Internal Family Systems Therapy
Richard C. Schwartz developed the Internal Family Systems model, or IFS, in the 1980s. It combines the multiplicity of mind paradigm with the paradigm of systems thinking. I love the phrase “multiplicity of mind,” which is basically the notion that we all contain multiple beings, which Schwartz calls subpersonalities, or, simply “parts.” He emphasizes that “a part is not just a temporary emotional state or habitual thought pattern,” but “a discrete and autonomous mental system” with an “idiosyncratic range of emotion, style of expression, set of abilities, desires, and view of the world.”
Most of us have probably spoken in terms of our different parts without fully realizing the implications. We say things like “Part of me wants to go out tonight, and part of me wants to stay home.” “Part of me wants to get married, and part of me wants to head for the hills.” IFS gets really specific about the fears and desires of these—and various other—parts, about how we feel towards them, and about how they feel towards one another. That last bit is what differentiated IFS from other theories that existed before it. Prior to Schwartz writing Internal Family Systems Therapy, little had been written about the complex relationships that one’s different parts formed with one another, let alone about how one’s intrapsychic system operated, and how that system compared to their family of origin system. Subpersonalities had basically been treated individually, as if they existed in a vacuum. But IFS views the parts as operating within a system, which Schwartz defines as “any entity whose parts relate to one another in a pattern.” By this definition, a computer is a system, as is a network of bus routes, as is a wristwatch. And of course all biological organisms are systems.
According to Schwartz, the average internal family system consists of at least five to fifteen different parts, with each falling into one of three categories: Exiles, Managers, and Firefighters. More on that later. The goal of IFS therapy is to help our parts transcend these categories, i.e. unburden them of their extreme viewpoints, so that they are just members of our internal family, each with their own non-extreme role to play. Schwartz acknowledges that thinking of oneself as composed of various inner entities that are themselves autonomous personalities, will strike some people as overly imaginative on his part. But he developed the IFS model based solely on what therapy clients were reporting to him and his colleagues for over ten years. He never tells clients what or who their parts are, or how they feel toward one another or toward the Self. He basically just makes sure that certain parts aren’t addressed or “retrieved” before they’re ready or before other parts and/or the Self feel that it’s safe to do so. The client pretty much does the rest of the work.
Note that I’m spelling the word Self with a capital S. In the IFS model, this Self is similar to the Self or Center that Carl Jung talked about, which he described as being different from one’s subpersonalities—so not a total of its parts, per se—and as being a state of mind that one can achieve, “a place of nonjudgmental, clear perspective,” passive and observing. But IFS joins this notion of the Self with that of Italian psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of humanistic and transpersonal psychology, Roberto Assagioli, who asserted that the Self can evolve from “a passive observer to an active manager of the personality.” This touches on another key premise of IFS therapy: people have an innate drive toward homeostasis, wisdom, creativity, and intimacy. When they encounter problems in these realms on a regular basis, it’s because something is blocking them from accessing their inner, innate resources. Too many resources—energy being a big one—are going to a small handful of parts or maybe even just one or two, leaving little to nothing for the Self and other parts. This creates a vicious cycle that ultimately prevents various parts from trusting the Self when scenarios arise that require action and not just passive observation. Which points to another goal of IFS therapy: to instill one’s parts with trust in one’s Self.
=
One thing a lot of people like about IFS is that it helps them—their Selves—to differentiate from their parts. When they feel or think something “extreme,” they can mitigate the threat of that thought or feeling by relating to it as its own entity, with its own fears, desires, and perceived roles. Instead of seeing ourselves as extreme, we can see a small part in that way, or maybe a couple small parts arguing with each other. It can feel overly monolithic, to think of ourselves as being pathological at our cores. IFS invites us to take the problem one part at a time. Its depathologizing effects even apply to what was formerly called multiple personality disorder but is now called dissociative identity disorder, which IFS views as an internal family system that is simply more “polarized, isolated, and protective” than your average neurotic’s. This makes the DID person’s psyche “less cohesive and more tortured,” but Schwartz contends that it otherwise does not differ from the inner families of folks who haven’t been as badly hurt. So it’s happening on a spectrum.
