Internal Family Systems Explained + Parts Work Meditation

In this recorded live class Ralph De La Rosa explains the 'Parts Work' of Internal Family Systems (IFS) and the way we relate to each of our emotional states. This 15-minute talk is followed by guided parts of work meditation.

Transcript

What would you do if there were a crying child in the room with us?

What would you do if you were all alone and there was a crying,

Helpless,

Freaked out little kid in the room with you?

That would be the natural impulse,

Right?

Some of us earlier today,

I posed this question in Williamsburg and somebody actually said,

I think I probably wouldn't know what to do.

I'd probably get freaked out and be apprehensive at first,

If I'm to be completely honest,

Right?

That might also be a reaction.

But sooner or later,

One would naturally soften and go to the child,

Right?

And maybe hold them,

Maybe let them know that they're not alone.

Maybe ask them what's going on,

Like what's the story here?

How did things come to be this way?

Why are you alone?

Why are you freaked out?

And listen.

Some sort of compassionate response.

But maybe at first,

You know,

Resistance.

Then we would soften into something.

Similarly,

What would you do if you had,

So just imagine that you had a big,

Burly bodyguard in your life who was with you at all times.

You couldn't get rid of that bodyguard.

And they were there to keep you safe.

But sometimes they were a little bit misguided and they actually ended up causing you harm or pushing people away that you really wanted to be around from time to time.

What would you do with that bodyguard?

Would you just tell them,

I hate you?

Or I'm ashamed of you or I'm sick of you?

You're stuck with this person.

Or would it make sense to maybe say,

Hey,

Thank you so much for what you're trying to do.

We need to have a little heart to heart.

But you wouldn't start that conversation off by saying,

God,

I'm just so sick of you.

Because then bodyguard isn't going to listen.

You're just going to clash.

Making sense?

So this is the case with our emotions,

Actually,

And how we relate to our emotions so often.

Because isn't it that the hurt parts of us,

The parts of us that are vulnerable,

That are tender,

That maybe have been danged up and bruised in life,

Maybe had it rough at home growing up,

Those parts of us,

The parts that we try to keep at bay,

The parts that we try to deny an existence that's not there,

I'm not dealing with that,

Not today,

Or the past is the past,

Or whatever our narrative for holding our vulnerability at bay is,

Those parts of us are actually just like freaked out little kids.

Because isn't it true that when those vulnerable parts of us emerge,

Something comes along and triggers something that hurts us,

That our response is typically kind of a little immature,

Isn't it?

But we can really think of the more vulnerable parts of us as being a little bit like Trishna here.

Less defenses,

Less resources,

And needing our care.

But instead we tend to say,

No,

Actually I'm putting you in the closet,

You don't exist.

Similarly,

We have a whole system of defenses,

Right?

Anger would be a really good example of defense,

Or numbness,

Or jadedness might be another really good defense.

It's an emotional manifestation,

A response that we conjure to keep us safe in some way.

And those emotions tend to be like our bodyguards,

Right?

They come out whenever the vulnerable kids get touched,

Isn't it?

Like somebody calls you a jerk,

Your feelings get hurt,

But you bypass the hurt feelings,

You go straight to the anger,

And I'm a jerk,

No you're a jerk,

Right?

So these emotions,

The more defensive ones,

Are very much like bodyguards that are with us all the time,

But as is the case with anger,

Do you ever get angry?

Yeah?

What do you do when you're angry?

You do what?

When I react,

I just get really mad.

Start screaming at people,

Right?

Can anybody else scream at people when they get angry in this room?

I think it's pretty universal that we tend to get seduced by anger,

And then maybe do some things that we're not so proud of later that have some sort of hangover effect,

Right?

And then we feel,

What,

Ashamed towards our anger.

We might even hate our anger.

Anger has been a really big one for me in life,

And I can't tell you how many times I've had some dysfunctional argument with a partner,

And then woken up the next day just like,

I hate that I'm so angry.

What do I do to get this part of me out of my life?

