Talking to My Self

The unconventional practice that's keeping me sane

I close my eyes. Take a breath. Begin my walk up the hill, my shoes growing damp from the dewy grass, until I arrive at an old house. When I first started coming here, it was a long-neglected wreck. Gaps in the boards, drafty rooms, a dark basement with a furnace that never seemed to work right.

Since I started visiting on a regular basis—though still not as often as I “should”—the place has transformed. The furnace is working! (Usually.) The rooms are bright and cozy. Sometimes while I walk up the hill, I notice a geeky awkward teenage girl pushing a younger one on the tree swing, and I can hear them laughing, and you don’t even know how much I love that sound. Just seeing them at all is kind of incredible—for years they stayed hidden, ashamed and frightened, certain everyone would find them unworthy of love. Yet now here they are, out in the open, playing together. Still feels like a miracle every time I see it. 

Welcome to the house of my psyche.

Meeting the Inner Family

As I shared in my post about depression treatment, traditional cognitive-behavioral talk therapy didn’t get me where I knew I needed to go. Yes, it helped; it took the edge off and I did learn some useful coping mechanisms. But—to me, at least—it seemed much more focused on alleviating symptoms than on addressing the cause of the injury. It didn’t offer me a path down to the roots.

Dense trees & twisting roots

When my sister (who happens to be a therapist) introduced me to Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, though, I was immediately intrigued. It just made sense to me on an intuitive level, and helped me understand not only what was happening inside my own self, but also within the wider world. 

The basic premise of IFS is that the inner psyche is composed of the core Self, as well as various parts that interact within an internal "family." If you've ever seen the movie Inside Out, you may be somewhat familiar with this concept already. 

Self

The Self is the true you: your whole, integrated, “highest” self. The Self, which we ALL have at the core of our beings, is compassionate, curious, caring, and nonjudgmental. When the Self is running the show, you'll bring these qualities into the way you think, move, interact with others, and respond to your parts.

Parts

For most of us, our highest Self isn't easy to access. Thanks to self-protective instincts, ingrained habits, and societal pressures, our parts are usually driving the bus. Different parts can be activated at different times depending on the circumstances.

A key aspect of IFS is that there are no bad parts. Though there may be parts you are ashamed of, or parts that seem to bring you nothing but trouble, they aren't trying to ruin your life. They are actually doing their very best to protect you from perceived harm. Learning to react to your parts with compassion is the work—and the magic—of IFS.

Parts tend to fall into one of two types, protectors or exiles.

Protectors: Managers and Firefighters

These parts are doing their best to protect you. Often, they manifest as things like the critic, the jealous part, the procrastinator, etc. While our knee-jerk reaction is to think of these in a negative light, they actually play a very important protective role, and work extremely hard to do so (even if the ways they show up in our lives often make us miserable).

Some protectors (managers) take on the role of controlling the outside world to avoid triggering the emotional pain held by exile parts. They may be an inner drill sergeant yelling at us to present ourselves in a certain way so that others will respect us. They may be hypervigilant. They may funnel all our energy into taking care of others while ignoring our own needs. They may push us to intellectualize or numb out so that we disconnect from our bodies and emotions.

Firefighters are the protectors that spring into action when—despite the best efforts of managers—an exile part is triggered. Exiles are wells of deep pain—the kind of pain so scary and intense that when you experience it, you feel you might die. Firefighters are there to put out the emotional flames IMMEDIATELY so that we can stop feeling this pain. And they don’t care if the often-extreme coping mechanisms they lead us toward (like addiction, alcoholism, restrictive behaviors, suicidal thoughts, abusing ourself or others) are harming us, or people around us. Despite the destruction they can cause, they are desperately trying to help in the only way they know how. 

Exiles

Exile parts have experienced something traumatic (which is defined broadly as anything that exceeds one's ability to cope) and remain frozen in time, locked in a sub-basement of the psyche, full of unexpressed pain. As we’ve seen, protectors work hard to keep these exiles hidden, because they often don't trust that you can handle encountering the exile—or they may be protecting you from feeling its pain.

A huge part of the process, then, is building a relationship between your Self and your protectors. In this way, you can begin to meet your exiles. This allows you to unburden or "re-parent" the inner-child exiles, so that the old wounds you carry can begin to heal, and the protectors can take on jobs that they actually enjoy doing. 

Importantly, you cannot skip the step of building a relationship with the protectors before healing the exiles. It's tempting to jump straight into unburdening the exile once you identify it. But if you bypass the protector, you will lose its trust, and your contentious relationship with it will persist. It may even get worse.

