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People often speak naturally about “parts” to describe their feelings and behavior. Someone might say, “A part of me knows better, but another part keeps going back to the same destructive type of relationship.” Or “I don’t know why I revert to a kid every time I visit my family; it’s like a part of me still wants my parents’ approval and recognition.”
IFS takes advantage of this language, building on the idea that we all have different parts of ourselves and that these parts exist in greater or lesser harmony, depending on our life experiences. When we’ve grown up in a difficult environment, these parts may take on extreme roles: a protective part might try to manage painful, frightening memories and feelings by pushing them away or using alcohol, drugs, self-harm, or other compulsive behaviors to numb out our capacity to remember and to feel.
Our natural longing for connection and our capacity to be vulnerable may be experienced as too threatening and get turned into an “exile,” a rejected part kept at bay. It can come to feel like a civil war, with different parts in conflict with each other and no healthy self in control, guiding us to make wise decisions and helping us manage the turbulence within. We may feel carried along or controlled by powerful feelings and impulses, leading us to behave in ways we regret, feel shame about, or simply don’t understand.
The core self: Accessing our inner wisdom, compassion, and clarity
When we are blended with our parts, we may have no idea that a healthy core self even exists. In fact, my clients often adamantly deny the existence of a healthy core self when we first start working together. A core tenet of IFS, however, is that we all have within us a wise, compassionate, curious, and competent core self. To access it, however, we first need to “unblend” from our various parts.
This can be a challenging step to learn, but it’s absolutely essential. It begins with taking a small step back from our experience so that we can see it from a slight distance. Trapped in the turmoil, there is little we can do to help ourselves.
Unblending: The power of stepping back
It all begins with the process of taking a small step back from our inner experience. In mindfulness practices and mindfulness-based psychotherapies, we cultivate the ability to become aware of our inner experience without getting immersed in it — the ability to see and sense what we are experiencing without being wholly in the experience. In IFS, we call this “unblending.” The part that observes? That’s the core self.
Unblending is an IFS term for a process that’s integral to many forms of therapy. In cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), for example, we learn to notice (step back from) our automatic thoughts and beliefs and gently question them. In the process, cognitions that once felt like reality come to be seen as nothing more than particular and often biased ways of interpreting the world and viewing ourselves.
From “symptom” to survival strategy: The power of reframing
One of the most powerful shifts early in IFS work occurs when clients come to understand that the symptoms they struggle with and feel ashamed of can be better understood as survival strategies that have outlived their usefulness. I had a client who was deeply ashamed of having cut himself repeatedly as a teenager. A psychiatrist had prescribed medication to control his self-harming behavior, a symptom of whatever disorder he’d been diagnosed with.
I asked him to get in touch with the part of himself that had done the cutting and to listen with compassion to why that part was hurting himself. Immediately, and with great sadness, he saw that this was an attempt to create a kind of pain he could control, in contrast to the emotional pain in his family that he could not—the deeply painful experience of invisibility and rejection he felt with his parents. Rather than view his cutting as a shameful symptom of pathology, he came to understand it as a desperate strategy for managing overwhelming feelings.
Another client, a young woman who was caught in a shame-filled cycle of binging and purging for hours every night, was able, through parts work, to see the frightened, hurting part of her that had no idea how to cope with overwhelming feelings of loneliness and abandonment. She was startled when I told her how glad I was that she had developed a part early in her life that could help her manage these overwhelming feelings when there was no one there to support her. Perhaps, I added, the usefulness of that survival strategy had outlived its time, and together, we could find other, less costly ways of comforting herself and managing difficult feelings.
The act of reframing, integral to IFS, can go a remarkably long way towards lifting what psychologist and mindfulness teacher Tara Brach calls the trance of shame.
The transformative power of self-compassion
Once clients have the ability to unblend from their extreme parts, they are invited to see those parts with compassion, to hear and see what their parts are struggling with, and what they need in order to heal. Compassion is a powerful healing force; often, the simple act of sitting compassionately with our younger parts is enough to begin the healing process.
As clients learn to identify when their younger parts have gotten triggered and to respond to those parts with compassion and reassurance, the fear, loneliness, and sadness quickly recede. There’s a caring, competent, compassionate adult in charge now.
To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
