What is Internal Family Systems Therapy?

The Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) model is a non-pathologizing approach to psychotherapy that applies systems thinking to work on inner relationships among parts inside an individual’s psyche.

IFS holds the perspective that every person’s mind is made up of relatively distinct sub-personalities, a little bit like what was portrayed in the Pixar film Inside Out. IFS also asserts that every person has a core Self, the true natural leader of the inner system. Self is the healing agent, and restoration of relationship between parts and Self is the goal of IFS.

Internal Family Systems is an evidence-based practice. IFS is used effectively to treat mental health disorders, trauma, and addiction. The goal of IFS is to restore inner wholeness, through reconnecting parts with the client’s Self, empowering Self to guide and harmonize the client’s inner world.

No Bad Parts

IFS was developed by a family therapist, Dr. Richard Schwartz, in the 1980s. The model has evolved since the early days, but it retains a core premise reflecting a revolutionary insight.

Schwartz’s insight was that all symptoms and behaviors, even the most destructive and damaging, are manifestations of an internal part that has positive intentions for the client. As the title of Dr. Schwartz’s latest book asserts, there are “No Bad Parts”.

Schwartz asserts that we get further in therapy with an attitude of curiosity and acceptance towards all symptoms, instead of picking sides or battling “bad” behavior. Only once we understand the positive intention of an extreme adaptation can we begin to shift dynamics of the inner system.

How Parts Become Extreme 

In the face of danger or threat, Parts take on extreme roles to help protect the inner system. Extreme roles can save a person’s life, but they carry burdens: painful emotions, somatic postures, and negative beliefs.

The pain of a role is not the same as the part itself. Parts wouldn’t naturally think negative thoughts or behave in self-destructive ways, but if they learn that it’s necessary for survival, they may take on these roles.

A way to understand this piece is to ask the question, “How might believing this painful thought, feeling this painful emotion, or performing this extreme behavior have helped me survive in my original environment?”

For example, as adults we may rail against our habit of eating too many sweets. One concerned or critical Part of us wants us to stop overeating, but we find we can’t, because another Part, different from the Part that wants us to stop, is doing the overeating. We can stay locked in an inner power struggle, one Part pitted against another.

But if we are willing to explore how the behavior of eating too many sweets helped us survive our original life circumstances, we may open up a series of discoveries that leads us to compassion and understanding of why we behave the way we do.

By asking the sweets-eating Part, with genuine curiosity and respect, how she is helping us respond to life adaptively by way of that behavior, she may give us a revealing answer. She might tell us that eating sweets helped us soothe bad feelings when we were small. Perhaps it wasn’t safe to have normal child emotions like sadness, fear, or anger in our home, so using food to numb emotions was adaptive. Or she may say that being a little bit overweight helps us feel safer from unwanted male attention.

We can’t know ahead of time what a Part’s answer will be – we have to ask.

Through open exploration, we may come to recognize that the sweets-eating Part, and other Parts like it, are still trying all these years later to help us be some version of us that was helpful once upon a time, when maximizing survival in our home environment.

Once we connect extreme behavior, beliefs and emotions and to a young Part of us that is doing her best in a difficult role, we tend to soften towards ourselves. That softening is the beginning of being able to heal the inner system.

Resolution comes when we give ourselves the kind of help now, Self-to-Part, that we actually needed then. Healing encounters happen organically in relationship among Self and Parts, once the burdens of false belief and painful emotion are recognized.

Self may spontaneously say to our little Part, Of course you were sad, of course you felt lonely and angry sometimes. You’re just a little girl! Those are normal, natural feelings for a child. For anyone! You don’t have to hide any of your feelings from me. That’s not your fault, you didn’t do anything wrong! Let me put my arms around you, I love you so much!

Through IFS, Parts are given the opportunity to “unburden”, or be released out of extreme roles. Released from a certain role, a Part no longer has to hold extreme beliefs or act in extreme ways. These changes have ripple effects throughout the whole inner system.

Internal Family Systems Therapy and Addiction

In IFS, addiction isn’t considered bad, per se. Addiction is viewed as an extreme behavior, coming from a Part trapped in an extreme role. Although the negative impacts of addiction are acknowledged, IFS makes a distinction between impact and intention. The intention of the Part within that uses substances is actually positive – to stop emotional pain from taking over the client’s inner system.

