Category: Internal family systems model of healing

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The Unburdening Process in Internal Family Systems Therapy 

internal family systems san diego california

Women recovering from addiction, mental illness and trauma can find relief and improve their lives through learning to use the healing tools of Internal Family Systems Therapy. That’s why Internal Family Systems Therapy is one of the many trauma-informed approaches we offer at Villa Kali Ma. We use IFS tools to help women who are reclaiming lives of purpose, beauty and meaning. In this post, we’ll dive in to the topic of unburdening, a key component of the IFS approach to healing trauma. 

What are Exiles in Internal Family Systems Therapy? 

Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) is a parts-work model, which holds that all of us have many different sides of our nature, sometimes called sub-personalities in other psychotherapy approaches. Figures like the inner child and the inner critic are examples of parts, but IFS shows that there are a surprising number of parts inside of each person’s system, and that parts can be very unique and personal. By learning to relate kindly to each of our parts, we dramatically improve our inner world, learning to meet our own needs assertively, and eventually behaving very differently in the outer world as a result.

IFS divides parts into two categories, protectors and exiles, based on their role within the inner system. Protectors act defensively and reactively to try to shield us from overwhelming amounts of pain. Protectors are recognizable within the concept of psychological defenses, where behaviors like rationalizing or denial serve a protective function. 

IFS holds that the parts of us that try, preventatively and reactively, to block us from feeling too much pain all at once are well-intentioned, misunderstood heroes. They have been helping us get through what otherwise might have completely blown us to smithereens, psychologically speaking. Protectors are the parts of us tasked with meeting expectations and maintaining relationships deemed necessary for our survival, such as making sure loved ones don’t abandon us and that we keep our jobs. Protectors can be quite extreme, but IFS says the extreme roles our protectors take on reflect accurately just how extreme our childhood circumstances were.  

Exiles, on the other hand, rather than taking strategic action or trying to manage pain, are the ones that feel the feelings. These are the parts of us that have been burdened with extreme beliefs, thoughts, feelings and behaviors. An example of an extreme belief could be “I am a bad person” or “I don’t deserve love”. These beliefs are considered burdensome and extreme by IFS, because it is impossible to hold such a core belief and function well in the world for long. As long as a part of us continues to believe that about ourselves, the way that we perceive our lives, and how we feel about being alive, will be painful and dysfunctional. Burdens ultimately create suffering and problems in our lives. For us to get better, it is suggested that burdens be cleared from our system and fully healed, so that we can operate in a healthier way. Once these burdens are removed, we can expect that our parts become naturally free, happy and high-functioning, turning from burdened parts into wonderful versions of themselves!.  

Other common burdens include shame, guilt, fear, rage, abandonment, betrayal, and powerlessness. Those of you who are familiar with the effects of trauma will notice that the feelings, thoughts, sensations and beliefs that exiles hold as burdens match the unresolved emotions and stresses of traumatization. The exiles are the parts within us, in fact, who are traumatized. 

Recognizing Parts as Helpful

Because of the way that trauma works in the psyche, most of us found a way to divide our inner world into parts that can function well in the world, perhaps even carrying on with normal life. It was necessary to carry on with daily life tasks without excessive pain, shame, guilt, fear and anger. The way that this is possible is through a kind of compartmentalization, which means that the trauma-generated beliefs, thoughts, feelings and sensations are stored separately, sometimes in a completely different part of the brain.

This capacity of separating out parts internally is not pathological, but rather an ingenious mechanism invented by a psyche facing life-threatening circumstances. It is a way to temporarily not process what would otherwise be overwhelming to be consciously aware of in that moment. 

In IFS, the parts that were stored away, who are holding the trauma experience, are in need of a process called unburdening. Although we have hidden traumatized parts away, their thoughts, feelings, emotions, and sensations still have influence on us. These wounded parts hold baggage that is weighing us down, and they keep trying to release it. 

Their feelings and needs erupt to the surface at inopportune times. If you’ve ever overreacted to something, that suggests hidden parts inside, to whom that big reaction rightfully belongs. For example, we sometimes react “childishly” to something. In such cases, rather than calling ourselves immature, it is probably more accurate to say that a child part within us has surfaced. That child part’s way of looking at the world, the feelings she’s having, her very immaturity, are actually completely developmentally appropriate for a child her age. 

