A Complete Explanation of Internal Family Systems and How it Can Heal you Mentally and Emotionally

In this episode, Sarah describes in detail, Internal Family Systems (IFS). IFS is an approach some therapists use to help their clients gain better self-awareness of what stands in the way of their happiness and goals. Learn why you are a procrastinator, perfectionist or experience negative self-talk. IFS is a system within your psyche made up of three types of parts: the conscious self, protector parts and vulnerable parts. These parts were created when you were a child, even as early as infancy. IFS is becoming a popular method of mental health therapy because of its effectiveness in addressing a variety of mental health issues. And the good news is you do not have to go to a coach or therapist to use this approach, you can learn how to apply it to yourself. 

Link to handout about IFS.

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Important links:
Sarah's Mindfulness Coaching website: https://www.sarahvallely.com
TSD Mindfulness Coach Certification https://www.tsdmind.org

This episode is a meditation for beginners, and mindfulness for beginners resource. Intermediate and advanced meditators will also benefit. The Aware Mind produces content that supports stress reduction, anxiety relief, better concentration and focus, and trauma healing.

The Aware Mind is produced by TSD Mindfulness, a virtual meditation center, offering mindfulness classes, certifications and private coaching for people with past trauma, anxiety and depression disorders, business leaders, and people who work in the helping professions (i.e. counselors, healers and yoga and meditation teachers).

Transcript

I suffered from pretty significant anxiety. I would wake up every morning with really high cortisol levels, feeling so anxious, having panic attacks. I. I've struggled with A DHD almost my entire life, and about five years after I began practicing mindfulness, that went away almost completely. So mindfulness has been absolutely transformative for me in my life.

I haven't come across anything since then until now. So that's been 20 years. And in the last year or so, I have been using this process of internal family systems with myself personally and with my clients. And this is the first thing since experiencing that. Transformation that mindfulness gave me.

This is the first time that I have, again, come across something that has been so powerful. You might not have even heard of Internal Family Systems. This might be a completely new concept for you. Internal Family Systems is essentially an approach that therapists use with their clients to help their clients heal from past trauma.

Or heal from lots of things like OCD, procrastination, even some physical ailments. In this episode, I will completely unpack, explain this modality to you to such an extent that after the episode is complete, you should be able to do this work on your own with yourself. I will say this might be the most far out topic that I've done on this podcast, but I believe it's probably one of the most.

Powerful techniques and topics that you'll hear on this podcast. Internal Family Systems has the potential to completely be a game changer in your mental health, whether you consider yourself to have past trauma or not. If you've done inner child work, then I think this is gonna make sense. If you haven't, please stay open to these ideas that I'm gonna talk about today and allow your imagination to help you consider how this all might play out for you.

Internal family systems is basically inner child work on steroids. Just to back up a little bit, I'll briefly explain inner child work, our inner child is an aspect of our psyche and it lives in this imaginary world in our minds, and we heal by going. Into our imagination, into this world as the inner parent and supporting and loving our inner child.

Internal family systems also often referred to as IFS, is similar in that it views the mind as made up of different parts, um, each with its own unique perspectives, each part with its own unique feelings and its own role. And systems is in the name Internal Family Systems. And this therapeutic approach, it, it does involve a system, and the system is made up of three basic parts.

One part is your conscious self, which is you, especially when you're calm, compassionate, and wise. And there's only one. Of these, the other parts, there's multiple parts, but there's only one conscious self. This one conscious self is a similar concept to the inner parent in inner child work. The second piece in the system are your protector parts and the protector parts.

They protect us from many kinds of discomforts, including emotional pain, protect us from embarrassment, protect us from fear. And the third category in the system are your vulnerable parts, which are hurt due to past negative experiences. It doesn't have to be trauma. So these vulnerable parts can be created as a result of a negative experience that you might have had as a child.

So the overall goal of IFS is to help people understand their different parts, help heal through that so they can have less anxiety, they can feel more self-worth, you know, they can really get to that place in their mental health that they wanna be. I. The reason IFS works is because it is based on a system that truly exists.

Like this is the reason that we are struggling. I mean, it just, it's a complete blueprint of what's happening. So if you completely address that system, then you're gonna get better. You're going to heal. So you might be wondering why do these parts get created? You know, how, how did this start when we were younger?

When we experience a trauma or a negative event, when we're younger, our psyche does not know any other way to respond, doesn't have any other way to integrate the experience, make sense of what happened, deal with it, other than creating these parts in their psyche. However, when we get to a point in our lives where we are aware that we have this conscious self, then our conscious self can process the painful experiences without fracturing into parts.

I. But without connection, awareness, you know, embodiment of this conscious self, we don't have an ability to make sense and process these negative things that happen to us. And so this system is what steps in essentially. So this, all this that I'm explaining this. Takes place in our psyche, mostly completely unconscious.

