IFS Therapy
An approach developed by Richard Schwartz in the 1980s from clinical practice, steadily winning recognition and love among clinicians — for its beauty, clarity, kindness (and proven effectiveness). Here’s a beautiful article by Dr. Schwartz about it.
A great fit for working with trauma (PTSD and CPTSD), dissociative defenses, eating disorders, depressive and anxiety disorders.
I love IFS because you can explain it to a five-year-old. Because it’s full of hope and faith in the person even in the most difficult situations. Because with it, you can step away from concepts like «resistance,» «secondary gain,» and «illness.»
For how it weaves together the humanistic principles of curiosity and trust in the client’s capacity to handle their own life — with a clear model that offers ground and roadmaps when a person is exhausted, disoriented, closed off, and full of mistrust toward themselves and their environment.
And I love it for its safety — for not rushing into «serious topics,» trauma and pain without the protective parts’ consent. It doesn’t try to break through defenses; it meets them with respect, gratitude, and attention.
(But when the protective parts do consent — enormous shifts can happen very fast.)
In early 2019, I began studying IFS, getting supervision, and working with it. In 2020, I completed Level 1.
You can read my notes on the method under the tag «IFS».
Here is one of them:
People defend against pain in very different ways. They lock vulnerable parts of themselves away in a closet — while other parts up on the surface laugh or freeze. Or work tirelessly — just so they don’t have to feel. Inner protectors stand guard at the closet doors, shielding the person from old wounds.
But sometimes something happens that bumps against the closet door, knocks the lock loose — and old pain begins to rise.
The person feels a little uneasy — or even very uneasy. And then other defenses come racing to the rescue — weeoo, weeoo, the fire truck is always on call — we put out the discomfort with cakes and pancakes, funny shows and online shopping sprees, binge-working, sex and wine, bouts of illness and self-harm.
All these defenses — both the first kind and the second — are deeply caring. They rescue however they can. However they’ve learned to. However it once worked.
Sometimes they even bring the person to a therapist — to scold or banish the troublesome parts. And of course, to nail the closet doors shut more tightly. Or to drag out whoever’s locked in there and «process» them, put them to use. Why are these wounded children just sitting around in closets? Unacceptable! Quick — open up, wash off, feed up, and send them to the mines! (And the unfit ones we destroy.)
One way or another, there’s always room inside a person for an efficient manager.
Some approaches join in on this hunt for parts — or on the idea that a person needs to be fixed, raised, and corrected. But I deeply love a different approach (IFS).
If you look at the psyche through a metaphor where each defense is a separate being with its own way of rescuing the person from pain — then you can talk to them. If you do it with respect, rather than «attacking and confronting entrenched patterns» — something new always opens up. If you don’t try to change them, push them aside, or destroy them. This model profoundly shifts how the work goes, and how a person relates to themselves.
The complication is that different inner protectors often hate or despise each other, and sometimes grow very large in order to outdo each other.
And then larger still. A very stubborn couch-dweller in defiance of a very strict critic, for example. Or a furious dragon (or a lonely hermit) opposing a powerful drive to please everyone.
They might fight for the steering wheel and take it in turns. Or they might just lock themselves in silent combat at the wheel while the ship of your life drifts wherever the wind takes it.
And this is the most important part of my favorite approach. I’m certain that no matter how disoriented, lost, and split a person may be — nothing has happened to their Self. The center is unharmed. The Self can’t be weak; it doesn’t need to develop. It’s just that sometimes the defenses are too active, have grown too large and polarized, fighting, fearing, and caring — so that pain won’t touch the heart. They’ve seized power, tucked the heart away somewhere safe, and lost contact with it.
Maybe that war ended long ago — and nobody told them. And they keep doing their duty, like a soldier forgotten at his post. Just don’t let new pain in. Just lock the old pain in tighter. Always on watch.
But the most beautiful thing about this model — (which, beyond being a fortunate metaphor, is also quite biological and proven effective for a number of disorders) — is that the person is presumed to be something more than the sum of their parts. When the parts calm down and stop being so active — sooner or later, the person feels that beyond the defenses and the pain, there is something else within. People say: «it seems… it’s me. Just me.»
Center, selfhood, Self.
And all that old, locked-up pain longs only to be heard and comforted! Not by someone outside, but by the person themselves — by their center and heart, by the Self. No external person can stand in for this.
The most beautiful thing is when, through the work, your Self returns to the wheel of your life. And all the parts — protective and vulnerable and many others — take their places in the passenger seats, or in the engine room, in the galley, up on the masts. Seen and heard, with a voice and a channel of communication, each with their own task, each an important member of the crew. No one is locked up or fighting for a place in the sun; they can quietly do their work and not demand special attention. This is possible. Sometimes it’s very long work — and sometimes one session changes what hadn’t changed in years.
This is me finally managing to say a little about my beloved therapeutic approach, IFS, which I’ve been studying since January 2019. Which I honestly tried to invent on my own before that and even wrote a lot of text about it, honestly!
And I’m so glad I later met it already this thought-through and ready.
In that time, my work has changed, especially around inner conflict, trauma, and depression. I’ll write about that separately.
Quotes
A little on how IFS works at the biological level. Beautiful! Healing imagination glues our trauma-broken brain back together, when we engage with pieces of implicit memory as though they were alive:
«Exiled parts… use non-integrated neural networks in the brain. Moreover, exiles primarily live in implicit memory (unconscious, tense, emotional, and without a coherent narrative).
The healing of trauma begins in the mind, when we turn to imagination — that powerful agent of neuroplasticity (Doidge, 2007) — and continues as we transform implicit memory into explicit, so that the brain can integrate dysregulated neural networks.»
— Internal Family Systems: Skills Training Manual, Richard Schwartz
Another quote from the same source:
«The unburdening process allows exiled parts to release, to let go of their pain, to feel whole again, and to reconnect with the inner system of parts. This process appears to be consistent with memory reconsolidation — a form of neuroplasticity that changes existing emotional memory at the synaptic level (Ecker, 2012).»…
Of course, memory reconsolidation, like IFS therapy, doesn’t make people forget the past. But it does change their present emotional experience when they remember traumatic events.«Counteractive» changes, the main strategy of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), focus on creating new networks to interact with the old ones, while memory reconsolidation, by contrast, reorganizes the original neural network at the synaptic level (Ecker, 2012). We believe that the unburdening process in IFS, by way of memory reconsolidation, heals traumatic wounds at their core.»
