FactsOfADrunkenMan.com - Richard C. Schwartz - Internal Family Systems Therapy

One summer I became particularly attached to a delightful 16-year-old girl who had been addicted to heroin. She told me privately that her father had molested her. One day when her parents visited, her father sat by passively while her mother ranted about the ways in which her selfishness was hurting them. The teen killed herself the next day. I felt a lot of different things, not least outrage at the injustice of what had happened to her. I decided I wanted to become a psychotherapist and do things better.

Perls, on the other hand, struck me as a courageous, outrageous rebel who was breaking out of the analytic paradigm. Emotions should be fully expressed and experienced rather than interpreted. His “empty-chair” technique, in which the client would talk to “top-dog” and “underdog” parts who sat opposite in an empty chair, was my first exposure to the idea of inner conversations.

Identifying parts caused my clients to find them less overwhelming and intimidating. In this way, observing instead of avoiding their parts helped my clients find a new perspective on their inner experience. The voices seemed to have reasons for being extreme, which gave us a clue that their extremity was not the whole story.

The only difference between family therapy and my approach with eating-disordered young women like Cora was that their inner relationships involved having feelings toward, thoughts about, and conversations with other thoughts and feelings.

So I guided Cora to focus on the pushing, angry voice and to ask it to stop interfering—to “step back” in her mind.

Sometimes we had to ask two or three voices not to interfere before the client could shift into a state like Cora’s, but we got there nonetheless.

What if the person who remained after everyone stepped back was always as compassionate as Cora had been? So I asked my clients who was being so calm and compassionate inside. Their replies were something like the following: “That’s not a part like those other voices, that’s who I really am, that’s my self.”

I began to experiment with noticing parts in my body and asking them to step back instead of using a mantra. Amazingly it worked, and this is how I continue to meditate today, almost 35 years later. At the same time, however, I was wary of big conclusions. I tested my new approach for several years before I was convinced that anyone and everyone could shift from distress to calm in a few seconds. After watching scores of clients embody qualities of the Self with total spontaneity as soon as their parts separated, I finally embraced the idea that there is more to us than we usually let ourselves dream. And whatever this was (in calling it the Self, I was following my clients’ lead), it clearly did not need to develop over time. It was always right there if our parts let it in. Beyond being a peaceful state from which to witness and transcend the world, this mindful state of Self was also healing, creative, and performance enhancing. When my clients entered the Self-state they didn’t just witness their parts passively, they began to interact with them creatively, which seemed to heal them. They brought their emergent compassion, lucidity, and wisdom to the project of knowing and caring for these inner personalities. Parts like Cora’s pessimist struck me as inner trauma victims, stuck in the past and frozen at a time of great distress, often in childhood. They were activists, and they needed the client to understand their motivations. Other parts mostly needed to be heard, held, comforted, and loved. Most amazing of all, once clients were in that Self-state, they seemed to know just what each inner personality needed. I decided to test this observation.

I asked each of these clients to focus on the backlash and listen. And, indeed, they heard furious inner voices who were in a punitive mood. Since we listened patiently, these angry parts calmed down and explained that we had disrupted their intricate defense systems by going to vulnerable parts without their permission. I realized that I was mucking around in some delicate, well-guarded ecologies, especially with certain very traumatized clients. I resolved to offer these parts my respect, learn the rules of inner systems, and become more ecologically sensitive. As a systems thinker I was embarrassed that I had failed to anticipate this kind of homeostatic reaction to blunt incursions. If this really was an inner family, then of course powerful responses were predictable. Family therapists know they must connect with, reassure, and get permission from the family’s leery protectors before they can safely focus on vulnerability. Why would internal families be different?

For years I did not want to accept that psychodynamic therapists were absolutely right on certain topics: The past does affect the present profoundly; people are driven by unconscious phenomena, which is to say phenomena that remain out of awareness; emotion and the body are key to effective therapy; and, finally, the therapeutic relationship is also key, including both transference and countertransference processes.

In response, our clients’ parts will answer clearly, take the client directly to crucial scenes from the past, and explain what is most important about their experience, removing the need for us to speculate, reframe, interpret, or instruct. Those painful scenes from the past often evoke internal waves of strong emotion that could easily overwhelm the client.

I learned that I don’t have to tell clients what to say to or do with their parts because their Selves know.