Because if I was just free from this anger,

Then I would be okay.

Except it never worked.

That never worked once for anybody.

The repression of emotions has never worked for anyone even once,

You know?

And the indulgence of emotions has never worked ever.

And the hating of ourselves for being some type of way has never worked.

In fact,

What I'm describing are types of relationships that we have towards our emotions,

Right?

In any situation,

There's always subject,

Object,

And then the relationship between the two.

This is true of me and Trishna.

This is true of me and eggplant.

I hate eggplant.

That's my relationship to it,

Right?

We all have a relationship to everything in our lives,

Right?

We have a relationship to each of the mind states that we pass through as well.

And any time that we are in enmity with any of our mind states,

That's actually an abusive relationship that we are living in with ourselves.

We're actually at war with ourselves.

And hopefully humanity is starting to figure out that war doesn't work so well.

It just makes things worse.

So the practice that we're about to do is based on these ideas.

And they're not ideas I came up with myself.

These all come from a system of psychotherapy that I practice called internal family systems.

And the idea here is just as there's an external family,

Right?

We all have an external family with many different members,

Right?

With all different kinds of personalities and tendencies and temperaments,

Behaviors,

Some of them crazier than others,

Some of them calmer than others,

Some of them more destructive than others.

But in any sort of family system,

All anybody ever wants is to be acknowledged,

To be respected,

To be listened to,

To feel cared for,

To feel like they matter,

To feel like they're heard.

That's all anybody wants in any family.

And somehow that seems to be quite challenging to get sometimes,

Unfortunately.

But so it is inside of us as well.

We have all these different parts of us that are very much like,

You know,

In AA they talk about how we all have a committee inside,

Right?

That there's so many different personalities within us.

There's a multiplicity of mind,

Right?

So they say like,

You know,

I'm a committee.

There's like 12 of me in here.

And who I am at any given moment depends on who's holding the microphone in that committee.

Because isn't it that when you're angry,

You're a completely different person than when you're lonely?

Because the tendency is like,

Let's say,

Here's me,

And here's an angry part of me.

Something comes along that ticks me off.

And here comes the angry part of me.

And I do this,

Right?

Anger is especially strong in that it takes us over when we're angry.

I mean,

That's the syntax right there is I'm angry.

Not I feel anger,

But I'm angry.

Right?

We the fancy word is we cognitively fuse.

We mentally fuse with our experience.

So the practice we're about to do acknowledges that there's all these different parts of us.

And that we tend to have because the more difficult parts of us,

The difficult emotions in us because they're difficult because of the way that we experience them,

We tend to have a negative relationship with them.

And that's what keeps us stuck.

Me hating anger actually ensured that anger stayed in my life and that I kept going on the merry-go-round with different experiences that triggered the same anger.

Us trying to keep our vulnerability at bay ensures that that's a situation that's going to stay exactly as we've left it.

Right?

It's nothing's going to shift.

And so we're going to do a practice wherein we can just allow feelings to emerge.

We'll see that we,

The internal family systems would be blending.

We tend to blend with our emotions where they take over.

We're going to practice something that is pretty revolutionary in that we can actually learn to take a step back.

We can put some space between ourselves and the emotion.

When we start to do this,

We start to be free.

We start to have choices.

This is a much better situation than this.

Here,

No relationship.

Here,

Relationship.

But there tends to be a relationship of,

I don't like you in the middle here.

But that's also not a stuck situation.

What I want to give you folks is this really cool method of asking the reaction,

The I don't like you.

Right?

Here's anger.

Here's I don't like you.

Asking I don't like you.

Can you just stand to the side for a moment?

Not pushing it away,

But just asking very politely.

When we talk to our own minds,

Things happen.

We do this all the time.

We yell at ourselves for something and we'll get a response.

We'll feel some type of way based on how we're talking to ourselves.

We're going to just ask not liking,

For example,

To relax and stand aside.

Then there'll be some other feeling in its place.

Maybe I'm ashamed of this feeling.

I'm sick of this part of me.

