Introduction To Internal Family Systems
by Richard C. Schwartz PhD
This is an intriguing book that positions the concept that we each contain an “internal family” of distinct parts - and that treating these parts with curiosity, respect, and empathy vastly expands our capacity to heal. I found the ideas of this book enlightening and a guide to self-discovery and transformation. After reading the book, I sketched out my internal family visually, identifying parts that had assumed extreme roles as a form of protection - the managers and firefighters that protected the exiles.
Understanding your parts can bring a deeper understanding of who you are and compassion to the parts you may dislike or drive you to do things that conflict with your desired character. The primary goal is to become Self-led, where you emerge as the leader of your parts and leverage them to excel in your work, relationships, and life. The outcomes of Self-leadership are the qualities that guide you to live a purposeful life - calmness, clarity, curiosity, compassion, confidence, courage, creativity, and connectedness.
The YouTube video at the bottom of this post is a recent Rich Roll podcast that discusses the multiplicity of the mind with IFS creator Richard Schwartz.
My Notes
Thoughts and emotions live with us, and we have to relate to them one way or another.
What we call “thinking” is often our inner dialogues with different parts of us.
Emotions and parts emanate from inner personalities I call parts of you.
It is this understanding of our disturbing thoughts and emotions - that they are manifestations of inner personalities that have been forced into extreme roles by events in our lives - that leads us to relate to them differently.
As our parts feel more accepted and less threatened or attacked, they transform into their naturally valuable state.
The most wonderful discovery I have made is that as you do this work, you release, or liberate, what I call your Self or your True Self.
If you don’t have any idea of who you really are, you can’t become that person.
The last place many of us have looked for peace and joy is inside ourselves.
The more your notice - step back from - rather than become or identify with your thoughts and emotions, the more you relax into being the “you” who is not your thoughts and emotions.
When a person is Self-led, they don’t need to be forced by moral or legal rules to do the right thing.
We all have pools of pain and shame, and protective strategies that are reinforced by our culture. We all come to distrust our Self and put on a range of masks. Until those pools are fully drained and our protectors fully relax, Self-leadership will be fleeting at best.
Calmness: You ride on the roller coaster of life like everyone else. It’s just that the ride that used to produce a white-knuckled clinging more often becomes interesting and sometimes painful or joyful.
Clarity: I define clarity as the ability to perceive situations without distortion from extreme beliefs and emotions. “beginners mind”, a perspective in which many possibilities exist because of the absence of preconception and projection.
Curiosity: When we are able to become nonjudgmentally interested in even our most despised inner demons, we find those internal dialogues to be enlightening and transformative.
Compassion: When your feel compassion, you see a person suffering, you feel empathy for them, and you know that they have a Self that, once released, can relieve their own misery. If people relieve their own suffering, they learn to trust their own Self, and they learn whatever lesson the suffering has to teach them.
Confidence: As people heal their vulnerable parts, their critics relax and their defenses drop. They feel Self-confident in the sense that their Self has healed those parts and has shown its ability to protect them or to comfort them if they are hurt again.
Courage: When a person is Self-led, they not only have the courage to act but also the courage to be accountable for acting.
Creativity: To allow for real Self-expression requires the courage to release all the creative parts we have locked in inner containers.
Connectedness: As we increasingly embody Self, we will feel a growing sense of connectedness to all the Selves around us. People often find themselves spending more time with others in who they can sense the Self.
If you are watching yourself, that’s a signal that a part is present.
As your parts come to trust you more, you will find that your ability to quickly separate and enter the Self state dramatically improves such that you can live increasing amounts of life from that place.
The protective parts that run your life must come to trust that it’s safe to permit more Self-leadership.
As each part drops its extreme role, all the parts begin to change their relationships with one another, eventually becoming an integrated, harmonious group.
Many of your parts can’t change until the parts they protect or are embattled with have changed first. If you stay curious with a part, you will learn about the reasons if’s afraid to change and that sometimes those reasons are realistic.
Ideally, your Self is present for every activity and interaction, and the appropriate parts are close by, offering suggestions, blending their emotions or abilities with your Self, or sometimes even fully taking over your body.
When a part does take over, it’s with permission of the Self rather than being an automatic reaction to step in and protect.
The protected parts are called exiles because they are the vulnerable ones that we try to lock up in inner prisons or leave frozen in the past.
We’re exiling not only memories, sensations, and emotions but also the parts of us that were hurt most by those events. These are often our most sensitive, innocent, open and intimacy-seeking parts.
I call protection parts that are responsible for our day-to-day safety the managers.
Managers are the parts of you that want to control everything.
The best way to understand managers is to think of them as striving to preempt anything that might touch our exiles. They want to protect our exiles, but they also disdain them for being weak and needy.
When you get to know them, you find that most managers are exhausted by their roles and are much more than their roles.
We all have parts that go into action at the point to put out the first, so I call them firefighters.
Firefighters do whatever it takes to deliver us out of the red-alert condition.
Firefighters will use virtually any thought, activity, or substance if it works.
Firefighters are reactive - they frantically jump into action as soon as the exiles are upset and their fire starts. Their urgency makes them impulsively unconcerned about consequences.
When firefighters take over, they can make us feel as if we’re possessed by something out of our control, so they make easy targets for demonization.
These three types of parts (exiles, managers, and firefighters) exist because of all the pain and shame you accrued in your life and the ways you were taught to relate to that pain and shame.
Since you didn’t learn how to heal that pain and shame, you had to exile it, which led to the need for all of these protectors.
Your parts don’t disappear - they just transform into roles they prefer.
As you get to know these parts and learn why they are the way they are - that is, you witness their stories from the past about how they were forced into the roles they are in - they change.
It turns out that there aren’t any inherently bad parts, just good parts in bad roles - good parts carrying extreme beliefs or emotions from things that happened in the past.
As your parts separate from the “you” that is left, you will begin experiencing and exhibiting those valuable leadership qualities (curiosity, compassion, and so on) and other ones because that is who you really are.
All that parts need to unburden - that is, to unload the extreme beliefs and emotions that keep them locked in rigid roles - is to believe that you fully understand what happened in the past when they acquired their burdens.
Ask this part to show you what it wants you to know about the past.
Once a vulnerable part has released its burden in this way, the parts that were protecting it or keeping it locked up often relax and become more interested in being healed themselves.