Understanding Exiles and Protectors
I. What is ‘Parts Work’/ Internal Family Systems [IFS]?
IFS, created by Richard Schwartz, is often called ‘parts work.’ I knew from listening to interviews with Schwartz that he acknowledged IFS as a shamanic way of working. To give the reader some context for IFS, I’ll walk you through its origin story. Schwartz, trained as a Family Systems therapist and practicing with individuals in the 1970’s, started to sense the limitations of working with clients as if each person was a unified mono-self. He realized that when we try to settle on a singular, coherent self-experience, we leave out much of what is really going on.
The field of psychology had previously pathologized thinking of ourselves as being composed of many parts. At its most extreme, this conceptualization got labeled multiple personality disorder (clinically known as Dissociative Identity Disorder [DID]). Sometimes the field described the ‘symptoms’ of DID, such as a person ‘hearing the voices’ of various parts, as psychotic hallucinations. It’s fair to say that psychology frowned on people relating to themselves as a system of many parts. But as any therapist worth their salt would tell you, by reducing ourselves down to the illusion of a mono-self mask, we relegate the messier, less culturally valued aspects of ourselves into shadow.
IFS’s premise is that all parts come into being at a particular moment because that was what the system needed at the time. The wounded parts, or exiles, earn this name by remaining stuck in the time when they fragmented off, isolated from the rest of the system. In addition to the parts, IFS says we all have an enduring, unbroken ‘not part’ that Schwartz calls the core Self (other systems might call this our essence, our beingness, our soul etc).
II. Connection between Parts Work & Nondual Consciousness
To me the biggest gift IFS offers is a super functional, straightforward way of understanding the truth of our nondual nature. First we have our parts, who live on the x-axis (in the realm of the conditioned,
(apparently he didn’t realize this when he came up with IFS, but other people with shamanic experience told him afterwards)in form.) These parts sometimes get conceptualized as ‘ego’ parts, frolicing in the dimension of becoming. Next we have the core Self: our beingness, or the awareness itself, which is always there, unbroken (i.e. the unconditioned, formlessness).
I would also add that, while writing this piece, I opened up Shinzen Young’s The Science of Enlightenment to see how he writes about and conceptualizes enlightenment. Instead of what I’ve encountered as a (more common) horizontal/vertical conceptualization, Young offers a simple image. We could think of his image like an ice cream sandwich, with the realm of becoming on top, the unconscious in the middle, and the ‘ground of being’ on the bottom . When I saw Young’s visual I lit up, because that conceptualization fits more intuitively with how I speak with clients, especially as we’re doing parts work. We could think of what’s happening in our daily lives as mostly manager and protector parts carrying out their jobs, doing what they think they have to do in the realm of becoming.
Underneath we have the unconscious, where the exiles, or wounded parts, live. Everything too overwhelming gets buried here. Sometimes the managers and protectors hide what they’re up to, such that we’re not even aware of what they’re protecting: this is a reframe of how we can relate to our defense mechanisms. And then, super importantly, core Self is the ground of our being, steadily and unchangingly existing below the level of personality. I often use the language of “dropping in” with clients, meaning, ‘drop in to the awareness, and “core essence is always there, underneath [the ego parts]”.
I also use the ‘ocean in a drop’ metaphor with clients. We can’t say the drop is the whole ocean. Yet you also can’t say the ocean isn’t the drop. It becomes obvious, with direct experiences over time, that the core Self, which excludes nothing, and most simply can be understood as Awareness, de-identified from any particular ego part’s perspective, contains the parts. And the parts are comprised of the same stuff as the core Self, in the same way that an ocean drop is comprised of saltwater.
III. Digging Deeper into Part
Here are the basics premises of ‘parts’:
Parts come into existence at a particular moment (usually a moment of trauma, i.e. when the nervous system gets overwhelmed and we feel alone in our overwhelm).
- We needed the part at the time it came into existence. Many of the parts are stuck in that earlier time, isolated from the system.
- There are no bad parts.
- In addition to what we can think of as ego parts (which IFS separates into ‘managers, firefighters, and exiles’, and I simplify down to ‘protectors’ and ‘wounded parts’), we all have an enduring, unbroken core Self (other systems might call this our soul, our authentic self, our higher self, our essence etc); Core self is not our ego.
To better understand the protector parts (sub-divided into managers and protectors in IFS), let’s try to put ourselves in the shoes of a manager. Managers (Protectors) try to maintain control of their inner and outer environments by doing things like: - keeping the system from getting too close or dependent on others,
- criticizing appearance or performance in efforts to improve, and
- focusing on taking care of others’ rather than their own needs.
