Right under our distressing ways of being
there's a version of us that has amazing capacity and care. Unlocking that capacity
and care and using it in our healing work is what IFS therapy is all about. One thing that is amazing and very unique
about Internal Family Systems therapy or IFS is that it teaches us, as the client, how
to become our own therapist, in a way, our own healer. They might use the term leader.
It does so through putting us in contact with a somewhat hidden potential self, what you might
think of as our "best self" or our "deeper self," right from the beginning,
without taking years to develop. Getting in touch with that deeper part of
ourselves is so invaluable and is an amazing part of the IFS model. In other words, it doesn't
just undo a disorder and help us come to function at a baseline, it goes beyond that to this really
resourced state. This state and now I'm going to sound a bit out there but I think of it as like
an enlightened version of ourselves. Now if you're thinking, believe me I'm not an enlightened
person. I drink too much, I have a really hot temper, I'm really insecure. That's just who I
really am, that's the only me I've ever known. Well it's not like in IFS we would say, "no, all
those problematic behaviors are just an illusion." In fact, we really start with direct focus upon
the parts of ourselves that we struggle with. The difference is, we approach those parts
as just that, as parts, not the whole. But before we really explore why it is absolutely
more accurate to think in terms of parts, I just want to start with appreciating
why it is also more respectful. I teach my students to think in terms of parts
even if they never use parts language with their clients. Like I'll tell them, please don't say
"my client is a drinker or a cutter." No they are not a drinker, they are a complex human being who
has a part of them that feels compelled to drink. A part of them. That part is not the totality of
their selfhood or define who they are. But what does this concept of parts have to do with that
enlightened version of ourselves I was mentioning? Well in IFS, when we can understand these
aspects of our identity that we struggle with, the moment we realize they are just one facet of
ourselves, it allows us to step back in a way and to be able to finally, actually see this part
more clearly and more importantly to approach it with compassion and curiosity. That's what
we're going to talk about in these videos. So I think most people are aware that we
all have different parts of our personality. What I think most people don't fully
appreciate is how distinct these parts can be. So much so, that we aren't just like one
person in a way. Not that we have multiple personalities in some pathological sense, it's
just actually normal and adaptive to have various aspects of our personality or parts that
sort of take the lead at different moments. As in, a part of me wants to go for that
promotion but another part of me wants to turn it down and is pushing me to stay invisible.
Or part of me does believe I'm a good person but another part is always telling me I'm bad or I
feel this inner sense of badness. You may even be aware that you have
some parts of yourself that you like, others you hate and sort of internally scapegoat,
like I hate the part of me that overeats or rages. Some parts you might even be scared of, like your
inner critic. Like, I really better not make a mistake because I don't want that to trigger my
inner critic, you know, I'm really frightened of that part. Now I feel like the idea of parts is
pretty intuitive and user-friendly for most people but there are a small group of people for whom the
idea of having parts sounds really hokey or new age-y or just hard to take seriously, as if it's
not scientific or something. But I can tell you there's nothing more scientific than the concept
of parts. It's not a question of whether our brain works this way, it's a proven fact that the brain
works this way, in terms of multiplicity. If you wanted to put it into computer language, you
would say our brains are parallel processors. So let me just give you the quick science download
of that. If you've watched my other videos about schemas this concept will be familiar to you, but
I'll give it another go here. For a moment it will seem like I'm changing the subject because I
need to speak with you about implicit memory. Okay so most of our psychology from how we
experience the world, to how we respond to it, is really based on learning, but not conscious
explicit memory type learning, like one plus one equals two, but the learning that exists in
what's called implicit memory. In implicit memory, particularly the type we might call procedural
memory, we learn how to be, how to do. It's not remembering facts, it's embodied memory.
In fact, often I hear people use the word muscle memory, but of course even muscle memory isn't
actually stored in our muscles, it's just that deeper parts of our brain are able to do such
sophisticated calculations really quickly and feed that information to us for immediate use.
It's the most obvious in the case of learning physical movements because we really can feel how
it's as if our muscles are remembering what to do and can execute those commands without
intervention from our conscious thoughts or logic. But honestly, that's just how most of our brain
works in regard to most of our learning around not just physical movements but what I think of
as our psychological movements. In the same way you wouldn't be able to return a tennis ball
or ride a bike through logical calculations, you wouldn't be able to be a successful
human through logical calculation either. We need most of our psychological movements to
happen automatically in a manner akin to muscle memory. So in the riding a bike example, a slight
little vibration that hits me in this exact way may cue me to lean almost imperceptibly to the
left with the goal of helping me stay upright. Well psychologically we're trying to keep upright
as well. Really our brain's main job is to make sure we survive, so upright means well fed, well
rested and connected to the group because we die without the group. The connected to the group
one is where our psychologies really come in. So if we try to go for something, but
we get a shaming look from our mother we pull back because we need that
relationship to be back upright. Or we go this way and get abuse, we come back.
