WiP #22 Internal Family Systems: Welcoming All Your Parts is the Pathway to Change 🌐 🧩 🛤️
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Internal Family Systems: Embracing Your Parts is the Pathway to Change
🗂 This Week in Work in Progress
Status Update: Come meet some of my Parts. Grab some inspiration to get to know yours.
Inspiration: Walt Whitman demonstrates love for the multitudes within.
Lighter Note: Some lighter Parts stuff, including a bedtime story and fun fashion.
🔔 Status Update
Ever been in a situation like this?
Friday’s winding down and you’re considering plans for the evening. Part of you is envisioning a date night with the wife. You know this one-on-one, romantic time is important to nurture and sustain the relationship. But part of you knows that you can get this project off your desk tonight, if you just focus and plow through. That would please your boss to no end, and maybe help move you up the ladder. Part of you just wants to crawl into bed and sleep, coz you’re friggin’ exhausted. And part of you is craving a kickback with some beers and the boys. It’s been a while.
The deets may differ, but we’ve all had situations where we’re pulled in multiple directions. And it feels like parts of us are battling for the win.
This happens because we’re actually, literally, made up of Parts. Says Richard Schwartz, author of the breakout bestseller, No Bad Parts, “Imbalanced systems, whether internal or external, will tend to polarize.” That’s what happens when you have competing needs, wants, and desires. In the same way that a group of people often disagree on how to spend an evening, so does the internal family of Parts living within.
In my past several newsletters, I’ve been alluding to Parts without actually defining terms. We’re all accustomed to speaking this way (“Part of me wants to do X but part of me wants to do Y”), so you’ve understood my drift. But today, I want to dig deeper. Today, I want to lay out the broad strokes of Schwartz’s therapy model, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and encourage you to start a dialogue with all your Parts.
I’m passionate about this model (it’s now the primary theoretical approach I use as a therapist, coach, and educator), because it refuses to pathologize people or their Parts. Instead, it heals wounded Parts – bits of us that broke off through pain and trauma and took on a life of their own. In IFS, we never abandon a Part. Instead, we free each Part up to express itself in positive, helpful ways. In other words, we heal the dysfunctional family within and live a balanced, cohesive life together.
I’ve been trained in IFS, but, perhaps more importantly, Richard Schwartz worked with me to free one of my Parts, Joy, who you’ll meet in a bit. He designed this model, has headed all research and training, and founded the IFS Institute. So, yeah, I am a lucky ducky.
Now that we’ve cleared up my credentials, let’s figure out why you should care about this model and your Parts.
IFS Basics
According to IFS, the human psyche is not monolithic but, rather, is made up of Parts and the big-S Self, which is our core being, our best self, our essence. The little-s self – what we refer to as “myself” – represents the whole, messy, often conflictual internal system. Here’s a handy map of the territory:
Everyone has some number of Parts and all of those Parts are good. They established themselves to help us survive some challenge. They may take their role too seriously for what’s needed currently, in our adult lives, and that can cause problems (imagine all your decisions being made by children). But their intentions are only good – to serve the system well.
Think of your Parts as subpersonalities, who carry your burdens – difficult emotions and painful beliefs absorbed into your system through life experience. I see them as tiny people living inside me. And, in fact, the better you come to know your own parts, the more they’ll feel that way to you. There’s one tragic catch: we haven’t been taught to be aware of, pay attention to, extend compassion to, or work with these parts. Instead, we do our best to ignore any Part of us that we don’t like and shower ourselves with self-criticism when those Parts take charge. We need to learn to love and respect our family members. Parts can transform when they’re healed or cared for by the Self.
Everyone has a Self – the essential core of our being that is by nature a compassionate presence and has the capacity to be an active leader. The Self embodies the 8 C’s: Compassion, Clarity, Calm, Creativity, Courage, Connection, Curiosity, and Confidence. You’ll know when you’re operating as Self. It’s an awe-some feeling. Our goal is to lead more often from the Self, while always honoring the Parts.
Meet Some of My Parts
The Business Coach: a Manager Protector Part
Formed at a young age, when she realized that she’d have to raise herself and also be the family caregiver, she holds intuition, compassion, courage, and confidence. She’s great at solving other people’s problems but can over-function. She looks like an adult, but she’s a kid. So she’s sometimes too proactive. She dives into problem-solving when that’s not needed or wanted – sometimes when no one asks for her opinion or help. Oy. We’re working on adding wisdom to the mix.
