At Villa Kali Ma, we offer Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) 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 addiction and the role of shame in women who use substances, through an Internal Family Systems lens. In the first part of this series we shared an overview of the IFS model. In the second part we explored why making an enemy out substance use is ineffective.
In this third and final post, we’ll talk about befriending, understanding, and appreciating substance-using parts for their true positive intentions.
Making Friends with Substance Using Parts
If you find it hard to imagine making friends with the part within ourselves or another person that uses substances, you’re not alone. The notion of lessening the amount of moralizing, judgment and fear we feel towards substances and the people who abuse them seems counterintuitive to many people. It may even feel threatening or upsetting.
The concerns typically center around the following questions: Are we condoning substance use if we stop calling it bad and wrong? Are we encouraging or indulging substance use if we pause our disapproval long enough to get to know it? Can we really afford to take the time, to get curious about substance using parts? Won’t substance using parts take over, causing havoc right and left, if we don’t keep them on a tight leash? If we stop pointing out the problems that come with addiction, aren’t we somehow enabling it?
According to Cece Sykes, Martha Sweezy, and Richard Schwartz, authors of the treatment manual on the use of IFS for addictions, the opposite is true. Resisting, labeling, judging, worrying and attempting to control substance use generally only makes it worse. Genuinely accepting, understanding, and befriending substance-using parts and their true motivations leads to those parts cooperating with the healing process.
Attempts to eliminate or conquer substance abuse almost always send a shaming message: You’re doing something wrong. This isn’t ok. There’s something wrong with you. We want you to be different. Be like us, don’t be like you. We know better than you do, about what you need. You don’t deserve attention, recognition, understanding.
Instead, we must find ways to get calm and curious, to truly open our hearts to substance-using parts, acknowledging them as beloved parts that are trapped in a very difficult, thankless job. We cannot permit substance-using parts to run the show, that is true (though it wouldn’t hurt to try to understand why they feel they need to run the show). And we must be able to set, hold and adjust firm, kind boundaries with them, for that reason.
Nevertheless, imprisoning and accusing substance using parts is a variation of an ancient and common psychological mistake: shooting the messenger.
Instead, we need to find a way to welcome, understand, and appreciate substance-using parts for what they are doing for the system. If they are extreme and destructive, then it is our job to find out why such extremity and destruction is necessary in the internal system.
Only once we have recognized the true benevolent intentions driving substance use do we have a chance of change. Instead of shaming substance use, we have to meet it with the opposite of shame: love.
Love not Shame for Women with Addiction
As we discussed in previous posts, shame is one of the biggest healing topics for women with addiction. Although women who have addictions and other extreme behaviors are often treated as though they don’t have enough shame (don’t they realize what they’re doing is bad?), this is a misunderstanding. It’s quite the opposite.
Women with addiction do very well realize that what they are doing is considered heavily judged. Most likely, substance-using women are keenly aware of the attitudes others have about their use. It is also highly likely that they condemn themselves even more harshly than anyone else around them would. Such women may very well believe that the use of substances is only one small piece of evidence in the giant pile of evidence that proves their badness, and low value, as people.
It is consciousness of this “fact”, of their supposed moral badness or other kind of inferiority, that, in part, drives many women with addiction to need to keep up a cycle of using. In the soothing arms of a mood-altering substance, women are temporarily free from constant reminders of their badness – and the horrible feelings and sensations that go with that belief. These women need to be loved, not scolded.
IFS adamantly insists there are No Bad Parts. There isn’t anything wrong with any of us, that can’t be understood at the end of the day as attempts to survive overwhelming pain. With this mindset, we can begin to understand where substance-using parts are coming from. Eventually, we may even come to love them, for their extreme loyalty and dedication to helping us survive.
How Substance Using Parts Help Us Deal with Shame
The key to understanding substance-using parts and what they are doing for our inner system lies in the phenomenon of shame. Many mental health conditions are closely tied to shame. For our purposes today, we will look at the connection between trauma and shame to help understand why women with trauma history often end up using substances to cope.
Trauma burdens survivors with a legacy of chronic shame – shame about what happened to us, about our inability to defend ourselves or others, what it says about us that people treated us this way, and about what we have done to cope.
Shame is defined by popular speaker and researcher Brene Brown as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.”
IFS pioneer Mike Elkin, offers a similar definition, stating that shame is the experience of “being witnessed in one’s badness”. Another key figure working on the topic of shame and addiction is legendary pioneer John Bradshaw, someone who has contributed enormously to the world of peer-led recovery. Byron Brown, meanwhile, explores the phenomenon of the inner critic and its connection to shame, through a spiritual lens.
However it is defined, these mental health thought-leaders and many more consider shame to be one of the most psychologically distressing schemas. Shame is often described by clients using phrases like “I want to die”, “I died” or “I want to disappear” or “I want to bury myself” – it is no exaggeration to say that shame is vibrationally close to death. To use Internal Family Systems terms, most, if not all, parts in our system have the job of protecting us from further experiences of shame.
Because shame is so extremely horrible as to be intolerable, our systems need to take on many roles and work very hard to find ways to protect us from contact with it. Shame feels so difficult to endure, that people go to great lengths to behave in ways that limit our vulnerability to it, often at great mental, emotional, and relational cost. When we inevitably encounter our legacy reservoir of shame anyway, in spite of all our attempts to be perfect, we will do almost anything to escape or numb that experience.