Or this way and it seems to hurt somebody else, we might pull back. And in fact, we learn in an
almost muscle memory way, don't do that again. I know I just gave a lot of examples
of sort of pulling back or inhibiting and the truth is most of our conditioning is
around inhibiting ourselves, but we could also learn that the only way to get any attention
in our family is to demand and scream and yell. So maybe leaning in is what is learned. I'm also
realizing I'm giving a lot of examples of what we might learn around stress but of course there are
things we might learn having to do with safety. Like maybe I've learned that if I lean in
with some vulnerability, my wife will help me feel safe and understand what's going on,
and we bond and learn and come back together in a better place than even before I felt shaky,
right? So that's a more healing type of learning. But either way, whether more traumatizing
learnings or healing learnings, the bottom line is, our brain learns through experience how
to survive, what will return me to homeostasis and then we repeat that, that thing we learn to
do, almost in an instinctive way in the future. This is doing through memory, not through logic.
That's why most of what we do isn't conscious or cognitive. It's kind of like we don't sit there
and try to cognitively figure out how to ride a bike, we remember how to ride a bike. It isn't
about rationality. This is a really important point because I know we all think we're making
choices based on rational thought, but honestly, most of the ways we move through the world
is really just psychological muscle memory. I know I give examples from our interpersonal
world, but equally through our inner world, like "oh, I felt this sadness but then I got
overwhelmed, so I better not feel that again." Now if you get the idea that we develop these
instinctual ways of being, where we really aren't even that conscious sometimes why we
are driven to respond like we are responding, the next thing to realize is we don't just
develop one way of responding or being, one personality. We develop different
ways of being in different contexts, or around different needs,
or around different dangers. Even around different types of people, for
instance. How should I be around a white person or an authority figure. Why? Because different
contexts might require a different strategy. So let's just take time to walk through a very
clear example of that so this can really hit home. Let's say your parents are divorced and when
you would go stay with your mom as a child, she was very critical, so your whole body learned
to sort of tense up in that house, as if reminding you to walk on eggshells and hold things in.
Maybe she was also threatened by your intelligence and needed to be like the one who knows more. So
your brain learned, around mom, I should drop 20 IQ points. While your mom was critical, let's
say your dad was very relaxed and unthreatened by you. So you could just be yourself. So at
his house your shoulders would relax more. You were standing taller. You just felt different
in your body and certainly in your emotions. Maybe your dad actually enjoys your witty humor
and you find that playful part of you really coming online and being developed. Now remember,
these are learnings, learned ways of being and they aren't learned in order to be forgotten,
they are learned in order to be remembered, in implicit memory. Why do we need to remember
them? Well, so the next moment you walk into your mom's house you won't forget how to be. The
smell, the sights, the sound of her voice and BAM that learning kicks in to protect you and
suddenly when that muscle memory is triggered, which is really just like a pattern of neural
firing, that's what a memory is, it's a pattern of neural firing, when that pattern fires it's really
as if you are a different person because you need to be a different person with mom. For instance,
even if you made the conscious choice I'm going to be funny around mom, nothing funny would
come to mind. That funny playful part of you, that net that knows it's safe and remembers how to
be funny, is not online. It exists somewhere else still because it will come on in dad's house,
remember the brain's a parallel processor, but in that moment, it's not sort of like the track
you are on neurologically if that makes sense. So hopefully this example gives you a sense of how
we develop different "parts" of our personality that are really pretty different. The person
you learned to be or were allowed to be with mom was pretty different than the person you
learned to be or were allowed to be with dad. And hopefully it is clear now why these
patterns would need to be stored in memory, in the same way you might have a "how to ride
a bike" memory file. That kind of file sort of comes online without even trying to remember,
for instance, how to ride a bike. The way you'd remember like what did I have for lunch yesterday,
no it's muscle memory. It just opens automatically with a sensation of getting on the bike or walking
into mom's house. Now the next thing to understand is that the person you learn to be with mom, it
generalizes to other similar contexts. So it isn't just learning how to be around mom, it's really
learning how to be around people like mom. So even when you're an adult when you are with someone who
is critical, well that part of you will come out to protect you. Maybe your boss kind of
reminds you of your mom and when she's around, you suddenly do that thing where you drop 20 IQ
points. Which is obviously not ideal and that is the next point to make, and that is, that there is
a cost to the fact that our brain works this way. The fact that we develop these parts or patterns
contributes to a huge portion of human suffering. Not all suffering comes from parts. If your child
dies you will suffer. If you experience racial oppression you will suffer, but that suffering
that comes from what we think of as "our issues," that is really explained mainly by the fact that
we are wired to have parts. There's a certain inflexibility and even lack of control that comes
into play when our parts take over. That leads to what we call being "triggered." To have that
cascade of thoughts, or feelings, or behaviors, just open up like that in an automatic way, that
can be very disempowering, particularly if those parts have learned to protect us by drinking,
or cutting, or raging, or starving ourselves, or attacking us through an inner critic. That
being said, while parts can produce suffering for us, which is of course why we work with
them in therapy, there's a very foundational, philosophical, but i would also argue scientific,
stance that IFS takes toward parts, and that is the statement: "there are no bad parts." In fact,
in IFS, they call this particular type of part I've been describing today: "protectors," because
these parts come online or learn to do what they do, you know the roles they take on, in order to
protect us, remember, to kind of keep us upright. So even parts that seem self-sabotaging
like our inner critic for instance, really has learned that we will be better
off with that criticism than without it. Every part of us is just trying to do its job
to keep us safe. So if we combat any part of us, even a part that hurts others, like maybe yells
at our kids, it's just gonna be more confused and scared and probably fight back harder.
