Three simple ideas

The healing I’ve experienced in my own inner world, and the healing my clients find within themselves, derives from three very simple principles:

1. Self. Every human being has a basic self, a capacity for curiosity and attention that tends toward healing. Some people think of this fundamental identity as their Buddha-nature, or the “image of God” in them, or the ultimate realization of who they were meant to be. Others (me included, most days) think of the self more modestly: as a a wise internal observer, mindful awareness, or even just self-awareness. However you conceive of it, your self doesn’t have to be developed or cultivated over time, and it can’t be damaged or destroyed. Each of us is born with a self, and it’s always there for us, whether we’re aware of it or not.
2. Parts. Inside our Self, every human being has a bunch of different sub-personalities, who help us interact with the world. If you’ve heard of an “inner child,” that’s a part. So is an “inner critic” or an “inner champion.” Each one of the parts inside us is like a little internal person, and together they form an internal community. We interact with our parts using the same respect and social skills we’d use with external people.
3. Healing. As human beings encounter challenges in life, the different parts of our psyches develop many creative strategies for protecting us from harm. One part of you might have learned to keep you safe by learning how to please others, for example; another part of you might try to keep you safe by keeping other people at a distance. When they’re working well, you don’t even notice all the ways your internal family is working on your behalf. But sometimes, your parts’ various protective strategies come into conflict with each other, or stop being useful and start causing you trouble. Fortunately, because your self is already oriented toward your own wellbeing, you have everything you need to help your parts let go of protective strategies that aren’t working for you any longer, and find new strategies that do.

You don’t have to believe these premises to interact with your inner world — you can just as easily take them as hypotheses, and test them out for yourself.

From IFS to partswork

While Schwartz didn’t know it at the time, he’d stumbled on an ancient and globally widespread way of conceptualizing the human mind. From ancient Egyptian priests to Jungian psychoanalysts to 21st-century biologists, many people have described the human mind as plural, just as IFS does. In fact, some have accused him of having appropriated the wisdom of Indigenous peoples

Today, we know the Internal Family Systems model is just one way to conceptualize our internal complexity for liberation and healing — one that works far better in combination with practices and ideas from kindred fields and disciplines. That’s why many practitioners of the model have come to think of ourselves less as “IFS practitioners” than as partsworkers: people who interact skillfully with the many parts of human minds for healing and liberation.