Connect with a part of you

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.

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Distinguish parts and Self

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!

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Establish a two-way connection

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.

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Build a relationship with your part

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!

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Address concerns

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.

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Witness and Offer Options

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.

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