Joy, an Exile Part
Joy wasn’t always smiling. She would have been better named Terror, when I met her. She held much of my early abuse in the form of unresolved and hidden pain. After work in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and a session with Schwartz, I was able to figuratively rescue her from all that trauma. I gave her the freedom to release her burdens – the pain she’d been carrying all these years. What emerged was an explosion of creativity and a boatload of joy. When I visit her now, she’s almost always drawing, a skill that grown-up me lacks. This little one was born twice – once from pain and once from love.
Distracto: a Firefighter Protector Part
When things feel a little tricky emotionally, it turns away. It’s also where ADHD lives. Or it is ADHD. I don't really know. I’ll keep you posted. But here’s what I do know: I used to find my distractibility maddening. It’s still frustrating at times, but it’s also kind of funny. Because Distracto is the happiest, most fun creature you could ever hope to know. It rarely talks. Mostly it just floats around, laughing and dancing and generally having a blast. It’s hard to spend time with it without a surge of pleasure. Of course, I still need to get stuff done. So, we have an arrangement. When necessary, Distracto will hang out in a separate room, so that I can speak with other Parts or stay focused on external tasks.
I’ve developed skills at negotiating within my complex internal family. But my Parts still go at it sometimes, similar to the Friday night conflict I described up top. I’ve been in many a boundary-challenging situation of late, for instance. Joy gets freaked out, votes for silence, and wants to hide. The Business Coach demands immediate and strict boundary enforcement. And Distracto does its damnedest to ensure that everyone forgets to address the matter at all. It can be quite a circus. But, with attention and compassion for all of them, Self usually emerges to lead us through the challenge.
My work with Parts has been rewarding – with patients, clients, students, and, most importantly, with myself. I’m still not a glowing orb of Self energy 🤣😂🤣😂🤣 but I’m working on it.
Meeting Your Own Parts
Meeting everyone and helping them work as a team is non-trivial because the internal family operates just like an external family and, in fact, just like any other system. The main goal of any system is to maintain homeostasis. NOT to change. So, a shift in any Part of the system throws everything out of whack until a new balance can be created and sustained.
In other words, expect a rocky but rewarding journey if you start along this road. I can’t recommend No Bad Parts highly enough. Buy the book and read it. Then, pick up the audiobook and let Schwartz guide you through the exercises, pressing pause whenever you need more time. And you can find certified clinicians to assist with this process through IFS Institute.
If you really want to change your life, the place to start is within. We all know that. But that’s easier said than done. Now, we have a map of the territory and a guide.
Do you already recognize some of your Parts? Who would like to get to know better? Please share. I’d love to know!!!
💡 Inspiration
"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)."
– Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself
I love the way Whitman loves himself here. Notice he’s not angry at himself for his contradictions. Instead, he sees the magnificence in his multitudes. He would have loved the IFS model, which encourages us to embrace each individual member of the internal family.
From Richard Schwartz, once again, “Any approach that increases your inner drill sergeant’s impulse to shame you into behaving (and make you feel like a failure if you can’t) will do no better in internal families than it does in external ones, in which parents adopt shaming tactics to control their children.”
And from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Enough said.
That’s what this quote triggers in me. What does it say to you?
🤡 On a Lighter Note
Some lighter parts stuff...
One way to honor your Parts is through fashion, hairstyle, and makeup choices. Any of you brave enough to try on one of these? 🎩 👗
Richard Schwartz explains Self in 3 minutes. Soak it in. 😌
Cuddle up with a blanky & a bottle (a cocktail will do). Bruce Moose & the What-ifs helps us see some exiles in action. 🦌
Apropos of nothing: NASA's Artemis 1 rocket successfully launched yesterday morning (4th attempt is the charm) for its 1.3-million-mile mission around the moon and back to Earth. Enjoy live reports here. The thing is solar-powered and so cool. It’s Parts are so sci-fi! 🚀
Want more help with the change process? Have a look at Change and the Search for Community .
🎀 It’s a Wrap
Enjoyed the read? You can share the love with fellow curious minds.
Until next week, take care of yourself and someone else if you’re able.
Lyssa