Obviously trauma plays a large role in how protective, polarized, and isolated a person’s internal family members are. I’ll revisit that aspect soon. But for now I also want to point out that one’s actual family members can also be hugely influential. Not every part, though, has its human analog in a given family of origin. But I would wager that most of them developed as a result of family of origin dynamics. So someone, for instance, might have a Mother part who says the exact same things that their mother used to say to them (maybe she was hypercritical—or maybe, as does also happen, she was unwaveringly supportive and encouraging). That same someone might also have a part (a Manager) whose job it is to keep them from feeling anger, because their mother could not tolerate the emotion or its expression. One part is an actual introject of the mother, while the other is the result of the mother’s intolerance. And of course we can have father introjects, sibling introjects, teacher introjects, etc.
A big point that IFS strives to make is that most people walk around with different voices in their heads, and they assume it’s all the same voice, and that that voice is their Own. But much of the time, until we start to gain more awareness, those voices are not Ours, and do not reflect our deepest inner truths and values. IFS offers a psychodynamic perspective that widens the lens on a given psyche, creating space for questions that would not otherwise be asked. “Whose voice is that, telling you you’re an idiot for accidentally dropping a knife? Where did that part of your internal family system learn to respond to accidents with such harsh criticism and name-calling? If that part were in human form, what would it look like? How would it move around in the world? How would people feel in its presence? How does your Self feel toward that part? What other parts might that part—the Name Caller—be protecting, or perhaps distracting from?”
You get the idea. There are lots of ways you could go with it.
But let’s stick with this example of the Name Caller a little longer. Based on my knowledge of IFS—the result of my reading the IFS book twice and using some of its interventions here and there with therapy clients over the past five years—I’d classify this part as a Firefighter. So let’s say a man is sharpening a knife in his kitchen. At some point it slips from his hand and clangs onto the counter. In the instant it slips, the man feels afraid, not knowing where the knife will land or what damage it might do on the way. The noise it makes also rattles his nerves quite a bit. The second he sees that the knife has landed and no damage has been done, he says to himself, “You idiot! Jesus Christ!” His Name Caller part has momentarily taken the reigns, if you will. It has commandeered the driver’s seat. It is in control. I am calling it a Firefighter because the role of all Firefighters is to automatically react whenever an Exile is activated. If a Firefighter is needed, it means that a Manager has failed at its job—its job being to prevent Exiles from getting activated in the first place. Exiles are the most sensitive members of an internal family system, and when they get upset, they threaten to overwhelm the whole shebang, so Firefighters kick into gear to try to stifle or soothe them.
In the example of the man who drops the knife, I’m seeing the Name Caller as a Firefighter who is trying to stifle—rather than soothe—the Exile that I’ll call the Frightened One. For whatever reason, the hypothetical person in this example cannot tolerate having that kind of fear in his system—perhaps because to him it indicates a fundamental weakness or lack of masculinity, which wasn’t tolerated in his family of origin—so his Name Calling part swoops in to shame the Frightened One back into exile.
=
The primary reason that parts or subpersonalities exist in the first place is to protect the Self, which is especially vulnerable when we are very young and have not fully differentiated from our parents or other caregivers. Parts become extreme when the Self is badly hurt and/or in danger of being thusly harmed, as is the case with trauma. Schwartz says that when a trauma occurs, members of the internal system are frozen or stuck at that point in time. I assume that this is especially the case when a person has no choice but to enter into a freeze state as a way of responding to the trauma, because it’s clear (at least to them) that fighting and fleeing are not viable options. Being frozen, these internal family members are not only unable to protect the Self, but their emotions are so extreme that they force other, non-frozen members of the system into hyperprotective roles, which sets in motion a vicious cycle of compensatory behaviors—like two sailors trying desperately to steady a boat that would in fact be steady if not for their constant leaning back and forth in fear of how their counterpart might cause them to capsize.
