Curious about: Internal Family Systems

Internal family Systems is a great model to work with. It opens up emotions that have been locked away, allows us to approach them with curiosity and compassion and give the opportunity for us to heal difficult experiences from the past that are impacting our present.

How does it work?

At the heart of Internal Family Systems are a couple of key frameworks: the 8 C’s, the 6 F’s and the understanding of exile parts, protective parts and their relationship with each other and our Self (with a capital S!).

What are the 8 C’s in Internal Family Systems?

These are core qualities we look to develop through therapy, offering a roadmap towards growth and healing

1. Curiosity – Asking questions with an open mind, creating a flexible approach to yourself and the world around you.

2. Clarity – Creating the space to be able to step back, and see things without being flooded by emotions.

3. Compassion – Meeting yourself with kindness and understanding.

4. Confidence – Building trust with yourself, your emotions and your responses to your experiences.

5. Courage – Acknowledging all emotions as valid and important. In IFS we say there are ‘no bad parts’ – every part has a story to tell.

6. Calmness – Working towards emotional balance and creating a sense of safety within yourself.

7. Creativity – Developing new tools and ways to resolve approach difficult experiences.

8. Connectedness – Feeling a sense of connection with your own feelings and needs and with the with wider world.

What are the 6 F’s in Internal Family Systems?

The 6 F’s a short hand for the steps we take in exploration and communication to understand protector and exile parts. This process gives the parts space to speak and be understood.

1. Find – finding the part that needs attention within your body

2. Focus – bringing focus to this part allowing you to connect with it’s experiences

3. Flesh out – spending time to understand the parts fears, needs and feelings

4. Focus towards – gaining an understanding of how we feel towards this part and why

5. Befriend – understanding why this part acts like it does, what it’s job is and why it’s so important to do this to keep you safe

6. Fears – spending time to understand the roots of fear this part holds.

This process can be really impactful in quite a short space of time, allowing us to open up boxes that we have shut off for a long time, but that need to be opened up and understood for us to be able to move forward as the person we know we are capable of being rather than being driven by past protective behaviours.

So what are parts?

Key to Internal Family Systems is the concept of parts.

Protective Parts

Protective parts are parts of us that we create often earlier on in life, in childhood and teenage years. These parts tell us (or sometimes yell at us) things like “Your selfish”, “Stop asking for so much”, “what is wrong with you”, “your so dramatic”, “you ruin everything”, “it’s all your fault”… the list goes on but you get the idea.

It is understood that these parts come from a place of protection and adaptation – they are trying to protect you, to shutdown behaviours that pushed your care givers, or as you get older, your peers, away. They move you away from your true Self, towards an adapted version of you that works for the social situations you find yourself in.

Exile Parts

Exile parts are are often vulnerable parts of us. When they are not accepted by caregivers/peers, we see them as the unwanted parts; they are inconvenient to others and therefore we learn to see them as ‘bad’, ‘dangerous’ or ‘wrong’.

The protectors role is to stop the exiled parts speaking up. They protect us from getting harsh reactions, punishment, rejection etc. Protectors work to maximise connection with caregivers and later in life with peers.

Why does this matter?

When we move into adult life, these protectors stay with us, reminding us of the danger of being our Self. As this is subconscious, we are not aware of what’s going on although you might get a sense of ‘why did I say that?’ or ‘why do I feel so scared, when there is nothing actually scary?’. It is hard to separate past reactions or emotions from the present, we feel ourselves being flooded with strong emotions that make us react.

In therapy we will will work through these experiences, understand the different parts and start to un-blend past experiences from present.

I integrate this way of working into my sessions with clients as and when feels appropriate. If you would like to get in touch about sessions, I’d love to hear from you.