The IFS Unburdening Process

IFS therapy calls the process of healing exiles “unburdening”, in honor of the fact that the goal of the process is to allow exiles to lay their burdens down once and for all. The heavy trauma baggage that these exiles have been carrying can, more often than not, be transmuted and transformed into something positive for the individual.

The unburdening process requires relating very differently to the parts within that are still carrying the beliefs, feelings, and sensations of our traumatic past. Rather than shutting them up and pushing them aside, we learn to support them by giving them what they didn’t have the chance to receive back then when the bad things were happening. By listening to them, believing them, and validating their feelings, we get into a position where we can give them the opportunity to drop the burdens they were forced to take on.    

IFS likes to use symbolic processes inspired by the natural world during the unburdening. These metaphors serve to help young parts intuitively grasp how toxic mental, emotional, and even physical baggage can be utterly transformed into a new state. Burdens can be burned up in fire, faded in sunlight, or liquified in a volcano. They can be dissolved into the ocean, washed away in the rain, or pounded to bits by a giant waterfall. Old beliefs and emotions can be buried and digested by the earth, whisked away by the wind and evaporated in fresh air. 

Once a part has told her story, and all the aspects of the burdens have been identified, the part is asked whether she would like to get rid of her burden using one of the natural world elements. There is no pre-defined way to use the elements – the burdened parts get to choose how they want to dispose of the material they have been carrying. Unburdening is, therefore, a creative, spontaneous, and unscripted process, drawing on images that arise naturally in the mind’s eye of the person who is healing. Intuition, instinct, and imagery are important parts of the unburdening process. 

When in the Therapeutic Process Does IFS Unburdening happen?

Unburdening generally takes place at certain spontaneous openings in the healing journey, quite a bit later on in the overall arc of the IFS process. It is not at all unusual for most of the IFS session work to be centered on working with protector parts, rather than exiles. As with all trauma work, a certain degree of safety and stability must be established first.  

This is because it is not possible to safely unburden exiles without the full permission and cooperation of our protector parts. Protector parts, like the inner critic and the addict, are powerful forces. If they do not feel it is safe to access our pain, or are afraid that healing this pain would somehow lead to consequences that wouldn’t be safe for us in the outer world, these parts easily sabotage or derail our attempts to heal. Sometimes the desire to heal runs directly counter to a protector part’s mandate. 

If we try to heal our exiles without the express consent of our protectors, we will fail and experience backlash. Symptoms that are present in our inner system as the result of the operations of one of our protectors will increase rather than decrease. For example, if we have a substance-using part in our system, we must have the trust and cooperation of that substance-using part before trying to access an exile that substance-using part is protecting. If we do not first gain permission, the substance-using part could very likely increase the substance use as a way to defend against conscious contact with the traumatized exile.

If and only if we have first befriended protectors, understood their concerns in full, and come to a friendly agreement about unburdening some of the exiles’ load of pain, is it a good idea to try unburdening an exile. 

Gaining consent from our protectors can be a long process. We must honor the wisdom and experience of our protectors, proceeding very slowly and with utmost respect. 

For all of these reasons, it is not recommended to try to undergo the unburdening process in full without an IFS practitioner to facilitate. At the same time, learning about the unburdening process can be helpful for anyone, as long as you remember not to venture into dangerous territory without a professional to help you. In that spirit, we offer the following exercise, for you to explore on your own time and authority, as you see fit. 

Journal Exercise to Explore the IFS Concept of Burdens

Please take what you like and leave the rest of the following journal exercise for exploring the concept of burdens and unburdening. If you notice that you are getting activated, take that as a sacred “no” and stop doing the exercise. There is no benefit to pushing through or overriding your boundaries or concerns; that will only result in backlash. 

Please, we mean it. Slower is faster with all healing work! 

This exercise zeros in on one particular part of the unburdening process, which involves asking the question, “What would you have rather experienced?”

