Inside your mind there is a family of parts that can help you heal

(first published in the Sunday Independent, August 16, 2020)

It’s a tragedy for mental health that more practitioners are not offering a transformational therapy that can actually heal, rather than just manage, trauma, writes psychotherapist Gayle Williamson

Byron (not her real name) is a high-functioning academic in her late 40s. She’s very capable, intelligent and funny; she’s also very traumatised after a childhood spent with a cruel mother and a weak father who failed to protect her from her mother’s annihilation. She’s been doing Internal Family Systems therapy with me for more than a year now and I think she’d agree that it’s taken her on an incredible journey, one that has substantially healed a lot of her trauma.

What follows will likely sound a bit weird, as it first did to Byron. We tend to view ourselves very simplistically, but this is the kind of fascinating and wondrous internal family that we all have. However, the starting point for most psychotherapy approaches is that the healthy mind is unitary, not multiple, so we don’t have the tools to engage with it. Unless, that is, you encounter Internal Family Systems, a cutting-edge therapy that helps you to ‘go inside’ and get to know and help the various parts that people your psyche. 

 One of the first parts of Byron that we started talking to was a nine-year-old little girl, who appeared naked with severe burns and wasn’t saying a lot. I got Byron to tell the girl who she was and why she was there: “I’m the older you.. I’m 45 now, and I’m here to help you.” It was hard at first for the girl to trust that Byron would help. But every day, between sessions, she’d visit the little girl for a few minutes in her mind, finding clothes for her to wear, putting potato skins on her burns, taking her swimming in the sea. And gradually the burns began healing. A key point in the work came when the little girl showed Byron a memory of hiding from mum behind a door. Byron was able to go into the scene and help the girl escape, punching her mother (as Little B asked her to) on the way past her.  When we asked Little B how she felt afterwards, she said: ‘I’m free.’ 

We’ve come a long way in the field of mental health, where it’s become the norm to talk more openly about anxiety or depression. We understand so much more about the brain, and how it’s affected by trauma. Indeed, our understanding of what constitutes trauma has evolved significantly. But the truth is, we’re still failing a lot of our patients and clients, with the go-to recommendation by GPs normally Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). And we’re failing them if we continue to pathologise the idea of a multiplicity – where someone diagnosed with ‘multiple personalities’ is told they have a mental disorder like schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder. The truth is, we all have multiple personalities. It’s just that, depending on what has happened to you in life, some of us will have parts that are more extreme than those of other people.

Accessing your unconscious

Harvard psychotherapist Richard Schwartz is usually described as the developer of IFS, not as a theorist, because his model is not theoretical – it’s based on years of direct reports from the parts of his clients. It’s evidence based and backed up by studies showing its effectiveness for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as for the pain and depression associated with rheumatoid arthritis. And yet, the dominant approaches persist in keeping the therapist in the expert role, providing intellectual insights, rather than trusting the wisdom of the client’s system and being led by this. 

Freud believed our unconscious could only be known indirectly, through dreams or free association, which then relied on the therapist to provide an   interpretation as to the meaning of the content. But it turns out that actually you can just ask someone to go inside themselves, find the scared or anxious or sad or critical part of them and ask it questions. All the client has to do is listen, stay curious and compassionate, and the answers come from their unconscious, often telling them things they had long forgotten about or blocked out.

If you look at my website, you’ll see it still says that I use CBT – that’s because I learned early in my career that it’s the one approach most people know and will search for. I know that most people don’t know what it actually entails, but I want to make sure that people who really need help can find me and then once they are here, I can explain to them: “Actually my way of working has changed over the years.. Have you heard of IFS?” 

   I have trained in a range of therapy approaches – from Sensorimotor therapy to psychodynamics to CBT. But I now believe all practitioners should be using IFS and that it’s what we should be training our student therapists to use. It’s based on the idea that we are not a single ‘I’, that in fact we are all naturally multiple – something we all intuitively know. How often have you heard yourself say “a part of me thinks this… but another part of me thinks that”? So the voices you hear in your head are not just random or irrational thoughts that you should be helped to ignore or change, a la CBT; the thoughts are actually parts talking to each other and they have meaning or intention. 

For example, when I first began treating Rob (not his real name), he was plagued by repetitive thoughts of being in a dream – a psychiatrist would say he has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  I initially focused on helping Rob essentially to ignore the thought. But after encountering IFS, I got him to focus on the part that was sending him the thought and ask why it was doing this. This has led us to several young parts of Rob who all had bad dreams and woke up alone and terrified, not knowing if the dreams they had were real or not. So, not so random; but rather parts just trying to get Rob’s attention and help, which he’s now been able to provide. When you really get the reality of parts, you understand that trying to change or avoid thoughts really means ignoring a young part of you in distress and compounding the pain.

A key, hopeful, principle of IFS is that there is an undamaged, resourceful Self at the core of every person; and the IFS therapist’s job is to help clients access this Self, which can then form a relationship with and heal each part of the mind that has been hurt.  It would be wrong to think of parts as just metaphors; they are actual sub-personalities, real phenomena, with their own autonomy and the power to take over the client’s whole system, as for example, when you feel like a child even though you are in your 50s.

How IFS Heals

A little neuropsychology will explain how IFS actually heals: during traumatic experiences, the part of our brain that records all the temporal detail associated with an event goes offline so that the event is recorded not in our conscious memory system but in our implicit or unconscious memory, with all the associated feelings and sensations. Implicit memory is where our parts are stuck, exerting powerful effects on us – so that when they’re triggered, we don’t have control and react as if what happened then is still happening now. But through IFS, clients develop a relationship with and help their parts in such a way that the parts move from the implicit memory system to conscious memory – taking them out of the places where they’re stuck in the past and retrieving them to a compassionate, safe, present-day relationship with the client’s core Self where they transform.

  I actually cannot understand why, despite being around for nearly 40 years, IFS is not more widely practised. Because the moment I encountered it, it made immediate, complete sense – not just to me, but to clients too. But it has been suggested that many parts of the profession are reluctant to hand over power to the client, as IFS does – no more the all-knowing therapist. Others may see it as a bit oddball, strange – as though humans aren’t the wonderfully mysterious and complex beings that they are. It’s also a fairly complicated model for therapists to learn because of how complex we are.

Unfortunately, you will struggle to find an IFS therapist in Ireland; there are a few more in the UK, which has a partner IFS training centre. There are lots to choose from in America, but you will pay exorbitant rates along the lines of 300euro per 50-minute session online.

Of late, Byron has been experiencing an unsettling excitement, asking herself “who am I now?”, as new ways of being open up for her. She’ll still frequently say “this is so weird, Gayle!”, and, “if anyone heard what I’m doing…!” But the unspoken next words are “and yet, it works”.

Client confidentiality has been protected

Gayle Williamson is a clinical supervisor and IACP-accredited psychotherapist practising in Dublin www.ferneytherapy.ie

Useful information:

https://ifs-institute.com

www.internalfamilysystemstraining.co.uk

**IFS developer Richard Schwartz will be holding a three-day virtual training seminar in February 2021. Bookings through Professional Counselling and Psychotherapy Seminars Ireland