If a given part—typically a Manager—is not protecting the Self, it likely functions to protect some other part of the system—typically an Exile. But managers are misguided in their go-to method for protecting exiles: they try to keep them exiled. But what all exiles want and need more than anything else is to be freed from exile and acknowledged as valuable parts of the system. Let’s say you were taught as a child—either implicitly, explicitly, or both—that anger is a bad emotion, never to be expressed. And let’s say that your parents stressed the importance of physical attractiveness and people-pleasing. As a means of basic survival, you would probably, unconsciously, give more power to the parts of yourself that fret about people liking you—because you’re so attractive and so darn nice—and far less power to the parts that long to be assertive. Again, Schwartz talks in terms of resources, saying that we all have the internal resources we need to navigate life effectively and thrive instead of just survive, but these resources are often unequally distributed. The result might be a person who displays impressive discipline when it comes to diet and exercise, but finds that saying no to other people is basically impossible. The approval-seeking parts have too much access to resources, whereas the assertive parts have too little.
And what’s more, those parts most likely don’t want to have so much responsibility. (Remember from Spiderman? With great power comes great responsibility.) Schwartz conceives parts as people who have been forced into their respective roles. But, much like a housewife who possesses feelings and skills that her housewife label does not accommodate, a people-pleasing part of one’s internal family system might be better suited for a much different role. The aforementioned self-discipline that enables people to work out for two hours a day and maintain a strict vegan diet, for instance, might find that its talents are put to better use in, say, writing a novel, starting a non-profit, or otherwise pursuing values that are inherent to them and not shoved into them by family of origin figures or society at large. (Of course, if veganism and excessive exercise reflect your genuine values and are not causing harm to other parts of your internal system, more power to you.)
=
When I was twelve years old, I developed an eating disorder. I decided that I was going to be “healthy,” and back then—in 1994—fat-free was considered synonymous with good health. So I limited myself to ten grams of fat a day, and I exercised obsessively. And after a solid year of that behavior, I was alarmingly thin. My parents got me into therapy and I was put on a meal plan, and within another year, my weight had stabilized and I was at least sometimes okay with that (as opposed to crying every time I looked in the mirror). When I reflect on that time through an IFS lens, I can see that I was in firefighter mode for a significant portion of my days. Every time I ate a meal or sometimes even a snack, I had to exercise afterwards. If I were to name the part that never failed to make me exercise—even if it meant being in a hotel room with my family and staying awake until I knew they were all asleep so that I could lie on the floor in the dark and do sit-ups and leg-lifts—I’d call that part The Redeemer. As a firefighter, it took such thorough control of me that all I could feel was the compulsion to exercise. I see now that this exercise was a form of self-soothing. Other common techniques of firefighters include numbing activities such as self-harming, binge-eating, drug or alcohol abuse, or promiscuity. Schwartz even mentions shoplifting as a firefighter technique.
For me at 12 and 13, The Redeemer served to squelch the fires of a part I’ll call The Guilty One. Every time I ate—even if not a milligram of fat crossed my lips—The Guilty One would come out of exile. She threatened to overrun the whole system with the intensity of her emotion, so The Redeemer would take control. After finishing yet another work-out routine or taking yet another walk or bike ride, I’d be redeemed—i.e. The Guilty One would be gone. Or at least temporarily silenced. Schwartz says that when people are often dominated by firefighters, they tend to be struggling with various addictions. My eating disorder was definitely an addiction—a behavioral addiction. And it also came with other symptoms. I had to drink at least 64 ounces of water a day, for instance, because that is what all the magazines said. And for the same reason I had to get at least 8 hours of sleep a night. Sometimes I had to chug a ton of water before bed in order to meet my quota. And I’ll spare you the list of strange behaviors that helped ensure I’d get to bed on time each night (most of them involved exercise). These obsessions with water and sleep (the latter of which was actually an obsession with time) were most certainly driven by a Manager part. I’ll call her The Health Nut.
Schwartz says that people who are chronically depressed are often dominated by managers. But surely a person can struggle with addiction and be chronically depressed, in which case maybe there’s equal representation of managers and firefighters? I do think that’s what was happening with me during that dark time. The only way to keep The Guilty One from coming out of exile would’ve been to never eat, and I loved eating too much to ever attempt full-on self-starvation. So, out she’d come every time, and then The Redeemer would do her thing, until the next meal.
