Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy is an exciting, and relatively new, psychotherapy that resonates perfectly with an axial 2.0 approach to self-transformation. It was developed by Richard Schwartz (1995) while working as a family systems therapist. He gradually saw that each person has their own internal family of subpersonalities or ‘parts’ and that each of these parts has their own feelings, beliefs, motivations and worldview. All of the parts have a positive intention and valuable inner resources and qualities, although some of them are distorted into extreme roles that they themselves do not like and so superficially appear as negative. There are both healthy and unhealthy parts, with ‘protectors’ that aim to protect us from internal and external threats to our safety and well-being, and ‘exiles’ that are child parts in pain from the past.
And at a deeper level, obscured by these parts, is Self, which is our true essence or nature. What IFS therapy does is not fight the unhealthy parts that seem so negative but rather listen to them – from the Self with curiosity, appreciation and compassion – so as to hear their stories and thus enable them to heal and take on more healthy roles and qualities. The goal is to both heal the unhealthy parts and to encourage all the parts to cooperate within an integrated system under the leadership of the Self.
This Self is equivalent to the True Self of the axial wisdom traditions, what the philosophy of metareality calls the ground state, and what we call the deep self (or soul). Richard Schwartz discovered this deeper Self through an empirical investigation of the human psyche in a therapeutic context, which enabled the Self to show up once a clearing had been made through the tangled web of obscuring parts. So to the philosophical deduction of this deeper self by Roy Bhaskar’s metarealism and the transrational apprehension of it by the great wisdom traditions, we now have further evidence, this time empirical, for its existence as our fundamental essence and true nature.
As well as being a very effective and evidence-based psychotherapy, one in which the real therapist and true healer is the individual’s Self itself, IFS also has a philosophically interesting conception of the ego. It sees the psyche or ego not as something negative to be transcended, as many spiritual traditions have done, but rather as something spiritual itself. The various parts, comments Schwartz, are ‘spiritual beings’ that when attended to by the Self with compassion and curiosity are able to release their limiting beliefs and emotions (or ‘burdens’ in IFS terminology) and so transform into their natural enlightened states.
Due to its effectiveness, its uplifting and edifying vision of the mind and ego, its non-pathologising approach that is highly respectful to all parts of the psyche, and its recognition of a deeper Self that is actually the true healing agent, IFS is ideal for forming part of an axial 2.0 theory-practice.
For an animated introduction to IFS, click here.