  1. Think of a specific, light-to-medium burden that you already have noticed you carry, which you can use to explore this process. The way to detect a burden is you notice that there is constriction, heaviness, resistance, or a sense of unhappiness around a topic.  

Please don’t go for an item that has a lot of emotional charge. Instead, pick something that you know you will be able to explore without getting triggered. 

For example, perhaps you feel under-confident in your cooking abilities. It’s not enormously triggering to think about, but you know that you have some kind of negativity around it. 

  1. Think of a specific time when you encountered this burdened feeling, thought, or sensation in yourself. Recall the scene in which you encountered this burdened energy, and write down the following:
  2. Sensations-What happens in my body when I encounter this burdened topic? Sensations, postures, & movement impulses, etc?
  3. Feelings-What emotions do I feel? What comes up for me? 
  4. Thoughts -What goes through my head?
  5. Behavior Impulses-What do I notice I want to do?
  6. Beliefs-What core beliefs get activated? What negative self-concepts seem to get confirmed?
  7. Do-Over time! For each of the above items you noted, what would you have rather experienced? 

I would have rather experienced…

  1. Sensations
  2. Feelings
  3. Thoughts
  4. Behavior Impulses 
  5. Core Beliefs

Congratulations! You have explored one aspect of the unburdening process – identifying what you would rather have had.

IFS Therapy for Women at Villa Kali Ma

Villa Kali Ma is a licensed provider of integrative mental health services, trauma treatment, and addiction recovery. In all of our programs, we use a combination of clinical and holistic approaches to help women heal from substance abuse, psychological disorders, and trauma. 

Our clinical program is built around evidence-based practices widely recognized within the addictions, mental health and trauma field to work best with women. These effective clinical modalities include Internal Family Systems Therapy (https://villakalima.com/internal-family-systems-therapy-for-women-with-addiction/), EMDR, Ecotherapy, and several other wonderful approaches, such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (https://villakalima.com/sustainable-recovery/acceptance-and-commitment-therapy/), Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Therapy (MSC), and Somatic Experiencing (https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-somatic-experiencing-5204186).  

In addition to our clinical core, we administer a comprehensive suite of holistic interventions, in complementary sessions interwoven throughout main treatment hours. Our holistic program includes yoga, breath work, acupuncture, nutritional medicine, spiritual coaching, and more. 

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Internal family systems model of healing

An Internal Family Systems Take on Addiction, Part 3

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.

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Addiction Treatment Internal family systems model of healing

An Internal Family Systems Take on Addiction, Part 2

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

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Addiction Treatment Internal family systems model of healing

An Internal Family Systems Take on Addiction: Part 1

In this series of posts, we’ll explore the topic of addiction, using an Internal Family Systems therapy lens.

Internal Family Systems is a non-pathologizing, evidence-based approach (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/internal-family-systems-therapy) that is changing ideas within the mental health world, about how women with addiction, mental health symptoms, and trauma can recover lives of joy, connection and capacity.

Although it is a treatment model and not a spiritual system, IFS joins the company of several longstanding spiritual traditions and holistic healing modalities, in seeking to spread a specific kind of good news. The good news that IFS wishes to spread, (and we at Villa Kali Ma do too!), is that the answer to all human pain lies within us.

At Villa Kali Ma, we are so pleased to be able to 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 articles, we’ll explore the highly relevant issue of shame as a core topic in addiction treatment, and how this particular burden might be lifted from the hearts, minds and bodies of women.

To kick off this series, let’s start with an exploration of the basic principles of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) approach.

The Internal Family Systems model: We are Self, we have parts

We all have Self

There is no one alive, IFS asserts, who does not have a wellspring of powerful, capable goodness within. This is Self.

We all have Parts

There is also no one alive who does not have parts – different sides of our personality that have distinct roles within our system, reflective of the ways that family members tend to take roles in a family system. Some parts of how personality have hardworking, ambitious or provider roles, such as the parts that may show up to work or be interested in success and status. Some other parts have nurturing and emotionally connective roles, such as the parts who parent, who notice and care how others feel, and so on.

