Internal Family Systems: Working With Our Parts
Have you ever felt stuck in an internal conflict, with a part of you pulling you one direction, and another part pulling you in another? I’ll give you an example: when my four-year-old is refusing to come to the table for dinner, I often find myself grappling between a part that feels angry and frustrated with how stubborn she can be, and a part that knows this is a normal behaviour for four-year-olds and wants to be gentle and patient. Having different parts of us that think and feel differently is the typical human experience. We are all complex beings that are shaped into who we are through interactions between our genes and experiences.
Over the past couple of years I have become very interested in Internal Family Systems (IFS), and in 2024 I completed IFSI Level 1 training. I am finding it so powerful both professionally and personally to explore and heal from this perspective. Here’s the basic points that can help you understand if this approach can be helpful for you:
We all have a Self. Self is the unwounded, authentic core of each of us. Self contains qualities including Compassion, Creativity, Curiosity, Confidence, Courage, Calm, Connectedness, and Clarity, (the 8 C’s of Self), as well as Presence, Persistence, Perspective, Playfulness, and Patience (the 5 P’s of Self). The goal is to have Self lead our inner systems.
We all have parts. There are no bad parts and at their core they are all well-intentioned. Our parts can work well with Self when our system is balanced. When our parts become extreme they can be quite dysregulating and take over, interfering with our ability to lead with Self-energy.
Our Parts and our Self interact in a complex system. Our system develops ways of functioning that can be helpful or harmful. By increasing access to Self-energy we can work with parts to begin to make changes in the system to facilitate healing and harmony.
If you’re noticing confused parts, that’s okay. This type of work isn’t a typical top-down, logical therapy approach (like CBT, for example), and I think this shift from the socially and culturally normalized way of thinking and seeing the world is part of what makes IFS work so well. IFS can help us access another level of understanding that isn’t coming from a fully intellectual place. If other, top-down therapies don’t seem to be working for you, the different perspective that IFS offers might help you.
When I started learning about IFS I had a lot of skeptical parts show up. That’s okay! In IFS all parts are welcome. We’re not here to make any parts go away, or even to change if they don’t want to. We’re here to learn more and see if anyone in the system wants to work with us to change. Often our extreme parts don’t want to keep doing what they’re doing but they don’t know what else to do. They need our Self-leadership to show them that there are other possibilities, that change can happen and it’ll be okay.
Really all you need going into this type of work is a willingness to try. My job is to guide our conversation, noticing parts and Self along the way. As we go, our goal is to increase Self-energy and explore the parts that show up. As we do this, we often find that the extreme parts begin to soften, and over time our wounded parts can begin to heal so that our system can reorganize, providing increased internal balance and harmony. If IFS therapy sounds like something you would like to explore, feel free to reach out for an initial consultation.