In September 2001, a friend of mine gave me a copy of the therapy magazine Psychotherapy Networker, and it happened that in that edition was an article by Dick Schwartz, the person who founded Internal Family Systems therapy. At that point I had not been a full-blown therapist for very long, and my main tools were to listen to clients as kindly as I could, and to hope that if I did come up with suggestion that they would be good ideas.

IFS turned out to be a revelation. It gave a sort of royal road into a person’s inner world, where they might develop the self-compassion needed to do the healing they were looking for. I signed up for the Level 1 course, and was off from my home in Brooklyn to the trainings in Connecticut for many week ends across a year and a half. I was lucky these were the relatively early years of IFS, and Dick Schwartz himself was leading the trainings, bringing his own “self” energy to the proceedings, plus a pretty large group of practitioners who were assisting.

IFS didn’t just give me a way in to the inner world with people, it also supplied a navigating system for once we got there. The concept of parts – the parts of us that are at the core of our pain and the parts that are protecting them – is so central to this method that it is sometimes called “parts work.” The idea is that we all get wounded in childhood, it’s like the Jaques Brelle song, “Sons of the thief and sons of the saint, who is the child with no complaints?” We don’t necessarily need terrible traumas to be wounded, we just need to be in the challenging rough and tumble of life itself. And that wounded child, the one who carries so much sensitivity and spontaneity as well as just pain, usually gets stuffed away in some long-lost attic or basement of the mind, and kept there by those protectors.

The protective parts tend to be harsh, somewhat extreme, and polarized. One such character would be the inner critic, stinging us with condemnations as we wander our way through the world. How, you may ask, does the inner voice that is so mean to us turn out to be a protector? Well, that inner voice is usually doing, or thinks it is doing some kind of preemptive damage control. If I can knock myself into presentable shape before my parents/teachers/classmates /siblings do, I will be safe from the pain and humiliation they can inflict. The inner critic’s belief system is that if I could just buck up and get over it, all would be well. To the critic, the inner child is an albatross round my neck, getting in the way of my safety with its silly feeling life.

Another kind of protector, again surprisingly, is the one that leads us into addictions and compulsions. The part that would have me doomscroll “just another ten minutes,” or perhaps take one more drink or one more hit of something, has noticed this nest of comfort, this little dopamine hit, that the behavior supplies. Its motto is, “more please.” Thus I can hide under the blanket of my own obsessions. The strange thing is that both these kinds of parts, the compulsive one and the critical one, have the same job of shielding off the child part (known as the exile) from the slings and arrows of this world. They are both doing their best, rather like a ten-year-old kid taking care of the three-year-old while home alone.

But would you know it, the healer we have been looking for was there all along, silently inside us. This healer, Dick Schwartz calls the Self. Here he links therapy to spirituality. Religions of the world talk about the sacred, whether it is the Atman in Hinduism, the Buddha self in Buddhism, or what the Mediaeval theologian Meister Eckhart called the birth of Christ inside us, it’s all describing a central core to us that is not any of these misguided parts. Without getting mired too much in the divine, Schwartz instead lists out the qualities of this Self, the eight C-words: calm, courage, creativity, connection, clarity, confidence, compassion, and curiosity. If you have enough of these C-words hanging around inside you, then you are in sufficient “Self-energy” to go the next step in your healing.

How does all this play out in a session? Let’s say someone comes in with a problem of anxiety. I would ask them to go inside themselves and look at that anxiety – is there a place where the anxious feelings live in the body, is there an image that goes along with it, is there anything else you notice about “anxious”? This helps develop the sense of “anxious” as being a part of me that I can relate to, almost as if it was a tiny person inside me. And indeed the next question is a major relational one: “How do you feel towards that part?”

The most common first answer to that question is, “I want it to go away,” which is quite natural, since it is what you came to therapy to make happen. But it is the wrong answer. It’s wrong because “I want it to go away,” can’t happen, because you can’t excise feelings out of yourself, as if you were doing some kind of finely tuned brain surgery. And anyway, “I want it gone” is a rejecting stance, and does not carry any of that eight C Self-energy. And so, I would ask you to go inside yourself and ask “I want it to go away” to get on board with the healing project and step to the side.

We ask all these aversive reactions to anxiety to do this stepping to the side until all have, temporarily at least, agreed to hold fire. According to IFS, once they have sufficiently done that, all that can remain is C-word like qualities, such as equanimity, which ruins things by beginning with E. When I can say, “how do you feel towards the anxious part?” and you answer with something like, “I feel sorry for it, I wish I could help,” I can then ask you to go inside yourself and let it know that, and notice how the part responds. Then there is silence in the room as you have that internal interaction, and after that you let me know what happened. From there we can go the next step of getting closer and closer to giving love, comfort and acceptance to the part in pain. It’s true that we can’t rewrite the past, but we can contact these parts of us that are frozen in memory and help them escape from their bonds.  Anxiety does not “go away,” in the sense of being excised out of our brains, but it does away through being comforted by the nearest kind person – you.

So that is a beginning outline of how IFS works. In this example the parts that we asked to step to the side are protectors and the part holding the anxiety is the exile, or young part. You can say that there are actually two relationships going on in the room – one between you and me of course, and the other one between you and your inner system. It’s a bit like you are on your phone and I am suggesting that you say such and such to the person at the other end of the line, there is silence while you communicate with your part, then you tell me what happened, and then I recommend the next step that the IFS would suggest. If you want to see a more detailed example of how this works, click on the Robin and the Cloud Man tab.

Things do not change; we change.

—Henry David Thoreau

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

—Eleanor Roosevelt