Ep. 2 - Intro to IFS

Theme music created by: Geovane da Silva

Episode Summary

Welcome back to Strawberry Saturn!

In this episode we begin a mini-series on a therapy modality known as Internal Family Systems (IFS)!

I share a bit about the multiplicity of the mind, implicit memory, parts, and thinking about our behaviors as adaptations that were learned by our parts in order to help us navigate life.

Reference Links

UpSpiral - Check out the Instagram account of the wonderful manifestation group I am in.

Dr. Tori Olds - Her YouTube channel shares a wealth of information on IFS and other therapy modalities.

Transcript

(Auto-generated by Whisper AI)

Hello and welcome back to Strawberry Saturn.

My name is Mari, and this is a podcast where I get to share things that I'm learning as I'm learning them.

And recently I've been learning a lot about my mind and a therapy modality called IFS.

IFS stands for Internal Family Systems Therapy and was created in the 80s by Richard Schwartz.

I was introduced to IFS in a manifestation group called UpSpiral.

And before I got into this episode, I wanted to say thank you to Leela and Michael for all their fantastic work there.

I also wanted to give a big shout out to Dr. Tori Olds and all of the work that she's done on YouTube with sharing knowledge about IFS and other therapy modalities.

I've learned a ton from her channel and I can't recommend it enough.

So after listening to this episode, if you want to learn more, I really recommend that you head over there.

Okay, so today what I'm going to do is begin a mini series on IFS.

And I'm going to start with introducing a few of the core concepts in this episode.

And then I'm going to get a little more specific and expand on those concepts in later episodes.

And to start, what we're going to be talking about is something called the multiplicity of the mind.

And the question you probably have is what does that even mean?

And if you remember that IFS is short for internal family systems, that's the first big clue right there.

Dr. Richard Schwartz saw the mind as being more of like a system made of many parts that are all working together, rather than just being one central thing.

And parts and IFS represent different sub personalities that have each learned how to navigate life in a different way.

Another way to think about parts is to imagine that each one is a mapping in the brain that is responsible for making cause and effect type associations very quickly.

And we'll get more into that in a little bit.

But for now, let's just think about that in terms of an example.

So let's pretend that it's Saturday night and someone gets invited to go hang out with some friends.

That person might have two parts that immediately start speaking up and recommending how to respond to that invitation.

One part might be saying like, "Yeah, let's go! It sounds like so much fun. I want to go see my friends tonight."

And the other part might just want to stay home and relax.

And each part has a totally different mapping from each other.

You can think of that mapping that they have as being made up of a collection of memories.

And those memories drive the decision making process.

So the going out part may have a bunch of memories where in the past, this person went out, had fun, and connected with friends and felt included.

Whereas the staying in part, the one that's more introverted, that doesn't want to go out, might have a bunch of memories of when that person chose to stay home and enjoyed relaxing and feeling comfortable instead.

And the learnings that each part has made based off of their own memories is stored in what is known as implicit memory.

So implicit memory is pretty wild when you think about it.

And it's also known as unconscious memory.

And it's very similar to the concept of muscle memory.

So just like you don't need to really think about how to walk, eat, drive a car or ride a bike.

After you learn how to do those things, you just know how to do those things.

You can feel what that's like.

And so when you're walking down the street, you're not thinking,

"Oh, left foot, right foot... Oh, what comes next? I can't remember."

You just know how to walk.

And our parts operate in a very similar fashion.

They don't need to think consciously about the things that they've learned either.

Our parts guide us through life in a very automatic and reflexive way.

And we really only notice our parts when they clash with each other.

Like in the example of going out versus staying in, that was a clash.

Or when the way they're helping us make decisions becomes a problem.

So if the part has learned something that's harmful, that can easily kind of spiral out of control.

A really extreme example of this is with addiction.

When a part learns that some behavior, whether it's smoking, drinking or eating a lot of food or anything can help regulate heavy emotions like anxiety or sadness or anger or anything else, it can become a problem because that part learns to make that association implicitly.

And we know that implicitly just means reflexively and automatically.

So every time that part experiences sadness or something heavy, it's not going to think, "Oh, wow, how can I regulate this emotion?"

It's just going to know, "Oh, I know what this emotion is and I know how to feel better.

I need a drink or I need to go smoke or I need to eat a lot of candy.

And then I know that the system will be regulated."

And knowing that parts act in this very automatic-type way based on the things that it has learned to be true is central to this next idea in IFS around the fact that there are no bad parts, and that every part in our psyche is always trying to help us and always thinks it's helping us, even when the behaviors that it's suggesting might actually be harmful to us when you take a step back and look at the full picture.