Over time I have found that I can train other therapists to notice the signs of an embodied Self, and also to notice their absence. In this way I discovered that we could all become aware of activated parts as they manifest physically, which means we can detect our parts as they react to a client (countertransference), and help our parts step back so our Selves can stay present. After the session, we can return to help our parts, which keeps them from interfering in future sessions. We can also talk to clients about our countertransference reactions if doing so seems useful. For this purpose, the language of parts helps because we do not have to say, I feel angry or afraid or impatient. Instead, we can say, A minute ago a part of me felt … and I will help that part so it doesn’t interfere. In general, the language of parts helps clients and therapists disclose strong feelings that might otherwise be embarrassing or controversial. Acknowledging that a small part of me is hurt or enraged is far less shaming or threatening than saying I am hurt or enraged. At this point our readers may wonder how the phenomenon of psychic parts relates to dissociative identity disorder (DID). From our perspective, the “alters” of clients with DID are parts, but their inner systems are more polarized and disconnected. This is because horrible childhood abuse causes vigilant protectors to rely on amnesic barriers, which block the usual web of inner relationships.

The job of protectors is to ensure that a proposed therapy will not make matters worse. This is their duty. They are more knowledgeable than the therapist about the delicate ecology of the client’s inner system and the possible negative consequences of going too fast.

Restoring trust in the Self is the quickest route to improved leadership and inner harmony. Therefore, rather than having the therapist help the client’s parts directly, we usually aim for the client’s Self to interact with the parts and report to the therapist.

Protectors fear one another, which keeps them in extreme positions. Each part believes that relaxing will allow a polarized part to take over, with catastrophic consequences.

Though we refer to parts with labels, it is a mistake to assume that the part’s label or role (the sad part, the angry part, the captain, the caretaker, etc.) captures its essence. In this book, we aim to help readers stay mindful that a part is not just an emotional state or a habitual thought pattern. Rather, parts are discrete, autonomous mental systems, each with their own idiosyncratic range of emotion, style of expression, abilities, desires, and views of the world. For example, a part who is angry can also feel hurt or scared. If we just see it as the “angry part,” we are likely to ignore its other feelings. If, on the other hand, we view it as an angry person (often a child or teenager), we are more likely to be interested in its full range of feelings and its potential to shift between feeling states.

Once released, these children change dramatically. Parts are the same. When we view a part as a child or teenager who is shy or angry in a certain context, we are more likely to be curious about who it would be in other circumstances than we are to believe it is defined by this one attribute. As a result, we are more likely to think of helping the part discover its full potential.

In response to danger, the individuals in human systems at all levels take on roles that can be categorized by three groups. One group tends to be highly protective, strategic, and interested in controlling the environment to keep things safe. In IFS we call the members of this group managers. A second group contains the most sensitive members of the system. When these parts feel injured or outraged, managers will banish them for their own protection and the good of the whole system. We call them exiles. Finally, a third group tries to stifle, anesthetize, or distract from the feelings of exiles, reacting powerfully and automatically, without concern for consequences, to their distress as well as to the overinhibition of managers. In IFS we call the members of this group firefighters because they fight the flames of exiled emotion. Internal systems that are responding to trauma not only divide into these roles, the protective parts (managers and firefighters) form alliances and get into conflicts with each other, and can be very harsh (or smothering) with the exile they are trying to protect or ward off. The sadder, more terrified, ashamed, rageful, or sexually charged an exile is, the more protectors legitimately fear its release and the more extreme they become in their efforts to suppress and constrain. In turn, the more an exile is suppressed, the more it tries to break out. In this way all three groups become victims of an escalating cycle of internecine conflict. Judith Herman (2015) described such cycles: [A trauma survivor] finds herself caught between the extremes of amnesia or of reliving the trauma, between floods of intense, overwhelming feelings and arid states of no feeling at all, between irritable, impulsive action and complete inhibition of action. The instability produced by these periodic alternations further exacerbates the traumatized person’s sense of unpredictability and helplessness. (p. 47) Exiles Children are commonly taught to fear and hide emotional pain or terror because adults react to them in the extreme way they react to their own hurt child parts: with impatience, denial, criticism, revulsion, or distraction. Managerial parts of the child then follow suit, adopting the same attitudes toward vulnerable young tribe members inside, pushing them out of awareness, blocking their access to the Self, and making them ever more vulnerable to trauma.

managers have no tolerance for fear, shamefulness, and emotional pain. To them, injured parts are defective, weak, threatening, and pitiful.

exiles, like any oppressed group, grow extreme over time. As they look for opportunities to break out of prison and tell their stories, their desperation and neediness become ever more of a hazard. They may dull and weigh the body, mind, and heart with their chronic unarticulated misery, or they may overwhelm emotionally with flashbacks, nightmares, and sudden fleeting tastes of pain, fear, and shame that cause protectors to panic and overreact. Like the abandoned children they are, exiles want care and love. As a result, they look for rescue and redemption, usually tapping someone who resembles the person who rejected them in the first place or even returning to the actual abuser (Schwartz, 2008). Often exiles will pay virtually any price for even small amounts of acceptance, hope, or protection.