Some parts hold the feelings, some parts hold the doing. Some parts may come to us in purely somatic form, as sensations and body signals. Some parts are socially acceptable and many are not. Some have entertaining, distracting, or playful roles. And so on!

Inner critics, inner children, inner taskmasters, addicted parts, excelling parts, dissociating parts, risk-taking parts, socially anxious parts, are all examples of possible parts we may have.

Very important to understand is that while the impact of parts can be destructive, all parts have positive intentions. That’s why IFS founder Richard Schwartz insists there are No Bad Parts.

3 Kinds of Parts

The parts we have inside fall into three categories, according to the IFS way of working with parts: preventative, reactive, and vulnerable.

Managers. Of the many parts within each of us, some work preventatively and proactively. IFS calls these “manager” parts.

Manager parts think ahead and try to help us to stay out of trouble. They are concerned that if we don’t behave in particular ways, something bad will happen. Their ultimate fear is that if and when this bad thing happens, our unhealed trauma will get triggered, and we won’t be able to deal with the overwhelming pain.

An example of a manager part many of us have is an inner taskmaster, a part who reminds us what needs to get done and when it’s due. This part often works together with an Inner Critic or judgmental part.

In general, manager parts are worried about things that could happen in the future. The taskmaster part might be concerned we will lose our job if we don’t stay on top of our tasks. The inner critic may be worried we won’t perform perfectly enough.

Underlying managers’ first few fears lies the real concern: what we might feel, that they believe we will get overwhelmed by. For the taskmaster, the first fear might be that we will miss our deadline. The second fear may be that if we miss the deadline, we will lose our job. The ultimate underlying fear could be that, if we were to lose our job, we would be flooded with overwhelming shame.

Therefore, a useful way to relate to manager parts, once we have a kind loving connection with them, is to see if they would be willing to tell us what they are afraid will happen if we don’t keep behaving the way they want us to.

While manager parts tend to be the most socially acceptable of our inner family of parts, they can be harsh, judgy, rigid and tough on the rest of the parts and may rule with an iron fist.

Firefighters. Another group of parts is reactive, responding to pain that is arising in the now. These are parts that numb, distract, and soothe. They are dormant, letting managers run the show, until we get triggered and our unhealed pain rises to the surface of our awareness as thoughts, feelings, and sensations.

While their intentions are positive in nature – to prevent us from getting overwhelmed by pain – firefighters get a bad rap in society because they can be destructive and out of control.

Since their goal is stop the pain no matter what, they are not good at thinking about longer-term consequences. That’s not their purpose. A binge drinking part that takes over when we’re feeling too much intensity internally is an example of a firefighter part.

Exiles. The third type of parts are vulnerable in nature. These parts are the tender, more childlike and wounded parts within us, who carry the burdens of what we have lived through, as thoughts, feelings, sensations and beliefs.

Our exiled parts are stuck in a difficult moment (or series of moments) of our past.  They often believe very negative, extreme, black-and-white things about themselves and the world, such as that they don’t deserve any love at all, people always let you down, or another “rule” of life that is painful to believe. Exiles live, in general, in a painful set of conditions, generally the ones we grew up in or were originally hurt by.

Exiles are the wounded ones within, and though the rest of the system (managers and firefighters) work very hard to keep these parts of us from rising up in our awareness and flooding our system with their pain and unmet yearnings, no amount of self-protection keeps these feelings at bay permanently.

In fact, these wounds are destined, unavoidably, to rise up within us when the time is right – once we are big and strong enough to meet them with the love they have always needed.

Once our wounded, vulnerable parts are healed (through a process which IFS calls “unburdening”), they are able to revert to their original and natural state, which tends to be childlike, loving, and playful. In their original form, these parts of us are lovely and delightful. Exiles often are deeply related to our ability to love, express ourselves freely, and experience joy.

Parts may want different things

Since each part has a role they fulfill, with priorities and concerns related to that purpose, parts of us may want opposite things. For example, you might realize one part of you wants to go on a whitewater rafting trip, and another part wants to stay safe at home and not have to endure any unknowns. These disagreements among parts can make us feel crazy, if we haven’t yet understood that everyone has many parts inside, each with differing and equally valid perspectives, and that they don’t always get along.

