What is Internal Family Systems? How Talking to Yourself can be Therapeutic

One of the theoretical orientations I’ve found most useful in my approach to therapy has been that of Internal Family Systems, and since I get the impression that not many people outside the therapist-world are familiar with it, I figured I’d write a little bit about it in this post. IFS is an approach pioneered by Richard K. Schwartz and takes the perspective that human beings are not just individual personalities, but that we are all comprised of many sub-personalities or “parts” with their own attitudes, beliefs, and “jobs” as well as their own relationships to each other part. Essentially, Internal Family Systems takes the perspective that every human being in the world has “multiple personalities.”

So what does this look like in practice? If you’ve ever been in a situation where a part of you wanted to one thing and another part of you wanted to do the opposite, your experience can be described in IFS terms. Perhaps you notice a trend of reckless behavior in certain situations that keeps popping up in your life. An IFS therapist would approach this by asking you to explore, visualize, and begin a dialogue with this part of yourself. To continue the example, maybe you imagine this part as looking like a teenage punk-rocker with a disdain for authority and a thrill-seeking attitude. Once you start to think about your life situations in terms of a part of you engaging in this behavior rather than simply you making decisions that are very out of character, it might start to make a lot more sense to you. Furthermore, once you start listening to and “speaking” with this part, you may discover things about its motivation and actions that were completely hidden to you before. This process represents some of the power that taking an Internal Family Systems perspective or using “parts language” can lend to a therapeutic encounter.

Internal Family Systems says that all of our sub-personalities or “parts” fall into three major categories: Managers (also sometimes called Protectors), Firefighters, and Exiles. Each category represents a certain pattern of behavior and “job” within your own psychic “family.” Therefore, a therapist using an IFS perspective may use techniques usually reserved for family sessions with the parts of one individual client. Just as a child in a family may be scapegoated, or a parent may be over-controlling, various parts of who you are may be stuck in dysfunctional patterns and relationships to one another. Validating their identity and giving them space in session can lead to resolution of conflicts in much the same way that letting each member of a family talk can do so in family therapy.

MANAGERS

A diagram classifying the various “parts” of the personality in relation to one’s Self according to IFS.

The most common classification of “parts” and the parts that come up most often are referred to as “Managers.” In IFS, managers are the parts of one’s personality that step in in order to help you avoid pain, endure hardship, or deal with emotions that you may find difficult. Managers may do this in healthy or unhealthy ways. For example, maybe you notice that when you feel envy that it makes you very uncomfortable and you tend to exercise more often in a desire to change your body image. This action would be the domain of a manager whose job it is to help you “handle” feelings of envy. This manager may look like a fitness instructor or a coach , and it may see its job as helping you channel your energy into a behavior that it sees as productive or helpful. However, if in this scenario you are using exercise as a way to mask dissatisfaction with other aspects of your life or even to express self-hatred, then your manager is likely not doing you any favors. It is important in the IFS approach to understand that, since each “part” is truly a part of you, that it ultimately has good intentions, despite how warped or destructive their actions may be. So this manager, if allowed to have a conversation with you, may try and explain that it is doing what it does for your own good. But if you find its actions to be destructive, in addressing this manager you have the power to tell it that it’s not helping as much as it thinks it is and to request that it do its job differently in order to be more effective. After such a conversation, or a series of conversations, with this part, you may start to experience it as more forgiving rather than pushy, or more encouraging rather than critical, and your relationship to exercise may become more about pursuing physical health than eliminating the “bad” aspects of your body. Perhaps the most characteristic theme of a manger part is that it seeks control.

FIREFIGHTERS

Firefighters are similar to managers, but more extreme. Their purpose is also to protect you from emotions that are believed to be “negative” or “difficult,” but they go to great lengths to do so. Firefighters are often born of trauma, and as such tend to be more reactive than thoughtful, and very sensitive to real or imagined “triggers” for their behavior. Whereas a manager may feel the need to put on a brave face or engage in a coping activity to deal with a certain situation, a firefighter will go straight to a destructive or self-harming coping behavior, such as substance abuse or eating disorder behaviors. Firefighters are also associated with a thrill seeking mentality and are motivated by immediate gratification or punishment.

