At Villa Kali Ma, we offer Internal Family Systems Therapy among our many other kind, compassionate, and trauma-informed psychotherapies for women recovering from addiction, mental illness, and trauma.

In this series of posts, we explore the highly relevant issue of shame as it pertains to addiction, and how this particular burden might be lifted from the hearts minds and bodies of women of this world – through an IFS lens.

For part one in this series on IFS for addiction, start here.

Two Parts, One Woman

There is a part within each addicted woman that genuinely, sincerely wants to stop drinking and drugging. It’s easy to see: if there wasn’t a part that wanted to stop using substances, a woman would never come to treatment. She would never swear off drugs and alcohol, or make promises she can’t keep. She would never start Dry January, throw her pills in the garbage, or hate herself for not being able to stop.

But if there wasn’t a part that thinks it’s better to keep using substances, living inside each addicted woman, then she wouldn’t need treatment. She wouldn’t break her well-intentioned promises, drop out of Dry January, and get her pills back out of the garbage. She wouldn’t deny the impacts of her behavior on her loved ones and children, lie about her use, or hide her activities from people she knows will disapprove.

What does this self-contradictory set of behaviors, thoughts and desires mean? Are women with addiction crazy in some way, as some psychiatrists has maintained for so long? Are they morally weak, as some religious institutions have claimed? Are they possessed by unhappy spirits, hungry ghosts, as some non-Western cultures believe?

The Internal Family Systems Therapy answer to this question is no, women with addicted parts are not crazy, morally bankrupt, or possessed. Rather, they are experiencing what happens when parts inside are polarized in a long-standing war about the best way to deal with pain. Inside every addicted woman, there are at least two parts, locked in conflict.

One part believes continuing to use substances is vitally necessary to survive. The other part that believes quitting substances is vitally necessary to survive.

Chronic Polarization: an Inner War

Internal Family Systems Therapy says that everyone has parts, and that all of these parts are well-intentioned, working in service of survival of the person who has those parts. IFS also explains that our parts don’t always agree on the best approach for handling life. In particular, they disagree on how to manage the overwhelming pain burdening traumatized people’s psyches.

What’s going on inside a person who has addiction? To use parts language, what’s the quality of the relationship between the part that’s using substances, and the part that wants to stop?

In short, it’s all out war. The war is between a part that thinks ahead and foresees consequences, who judges, shames, berates and moralizes, on the one hand. The substance-using part, on the other side, continues to use drugs and alcohol, as a way to tamp down the rising flood of overwhelming distress.

Typically, the critical part is merciless, yelling at the woman to stop. But like a fireman in the midst of an out-of-control, blazing conflagration, the substance-using part can’t afford to think about later, about right and wrong, or collateral damages. The goal of this part is to put the flames out, now. Both parts are trying to help the woman survive, but in different ways, with different top priorities.

The Trouble with Confrontation

According to IFS and addictions pioneer Cece Sykes, the last thing that women with addiction need is someone to point out or remind them (even lovingly) that what they are doing is a problem.

The strategy of “tough love” is relatively common amongst friends, family, and even some treatment providers. It is intended, very often, as an act of kindness – indeed it takes quite a lot of care and courage for someone to confront a person’s self-destruction. And though the worry can come out wrong (as attempts at control, expressions of anger, or guilt trips), the concern is real and well-meaning most of the time.

The problem with confrontation is that, the belief that what addicts need is to be made aware of the “reality” of their behaviors is misinformed. This strategy is based on the idea that people who are using substances don’t fully realize, or care, that what they’re doing is a problem. But that’s not so.

Women with addicted parts could write the book on what’s wrong with using. It’s not a question of not seeing themselves and the consequences of what they are doing, though they may not show you that they know. In sober moments, in private self-encounters, they do feel all the guilt, shame, and self-recrimination you think they should feel, or which you think they need to feel, in order to have the motivation to get better.

Trouble is, self-hatred, self-judgment, and guilt, rather than inspiring change, tend to drive the next using cycle. Adding shame to an addicted woman’s system doesn’t work, for the simple reason that women who are use substances, are using in part because of experiencing too much shame to begin with. That overabundant, preexisting shame is a hallmark legacy of traumatization, and a strong indicator of having grown up in a dysfunctional family system.

The Shame Cycle

Where there is addiction, Sykes insists, you may rest assured that you will find a staunch set of protective manager parts who use shame regularly and without mercy, locked in a feud with the parts that reactively seek numbing substances to deal with the pain of that very same shame.

The shaming parts flood the woman with feeling like a bad person: guilt, fear, and inferiority, whenever they can. The purpose of generating all these bad thoughts, feelings, and sensations, is to try to get the woman to stop using substances (and many other “shoulds” and “oughts”).

The parts that use addiction to deal with shame in the first place, will, like clockwork, turn to the same coping tool all over again. The more inner judgment coming from inner critics and protectors, the more the body is flooded with overwhelming feelings and sensations of shame, in turn activating the firefighter, reactive protector parts that use substances.

Siding with Manager Parts Amplifies Substance-Using Parts

Confronting, or siding with the part that wants to stop is not the right answer, according to IFS. Trying to get someone to stop, without understanding the part that believes survival depends on using, only makes this polarization worse. The addict part will dig in its heels, feeling itself to be under siege not only by the inner critic and concerned parts inside, but also by friends, family, and therapists.

This onslaught of pressure to stop using isolates the using part of the psyche, marginalizing it and making an enemy out of it.

When people who have addicted parts are confronted with consequences, the amount of shame that floods the system is geologic in scale. If the woman we’re confronting were to let in even the tiniest truth of what we are saying, she fears, the fragile dam of her defenses would go crashing down. This loss of any defense against a picture of herself as unworthy, damaged, or inferior, is a reality she dreads to her core.

So when we meet a part in someone else that uses denial to cope, a part that says “It’s not a big deal” or “I’m not really addicted”, this part doesn’t represent the whole woman. It is a defensive part who is trying to keep the woman away from catastrophic floods of shame, which this part believes the woman would not be able to survive.

The Cure in Curiosity

Rather than attempting to strengthen the parts that criticize, berate and shame, by giving voice to parts within us that also criticize a substance-using woman’s choices, it would be far more helpful, IFS says, to get curious.

Genuine, non-attached curiosity can open up many forms of friendly, exploratory dialogue. It may lead to the asking of such questions:

What does the substance using part need everyone to understand about what it’s doing and why, what burdens it carries?

Why and how does addiction help this woman?

What problem are these substances solving?

When did using substances become a coping strategy, and why?

Which parts are protected by the substance using part?

What do the substance-using parts fear would happen, if using substances were no longer an option?

Finally, if there were an effective, valid alternative to using substances – a credible way to heal the underlying pain the substance is managing – would the substance-using part be willing to consider stopping?

The only way to get answers to such questions, IFS says, is to make friends with the substance using part.

For more on how to befriend the parts that use drugs and alcohol, look out for the next post in this series, next month!

Lots of love, your friends at Villa Kali Ma