All of this is completely normal – inside the psyche, there is not a single personality with fixed qualities, but rather a fluid, changing, shifting, dynamic “inner family” of several different parts with different qualities, personalities and purposes.

In general, systems that carry more wounds, just like families that carry more wounds, have more conflict and what might be broadly called “dysfunction”, although it’s important not to judge or pathologize what inner systems, or indeed outer systems, do in their desperate attempts to manage overwhelming pain.

According to IFS, there’s no moral meaning to any of this. It’s all just about how much unresolved pain a person might be carrying. The more extreme, polarized, rigid, conflict-ridden or self-contradictory a person seems to be, the more overwhelming pain they must be dealing with at some level or another.

We are Self, we have parts

Although we have many, many parts inside, no single part is the totality of who we are. Rather, through walking gentle paths of relating to our parts, we discover that underneath and transcending the inner community of parts, there lies an indwelling, untarnished force, that “I” which IFS calls Self.

Self is a compassionate, calm, courageous living presence, pure aliveness, the seat of our purest consciousness. This is who we actually are in our nature – we have parts, but we are this loving presence.

This presence we are loves our parts unconditionally and is available to help them with the thing they need most: love, acceptance, belonging and inclusion. Getting to know this life energy, this kind presence, who can be found inside all of us and who can restore love to all parts in the inner family, is the key to recovery.

Self-led

Once Self is restored to a sufficient degree, we become Self-led. Being Self-led means that we live life from the center, from the core of who we really are, with calm compassion, curiosity, and a strong penchant for connection.

Becoming Self-led is a gradual and fluid process. Once Self is sufficiently present in a consistent enough way internally, parts feel safe and settle down quite a lot. Extreme parts that once were entrenched in difficult conflicts are willing to soften, as they realize that their protective functions are not quite as necessary as they used to be, now that a loving, wise presence is in charge.

It is core to IFS that only once our protectors really see and trust that enough Self is here, taking care of us and tending to the needs of the vulnerables, can we expect them to stop doing their extreme behaviors.

All it takes to get to know Self is to relate to parts

All we have to do to get in contact with Self, IFS teaches us, is to go through a process of realizing we’re not actually one and the same as the parts that arise in our consciousness. This recognition is called unblending in IFS – when we perceive the truth that a part is only part of us, not all of us, there is a natural kind of differentiation and separating, which is helpful for founding a loving relationship with that part.

When we separate ourselves enough psychologically to have a relationship with the part, instead of thinking we are the part, and we do not conflate ourselves or identify with parts as being “all of us” – they are roles, activities, energies, personalities, but not the totality of our life essence – we gradually realize that though there are many different parts of us, there is only one core, true Self. An “I” who can never be harmed, traumatized, burdened, or disturbed.

In the next post in this series on Internal Family Systems and addiction, we’ll get deeper into what is going on inside women who use substances, and how they might heal from the pain driving that substance use.

Thanks for reading! 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.

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Internal family systems model of healing Self-care Strategies Therapy

Humility and Healing in the Addictions Profession

Any honest psychotherapist will tell you that when genuine healing arrives, it wells up out of a hidden source, dispensed by something (or someone, depending how you look at it) that surpasses our understanding.

What exactly that hidden source is, we can truthfully only speculate. People in the psychology field can (and frequently do!) draw up diagrams and theories of the healing force, but the jury is still out.

The theorizing, of course, has been going on for millennia, since long before modern psychology was a twinkle in Freud’s bespectacled, Austrian eye. Model after model has attempted to explain not only what’s going on when soul illness takes hold, but also what is happening when we heal.

No model, in the end, resolves the mystery to anyone’s permanent satisfaction. And as this blog post will explore, we at Villa Kali Ma are inclined to call that a good thing.

Internal Family Systems Therapy and the Self

Some contemporary psychotherapy models, like Internal Family Systems, have postulated that healing wells up from a kind of independently operating energetic field that is very personable and relatable. Something that’s not the human mind nor the ego personality per se, but nevertheless feels like it’s us.

