Internal Family Systems Archives

Resourcing in Parts Work

I want to speak in defense of using resourcing techniques in parts work—something that standard IFS doesn’t include. I’ll discuss how I’ve found it helpful and end with a case study of a session that benefited from resourcing.

Standard IFS doesn’t use resourcing

Those of us who have studied Internal Family Systems (IFS) will recall that its founder, Dick Schwartz, takes a stance against using grounding and resourcing techniques to help clients get out of distress. His understandable concern is that these techniques can be used to overrule the protective strategies of firefighters or suppress the emotions of exiles.

If, for example, we instruct a client who begins to dissociate to look in our eyes and feel her feet on the floor, we are encouraging her to override her dissociating part, whose goal is protective. In response, that part is likely to increase its level of activity or turn to the next option in the hierarchy of distractions.
Schwartz, Richard C.; Sweezy, Martha. Internal Family Systems Therapy (p. 270). Guilford Publications. Kindle Edition.

The Marital Spat That Wasn’t

Some people are happily married. As of two years ago today, I’m ecstatically married. Ninety-nine of the time, spending my life with my partner is hilarious and delightful and fulfilling.

As I type this, he started singing a sea chanty at me out of nowhere. See what I mean? [Husband note: I Saw Three Ships is a Christmas song, not a sea chanty] Yes, I let him read over this and leave notes. Checks and balances.

As wonderful as that 99% of the time is, that last 1% can be just about as painful. There’s something about being “all in” with someone that makes fighting with them hit your deepest insecurities, right?

Early on in our relationship, we had a conflict that took us months to fully resolve. It activated the “fixer” part of me, so I tried everything: individual therapy, couples therapy, and reading everything I could find about healthy conflict resolution, including a 400 page book by famed couples therapist John Gottman. One of the things I read somewhere haunted me: the idea that couples therapy works by helping couples talk more constructively, but they almost never keep it up outside the therapist’s office.

Witness and Offer Options

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series IFS Practice 101

This is the last post in my IFS Practice 101 series. I spent five posts explaining how to get to know protective parts of you and get their permission to work with the hurt, exiled parts of you that they protect. But I’m going to cover working with these vulnerable exiles in just one post, and I’m doing that to make a couple of points.

First, because this isn’t a manual for working with exiles. You can start listening to the protectors that are chatting away in your head anytime. But working with exiles is delicate, and it’s really helpful to have a feel for your Self-energy before you attempt it. We don’t always get that luxury, of course—our exiles come out when they come out! But it wouldn’t be responsible of me to suggest you try following my directions based only on a blog post. Get some live experience with parts work first! What I hope this post will be useful for is understanding what the heck IFS is, and helping people who are learning IFS to understand this part of the process from a new angle.

Second, because I hold the IFS process for unburdening loosely (and so does official IFS, in fact). I think it’s helpful to think of it less as a series of steps and more as a menu of options you can offer your exiled part, who can take any of those options in any order they please, or come up with something new. That’s why I’ve boiled a classically 6-step process down to just two steps: witness and offer options.

Address concerns

This entry is part 5 of 6 in the series IFS Practice 101

Now that you’ve built a relationship with a part of you and learned what would make things easier on that part, you can find out if it’s ready for you to go ahead and facilitate that change. Throughout the rest of the process, parts may pop up at any time with something to express (verbally or otherwise).

Our first goal is to distinguish between information and concerns.

Hearing Information

Sometimes parts just want to be heard:

“This will never work!”

“I really hated when that happened!”

and even “Remember to take out the trash later tonight!”

And that’s totally fine. The only action needed in these cases is to hear them and let them know you did. When parts of you feel heard, they tend to relax.

Build a relationship with your part

This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series IFS Practice 101

Now that you and a part of you have an open line of communication, use it! The goal is for you to get to know the part and for the part to get to know you. These can happen in either order, and you can go back and forth between them. This step is usually taught as a grab bag of questions to ask, but I have teased out the goals of this stage in order to help you learn it and practice it more easily.

