Healing the Inner Child (an Introduction to IFS)

In this video,

I want to speak about a fundamental topic,

Which is that of healing the inner child.

And I want to present a revolutionary method to do so called IFS,

Or internal family systems.

So we hear a lot about the inner child,

And sometimes it's hard to connect to that inner child.

It's hard to understand how to speak to it,

How to listen to it.

For years,

I tried connecting more to the child within,

Trying to understand what that child really wanted,

What its unmet needs were.

But it was a little bit difficult.

I was making a little bit of progress,

But then I came upon IFS,

The internal family systems.

IFS is a method that was created,

Received by a man named Dick Schwartz,

Who was a psychotherapist for years.

And during his sessions,

He noticed increasingly that his patients would say things like,

Part of me wants this,

But part of me wants that.

And he got to see that not only do we all have parts inside of us,

But that these parts often tend to conflict with each other.

And what he discovered,

Which is truly revolutionary,

Is that you can actually go and speak to these parts and listen to what these parts have to say,

And that you can heal these parts.

And by healing these parts,

We heal ourselves.

And how this is connected to the inner child is that almost all of these parts are actually parts of our inner child.

They're either wounds suffered in childhood or defense mechanisms that we created to prevent some of these wounds from repeating themselves.

So the most fundamental idea and the first idea in IFS is that our society lives with the myth of the mono-mind,

The idea that our mind is one thing,

That it's unitary,

When really it's a bunch of parts competing for the joystick,

Competing to take control of the dashboard.

Some of you may have seen the amazing Pixar movie,

Inside Out.

In that movie,

We're inside the head of Riley,

And inside her head,

There's different emotions.

There's fear,

There's sadness,

There's disgust,

There's anger.

And what we see in the movie is that these different emotions take control of Riley at different moments.

And when they take control of Riley,

Riley acts like these parts,

Like these emotions.

And what's pretty incredible is the discovery that what's shown in Inside Out is actually very close to reality.

And this is how we all operate.

So to give you a little bit more clarity on how IFS is structured,

There are three main actors of who we are,

According to IFS.

There are our protectors,

Or protective parts,

Our exile,

Or exiled parts,

And the self.

So our protectors are our defense mechanisms.

They're the parts that run the show of our lives.

To give you an example,

I have a protector that I call the White Rabbit,

Named after the character in Alice in Wonderland.

So it's the part of me that thinks that it's always late,

That is afraid of not having enough,

That has the to-do lists,

That is always running.

There's another part of me that I call,

And I say I call them,

But in IFS,

When you start working with the parts,

And this may sound a little crazy,

But it's really true,

Oftentimes they will name themselves.

And so the part called White Rabbit named itself to me,

And I have another part that named itself.

It's a part I call Beyonce.

So my Beyonce part is the part of me that wants to be admired.

It's the part of me that wants to be thanked when I pick up the bill at the restaurant.

It's the part of me that wants to be complimented when I clean the house well.

So the protectors,

They're the ones who run the show of our lives.

The protectors fall in two categories,

Which are our managers and our firefighters.

So the managers are the parts that run our lives on a daily basis,

Such as my White Rabbit or Beyonce.

The firefighters are the ones who come in when there's a crisis.

So one of my firefighters is a part I name Adolf,

Which is a very angry part that likes to fight.

So whenever there's a core wound that is threatened,

Adolf will sometimes grab the dashboard and make me very angry.

Another firefighter I have is a part I call Let's Have Some Fun,

Which is the part that has led me in my life to many addictions,

To take me away from the pain of childhood.

And so this leads me to talking about the second category of players in IFS,

Which are the exiles.

So the exiles are the wounds that we suffered in childhood,

Most often between the ages of zero and seven years old,

Even though these wounds tend to repeat themselves throughout our lives.

To give you an example,

One of my core wounds is the wound I call the exile,

I call the unworthy.

So my father,

I was the child of my father's mistress.

My mother was 19 years younger than my father,

And my father already had a family.

And my mother became pregnant without obtaining my father's approval.

My father was therefore forced to leave his family and to be with me,

And he rejected me as a child.

And so he loved me conditionally.

I felt that he felt that I needed to be a certain way and that I wasn't.

And so I could feel the love was being removed from me if I acted in certain ways.

So this is one of the this core wound of unworthiness was something as a child that was very painful.

And that's why my system created parts such as Beyonce,

Because if I get compliments,

If I get admiration,

Then I don't run the risk of feeling this this wound that I'm basically not lovable the way I am.

So in addition to the protectors and the exiles,

The third player in IFS is what IFS calls the self.

So unlike the the parts which are specific to each individual,

The self is what we all share.

The self is our divine nature.

The self is what non-duality calls our being,

Consciousness,

The source.

So one of the most powerful ideas of IFS is that we can learn to come back to the self,

To come back to the part of us that's compassionate,

That's curious,

That's creative,

That's confident,

That's courageous.

