Dear noname:

I looked up the IFS you mentioned (Internal Family Systems Model) on Wikipedia. It reads: “IFS sees consciousness as composed of a central self with three types of subpersonalities or  parts: managers, exiles, and firefighters.. A core tenet of IFS is that every part has a positive intent for the person, even if its actions or effects are counterproductive or  cause dysfunction. This means that there is never any reason to fight with, coerce, or try to eliminate a part; the IFS method promotes internal connection and harmony… Managers are parts with preemptive protective roles. They handle the way a person interacts with the external world to protect them from being hurt by others and try to prevent painful or traumatic feelings and experiences from flooding a person’s awareness. Exiles are parts that are in pain, shame, fear, or trauma, usually from childhood. Managers and firefighters try to exile these parts from consciousness, to prevent this pain from coming to the surface… Firefighters.. work to distract a person’s attention from the hurt or shame experienced by the exiles by leading them to engage in impulsive behaviors like overeating, drug use, violence, or having inappropriate sex.. overworking or over-medicating… Everyone has a true self. known as Self to distinguish it from the parts… (and) have access to this Self and its healing qualities of curiosity, connectedness, compassion, and calmness. IFS sees the therapist’s job as helping the client to disentangle themselves from their parts and access the Self… The goal of IFS is to have a cooperative and trusting relationship between the Self and each part”.

My thoughts this Monday morning: The Firefighters part of you, you (and I) are well aware of that part. The Manager part, that is quite clear to me. Last you mentioned this part is yesterday, (not using the term): “I’ve always thought of myself as a ‘project’ type of person. Someone who finds (or creates) a problem and solves it, then moves on to the next problem… To feel better”.

The Exiles part, there is more understanding to be made about this part. Throughout your posts and threads, you expressed a lot of awareness of the “pain, shame, fear.. trauma” that you experienced since childhood, at times crying whole heartedly, feeling the pain intensely, the pain of feeling unloved and unlovable. But there is something missing in your awareness of Exiles, and this is why Firefighters have been working overtime, and why Manager, however hard it works has been overall unsuccessful in making you feel better. I mentioned this lack of awareness from the beginning of our communication, but your manager chose to dismiss my input.

Here it is again (and for simplicity, I will mention only your mother here, not your father): you may not think about your mother much, you may not be in contact with her much, and you may think that you understand everything there is to understand about her role in your life, and that you are over it. But you are not.

I will explain further: for as long as you did not successfully confront the following core belief (and your attachment to this belief) that she was a loving mother to you, you are still holding on to this belief (even if you don’t think about it).

For as long as you are  holding on to this belief, you are also  holding on to the belief that there is something very wrong with you. You can’t change the latter belief unless you change the former because the two are tightly connected.

The positive intent of Exiles, holding on to the former belief is to ease the pain, to feel loved. But it backfires because Exiles also believe being terribly faulty, unlovable and that hurts, followed by Firefighters hijacking your life and you end up on mental/emotional rollercoasters of impulse and drama that give you a rush, but no love.

Like I wrote to you ages ago- if your mother loved you as a child, you wouldn’t have felt so unloved, a core feeling that lasted through and is dominant still,  in your third decade of life. (It is not possible for a child to be loved and yet… to somehow miss that love!)

You wrote yesterday: “the other night, cognitively I knew I had every right to relax and have some fun, but it was (as) if my body was saying no, telling me that I might be missing something if I relax too much”-

– how can Manager relax its tight grip on Exiles- leaving a part that is so faulty and incapable to relax and create.. that is a recipe for disaster.

anita