But if we respect every part of our mind, slow down, listen to it, speak with it, mentor it,
relate to it with compassion, things can actually change. When our parts can feel the more conscious
adult version of our mind taking notice of it and kindly trying to help it, they can step out of
the leadership position because they finally feel there is something greater to surrender to. And it
allows the parts to finally be a bit free of the burdensome job they had to protect us, and that
is what IFS is all about, learning to slow down and mindfully track, explore, and converse with,
aspects of our personality that we find troubling, really thinking of them as parts, not the whole of
who we are. They took on their unique way of being in order to help us survive, and while on the
surface we might not understand why they needed to do that particular thing in order to protect
us, if we track it down and actually listen to the part, the story can unfold. How it learned what
it learned, the history of that, and I used the word history here purposely because Schwartz talks
about how each part has its own secret history. And he's drawing from a poem by Longfellow, that
reads: "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life, sorrow
and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." I think that is such a powerful line,
in terms of not judging others because we don't know how they suffered. But in truth,
we often don't really know how we've suffered and how we had to adapt in order to survive. We
haven't let ourselves put the dots together on it. Internally, each part of our heart,
whether a jealous part or scared part, has its own secret history, one that
only our parts can truly reveal to us, and when we can discover those histories
and approach our parts with compassion, it changes everything. Why, because when
understanding and compassion are given to our parts, it allows for some really deep
healing work, some real transformational work, where our parts can finally feel safe enough
to relax, to come out of this almost trauma drive to control us and instead let our inner
adult take charge. It is almost like through our love toward them, that they can realize
they aren't in the trauma scene anymore. By the way, the science-y way of saying this is
that we are working to change implicit memory and yes if you've watched my video on memory
reconsolidation, which I'll link to below, I do believe that IFS is one of the therapies that
works because it changes implicit memory through the process of memory reconsolidation.
That being said, while I think that's intellectually interesting and I know I use the
word "schema" in other videos, there's something important about not only thinking about or
approaching our parts as neural firing patterns, or conditioning,or schemas, but rather visualizing
them as like, human, because there's a way we are dealing with human consciousness. It's a
human story. It's not a "what," it's a "who." When I have a client who is depressed, I'm
not thinking, what is this depression? Is it a chemical imbalance, is it a coping strategy,
how do I get rid of it? I'm thinking, who in there is depressed? Who in there gave up hope and why?
Who in there got so punished for their anger that they learned to shut down instead. That part needs
someone to find it and build a relationship to it, to listen to it, because just like with humans, a
part will only be able to change, be able to learn and shift, once it feels heard first. Once its
secret history is known and its fears addressed that's how safety is established,
right? Just like with all of us. Feeling heard, especially around our fears, is the
first step, always. You know I hope in this way of talking with you, I've begun to capture some
of the ethos of Internal Family Systems work, in the same way I've tried to capture, you
know, the ethos of ADP in the video on ADP and the other experiential forms of
therapy I'm trying to cover on my channel. That being said, there are actually a number
of interesting pieces in IFS that we haven't addressed yet that I think are worth exploring,
which is why I chose to make this series, a whole series, rather than just one video,
because if I were you watching this one video, I might be left wondering, well if I'm just a
collection of various learned ways of being, then which part of me is the real me? Who am I then?
It turns out that IFS has a very clear and very inspiring answer to that question and that answer
is a key piece of what is so healing about IFS, so let's go there next. Thank you for watching.
I hope you found this video helpful and if you did you can help me out by liking and
subscribing, or if you're a therapist who would like to train with me while earning
CEUs, you can visit my website at toriolds.com