EXILES

Exiles are the most sensitive and secretive parts of the human personality in Internal Family Systems. These are parts of the psyche that come into being due to trauma or abuse and usually appear as young children or small, vulnerable creatures in the mind’s eye. Exiles are frozen in time, and as their name implies, they are cast out, ignored or shunned by all the other parts. This is because exiles represent the pain and fear of the trauma or abuse, and may take on the shame and guilt around this. Exiles and other parts may believe that exiles somehow deserved or merited the pain that they feel, and because of their strong association with pain and trauma, these parts are often seen as repulsive, unattractive, or “weak.” Unless one confronts this situation and seeks to form a healthy relationship with one’s exiled parts, they may be forever hidden away, causing problems in obscure but powerful trends in one’s day-to-day life.

THE SELF

Beyond all of the aforementioned “parts” of the human personality, there also exists The Self. The Self is the part of you that is separate from any other identified parts, and it occupies a lofty place in the IFS worldview. If a human is able to “unblend” or recognize their distinction from their managers, firefighters and exiles, they will start to experience their true and authentic underlying personality. The Self is seen as a vast source of energy, wisdom, and motivation, but is often obscured by people who let their parts have an inordinate amount of control in their lives. If an individual is in the throes of active addiction, for example, IFS would say that they are “blended” with a firefighter that is basically running their life due to its being given far too much control. When a part is active to this degree, an individual starts to believe that they are that part of themselves, even to the point of expressing skepticism that they could be anything different. However, if such an individual were to do the internal work of speaking with their firefighter and enacting healthy boundaries with it, they would start to realize that they don’t have to react to difficult emotional states by using. Once the firefighter steps down from a place of power, it is possible to give that power to The Self, where it belongs.

Internal Family Systems is a profound and complex way of not only seeing therapy but seeing humanity, and as such there is much more to it than what I can convey here. However, I hope that this overview provides some education and gets people interested in seeing human nature in terms of “parts.” It is often revolutionary when an individual realizes that not only are they not their parts, but that they can talk to their parts and ask them to do their jobs differently. One of the most fascinating elements to IFS work to me is that once a person begins to form a healthy relationship to a part of themselves, that part will change. Parts that start out looking monstrous or disgusting become beautiful and even trusted allies. Just as a healthy family needs direct communication and boundary-setting to function properly, so does the psyche in Internal Family Systems.

Save the Inner Children: What Q Anon Tells Us about Collective Dysfunction.

A recent “Save the Children” Q Anon rally - Stephanie Keith / Reuters

I’m returning to the subject of conspiracy theory for this post, and more specifically Q Anon. I admit that some of my impetus to write about Q Anon is morbid fascination, but a substantial portion of it is grounded in what I see as the vitally important act of monitoring a highly destructive set of fascist myths that is gaining political power around the globe, and is more recently masking itself by co-opting the phrase “Save the Children.” I also believe that taking a psychological perspective when treating what is essentially mass delusion can tell us a great deal about what is dysfunctional in our society, and maybe even in ourselves.

Q Anon is, in essence, a conspiracy theory that arose from internet message board 4chan that claims Donald Trump is waging a secret war against a cabal of Satanic blood-drinking pedophiles in The Democratic Party. It’s a story as bizarre as it is antiquated, and can be traced back to “Pizzagate,” The Satanic Panic of the Eighties, and even further to the medieval “blood libel.” Despite its bizarre belief system becoming more ornate and all-encompassing over the years (including now elements of time travel and alien contact) it has seen a disturbing rise of adherents, not just in America but around the globe. Recent rallies co-opting a message of “Save the Children” have taken place in London and Berlin as well as Los Angeles, and the movement is now supported by multiple individuals likely to soon become members of congress. The crux of what has made Q Anon so appealing to so many people lies in its stance of protecting the most vulnerable people in our society - children - from the most powerful people in our society - politicians and the wealthy (almost categorically cast as liberals in this right-wing drama). Disguised as a child advocacy movement, it can bring in a much wider range of adherents who may initially be unaware of the ideology attached to its “Save the Children” demonstrations.

