Multitides: Introduction to Internal Family Systems

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

-Walt Whitman

I started going to therapy back in 2020 and have continued since. In this post I won’t dive into why I pursued therapy, nor will I dive into the many challenges my therapists helped me navigate and epiphanies they helped me reach. While that’s a journey rich with wisdom to share, today I want to talk about one specific approach used by one of my therapists that changed my life almost instantly. After 3 years of gradual but consistent progress, one session using this approach created sudden and significant positive changes in my healing journey. I have continued to practice this method myself and have also studied it further in order to share it with private clients and even offer it as a public workshop. The feedback I get is the same feedback I gave my therapist when she guided me through this method. The response is one of surprise (how can one experience such a shift within the context of one session?) of hope (if one session created such a shift, imagine what continuing on this journey could offer) and of relief (this approach helps soften self criticism and shame). I admit, I don’t think I can ever un-see what I’ve seen and I believe I will forever view myself and others with more compassion, curiosity, and understanding now that I’ve been introduced to Internal Family Systems. So what’s this all about?

The History of Internal Family Systems

Richard C Schwartz received his PhD in Marriage and Family Therapy from Purdue University and was a practicing family therapist in the early 80s. As a “systems” thinker, he moved through family therapy with the understanding that no individual member of a family can be understood without understanding the dynamic of the family as a whole, a system of parts. For example, a parent with an addiction, mental health issue, or poor emotional regulation can force a child to become hypervigilant, anxious, or angry. We cannot understand that child’s behaviors or struggles without understanding the context of the environment in which those struggles were born and are being reinforced.

This paradigm was the foundation of Schwartz’s work as a family therapist, and the claim was that by reorganizing the family (getting treatment for parents so the home environment could be more stable, for example) the child could be relieved of the stress of their chaotic home life and be free to be a child again. He conducted a research study to test the efficacy of this approach on children with bulimia and was alarmed to discover that the approach had no impact on their binging and purging. He describes reaching his wits end and deciding to directly ask these clients “why are you still doing this?” Again and again, client after client, they’d respond unknowingly using the same verbiage as one another: “There’s this part of me that takes over, I can’t control it.”

Multiple Personalities?

He was concerned, considering that maybe these clients were “sicker than I thought they were” and feared he was witnessing an uptick in Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnoses (once considered Multiple Personality Disorder). But then he started listening inward and discovered that he had his own chorus of parts disagreeing with one another in his own mind. This made him get curious. As he explains in many interviews and in his book No Bad Parts, “I asked the clients to describe their parts, which they were able to do in great detail. Not only that, but they depicted how these parts interacted with each other and had relationships. Some fought, some formed alliances, and some protected others. Over time, it dawned on me that I was learning about a kind of inner system, not unlike the ‘external’ families I was working with. Hence the name: Internal Family Systems.”

In the case of the bulimic clients, he saw that the parts often acted in cycles that went something like this: The person would make a mistake and an inner critic would chime in, shaming and punishing them for their stupidity. The shaming would trigger a part that feels worthless, stupid, lonely, and depressed. The depths of feelings like shame and worthlessness can feel unbearable, so to rescue them from their despair, the binge would arrive and use food to soothe, distract, and ultimately numb the person of their shame and loneliness. After the binge/purge cycle, the critic would show back up to shame the person for the binging and purging. The cycle repeats.

If you can’t relate to the experience of an eating disorder, replace that binge with whatever you reach for to self soothe when you’re feeling stressed, afraid, ashamed, worthless, or lonely. Maybe you crack a beer or pack a bowl, light up a cigarette or turn to online shopping, maybe you go to sleep, maybe you dive into work or clean the whole house, maybe you endlessly scroll social media. These “bad habits” that we turn to when in emotional distress or overwhelm are all attempts to protect ourselves from the horrors of our most unbearable emotional experiences.

Whereas the history of modern psychology has landed us in a place where having multiple parts of the self is a diagnosable pathology, Internal Family Systems assures us that not only does everybody have many parts, but that it’s completely normal and that none of our parts are inherently bad even if they are causing problems in our lives. So who are these parts?

What exactly is a part?

