A Brief Intro to Internal Family Systems (IFS)

Hi everybody.

I would love to give you a really quick tour of this amazing model called Internal Family Systems that is based squarely on the work of Dr.

Richard Schwartz who developed this model of IFS about 40 years ago.

So the model tells us in essence that rather than each of us just being one kind of big monolithic entity,

We all are comprised of a core essential self at the core of us kind of like an apple core that's always there all the time filled with wonderful qualities and many different parts.

So what do I mean by this?

Well you can think about your core self kind of like this heart.

This is the essence of who you truly are.

It's your authentic self.

This is also your core connection to the divine.

It's the God image within you and it always contains qualities that reflect the divine.

In IFS language we call those the 8C qualities.

Qualities like calmness,

Clear-mindedness,

Compassion,

Connection,

Curiosity,

Confidence,

Creativity.

These wonderful qualities that reflect who you truly are and who I truly am but I don't usually walk around in the 8C qualities and maybe you don't either and the reason why is because we all have parts and when our parts get activated they take over and obscure our access to the self or the God image that is within all of us.

We have many different parts that are unburdened that make up our unique personalities.

We're all kind of unique in the grand scheme of things but what happens is when we're going through life and negative things happen,

In clinical language we would call this trauma,

In biblical language we would call this the sin in the world,

Our parts become burdened with that negative traumatic sinful experience so they lose access to the core essence of who they truly are and they become burdened with things like shame,

Who I am is bad,

Or sadness and depression and when those feelings take us over it feels horrible.

We lose access to our calm,

Clear-minded,

Courageous qualities and suddenly we're taken over by shame,

Negative thinking and all of the sensations of these parts of us.

These are called our exile parts mostly because all the rest of our parts want to exile them far away so we don't have to feel them.

In order to accomplish that we have two types of protective parts who try to protect us from our exiles pain.

One type of parts are the managers,

They're proactive,

They try to prevent that pain from happening.

Then we have the reactive team,

Those are our firefighters and their job is basically to come in when the pain is active and put it out like firefighters do with a fire.

So what are these kinds of parts about?

Well you may be familiar with some of the well-intentioned tactics of our manager parts.

They are things like denial,

Everything's fine,

It's all fine,

There's no problem here,

Keep moving people,

Nothing to see.

Or control,

Let me get in your business and tell you what to do.

You know you should,

Right?

Or our inner critic who likes to come at us and yell at us and tell us how we're doing everything wrong.

These are good parts meaning they're trying to help us not feel pain,

They're just stuck in bad roles.

But when they don't succeed and our pain floods us,

Let's say suddenly we're flooded by sadness or by shame,

Then our firefighters have to kick in.

And you may also be familiar with some of their strategies.

My personal favorite is cookie monster.

If I happen to be feeling flooded with shame or sadness or brokenness,

Cookie likes to jump in and eat a whole package of cookies.

It makes the pain feel better in the short run but it makes it worse in the long run.

And interestingly that's the same for almost every one of our burdened managers and firefighters.

Some of our firefighters are more significant like our rage or our blame shifting,

Where if we're feeling threatened our rage part may jump up and yell or throw things or call names or blame someone else in an attempt to get what feels threatening to back up,

Right?

Or perhaps our alcoholic parts may show up and try to pour some wine or beer or cocktail on the pain and again that can help make it feel better for a minute,

Then it usually feels worse.

So that's a really quick overview to all of the components of the system of internal family systems or IFS.

We have a core self that is deeply intrinsically calm,

Clear-minded,

Loving,

Compassionate.

This is who you truly are and who I truly am.

We have exile parts that are burdened with pain.

We have proactive managers who are trying really hard to get us to do it right and please people and keep everything under control so our pain doesn't get activated.

And then we have our firefighter parts that jump in to try to put the pain out when it invariably comes up.

That's all there is to it.

There's your quick example of the internal family systems model.