Addiction is a strategy used by parts whose job it is to help us tolerate the intense pain of our shame when it gets too much. Substance use blunts, distracts, and soothes us when we have a shame attack.
IFS founder Richard Schwartz has noted on several occasions in trainings and public talks, that if you ask a substance-using part what it is afraid would happen if the client stopped using substances, the answer is often that it fears the client will commit suicide. These examples illustrate that in their own extreme ways, substance-using parts are trying to save the life of the client.
Recognizing that substance using parts work to protect us from experiencing overwhelming shame and feelings of wanting to die is an important step in the direction of forgiving our substance using parts. Maybe someday we can even feel love and gratitude towards our addiction, for trying to help us survive the unsurvivable.
The Inner Shamer
IFS maintains that although substance using parts get a lot of negative attention, they are only half of the story. Equally important to befriending our substance using parts, is to get to know our inner shamers. These parts continue to tell us, over and over again, that we don’t deserve love and belonging.
Inner shamers attack our lovability and worthiness, using unfair standards and comparisons to others. They berate and condemn us, frighten and harass us. They critique and savage us, until we are so broken-spirited and hopeless, we stay safely away from the fray of life. We withdraw from the playing field of life, where, our inner shamers say, we are safer.
What IFS reveals is that the parts doing the inner attacking are doing so for a positive intention, just like substance using parts. In fact, it is very likely to be the same intention: to help us avoid getting overwhelmed by shame.
The inner critic is one such part in the inner system that uses shame, to try to prevent us from experiencing even more shame. How could shaming ourselves help avoid more shame? How could taking on the belief that we are unworthy of love and belonging help us feel less bad?
The answer to these questions is specific and personal. We can only find out by getting to know the inner shamer and asking it why it feels it needs to shame us for us to be safe. Just as with substance using parts, we won’t get anywhere by trying to fight, judge, or marginalize the inner shamer. All we can do is try to understand why the inner shamer believes that it must do what it is doing.
Although personalized answers are best given by asking one’s own inner shamer, there are some general truths that help explain why shame is sometimes believed to be necessary for our survival. As little beings, we all did whatever was required to reduce the amount of harmful inputs from the environment. We did anything that was effective to be less harmed by rage attacks, abuse, violation, withholding of love, abandonment, or whatever else may have been harming us. We also did whatever worked to increase the amount of needed inputs: we learned to perform acts that maximized love, affection, kindness, contact, and help. The more extreme the environment we grew up in was, the more extreme our parts had to be, to get us through safely.
Perhaps shaming ourselves once made us less of a target of anger, sexual violation, or envy. Maybe it helped us expect less out of life, and therefore not feel so much pain, disappointment or rejection, which would have been met with more shaming. It could be that taking on the belief that we deserved what was happening to us made abuse hurt less, helped us make sense of why harm was being done to us, or gave us a sense of greater agency in experiences of severe helplessness.
Collapsing ourselves into a shame-maintaining body posture, according to Dr. Janina Fisher, serves self-preservation in multiple ways in traumatogenic family environments. Shame, although very primitive, works to change behavior quickly even when we’re very small, because it is so painful. It is extremely common for women to have strong self-shaming parts, that they rely upon to help them feel safe in a dangerous world, that have been with them since they were very young. To find out what your inner shamer believes is necessary to keep you safe, you must first befriend that shamer until it is willing to share from the heart with you.
Healing What Lies Beneath
Addiction represents, in part, a desire to escape from the sensations, emotions, and burdensome beliefs of shame, which can be summed up with the following untruth: I am bad. I don’t deserve love. I deserve abuse. People don’t love me, protect me, or care for me, because I am bad. I may as well die. Paradoxically, the self-shaming parts are also trying to protect us from having to re-experience being burdened with a belief in our badness, by getting us to avoid behaving in ways that we associate with having been traumatically shamed before.
The ultimate cure, IFS maintains, is to eventually get in contact with the parts of us that carry the burdens of having been shamed – our exiles. We must heal the shame itself, by removing it from the shoulders of our most tender parts. Once we do free our exiles from that which they never should have had to carry, by completing the IFS unburdening process (or another process for traumatic memory reprocessing, such as EMDR), our substance using parts and our shamers will naturally relent.
Not only will they stop being destructive to us, they will be happy not to have to work so hard and in such extreme, painful ways. They will be relieved and comforted that someone safe and loving (in this case, us!) is at last taking care of us in ways that they never could.
There are vulnerable parts within all of us, and like children, vulnerable parts cannot stand to be without love. When they were told, through words or actions, that we did not deserve the love, protection, contact, belonging, nourishment, that we really needed to feel safe, to grow up, and to be ok in this world, it created a wound. That wound can be healed.
How is the wound healed? Through building a loving relationship with Self – that timeless, shining sun of compassionate, available unconditional love, that is found inside all living beings.
Thank you for reading!
If you’re interested in seeing how IFS and other compassionate approaches to healing women’s trauma, mental illness, and substance use could help you or someone you love, we invite you to check out our integrative programs for women.