Having locked up exiles, managers live in fear that they will escape. Various managers adopt different strategies to avoid interactions and situations that might trigger an exile. As we describe some of the most common managerial roles, keep in mind that managers (and firefighters) are forced into these roles. Although they believe they must do what they do, they don’t enjoy it.

Our point is that the primary purpose of all managers is to keep exiles out of mind, both for their protection and to protect the system from their feelings and thoughts.

The rigidity and severity of managerial strategies will match the degree to which a manager thinks (correctly or not) that the person is in danger of being reinjured. Like parentified children in families, managers are not equipped to lead, but they feel that they have no choice.

Managers, like exiles, tend to be children who really want to be nurtured and healed. Unlike exiles, however, they believe they have to hide their vulnerabilities and sacrifice themselves for the system. The more competent they become, the more the system relies on them, and the more they feel overwhelmed with their responsibilities and power. Eventually they come to believe that they alone are responsible for the person’s success and safety, which makes them ever more wary of relinquishing leadership to the Self.

The first firefighter tactic for clients with bulimia, for example, tends to involve food, but if food isn’t effective, the client’s firefighter team will try other measures, such as drugs, alcohol, sex, self-cutting, or stealing.

Firefighter techniques include numbing activities like self-mutilation, binge eating, drug or alcohol abuse, dissociation, and sexual risk taking. A firefighter will usually try to take control of the person so thoroughly that he feels nothing but an urgent compulsion to engage in some dissociative or self-soothing activity.

In contradistinction to managers, who try to shut out exiles, firefighters tend to try to find something to calm and appease. In turn, the impulsivity and extremity of firefighter behaviors inspire a barrage of criticism from managers internally and from people around the client. Although managers may rely on firefighters and even call on them, they attack the firefighter after the fact for having put the person at risk and caused her to be indulgent, weak-willed, or insensitive to others. The typical dynamic between managers and firefighters is a vicious cycle that repeats and escalates, with managerial shaming activating exiles, which energizes firefighters, which alarms managers, and so on. As a result, managers and firefighters are strange, uncomfortable bedfellows who are often in conflict.

Managers, for example, often dominate the systems of people who are chronically depressed, exiles dominate in those who experience bouts of intense sadness or fear, and firefighters dominate people who have problems with addiction.

Generally the longer and more sadistic a person’s traumatic experience, the more polarized their system will have become and the less the parts will trust Self-leadership.

When children are uncertain or pessimistic about their value, they strive to understand what will please their parents and they try to become that. The normal need for approval grows into a craving, and they take the extreme messages they are given about their worth to heart. If a child is told, verbally or nonverbally, that he has little value, his parts organize around that premise. His parts feel desperate for redemption in the eyes of the person who is withholding love, which can include any person on whom the child depends.

Parts often take on the extreme ideas, behaviors, or feelings of significant others. These transferred burdens are just as organizing and constraining as personal burdens.

Approval-craving parts can mimic virtually any extreme part of a parent or other authority figure.

If we were to view the part itself as a mental introject we would miss its valuable qualities and its ability to transform. The introject is the burden, not the part. Our goal is to release parts from the constraining influence of their burdens and enable them to pursue their preferred, constructive roles. Rather than pushing them to change, we are helping them to let go.

Everyone has a seat of consciousness at their core, which we call the Self. From birth this Self has all the necessary qualities of good leadership, including compassion, perspective, curiosity, acceptance, and confidence. It does not have to develop through stages. As a result, the Self makes the best inner leader and will engender balance and harmony inside if parts allow it to lead. At the same time, our parts are organized to protect the Self and remove it from danger in the face of trauma at all costs. Protective parts will report having pushed the Self out the body for protective reasons. Once they do this, the inner system is on its own with the extreme feelings or thoughts we call burdens. Nevertheless, the Self remains whole. The therapist does not supply or strengthen the Self. Although the Self can be an observer, it is neither passive nor just a witness. Instead, once parts differentiate from the Self, it becomes an active, compassionate, collaborative leader. And strange though it may sound, as parts gain trust and open space for the Self, clients often say they feel physically as well as mentally present, lively, and centered (for more on IFS practice and the body, see Chapter 5).