And from that part of us,

Which is really who we truly are,

We can get into a dialogue with our parts.

So the way it works in IFS is that first we speak to a protector and we try to understand why it's doing what it's doing.

And what's really interesting about this process is that we will notice that if we ask the part how old it thinks we are,

Almost always it will give us an age that is an age related to childhood.

So these parts are stuck in childhood.

And this is how this relates to healing the inner child,

Is that we're going to go in there and we're going to show the parts that actually our life is not the way it was back then,

And that perhaps the defense mechanisms that we used back then and that were necessary for us are actually self-defeating for us in the present.

So we're going to work with a protector by first thanking that part.

And this is,

I think,

One of the key elements of IFS and generally of relating to our shadow and to our inner child is to understand.

And this is actually the title of one of Dick Schwartz's books on IFS called No Bad Parts.

It's the idea that none of our parts are bad,

Even the parts of us that are violent,

Even the parts of us that take us into really bad addictions,

The parts of us that society would condemn the most have a good intention.

They're trying to prevent one of our wounds that felt so bad when we were children from being reactivated.

And so one of the ways of healing the inner child that IFS shows us and that we can do incredibly through IFS,

But we can also do more generally in our lives,

Is to thank our parts,

Is to have gratitude and appreciation for what they're doing,

For their intent.

It's actually by moving towards them with gratitude and appreciation that we can really start to loosen their grip on our lives.

This is actually very close to what the compassionate theory of addiction says about addiction.

I remember being really impressed by what Gabor Mate said in his book on addictions in the realm of Angry Ghosts,

Where he explains that one of the mistakes we make with addiction is that we have shame around it,

We condemn it,

And we don't see that addiction is actually a mechanism that was put in place by our system to help us.

And that the first thing that we can do if we want to relieve addiction is to thank it.

It's to understand its intent.

So in IFS,

First,

We are going to befriend our protectors.

When we're in self,

We're going to speak to them and they're actually going to speak to us and we're going to hear what their concerns are,

How they view life,

What their fears are.

And as we develop a trusting relationship with our protectors,

And this can be done by ourselves,

This is one of the most powerful aspects of IFS,

Is that it's not just something that we do in therapy with a therapist,

But there is a lot of work that we can do with our parts by ourselves.

And to help us do that,

There are amazing books,

For instance,

Such as the books of Dick Schwartz.

We can also work with a therapist and this is incredibly helpful.

And if you're curious,

I encourage you to look up IFS therapists and see if you can get some support.

I certainly do both.

I work with an IFS therapist and I also do work by myself.

And it's made tremendous changes in my life in terms of giving me more calm,

Clarity,

Confidence,

Less stress,

Fear,

Addiction.

But coming back to the process,

The protectors are always protecting an exile.

So when we gain the trust of a protector,

We can go and have a relationship with the exile that it's protecting.

We can see the wound inside of us.

If I look at the wound of unworthiness,

For instance,

I see that I carry what IFS calls burdens,

Which are beliefs.

I recently saw in a session I did with my IFS therapist,

It was actually a session with psychedelics,

That I carry the belief in one of my parts that I cannot make mistakes and that if I make mistakes,

I will no longer be worthy of love.

And so what IFS is going to help us do is to release those burdens.

And as we release the burdens of the exiled parts,

We're also going to diminish the incentive for our protectors to do what they do.

So,

For instance,

Me,

By releasing partially but significantly the burden that I cannot make mistakes,

I've also managed to diminish the impulse of my Beyonce part to constantly seek validation,

Approval,

Admiration and so on.

To conclude this video,

I want to say I want to really encourage you,

If you feel called to look into IFS,

Because it truly is revolutionary.

It's revolutionary because it takes many of the insights from prior methods of psychotherapy,

And it gives us a very concrete way to go and heal the parts of our inner child that needs to be healed.

But a word of warning is that it's very important not to go and speak directly with our exiled parts without getting approval from our protectors,

Because our system has worked in a certain way for years.

And if we go and meddle with the system,

There can be a backlash from our protectors.

So if you're going to work with IFS,

Make sure that you really follow the guidelines that are set out in the books on IFS,

Or even better,

If you're able to,

Working with a therapist.

But to conclude,

I want to say,

Yes,

What we need to do is to really see the different parts of our inner child.

We need to see that what we are ashamed of,

The anger,

The compulsions,

The fears are actually tools that were developed inside of us to really help us.

So the first thing we do to go towards healing is to really thank these parts,

To thank these defense mechanisms,

To see how they've been trying to really prevent us from feeling pain.

And then once we understand what our core wounds are,

It's also moving towards those wounds with tenderness,

With care,

With appreciation.

So that's what I wanted to share with you about some principles of healing the inner child and the wonders,

Really,

That we can achieve with this method of the internal family systems.