When people are trying to get their heads around the Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy model, one of the first concepts they hear and learn about is "parts". But what is a “part” and how does the IFS concept of parts differ from how we might speak or think about parts colloquially, or even “parts work” in other therapeutic modalities?
Before I get into that, it’s important to emphasise that an inevitable feature of being human is that we don’t live every moment from a calm, centred, or authentic place, or what IFS calls the Self (aka, the real “you” that isn’t-a-part), no matter how evolved, gifted, or mature we are. All of us know we don’t participate in life in every moment as grounded in our innate human wholeness. IFS conceptualises these moments as us being taken over (or “blended” in IFS) with protective and wounded parts of us that are responding from difficult or unresolved moments in our personal histories. A part can literally take us over mentally or physically at any time and make us see the world through its eyes.
From an IFS perspective, each one of us has a veritable tribe of inner parts, each with different ages, temperaments, and talents. We might find ourselves in certain moments unaccountably frightened, confused, dissociated, critical, people pleasing, or having the impulse to control everything. Richard Schwartz, the creator of IFS writes that these parts “are discrete, autonomous mental systems, each with their own idiosyncratic range of emotion, style of expression, abilities, desires, and views of the world”. Schwartz’s description of these
parts also speaks to the complexity of human experience. Just like external people, parts have full spectrum personalities. For example, a part that is characteristically angry, can also feel hurt or scared. If we just see the part as “angry”, we’re missing its multi-dimensionality, thereby forgoing an opportunity to see what other feelings it has, and thereby missing an opportunity to be more than what it looks and seems like at face value. I often say to clients, "the part is more than the extreme role it's been brought into - let it know you see it's more than that".
One of the things that makes IFS stand out and resonate so deeply with people is that these parts are not merely treated as metaphorical constructs, or a “tool” to get to deeper wounds. I would argue that other modalities that use parts do so as an intellectual exercise, thereby essentially encouraging people not to take themselves and their experiences seriously. Parts in IFS are connected with and brought into relationship with the Self to be experienced as genuine and valuable aspects of the person's consciousness. In other words, we treat our parts seriously as we treat the external people in our lives whom we care about, and show them respect, care, and love. And in treating the parts of us in this way, we deepen internal relationships and essentially excavate people's natural ability to be with every aspect of our psych in a deeply compassionate way.
We consider and treat parts the way we do with other people in our lives with whom we want to develop and deepen relationships. Parts think, feel, utilise the body to express themselves, and take on different roles in a person’s psyche, and in relation to each other. While we treat parts like people, at the same time, there are many ways they are not actually like people. IFS Therapist Martha Sweezy writes that parts can shape shift (from one moment to another, or one session to another), appear and disappear, change size and shape, and transform in innumerable ways. Their environment of the psyche is not like the external material environment in that it is an expansive multiverse that has no material constraints. And, although we find parts in the body, they can also be outside the body. Their moment-to-moment transformations are like plots of fantasy novels, science fiction, and the untamed creativity inherent in everyone. And of course, parts routinely travel through time and space. When I think of the 2022 film, “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once”, I think of the endless possibilities available to parts.
How do parts come into their roles, or get cast in extreme roles inside of individuals? After years of facilitating internal experiences for clients, I would say that generally the less healthy our caregivers in childhood and those in our family-of-origin, the more wounds we accrue, and the more extreme the protective strategies of our parts become. Children are extremely vulnerable because they have not yet developed the capacity to fend for themselves - this takes many decades and we are exposed repeatedly day after day to the explicit and implicit teachings of those who care for us, and those who share our childhood homes. So, children are very vulnerable and have to adapt to whatever the early environment is. Therefore, unlike a medical model of the mind, there is nothing “pathological” about parts - it is important to remember that they’re adapting to their immediate environment to maximise the chances of survival (our dictate as human beings) and doing their best to help us out and keep us safe in whatever that environment is. It is often only as adults that these parts that help us survive our childhoods start to cause chaos when they move beyond the family-of-origin environment out into the wider world. A part that helped us survive our childhood home like a rageful protective part will not generally do well in the adult professional workplace.
This is where the inner family analogy is particularly strong - in external families, often children get pushed into extreme roles because of what happens to and around them, which are adaptive at the time. For example, in a family where a parent is unwell, a child may get cast into a role of being extremely responsible or caretaking in the external family system. This isn’t who they are, merely the role they have been forced into due to the circumstances in which they’ve found themselves. If the circumstances of the family change, say another responsible adult takes over the running of the family, the child will not need to be so responsible any longer, and they are relieved to be no longer be burdened with a job beyond their developmental ability. The same goes for parts an internal system. When a burdened protector meets the Self, and a trusting, compassionate relationship is developed, the part is invited to try another role as it can trust the Self to lead the system. We don't demand the part take another job - it ultimately knows that it's role is beyond it's developmental capacity and will often willingly take on a job much more suited to it's age and stage.