IFS “eight Cs”: creativity, courage, curiosity, a sense of connection, compassion, clarity, calm, confidence.
Christian theologian John Calvin: “For our nature is not only utterly devoid of goodness, but so prolific in all kinds of evil, that it can never be idle … The whole man, from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, is so deluged, as it were, that no part remains exempt from sin, and, therefore, everything which proceeds from him is imputed as sin.”2 This is known as the doctrine of total depravity, which insists that only through the grace of God can we escape our fate of eternal damnation.
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman summarizes these underlying assumptions about human nature here: “The doctrine that humans are innately selfish has a hallowed tradition in the Western canon. Great thinkers like Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Luther, Calvin, Burke, Bentham, Nietzsche, Freud, and America’s Founding Fathers each had their own version of the veneer theory of civilization.”
The mono-mind paradigm has caused us to fear our parts and view them as pathological. In our attempts to control what we consider to be disturbing thoughts and emotions, we just end up fighting, ignoring, disciplining, hiding, or feeling ashamed of those impulses that keep us from doing what we want to do in our lives. And then we shame ourselves for not being able to control them. In other words, we hate what gets in our way.
This approach makes sense if you view these inner obstacles as merely irrational thoughts or extreme emotions that come from your unitary mind. If you fear giving a presentation, for example, you might try to use willpower to override the fear or correct it with rational thoughts. If the fear persists, you might escalate your attempts to control by criticizing yourself for being a coward, numbing yourself into oblivion, or meditating to climb above it. And when none of those approaches work, you wind up adapting your life to the fear—avoiding situations where you have to speak in public, feeling like a failure, and wondering what’s wrong with you. To make matters worse, you go to a therapist who gives you a diagnosis for your one, troubled mind. The diagnosis makes you feel defective, your self-esteem drops, and your feelings of shame lead you to attempt to hide any flaws and present a perfect image to the world. Or maybe you just withdraw from relationships for fear that people will see behind your mask and will judge you for it. You identify with your weaknesses, assuming that who you really are is defective and that if other people saw the real you, they’d be repulsed.
also identified five that begin with a P: patience, persistence, presence, perspective, and playfulness.
When parents are Self-led, they relate to their external children in the same way they do their internal ones—with patience, calm, clarity, love, firmness, and reassurance.
joy, equanimity, forgiveness, perspective, and playfulness.
note that in terms of spiritual preferences, our exiles’ sense of worthlessness is likely to unconsciously steer us toward spiritualities or gurus that promise redemption or salvation. Similarly, because of their fear and hurt, we might tend toward forms of worship that are centered around a guru or some notion of an all-powerful God.
Now I invite you to do a scan of your body and your mind, noting in particular any thoughts, emotions, sensations, or impulses that stand out. So far, it’s not unlike mindfulness practice, where you’re just noticing what’s there and separating from it a little bit. As you do that, see if one of those emotions, thoughts, sensations, or impulses is calling to you—seems to want your attention. If so, then try to focus on it exclusively for a minute and see if you can notice where it seems to be located in your body or around your body. As you notice it, notice how you feel toward it. By that I mean, do you dislike it? Does it annoy you? Are you afraid of it? Do you want to get rid of it? Do you depend on it? So we’re just noticing that you have a relationship with this thought, emotion, sensation, or impulse. If you feel anything besides a kind of openness or curiosity toward it, then ask the parts of you that might not like it or are afraid of it or have any
as you focus on this emotion or impulse or thought or sensation and you notice it in this place in your body, ask it if there’s something it wants you to know and then wait for an answer. Don’t think of the answer, so any thinking parts can relax too. Just wait silently with your focus on that place in your body until an answer comes and if nothing comes, that’s okay too. If you get an answer, then as a follow-up you can ask what it’s afraid would happen if it didn’t do this inside of you. What’s it afraid would happen if it didn’t do what it does? And if it answers that question, then you probably learned something about how it’s trying to protect you. If that’s true, then see if it’s possible to extend some appreciation to it for at least trying to keep you safe
After parts unburden, they will manifest their true nature in valuable qualities (like delight, joy, sensitivity, empathy, wonderment, sexuality) and resources (like the ability to focus, clear discernment, problem-solving, passion for serving others or the world) that you have new access to and enrich your life.
To do these things and more, they can exacerbate or give you physical symptoms or diseases, nightmares and strange dreams, emotional outbursts, and chronic emotional states. Indeed, most of the syndromes that make up the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual are simply descriptions of the different clusters of protectors that dominate people after they’ve been traumatized. When you think of those diagnoses that way, you feel a lot less defective and a lot more empowered to help those protectors out of those roles.