IFS calls this inner healer Self, in honor of the language that came most naturally to IFS founder Richard Schwartz’s clients as they were articulating its presence in sessions. Because rather than being a theory dreamed up outside of a clinical context, Schwartz says that he first uncovered and then verified Self’s presence and properties through decades of clinical work, helping the most “hopeless cases” recover.

In the final analysis, Schwartz (a self-proclaimed rational pragmatist by training and inclination) proposes that Self is an indwelling, benevolent healing energy found within everyone. Self is available to help with the healing process. Schwartz maintains, in fact, that Self is the probably the best, most reliable guide for healing that we have.

The benefits of working with the model of Self 

Self cannot be dirtied, damaged, or destroyed, Schwartz insists, no matter how much else goes wrong in our lives. Like the sun, Self shines on, untarnished, behind our trauma, addictions, and mental illness. Once we clear the clouds, the Self is revealed, shining gloriously as ever. And Self can be called upon – in fact it is the best source to call upon – for help removing all that blocks Self’s light from reaching us and healing us with its life-giving radiance and warmth.

Far from resolving the mystery that surrounds psychological recovery, however, IFS’s concept of Self raises almost as many questions as it attempts to answer. For some skeptics, the concept of Self sounds like another version of the storied holy grail. A fountain of healing, perhaps, but nothing we can lay our hands on in any satisfying way.

For the pragmatic among us, though, it’s important to acknowledge that embracing this core tenet of the IFS model produces specific results that have eluded other models. IFS is counted as an evidence-based practice which is particularly helpful with some of the toughest areas of the mental health field, including extreme trauma, addictions, eating disorders, self-harm, bipolar disorder, and dissociative identity disorder.

The success of the model is owed, in large part, to IFS’s gift for creating true alignment within, bringing peace to a fractious inner system under the benevolent leadership of the Self. So whether or not we find the IFS picture of a benevolent healing Self latent in all people to be plausible, the results speak for themselves. Navigating the healing journey by consulting a compass magnetized to the concept of Self (or something similar) is undeniably useful in many psychotherapeutic contexts.

Most importantly, IFS has brought hope and healing to desperate cases that have languished or been abandoned altogether elsewhere in the behavioral health field, including the fields of trauma and addiction recovery.

Self-Healing as An Emergent Property of Nature

Setting aside IFS and the notion of Self, some folks may intuitively and rationally relate more to the idea that an indwelling, self-correcting and emergent healing force is available to all of us, simply because we are part of nature.

We are mammals after all, born from nature’s creative genius, the same as the rest of life. Therefore, the reliable property that can be counted upon to cleanse, heal, replenish and restore communities of animals, plants, materials – even whole ecosystems – can be prevailed upon to heal us too.

Nature shows a remarkable ability to bounce back from the extreme burdens placed upon her, as the returning forests of Chernobyl testify. Similarly, nature finds ways to heal the body and spirit, from even from the deadliest of toxic loads.

Healing by A Power Greater Than Ourselves

Many psychotherapists and others drawn to the healing professions are actually privately inclined to relate to the healing force as what AA calls “a power greater than ourselves”. For such professionals, the healing force is to be approached with humility, reverence, gratitude, and profound respect. Though to use spiritual language is generally frowned upon in the behavioral health profession (perhaps with good reason), there are many healers who, in the privacy of their own heartspaces, do unwaveringly believe that it is God, Spirit, buddha nature, christ consciousness or something along those lines, that is dispensing the healing, and not the healer themselves (at best an instrument of God’s healing).

If we are willing to believe what gifted healers, including groundbreaking psychotherapy visionaries like C.G. Jung have said about their own experiences with inspiration and discovery, we will find this to be a common theme: healers serve as medium, channeling healing from higher realms, much more like a priest or shaman, than a doctor or machinist repairing a broken mechanism.

Healing as a Property of Physics

Still, some therapists and healers are drawn to more materialistic, rationalist explanations of the healing force. They might be more prone to view healing as the effect of ultimately predictable operations of physics, large or small scale; healing is mysterious only because we don’t yet understand these operations.

