MY INTERNAL FAMILY – in therapy

Back in 2016 I wrote a post about a session with an experienced American Dominatrix. Ten minutes in, with an insight that startled me at the time, she told me: “You’re just a little boy!” I had been reminded of the session by an article on Transactional Analysis, a longstanding therapy technique that considers our “parent,” “adult” and “child” ego states. More recently my therapist has helped me use this model and the language that comes with it, to understand myself better. I have come to see my submissive sessions with a Dominatrix as having allowed the child-like part of my character to be “let out” in a non-judgemental environment.

Through my therapy sessions, I have also come to realise that many of the behaviours that have stood in the way of happiness for much of my life have been driven by my inner child. He can make me sulky and rebellious, and often also makes me fearful, even causing me to freeze in the face of adversity rather than to plan my way out of it.

With my therapist’s help and with this new language, I’ve made a lot of progress in being able and, more importantly, willing to probe such feelings and try to understand them. This has been important in handling this strange period of, mostly lonely, Covid-19 lockdown. However, the last few weeks have seen me slide backwards, as various challenges that I thought had been buried have pushed their grasping, skeletal hands above the surface, demanding my attention in ways I have struggled to deal with. Once again, my inner child has stood frozen as they advanced towards him, causing me to spend day after day binge-watching Netflix series just to avoid looking at their ugly forms.

Knowing that my sense of fear and paralysis was coming from my inner child was interesting but not necessarily useful. Transactional analysis is perhaps a better model for understanding how my three ego states interact with those of others in my life than for working out how better to manage the limiting behaviours of my inner child.

So, in our last few sessions, a new model has been introduced, at first without me realising it but now with more awareness. I’ve been asked to consider myself as a series of “Parts” that together make up what’s called an “Internal Family System”. Have you ever said something like: “Part of me wants to do xxx, but another part of me isn’t sure?” Internal Family Systems therapy builds this simple internal conversation into a model for understanding the various “Parts,” or sub-personalities, that make us up and offers tools for keeping them in constructive harmony.

The figure below represents the Internal Family Systems model, the various sub-personalities falling into four distinct categories, each with different roles:

I don’t yet have enough of an understanding of all this to go into much detail, but here are some examples of the kind of thinking this new model of myself has prompted:

My inner child is an “Exile” that carries my lack of self-worth, my dependency on what others think of me and a bunch of other unhelpful mindsets.

When my inner child is stressed, my Firefighters distract me from it with, among other things, dissociation, and compulsive eating. The immediacy of this response can be almost laughable, a stressful event leading within seconds to an open fridge door. Perhaps, in the past, some of my compulsion to spend so much time with sex workers came from here too.

One of my Manager Parts is a “Caregiver – he cares for everyone around, but not for himself, and uses this as a strategy to run away from his own emotions” (I’ve bracketed this quote and the one below because I lifted them from this excellent article on IFS)

For much of my life, I have had a Manager part who was a – “Passive Pessimist – he avoids interpersonal interaction though passivity and withdrawal, so that he won’t be close to other people (closeness can unleash denied, troubling emotions).”  I feel that, through my own exploration, and more recently through therapy, this part has been a less strong influence in recent years, though I worry he might return.

Just as the model suggests, I have a “Self” (capital S) who can look objectively at the other parts. That Self, now that my therapist has helped me identify it, is just starting to be able to use at least some of the eight “C’s” listed in the chart to dialogue with other Parts of me and address their needs. A big hurdle I have to overcome is to allow my Self to use the C of Compassion towards those needy Exile parts, rather than just beat them up every time they cause me to lose the plot.

Looking back on a recent session through an Internal Family Systems lens, I now realise that my therapist was first greeted by one of my Exile parts, who started gloomy and dispirited but, by the end, was working with my Self to help me plan for how to move forward and manage the Exile.

In the context of this model my recent backwards slide into negativity is my child-like, fearful “Exile,” feeling horrified of all the work/relationship/house issues that have re-emerged, and is being shut down in a way that stops me making progress. My “Self” has to have a dialogue with the Exile child using the “Cs” of Creativity, Clarity and Calmness to find solutions, both for the issues and for that part of me that is fearful of them.

Part of me re-reads that sentence, and the rest of this blog post, and scoffs at all the psycho mumbo-jumbo, coming, as it does, from this ex-army, ex-rugby playing, businessman from a generation that pre-dates this kind of thinking. But I now recognise that “Part” of me as a self-critical “Manager” Part and my “Self” smiles fondly at him, allows the criticism but doesn’t respond to it, and moves on.

I find all this both highly fascinating in an objective way and potentially very helpful. It’s all very new and there is too much to take in all at once, but wanting to write about it has caused me to read into Internal Family Systems on-line and let me glimpse how thinking of myself this way might help me grow and better manage both my reactions to adversity and my relations with others.

Quite by chance, this new thinking coincides with me starting to watch The Sopranos for the first time. I am no Tony Soprano, though I did live in New Jersey for a while, but I am enjoying seeing how the Jennifer Melfi character teases out his emotions and breaks down his resistance to talking about them.