IFS Parts Work Ended my Cycles of Dysfunction
Most of my life I’ve been relentlessly frustrated with myself. I knew what I wanted and who I wanted to be but couldn’t get myself to do the behaviors that would get me there. I wasn’t able to hold a job, stay fit, or maintain meaningful relationships or spend quality time with my children.
My mind was always working on this problem in the background. I consumed hundreds of self help books, articles and podcasts. I tried every trick and technique I could find to get myself to do the things I thought I needed to do.
The shame was immense. I would commit to spending focussed time with my kids when they were little, and then not follow through. I could get myself there, but I couldn’t get myself to engage for more than a few moments. I would block out time to deliver work commitments and I could get myself in the chair, but I couldn’t get myself to do the task. I would start new friendships, but I couldn’t nurture and maintain them. I would make a plan to clean and organize my living space, but never did.
My sense of worthlessness demanded I do something monumental with my life. With each failure through my teens and twenties, from personal rejections to business failure, bankruptcy, foreclosure, divorce, I kept sinking deeper into worthlessness. This compounding worthlessness kept demanding that I take bigger and bigger swings to redeem myself, which would lead to bigger more dramatic failures, and the whole cycle was terribly overwhelming.
I was constantly making lists, building out the calendar and devising ways to “trap” myself into doing what I needed to do. My life became a ruth goldburg machine of chain reactions I would devise to trick myself into doing this or that thing I needed to do. It rarely worked.
As I entered my 30s my ADHD leveled off a tiny bit and I was able to maintain a little focus and consistency. I found that I could keep a routine for a few weeks, even months at a time, but never for longer. And what got interesting is I could see it coming. I could be consistent but I would start to feel something rising up inside me that was upset. It got to a point that I knew the cycles so well I could tell when I had about 4 more days before what I had built would be shot to hell. There were versions of this all over my life from maintaining my health, my relationship patterns with my wife and kids, and finances. This was the most frustrating stage, like watching train wreck without being able to do anything about it. It was worse than before because now I could see what was happening, but with no power to do anything about it.
Long before I had heard about parts, I was aware that I was one guy when I made plans and acted on them, and another guy when I threw out all the plans and did something to make myself feel better. My plan making part eventually became despondent and stopped making plans, because it was too traumatic to see it all get thrown away. It seemed like the longer a plan worked, the more destructive the response when the other part smashed them.
Parts of me would blow up my routine and then my intellectual part would try again, tweaking things each time trying to find the grail self management strategy that would allow my life to make some actual long term progress.
Around my 40th birthday I encountered a Twitter thread written by a man working with his parts around some office task and it blew my mind. I immediately read everything I could about Parts and IFS and a few months later I started IFS therapy.
IFS therapy resolved my deep sadness and my relationship issues. I no longer have the depressive cycles and my relationships are meaningful and self sustaining. I no longer have the inner demand to do something hugely redemptive with my life, I love myself as I am. My ADHD is still pretty bad and I can’t really get myself to do everything all my parts want to do. It is getting better, writing and maintaining this website is an example of something I couldn’t have done a few years ago. The big difference is that when I can’t get myself to do something, I know why and it makes sense, and I don’t feel the shame I used to.
A lot of the things I was pushing myself to do were to reverse the shame I carried. Now that that’s gone I have a lot less pressure to perform. The big boom-bust cycles don’t happen any more. If a part of me feels unhappy with what I’m doing, I stop and work with it instead of ignoring it and pushing through. This sometimes means doing less than I planned on a given day, but I don’t have the big destructive breakdowns so on balance more is getting done.
I have strong relationships with my children, who I’m convinced would be in a “no contact” mode by now if I hadn’t transformed. My marriage and other friendships are rich and meaningful, an complete reversal of my experience prior to IFS.
I’m most grateful to IFS for reconnecting with my abandoned childhood parts. I’ve had some very trippy experiences, for instance snapping back into childhood scenes where I suddenly became 7 years old in a traumatic moment that I hadn’t thought about in many decades. I don’t mean I saw the scene, I mean that I was him, looking out his eyes, as a 7 year old, feeling the terror and shame and right back there in the scene that I dissociated out of 35 years earlier. Somehow while I was that little guy I was also my present day self and able to offer him the connection, care and protection I needed back then and take him out of those scenes and into my arms.
IFS is wholistic, it addresses the Spiritual, Emotional and the Intellectual aspects of your being.
We all have parts and IFS is not about getting rid of our parts, it’s about bringing them into harmony under your healthy leadership. It’s about freeing burdened parts of the grief and painful scenes they may be stuck in and helping protective parts who use extreme behavior to keep the pain at bay to find more functional ways to do their jobs. If you still aren’t sure what parts are, consider this; have you ever been in an heated argument with someone you’re close to and as you are talking you know you are making it worse but you keep saying it anyway? That’s parts, part of you has to say what you are saying and part of you is watching helplessly knowing you’re making it worse. Neither part is right or wrong, they both need leadership and connection.
We don’t literally have little people running around inside us but if we conceptualize our neural pathways that way we are able to work with them in healing ways. When we experienced something overwhelming and too big to handle when we were younger, we often dissociated and mentally left the scene entirely. After the event we refused to think about it. This left abandoned neural clusters in our brain that were disconnected from our main psychology. When a similar event happened to us later, those abandoned neurons fired and “took us back” to that awful experience, as if it were still happening today. This is why we can get triggered by seemingly little things and react in big, sometimes embarrassing ways. Parts of us don’t know that we aren’t still in that awful scene back there.
With IFS we create a safe setting to imagine sending love to an aspect of ourselves that we haven’t connected with since it was abandoned in a traumatic moment. This causes our neurons to literally “reach out” to those abandoned neurons and connect them to our current day neural network, where they can be updated and move past the trauma.
IFS is a flexible model that supports a huge range of styles. This means you can find a practitioner who’s compatible with your world view and personality. It can go as deep as you like and a good practitioner will never push you past where you’re ready to go. You can work with one issue and then stop, or you can go through a more wholistic transformation. It’s completely up to you.
You can go pretty far with it on your own if you are unable to or don’t want to see a practitioner.
As you connect with your parts and hear their stories and become better at meeting their needs and helping them to trust you, your relationships will improve. You’ll see how your parts react to other people’s parts and you’ll start to see the deeper needs behind other people’s behaviors. You’ll be more peacefully connected inside and outside.