On Internal Family Systems Therapy
Parts and their voices, wants, methods, strengths, and weaknesses make up the self
At every change of her mood regarding our partnership, I wondered about the content of Maya’s inner debate. I only ever got one insight after the first time she came back and wanted to let me know that she now understood that relationships can be nurturing and secure bases.
Our Polish friend Ana, when horribly drunk, used to proposition me and Eolanda for sex.
“Guys we should have a zreesome.” She would blame her straight talking on an alter ego that she called Bertha.
We invariably said, “we’re up for it, but would you be breaking any terms of your partnership?”
She would get excited about it and say “Hmm, I’m going to ask Paul if I can.” Then she would slip away before coming back in to tell us her sad news. “He said, ‘no’.”
After 7 minutes more drinking and blabbering, she would say, “but I really want to have a zreesome. I’ll go ask Paul again.” At that point Paul would take her home.
Eolanda and I had the same 2 thoughts. One is that if something like group sex is worth doing when drunk then it has to be worth doing when sober, but the controls of the super-ego quash the base id and the desire is never vocalised outside therapy. Secondly if the desire seeking daylight is specifically something that you’ve had conversations about stopping yourself doing in order to keep the heart of one’s partner safe, then that is a very precarious way of organising one’s principles.
I found that IFS Therapy provides some way of tuning-in to more than one persona and visiting their realms. They have different needs, different voices, different reasoning, different strengths, different weaknesses, and different conclusions.
American Psychotherapist Richard Schwartz developed IFS in the 1980s while working with clients struggling with eating disorders and trauma. He noticed that many patients naturally described their minds as containing different “parts” — inner critics, protectors, wounded children, impulsive voices — that interacted almost like The Beezer’s The Numskulls (1962) or Inside Out (2015)’s emotional homunculi living and working together to meet their human vessel’s needs. Rather than treating these internal conflicts as unwanted pathology, he began developing a systems-based model in which each part served a self-interested role, furthering their just agenda even when having a net destructive impact on the directives of other parts. Influenced by family systems theory, Jungian ideas about multiplicity, and trauma psychology, Schwartz proposed that in overseeing these parts, one can formulate a core “self” capable of calmness, compassion, understanding and leadership. The model gradually expanded from a niche therapeutic framework into a widely used modality, particularly in the treatment of complex PTSD, attachment disturbances, addiction, and shame-based disorders.
Research into IFST remains relatively young compared with older modalities like CBT, but the evidence base has been growing. A 2021 pilot study published in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma found that adults with PTSD and multiple childhood traumas showed significant reductions in PTSD symptoms, depression, dissociation, and shame following a course of IFST; notably, most participants no longer met PTSD diagnostic criteria at one-month follow-up. Other studies and reviews have suggested benefits for depression, chronic pain, rheumatoid arthritis, anxiety, and self-compassion. The current academic consensus is that IFST appears promising, especially for trauma-related presentations, but requires formularisation and stronger long-term evidence before it can be considered as empirically robust as more established therapies.
To restate another article [See — On Attachment Theory], people with disorganised attachment confuse themselves as much as they confuse their partners. One week they are intensely connected, affectionate, emotionally hungry, sexually open, future-focused. The next they are distant, numb, irritated, or suddenly convinced the relationship is unsafe, engulfing, disappointing, or doomed. To the observer, chaotic inconsistency looks manipulative, immature and dramatic. Internally, however, it feels like survival.
To recap yet another article [See — On Attachment Style Causes], disorganised attachment develops when a child experiences caregivers as both a source of comfort and fear. This does not always mean overt abuse. Sometimes it comes from unpredictability, emotional volatility, neglect, fright, or anger, these traits themselves suggesting that the caregiver had their own mental health complaint or situational difficulties such as addiction or domestic abuse.
The child, whose existence is beholden to and dependent on that caregiver faces an impossible bind, internalising a narrative of “my best chance of survival comes from this person but so does the pain.” That contradiction never fully resolves, so the nervous system enrolls in toeing the lines of alternating strategies.
This becomes encoded across relationship types and shades of love. As adults, disorgs experience romance as activating, no different from that maternal love of their origin story and so deep partnerships are destined to be rocky. And, in inversion, they don’t recognise love in stable connections. Calm relationships feel fruitlessly dead.
IFST provides a framework for understanding why disorgs can genuinely love someone while simultaneously feeling compelled to flee from them. It’s plan to see how the key idea in IFS, as applied to disorgs, complements their dilemma in pitching the partnering psyche, not as singular, but as 2 warring parts. Distinct emotional systems under one cranial roof carry different jobs, fears, memories, and protective strategies. In securely attached people these systems cooperate relatively smoothly. In disorganised attachers, those systems are in conflict. One part longs for intimacy. Another part experiences intimacy as danger. The result is the infamous push-pull cycle mentioned in another article [See — On Push-Pull Cycling].
IFS would describe this dynamic as polarised parts. A disorganised attacher may have parts such the following:
a yearning part desperate for closeness, saying, “Oh, to be seen.”
a protective avoidant part terrified of dependency, saying “if I ever need them, I’ll suffer.”
a shameful part convinced they are unlovable, saying, “you only like me for X.”
a hypervigilant part scanning for betrayal, saying, “it’s better to have my guard up, despite the mental bandwidth.”
a sexual part using intimacy for reassurance, saying, “so long as I fuck them, this relationship still has wheels.”
a numbed, dissociative part shutting out when overwhelmed, saying, “if I can just make it to tomorrow…”
an independent part, wriggling free of the implications of partnership, saying, “I’ve come this far because no one has managed to keep me down.”
a lovebombing part excited at finding a love that feels flawless so far, saying, “you’re the only person who understands me.”
a pessimistic part who can’t salvage hope for the future from the wreckage of the past, saying, “I don’t know why, but this won’t last.”
As in Pixar’s animated film, which sought consultation from local university psychologists Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner, different parts step up to take executive control at key moments. IFST calls this “blending” — when a part temporarily becomes the whole identity.
The punchline of Inside Out is that whenever a secondary emotion grabs the steering wheel, suboptimal results ensue. At one point, joy is forced and its misapplication lacks a firm attributable appropriateness, and so is interpreted as sociopathy. It’s only when sadness becomes executive with well-timed insight that emotional surrender bestows a melancholic beauty over a serious life event for the self. That part’s mournful lens is sometimes the correct application for certain moments for them to carry meaning for the soul.
IFST helps build an affinity with warring parts. The goal is to access what IFS calls the “self” — a calmer internal state capable of compassion, curiosity, and leadership. Akin to the adult state of transactional analysis. So instead of “I suddenly hate my partner”, IFST encourages a mindful space between the controller and the reaction by saying “a protective part of me — let’s call it ‘spurned toddler Maya’ — is becoming overwhelmed by intimacy”. Over time, the individual recognises and applies levers to internal parts that pursue intimacy, sabotage connection, fear abandonment, fear engulfment. Much like in the film, they learn to work in concert on a joint directive, learning as they mature.