I don’t think I was dominated by exiles during that time, but just for the record, Schwartz says that when people are dominated by exiles, they’re likely to experience bouts of intense sadness or fear. And even when exiles are effectively kept in exile for long stretches of time—entire lifetimes, perhaps, in some cases—they’re still basically running the show. Managers and firefighters wouldn’t need to exist if there weren’t any exiles to begin with. But unfortunately most of us are socialized to exile various parts of ourselves, usually at a very young age. And of course, all of it happens outside of our conscious awareness, as do the exhausting patterns and vicious cycles that can result.
Until, that is, we become more conscious and aware.
=
Interestingly enough, Schwartz predominantly developed IFS in his clinical work with bulimic clients. He says in the book that you can’t study bulimia without “being struck by the parallels among the conflicts within these individuals, within their families, within various cultures, and within our society.” Schwartz provides the case example of a client he calls Nina, a woman in her late twenties who is grieving the sudden, untimely death of her husband and who is caught in a vicious cycle of bingeing, purging, and excessive exercise, as well as a series of failed rebound relationships. In their very first session together, Nina became overwhelmed by a frantic feeling, which Schwartz recognized as an exiled part getting triggered, or breaking out of exile. So he asked Nina to put that feeling into a room by itself. This “empty room technique” allows people to separate from a given feeling, and typically, as a result, see that feeling as one of their internal family system members, or parts. Nina was quickly able to see that her frantic feeling looked like a little girl, maybe 6 or 7 years old, and she felt sad for her because she looked lonely. This sadness is a good sign because it means that Nina is aware enough of the part’s existence in the first place to know that she feels anything toward it, and because that type of sadness is very similar to compassion, which is crucial to any kind of psychological or emotional healing.
The next thing Schwartz did was ask Nina if he could talk directly to the Little Girl (her official name now). He directed Nina to let the Little Girl’s voice come out of her (Nina’s) mouth, while Nina imagined herself sitting across the room in another chair. This IFS method is called direct access. After his conversation with the Little Girl, in which he asked her to separate from Nina, with the understanding that she would soon get her needs met in the system, Schwartz asked Nina to identify other parts that reacted strongly to his conversation with the Little Girl. By tracking down the voices she heard or feelings she felt as Schwartz talked to the Little Girl, Nina identified three other parts: Superwoman, the Protector, and the Old Lady. The latter part was a firefighter, while the former two were managers.
Managerial parts are often inner critics or moralizers who shoulder the burden of perfectionism. (Yes, perfectionism is a burden.) They tend to believe that if they can make the person perfect, then he or she will finally be redeemed—especially in the eyes of whomever originally suggested, implied, or outright stated the person was somehow fundamentally flawed. Managers can also be like parentified children: neglected, suffering, and scared. And as can be the case in actual families, the more competent these managers become, the more the system relies on them, and the more overwhelmed they feel by their inappropriate responsibilities and power. These managerial parts come to believe that they are solely responsible for any success and safety the person has achieved, and as a result they lose more and more trust in the ability of the Self to lead.
Schwartz says that when managers are in control, therapists should receive their explicit permission before working with exiles. He says those parts have good reasons for enacting the roles they do, and before asking them to stop, their concerns must be respectfully addressed. What Schwartz typically says of exiles to managers is, “The parts that hold your pain and fear can change if they are taken care of. Their extreme state is the result of being stuck in the past and of having been exiled. Once retrieved and cared for, they will let go of their extreme feelings and will be valuable, enjoyable parts, and you [the managers] will not have to stay in this extreme role of trying to keep them out.” To her own Superwoman part, Nina said that, while it was true that the exiles could be hurt more easily if released from exile, they could also be more easily helped in that case, because Nina would have access to them. Apparently, though, Superwoman was dubious and would need some more convincing.
But in the case of Nina’s first session with Schwartz, an exile was already in control and the therapist therefore did not need permission from any managers to work with that very sensitive part. Such instances are golden opportunities for therapists to earn credibility with managers by calming the exile, differentiating it from the client’s Self, and essentially returning it to exile (albeit temporarily).