Remember, this post is an introduction to Internal Family Systems. I intend to continue sharing this modality with my community because it is so rich with wisdom and healing. But here are the basics:

When we are born, we arrive on the planet without language, without knowledge, beings of pure awareness and curiosity. What we learn about the world and about being human we learn from our caregivers and the people in our communities of origin. Our understanding of the world, our actions, beliefs and behaviors are developed by our childhood environment and experiences. No perfect human exists, and thus no perfect caregiver exists, and there is a wide range of imperfection among the many imperfect caregivers of the world, from loving but flawed to horribly abusive. Inevitably, we are disillusioned as children at some point and our unguarded trust, joy, curiosity, and sensitivity are dismissed or punished by an adult. Imagine a curious little boy, eager to learn about the world and marveling at its mysteries being told by his parent to get his head out of the clouds and “stop asking so many annoying questions.” Being scolded by a parent is how a child learns that something they’ve done is “bad” or “wrong.” So the child exiles their curiosity (or whatever quality was rejected), because they feel it makes them annoying and unlovable to the people whose love matters to them most. There are all sorts of events in childhood and throughout our teens, twenties, and well into adulthood that hurt us enough that they change us and change the way we show up in the world and in our relationships. These are the types of parts that come into being within us:

Exiles

These are the sweet, sensitive, vulnerable parts whose sensitivity makes them prone to the deepest wounds. We often hear these parts called “inner children.” Because the experiences that create these parts often occur when we are young, we had no ability to make sense of the events or our emotions about those events when they happened. These emotional wounds occur before we have the ability to understand or process them, so they linger within us without resolution. A note on why I’m not using the word trauma here: Traumatic events like loss and abuse absolutely create exiled parts, but there are plenty of exiles tied to events that some might not consider “traumatic,” like divorce, moving homes/schools, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and accidentally hurting someone’s feelings, etc. As adults, any reminder of these unprocessed events brings up the intense and unprocessed emotions from the event, and the intensity is so overwhelming that we often feel an urgency or desperation to distract or get away from those feelings. We shut them away. Exiled.

Managers

Managers are the parts that exist to protect you from having to experience those intense feelings and unhealed wounds. They try to keep you busy, keep you perfect, keep everything under control so that you never have to feel stupid, unloved, rejected, ashamed, worthless, or any of the other emotional wounds our exiles carry. Managers can show up in the form of perfectionism, caretaking and codependency, skepticism or cynicism, denial, avoidance, overworking, judging, dependency and helplessness, worrying, entertaining, etc. They try to manage life, relationships, and circumstances in order to prevent intense or uncomfortable emotions from overwhelming your system.

Firefighters

As my fellow control freaks and perfectionists know, control is an illusion and perfection is a myth. Despite our manager parts’ best efforts to control all circumstances in our lives, heartbreak happens. Tragedy occurs, we make mistakes, people do and say hurtful things, and our manager parts are no match for the unpredictability of life. If our managers cannot prevent hurt, fear, or shame from arising, the firefighter parts activate to distract us or soothe our emotions. For many of us, our firefighter parts are the parts we feel the most shame, embarrassment, and confusion about. They show up as behaviors like binge eating, shopping, drinking, drug use, social media use, tv binging, angry outbursts, fantasizing and daydreaming, hobbies we pick up and never follow through with, avoidance, and suicidal ideation if none of the rest work.

Self

If these different parts are characters on the big screen, we in our truest form are in the audience watching the plot unfold. Parts can be extreme, overwhelming, and deafening as they fight with each other, so we often forget that we are the awareness able to step back and observe all this activity within. As a yoga and meditation guide, this is what I love most about IFS. Built into this model is the fundamental claim that there is a TRUE SELF buried beneath these parts. As we begin to see our parts, we can work with them, heal them, and relax them out of their destructive behaviors (more on that in a later post.) Once we can start to see our parts, we can pause to consider “who or what within me is able to see these parts and study them?” The answer is Self, spirit, consciousness, awareness, whatever you want to call it: It is the watcher in the audience. The more we do this work, we become more capable of moving through life led by our true Selves rather than our parts. IFS describes the qualities of Self using 8 C’s:

• Curiosity: Non judgmental, neutral, curious to know more
• Calmness: Not emotionally attached or reactive
• Confidence: Feeling capable of navigating what arises
• Clarity: Able to discern parts from each other and self
• Courage: Up to the challenge of doing hard things
• Connectedness: Relationship with others, intuition, divine
• Compassion: capacity to be with suffering of others
• Creativity: Open minded, inspired, playful

I’m so excited to continue sharing this paradigm shifter with you. After a lifetime of self criticism and shame about my “worst behaviors,” I have finally found self compassion and forgiveness. My critic still speaks up, as does my skeptic, my rebel, my perfectionist, my daydreamer, and many more. But these days we aren’t enemies. I’ve met enough of them to know why they exist, why they do what they do, what they’re trying to protect me from, and they’ve gotten to know my true Self enough that they’re coming around to the idea that she just might be the one we can all trust to get it right. What I can say with confidence based on my own experience with IFS, my clients’ experiences with IFS, and my research on the thousands of clients who have used IFS is that even the parts of you that you struggle with the most have good intentions and are deserving of softness and compassion.

Thanks for being here. Subscribe to this blog to get updates about new posts as I continue to explore IFS and the other healing modalities I use and share.

With love,
Christen