Just as I was about to graduate from my doctoral program, I attended my first big girl conference. It was three days long at a hotel in Monterey, CA and I can’t begin to tell you how intimidated I felt. I was surrounded by thousands of seasoned clinicians, many of whom already knew each other. But my jitters quickly melted away once I became absorbed in what was being presented. The entire conference was on the therapeutic modality Internal Family Systems (IFS), something I had never actually heard of prior to the conference. But by the final day, I was spell bound and completely enthralled with this way of offering healing.
IFS (created by Richard Schwartz in the 1980s) is a type of psychotherapy that sees each person as having many different parts to them that make up an internal family within. Each of these parts have their own independent agendas, ways of informing how you interact with others and even yourself, and strategies for keeping you emotionally safe. Some of these parts contain the memories of traumatic or upsetting experiences and are stuck back in time, reliving those experiences in a never ending loop of suffering. The goal of IFS is to foster a relationship with each of these different parts so that they can be healed and integrated into a greater sense of wholeness within.
IFS identifies that we have a core part of us known as Self. This core part is the hub of the entire system and is connected to wisdom, compassion, patience, and curiosity, to name a few. When we have a strong relationship to Self, we are operating from the most grounded and well-informed place within us. In order to heal the other parts, we have to maintain a strong grip to Self, because it is Self that actually does all the healing and repair and helps to integrate all the other parts of ourselves.
There are eight main characteristics of Self (known as the 8 C’s of Self): calmness, clarity, curiosity, compassion, confidence, courage, creativity, and connectedness. It’s extremely challenging to embody all eight characteristics at the exact same time but if we can sustain at least a couple of them at any given moment, that is usually more than enough to facilitate healing.
When practicing IFS in therapy, I spend a couple of sessions orienting clients to their Self. Once there’s a strong enough connection to Self, we begin reaching out to the different parts that are activated in their lives. Parts are often quite eager to have this contact; they usually have a lot to say and are pretty stressed out so to have undivided attention and the opportunity to share their fears allows us to understand these parts quickly. The true depth of IFS is experienced when we connect with those parts that are stuck in a traumatic or upsetting experience from the past. We’re able to rewrite those traumatic memories, offer healing to those wounded parts, and give them new ways of understanding and relating so that they can join you in the present moment.
What I love the most about IFS is that it is technical and grounded in traditional psychological concepts, but in practice it is deeply spiritual and shamanic. My clients and I enter into a different realm together, reaching out to fragmented parts, transforming their pain and angst in such a visceral way that they come back to the earthly realm, beautifully altered, and more whole than when the process first started. In the practice of IFS, I witness the warrior within each of my clients, embodying the bravery needed to do such deep psychological and emotional work that has every right to terrify them. They take a leap of faith and that leap lands them home in the sweetest, fullest way possible.
