connected with the planet and with life. The great systemic problems — climate crisis, geopolitical conflict, economic and social inequality, humanitarian crises — emerge from disconnection and trauma: burdened parts operating at collective scale, low drama institutionalized into the structures of entire civilizations. Individual transformation toward Self and the construction of new gameworlds where high drama — genuine contact, clean feeling, uncertain outcomes — becomes the norm rather than the exception are not parallel projects: they are the same movement at different scales.

Glossary

IFS

Blending — the state in which a part’s perspective and feelings merge with and override the Self, such that the person speaks and acts from the part rather than from Self-presence.

Burdens — painful beliefs, emotions, or bodily states that parts carry as a result of wounding. Not intrinsic to the part but acquired through experience.

Cultural and legacy burdens — burdens absorbed from the surrounding culture or transmitted across generations, carried by parts before any personal experience that would account for them.

Exile — a part pushed out of conscious awareness because its feelings, needs, or qualities were too painful or too threatening to attachment in the person’s relational environment. Exiles carry the original wounds.

Firefighter — a protector part that responds reactively when an exile is activated, acting impulsively to suppress or escape the exile’s pain.

Manager — a protector part that operates proactively to prevent exile activation by controlling behavior, environment, and relationships.

Parts — the distinct inner voices, feelings, and patterns that compose the internal system. Parts take on extreme roles only in response to wounding; they are not pathological by nature.

Protector — umbrella term for managers and firefighters: parts whose primary function is to protect the system from exile activation.

Reconsolidation — the process by which a memory is retrieved, updated with new experience, and re-stored in modified form. In IFS, healing occurs when an exile’s implicit memory is accessed in the presence of Self and updated through the experience of being witnessed and unburdened.

Self — the undepletable core of the person: a state of presence characterized by clarity, compassion, curiosity, calm, confidence, creativity, courage, and connectedness. When Self leads the internal system, parts can relax their extreme roles.

Self-led — describes a state in which Self, rather than any part, is guiding the internal system and its responses.

Unblending — the process by which a part separates sufficiently from the Self that the person can be with the part rather than in it.

NVC

Attunement — the capacity to perceive and resonate with another person’s internal state, particularly their emotional experience. The relational basis of co-regulation.

Co-regulation — the process by which one person’s regulated nervous system helps bring another’s into regulation.

Needs — universal human requirements for wellbeing, distinct from the specific strategies used to meet them. Feelings signal whether needs are met or unmet.

Strategies — the specific actions or behaviors used to meet needs. Unlike needs, strategies are particular, negotiable, and context-dependent.

PM

Being with — remaining present with an experience or person without attempting to fix, change, or escape it.

Box, the — the totality of a person’s habituated identity structure: the beliefs and survival strategies assembled in early life that define what seems possible. Not pathological but finite and navigable.

Bright Principles — the irreducible values or qualities that constitute a person’s deepest nature, prior to all strategy and conditioning. When exiled, they become shadow.

Gameworld — any shared reality maintained by collective agreement: the implicit rules and narratives that define what is possible within a given relational field, and which parts of experience must be suppressed to belong.

Gremlin — the internalized pattern that sabotages authentic presence and growth, particularly at thresholds of expansion. Personified to allow direct engagement rather than abstract analysis.

High drama — genuine contact in which clean feelings are in play and outcomes are uncertain. Distinguished from low drama by the presence of Self and the absence of manipulation.

Low drama — Box-managed conflict conducted through the roles of Victim, Rescuer, and Persecutor. A substitute for genuine contact that recycles unmet needs through strategies that perpetuate them.

Next culture — the emergent social form PM works to instantiate: communities organized around adult responsibility, conscious feeling, and authentic contact.

Nonlinear space — the field that opens when Self has sufficient presence to override the Box’s habitual management of experience. Characterized by genuine responsiveness to what is arising.

Possibility space / probability space — probability space is the domain of the Box: what is likely given current conditions. Possibility space opens when conscious presence makes available what probability alone would not predict.

Radical responsibility — taking full authorship of one’s experience, choices, and impact without blame or guilt. Not self-blame but response-ability: the capacity to respond from choice.

Shadow — a Bright Principle that has been exiled and now expresses itself in distorted form through protective layers.

Sourcing — generating one’s own state and presence from within rather than depending on external conditions.

Stellating — activating a quality in another person by embodying it oneself, through the resonant nature of human systems in genuine contact.

Bibliography

IFS

Curry-Sartori, Joanna — The Self-Led Educator. PESI Publishing, 2025.

Schwartz, Richard C. — Internal Family Systems Therapy, 2nd edition. Guilford Press, 2020.

Schwartz, Richard C. & Hübl, Thomas — Releasing Our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral, and Collective Trauma. Sounds True, 2025.

NVC

Rosenberg, Marshall B. — Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, 3rd edition. PuddleDancer Press, 2015.

Kashtan, Arnina — The Courage to Love Yourself: Discover the Hidden Power of Self-Compassion, Authenticity, and Radical Acceptance, 2025.

PM

Callahan, Clinton — Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings: Living Your Own Truth. Hohm Press, 2014.

possibilitymanagement.org

Systems Thinking

Meadows, Donella H. — Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

Scharmer, Otto & Kaeufer, Katrin — Presencing: 7 Practices for Transforming Self, Society, and Business, 2025.