I developed IFS while working with clients suffering from eating disorders, where the most common approach to treating these people remains focused on “defeating” their disorder (with expected results). Our cultural war on drugs, as well, has been an unmitigated disaster with massive unintended consequences throughout the world. We need a new approach based on no longer trying to kill the messenger and instead listening to the message—no longer going to war against nature or human nature. This view—that people have a sinful, aggressive, selfish, impulsive nature that must be controlled by their rational minds (or by help from God)—also leads to a profound sense of disconnection from other people and disdain for oneself. If everyone is out for themselves, then you should be too. You have to protect yourself. You shouldn’t be too open and naïve. You need to watch your back. The problem here is that this approach doesn’t work. It only leaves you feeling lonely, ashamed, and afraid—feelings you think you have to hide for fear of being rejected. When you believe you are a separate, selfish, and sinful soul among other wretches like yourself, it’s hard to not feel lonely, even when with people. When you’re alone with your pathetic self, you feel even more rejected and worthless and, consequently, are likely to withdraw even more.
Exiles Let’s start with the exiles. These are often the younger ones that have frequently been called inner children in our culture. Before we get hurt, they are the delightful, playful, creative, trusting, innocent, and open parts of us that we love to be close to. They are also the most sensitive parts, so when someone hurts, betrays, shames, or scares us, they are the parts who take in the extreme beliefs and emotions (burdens) from those events the most. After the trauma or attachment injury, the burdens these parts absorb shift them from their fun, playful states to chronically wounded inner children who are frozen in the past and have the ability to overwhelm us and pull us back into those dreadful scenes. They move from feeling “I am loved” to “I am worthless” and “No one loves me,” and when they blend with us, that belief becomes our paradigm and we feel all their burdened emotions. It feels unbearable to reexperience those emotions and to believe those things, and, often, those burdens impair our ability to function in the world. I’ve had clients who, when their exiles took over, couldn’t get out of bed for a week.
Even when they are exiled, their burdens can exert an unconscious effect on our self-esteem, choice of intimate partner, career, and so on. They’re behind the overreactions that seem mysterious to us and leave us perplexed as to why certain small things hit us so hard. It’s very hard to grow up in the US without accumulating a number of exiles. As a child, you were almost certainly hurt, humiliated, or terrified multiple times by your family or peers and were then coldly expected to just move on. Abuse survivors inevitably have many exiles.
Managers When you have a lot of exiles, other parts of you will have to leave their valuable roles to become protectors. It’s like your adolescent parts are pressed into military or police service. Some of them take on the role of controlling the outside world so that nothing triggering happens—they manage our relationships, appearance, and performance often by yelling at us the way our parents or teachers once did so that we’ll try harder or look better. These are the parts that become inner critics. Other parts take another approach and try to take care of everyone else while neglecting ourselves. Others are hypervigilant, and some are intellectual and are skilled at keeping us out of our bodies. There are many common roles these manager parts take. What they all have in common is the desire to preempt the triggering of our exiles by controlling, pleasing, or disconnecting us.
Those can be wake-up call events if I can help them keep the striving, materialistic, competitive parts of them that had dominated their lives from regaining dominance so they can explore what else is inside them. In doing so, I can help them access what I call the Self—an essence of calm, clarity, compassion, and connectedness—and from that place begin to listen to the parts of them that had been exiled by more dominant ones.
First, we find out who we aren’t. That takes identifying the extreme beliefs and emotions our parts carry that have (often unconsciously) governed our lives, and determining that those don’t belong to us.
took me a while to realize that I’m not worthless and pathetic. Those were just beliefs my exiles carried from being raised by a frustrated father.
Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow is well known for his ideas on self-actualization. He asserted that after our basic needs for safety, belonging, and affection are met, we become aware of a higher need to do what we’re best suited for. “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself…. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one idiosyncratically is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”
While there are countless approaches out there that coach you to articulate and pursue a meaningful vision for your life, too often those attempts come from your managers rather than your Self. In my experience, it’s best to wait until your protectors have relaxed so that the vision emerges—in this way, you receive your vision rather than create it.
As you unburden your exiles, it allows your protectors to transform, and you begin hearing more from those parts of you that aren’t so obsessed and driven—the ones who love being truly intimate with others, the ones who want to create art and move your body, the ones who want to play with family and friends, and the ones who just love being in nature.
This part has been around since I was thirteen as a result of having been treated as an exile when I was in middle school because of my weight, my odd interests, who I hung out with, and who wouldn’t hang out with me. One defense he developed was to always find a way to feel better than other people. He was really poorly treated for a long time and had to burrow inside.
Brian Gallagher, “The Problem with Mindfulness,” Facts So Romantic (blog), Nautilus, March 30, 2018, nautil.us/blog/the-problem-with-mindfulness; and Lila MacLellan, “There’s a dark side to meditation that no one talks about,” Recesses of Your Mind (blog), Quartz, May 29, 2017, qz.com/993465/theres-a-dark-side-to-meditation-that-no-one-talks-about.
Alex Lickerman and Ash ElDifrawi, The Ten Worlds: The New Psychology of Happiness (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 2018), 296.
Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2008), 163.
Jean Houston, A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story (San Francisco: Harper, 1996).
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