It is like this whole imaginary world existing in our mind that we aren't conscious of. Similar to inner child work, you know, the inner child lives in this imaginary world in our psyche, but at the same time has this huge impact on our lives, on our behaviors, on our emotions, on our thinking. So it's powerful even though it's this like thing going on in your consciousness.

So I'm gonna go through and unpack each of these parts, the conscious self, the protector parts, and the vulnerable parts. Starting with your conscious self. Can you remember the first time you realized you could give yourself compassion? The first time you realized you could think caring thoughts toward yourself, the first time you realized you could be curious about your own pain?

That. That's it. That's when you became aware of your conscious self. For me, this was when I was in my forties. I was on this incredible healing journey. I was having this cathartic experience writing in my memoir about my A DHD, about my anxiety attacks, about my mindfulness meditation practice, and how that was really helping me move through and heal.

But on this one particular day, I'll never forget it. I was having an episode of this emotional release, not like an outta control emotional episode, but a moment when I was like, I need to let this come out so I can heal. And I felt guided to talk to my pain. And this is before I knew anything about IFS.

I've just been learning about IFS in the last couple years. This happened maybe about 10 years ago, so this moment was the first time that I turned. Towards myself with curiosity and compassion. And, and maybe you haven't had this moment yet. I mean, I didn't have it until I was in my forties and I had been practicing mindfulness and other meditations for almost 10 years, probably, and still hadn't had this moment.

So, I don't know, maybe I'm just really slow. But it, it took a while. So I'm trying to remember what I said to myself when I had this moment, but I think it was along the lines of thinking kindly towards my pain, allowing my pain to exist, and you know, letting myself know that it was okay to feel this way.

What I remember very distinctly was that I viewed the pain. As something a little bit more separate from myself, from my conscious self, and that piece is really important. I help clients move into their conscious self by asking them what are they curious about in terms of their inner process, and asking them what caring thoughts can they have towards themself?

Considering questions like that can help you move into this conscious self. In the IFS world, they usually refer to this. It's just the self, I don't use that term. I use the essence self or conscious self because it gets confusing with Buddhism because Buddhism has a term self also, and they're, but they're different in, in Buddhism, we're actually trying to release the self.

We're trying to get to this place where we're not. In this consciousness of thinking that we have a self, um, which is like the complete opposite of I-F-S-I-F-S, is that you're moving into your conscious self and embodying that both important processes a little bit different with, um, slightly different outcomes, but also some of the same outcomes as well.

All right, so that's a little bit about the conscious self. We only have one of those. Now I'm gonna talk about the protector parts. We have multiple protector parts. Traditionally, IFS breaks protector parts into two categories, managers and firefighters. There's other schools of IFS where they actually divide protector parts into lots of different categories.

I actually don't divide protector parts into any categories. It's just I. Protector parts. If there's a part of you that is trying to protect you from something, then it's a protector part. But just to let you know about these managers and firefighters. An example of a manager part is you being a perfectionist or you being a workaholic.

Those are really typical manager parts, helping manage your life and at the same time protecting you from feeling some difficult feelings and the firefighter parts. Could be an addiction to food or an addiction to social media. The firefighter parts are known for pushing you away from things, but when it comes down to it, protect your parts are protecting you from feeling intense emotions.

Especially emotions of fear, of shame and of pain and protector parts feel a burden of responsibility to keep you safe from these emotional discomfort. And they have some really creative methods for doing this. So here's a list of many different ways that our protector parts will keep us safe from these discomforts protector parts can push us to procrastinate.

To overthink, to have intrusive thoughts, to experience brain fog, to have abdominal pain, to experience nausea. Protector parts can push us to project things into the future. Can overanalyze to overplan, to under plan, to shut down emotionally or to blow up emotionally. Protector parts can drive you to seek out a romantic partner.

They can drive you away from seeking a romantic partner. Protect your parts can cause you to talk a lot or to talk very little. The list goes on and on. This is where it gets weird. These parts live in certain areas of your body or even hover around a certain area of your body. I. I'll publish a meditation that will guide you through this process so you can experience this and realize this is truly how it is.

It's, it's really quite interesting because your parts are living in a certain area of your body. The parts can cause certain body pains, not. All your body pains are from your parts, but some can be. And in the IFS world, they might not word it that way. They might not say the parts are living in your body, they might more explain it that they're taken over or, um, kind of controlling this part of your body.

In the if FS world, they often refer to the protector parts as using your body to carry out what they want carried out. I've gone over what the conscious self is and what protector parts are. Sometimes our conscious self blends with a protector part, meaning we can't tell the difference between our conscious self and the protector part.

When I do this work with clients, I always ask my clients, how do you feel towards the part? You know, they might feel frustrated towards the part. They might be exhausted, they might feel helpless towards the part. I ask this question so my clients can see a separation between their conscious self and the part I.