Here’s a helpful cartoon that teasingly calls out how some of our manager parts operate.
Firefighters (Protectors) earn their name by ‘dousing’ the inner flames of feeling.The impulsive, firefighters:
- Jump into action when one of the exiles is at risk of flooding the system with feelings
- Strive to find stimulation that will override the exile’s feelings. Binge-ing on drugs, alcohol, food, sex, or work are common firefighter activities.
Exiles (Wounded parts) carry the emotions, memories, and sensations from past distressing experiences. Managers often want to keep these feelings out of conscious awareness and thus try to keep vulnerable, needy parts in exile through control and prevention strategies. Firefighters try to douse the intense emotions and unmet needs of the wounded parts by avoidance, distraction and numbing strategies.
III. Digging Deeper into Part
As I learned how to be an IFS therapist, I also went through my own personal process of discovering and befriending my parts. The shift in my conceptualization of myself felt like a fragmentation of what had previously been experienced as solidity, like taking an icepick to an iceberg. It felt active, intense—sleeves rolled up work. It could also feel fun, and playful. For me, with many neglected, parentified child parts, it felt like getting a second chance at childhood, like I was able to go back and meet the needs of parts of myself that had been on standby my whole life.
Every ounce of permission I gave to myself and to my parts–to feel, to express, to set boundaries, to play, to rest, to try, to give up, to let go, to lean in–translated to clients, who I encouraged to give themselves, and all their parts, the same permission, the same compassion, the same conscious, aware presence. Clients started having access to long-buried, previously unconscious wounded parts of themselves, and reported profound experiences in session. Instead of a listener, as I felt in most of my psychodynamic work, or a coach/teacher, as I’d felt when doingDBT/ACT, now I felt like a co-conspirator.
My clients and I had found an insurance-approved way to journey, and we romped with wonder through non-ordinary reality. One client, in her mid 60’s, who had struggled with anxiety her whole life, spontaneously went into a journey where she saw herself as a baby seal. I was delighted when she told me that a humpback whale (who I’d encountered for the first time at the FSS weekend workshop) swam nearby and shared its strength with her. The client glowed when she told me how she loved the feel of her seal body moving gracefully and freely through the water.
What fascinated me was that my heightened perception meant it felt incredibly easy for me to ‘spot’ when clients were merged with fragmented parts of themselves. Not only could I perceive which ‘exiles’ (using the Schwartz language for the wounded parts who’d fragmented off from the rest of the system) were getting activated, I also seemed able to guide clients into these deeper realms. Suddenly, instead of the frustrating experience of clients not knowing how to bridge the disconnect between their conscious minds and their unconscious processes, it felt like I became fluent, almost overnight, in how to communicate between the two. Janina Fisher, who elaborated on Schwartz’s parts work with her structural dissociation model, conceptualized how we slip into a ‘merge’ with a part, contextualizing these merges as being closest to the psychological principle of dissociation. Her framework felt absolutely crucial to ‘unlocking’ the unconscious.
Here is a personal example with my Nonna’s death. My Nonna, my maternal grandmother, had been my primary caregiver when I was a baby and my mom went back to finish undergrad. I found out recently that my Nonna became ill and died when I wasn’t yet 3, an entirely different story than the one I’d believed most of my adult life. From an IFS perspective, we would say that this 2-and-a-half year-old part of me fragmented from the rest of my system in 1982, and stayed exiled. Grief-stricken, shocked, abandoned, and holding all the complex, disorganized emotions of that time, the part had the developmental skills appropriate to a toddler. But that meant she was unable to communicate what she needed, or to process the somatic sensations, as 2-year-olds can’t self-regulate or verbalize!
Working with this part of myself meant first befriending her protector parts, the manager parts who’d grown up too fast, who spackled calm and competence on top of whatever roiling emotions lay under the surface. With permission from the protectors, there could be titrated moments of compassionate contact with the exiled 2-year- old. She liked being held and hugged, something my partner was willing to do. She liked it when other people were calm, & not preoccupied. She loved it when people oriented to her, metaphorically ‘getting down to her level’. Lovely older women friends, with years of on-the-job experience with their own kids and grandkids, seemed to know how to do this instinctively. She needed time, and not to be rushed. She was a little bit slow to warm up—and most definitely did not want invasion or abandonment. She did not want to be analyzed, argued with, cajoled out of her feelings, or judged.