In IFS, there are different kinds of Parts. Some Parts protect the inner system, and other Parts carry the wounds and feelings of what happened to us. Protector parts act to keep wounded Parts and their pain out of conscious awareness, so that we don’t get overwhelmed and can carry on the tasks of daily life. Protector Parts can be either preventative, or reactive.

Preventative Parts protect us by making sure we behave in ways which reduce the likelihood of the bad things from our past happening to us again. Their motto is “Never again!”

Our Preventative Parts dedicate themselves to getting us to behave in ways that minimize the chances of getting triggered or hurt again. Preventative Parts have many ingenious strategies to keep our vulnerabilities shielded. Some examples of Preventative Parts include Perfectionist, Inner Critic, People Pleaser, Overplanner, Controller, Hypervigilance, Hardworking, or Caretaker Parts.

But no matter how hard our system works to prevent our pain-carrying Parts from getting triggered into conscious awareness, sometimes they do. When that happens, Preventative Protector Parts hand the job off to our Reactive Parts, whose job it is to manage pain once it has been triggered.

Reactive Parts kick into gear once the pain of a wound has gotten too close to the surface, and swift action is needed to soothe or suppress the feelings. Typical Reactive Parts include all the behaviors we might do that numb or modulate feelings: Substance Use, Eating Disorders, Self-Harm, Shopping, Internet/Phone Addiction, Binge Watching, Suicidal, Risk-Taking, Sexually Acting Out Parts, and so on.

How Internal Family Systems Therapy works for Women with Addiction

IFS maintains that we cannot expect our Reactive Parts to stop doing their jobs, until we have shown both the Preventative Parts and the Reactive Parts that the wounded Parts are ok now. And for those wounded Parts to actually be ok, they need to be retrieved from where they have been frozen in scary moments of the past, and brought into relationship with our core Self in the here and now. The Self is one within us who can be loving, kind, and wise.

IFS provides a pathway for Self-Part reunion to become a reality, by providing wounded Parts a chance to tell their stories to us. The healing for those wounded Parts comes through a restored relationship with us, which is a little bit like adopting our own little orphaned inner children from the past, to come live with us now in the present. Once those wounded Parts are healed through a restored relationship with Self, who helps the wounded Parts release their burdens of extreme beliefs and emotional pain, then Reactive Parts are freed from having to resort to extreme behaviors to soothe the wounded Parts’ pain.

While stabilization of destructive addiction behaviors is in progress, therefore, IFS actively pursues the underlying wound healing that will make the Substance Using Part (a Reactive Part), redundant in her role.

Convincing the Substance Using Part that she no longer needs to do her job for the client’s inner system is a process. A big portion of the therapy involves befriending the Substance Using Part as the protector that she really is. Befriending needs to be genuine, from Self-to-Part. The kind-hearted, wise Self within us befriends the Substance Using Part.

Befriending means that rather than shaming, judging, criticizing and blaming the Substance Using Part, we allow Self to fully acknowledge the Part’s adaptive role in helping us survive until now. This process of making friends with the Substance Using Part involves asking Preventative Parts that shame and judge us, such as the Inner Critic Part, to step back, to take a break from their job of trying to control our behavior through judgment.

Once fully thanked and understood, the Substance Using Part reveals which overwhelming experiences of the past she is protecting the client from reliving. When that “target” wounded Part is unburdened through restoration of relationship with Self, the Substance Using Part sees on her own, that her services are no longer necessary for survival.

Internal Family Systems Therapy at Villa Kali Ma

At Villa Kali Ma, we integrate Internal Family Systems Therapy methods and mindsets into our holistic residential and intensive outpatient programs for women healing from trauma, addiction, and mental illness. With its emphasis on each person having a Self, and its insistence on unconditional compassion for all Parts, we find it to be a natural fit with our philosophy!

If you’re curious to find out how IFS and other trauma healing modalities could help you recover your birthright to live freely and wholly, we warmly invite you to check out our many programs for women recovering from mental illness, addiction, and trauma.