If you are having trouble moving into that separation, then you, your conscious self are having the same emotions as your protector part. You're having the same perceptions, you're having the same beliefs as that part, but there's ways around that. There's ways to coax that part to move over a little bit so you can really see that separation.

The third part of the system are the vulnerable parts, so the system is made up of the conscious self. The protector parts and the vulnerable parts. Your vulnerable parts are young, wounded parts of you that carry deep pain and shame and fear. Feelings of unworthiness. Our vulnerable parts hold raw, painful experiences that you couldn't process at the time.

These parts are created because of trauma, because of rejection, because of neglect. These vulnerable parts are often referred to as exile parts because the IFS system suppresses them. They're in exile, but they still have an influence over how we think, how we feel, and how we behave. Our vulnerable parts believe things like, I'm not lovable.

I caused what happened. It's my fault. I need to do better. And our protector parts have us think things and do things that keep the vulnerable parts quiet. But we can't truly heal until we hear their story. During the IFS process, we communicate to these parts and these parts communicate back to us. It's essentially a conversation.

I. Another weird thing about this approach, but totally works. When you get started with this process, you begin with a struggle and consider that that struggle is a part of you, such as procrastination, such as yearning for something. Or you can even start with a physical struggle, like um, abdominal pain, for example.

And you begin by asking this part some questions. Where are you located in my body? When did you get created? What is your job? What are you afraid will happen if you don't do your job? I did this just the other day with a client and we started with procrastination. Her part was located in her chest. It was created when she was four.

It was created to avoid getting in trouble for doing something wrong. This part was created and decided if we put doing things off, then we put off getting in trouble. Logical solution, right? More questions that we can ask the part. What do you need? And do you see how doing your job actually can cause problems?

For me now, helping the part see that even though it's their intention to be helping you, actually, it's more of a hindrance at this point. Asking the part how they feel. What do they feel responsible for? Are they aware of the conscious self? Do they trust the conscious self? The answers to these questions are very valuable in proceeding with this approach.

And then another thing we need to communicate to the protector parts is to take a step back and in order for us to kind of coax the part to take a step back, they need to better trust the conscious self, like I said, and they need to know that their attempts to keep you safe are appreciated. So we need to speak to them and give them gratitude.

You know, thank you for making all these attempts to keep me safe. Thank you for pushing me to procrastinate so I could potentially be safe from criticism. But at the same time, having the protector part realize that their services. Are no longer needed because you are connected to your conscious self, and that means that you can process the pain that might come up.

So the protect your part is created to keep you from the pain because maybe you weren't able to process that pain before, but now that you are connected to your conscious self, you can hold space for that pain and you can move through the healthy cycle to process Through that, you can process what.

Comes up, you know, the parts don't think you can deal with the things that come up. So once that part can really realize that, you know, feel appreciated, but at the same time know that maybe this isn't so dire anymore, um, that they can take a step back. And in order to make this whole thing work, we, the conscious self need to listen to the needs and the wants of the protector parts and have compassion, not have any judgment towards them.

Or the process can take time. I mean it, it might happen in one session or it might take a few months. So again, sharing your appreciation for the parts effort and keeping you safe, showing the protector part that there's actually some negative impacts of their efforts. For example, if you're part is causing you to get distracted with work and get or get distracted with TV or social media, you can explain that this distraction actually pulls your attention away from your body.

Away from your emotions, away from you, understanding yourself better on a deeper level, and that whatever this protective part is doing actually gets in the way of you embodying your intuition more. So again, after you've taken the time to understand what the part is afraid of, and giving it gratitude for its intention to keep you safe, ask the protector if it would be willing to take a step back, even just temporarily.

For the next 10 minutes, you know, so you can move along with this process. It doesn't have to be permanent. That might feel like a little too much for your protector part, but that's something you could work up to. So here's the reasons for the protector part. Taking a step back so you can feel your body sensations.

Because as we know, feeling your body sensations is a huge part of the trauma healing process. If you remember the book, the Body Keeps a Score. I did a podcast episode on that called Everything You Wanted to Know about Healing from Trauma, but we're Afraid to Ask. I published that episode on July 29th, 2022.

So the protector parts do a really good job of not allowing us to feel some of these physical sensations that are associated with our emotional pain, and that's because physical sensations are one of the doorways to feeling those emotions. And the protector parts know that. So they don't want you to sit with that.

Physical sensation for too long because then you'll get in touch with that deep pain. So we need those protector parts to take a step back so we can feel physical sensation so we can feel emotion, so we can have more clarity. We ask those protector parts to take a step back so we can feel less self pressure.

You know, consider for a moment all that self pressure that you feel that comes from your protector parts. We ask these parts to take a step back so we can open up to and understand what we really desire, what we really need that can be clouded by the parts coming in and doing their jobs. And we need the protector parts to take a step back so we can continue with this IFS process.