If all of this sounds to you exactly like Schwartz assures readers it isn’t—a product of his fevered imagination—you’re probably not alone. In using IFS as a therapist myself, I’ve never spoken directly to a client’s parts (the direct access technique), and I’ve never succeeded in helping a client discover more than two or three parts, whereas Schwartz helps Nina identify eight: the Little Girl, Superwoman, the Protector, the Old Lady, the Flower Child, the Barbie Doll, the Monster, and the Scared One. She eventually discovered that the Monster—an exiled angry part who felt ignored and powerless—was actually protecting the Scared One, another exiled part, a girl who looked to be four or five years old and would not even raise her head to meet Nina’s gaze. Well of course, you might be thinking. How can she raise her head when she isn’t even real???
Or maybe that’s just what I’m thinking. I do have a lot of respect for internal family systems therapy, but I might ultimately be too skeptical to take it as far—or you might say deep—as Schwartz does. If my own therapist asked me to put one of my parts in a room by itself and tell her what I saw, I’d probably go along with it and do my best. But if she then asked that part to speak through my mouth, or if she started speaking directly to that part through me, I predict there’d be some eye-rolling and/or heavy sighing. Schwartz would probably say that such resistance indicates interference from a hidden part of my internal family system. And, keeping in mind that any extreme feelings or thoughts do not characterize the Self, he’d set about finding the hidden part by frequently asking me how I’m feeling, and listening carefully for even slight departures from my compassionate or curious Self.
Which speaks to what I can totally get on board with when it comes to IFS: its unwavering trust in and respect for the Self that every human being contains at their core. It’s the Buddhist concept of basic goodness, which I’ve heard defined as a fundamental workability. Schwartz asserts that “there is nothing bad inside of you that is you.” He says that we were all born good, and that anything shameful or destructive within us was “pumped” there by people or events. Through processes like internal family systems therapy, it can be pumped back out.
=
As you can see, IFS requires a certain level of commitment to a very particular way of conceptualizing one’s own internal world. And it can get complicated. I tend to lose interest, for instance, in what parts are managers, exiles, or firefighters. That exiles can become receptacles for feelings that other parts—I assume namely managers— don’t want to carry, feels overwrought to me. I’m mostly interested in what a given part says and the way a person feels when that part is talking to them. People will often mention a part of themselves very quickly and then move on, like “A part of me just didn’t understand, but I get it,” and then they’ll go on to empathize with another person, justifying their behavior. But what about the part that just didn’t understand? What does that part have to say? And how does the person feel toward that part’s lack of understanding? Is it okay to just not understand something? And how long has that part been there, not understanding things but then being told by some other part that her confusion doesn’t deserve attention, compassion, or validation?
For all his complex conceptualizations of the human psyche, Schwartz does a great job at consistently widening his lens and bringing IFS back to basics. He says, for example, that asking the simple question, “What do you say to yourself?” is very useful in accessing a person’s inner dialogue. Then the therapist can translate with “So a part of you says you’re selfish…” thereby seamlessly shifting the conversation into IFS language. The therapist can then ask the all-important question, “How do you feel toward that part?” Follow-up questions could include, “Why do you think it does what it does? How often do your hear from it? How much influence does it have over you? How much influence do you have over it? How would you like your relationship with it to change?”
Of course, some people won’t always need a therapist to ask these and similar questions. You can ask them of yourself. The next time you get emotional about something or otherwise think or feel things that seem extreme in a given context, after you’ve calmed down, ask yourself what part took over for your Self in that moment, and why. If it helps to think in terms of managers, firefighters, and exiles, then definitely do so. But it can also be immensely liberating to remind yourself that when your thought, emotions, or behaviors get extreme (and this occurs on a spectrum and will look different for everyone), then your Self is no longer running the show. You need not identify with those thoughts, emotions, or behaviors. What you must do, though, is take responsibility for them. While some sort of trauma—be it Big T or Little T—is likely the reason that polarizations and imbalances in your internal family system exist, and in that way you are not to blame for those polarizations and imbalances, you are still the only person who can take responsibility for them. It’s one of the more brutal examples of how life isn’t fair. “It’s not my fault, but it’s my responsibility,” should be the motto for much of humanity.
