Welcome to your inner world
I need to let you in on something. It’s probably remiss of me that I haven’t explicitly mentioned this to you before but it’s now time to tell you about the psychological system that underpins my work and my life.
I hope that phrase ‘psychological system’ hasn’t put you off. I promise it’s enlightening information that can, in fact, change lives.
It’s the system that I used with clients in my private practice, it informs my writing practice and it’s what I’ve been teaching to a small group of keen bean teen writers to help expand their creativity.
It’s called Internal Family System and it’s amazing.
For a long time, it was only known and understood by a select group of therapists and their clients.
But now its crossing over into the public sphere with people such as Jonathan Van Ness, Glennon Doyle, Alanis Morrisette, Tim Ferris and even Elizabeth Gilbert espousing its virtues.
For good reason. It’s changed my life monumentally and now like any good evangelist, I mean, global citizen who cares about people, I want others to know about it too.
It’s both a model for self understanding and method for healing.
It can help expand our creativity, build our confidence, improve our relationships and much more. Gold.
So here’s what you need to know…
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is an evidence-based, therapeutic modality that introduces us to our inner world.
It turns our attention away from the circumstances, busyness and dramas happening in our external world, and encourages us to focus within.
It recognises that our inner world is impacting on our external world, and that inner focus is a powerful site for change.
Internal Family Systems offers a roadmap for inner exploration and a step-by-step process for true transformation.
It offers a way to understand ourselves, and others, and a path to creating meaningful and lasting change in our lives.
The two key landmarks in our inner world are our Self and our parts.
At the heart of IFS is the assumption that we have a Self or a core sense of who we are.
This is not a new concept. Almost every spiritual tradition speaks of an essential self or higher self or true self or enlightened mind or awakened heart or seat of consciousness or soul, which sits at the heart of us.
Our Self is the natural leader of our inner world and is the one who is able to help the many parts of us.
In Internal Family Systems, our Self is known its qualities, the 8Cs - Curiosity, Calm, Courage, Confidence, Clarity, Creativity, Compassion and Connectedness.
When we are being curious, calm, courageous, confident, clear, creative, compassionate or connected, we are in Self energy.
With Self energy, we can connect with, understand, form a relationship and help transform the parts of us that need our help.
We also have many parts.
Our inner world is naturally multidimensional. We are not one singular, unitary personality. We have many parts.
Our parts often first show up as feelings, thoughts, sensations. But it’s helpful to see them as more than that.
Why? So we can connect with them, relate to them, and be in relationship to them.
When we begin to form a relationship to our parts, rather than trying to get rid of them, we realise that every part has good intentions for us and is trying to help in some way.
Our parts can be divided into two distinctive categories based on the key role they play: A part’s role is either to protect or to hold onto hurt.
Our hurt parts are often younger, more vulnerable parts of us that have been holding onto shame, loneliness, worthlessness, abandonment, powerlessness, meaninglessness or rejection.
Our protector parts step up to protect our younger more vulnerable parts or our system as a whole and often appear as critics, responsible, distracting, pleasing, analytical, avoidant or perfectionist parts.
Parts that we often associate with mental health symptoms such as anxiety, depression, overwhelm, panic, OCD and others are often trying to protect us in some way.
When our parts are in balance and harmony with our Self and each other, they bring helpful qualities to our inner world and play a constructive role.
But parts can get thrown out of balance and harmony when, in response to events in our life, they feel forced into a more extreme role such as holding onto pain or being highly protective.
What does this all mean?
So many things but here are a few things to chew over…
If we’re feeling confused, holding two seemingly opposite opinions at once, that’s normal. We have different parts within that are fighting to be heard.
If we’ve tried to change a habit, even if it’s a good positive change we want to make in our life, it won’t always work if one or more of our parts aren’t on board. They can sabotage the process.
If we’ve tried to change our mindset and that hasn’t worked, well yes, again we have one or more parts that have strongly held beliefs, thank you very much, and no challenging our thinking is going to convince them to believe otherwise.
When we feel overcome with emotion or behave in a way we’d prefer not to that’s normally when a part has overtaken our system.
If we’re lacking creativity, confidence, clarity, courage, connectedness - in fact, any of the 8C Self qualities - then we’ve got parts crowding out our natural and innate creativity, confidence, courage and connectedness.
There so much more to discuss but I think I’ll leave it for now. But before we go, one more thing…
As I was writing this post, I had several parts interfer with the process.
There was a part that was questioning why I was writing this at all. Would people even get it or find it remotely interesting?
There was a part that just wanted me to get the post written, no matter its quality, just write the damn thing so we can go and read a book.
And one other part that was saying, ‘Why can’t you control these parts! You’re meant to be good at this stuff. They are so annoying!’
Yep, a normal day in the office. This is what I did: I kept pausing, acknowledging and recognising my parts, reassuring them and encouraging them to give me space so I could write.
Eventually, they did. Phew.
Here’s some other IFS resources if you’re interested in exploring more.
Here’s the founder of IFS, Richard Schwartz explaining the core concepts
What is Internal Family Systems?
Here’s some articles
Internal Family Systems is revolutionising mental health treatment
IFS - Exploring the model in practice
And some recommended books
No Bad Parts: Healing trauma and restoring wholeness with the IFS model
Parts work: An illustrated guide to your inner life
Self-Therapy: A step-by-step guide to creating wholeness using IFS
This was so interesting! Thank you for the resources and for sharing about IFS!
Thanks so much for pointing me to this! I've been using parts work with writers, as taught to me by a coach called Sas Petherick, and I keep coming across IFS and thinking it would be the next step to learn more. I love how writers can engage with parts work in a really creative way, and there's so much potential in cross pollinating parts work and storytelling. Thank you again!