But it's important to recognize that at one point that part learned that behavior was helpful and it just doesn't realize that the behavior it's suggesting is no longer helpful because that hasn't been updated in its mapping of the world.

So going back to the example of someone having a part that's suggesting that they drink alcohol, when that part recognizes that the system is overwhelmed by some heavy emotion, it's trying to help regulate those difficult emotions with alcohol.

And that part likely doesn't know that drinking too much can be harmful to the whole system.

It only knows that the person finds immediate relief when they drink.

And something I really liked from Dr. Olds' videos on YouTube was that she talks about changing how we think about problematic behaviors.

Like if someone has a nail biting problem, they've probably learned that biting their nails helps regulate anxiety or some other kind of heavy emotion.

So even though that behavior may come with other consequences, like their nails hurting or feeling like they're being judged by their peers, it's still a solution or an adaptation from that part that's it's learned to do in order to manage stress.

And we can use this logic with pretty much any behavior that people do.

Like if someone punches a wall when they get angry or judges themselves or others very harshly or is always trying to micromanage their peers or works too much.

And at one point all of those behaviors were solutions and were probably learned out of necessity.

And that's such a liberating idea when you think about it because it opens the door for so much more self-compassion and compassion towards others.

Because in recognizing that parts are simply adapting to their environment and trying to provide solutions, it takes away this stigma of like, "Oh, maybe that person's just a bad person."

Or maybe if I do something that I'm not proud of that I'm a bad person.

And it takes away that stigma because we know that those things aren't true, that all the behaviors can be traced back to some type of adaptation that needed to happen.

Like that learning from a part of ourselves did help us at one point and just needs to be updated.

Which brings us back to the core purpose of parts.

Parts are here to help us anticipate and respond to life.

So if X happens in life, a part of us knows to respond with Y.

If A happens, a different part knows to respond with B.

These mappings are important and they must happen quickly.

And why?

Because we have to make a ton of decisions every day just to survive.

Some scientists estimate that we make an average of 35,000 decisions per day.

So everything from, "Do I want to get out of bed now or in five minutes?"

To like, "What do I want to do when I shower?

What shampoo?

What conditioner?

What do I want to wear?

What do I want to say at work during my first meeting?

Which route am I going to take to work when I'm driving?

Do I want to go grocery shopping out of work?"

All those decisions need to happen every day and they really do add up.

And if our brains didn't have a way to optimize making thousands of decisions, we likely wouldn't still be here as a species.

So the next question becomes, can we change something that we've learned implicitly?

Can we update the learnings that our parts have made?

And according to IFS, the answer is yes.

Dr. Olds uses this metaphor in her videos that I really liked about thinking of conscious learnings as being kind of like editable documents on your computer.

So you can just go in and edit it anytime you want if it's a conscious learning, something that's in your conscious memory.

But remember that parts work with implicit memory and all of their learnings are harder to access.

And the metaphor that Dr. Olds uses is imagining those same documents as being in a zip file.

And if you don't know what a zip file is, basically it's a compression.

That you can take a bunch of documents and shrink them in size.

But it means that when a bunch of files are zipped, you can't easily open them up and edit them.

You have to first unzip them in order to get them into a format where you can edit them again.

So when we think about our parts and the things that we've learned implicitly, we know that unless we've taken the time and energy to unzip and work with some of those automatic learnings and then update those learnings, then those learnings have probably never been updated, which is kind of mind boggling to think about.

Like most of us probably have things that we learned when we were very young that are still driving hundreds, maybe thousands of decisions that we make every day.

And there's a good chance that at least a portion of those learnings that we learned when we were very young are no longer serving us.

So what was true for us when we were six might not be true for us when we're 36, 46, 56, whatever age.

And the question then becomes, what would it be like to update something like that's problematic from a part?

So what would it be like to update a learning so that it actually helps us as an adult?

And depending on the learning, it could change your entire life.

So we'll get more in detail about the process in IFS of what it takes to update something that's in implicit memory that a part has learned in the next episode.

But for now, I wanted to close with an example of something that I learned in my own IFS therapy sessions.

During the sessions, what I kind of realized was that a big part of me was making decisions because of a fear of disappointment, or really choosing not to do certain things because it didn't want to be disappointed.

And this sort of playing small or playing conservatively was affecting every day for me in ways that I never even realized.

And just becoming aware that there was a part of me that was afraid of being disappointed and was driving actions because of that fear was so powerful because I was able to then bring conscious attention to that part and choose to make more decisions that were a little scary, even if it did mean that I might feel disappointment and getting to a better state of how to regulate something like disappointment into my own life.

And I could go on and on about it, but I just wanted to give that idea while it was still fresh in my mind.

So yes, that's all I have for today.

Thank you for listening and I'll catch you next time.