Have You Considered Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy?

A personal account of my time doing IFS therapy this year

Minty Horseradish
Change Your Mind Change Your Life
6 min readNov 11, 2021

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Photo Credit: Minty Horseradish

It was April. I’d moved into a new community-orientated house. I had a full-time job, and I was healthy. It was Spring. Despite everything looking normal and happy on the outside, my world felt engulfed in darkness.

I woke up every day with a feeling of dread. I wanted someone to come and save me from drowning. Luckily enough, years of meditation and cultivating self-awareness meant I could dis-identify from much of this pain. I knew that in the depths there was old trauma that needed to shift — something needed to be heard or expressed. It was on that basis that I decided to try Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy.

IFS is groundbreaking in its approach. It differs vastly from traditional Freudian or psychotherapy which is talking-centred and usually consists of people reciting stories of their life. IFS, on the other hand, backs you into a corner and forces you to stop thinking. Forces you to stop reciting the stories you’ve been telling yourself your whole life and to really deeply look into the wounding underlying the suppressed emotions. It incorporates a spiritual approach, its aim to assist us in reconnecting to our Self: the core of who we are that is kind, compassionate and cannot be damaged (one might also know it as intuition, or Soul). To do so, we first need to see our shadows (also known as our “unconscious”).

Established by Dr Richard Schwartz, IFS works on the basis that we are made up of a “family” of different Parts, or subpersonalities, that are trying to coexist together. Just like a real family, differing Parts have conflicting needs and they might be dysfunctional. Some Parts are louder than others, some might appear negative or positive, and some are frozen in time bearing a burden of past trauma. There are effectively no bad Parts — all these Parts of us are valuable and serve a function. However, the Parts frozen in time are safeguarded by “Protectors”, or as I’d like to think of it, habits we developed earlier in our lives that enabled us to survive from either chronic and/or traumatic situations or attachment-violation. These unconscious habits might then play out in our life as behaviours that might lead to the breakdown of relationships, unhealthy lifestyle choices or poor self-esteem. For me, many of my Protectors started in childhood or as a result of an intimate relationship breakdown.

The therapy sessions involved initial counselling: talking through how I was that week, and in doing so, my therapist would point out the different Parts that she noticed.

“It sounds like there is a judgement Part”, my therapist Angela would say, to which I would reluctantly admit, was true. My judgement Part was a Protector. “It” judged myself and others harshly to cover up an “Exile” or wound that felt like it never healed.

“Can you see that Part?” she would continue.

“Yes,” I would say.

“What does it look like?” she asked.

“It’s brown and looks like a hedgehog,” I responded.

“Say hello to it.”

“Okay.”

“Ask it how old it is.”

“It’s from when I was 5.”

“Ah, that’s a really old Part”, Angela would note “Ask it if it would kindly step aside.”

“Mmmmm…” with my eyes closed, I would meditate on the brown hedgehog-like image that my mind had conjured up and try to communicate with this Part, asking it to step aside.

“Okay”, I said when I was ready when the Part felt ready.

“What comes up?”

Through this process, again and again, my Parts would reveal to me my inner conflicts and wounds. My judgement Part came from memories of unworthiness and the high standards that were expected of me throughout my childhood and adolescence. My sadness came from a fear of abandonment and all the moments in life when I did not feel heard. My fears came from witnessing arguments between my parents. Old memories would flash before my eyes, and time and time again, I would be in tears. Therapeutic, cathartic, luscious tears. Tears that would wash away the decade-old scabs that covered those Parts of me that hadn’t been seen, acknowledged, held or loved before.

In a way, looking at myself in Parts allowed me to depersonalise the experience of actually being the wounded person. I wasn’t wounded. I wasn’t broken or defective. There were just fragments of my lived experience that felt unresolved, through no fault of myself, my family, and the people in my life. In many instances, I could not emotionally process the abuse, hurt, or abandonment that I felt when it happened. It is neurologically not possible to before a certain age since our pre-frontal cortex continues to develop post-natally, from birth into toddlerhood.

The central insight for me was that although I had decided to embody “radical self-love” this year I couldn’t do so if I was unaware of the Parts of myself that I habitually disliked, were repulsed by, hated and tried to distance myself from. I was only adding to my own pain. Stoking the flame of my suffering by allowing them to rule my life through subconscious decisions and habits.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate” — Carl Jung

The more I uncovered myself, piece by piece. Each difficult week by week. The more I understood myself and the more I could grieve, cry, scream, hold, forgive and love those Parts which I’d abandoned for too long.

“Tell this Part how old you are now”, Angela continued.

“I’m 35 now”, I answered. Tears now spontaneously flowing down my face. Followed by deep, deep sobs. “35”, I’d think to myself, “35… that’s how long it's taken for me to see that this Part of me is hurt. That’s how long it’s taken for me to hold it and tell it that it's safe.”

All of my Parts, having a Parts Party!

No therapeutic modality is a cure, but the IFS process is a new paradigm of therapy and is powerful and healing. One that appears to be becoming more and more popular. For reasons outside the scope of this article, I have decided to cease IFS and move towards a transpersonal approach. However, I would recommend this therapy for those who are serious about doing the work and really stepping into the darkness to shine a light on those parts who are calling out for attention.

As I continue on my journey of understanding my own humanness in this messy, complicated, glorious world I will look back on this year fondly. No longer stuck in a dark night, and with a healthier relationship with Self, I’m ready to make the lifestyle choices needed to nourish myself. I also feel grateful that I have a new tool that I have been able to incorporate into my meditation practice. But most of all, I’m stepping into acceptance of all the Parts of me that make me: me. And every now and then, we have a Parts-Party.

“Give that Part a hug, tell it to release anything it wants”, said Angela.

“Okay”, I responded as I watched my judgements float into the sky and dissolve into clouds.

“Now put it somewhere safe, maybe your heart. Tell it how much you value it. Ask if it was a new role in your life. And don’t forget to check on it every now and then, that’s the most important bit.”

More about Internal Family Systems Therapy here.

To find an IFS therapist in the UK click here.

*name changed

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Change Your Mind Change Your Life
Change Your Mind Change Your Life

Published in Change Your Mind Change Your Life

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Minty Horseradish
Minty Horseradish

Written by Minty Horseradish

Environmentalist, educator, engineer and psychotherapist-wanna-be. I’m a Poet and 浪漫 .

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