For such healers, there is a kind of faith that we may eventually, through scientific experimentation and discovery, crack this mystery once and for all. Then we may at last be able to harness and control the properties of nature’s healing powers, to be at our command. In such a view, it is our ability to finally see into the heart of the mystery which may liberate us.

A Mystery at the Heart of the Profession

We at Villa Kali Ma find something compelling in each of these models. What we like about IFS’s notion of Self is that it feels personal and relatable. What we like about a nature-based understanding of healing is that it feels beautiful and abundant, like nature itself. Many of us feel wonderful acknowledging that healing comes from a power which will always be far greater than ourselves. And what we like about the scientific approach is the encouragement to experiment, and make sure we always favor the facts over our biases.

None of these approaches, to our view, erases the mystery. And that’s ok. That’s good. Because while the mind is an articulate tool for conceptualizing and interpreting data we may gather about the ultimate source of healing, and the heart is good at finding healing waters by feel, there nevertheless remains a mystery at the heart of the art and science of recovery.

This mystery encompasses why exactly it is that some of us who undergo terrible trauma do not end up turning to addiction (or other extreme behaviors) to cope, while others of us do. Or why some of us who fall into domain of addiction or mental illness have it in us to find our way back to the land of the living again, while others of us don’t even start that journey. Why, furthermore, do children growing up in the same family, with similar genes and identical childhood conditions, come up with such different solutions to the same problems? If abuse begets abuse, why don’t all children of abusers become abusers? Pull on this thread, and you may unravel a tapestry shot through with patterns which are far larger than we are prepared to glimpse.

Indigenous and Contemporary Practices for Healing

At Villa Kali Ma, we offer a spectrum of modalities, representing the full scale of what we have found to be practically helpful for helping women recover from trauma, addiction, and mental illness. Sometimes, our holistic approach means integrating indigenous, alternative, Eastern, or just non-mainstream healing systems into the work, and sometimes it means we rely mainly on broadly accepted clinical models. We’re open to all healing systems that bring benefit – we’re interested in what works in the real world. Most often, we combine approaches, because each woman is different and not everything works for everyone.

Answers to the mysteries briefly touched on in this blog post have been offered by indigenous cultures and ancient systems of knowledge for thousands of years. Respectfully, we often lean on these traditions, taking many tools and ideas from these treasure troves.

For example, we rely on the healing powers of posture and breath discovered by yoga to help women regulate their bodies and create peace, safety, strength, and calm. We use the power of imagination to encounter symbolic personal representations of illness and find their energetic medicine – a healing approach akin to what is found in most shamanic cultures (though also used in art therapy, hypnotherapy, and Jung’s active imagination, to name a few Western healing systems that rely on healing imagery too). Throughout our many mindfulness-based approaches to therapy, furthermore, we use insights taken from the science of meditation, originally gifted to the West by way of Eastern cultures.

We run a fully licensed facility and our board-licensed and certified therapists are anchored in the Western model. But we don’t mind acknowledging where the Western scientific model has fallen short. If the mental health crisis facing America is any indicator, the West has, in spite of its resources and special kind of brilliance, not yet solved the problem of how to heal human misery.

Humility in the Healing Profession

Whether you believe that the contemporary Western models of illness provide a better model, or you’re more inclined to acknowledge the wisdom of older indigenous models as potentially superior, is not that important at the end of the day. Either way, whatever model, we here at Villa Kali Ma we believe in the power of humility. No matter which tool we take in hand, a spirit of humility needs to guide that hand.

We know we may very well lose our footing if we reach too far into speculation about the what and the why, and most especially if we ever think that we have settled an issue once and for all. Those of us who work in the field of trauma, mental illness, and addiction recovery cannot afford to be settled.

Instead, we must learn a different art than certainty, dominance, mastery, and generalization. These are dangerous practices for us and our clients. Rather, we learn, with humility, to do all we can to dowse for the waters of a healing spirit inside a client’s system. We do what we can to invite, encourage, and honor that spirit, so that it might feel welcome in the psychotherapy room with us.

When we see the healing force’s promising seed sprouting within ourselves or another, we do what we can to nurture it, careful not to crush it or harvest it too soon. We remember not to assume we know what it is. A lot of the time, doing what we can to nurture it means getting out of the way, trusting the inborn wisdom of that force, to know better than our well-meaning, sometimes-anxious healer personas.