According to Bessel van der Kolk, MD, trauma treatment pioneer and bestselling author of The Body Keeps the Score, research shows that when it comes to trauma, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

For some people, working with bilateral stimulation to desensitize traumatic memories through Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) will be the most expedient way to bring a problematic trauma narrative to its end.

When the time comes to heal deep attachment wounding, on the other hand, it may be more powerful to work on restoring inner relationships between burdened parts and the Self, through Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS). During phases when stabilization are front and center, learning to shift polyvagal states or regulate arousal through breath, posture, and movement may be the most direct path to feeling better.

Trauma treatment means addressing multiple distinct systems of a person’s being. At the very least, trauma treatment will need to address the role of thoughts, physiology (the brain, nervous system, and other vital systems), emotions, and behaviors (including substance use).

Holistic Trauma Healing: A Whole-Person Approach to Recovery

At Villa Kali Ma, we also consider the role of spirituality, creativity, and nature. We look at intra-psychic (inner dynamics and relationship to Self), interpersonal (relationship with others), and transpersonal pieces (relationship to God/Source/Universe/Divine) too, when relevant for a woman’s journey.

Each of these systems may respond differently to different treatment approaches, and have different needs. Within any category, many wonderful treatment modalities can serve. Working with the body alone, we consider nutrition, exercise, mindfulness, somatic experiencing, massage, yoga, reiki, acupuncture, ecotherapy…and more!

The purpose of a holistic approach to trauma healing is to integrate. Integrative practitioners take interventions from many healing systems and use them sensitively. At Villa Kali Ma, we aim to adapt mindsets and models to serve the live unfolding healing process, rather than to expect any woman to fit into a pre-existing protocol.

Integrating Mindfulness, Movement, and Meaning

Trauma affects the body in a specific way: it restricts movement. Not only the big, expressive, playful movement we see children and animals, but also the natural fluid flow of aliveness that all bodies have. Even in stillness, bodies are movement, according to Somatic Therapist Manuela Mischke-Reeds, author of Trauma-Sensitive Movement: 96 Somatic Techniques to Support Nervous System Regulation and Embodied Transformation in Therapy. Trauma forces movement into rigid, repetitive conditions, that create pain and hold emotion back from resolution.

Trauma also affects the meaning that we make of our experiences in the now. This happens as we are forced to carry extreme beliefs, which are false conclusions about the self and the world. The meaning trauma compels us towards is distorted, overgeneralized, and self-centered. We believe not only that the world isn’t safe, that bad things can happen at any time, but also that we ourselves, in our worthlessness or inadequacy, are to blame for what happened.

What trauma does to our cognition and to our body is reflected in our attention. Rather than being able to flow our attention freely and organically, our attention gets burdened, stuck, and dysfunctional. We lose capacity to be openly mindful, receptive, exploratory. With our attention hijacked by strategies meant to protect us from re-experiencing unresolved trauma, the benefits of the alpha brainwave flow state are unavailable to us.

The path of healing holistically from trauma removes trauma’s blockages and burdens. Trauma healing takes constraints away, permitting us to slip back into free-flowing movement, meaning, and mindfulness. Rather than efforting, we come to rely on what naturally and organically emerges from our aliveness. Holistic trauma healing approaches all work with how attention, movement, and meaning can be restored back to health.

Evidence-Based Practices for Mind-Body Healing

At Villa Kali Ma, we use many evidence-based practices to help women find recovery.

The key clinical modalities we use are generally considered to be gold-standard approaches for healing trauma and addiction. Evidence-based modalities we offer include:

Individual, family, and group psychotherapy

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT)

Experiential therapies (Expressive Arts Therapy, Equine Therapy, and Ecotherapy) Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

Motivational Interviewing (MI)

Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

12 Step

and more!

In addition to those clinical approaches, we use holistic treatment approaches, some of which stand out in the literature as being especially supported by evidence.

The ancient Indian healing system of yoga is widely acknowledged and accepted as having an important role to play in clinical applications at this point. Randomized control trials and other formal studies have helped remaining skeptics over the hump.

The practices and principles of yoga inform all of our programs. We love yoga, not only as a form of exercise, but for its salubrious effects on the nervous system and its natural enhancement of mindfulness. Yoga alone is an admirably comprehensive path to wholeness.

