Pieces of Nathan

This spring, I encountered a new paradigm for inner healing called Internal Family Systems (IFS). The basic concept behind IFS is that, like our physical bodies, our personalities have parts. It points to a reality that I might refer to almost without thinking.

Part of me wants to go out for a beer with friends, while another part of me wants to stay home with the family and have a movie night. The parts weigh the different options and make a good decision.

This is how it might work if my parts were well-ordered, but unfortunately, they aren’t. As St. Paul says in one of his letters, my parts are at war with one another. Some of my parts are in exile, so wounded by my sins or the sins of others that they hide in the shadows. Other parts take control of the situation and try to prevent my interior mess from spilling into the streets. Other parts of me cope with my interior pain in unhelpful or even destructive ways.

But these broken or maladapted parts are not the whole story. At the core of who I am is the me that God created me to be. It’s the image of God stamped on my soul at that moment that I was created in my mother’s womb, renewed by sanctifying grace at the moment of my baptism. IFS refers to this central “me” as the self, which is supposed to rule the parts the way Jesus lead His disciples.

An Established Approach

IFS isn’t a new approach. Psychologist Richard Schwartz developed the model in the 1980s based on his work as a family therapist. Although an atheist, he presented his model in Christian circles, where it began to flourish because it fit very well with a Christian understanding of the human person. Altogether You, by Jenna Riemersma, contains a great description of the model from a Christian perspective. I highly recommend it. I’ve also been listening to the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast by Dr. Peter Malinoski. Also excellent.

In trying to understand the phenomena of inner conflict people experience, Schwartz began to recognize parts operating in three distinct roles: exiles, managers, and firefighters.

Exiled parts are the ones that hold negative emotions and experiences, especially those related to trauma. The emotions present in these parts are so potent and discombobulating that the rest of the parts do everything they can to shut them down. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work, so they come to the surface when triggered by similar experiences or emotions.

Manager parts try to control the other parts to be able to function in the world. They are the parts that put up the mask of “everything is fine” when the interior life is a dumpster fire of anxiety, shame, or sorrow.

When the manager parts lose control and the exiles burst to the surface, firefighter parts jump in to shut down the exile’s emotional outburst. They tend to drive extreme behavior like addiction, rage, mania, disassociation, or withdrawal.

A person might have about a dozen of these parts that interact with one another in various negative ways. IFS therapy focuses on trying to understand and love each of the parts while coming to live with the inner self in charge of all of the parts. My wife Mary likened this process to ministering to the lepers that live inside us.

Finding my parts

Inner healing has played a big part in my life and I am always hungry to go deeper. When you’ve gone crazy, sanity is the path of life. One thing I like about IFS is that it has exercises that can teach you to look into your interior and begin to understand your parts.

One night as I lay in bed, I tried an IFS recollection exercise to reconnect with exiled parts of myself. My thoughts led me to think about how I had quite literally stuffed part of my psyche into a box using my intellect after my nervous breakdown. I remember at the time deciding that I was going to just think my way out of trouble by sorting my experiences from the breakdown as real or imaginary. Any crazy experiences got stuffed in a box.

Since the “Thinker” is one of the manager parts that Altogether You references, I thought that this is very likely a part of me that did the stuffing away. I looked inside and asked if there was an exile related to my crazy time and could it please reveal itself.

I had an immediate sensation and mental image of something that looked like madness. More specifically my madness. It’s hard to describe. Imagine a video of a person spastically gyrating and then speed it up so you can only see the vaguest hints of head and hands and elbows in a whirlwind of chaos.

I took some time to encounter it and learned that the name of this exile was “Believer”. When I thought about it, it made sense. When I had my breakdown, I lost my ability to discern the difference between truth and falsehood. I just believed everything, including some really crazy and untrue things. My “Thinker” part shoved that broken “Believer” part into a box.

