Ep. 12/ Internal Family Systems
Internal Family Systems
By: Emily Pagone, LCPC, NCC, CCTP, PMH-C
As someone who spends lots of time on “both sides of the couch” as a clinical therapist/counselor and fellow traveler, I have become incredibly fascinated with utilizing Internal Family Systems with all different types of individuals regarding various emotional struggles; but, I am particularly passionate about working with adults in individual therapy – who happen to be parents – on recognizing their emotional parts. I enjoy the intricacies and layered work of working with adults who also happen to be parents because their personal work has a massive permeating impact on every part of their life – especially so, on the most significant part of their life…their precious children.
Through working with parents in individual therapy, I am also able to work indirectly with their children. When I am able to help guide a parent towards integrating a self- compassionate voice towards themselves, I witness how doing this creates an emotionally-regulated space where they can provide their children with a regulated version of themselves while exhibiting more empathy and patience towards their children. I have witnesses this deeper level of self-compassion and patience provide parents the opportunity to offer their children a regulated, balanced version of themselves even during their child’s “big feeling moments”. This ultimate goal is hard work for all parents.
If “us parents” can organize our internal dialogues towards ourselves in a helpful, compassionate, effective way, then we are able to model and infuse this way of thinking within our children. This is the first step of helping our children – it is first creating space for ourselves as parents/caregivers/teachers; doing this allows us to have the bandwidth to show up for a child’s emotional moment with a more present, mindful version of ourselves we want to have along for this ride. This can often be its own endeavor, but everyone is able to achieve this eventually, and no parent/caregiver is alone in this journey!
We can best guide our children by holding space and creating a moment of pause for our parental/caregiver overwhelm we are most likely feeling; after creating pause, I gently and compassionately push you to endeavor to speak to that overwhelmed, frustrated part of you. It is important to address this frustrated part with care and compassion in order to regard it an genuinely ask if here are unmet needs in this part of you. What does that part need to hear? Is it something like, “you have been doing everything imaginable to care for this child, and them having a hard moment is not a reflection of you or your parenting/caregiving.”. This is the beginning piece – but it is THE most important, critical piece – that allows us parents/caregivers to understand how we can speak to our overwhelm first in order for us to have the emotional energy and wherewithal to coach/guide the child through their overwhelm. Learning how to recognize, foster, grow, and integrate a voice of self-compassion – while understanding many previously unmet emotional needs - within our adult minds as parents/caregivers is the birthplace of where we begin to help our child through an overwhelming moment.
Although we want to protect children from anything that is ever hard, the goal is to truly help the child feel their big feelings in a safe way, with caring adults that can compassionately withstand the child’s emotions, towards the goal of finding strategies they can learn and lean on to help them through the process; this requires accepting another truth there: big feelings, feelings of overwhelm, are NOT “bad”.
Allowing ourselves to guide and assist our child through the inevitable “big feelings moments” comes from deconstructing, reconstructing, and re-authoring the inaccurate narratives that are often subconsciously present from our own childhoods and we unintentionally bring those forward into our experiences as parents when we are staring into the eyes of the child version of ourselves. The strategies to help children regulate, co- regulate, and process big emotions can be done with the trusted guidance of a child and family mental health therapist/counselor, and by also implementing the above steps consistently within the home – and truly, this is all effectively and ideally accomplished by parents doing their own individual work in therapy themselves with a trusted mental health professional.
This hard work of effectively helping our children cope with their feelings begins with our own feelings, triggers, and overall emotional healing journey as parents/caregivers/teachers – and as humans, addressing the narratives and emotional wounds that were present within us before becoming a parent or caregiver. When we can integrate self-compassion, we create a birthplace of emotional energy to show up for our children in the way they need us to.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is an approach to psychotherapy that identifies and addresses multiple sub-personalities or families within each person’s mental system. These sub-personalities consist of wounded parts and painful emotions such as anger and shame, and parts that try to control and protect the person from the pain of the wounded parts. The sub-personalities are often in conflict with each other and with one’s core Self, a concept that describes the confident, compassionate, whole person that is at the core of every individual. IFS focuses on healing the wounded parts and restoring mental balance and harmony by changing the dynamics that create discord among the sub-personalities and the Self.
Developed by Richard Schwartz, observed patterns of inner lives were conceived of the mind as a family, and the parts as family members interacting with one another. Exploring how these components functioned with one another was the foundation for IFS and the idea of the core Self.