In addition to yoga, we incorporate mindfulness-based approaches into all of our offerings. In particular, we love Kristin Neff and her Mindfulness and Self Compassion program. Mindfulness-based approaches have benefited from a fair number of formalized studies, which we appreciate for the extra scientific verification of what we experience in ourselves and in our clients.

Explore Holistic Trauma Treatment at Villa Kali Ma

Villa Kali Ma has a dedicated residential trauma treatment program, the Retreat, for those women among us who need trauma treatment primarily. Our residential addiction treatment program, the Villa, helps women who also have substance use disorders recover from their trauma holistically. We offer holistic treatment in our intensive outpatient treatment program, as well.

The essence of holistic trauma recovery is a focus on wholeness. When wholeness is recognized to underlie all symptoms, no matter how severe, distorted or destructive those symptoms seem to be, we get much further. When trauma-generated burdens, beliefs, and behaviors are given the opportunity to resolve out of the body, mind, emotions, and energetic field, women bounce back into a natural state of wholeness on their own.

Are you curious to find out if this could be true for you, too? We believe that it could be. Whatever you decide, and whatever your journey back to wholeness,  we wish you the very best! You can do it!

At Villa Kali Ma, we work with women recovering from trauma, mental illness, and addiction. These three forms of suffering often go together. When a woman has trauma, she experiences mental and physical health symptoms stemming from that trauma. It is also very likely that she has at least a few addictive or compulsive behaviors.

We can also frame this equation the other way around. When a woman has a substance use disorder, she has mental health symptoms too. And almost always, she has underlying trauma.

Villa Kali Ma’s holistic residential and outpatient programs address these three topics together, because they aren’t easily teased apart. Compassionate understanding of how trauma, mental illness and substance abuse work together is required to gently unravel the complex ways they can interact.

For women who struggle with substance abuse, it can make all the difference in the world for our self-esteem to realize that addiction makes sense in the context of a traumatized body, mind, and spirit. In this article, we’ll look a little closer into the connection between trauma and addiction, so that those of us dealing with addiction can loosen up, and let go of any remaining judgment about the topic. Addiction isn’t a moral issue, it’s a neurobiological one.

Understanding the Link Between Trauma and Addiction

The link between trauma and addiction is especially strong among women, with the majority of women entering substance abuse treatment reporting a history of significant trauma.

Some of the trauma that women with addiction report is clearly generated by a single, overwhelmingly distressing event, like a car crash or sexual assault. For many women, however, the trauma is much older, subtler, and more deeply rooted, reaching all the way back to childhood.

Today, there are several definitions of trauma that go beyond the well-known clinical diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It behooves us to know about them. We may not recognize our own trauma if we only know about PTSD. Correctly, we may think that PTSD is generally developed in response to one big event that changes a person’s life.

What women may not know enough about is complex trauma, which was first introduced by Judith Herman in the 1990s in her trailblazing book, Trauma and Recovery. While not classed as an official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders at this time, Herman found evidence in her work for an equally prevalent syndrome now known as complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD).

Like PTSD, C-PTSD generates symptoms of severe anxiety (due to hyperarousal, or feeling always on guard), as well as intrusive thoughts and memories. It can also create depressive patterns and habits of disconnecting from feelings. C-PTSD is responsible for difficulty with soothing and regulating emotion, struggles in interpersonal relationships, and low self-esteem. Like PTSD, C-PTSD is paired with strategies for avoiding people, places, and scenarios that trigger unresolved trauma to re-surface. C-PTSD is an underlying cause for substance addiction, eating disorders, and self-harm.

Why Trauma Often Leads to Substance Abuse

Why do PTSD and C-PTSD tend to lead to substance abuse? One explanation can be found in a basic understanding of the nervous system, and what prolonged exposure to threat does to the nervous system.

Trauma disturbs the nervous system deeply. To understand how, we look at a model of nervous system arousal states pioneered by psychiatrist Dr. Dan J. Siegel. The framework is called “the window of tolerance”.