Systems at all levels—families, companies, and nations—function best when leadership is clearly designated, respected, fair, and capable. Internal families are no different. The Self can care for and depolarize warring parts in an equitable and compassionate way, lead discussions with parts regarding major decisions on the direction of the person’s life and deal with the external world. Parts do not disappear under Self-leadership, but their extreme roles do, as does the rigid three-group arrangement of managers, firefighters, and exiles. In a Self-led system the youngest parts may just want to be spontaneous and play. Meanwhile, others will want to advise, remind, problem-solve, lend their talents, and generally help.

In the IFS model we view the client’s inner and outer worlds as nesting, interconnected systems that operate according to the same principles and are responsive to the same techniques. In addition, systems that interface come to reflect one another, so changes at one level are likely to produce some kind of change at other levels.

To be ecologically sensitive we drop the interpretive stance of the expert and, in a spirit of humble curiosity, collaborate with the client’s parts to map their inner relationships. Once we have a preliminary map, we are guided by it in a spirit of respect and the willingness to keep learning. When we misstep and the client’s system reacts severely, our job is to remain curious not to pathologize that reaction.

As a doctoral student, psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (2008) searched for the source of human happiness. After interviewing many people, he concluded that any activity, including sports, auto mechanics, art, reading, and even housecleaning can bring a sense of fulfillment if the activity helps the person to access a certain state of mind, which he dubbed flow.

Parts find the relationship with the Self incredibly reassuring, but to reap the benefits of being with the Self, they must first risk differentiating from and noticing the Self—a frightening prospect for many protectors.

Our core Self, the soul that is revered in spiritual traditions, encompasses curiosity, compassion, calm, confidence, courage, clarity, creativity, connectedness, and kindness. It is, however, easily obscured by protective parts who take over when we get terrified or feel shamed. When protectors take over, we identify with and feel dominated by their beliefs about, for example, how dangerous the world is or how weak we are.

Self has an infectious air of confidence, conveying to protector parts that it is safe to relax because instead of trying to “let it go and move on” (the typical protector advice that encourages people to abandon and isolate their burdened young parts), injuries can be healed.

In a letter in 1950, Albert Einstein wrote: A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

Many protectors are reluctant to step out of their roles because they believe the person would be weak and passive without them. Protectors always have intense fears about allowing clients to open the door to the exiles they locked away years ago in inner basements, prisons, and caves. When a client says he is afraid to do something in the inner world, we know a part is speaking. But once the part perceives the fearless nature of the Self in the inner world, including with emotional pain, shame, rage, and terror, its fear subsides.

Action led by the Self is more effective over time than parts-led action because its compassion-infused message is better able to slip past opponents’ protectors and touch their Selves. In contrast, righteous, caretaking, or power-seeking parts polarize with each other, magnifying danger in the short run and giving rise to a hopeless sense of burnout and cynicism in the long run.

Every bit of guidance and every clinical example in this book aims to help you and your clients access the Self.

extreme parts have a rationale for their behavior and they feel driven to extremity by beliefs, emotions, and energies that enter our systems from trauma or attachment injury; additionally, these beliefs, emotions, and energies can be inherited from family, ethnic group, or culture. We call extreme beliefs, emotions, and energies that enter through direct life experience personal burdens. We call the ones that were absorbed from family, ethnic group, or culture legacy burdens. The importance of distinguishing between parts (who are valuable) and their burdens (which need to be unloaded) cannot be overemphasized.

let’s say a mother, whose dominant manager focuses on pleasing others, shames her daughter whenever she expresses anger. As a result, the daughter develops a manager who worries about approval and works to silence her assertive parts. Her approval-seeking part is getting too much responsibility, influence, and access to resources, while her assertive parts get too little. This is the product of the over-pleasing legacy burden. This burden may have arisen initially from the travails of her immigrant ancestors generations earlier.

When Joe (or anyone) is anxious, we will relate to him the way we relate to our own anxious parts. This is an important law of what I call inner physics. If you hate your vulnerability, you will punish your son when he is vulnerable. If you fear your anger, you will either punish or cave in to your daughter when she has a tantrum.

A child who hears We do not boast in this family will exile his proud part. A child who hears We are strong in this family will exile her weak parts. In this way, any feeling from sadness or anger to excitement and love can be exiled in families.

When we want to find out if a burden is a legacy or personal, we ask the part, “What percent of this belief (feeling, behavior, etc.) belongs to someone else?”

In all cases, inner and outer children have a developmental tendency to translate experience into identity: I am not loved becomes I am unlovable, and a bad thing happened becomes I am bad.