Recognizing this tender, young part of myself, and asking myself to work with her according to where she was developmentally, made me begin to grasp how much of this work happened outside of a traditional therapeutic space. Most importantly, I had access to my core Self, the awareness itself which was totally fine, totally unbothered by the situation with my inner 2-year-old. Instead of ‘reparenting’, or getting stuck in loops of endless nonverbal processing, the single most helpful thing seemed to be to unmerge from the 2-year-old part, calm my nervous system using resources, drop into core Self, and then go back to the 2-year-old part from the awareness itself. At which point, it did feel possible to bring compassionate presence to the 2-year-old part.
For me I felt like there was an ebb and flow to parts work, an ‘active’ phase, and a ‘sitting with’ phase, which reminded me of the formulation of suffering and pain from DBT. If suffering is wanting things to be different than they are, being in contention with what is, and pain is inherent in life, I started to see the active part of the process as exposing suffering, revealing to ourselves where we’d gotten caught in sticky spider webs of egoic contention and distortion. The next phase, the ‘sitting with’ phase, isn’t traditionally passive, but definitely involves a different stance than the active de-identification. ‘Sitting with’ involves getting as close as possible to the pain. And once we strip away the suffering, we just sit. Mysteriously, sitting with the pain seemed to allow for alchemy–once we’d cleared away all the distortion, it was as if the pain itself showed us how it could transmute.
The conscious mind didn’t ‘know’ how this transmutation occurred—instead it seemed to happen through grace once we surrender. The wisdom of the body and system shows us the way back to health and wholeness. My favorite part of every exploration was when we’d finally gotten to the core of the pain, and I helped clients use titration to stay within their window of tolerance while sitting with the pain, not merged (or, in Janina Fisher’s language, “unblended”). Clients and I watched many of the parts transform. They gave up old, outdated strategies. They grew up, finding safety and release after lifetimes of tension, fear, and constriction.
What felt fascinating to me, observing from this professional-but-open perspective, was that simply adopting an ‘allow’ mode meant clients’ processes could unfold easily, almost independently. Client’s parts told us what they needed. Because we’re a culture of doers, I often use the metaphor of visiting someone in the hospital, perhaps at the end of life. There’s nothing to do. Nothing to say. You can’t take the person’s pain for them. You can’t fix whatever’s happening. You offer, instead, the most stripped down version of compassionate presence–a compassionate presence that has no agenda, asks nothing, takes nothing. In English, we call this type of presence sitting with someone. In my experience, finding one’s way into ‘allow mode’–dropping agenda, leaving behind the compulsive need to control and manipulate experience –constitutes the ‘gateless gate’ to non-ordinary reality. And in non-ordinary reality, alchemy, time travel, and magic become plentifully abundant.
IV. Undertaking ‘Parts Work’ (or any work!) from a Nondual Frame
We begin parts work with our ice picks in hand, actively deconstructing. Then we turn to work with the parts who lay amidst the shattered ice sculpture that used to look like a mono-self body. As we get to know what the wounded parts are holding, and how the protectors protect, we often employ active curiosity, exploration, and de-identification. Ironically, or paradoxically, the active identification of the parts gives way to de-identification. First comes recognition: for example, ‘oh there’s that uber competent protector part, planning everything and making checklists!’. Almost as soon as we identify the protector part and her role, the strategies she utilizes, her motivations, we see that understanding where the strategies and beliefs come from allows for de-identification.
To me the simultaneous identification/de-identification phenomena is important, and something that doesn’t always happen within IFS. I’ve come to think about this as a recognition that specific practitioners–who themselves bring varying levels of consciousness to how they practice–will have different capacities to help clients do this type of identification and de-identification based on where they are in their own process and path. I’ve had clients who have switched from a previous therapist who also ‘did IFS’ exclaim, upon seeing what we were up to with our parts, ‘ohhhh! What I was doing with my previous therapist was just giving the parts new jobs.’
To me, there are hazards of taking the ‘good stuff’ of IFS, and simply recreating identity formation. Similar to engaging with DBT as if it’s all about giving egos more skill–but ultimately strengthening the egos–there’s a hazard of becoming more attached, more identified with, our ego parts, rather than using the model to pierce the illusion of ego. From where I sit, recognizing that a part is just a part, that it functions according to its perspective and isn’t who we ‘really’ are, in the sense that it’s just a drop of water in the ocean of ourSelves, is like working with a living koan. Recognizing that outdated information, circumstances, strategies, and perspectives are only a ‘part’ of the picture, and coming back to the ‘big picture’ (of ourselves as BOTH shakti parts, and shiva beingness) means we have a very functional template to live in the world as both. And once these kinds of identifications and de-identifications take place, it’s possible to sit with the emotions and somatically held trauma we find, after clearing away layers of distortion, fear and compulsive egoic strategies.