The parts get in the way of our ability to continue with this process. When a protector part does take a step back, a few different things can happen. One is another part can take a step forward to protect you from what that other part was protecting you from. This happens nine out of 10 times. In my experience when I'm working with clients, for example, you might be working with a overthinking part.

You ask that part to take a step back. It does. And then a brain fog part steps in, or a frustration part or an exhaustion part steps in, or when this part takes step back, a childhood memory might come up, or a body sensation might come up, which actually could be pretty intense and emotion can come up, which can be pretty intense.

But here's the thing, if this does feel intense, if these responses are intense, we can dial down their intensity and we can do this by continuing the conversation and saying, I see you. I know you're here to warn me or to tell me something or to do your job, and I do. I want to hear you, but I need you to dial down the intensity so I can hear you and I can understand you.

This almost always works. So if this part of the process gets intense, you can give reassurance to that part. So say you ask the overthinking part to take a step back, and then the frustration part takes a step forward. You can explain to the frustration part. I hear you, I see you. I wanna understand why you're frustrated, but I need you to dial down the intensity of that emotion so we can continue with this process.

So you might be thinking, well, what if I ask this part to take a step back and it doesn't? What you need to do is stay in the conversation, get curious, and ask the part why it doesn't wanna take a step back. Maybe it doesn't fully trust you, the conscious self. Maybe it doesn't trust that the conscious self can handle what's coming up.

Maybe it's afraid. It's biggest fear will come true if it takes a step back. Show the part compassion by listening to its fears, to its anger, to, to whatever it is that it's experiencing. Give reassurance. You won't be forgotten, you won't lose your job entirely. Like these protector parts are really into their jobs, you know, letting the protector part know, uh, it's just temporarily, I need you to kinda relinquish this job.

Or just, or just to a certain degree. I. Or the promise that you'll give the part a new job if the part is resisting. This means that there is something really important there. There's something really important underneath what's going on here. And so the good thing news is, is that you've hit on something, right?

We found something, and so it might take a few sessions to work with this, but it'll be good. It'll, it'll be a good breakthrough. What I just went over are some explanations about how you communicate with your parts. Now I wanna talk about how your parts communicate with you. Our parts communicate with us in a few different ways.

One is verbally, so we'll actually hear words in our mind, but not always. Sometimes it can be more emotional. Our parts might communicate with us through the emotion of fear or sadness or shame, or this sense of responsibility or emotional pain or anger, or our parts might communicate with us through images in our mind.

I. Some of my clients see a symbol that represents what they're trying to communicate to them, or they might see a childhood memory. Our parts communicate to us through our body sensations such as faster breathing or tightness in our abdomen or pressure in our head. If your part was created before you were verbal, meaning.

When you were an infant, which a lot of our parts are personally, when I do this work, a lot of my parts were created in infancy. So if your part was created in infancy before you were verbal, then that part isn't gonna be able to communicate with you verbally and so you can have to rely on emotions, images.

Body sensations to communicate with this part. It still works. It's still possible. And yes, IFS work does involve awareness of the body, and if you've had significant trauma, turning towards your body can be difficult. This is also explained really well in that book. The body keeps the score. This is because as a child.

You know, when you were having your trauma, in order to keep emotionally safe or possibly physically safe, you had to turn your attention outward. You had to turn your attention to the people around you, to the environment around you, so you could. Keep safe. You didn't have the luxury to turn your attention inward, to notice your body, to notice your emotions, and this really stuck with you, you know, into adulthood.

Still really focusing outwardly and not so much inwardly. So any practices that are gonna help you turn your attention more inwardly are gonna be really healing for you. Also, your protector parts know. That if you sit with a physical sensation long enough that you are gonna open up to your vulnerable parts into this pain.

This is because those physical sensations are a doorway to these vulnerable parts, to this pain that needs to be healed. But attention to your physical sensations is a good path towards healing. The ultimate goal of IFS work. Is to have your vulnerable parts tell their stories. So these parts are suppressed.

They're in exile. The goal is to bring them forward, allow them to tell their stories, but you need the protector parts to be able to take a step back to allow that to happen. So when your vulnerable parts are telling their stories, you might ask questions like, what happened? How old were you? What were you feeling?

How did you respond? How did the other people in your life respond when this happened? This IFS work has been so valuable to me personally understanding, you know, why I do the things I do. Why do I yearn for certain things? Why do I avoid certain things? Why do I overthink or overwork? Why do I feel like I need to get things right?

Why is it so scary to make a mistake? It's helped my clients with certain physical ailments, with negative self-talk, with intrusive thoughts. I know that was a lot of information that I just shared with you. It's a lot to process. You might wanna listen to the episode a couple times to integrate the information and I will upload a guided meditation that will lead you through this process so you can use this work on yourself.

Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend.