Some people who experience trauma in childhood go on to have a fear of authority figures in adulthood, as the association of this traumatic experience lingers and can be triggered when encountering someone in a leadership role. Nicole Zupich saw this manifest in her own life at her job as a data scientist: She found it hard to say no to colleagues and developed a habit of people pleasing.
In therapy, she learned to recognize these habits were based on a fear that developed in childhood and never fully went away. Separating this “part” of herself from her capital-S “Self,” allowed her to meet it with compassion and even thank it for protecting her against the threat it had identified in an authority figure.
“I have this toolbox of things, and it’s not that I don’t ever get triggered, but things are so much more manageable," Zupich told Salon in a phone interview. “They don’t feel like they’re going to just overtake me, and it gives me a little bit of a sense of control, in a healthy way.”
This therapeutic technique, Internal Family Systems (IFS) or “parts work,” has increased in popularity in recent years, with more than 6,000 practitioners registered since it was first developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz in the 1980s. Many therapies pull from the idea that the mind has various parts, including Sigmund Freud’s division of the id, ego and supergo. However, IFS incorporates a recognition of the self that is almost spiritual in nature — similar to the soul in Christianity or Atman in Hinduism.
“Remembering a time when you faced a dilemma, it’s likely you heard one part saying, ‘Go for it!’ and another saying, 'Don’t you dare!' Because we just consider that to be a matter of having conflicted thoughts, we don’t pay attention to the inner players behind the debate,” Schwartz wrote in his 2021 book “No Bad Parts.” “IFS helps you not only start to pay attention to them, but also become the active internal leader that your system of parts needs.”
IFS has been shown to reduce symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and pain and depression among people with rheumatoid arthritis in small studies. However, some are wary that the practice has gotten too popular without a sufficiently strong evidence base, especially for people with psychosis.
Dr. Lisa Brownstone, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Denver, said she has seen clients with psychotic experiences or difficulties establishing reality or a sense of self get confused and disorganized after using IFS with other providers. While this technique might work for some people, it's important to test it in larger randomized controlled studies to better understand how it works and compares to other therapies in the field, Brownstone said.
"The amount that this is being discussed on social media by influencers and advertised seems quite disproportionate to the amount of research that is being done," Brownstone told Salon in a phone interview. "That concerns me because I think the amount this is being proliferated on social media is affecting the public imagination of what psychotherapy is."
One of the appealing aspects of IFS is that it allows people to feel multiple things at once, which can be freeing for clients and is really at the root of many psychotherapy techniques, Brownstone said.
"I think it's probably mostly harmless for a lot of our clients, who generally are doing okay in life and and just need a little bit of support in the therapy space to integrate and better understand who they are and where they want to move in life," Brownstone said. "But for some it might be harmful."
Anecdotally, some report IFS to be effective even when other therapies aren’t. Zupich, who has complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), didn’t feel like her symptoms were getting better with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or other techniques.
“Your goal is to unburden those parts, and once those parts are unburdened, what’s left is your true self, like who you are at your core,” Zupich said. “The more time you spend as your true self, the easier life is and the more authentically you can live.”
In practice, therapists using IFS help patients differentiate themselves from their parts and acknowledge these “parts,” sometimes by talking with them directly, said Dr. Martha Sweezy, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School with more than 20 years of experience using IFS who has written books about its use in treating addiction, along with shame and guilt.
“Many people are having strong negative emotions and they've been trying to avoid paying attention internally or have been on the run, kind of, from themselves,” Sweezy told Salon in a phone interview. “So we are asking something that can be challenging for people at first, but it’s also very novel and exciting once their parts start talking back to them and giving them information.”
The idea is that this space that is created between the self and the parts can allow the patient to observe where the part is coming from, such as a traumatic experience in childhood. The different parts in IFS work tend to fall under three categories: exiles, which carry the emotional memory of past experiences; managers, which keep the person functioning despite the emotional distress created by these emotional wounds; and firefighters, which use things like substance use to block overwhelming emotions. The latter two are also called “protectors” because they use coping mechanisms to protect the exiled parts.
These parts can hold onto the pain from trauma or mistreatment that happened in childhood or adulthood, said Dave Morin, a marriage and family therapist in Connecticut who has used parts work.
“Then there are these other parts that are sort of protective and they try to keep these other parts hidden away out of consciousness, or from being perceived by other people," Morin told Salon in a phone interview.
From a psychological point of view, these parts can cause suffering. IFS is a way to unburden the self and have a more integrated inner system, Morin said.
“IFS as a therapeutic paradigm basically gets the protectors to calm down a little bit and then get to those exiles, the wounded parts holding onto trauma, shame, or deep-seeded pain,” Morin said. “Once we have access to those parts of ourselves, that’s where healing can happen.”
