Short Intro to IFS Therapy
Here are my notes about Internal Family System Therapy!
Here I‘m sharing the basics of what is good to know if you wanna try out Internal Family System Therapy!
I’m a fan of this form of therapy as it is quick, fun and effective, you don’t need a lot of prior knowledge and can do it easily by yourself – so I wanna support anyone who wants to try it and share my knowledge here, hope this helps!
i even put in some stupid memes for you.
Overview
It's based on the premise that each individual's personality is composed of various sub-personalities or "parts" that interact within the psyche. These parts can be seen as distinct emotional states, beliefs, memories, or roles that people adopt.
In IFS therapy you explore and understand these different parts of yourself.
For me it has a really playful character and I use it when I feel like there’s something up that is not just temporary feeling but a pattern I wanna explore.
Then I sit down for 30min–2h, listen to music that helps me connect to that feeling and afterwards I always feel and understand myself much better.
Concepts
Multiplicity principle: we are not one, we are many
Part
= a sub-personality with its own beliefs, viewpoints, interests, roles and burdens
every part has good intentions even though not everything they do for us is always helpful.
have an indeterminate number of parts
the problem is not our parts. Our parts are wonderful as they are. Sometimes, they just need help to let go of the burdens they have taken on to protect us and move into the roles they are meant for. As long as we can relate to our parts from a loving, caring, curious, calm and compassionate place we have everything we need to work with them and this is, on some level, what inner freedom feels like.
3 kinds:
self, protectors, exile
Self
not a part but it is ever present, like the sky.
Some of its qualities are clarity, compassion, curiosity, calmness and courage
not always accessible. Sometimes parts take over in order to protect our inner system from overwhelming emotions, and this protection gets in the way of experiencing the presence of Self
Exile
= the parts of us that are burdened by the pain, hurt, fear, loneliness, abuse and shame
Protectors
Firefighter
same goals as manager: try to make sure that overwhelming and upsetting emotions do not take over our inner system and cause our IFS to fall apart
but more reactive
When a firefighter takes over to protect the inner system, the result might be something drastic and impulsive
e.g. drinking again after being sober for months, quitting your job to show your boss how upset you are at being treated unfairly, spending money you do not have as a distraction from intense emotions, or cutting people off instead of talking openly about your issues and trying to find helpful solutions
Manager
proactive
think about long-term consequences of their choices
main role: to make sure that we stay on top of our responsibilities each day
e.g. do the laundry
Managers take all these actions to try to keep things under control and make sure that the emotions carried by exiled parts do not overwhelm our inner life and systems.
extreme version:
people pleasing
perfectionism
Goals of IFS
help parts that tend to dominate our inner lives for the purpose of shielding us from painful, overwhelming, scary, upsetting, traumatic memories to let go of the burdens they have taken on to protect us and move into the roles they are meant for
By gaining understanding and working with them, self = inner freedom can emerge.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” – Rumi
exile feel bad emotions so intensely that our protectors keep them exiled to make sure that we can function in this life.
No matter how hard our protective parts work, however, exiles generally find a way to come out and overwhelm our system.
When this happens, our protective parts become more extreme to keep the exiles under control.
How IFS helps:
get to know their parts
to understand what (good) they are doing for the person
and how they are doing it.
unblend and separate from their parts so they can experience their parts from a place of curiosity, compassion, calmness and acceptance
& more internal harmony
learn how to be with the exiles without protective parts having to use their extreme strategies to keep the exiled parts at bay
Perspectives & connections
Neurological interpretation
this is one way of making sense of what roughly happens in the brain and found it plausible. if ur a cognitive scientist and violently shaking your head after this section please comment
parts can be seen as clusters of beliefs and emotions and values that get activated at different times, and that can be interfaced with by treating them _as if_ they were actual subminds.
When an IFS book has a case study about a person with a “confuser” part that tries to distract them when they are thinking about something unpleasant. I wouldn’t interpret that to literally mean that there’s a sentient agent seeking to confuse the person in that person’s brain. I think it’s more something like… there are parts of the brain that are wired to interpret some states as uncomfortable, and other parts of the brain that are wired to avoid states that are interpreted as uncomfortable
At some point when the person was feeling uncomfortable, something happened in their brain that made them confused instead, and then some learning subsystem in their brain noticed that “this particular pattern of internal behavior relieved the feeling of discomfort”. And then it learned how to repeat whatever internal process caused the feeling of confusion to push the feeling of discomfort out of the global workspace, and to systematically trigger that process when faced with a similar sense of discomfort
There’s a thing where, once information that has been previously only stored in a local neural pattern is retrieved and brought to the global workspace, it can then be accessed and potentially modified by every other subsystem that’s currently listening in to the workspace. I don’t fully understand this, but it seems to be something like, if those other systems have information suggesting that there are alternative ways of achieving the purpose that the confuser pattern is trying to accomplish, the rules for triggering the confuser pattern can get rewritten so that it’s no longer activated.
But there’s also a thing where, it looks to me like part of what these stored patterns are, are something like partial of your brain’s state at the time when they were first learned. So when IFS talks about there being “child parts”, then it looks to me like there’s a sense in which that’s literally true.
Suppose that someone first learned the “being confused helps me avoid an uncomfortable feeling” thing when they were six. At that time, their brain saved a “snapshot” of that state of confusion to be re-instated at a later time when getting confused might again help them avoid discomfort. Stored with that snapshot might [also be associated] other emotional and cognitive patterns that were active at the time when the person was six – so when the person is “talking with” their “confuser part”, there’s a sense in which they really are “talking with a six-year old part” of themselves.
And also there’s a thing where, even if the parts aren’t literally sentient subselves, the method still becomes more effective if you treat them _as if_ they were
If you relate to your six-year old part as if it was literally a six-year old that you’re compassionate towards, when it holds a memory of being lonely and not understood… then that somehow brings in the experience of someone actually caring about you into the memory of not being cared about.
And then if your brain had learned a rule like “I must avoid these kinds of situations, because in them I just get lonely and nobody understands me”, then bringing in that experience of being understood into the memory rewrites the learning and eliminates the need to so compulsively avoid situations that resemble that original experience.
Connection to attachment
"It is very common to have a primary exile, usually very young, that carries as her primary burden the belief that she is somehow unlovable, and that people will always eventually leave her.
Such an exile is very often protected by a manager who tries to please everyone around her in the hopes that this will keep them happy enough that they won't leave.
This ultimately always fails, however, leading to the exile breaking through and overwhelming us with unbearable sorrow.
Often at this point a firefighter will react, for instance with dissociative, self-harming, or suicidal content.
The only solution, then, is to befriend both the protectors enough for them to trust that we can and will help the exile, then witness, unburden, and retrieve her.
At this point, all that will be left is what we might describe as an evolutionarily-standard drive to avoid exclusion, no longer psychopathologically burdened by the effects of insufficient or inconsistent parenting.
This does raise the question of how much anxiety about exclusion is 'normal'.
In any case, once the whole inner triad thus described has been unburdened and reorganized a bit, all that is necessary is a word of reassurance (from Self to parts) to allay fear." ~ Leo Abstract (thanks for adding that!)
Resources
General Info
Exercises
& find my YouTube videos, music, and more here! 🍓