Exploring Yourself Using Internal Family Systems Therapy

Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), developed by Richard Schwartz, is based on the understanding that our psyches are made up of different parts or subpersonalities, and it provides a powerful methodology for working with and healing our parts. One aspect of this is how we explore our parts.

In most forms of therapy, when we want to work with a psychological issue or reaction, we either analyze it intellectually or dive into it emotionally. In some forms of therapy, you figure out each reaction or feeling using what you know about your psychological makeup and what you can sense or guess about the part. For example, if you have a part that feels hurt and upset whenever you get judged by people, you might remember that you were judged a lot by your father and figure that this part’s sensitivities come from that history. This intellectual approach is a good first step, but it is too much based on guesswork and theory and so it can’t give us a full, nuanced understanding of a part. And even if our guesses are right, we aren’t in direct contact with the part or its feelings, so it is difficult to really heal it.

Other forms of therapy take the opposite approach. You become the part and attempt to fully embody it and feel all of its feelings fully. In the above example, you would inhabit that part experientially, feeling it in your body and delving into the depth of the pain it feels for being judged. This approach recognizes that you can learn most about the part by allowing your insights to flow from your experience. This can work as long as you don’t avoid the part’s feelings. However, many of us have parts that are holding a lot of pain, and we tend to defend against feeling this pain. This makes it quite difficult, in some cases, to fully inhabit the part. And some parts have pain that is overwhelming or traumatic. It wouldn’t be a good idea to dive into these feelings even it you could. You need to remain centered and in touch with your inner resources while you are approaching pain like this. IFS provides a method for achieving this.

In IFS, we inhabit our true Self, which is a place of groundedness, curiosity, and compassion. From this place we get to know each of our parts by asking it questions and listening to its responses. We aren’t just using intellectual ideas about the part; we are truly listening to what it has to tell us. But we also aren’t just diving into its feelings. We are learning about the feelings experientially, but from the safe vantage point of the Self.

IFS walks a middle ground between analyzing our parts intellectually and immersing ourselves in their pain. This allows us to explore our parts experientially without the problems of avoidance or retraumatization.