How a Podcast Helped Me Understand Internal Family Systems (IFS)

I had heard the term IFS and the name Internal Family Systems loosely and had made some assumptions: It’s for families (it’s not), it’s a process only a therapist can do with you (that’s not true), and it implies we all have Multiple Personality Disorder (we don’t).

What I know now is that IFS is a quietly powerful way of connecting to our inner voices, feelings, and to our core Self-energy, which is thoughtful and wise. This connection allows us to heal the young, innocent, traumatized, scared, and ashamed parts inside us.

The Podcasts that Started it All for Me

The ah-ha moment for me came when I was listening to the We Can Do Hard Things podcast with Glennon, Abby, and Amanda. Their guest for three episodes was Dr. Richard Schwartz, the founder of the IFS Institute. He was coming out with a new book, “No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with The Internal Family Systems Model.”

Dick, as he asked to be called, explained the fundamentals of the model through his conversation with the hosts:

• We are inherently good.

• We’re all multiple. The idea that we have one mind, out of which different thoughts and emotions, urges and impulses emanate, is false. As Glennon said in the podcast, “We keep trying to figure out our “I” and the reason it’s so confusing is that we are a WE.” We contradict ourselves because we contain multitudes.

• These autonomous, little minds inside us are what we call ‘Thinking’.

• Once you can get curious about them, they’ll share their secret history of how they had to do what they do at some point, and how they got stuck in that role.

• They are like kids in a family— they start out innocent, pure, open, and eager. They are basically inner children. However, traumas and hard things force them out of their naturally valuable roles into extreme ones that can be damaging. This often freezes them in the time of the trauma.

• Our parts very often have no idea how old we actually are because they are frozen in time. It still thinks you are 10 years old, and it still has to protect you the way it did back then. This is why they are called Protector Parts in IFS.

• Parts are often “burdened” by extreme beliefs and emotions that come into the system during trauma, and they adhere to them almost like a virus that drives the way they operate.

• The most significant discovery is that, in addition to the burdens these parts carry, once you open up space inside and get to know them, they also possess wonderful qualities.

• At our essence, who we are is the Self (big S!), and that can’t be damaged. When we can access the Self, it knows how to relate to these parts in a healing way. It also knows how to relate to other people in a healing way.

• The SELF is the wise one in the system. We know when we are living in this Self-energy when we experience the 8 C’s:

  • Curiousity

  • Calm

  • Confidence

  • Compassion

  • Courage

  • Creativity

  • Connectedness

  • Clarity

• When we don’t feel one of these 8 C’s, we know we are in a part of us.

• When we access the Self-energy space within us, we can then use that space to become curious about whatever part we want to work with.

• There are no bad parts. Some parts have behaviors that are damaging to ourselves and others, yes. But these parts are making us act this way because they think they are keeping us safe.

This is the part about how the eight C’s feel inside that really made sense to me: Dick used an example in his system of his parts. They sit at a big conference table, and there are all sorts of parts of him around the table.

At the head of the table is Self, who knows and is made up of the eight C’s listed above.

“So at the head of the table, you’re feeling pretty calm. You have a lot of confidence relative to the parts and you’re very curious about them. You’re not assuming things about them, and you’re open to hearing from them. You also have compassion for them. You have a kind of built-in care for them that they can sense. You see them clearly.

When you are blended with some of these protective parts, all you see are distorted images of these parts. When you are in Self, you can see that it’s just a little kid. It’s not a critic. So there is clarity.

And then you can be much more creative in how you relat to them. So you have creativity and you fell connected to them.

You also feel courage. You have to have courage to actually go to the places in your scpyche that otherwise you’d be really scared to go to.”

The boardroom imagery really helped me understand the concept of IFS, because I could feel something inside of me jumping up and down, and screaming, “This is it! This is us!”

Back to the podcasT

Dick continues about IFS that the part of you that is cutting, won’t let you eat, eats too much, yells at your kids, buys too much stuff… these are not good or bad parts of you. These parts are really just trying to help you. They think they need to do these things. Because often times, they did! The cutting part could distract you from the abuse. The not eating part could control something for you in a wildly uncontrollable childhood. The yelling part is yelling because it’s afraid that if it doesn’t yell, another part might physically hurt the child.

I highly recommend listening to the third episode in the series for the next part, because I cannot explain the magic that happens when we talk directly to our parts. If you want to skip to this part in the podcast, it’s at about the 18-minute mark. Dick walks Glennon through the IFS process with her bulimic part. It is absolutely riveting to listen to.

MY Parts

Some part of me was absolutely riveted by what I witnessed with Glennon, so I listened to the next few episodes where Dick works with Glennon’s wife, Abby, and then Glennon’s sister, Amanda. His conversation with Amanda was the one that broke my system wide open.

Amanda didn’t know what part she wanted to focus on because she had a few:

• a part of her that desperately didn’t want to be out of control

• a part of her that was so angry, scared, and lonely that she feels like she is in control of things.

• a part of her that was exhausted and tortured and just wanted to be able to stop deciding that everything is good enough.

• And she had another part that felt like she must be hypervigilant and make sure that things are good enough so that everything doesn’t go to shit.

• She said she felt desperate to feel satisfied. She always feels that things are wrong or reacts to things that aren’t good enough. And she wants to be “satisfyable”. She recounts with a trembling voice that the last thing her ex-husband ever said to her was, “You will never be satisfied.”

• This illustrates how two parts can be polarized and feel opposite of each other, creating a lot of tension and chaos in our system. Amanda has one part that desperately wants to be satisfied, and another that thinks it will never be.

Oh. OH. OHHHHHH. Did I feel that!

Amanda goes on to dig deeper with Dick, and she finds a part that she calls her General Manager part. And inside my system, my General Manager said, “I’m here inside you, like Amanda’s Manager!” My General Manager was also really worried that things wouldn't be good enough. That we’d get in trouble, or worse, fail. And failure would mean losing the love of the people that we love.

This is when I encountered my first part, which has set me on this IFS path to learning, growth, and healing. I read everything I could about the subject, listened to every podcast, and then discovered the IFS Institute, where Dick has built robust training programs to help practitioners learn and practice the model. I signed up for formal training. I’m now IFS-Informed (since I’m not a therapist, I can’t be certified. Informed is as close as I can get!)

If you are interested in learning more about IFS, I recommend you check out the resources tab on my website. I have links to books, meditations, and other resources that can help you learn more.