Right under our distressing ways of being there's a version of us that has amazing
capacity and care. Unlocking that capacity and care and using it in our healing work
is what IFS therapy is all about.
One thing that is amazing and very unique about Internal Family Systems therapy or IFS
is that it teaches us, as the client, how to become our own therapist, in a way,
our own healer. They might use the term leader. It does so through putting us in contact with
a somewhat hidden potential self, what you might think of as our "best self" or our "deeper self,"
right from the beginning, without taking years to develop.
Getting in touch with that deeper part of ourselves is so invaluable and is an amazing
part of the IFS model. In other words, it doesn't just undo a disorder and help us come to function
at a baseline, it goes beyond that to this really resourced state. This state and now I'm going to
sound a bit out there but I think of it as like an enlightened version of ourselves. Now if you're
thinking, believe me I'm not an enlightened person. I drink too much, I have a really hot
temper, I'm really insecure. That's just who I really am, that's the only me I've ever known.
Well it's not like in IFS we would say, "no, all those problematic behaviors are just an illusion."
In fact, we really start with direct focus upon the parts of ourselves that we struggle with.
The difference is, we approach those parts as just that, as parts, not the whole. But
before we really explore why it is absolutely more accurate to think in terms of parts,
I just want to start with appreciating why it is also more respectful.
I teach my students to think in terms of parts even if they never use parts language with their
clients. Like I'll tell them, please don't say "my client is a drinker or a cutter." No they are
not a drinker, they are a complex human being who has a part of them that feels compelled to drink.
A part of them. That part is not the totality of their selfhood or define who they are. But what
does this concept of parts have to do with that enlightened version of ourselves I was mentioning?
Well in IFS, when we can understand these aspects of our identity that we struggle with,
the moment we realize they are just one facet of ourselves, it allows us to step back in a way and
to be able to finally, actually see this part more clearly and more importantly to approach
it with compassion and curiosity. That's what we're going to talk about in these videos.
So I think most people are aware that we all have different parts of our personality.
What I think most people don't fully appreciate is how distinct these parts can be.
So much so, that we aren't just like one person in a way. Not that we have multiple
personalities in some pathological sense, it's just actually normal and adaptive to have various
aspects of our personality or parts that sort of take the lead at different moments.
As in, a part of me wants to go for that promotion but another part of me wants to turn
it down and is pushing me to stay invisible. Or part of me does believe I'm a good person
but another part is always telling me I'm bad or I feel this inner sense of badness.
You may even be aware that you have some parts of yourself that you like,
others you hate and sort of internally scapegoat, like I hate the part of me that overeats or rages.
Some parts you might even be scared of, like your inner critic. Like, I really better not make a
mistake because I don't want that to trigger my inner critic, you know, I'm really frightened
of that part. Now I feel like the idea of parts is pretty intuitive and user-friendly for most people
but there are a small group of people for whom the idea of having parts sounds really hokey or new
age-y or just hard to take seriously, as if it's not scientific or something. But I can tell you
there's nothing more scientific than the concept of parts. It's not a question of whether our brain
works this way, it's a proven fact that the brain works this way, in terms of multiplicity. If you
wanted to put it into computer language, you would say our brains are parallel processors.
So let me just give you the quick science download of that. If you've watched my other videos about
schemas this concept will be familiar to you, but I'll give it another go here. For a moment it will
seem like I'm changing the subject because I need to speak with you about implicit memory.
Okay so most of our psychology from how we experience the world, to how we respond to it,
is really based on learning, but not conscious explicit memory type learning, like one plus
one equals two, but the learning that exists in what's called implicit memory. In implicit memory,
particularly the type we might call procedural memory, we learn how to be, how to do.
It's not remembering facts, it's embodied memory. In fact, often I hear people use the word muscle
memory, but of course even muscle memory isn't actually stored in our muscles, it's just that
deeper parts of our brain are able to do such sophisticated calculations really quickly and
feed that information to us for immediate use. It's the most obvious in the case of learning
physical movements because we really can feel how it's as if our muscles are remembering what to do
and can execute those commands without intervention from our conscious thoughts or logic.
But honestly, that's just how most of our brain works in regard to most of our learning around
not just physical movements but what I think of as our psychological movements. In the same way
you wouldn't be able to return a tennis ball or ride a bike through logical calculations,
you wouldn't be able to be a successful human through logical calculation either.
We need most of our psychological movements to happen automatically in a manner akin to muscle
memory. So in the riding a bike example, a slight little vibration that hits me in this exact way
may cue me to lean almost imperceptibly to the left with the goal of helping me stay upright.
Well psychologically we're trying to keep upright as well. Really our brain's main job is to make
sure we survive, so upright means well fed, well rested and connected to the group because we die
without the group. The connected to the group one is where our psychologies really come in.