Let the part get to know you

Letting the part get to know you is about building trust, and that’s a three-part process. It pains me a bit to realize these are the same three steps referred to in marketing: know, like, and trust. I guess marketers have strong incentives to get relationship-building right!

Establish a two-way connection

This entry is part 3 of 6 in the series IFS Practice 101

If you’ve done the first and second steps of the parts work process, you’re ready to establish an inner connection. One of the defining features of parts work and especially Internal Family Systems is the two-way relationship between your parts and your core Self. Outside of parts work, we often try to have one-way relationships with our parts, by doing things like telling ourselves to think differently (talking to a part without listening to it) or feeling for subconscious associations (listening to a part without talking to it). Imagine how hard it would be to problem-solve with a friend if only one of you were allowed to talk! Parts work makes things easier by allowing us to have dialogues.

The fact that this is a dialogue doesn’t mean it has to come in verbal thoughts. Parts can communicate in different ways: through mental imagery, physical sensations, by guiding you to move in a certain way, or by giving you intuitions. Sometimes people can’t tell what a part is saying until they try drawing. The key is just that you are aware of the part and the part is aware of you.

Distinguish parts and Self

This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series IFS Practice 101

The next step in the IFS process after connecting with a part of yourself is to sort out where all your different thoughts and feelings are coming from. Once you know who’s who, you can separate out:

your Self (your awareness/presence)
the part you’re trying to get to know (the target part)
and any other parts that are jumping in (the concerned parts)

Separating parts from your Self allows you to embody your inner wisdom and stay calm even while thinking about upsetting things. Separating parts from each other helps you get to know each one more deeply than you normally can. So let’s see how to do this!

Connect with a part of you

This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series IFS Practice 101

The first step to doing parts work such as Internal Family Systems is to connect with a part of yourself. For those of you who are familiar with the “6 F’s” process for getting to know a part, this post corresponds to the first 3 F’s, but I break things down a little differently based on the kinds of questions I’ve seen people run into.

Get ready

Many people like to do parts work sitting with their eyes closed. Closing your eyes helps you focus on your internal experience. But it’s also possible to do this other ways. I often connect with my parts while taking a walk. I find that looking at the sky and the trees brings out my Self, and then it’s easier for me to connect with my parts as a result.

Types of protectors: What are managers and firefighters?

In the story of Alma, she has two protectors, Clara and David. IFS distinguishes between these types of protectors: Clara is a manager, and David is a firefighter.

I didn’t give these terms in the IFS Theory 101 series because I find that distinguishing between types of protectors is one of the top causes of stress and confusion among learners of IFS, and one of the least important things for IFS clients to do. The distinction is mostly there to help practitioners.

But people do refer to managers and firefighters quite often, so if you’d like to know what they are, read on!

Parts are like muscles

One day when I came to my physical therapy appointment, I overheard a physical therapist telling her patient to do an exercise one way instead of another way “so it’ll hit the right muscles instead of the wrong ones.” I noticed that all she meant by “the right muscles” was “the muscles you need to strengthen,” and all she meant by “the wrong muscles” was “the muscles that have been compensating for the weak ones.” It wasn’t a judgment about the muscles themselves being good or bad. That’s so obvious when it comes to muscles, but so hard to grasp when it comes to parts of our personality.

In parts work, we often want to isolate one part of ourselves at a time so we can understand it more deeply than we usually do. Everyday life is sort of like asking a classroom of kids what they did over summer break: the extroverted kids all talk at once, the introverted kids don’t even try, and all you hear are little snippets of “ice cream” and “summer camp.” But if you ask each child individually about their summer, you can learn their whole story. Similarly, if you ask a person how they feel about a big decision, their head will spin with snippets of their louder parts’ opinions: “it’ll be great!” “but I’m scared!” But if you can isolate each part and listen to it fully, you can find out the reasons behind the different stances, and discover latent opinions too.

Standard IFS doesn’t use resourcing

Hearing Information

Let the part get to know you

Get ready

What's Your Procrastination Type?