The window of tolerance refers to a level of nervous system arousal (or wakefulness). When our nervous system is operating within the window of tolerance (not too activated, not too sleepy) life feels good to us. We are pleasantly alert and energized, but not frazzled, agitated or stressed. At the same time, we are pleasantly relaxed, but not numbed out, shut down, or fog-brained.

It’s normal to move in and out of higher or lower states of arousal throughout the day. Sometimes we have more energy and other times we are more relaxed. What happens for people with trauma, though, is that, through repeated exposure to danger, our nervous systems get stuck in extreme states of activation, outside the window of tolerance on both ends of the spectrum.

On the upper end, we are cued by threats in the environment into hyperarousal, or the fight-flight nervous system response. Hyperarousal is a very uncomfortable state. It feels like agitation, aggravation, panic, and distress. Anxiety, fear, dread, and irritability are all signs that we are in hyperarousal.

When our bodies believe it will save our lives, external threats may also prompt us to go into hypoarousal. Hypoarousal is what Dr. Stephen Porges calls “dorsal vagal collapse”. In hypoarousal we may shut down, space out, or go numb. Chronic depression, among other symptoms, is sometimes a signal that chronic hypoarousal helped us survive in the past.

Hypoarousal is also the eventual result of being in hyperarousal for too long. The body “crashes”, bypassing the window of tolerance, all the way down to collapse. The body shuts us down, to create an opportunity to rest and recharge which is still life-protective.

What do you think might happen to a woman whose life circumstances repeatedly cued her nervous system into states of hyperarousal and/or hypoarousal, again and again, over many years? What beliefs, emotions, and action tendencies (to use Dr. Carol Dweck’s BEATS) might she develop, that match a nervous system that only operates in danger mode?

If you thought, she might turn to substances to get some relief…bingo! Women whose nervous systems were trained, through no fault of their own, to overproduce feelings of distress even in non-dangerous situations, have a problem to solve. If they don’t know better, or no other kind of help is available, they often find their way to substances.

Substances are addictive because of the way they affect the nervous system: to relax, soothe, or enliven it, and to bring much-needed sensations of pleasure, safety, and ease. Substances – at least in the beginning – loan us a window of tolerance.

Identifying and Treating Co-Occurring Disorders

Many women who meet diagnostic criteria for a substance use disorder (SUD) also qualify for a mental health diagnosis. For example, a woman can have cocaine addiction and major depression at the same time. A woman can be an alcoholic and also have anxiety.

The interplay between trauma, co-occurring mental health disorders, and addiction is complicated. Trauma, addiction, and other mental health diagnoses share symptoms like anxiety, depression, obsessive thinking and compulsive behaviors. That’s why it’s important to treat all of these conditions in parallel, and to hold all possible hypotheses about what will help a particular woman with an open mind.

In general, our staff feel it is wise to take all levels and layers of a woman’s being into account. We try on different lenses when finding the best course of treatment for each woman. At Villa Kali Ma, we embrace a range of viewpoints, including (but not limited to) a scientific, neurobiological understanding of symptoms. We understand that identifying and treating co-occurring disorders can also involve cognitive, behavioral, relational, somatic, and spiritual ways of understanding a woman’s suffering. All of this depends on who a woman is and how she experiences herself. We are all much, much more than our symptoms.

Broadly speaking, it is helpful to work with a hypothesis of a mental health diagnosis, such as bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, or major depression, even though such diagnoses are sometimes considered controversial in the field. The benefit of using such terms as a trail map for understanding a woman’s experience is that diagnostic categories can be correlated to best practices for treatment.

When we discover during initial assessment that a woman resonates with the diagnostic criteria associated with a particular co-occurring disorder, that gives us some idea of what course of treatment may be especially effective for her. Knowing what has helped other women who experience life in similar ways never hurts.

Trauma-Informed Addiction Care at Villa Kali Ma

At Villa Kali Ma, we have believed for a long time in the power of addressing trauma and co-occurring mental health disorders alongside addiction. From our own experiences, clinical insight, and observations in the field of addiction and trauma treatment, we see the power of this trifold approach.

In our holistic inpatient and outpatient programs for women struggling with addiction, we offer a differentiated, highly customized path through treatment. Each woman receives what really benefits her as a unique and irreplaceable person.