We'll ask that to relax and stand aside too.

Then we'll just keep peeling back different layers of reactivity.

What starts to,

Universally and surprisingly,

What starts to happen is we start to soften a little bit towards the feeling that we're having,

Towards the part of us that is present.

We can start to maybe appreciate,

Oh,

That hurt child in me.

That's freaked out.

Maybe I should go towards it instead of away from it.

Maybe I should listen.

Maybe there's a story here that needs to be understood.

Maybe there's a way that I can express warmth towards my own hurts and difficulties.

Quite frankly,

When you get to the point that you can have compassion for your own struggles,

Life opens up in a totally different way.

Don't take my word for it.

Or this is a part of me that's been trying to keep me safe in some way.

Perhaps a better approach is to say,

Thank you so much for what you've been trying to do.

I see what you're up to.

I appreciate it.

By the way,

The inner critic is a really good defender.

The inner critic just wants us to not fail,

But the inner critic is an emotion that yells at us.

It makes it more likely that we're going to fail.

Defenses when they feel heard by us in some way tend to be open to a different point of view or maybe even reveal the hurt part of us that it's trying to defend.

That's a big download.

You don't have to remember all of that.

I'm going to walk you through this.

Let's give it a shot.

Sitting up tall,

Sitting with an air of your basic human dignity,

Letting your seat be heavy,

Gently closing the eyes.

If it's available to allow the spine to lengthen,

To allow the crown of the head to lift,

Top tips of the ears go directly up towards the ceiling.

The crown of the head lifts,

It lengthens the back of the neck.

Then we can straighten the back of the neck by letting the forehead tilt forward just a little bit.

The chin might naturally move in and down towards the throat just a little bit.

Displaced on either side of the lap,

Somewhere around mid-thigh so that they support a width in our collar bones and openness in the chest.

You can take a breath and just come into being here with yourself,

Discovering what it's like to be in this body right now.

Then remembering why you're here.

Even if you just came because you're curious and holding your sense of motivation for being here in your mind for just a few moments.

Take a breath all the way down to your belly,

Nice full breath,

No straining,

And let it out through the mouth.

Nice long slow exhale through the mouth.

Then take another big deep breath,

Really fill up the belly this time.

Big full third trimester belly and then exhaling through the mouth.

Take an even fuller breath,

Send it all the way down beneath the navel and a slow long exhale.

This is a breathing pattern for joy neurologically so keep going.

Big belly breath,

Making sure the rib cage is nice and relaxed and a rhythmic exhale,

Exhaling just about as long as the inhale was.

Keep going.

We're going to breathe like this for about two minutes,

Which is how long it takes for a breathing pattern to affect our nervous system.

You'll see that you begin to wind down with every exhale.

The rib cage is relaxed,

The shoulders can soften a little bit.

The brain also takes cues from the muscles in the face so you can allow the brow to unfurl as you breathe.

Allow the cheeks to completely lose their shape.

The jawline from ear to ear can melt.

Clenching teeth can be parted.

Keep breathing.

The belly can soften,

The pelvis can soften.

Even the legs and the feet,

You can imagine the cascade of relaxation coming over the lower half of the body.

Then allowing the lips to close,

Letting go of the belly breathing.

Just be open to the effects of the breath work.

So we begin.

Please place your attention right in the center of your chest,

The space of the heart.

I invite you to imagine that your nose is right there in the center of your chest just behind the sternum,

Maybe a few inches into the body closer to the spine.

Watch that when you breathe in,

You breathe into the chest,

You breathe into the heart,

And when you breathe out,

You breathe out from the heart.

You breathe in and experience the expansion,

The swelling of the heart,

And breathe out and the heart empties,

Dissolves.

Just for a few minutes here enjoying these sort of elegant risings and fallings in the chest as you breathe.

Nice and.

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Reviews

🙏🏽

Skilful guidance through a deep process with different options to explore and a sense of space and calm💟

Different from most Meditations I've done. Bit felt like something deep was happening. Also new insights. Thank you!