A woman offers a child to The Devil in goat form in Goya’s The Witches’ Sabbath

I see this movement’s focus on child welfare and abuse as especially interesting, and I think there’s a good case to be made that it’s key to understanding why so many people seem so ready to believe such bizarre and unfounded claims. There is of course no evidence that “Q,” the movement’s anonymous leader, is actually a government insider as he claims to be, there are no records of children claiming to have been abused by the alleged cabal, and there is no scientific evidence that consuming the blood of children can produce a high like a drug or make one appear perpetually young (another central claim of the movement). So, what is it about these stories that allow them to fly under the radar of rational scrutiny and exploit what appears to be a huge blind spot in human consciousness? What is the unconscious power of this narrative that it holds such allure for such large groups of people? It is patently obvious that the appeal isn’t rational; although lack of critical thinking skills likely plays into Q Anon delusions, I don’t see it as likely that their draw is logical. Rather, I believe there is something symbolically significant in the claim of mass child abuse. I’ll preface this by saying that of course child abuse does occur en masse and is very often covered up or ignored, but in this article I’m focusing on the story element of children being abused by a secret Satanic government cabal as alleged by Q Anon. An example of how the movement embellishes this narrative is the recent addition of “mole children” to its mythology. A few months ago, Q Anon adherents began to spread the claim that there are networks of underground tunnels containing masses of abused children, some having been experimented on genetically. This belief has led to the arrest of an Illinois woman who traveled to New York City with a trunk full of knives claiming that she was acting on orders from Donald Trump.

Approaching Storm by Railway, Jeffrey Smart

If we are to believe that Q Anon is what Jung would call an unconscious “irruption” resulting in mass delusion or moral panic, then we can view its symbology as psychologically significant. As such, I believe the more outlandish elements of the mythology to be the most telling of the mental state of those that adhere to it. I want to focus specifically on the “mole children” element as a potent symbol of collective trauma, and its connection to the Internal Family Systems concept of an “exile.”

Internal Family Systems is a unique therapeutic approach pioneered by Richard Schwartz in his book of the same name.

Internal Family Systems is a therapeutic modality that takes the perspective that we are all made up of sub-personalities or “parts,” and that these parts of ourselves have different jobs. Some parts of ourselves are “protectors” whose job it is to shelter other parts that they perceive as vulnerable. This can be done in healthy and unhealthy ways. However, there is another classification of sub-personalities deemed “exiles” that I’d like to focus on in this post. An exile is a part of ourselves that we have deemed repulsive, weak, pathetic, or generally disagreeable, and have dissociated from our conscious persona. Exiles are born in trauma, particularly childhood trauma, and very often take the form of weak and vulnerable children. In a therapeutic or artistic setting, exiles are often seen as children who are locked away somewhere like a basement, cave, attic, or even underground. I believe that the “mole children” element of the Q Anon belief system shows itself to be a projection of many traumatized individuals’ exiled parts. Projection is of course the most common psychological defense mechanism, and enables an individual or group to imagine the elements of themselves of which they aren’t conscious are being embodied in an outside source. Believing that others are demonic feels much less threatening than facing one’s inner demons, and believing that children are abused in secret underground facilities by the thousands is easier for many to believe than the idea that they themselves may have suffered abuse. The hellish underworld the mythology places these abused children in is a symbol of dissociation. I think that this unconscious attraction to an irrational belief system is due to its articulation of a hidden and deeply powerful battle in the human heart. The seed of an ideology finds fertile ground when a person believes that it can tell them something of which they are not already conscious. This creates a mysterious and even sometimes religious or spiritual allure.