With all that we know about the ways that trauma, addiction, and mental health affect women in predictable ways, we also know that each woman’s recovery is special. Like nurses in a maternity ward, we never get tired of the miracle of new life! In our case, the newborn we hold precious is a recovering woman, taking her first breaths in the light of a new, safer, friendlier world.

If you’re wondering about the connection between your own trauma and substance use, we invite you to check out our suite of holistic recovery programs for women.

Signs of unresolved trauma can be tricky to recognize. Many of us live with trauma for years without a clue that life could be any different. For women with a trauma background, we may know that our past was “bad”, but we may not see how thoroughly our environment shaped us.

Trauma affects everything about us, from our work lives, relationships, and conscious emotional experiences, right down to the unconscious operations of our brains and bodies. Trauma molds how we process sense stimuli like sights and sounds, and how we store and recall memories. Trauma explains most of our tendencies: how we make eye contact, move our bodies, and hold ourselves upright.

Trauma is like the proverbial water to the fish. Until we have the opportunity to experience life on land, we won’t even have a word for “water”. The good news is that when we start to heal trauma at the root, we can experience widespread transformation in our lives.

The fact that trauma is so pervasive in its wounding effects is exactly why, when we heal it, we experience a beautiful change that flows into every part of us. In this post, we’ll look closer at some of the ways that unresolved trauma might be showing up.

How Unsettled Trauma Manifests in Everyday Life

Many people have heard by now that trauma has symptoms like flashbacks, nightmares, and severe anxiety. What we may not have heard about are the ways that complex trauma, the kind that begins in childhood or even in the womb, gets woven into our very personalities.

For people who grew up in distressing circumstances, trauma is baked into our beliefs, emotions, and behavioral tendencies. We take it to be part of our identity. Years later, as adults, we may say, “I am insecure”, or “I am a procrastinator” or “I overeat” without really understanding why. We don’t know where these sides of us came from, nor what purpose they serve. It is likely that our inner world is soaked with shame.

People with complex trauma often blame ourselves for our supposed (or real) deficiencies. We do this even though every other traumatized woman in the world has the same symptoms, and the same shame about those symptoms. As Dr. Janina Fisher says in her work on shame and trauma, we wouldn’t be surprised to learn that people with the same flu experience the same symptoms, would we?

It’s important to call things by their right name, and to recognize the true origin of personality traits and behavioral styles, when they actually come from trauma. For any woman with a substance use disorder, for example, you need to know that you have used substances for a good reason. The substance was a way to meet the demands of life…. in the context of a traumatized nervous system.

Here are some other very common, everyday ways that trauma shows up in women’s lives.

Perfectionism

Perfectionism means more than having a high standard. If you have a perfectionist side to your personality, you may feel severe emotional distress when you don’t meet your standard. If you associate achieving or striving for perfection with feeling safe and secure, to the point where it makes you anxious to be seen when you’re being imperfect, you may have a trauma-generated perfectionist part (to use the language of the Internal Family Systems model).

Harsh Inner Critic

Hand in hand with the perfectionist Part, the Inner Critic is another common trauma-generated Part. Almost everyone can relate the description of a voice inside our heads that criticizes us. If you have an exceptionally mean inner critic, who berates you, shames you, and calls you names, you may have an over-empowered inner critic. Over-empowered inner critics are a legacy of trauma.

A Need for Control

Another common Part found in women with trauma is a high need for control. Being controlling may be considered a bad thing (by those affected by our behavior), but the attempt to make our environments more predictable stems from bad experiences with uncertainty in the past. If you have a very hard time letting go of outcomes and “seeing what happens”, this can be a sign of a controlling Part, another trauma-generated personality facet.

People Pleasing, Boundary Struggles, and Conflict Avoidance

Do you absolutely hate it when people are mad at you? Do you struggle to set boundaries (or even know what your boundaries are?) If you avoid conflict and boundary setting because you can’t stand feeling angry or having others be angry at you, you may have developed a submission-oriented Part. This Part typically feels it is her job to make sure you make others happy, no matter what. The “collapse and submit part”, Dr. Janina Fisher explains, represents a survival strategy. It was developed in environments where our maintaining our attachment bonds required us to give up our power.