If you find yourself resonating, dear reader, with our conviction that humility as healers protects, you might be interested to peruse our many offerings available for healing women’s suffering. Whatever your situation, we send our heartfelt blessings over to you today, that it may fill you with all that you need to thrive and shine, filled to the brim with health as you define it!

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Internal family systems model of healing

Unburdening: Parts Work and the Internal Family Systems Model of Healing

Internal Family Systems Therapy, also called Parts Work and IFS for short, is gaining widespread popularity in addictions and mental health treatment.

IFS is on the rise, not only because it has earned a spot on the list of the so-called “evidence-based” approaches favored by regulators, which always gives a healing modality a boost in visibility, but because it’s intuitively appealing and even, sometimes, fun.

Especially in combination with the arts and somatic therapies, Parts Work is a revolutionary treatment for trauma and addiction. I like to think it’s making progress towards healing the world of all manner of soul sickness.

How Does Working With Your Inner Parts Heal You?

According to the IFS model, healing takes place through the process of unburdening.

Unburdening takes place when a misunderstood Part of your own Self reveals itself to you, and you are able to recognize it in a positive light. When you are willing to understand, rather than condemn, you will become aware of your misunderstood Part’s burden.

A Part’s burden is related to its primary life-enhancing purpose, and the needs that it has to be able to do its positive job well for you.

Prodigal Return

Once a Part has told you its story fully, you will be stunned with compassion. You will feel a greater respect for all you have endured, and what it took to survive what you have survived.

With forgiveness for yourself and your Part, you will be moved naturally to reclaim it as a long-lost member of your inner family. You then recognize your Part as an important, valued side of your own vital life force.

Through this reclamation, the Part is integrated. This means the Part is brought back into harmony with the rest of you, through a restoration of relationship with the rest of your psyche.

Making amends with this Part, understanding her true intentions, and seeing her side of the story, you decide consciously that you no longer need to keep her banished away like a criminal.


Banishment

As Romeo ardently expresses in Shakespeare’s poetic voice, banishment is the worst kind of punishment: “Ha, banishment! Be merciful, say ‘death;’ For exile hath more terror in his look”. And yet self-banishment of Parts of our own nature is the most common strategy we humans use at this stage of our evolution, for fitting into this anti-human world and its requirements of us.

Banishment itself is the source of a lot of our own pain. The pain of a Part’s banishment is part of its burden. The burden a Part carries, and the pain the Part feels in being rejected, marginalized, and forsaken by you, is largely responsible for the problematic, disruptive behaviors generated by this part.

Taking a Part out of inner solitary confinement is the beginning of healing and getting to the bottom of where all the trouble started.


Rehabilitating the Wild Ones Within

With time, patience, and a sincere willingness to heal, even the most difficult Parts will eventually respond to our attention. Once they trust us, they turn from wild beasts threatening to rip our lives to shreds, into devoted loyal guard dogs wagging their tails when we come into the room. It is love that accomplishes this.

IFS teaches us a radical practice of allowing any and all sides of us back into the protective circle of our own Self-love. An IFS therapist holds space for this process for another, sometimes serving as an example. But each woman’s Parts will only ever be cured by her own fierce love.

Interview With a Part

Here are some questions that help Parts tell you their story. Try them out as a journaling exercise next time you’re aware of a problematic side of you. Examples of Parts recognized by pop psychology include the Inner Child, the Inner Critic, and the Addict, but there are many others.

  1. Who are you? What name I can call you?
  2. What is your original, highest, most benevolent purpose in my life? What is your job within my Psyche?
  3. What would happen to me if one day you couldn’t do your job (if you called in sick)?
  4. What is your special burden? What’s hard about being you? What don’t I see or understand about you?
  5. What or who inside gets in the way of you performing this function and purpose easily?
  6. What or who inside assists you in performing this job/benevolent purpose? Who are your allies?
  7. How could I help you? What would help you perform your job better?
  8. What would it take for you to feel completely relaxed and ok that this job is getting taken care of?

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