Internal Family Systems

This is a technique Adam is passionate about and pursuing training in.

Internal Family Systems is a method developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, a psychologist who did a lot of work with families. He noticed during family sessions that there were habitual patterns each member fell into that in essence, perpetuated troublesome behavior in the family dynamic (a “problem child” who acts out, an alcoholic parent, an enabler who just wants to keep everyone happy, etc). As Dr. Schwartz spent time with the individual family members go get a better understanding of their perspective, he found that within all of us, we have “parts” that become activated and respond as if they were their own family dynamic.

Dr. Schwartz is famous for the phrase “it is the nature of the mind to be subdivided,” meaning it’s natural for your brain to compartmentalize experiences or have strong neural pathways that resulted during a distinct moment in your development.

He categorized these parts into three groups: the “managers” (the ‘never let them see you sweat’ parts that try to keep everything below the surface), the “firefighters” (the parts that overreact to distress, trying to quench the emotional fire with over-the-top or risky behavior), and the “exiles” (the parts of us that are so wounded that we try to exile or push them as far away from us as possible so we don’t have to experience their pain). Within these three basic categories are a variety of parts each of us carries.

Each of these parts has a “noble intent”—in other words, they’re trying to do something good for you, they just might go about it in a way that isn’t very helpful. Once you are more aware of these parts, understand why they get activated and what they’re trying to accomplish, you can more easily work with them.