Richard Schwartz explains his IFS system.

When I first saw a video in my YouTube feed about Internal Family Systems (IFS), I skipped right past. It’s just me and the missus here and we get along fine.

It wasn’t at all what it sounded like. IFS is actually a kind of therapy for individuals invented by Richard Schwartz.
I’ve watched Schwartz in several interviews and I remain intrigued.

The idea is that you have a “family” of parts in your mind that behave like individuals. If you do things to sabotage yourself it’s usually one of those parts trying to protect you from reliving some childhood trauma.

You can talk to them and they answer. If you talk to them properly you can heal the “exile” and get the protector to relax.

It’s the opposite of what they used to teach about multiple personalities, that trauma causes them.

It’s more that you already have them without realizing it, but trauma makes them more noticeable.

Schwartz divides the parts into exiles and protectors, which can be managers or firefighters. Exiles, being the vulnerable parts we try to lock up to keep from reliving their trauma. Managers arrange your life to avoid triggers. Firefighters erupt when you’ve been triggered, to stop you reliving an exile’s traumatic memories. At the heart of it all is Self, which is curious, compassionate and knows how to heal.
The more “Self energy” you bring to the conversations, the more they will trust you. I think of it as the part of the ego that’s most genuine, most connected to the center that Carl Jung calls Self.

IFS reminds me of Carl Jung’s active imagination, which I’ve also tried with limited success.

My current thinking is that Jung helps you deal with the stuff in your head that culture puts there, and IFS is for all the people you used to be who are  in there suffering.

The idea is to heal them and get them working together.

It sounds so crazy at first, but I’ve played around with it and I swear it works.

As an American, it feels revolutionary. We’re taught to repress our painful parts, not make friends with them.

Procrastination

How my experiments with IFS have gone so far…
I’ve been thinking and writing ideas for the blog but for some reason I can’t bring myself to post any of it. I’ve been like that for weeks. It’s like somebody slammed on the brakes.
I inquired why and I got back images from a part: “DON’T” in all caps from the spoof movie trailer in Grindhouse, being charged by a bull, and the phrase What Dreams May Come, which if you haven’t seen it takes place in Dante’s version of hell.

There was kind of a kidding, not kidding vibe. I started making friends with this protector and suddenly I got a whiff of something traumatic from when I was 13 I thought I had processed that hurt more than expected.

The protector, who I’ve named Goth Boy, said do you really want to relive all that and I said I did.
The exile he was protecting I named Suffering Boy. He had a lot of shame and believed he was in Hades all alone.
I decided to treat him like a 13 year old foster child with a messy past. He told me his stories and I cried and told him I loved him and would he like to come with me to the present. He gave up his burden and no longer thinks of himself as Suffering Boy. I offered to take him with me to the present.

He said he’d rather stay in the late 70s where there was more nature and he could swim in the river.
And I felt better. Not sure how that applies to procrastination, however. Apparently I needed to deal with some some feelings I didn’t realize I was ignoring. My parts weren’t going to let me do anything else until I did.