The Practice of IFS

IFS is a form of self-inquiry that can be done solo through a meditative process, or with a friend. (Though, choose wisely! The friend must be cool with having conversations that most would consider bizarre, and be able to hold their own when faced with displays of emotion.) There may, at times, be things that crop up that feel too painful to handle. That’s a good indication to back off and seek help from a professional. 

My Personal Practice

Generally, my practice is a meditative one. I ground myself, focusing on my breath until I feel my compassionate Self settling in (which, for me, comes with a feeling of open-hearted curiosity). Then I scan my body and pay attention to any achy or tight areas—because parts often manifest as sensations in the body. The rest is a process of gentle inquiry. I'll ask the part what they're called. See how they're feeling today. Ask them what their role or job is, and how they believe they are helping me. Some parts will open right up, while others are hard to pin down.

The process isn’t always easy. Quite often, a sleepy or distracted part will come along to shut the whole thing down. Sometimes, to keep myself focused, I’ll put on a blindfold (à la El from Stranger Things) and transcribe the session on my laptop. The blindfold helps me stay inward and experience things as they unfold, instead of fretting about sentence structure or typos. 

I offer these details because when I was starting out I wasn’t really sure how to practice—but I don’t want to give the impression that there is one right way to do this. As my therapist is quick to point out, it’s enough to simply notice when a part is clamoring for your attention as you go about your day. It doesn’t have to be a whole fleshed-out scene with a narrative and dialogue. It can be entirely wordless, instinctual, subtle—a recognition that a part is activated, a settling into curiosity, a tiny movement or shift in breath that shows the part you appreciate how hard it’s working to keep you safe.  

I realize that this all may sound a bit wacky! But I've found that tapping into my imagination and a sense of play when doing therapeutic self-work is very refreshing. Plus, everything (and I mean everything) makes a whole lot more sense when I view the world through this lens.

If you’re curious, feel free to give it a try. You may be surprised by what comes up. Whatever does, just go with it. If there's a little voice that tells you you're doing it wrong, or that this is stupid and you're just making it up anyway, fantastic—you just met a doubting part! When this one comes up for me, I often chat with it for a minute and acknowledge its concerns. Eventually, it backs down, because my Self knows that the thoughts and images that arise during this process come from somewhere. For me, this whole experience has been a powerful lesson in learning how to trust my own inner wisdom.

IFS in Action: Meet Dan

One morning, I woke up panicked, completely overcome by dread and nausea. Instead of stewing in it or letting the unpleasantness spiral further, I settled into my curious Self to see what I could find.

I focused first on the feeling of dread, wanting to get to know this anxious part and see if I could get a mental image of it. Strangely enough, the image that came to mind was of a portly construction worker eating chicken wings. I asked his name and he told me it was Dan. I wasn't with him long before a new feeling sprung up and I felt like crying for no apparent reason, so I knew a different part was there too. 

Once I examined that one, a clear image came to mind, and with it a memory: when I was a little kid, my mom had arranged for me to go to a Girl Scouts meeting after school. I had to get off the bus at a specific stop and walk to the church where the meeting would be held. I was given very clear instructions, but I messed it up and got lost. It just so happened that my mom was going to the grocery store that afternoon (we lived in a very small town at the time), and she saw me walking aimlessly down the sidewalk, crying. So it all worked out fine, and as I remember she dropped me off at the meeting after that. 

That this particular memory came up was very interesting to me, because I hadn't thought about it in ages, and besides, I'd never thought that experience had been traumatic in any way. I mean, it had a happy ending, after all. But apparently part of me was still stuck in that moment. The Lost Child was still wandering, feeling incompetent and vulnerable, and Dan was stuck watching over her even though he knew nothing about kids. 

It took a while, but I was eventually able to unburden that Lost Child, and she has since befriended one of my other ex-exiles, the awkward teen who loves looking after her and pushing her on the tree swing. This freed up Dan to get a new job: helping to renovate my dilapidated psyche-house. Even so, he still gets anxious sometimes and needs my attention. When I feel that nauseated dread building in my belly and chest, I know Dan is there. I'll talk to him inside my head. Hey, Dan, I see you. I feel you. Thank you for all you’ve done for me, and for the Lost Child. I know it's hard for you, and I appreciate it. Just that small acknowledgment will often make my nausea completely vanish. 

Further Listening/Reading

If you haven’t run for the hills yet and want to dig into IFS more deeply, this podcast episode with Richard Schwartz is a good place to start. I also highly (HIGHLY!) recommend reading or listening to his book, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model.

In all honesty, even though I’ve found this to be an effective method for me, it’s still really hard to carve out the time and motivation to work on it regularly. But, of course, you can only get better at a thing by doing the thing. And deep within my Self, I know that true acceptance and self-love will only come when I keep showing up for, and building relationships with, all the members of my internal family.