When a child has reason to be pessimistic about their value, the normal need for approval escalates to craving. Such children are vigilant about messages regarding their worth and vulnerable to the negative judgment of anyone on whom they depend. Striving to lift the curse of unlovability, these young parts influence otherwise sensible adults to return to people who have hurt them or to find a close substitute, which is likely to result in a string of unsatisfying, dangerous relationships.

Protectors have burdens, too. First, they believe the negative press about the exiles; second, their jobs are burdensome. One of the terrible ironies of emotional abandonment and abuse is that a child’s protective parts mimic abusers, be they adults or other children. Approval-seeking managers and reactive firefighters are capable of repeating, internally, virtually any extreme behavior that has been perpetrated on a child, from perfectionism, criticism, and moralizing to physical attack, all in the mistaken hope that a perfect (or punished) child will be better loved. The job of mimicking a perpetrator is, of course, nasty and makes the part unpopular in the system. Protectors need our help to let go of the extreme parental energies that constitute legacy burdens.

The length and difficulty of treatment in IFS are governed not by symptom severity but by degree of inner polarization, distrust in Self-leadership, and the client’s level of burdening.

parts are forced into extreme roles in a few ways: They protect exiles proactively (managers) or reactively (firefighters), they polarize each other, and they are frozen in a frightening time in the past (both protectors and exiles).

most people are socialized to exile various of their own parts, even people who were never severely hurt will be organized according to this manager, exile, firefighter triad, and the client’s symptoms tell us which group dominates.

managers tend to dominate in people who are chronically depressed, firefighters in people who are prone to impulsive behaviors, and exiles in those who experience acute anxiety, fear, sadness, and loneliness.

We keep in mind that protectors are burdened too, but are unlikely to release their burdens until the exiles they protect have been healed (unburdened) and the system is less vulnerable.

When a child is injured, the qualities for which she was attacked or that she believes got her in trouble are viewed by the internal system as a liability, so parts who lead with those qualities (e.g., naiveté, sweetness, spontaneity, excitement, courage, anger, sadness, frustration, sensitivity, compassion) will be banished, which makes those parts feel unwanted and desperate. From their place of exile, they long for rescue and redemption. Meanwhile, protectors are constrained by what they believe about exiled parts. All in all, the burdened system is a portrait of restriction, constraint, rebellion, and frustration. And this is the way most of us expend most of our energy.

Only our parts can decide to allow the Self back into the body.

I discovered that my father’s rage attacks and spankings had scared the Self out of me, leaving me desensitized. In the grip of my own rageful protector, I wanted to knock people down and was able to disregard physical pain even while my saner parts were screaming at me to stop.

Embodying the Self can terrify people who have suffered severe abuse. As mentioned above, savvy perpetrators try to prevent the victim from having access to the Self. To keep a victim compliant and brainwashed, such a perpetrator will increase punishment whenever the child (or adult) embodies Self-energy (any of those C-word qualities ranging from curiosity to compassion). As a result, survivors of severe abuse risk backlash from their protectors when they try to embody the Self.

Thus we make a point of asking the client to check if any protectors are afraid to let her embody before guiding her to do so directly. If any parts are afraid, we address their fears before proceeding.

(RS) had one client who found a manager creating chronic fatigue symptoms in order to get care and rest for a needy little girl part.

Parts not only embody or disembody, they can be more or less embodied. The more embodied they are, the more their experiences and approach to life is illustrated in posture, gesture, voice, and facial expressions. They can, for example, show up as muscle tension, pressure, or trouble breathing; they can be numb, weak, chronically hot or cold; they can be starved or want the insulation of fat to avoid attracting sexual interest; they can also be sexually overstimulated.

Managers—who need to contain, suppress, hold, freeze, and control—tend to show up in the muscles and fascia. Although they can be found anywhere in the body, managers can more easily handle the energies at junctions: all joints, the pelvic and respiratory diaphragms, the throat and jaw, the shoulders, and the lower back. Firefighters tend to activate the endocrine and nervous systems in the service of fight and flight, releasing stress hormones, increasing heart and breath rates, and dilating the pupils. As well, firefighters use physical arousal or desire (e.g., cravings for food, sex, alcohol, drugs, or sleep) to distract from emotions they view as a threat. Meanwhile, exiles often hide out in or around the heart, gut, and back.

We have heard from parts who claim to have increased immune responses (causing autoimmune disorders) or lowered immune responses (allowing viruses or bacteria to flourish). We have also heard from parts who claim that they took advantage of existing organ weaknesses or genetic predispositions to create certain symptoms in the service of some agenda. We have no clue how they could have done this, but we do know that our clients got better when parts who said they were doing something to the body agreed to stop.

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