So if we try to go for something, but we get a shaming look from our mother
we pull back because we need that relationship to be back upright.
Or we go this way and get abuse, we come back. Or this way and it seems to hurt somebody else,
we might pull back. And in fact, we learn in an almost muscle memory way, don't do that again.
I know I just gave a lot of examples of sort of pulling back or inhibiting
and the truth is most of our conditioning is around inhibiting ourselves, but we could also
learn that the only way to get any attention in our family is to demand and scream and yell.
So maybe leaning in is what is learned. I'm also realizing I'm giving a lot of examples of what we
might learn around stress but of course there are things we might learn having to do with safety.
Like maybe I've learned that if I lean in with some vulnerability, my wife will help
me feel safe and understand what's going on, and we bond and learn and come back together
in a better place than even before I felt shaky, right? So that's a more healing type of learning.
But either way, whether more traumatizing learnings or healing learnings, the bottom
line is, our brain learns through experience how to survive, what will return me to homeostasis
and then we repeat that, that thing we learn to do, almost in an instinctive way in the future.
This is doing through memory, not through logic. That's why most of what we do isn't conscious or
cognitive. It's kind of like we don't sit there and try to cognitively figure out how to ride a
bike, we remember how to ride a bike. It isn't about rationality. This is a really important
point because I know we all think we're making choices based on rational thought, but honestly,
most of the ways we move through the world is really just psychological muscle memory.
I know I give examples from our interpersonal world, but equally through our inner world,
like "oh, I felt this sadness but then I got overwhelmed, so I better not feel that again."
Now if you get the idea that we develop these instinctual ways of being, where we really
aren't even that conscious sometimes why we are driven to respond like we are responding,
the next thing to realize is we don't just develop one way of responding or being,
one personality. We develop different ways of being in different contexts,
or around different needs, or around different dangers.
Even around different types of people, for instance. How should I be around a white person
or an authority figure. Why? Because different contexts might require a different strategy.
So let's just take time to walk through a very clear example of that so this can really hit home.
Let's say your parents are divorced and when you would go stay with your mom as a child,
she was very critical, so your whole body learned to sort of tense up in that house, as if reminding
you to walk on eggshells and hold things in. Maybe she was also threatened by your intelligence
and needed to be like the one who knows more. So your brain learned, around mom, I should drop 20
IQ points. While your mom was critical, let's say your dad was very relaxed and unthreatened
by you. So you could just be yourself. So at his house your shoulders would relax more.
You were standing taller. You just felt different in your body and certainly in your emotions.
Maybe your dad actually enjoys your witty humor and you find that playful part of you really
coming online and being developed. Now remember, these are learnings, learned ways of being
and they aren't learned in order to be forgotten, they are learned in order to be remembered,
in implicit memory. Why do we need to remember them? Well, so the next moment you walk into
your mom's house you won't forget how to be. The smell, the sights, the sound of her voice and BAM
that learning kicks in to protect you and suddenly when that muscle memory is triggered,
which is really just like a pattern of neural firing, that's what a memory is, it's a pattern of
neural firing, when that pattern fires it's really as if you are a different person because you need
to be a different person with mom. For instance, even if you made the conscious choice I'm going
to be funny around mom, nothing funny would come to mind. That funny playful part of you,
that net that knows it's safe and remembers how to be funny, is not online. It exists somewhere else
still because it will come on in dad's house, remember the brain's a parallel processor, but
in that moment, it's not sort of like the track you are on neurologically if that makes sense.
So hopefully this example gives you a sense of how we develop different "parts" of our personality
that are really pretty different. The person you learned to be or were allowed to be with
mom was pretty different than the person you learned to be or were allowed to be with dad.
And hopefully it is clear now why these patterns would need to be stored in memory,
in the same way you might have a "how to ride a bike" memory file. That kind of file sort of
comes online without even trying to remember, for instance, how to ride a bike. The way you'd
remember like what did I have for lunch yesterday, no it's muscle memory. It just opens automatically
with a sensation of getting on the bike or walking into mom's house. Now the next thing to understand
is that the person you learn to be with mom, it generalizes to other similar contexts. So it isn't
just learning how to be around mom, it's really learning how to be around people like mom. So even
when you're an adult when you are with someone who is critical, well that part of you will come out
to protect you. Maybe your boss kind of reminds you of your mom and when she's around,
you suddenly do that thing where you drop 20 IQ points. Which is obviously not ideal and that is
the next point to make, and that is, that there is a cost to the fact that our brain works this way.
The fact that we develop these parts or patterns contributes to a huge portion of human suffering.
