I had been following Internal Family Systems for a while, but now I have settled on a minimal version of it, plus some understanding I have found along the way.

It took me a while to even start writing this blog, because I’ve been putting it off for so long, but I felt responsible, so, here I am, on an airplane, writing this.

I have realized that I saw IFS as a silver bullet to all my problems. I thought I could completely alleviate all the thoughts and incidents that have bothered me since my childhood and be free of the hurt it caused. But now I think I was seeking the wrong solution.

Maybe the hurt would never go, but we learn to be at peace with it, and live with it. Maybe over time, the pain will reduce. Maybe the pain is required. Even though it hurts, it makes you, you.

Maybe trying to make myself free from everything that hurts you makes you devoid of the human experience.

IFS, Parts and the mess #

I love the introspection that comes with IFS, and it’s been real helpful. It has helped me a lot. But now I think IFS makes everything very complex.

First of all, while I love the idea of parts and how they interact with each other, IFS makes it much more complex by attributing them certain characteristics, personalities of their own and a bunch of other stuff. So when we encounter a particular behavior, we have to find the parts involved, classify it into an exile/manager/protector/firefighter or whatever, find what name they’d like to be called, find what kind of person it is, how it looks, if it’s a kid or a grownup (because according to IFS, traumatized parts are stuck at the age when the traumatic incident happened), where they are and all that. Maybe all this is not really needed. It just moves us further away from what we actually should do. And in my experience, it immobilizes us.

And another thing I have a problem with is that certain parts influence other parts and now there’s a “web of influence” and it’s up to us to find it. And what’s worse is, it changes from time to time.

So just to recap, with IFS, we have to track parts, their characteristics, memories and everything, their classification, their position in a certain graph, what they’re influenced by, what they’re triggered by, what parts they trigger, how do they manifest in the body, how do they evolve.

And if you want to debug, you’d have to identify the firefighters first, listen to them about how they were pushed to their current role, and persuade them to let us access the exile. But if you’re stuck in some phase, then you’re in an immobilized state, which is real bad.

Doing this everyday is hard work. But now i’m thinking, maybe all this is not required?

A Better Approach #

A better approach I found was from Morita therapy which straight up tells us that thoughts would come no matter what. Well, that hurts, but phew, what a relief.

Based on what I read, Western psychology focuses more on fixing each symptoms instead of the root cause. I couldn’t agree more.

Morita therapy tells us to accept each and every thought. Trying to control a thought is like trying to nullify the effect of a sea wave with another wave. That would end up in an infinite sea of waves.

Maybe instead of controlling the waves and forcing it into producing a different outcome, we should just accept the thought, make peace with it and move forward. The solution will come on its own. That, I think is a better approach.

I think I was doing IFS wrongly, because it never instructed me to do what I’m gonna say, but thinking in terms of IFS led to me having a negative view of myself and others. Yes, IFS instructs us to practice gratitufe, but because whenever I encounter something, I think in terms of parts and trauma. But now I can just accept that everyone is flawed and it’s okay and try to love them or leave them. (We can pick our battles.)

But there still are problems #

Solitude, the act of sitting with one’s thoughts, alone, and trying to accept them - that’s something I still dread and something I have to force myself to do, even though I think I got a bit better at it. (I was worse before.)

Which reminds me of this quote by Carl Jung that I think is true:

“To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful.”

Maybe it’ll get easier.

Say yes to life!