Co-authored with Sarah Bergenfield
Internal family systems (IFS) therapy generally begins with this request: Turn your attention inside and notice. Whatever you notice, we’ll call it a part. It might be saying something to you. It might be showing you something. It might be two parts arguing. Or it might show up as a sensation. Once you notice it, you’re differentiating: It is not you, and you are not it. If you find yourself wishing it away or tuning it out because you fear or hate it, that is another part, and you can ask it to differentiate, or unblend, too. IFS calls curiosity, clarity, confidence, compassion, and the other centered feeling states that commonly arise when parts differentiate self or self-energy. Sometimes when one part unblends, another one blends. If this happens, you just keep asking them to separate until you feel curious.
As a psychotherapy approach, IFS has been more concerned with engagement than explanation. It aims for participants to interact with and occupy—rather than distract or dissociate from—their inner experience. But that’s not satisfactory for some people, including those who find the process of helping multiple parts unblend frustrating and confusing and those who feel alarmed when their parts talk back. Once the focus becomes understanding what’s being asked rather than experiencing, the routine IFS question “How do you feel toward this part?” can increase their frustration. How am I supposed to do this? What is a part anyway?
The Role of Storytelling and Curiosity in IFS
While IFS doesn’t have a research-based answer, the mind naturally formulates hypotheses and tells stories. If you get a thrill from connecting with your parts and tell yourself a satisfactory story about the experience, you won’t want or need other explanations. But if you get confused or just feel curious, you may find value in pondering this neuroscience-informed story about parts.
We’ll start with the brain. To navigate a tsunami of environmental data and conserve energy, the brain builds a world model in childhood and then predicts that model will repeat. These predictions are represented in the mind (which neuroscientists see as a product of the brain) visually, aurally, or in sensation. Whichever way they appear, when we pay attention and ask questions we get answers: I conform now because I had to as a child… If I stop doing this, I will be punished. And so on. We hear stories about dangerous times that serve to reinforce old predictions and influence current behavior.
The job of the brain is survival. Accordingly, conservative and behavioral patterns that no longer make us safe can continue long after circumstances have changed. When the brain is stuck, we need to influence it. The mind shows us how—with stories. When we think of patterned behaviors as entities (parts), which are subjectively represented by feelings, opinions, and goals, we engage our relational skills. We offer empathy and compassion—to ourselves. We feel into the strangeness of subjective experience, where we are older and younger, wiser and more innocent or ignorant all at once—and we can accept all that.
Understanding the Inner Community of Parts in IFS
IFS calls this dynamic, multi-age self-experience an inner community of parts. In this community, vulnerable parts are protected by other parts. These protectors, who are tasked with being conservative, tend to keep seeing what they’ve learned to expect despite what neuroscientists call prediction errors, which is information that contradicts expectations and can (should) be used to update a predictive model. Combining the language of IFS with neuroscience, we could say that protective parts are alarm predictions that activate in familiar contexts but, unlike predictions that don’t involve threat, they don’t update in response to prediction errors.
In the language of neuroscience, we can understand the parts who suffer and enact all this as pattern-based predictions—learned expectations about what is likely to happen, paired with a familiar way of feeling and acting to meet those expectations. Here’s an example. A bad thing happens and the brain predicts more of the same, which launches two stories that will continue in tandem. One is a negative identity story (e.g., I’m unlovable, or I will always be hurt and exploited), the other is a survival story featuring whirlwind efforts (dissociation, denial, self-attack, self-sacrifice, deflected rage, addiction, and so on) to quickly and effectively manage that threat. Over time, these protective strategies may wreak relational and identity havoc, but they’re effective in the short run and they’re not the linchpin problem. They’re attempted solutions.
Revising Negative Identity and Survival Stories
In therapy, we want the problem—that assault on personal value that calcified into a negative identity, that “terrible truth” experience (or experiences)—to emerge and be revised. Accordingly, IFS therapy starts with the strategic aftermath of an identity insult (we’re calling this the survival story) and gradually makes its way to the precipitating event (or events) to facilitate a do-over—not a rewrite of reality but an active reclaiming of credibility, worth, and goodness. To free the brain from fear-based rigidity, therapy engages the mind and its stories. In this way, Who am I?—that primal exploration of value and lovability which got interrupted when the bad thing happened—can finally continue in a positive direction. In the language of neuroscience, therapy aims to establish a safe context in which the brain can update expectations that got paired with negative pattern-based predictions.
