Puzzles and Locks
Meditating on Internal Family Systems theory and the 5 piece interlocking harness on our baby stroller
After a long stretch without a sitting meditation practice in these early months of fatherhood, I’ve recently started carving out time to sit alone in the corner of my office with a candle in the dark. The other morning, after 15 minutes of sitting in silence, I felt that familiar tingling feeling in my belly and this clear image came to me:
The image is of the harness on my kid’s stroller: it’s made of 5 pieces that fit together which keep them secure as we ride around the neighborhood. There’s a round base with a button latch that comes up to their bellies and then two straps on either side that click together, each forming a crescent. The crescents are connected to straps that slip over their arms, then fasten into the circular base, clicking into place and making them snug and secure. It’s a well designed and creative locking system. It keeps my kids safe, and it took me a while to figure out how to open and close it with ease. And then I just kept thinking about it.
Sometimes theoretical models can be really helpful for understanding the human condition. These days, in my therapy practice, I work with clients who have all kinds of intense life issues that burden them. For the last few weeks when I fit the pieces of the stroller lock together I think about how the harness design could be a metaphor for the way our internal systems naturally develop to hold parts of us in place, and what it looks like to liberate a constrained part.
The following writing is admittedly pretty abstract and I promise I won’t in the least fault you if just want to skip over it and look at the cute pictures of my kids, but let me try to explain what I mean:
Exiles and Protectors
In the Internal Family System model that I often practice with in therapy, all of our psyches are made up of different “parts,” or inner personalities, that have relationships with each other. Everyone has “exiled” parts that have gotten trapped in earlier times because of some trauma or hardship. The exiled parts, or “exiles,” always seem young when you get close to them, and they carry the painful memories and beliefs that come from early, difficult or tragic life events. Our exiles have profound feelings of weakness and frailty and what they call in IFS “buried reservoirs of fear, loneliness, self loathing and despair.” Exiled parts carry messages with them that say things like:
No one loves me
I am always alone
I am worthless
I will never be good enough
Do you ever have voices in your head that you notice saying things like that? There’s a decent chance you do even if you don’t notice them very often. Some of us hear them louder than others. The exiles in our heads are really just like little kids that want to be free from their burdens so they can relax and play. But they are stuck away from everyone else, unacknowledged, like they are hidden in closets or in basements deep in our psyche. They’re often feared by the rest of the parts in the system because their strong energy can flood us and we can start identifying with their thoughts. In fact it seems like the rest of the system is designed around keeping these exiled parts trapped in place.
In the IFS model we also have “protector” parts that keep the exiles hidden from consciousness so they don’t flood the system with pain. So much of our outer personalities and our sense of self can actually be seen as these protector parts we all have. In the model there are two kinds of protector parts: “managers” and “firefighters.” These are other voices you might hear in your head. Or you might be so blended with your protector parts that you’re convinced they are you.
Protectors: Managers
Managers are highly valued by us and the other people in our lives, they are the parts that get things done and are proactive. Manager parts might have qualities like being logical, caretaking, perfectionist, approval seeking, conflict avoidant, judgmental…and if you start paying attention to them you’ll see their actions are usually determined to prevent setting off exiled feelings through responsible, competent and thoughtful accomplishment of everyday tasks and obligations.
For example, I have a manager part that–right at this very minute– is trying to write this blog post. He knows that if I get it done, my general feelings of accumulated worthlessness (which, if I look closely, are always kind of there in the background from unresolved issues in my childhood) will be temporarily relieved and I'll be able to enjoy the evening with my family. The pressure’s on. Manager parts can be very judgmental. Depending on the kind of people who raised you and the schools you went to, your internal managers might be extremely judgmental.
Protectors: Firefighters
Firefighters are the other kinds of protector parts. They are often not as loved by us or the people in our lives. The ones we call firefighters are generally focused only on the present moment and they are reactive, impulsive and risk-taking. They see their job as “putting out emotional fires” by distracting and escaping pain by altering states with a substances, activity or diversions. Firefighters often fall under the category of “fight, flight or freeze” trauma responses.
Some socially acceptable firefighter behavior for me might be scrolling endlessly in a daze through social media, playing loud punk rock music and riding my bike in the hills, or eating a whole bag of those delicious and addictive cheddar cheese puffs from Trader Joe’s.
Less socially acceptable firefighter behavior might be smoking weed, drinking, or harder drugs, binging and purging, cutting, rage, and emotional abuse. Firefighters are determined to keep away the pain at whatever cost. That’s how you can tell them apart from the managers.