Exiles can often be conceptualized as a repressed version of an “inner child,” and when such a spontaneous, joyful, fun-loving and sensitive element of the human psyche is locked away, its absence is sorely felt in the conscious life of the individual. It becomes even more telling when we take into account the Q Anon mythology that such vulnerable children may be eaten - bodily consumed - and thus taken away forever. This is the unconscious fear of the individual who has been traumatized; that they have irrevocably lost their inner child to shadowy and corrupt forces. I believe this explains some of the fervor behind such a push to “save the children” among members of the movement.

To clarify, when I speak of childhood trauma I am not proposing that all adherents to Q Anon have suffered sexual or physical abuse as children - although it is statistically likely that some have. Various forms of abuse are downplayed or normalized in childhood, leading to under-reporting, and this especially holds true in the case of emotional abuse, which I imagine most Americans would struggle to even define. When a society neglects education and mental healthcare, then a higher rate of abuse will occur among its families. However, I wonder if there might not be a form of mass trauma at work here on a societal level; trauma that may have began as uniquely American, but at this point has affected most of The Western World. My theory is that Western culture conditions its citizens with a certain set of messages or beliefs that denigrate and harm any healthy concept of self-worth. We can find such messages in the narrative of The American Dream, the Puritan work ethic, and “bootstrap” economics. We are brought up to believe that anyone can achieve any degree of success in this country if they are only willing to work hard at it. The corollary of this is that if you aren’t successful, then there must be something wrong with you. You aren’t working hard enough, or your work isn’t good enough. This leads us to identify our own value as human beings with the perceived quality of what we can produce for others. This commoditization of merit can be hideously destructive because behind it is a simple message: when you take away what a human being can produce, that human being is essentially worthless. There is no room for the innate dignity or worth of humankind in this message, and it is especially corrosive to the wellbeing of a child, who naturally does not produce labor for the benefit of society and shouldn’t have to. I suspect that this factors into the arduous difficulty that many of my clients show when trying to practice self-love.

Damage done from such societal messages may run counter to what many people think of when they hear the word “trauma,” and some may find it hyperbolic to label it as such. However, beliefs about one’s self-worth are so innate to who we are and so elemental in any form of psychological stability that I can’t think of anything more traumatic than believing oneself to be worthless. In working with trauma in session I often find that, although abuse and traumatic memories themselves do a huge amount of damage, they are not as pernicious or destructive as the beliefs that spring from traumatic experiences; namely that one’s own life doesn’t have worth or value. When we conceptualize a child being conditioned with these messages, it becomes more understandable how the child may deaden themselves to the emotional sensitivity of such a “truth” and “mature” too quickly in order to be seen as a productive member of society. Thus the child grows into an underdeveloped adult without ever fully having experienced childhood. The inner child, the exile, is locked away, deep in the unconscious mind - and here we see the image of “mole children” living underground in slave-like conditions, being abused and killed in large numbers without America’s conscious awareness of such an act. The outward mythology mirrors the inner turmoil.

I touched on this American, and perhaps more broadly Western, perception of conditional self-worth in a previous post, but I believe it to be an important and vastly under-studied phenomenon. Of course income inequality, political corruption, and heightened consciousness of systems of oppression all play a part in societal trauma, but these external forces alone may not induce a state of trauma without a corresponding system of beliefs that make individuals more vulnerable. In other words, there are many Americans who may lose their job but have the psychological resilience to not let it put them in a dejected and defeatist mindset. But if an American who believes that they have no inherent worth apart from their job is laid off, it is much more likely that they will experience this loss as traumatic. If this is behind even a fraction of what is causing thousands of people around the globe to impose their delusional and violent fantasies onto their system of government, then we cannot afford to ignore it any longer. When we see such large numbers of people eschew reason entirely, who represent a threat to the safety of their neighbors and the stability of world governments, it becomes necessary to assess and treat the illness that is causing such symptoms. I know through my work that it’s possible to reverse the damage that messages of conditional self-worth wreak on an individual level, now it’s just a matter of doing it on a societal level. America, and the rest of The Western World, has to look itself in the mirror and reassess its values before we fully regress to a psychic dark age. If we can show the emotional fortitude to examine and change our beliefs as individuals, it must be possible to do it as a nation.