Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy: revolutionary

“In IFS, mental health symptoms like anxiety, depression, paranoia, and even psychosis were regarded not as impassive biochemical phenomena but as emotional events under the control of unconscious ‘parts’ of the patient — which they could learn to interact with directly.”

“Eventually, Schwartz did come up with names for the most common roles he saw parts taking on in their relationships with each other. Parts that he called protectors used a vast array of coping strategies, sometimes very extreme ones, to manage the emotional pain of deeply buried parts that Schwartz called exiles. Exiles were often very young and lived in a nightmarish limbo, interpreting even minor adult pain through the lens of the childhood memories they were trapped in. Because they were so vulnerable, exiles were hard to access. You had to go through protectors to get to them, and protectors could be tough customers. To speak to a seven-year-old exile carrying the pain of a father’s abusive criticism, for example, you might have to reckon with a blustering 40-year-old protector of a different exile who thought the seven-year-old was just as much of a pussy as his father used to call him — and that you were too, for taking his concerns seriously.”

“If a patient got all their parts to step aside, protectors and exiles alike, something curious happened. They entered a state of mind far clearer and more joyful than any they seemed able to maintain in day-to-day life: calm, confident, curious, compassionate.”

“So Schwartz decided to call it Self: a unified mode of consciousness that seemed to lie just beneath all the sound and fury of parts, surprisingly reminiscent of the clear mental waters that Buddhists sought with mindfulness meditation. When a patient went into Self and visualized approaching an exile with total openness and compassion, something extraordinary happened: They began spontaneously to do the kind of work with their exiles that Schwartz himself would have done, far more effectively than Schwartz had been able to do from outside. With relief and gratitude, exiles opened up to Self about pain that they had held inside for decades. Patients sobbed, shook, screamed. Some reported seeing images of the exile opening its arms out for a hug or crawling into their laps, its long wait for rescue finally over. It almost felt to Schwartz as if he had hacked into the mind’s built-in system for psychological self-repair.” The idea that healing comes from inside the client and not from the therapist makes IFS revolutionary.

“Schwartz decided to call the process ‘unburdening,’ since his patients found it natural to visualize the exile’s pain as a physical burden that was being burned away, dissolved into the ocean, or released into a great beam of light. Once an exile was unburdened, Schwartz found, the protectors that had been managing its pain — for instance, by eating mass quantities of ice cream every time the exile got triggered — tended to be more than happy to abandon their stressful old roles and find more fulfilling new ones. The transformations were powerful and lasting. Schwartz’s bulimic patients finally stopped bingeing and purging.”

“What sets IFS apart is the radically open and de-pathologizing stance it takes toward even the most extreme parts, which are presumed by default to be protecting exiles, and the calm, compassionate Self that seems to emerge in response. Schwartz credits the value so many have found in IFS’s map of internal multiplicity to the fact that, as a family therapist, he was largely ignorant of what had come before.”