The Self
The last thing you have to know here if you want to understand this puzzle is that in the Internal Family Systems model everyone has a core Self - the part of us that is fundamentally curious, compassionate, connected, creative, and courageous. It’s the playful, non-judgemental part of you that notices your other thoughts. It’s the part I could feels when I noticed my belly was tingling in meditation the other morning. The IFS theoretical model is different from, let’s say, a model like Christianity, that believes we are fundamentally born in sin. It’s way more like Buddhism, it starts from a place that everyone is fundamentally good, and that there is a part of us that is fundamentally divine.
The Self is the part in IFS that we are always trying to connect with and act from. Often time our parts— the protectors and exiles—don’t even remember that we have a core Self and so the work is all about finding that Self, building relationships between the Self and the parts, and then helping the parts unburden from old, unresolved pain so that our internal systems can recalibrate and live with more self-awareness, ease and joy.
Polarization
This is how I started thinking about the lock on my kid’s stroller.
Often times our protector parts, if they don’t have a relationship with Self, end up at odds with each other. One of the common situations I see with my clients (and I definitely see sometimes with myself) is that there will be exiles who are being “protected” by a group of managers AND a group of firefighters. Both groups of protectors end up in a polarization, like a war being fought between two sides with no one to step in and mediate. Often times this is what addiction looks like: compulsive, self-destructive firefighter behavior and hyper judgmental manager retaliation, while the exiles flood the system with desperate negative emotions and no Self to be found.
The therapy work in a situation like this looks like building Self-awareness, identifying protector parts and then “unblending” from them to build more Self awareness. This idea of unblending becomes very useful when you are trying to determine who is a protector and who is Self. When you unblend from the protectors that non-judgmental curiosity is always there underneath.
And then it looks kind of like a mediation between people in conflict, except it’s all happening inside of one person: recognizing their different parts, honoring how they’ve all struggled, and how they’re all trying to do right from their own perspective. The more Self awareness, the more there’s a possibility to reduce the inner turmoil by building relationships between the Self and parts, the more ability to witness the burdens and help release them. Because the exiles and firefighters often hold a lot of intense energy, their actions can easily get labeled as “mental illness,” but that’s often not a very helpful way to think about it.
Unburdening
When we get to the park and I open the locks on the harnesses for my kids to get out and play in the grass I sometimes imagine an intrenched set of internal locks that keep people from freeing their inner children opening and letting them be free. I realize it’s kind of an odd thought, my kids aren’t “exiles" in someone’s internal system, but I think it’s useful to remember that our protector parts, even the ones that are telling us to do things like shoot heroin or kill ourselves, for example, they are trying the best they know how to keep us safe. And it can often feel like cycles we get into are impossible to change, like being trapped in a set of locks and puzzles with no key to freedom. Sometimes if we cultivate enough Self energy the burdens release just like pushing a button on a 5 section harness of protectors and letting the young exiles come out into the grass and remember how to play.
Systems Thinking
The more I notice these kinds of polarizations in myself and in my clients, the more I see how the polarizations in the society we live in have similar origins, and maybe even similar solutions. Even the global armed conflicts affecting the world right now and the mass shootings we are hearing about everyday on the news, they have at their heart these exiled parts of individuals, like puzzles and locks, waiting for us to figure out how to unblend and unburden the different parts, crack the codes together. Who gets exiled in our society? Who’s holding the pain? Who are the “protectors” that battle each other, convinced they are in the right? How does our outer world reflect the inner worlds we carry around? The more we come to understand and unburden our own internal exiles the easier it becomes to think about the larger polarities in our world. Search inside for your true Self and follow that voice.
(If you want to know more about IFS therapy I recommend the book Internal Family Systems Therapy by Dr. Richard Schwartz and Martha Sweezy. This blog post was particularly inspired by the article Manager and Firefighter Polarizations: An Internal Family Systems View of an Addiction Cycle by Cece Skyes, LCSW. Also here’s a really awesome comic website about someone’s journey as a client in IFS therapy. This is the first time I’ve tried to write about IFS and I find it tricky to make it readable. Thanks for taking the time to read it. I plan to get better at it. I’m so inspired by this way of thinking as a practice of freedom and liberation.)
Beautifully reflective and wise Sascha! I love these lines especially:
“How does our outer world reflect the inner worlds we carry around? The more we come to understand and unburden our own internal exiles the easier it becomes to think about the larger polarities in our world. Search inside for your true Self and follow that voice.”
I liked the part about the lock way more than the part about IFS :)