by Marc on June 8, 2020
On January 28 I started a series of posts reviewing promising psychotherapeutic approaches to addiction. I managed to cover a few, though with stops and starts — mostly due to Covid hassles and anxieties. So today I’m continuing the series with a post on Internal Family Systems (IFS). I wanted to understand it better before trying to explain it, and I think I finally do.
For years my online therapy with people in addiction has relied on my early training in psychodynamic therapy, dobs of mindfulness-meditation, what I’ve picked up from emotion-focused psychotherapy, ACT, Gestalt and other gems, plus my own personal experience of addiction. Add to that 30 years studying developmental psychology with a focus on emotion regulation, and what I’ve learned about the brain processes that underlie addiction and drug use. All of this came together in my own hybrid style of therapy. And it usually helped. Yet there were people I couldn’t help at all. There were brick walls and false leads and levels of trauma, chaos and heartbreak that left me gaping, and left my clients no further ahead. I knew I needed more training.
Internal Family Systems has been around since the 80s, and more and more people are becoming aware of it. It’s not easy, primarily because its premises go against the grain of mainstream psychology. Instead of trying to fuse the parts of the person into one coherent whole, IFS allows the parts to remain parts, it sort of honours them, so that you can get to know them, listen to them, understand them, and eventually take care of them. With respect to addiction, you never hear “you must stop.”
What are these parts? Maybe you’ve thought of them as voices, or selves, or subpersonalities — it doesn’t matter. They appear as habitual perceptions or expectations with distinct emotional loadings (e.g., anxiety, anger, longing) — and they can be intrusive in the background or they can seem to take over.
In working with addiction, the parts are not hard to find. Addicts often identify at least two. One is the “addict self” who just wants to get high (or to binge or have sex). That part is powerful, it
overtakes the system, it has no regard for tomorrow, and it’s very difficult to resist. In AA, it’s said to be doing push-ups in the parking lot. In psychology jargon, it’s called compulsion. NIDA calls it a diseased brain. But I don’t find any of these concepts at all helpful. From a neuroscience perspective, I can point to the part of the brain that “does” compulsion — the dorsolateral striatum — but all that’s really doing is putting a habit into play. And as we know, addictive urges are all about habit. So what happens if we consider this to be a part of a person that is young, energetic, one-track minded, and determined to overcome negative emotion in the only way it knows how? When you think about it that way, it’s hard to negate it or to hate it.
The other part addicts often identify is the voice that gives you royal shit for doing it, thinking about it, planning it, having done it (drinking, drugs, gambling, whatever) last night or every
night for the last week or the last month. We often call this the internal critic, and its specialty is self-blame and self-contempt. So what happens if we see this part as a younger version of ourselves, who learned to be our caretaker or disciplinarian? You better be good! Don’t you dare goof up again! You’re going to be in real trouble if you do that!! Once we see this part as trying to help keep us out of trouble, it’s hard to feel alienated from it or even victimized by it. Instead, IFS asks us to open a dialogue with this part. For example: You come out whenever I’m likely to do something “bad” (like call my dealer), don’t you — I guess that’s been a full-time job lately. But then you get so upset with me that I get seriously depressed, and then I just want to get high all the more. Let’s try reducing the pressure a bit.
And there lies the problem for most addicts. (I use that word for convenience, as you know.) The critical voice and the “let’s get high” voice activate and augment each other. Endlessly. In IFS, both these parts are called “protectors” because their job is to take care of you. Neither one is evil. They just have radically different styles. The critical voice or “manager” thinks only of the future. The “getting high” distractor voice thinks only of the present. These two parts branched off and solidified, earlier in development, because you needed them. Or so it seemed. How
many times a day do you suppose the average 6-year-old thinks about NOT getting in trouble? How many times did you do bad shit anyway? The trouble now is that those two parts are so busy trying to shut each other down that you can’t get anywhere. Neither part will stop doing what it’s doing. It all seems so hopeless.
IFS recognizes a third class of parts called “exiles”. These are (usually) the really young parts that have experienced trauma or abuse of one kind or another. They are terrified. They’ve been hurt or shamed beyond their capacity to heal. We normally can’t or don’t want to re-experience that hurt, so we keep it buried. Hence the term “exile” (what psychoanalysts call the unconscious). But we don’t bury all of that pain…the hurt rises up inside us when we feel desperate, alone, misunderstood, or threatened. Addiction itself can trigger these feelings! And that’s exactly when the distractor — the “I need to get high” voice — gets activated. I can take care of this awful feeling, it says. Right now! Which of course triggers the manager part: Don’t you dare! You promised. Then the savage back-and-forth between these parts pushes the exiles further down, hides them even more, and douses them with more shame and fear…in case there wasn’t enough already.
Having practiced IFS as a therapist now for several months, I am sold on its efficiency and its power. (I’ve even begun as a client, myself, with an IFS therapist. What better way to learn the ropes…not to mention some timely self-improvement.) My clients “get it” almost at once. I don’t have to sell them on the rather esoteric imagery and jargon. They just take a look inside and say, Um yeah, that’s pretty much what’s happening. And then they start to change.
This is just a bare-bones intro. Let me end by saying that the goal of IFS is to let your Self (they spell it with a capital S) start to take care of your parts — appreciate them, comfort them, ask them to turn down the volume, to step back a bit. And reassure them that you — the present whole you, the Self, the calm centre that you may find in meditation — are going to take care of things, and take care of them — so they can begin to relax.
It’s pretty remarkable to feel that start to happen. You don’t feel so desperate. And all those layers of hopelessness begin to lighten and float away.