I’m using of the word “responsibility” quite literally here, as rooted in the word “response.” You must respond to your different parts—your different thoughts and emotions and the behaviors they engender—and you must listen for their response, and thereby engage in a dialogue with them. I think most people would probably benefit from having a therapist guide them in this work, but not every person needs that. We can have conversations with our different parts on our very own, either in our heads or, perhaps more effectively, on paper, in the form of journaling. I’m a big fan of journaling because it not only forces us to give our full attention to such internal dialogue, but in writing it down, we can actually see our own thoughts, and there’s something powerful about that. Our feelings and cognitions are so often just happening in the background, coloring our every experience, the water we’re swimming in without knowing we’re wet. When we write them down, we not only separate from them—literally get them out and onto something else—but we can see them more clearly. And often what we see about them is how utterly absurd they are, either in their repetition, their extremeness, or their cruelty.
One thing I like to imagine is how I’d feel about a given part of myself—a given voice inside my head—if it were an actual person following me around, saying the things it says. The answer is usually that I would feel some kind of contempt for it. I would be appalled by its behavior and demand to know where it got the nerve to say such things to me. Or I might even pity it for being so obviously unhappy and full of self-hatred that it had to take its misery out on me. And maybe that pity could be transmuted into compassion. And that’s where some real healing could happen.
=
While I don’t expect this blog post will inspire everyone to run out and find an IFS therapist, I do hope it inspires people to think of their internal worlds differently. Making this episode has certainly had the latter effect on me. I’ve been irritable this week, and thanks to being immersed in IFS stuff I’ve been relating to my irritability differently. It feels like an exiled part. The Grump, we could call her. Everything annoys her. It has also occurred to me that my irritability might actually be a result of studying IFS. In getting more curious about my own subpersonalities and ways of being extreme, it could be that I’ve been sending the message to exiled parts that they can come out of hiding.
And also: I’ve had good reason for feeling irritable this week. Lots of annoying things happened! The world is an obnoxious place. Sometimes it’s just too much. So my goal is not to eradicate The Grump. Being prone to irritability is a part of my personality. My goal is to befriend it without being controlled by it, and to respond to it with compassion. As they say in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, everyone must be welcome to the party. You can’t respond with compassion to something you’re ignoring or actively shunning. It sucks to feel irritable and annoyed by everything. That feeling deserves compassion. Which is another aspect of IFS that I love, when you strip it way down: it fosters self-compassion.
But what is that, even? As I’ve mentioned in at least one other blog post, the word compassion literally means to suffer with. When we show compassion to others in this way, it could look like a memory I have of my little niece, Marielle, who was probably three or four years old when this happened (she’s ten now). It’s one of those teeny tiny memories that sticks around when it seems like it shouldn’t have made such a mark. Marielle had just washed her hands, and a drop of water had traveled up her long-sleeved shirt as she reached up for the hand towel. She hated the way that water felt, creeping up her sleeve, and she started to cry. Without thinking, I said, “Oh, I hate the way that feels, too. I’m sorry that happened.” I really do hate it when water gets under my long sleeves, and I really was sorry. And Marielle instantly stopped crying. She looked almost shocked. I don’t think it had occurred to her that someone else had had that exact experience and also hated it. I may have then rolled her sleeve up and wiped her arm off, which I’m sure also helped soothe her, but she’d already received what she really needed in that moment: to have her experience recognized and validated. We can respond to our own difficult experiences in a similar way. With a loving acknowledgment of suffering. Of course I know that my niece was not actually suffering, but you get my point.
Each of us contains a loving, compassionate Self within. We can think of it as an inner Best Friend, and our primary responsibility in life is to make sure our relationship with that inner Friend is thriving. Every other relationship depends on that one. But so many people go about their days ignoring their Selves. And just like those other relationships, the one we have with our Selves requires quality time and attention. For me, this looks like meditating, doing yoga, and engaging in creative activities and projects (including this radio show) that reflect my deepest values. For you, it might look different. But however you get there, the day that you can honestly say, “I am my own best friend,” is the day that you are truly free.