The Psychology of Trauma: What Happens Beneath the Surface

Trauma begins with a basic premise – that we must “do or die”. In other words, something is required on our end – an action must be taken, to ensure that we make it.

To a certain extent, that’s true of all life, and there’s nothing wrong with developing agency. “Working for a living” – expending physical effort to stay alive – is part of being human the moment we leave the womb, as Dr. Daniel J. Siegel explains in his work on personality development. But in trauma-generating environments, we learn that we have to do extreme, almost impossible things to get our life needs met.

When you remember that as mammals, we will not make it to adulthood unless the adults take care of us, the extremity of our survival adaptations makes a little more sense. As babies we needed a lot from our caregivers: not only physical care but also emotional connection. Caregivers must provide relationally-attuned attention that helps us feel “safe, seen, and soothed” for secure attachment to take root. We all adapted to available attachment conditions in ways that optimized our survival. Women who have trauma had to develop very extreme creative solutions to make it work.

There are many ways a child may take on an extreme burden. She may suppress and hide her needs and emotions, or take the role of parenting her parents. She may perform heroically in school to bring pride to the family, or clown around to make her parents smile. She may have to play nurse or try to control a parent’s drinking. Girls frequently develop strategies based on playing small, acting out, or hurting themselves.

All of these learned behaviors become habits. Double binds turn into permanent compartmentalization. The mental and nervous-system gymnastics we go through to stay safe and attached become personality traits later on. The greater the level of polarization and paradox inside our own psychology, the greater demands our environment must have asked of us.

Everyday Signs You Might Be Living with Unhealed Trauma 

In the Internal Family Systems Therapy model, we look at polarizations between Parts of our personality that have opposing strategies. If a Part of you thinks you should stop drinking, and another Part drives you to drink, that’s a classic polarization between parts. Here are some other examples of polarities that sometimes arise in women who survived trauma-generating childhoods.

Work hard, Party Hard

Many women work to the brink of burnout (and beyond!), driving themselves into the ground trying to follow a strategy of finding relational safety through high performance. If I only achieve perfection, then I will at last be loved, is the logic of this Part.

In response to this, another Part, whose job it is to take away the feelings of exhaustion and anger at the requirement to meet this part’s demands, is likely to kick in with some way of numbing out. For women with substance addiction, this can be the typical “party hard” part. There are other ways to numb out and check out, including behavioral addictions like eating disorders, self-harm, compulsive shopping, and more.

Procrastination and Perfection

Procrastination is an avoidance strategy. It is frequently polarized with perfectionism. When we have extremely high standards and it makes us anxious not to meet those standards, we can develop a pattern of avoiding or delaying projects and daily tasks. We postpone because we don’t want to get sucked into horrible feelings associated with not meeting our standards of perfection. This polarity can keep us paralyzed, unable to move forward.

“Shameless” and Ashamed

Some women experience a polarization between an acting out Part, and another Part that feels deeply ashamed of that behavior. For example, a woman may act out sexually, by cheating on her partner. The survival benefit of that behavior is explained by the short term sensations created by the behavior: a sexual “high”, juicy romance or fantasy. The sensations created by acting out are used by a traumatized nervous system to soothe and distract from pain. Another Part of this woman’s personality then holds the shame, guilt, and regret about this behavior. Because these Parts are locked into a polarization, the end result is inner turmoil.

How Villa Kali Ma Helps Women Heal from Emotional Trauma

Villa Kali Ma is a unique treatment provider. We take a holistic approach to healing women, combining the best approaches from all relevant fields. For women who have trauma, we created a dedicated facility, the Retreat. The Retreat is a licensed residential trauma treatment center.

The Retreat is an in-patient setting providing cutting-edge trauma-treatment modalities like brainspotting and ketamine assisted psychotherapy. We also help women through the most tried and true trauma healing approaches like somatic therapy, Internal Family Systems Therapy, and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing – powerhouse modalities for restoring feelings of capacity, reprocessing traumatic memory, and bringing back joy.

If you’re ready to look deeper into the ways that trauma, mental illness, and addiction can be healed with compassion, we invite you to check out our many programs for women.