Not all suffering comes from parts. If your child dies you will suffer. If you experience racial
oppression you will suffer, but that suffering that comes from what we think of as "our issues,"
that is really explained mainly by the fact that we are wired to have parts. There's a certain
inflexibility and even lack of control that comes into play when our parts take over. That leads
to what we call being "triggered." To have that cascade of thoughts, or feelings, or behaviors,
just open up like that in an automatic way, that can be very disempowering, particularly if those
parts have learned to protect us by drinking, or cutting, or raging, or starving ourselves,
or attacking us through an inner critic. That being said, while parts can produce suffering
for us, which is of course why we work with them in therapy, there's a very foundational,
philosophical, but i would also argue scientific, stance that IFS takes toward parts, and that is
the statement: "there are no bad parts." In fact, in IFS, they call this particular type of part
I've been describing today: "protectors," because these parts come online or learn to do what they
do, you know the roles they take on, in order to protect us, remember, to kind of keep us upright.
So even parts that seem self-sabotaging like our inner critic for instance,
really has learned that we will be better off with that criticism than without it.
Every part of us is just trying to do its job to keep us safe. So if we combat any part of us,
even a part that hurts others, like maybe yells at our kids, it's just gonna be more confused
and scared and probably fight back harder. But if we respect every part of our mind,
slow down, listen to it, speak with it, mentor it, relate to it with compassion, things can actually
change. When our parts can feel the more conscious adult version of our mind taking notice of it
and kindly trying to help it, they can step out of the leadership position because they finally feel
there is something greater to surrender to. And it allows the parts to finally be a bit free of the
burdensome job they had to protect us, and that is what IFS is all about, learning to slow down
and mindfully track, explore, and converse with, aspects of our personality that we find troubling,
really thinking of them as parts, not the whole of who we are. They took on their unique way of being
in order to help us survive, and while on the surface we might not understand why they needed
to do that particular thing in order to protect us, if we track it down and actually listen to the
part, the story can unfold. How it learned what it learned, the history of that, and I used the
word history here purposely because Schwartz talks about how each part has its own secret history.
And he's drawing from a poem by Longfellow, that reads: "If we could read the secret history of our
enemies, we should find in each man's life, sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."
I think that is such a powerful line, in terms of not judging others because
we don't know how they suffered. But in truth, we often don't really know how we've suffered
and how we had to adapt in order to survive. We haven't let ourselves put the dots together on it.
Internally, each part of our heart, whether a jealous part or scared part,
has its own secret history, one that only our parts can truly reveal to us,
and when we can discover those histories and approach our parts with compassion,
it changes everything. Why, because when understanding and compassion are given
to our parts, it allows for some really deep healing work, some real transformational work,
where our parts can finally feel safe enough to relax, to come out of this almost trauma
drive to control us and instead let our inner adult take charge. It is almost like through
our love toward them, that they can realize they aren't in the trauma scene anymore.
By the way, the science-y way of saying this is that we are working to change implicit memory
and yes if you've watched my video on memory reconsolidation, which I'll link to below,
I do believe that IFS is one of the therapies that works because it changes implicit memory through
the process of memory reconsolidation. That being said, while I think that's
intellectually interesting and I know I use the word "schema" in other videos, there's something
important about not only thinking about or approaching our parts as neural firing patterns,
or conditioning,or schemas, but rather visualizing them as like, human, because there's a way we
are dealing with human consciousness. It's a human story. It's not a "what," it's a "who."
When I have a client who is depressed, I'm not thinking, what is this depression? Is
it a chemical imbalance, is it a coping strategy, how do I get rid of it? I'm thinking, who in there
is depressed? Who in there gave up hope and why? Who in there got so punished for their anger that
they learned to shut down instead. That part needs someone to find it and build a relationship to it,
to listen to it, because just like with humans, a part will only be able to change, be able to learn
and shift, once it feels heard first. Once its secret history is known and its fears addressed
that's how safety is established, right? Just like with all of us.
Feeling heard, especially around our fears, is the first step, always. You know I hope in this way of
talking with you, I've begun to capture some of the ethos of Internal Family Systems work,
in the same way I've tried to capture, you know, the ethos of ADP in the video on ADP
and the other experiential forms of therapy I'm trying to cover on my channel.
That being said, there are actually a number of interesting pieces in IFS that we haven't
addressed yet that I think are worth exploring, which is why I chose to make this series,
a whole series, rather than just one video, because if I were you watching this one video,
I might be left wondering, well if I'm just a collection of various learned ways of being, then
which part of me is the real me? Who am I then? It turns out that IFS has a very clear and very
inspiring answer to that question and that answer is a key piece of what is so healing about IFS,
so let's go there next. Thank you for watching. I hope you found this video helpful and if you
did you can help me out by liking and subscribing, or if you're a therapist
who would like to train with me while earning CEUs, you can visit my website at toriolds.com