By this point, I had developed a pretty severe headache, so I took some ibuprofen. I think it was somehow associated with my encounter with this very broken and burdened part. Apparently, parts can be associated with specific body sensations. I didn’t try to fix it, though I did pray for it and ask God to bring His healing power into this part of me. I seemed to experience it settling down with this, and I fell asleep shortly thereafter.

Setting Captives Free

I shared this experience with Wendy Vello, the counselor who introduced me to IFS. She asked if I’d like to try to unburden the part that I’d uncovered. We scheduled a phone call for later in the week.

Wendy explained that my parts get locked into the mental state that came to be as a result of trauma. My nervous breakdown was severely traumatic and part of me still thought that the trauma was ongoing. Unburdening involved first encountering that part of myself with love and hearing the burden that has been pushed down below conscious awareness. Then the part is invited to let that burden go.

Wendy’s first big insight was that the crazy part that I encountered was not an exile, but a firefighter. That big crazy energy that I had stuffed down like a jack in the box was actually trying to protect some other part.

We said a prayer for God’s guidance and protection. One of the keys to unburdening is a sense of peace and safety. I’m not forcing these parts to expose themselves, I’m inviting them to come into the light.

I invited the crazy part to relax and step back so that I could meet the exile that it was trying to protect. Then I invited the exiled part to come forward. In my imagination, I immediately saw myself as a little boy, holding something broken with a hangdog expression. “Nothing I try to build ever works!” it seemed to say. The sense of sadness and despair was palpable, but not overwhelming. I still felt peaceful and in control.

I described my experience to Wendy, and she suggested that I  invite the part to go into greater detail. Memories came to mind, two of which stand out right now. The obvious one was the business failure that took place shortly before my breakdown. Another was a science project from maybe 6th or 7th grade that I just never got working. I had to turn in a report that my project had been a complete failure.

Eventually, the memories stopped coming, and Wendy suggested that I update the part on where I am in my life now. I’d just finished building an addition, I’ve published a couple of books, I have a beautiful wife and family, and I’ve spent more than a decade serving the poor. A lot of things are working in my life. I felt the part relax in my mind, comforted by the good things that I shared with it.

Then came the unburdening. I asked the part if it had any burdens that it wanted to get rid of and it said yes. Wendy suggested that I could invite the part to get rid of the burdens using one of the cardinal elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. I had a mental image of the part piling up a bunch of broken things and lighting the pile on fire. As the objects burned, I felt a new sense of interior freedom.

Wendy suggested that I ask the part if it wanted any gifts in exchange for the burden that it just tossed onto the fire. It asked for a toolbox. I prayed and asked God to give it all the tools it needed to make new things.

The last step was to invite the part to find a new location in my body. It said that it wanted to be in my right shoulder and arm. I said okay, and felt a wave of warmth and heat in my right arm. It surprised me.

After unburdening the exile, Wendy and I went through a similar process of unburdening the crazy firefighter. Interestingly enough, that part was glad to give up the crazy role. It was exhausted. It just wanted to sit where the Most Holy Trinity dwells in my heart and adore the Lord.

Growing in Freedom

Since that phone call, I’ve learned about some of my other parts. I’ve gone through the unburdening process several times. As a result, I’ve experienced greater freedom and interior peace. I’ve found that my anger is less easily roused and I’m learning to be more gentle and responsive to the people in my life.

I think a big part of that is the second commandment: Love your neighbor as you love yourself. I’m only able to love my neighbor to the extent that I love myself in a properly ordered way. If I hate parts of myself and try to stuff them down in the darkness of my unconscious, I’m going to act that way toward my neighbor. If I can love those parts of myself that are difficult to love, unsightly, awkward, and broken, then I’ll be able to extend that same mercy to others.

I’m still trying to understand what my interior life is supposed to look like after all this. The parts don’t just go away when they are unburdened, but they can take on new, better roles. In praying about this, the Lord gave me the image of a writer’s room on a television show. The self is the head writer that ultimately makes decisions and the parts are like the writers that bring their gifts and personalities to the table to contribute to the final script.

I’m greatly comforted to know that the story being written is a love story. God’s love for me opens the door for me to learn to love myself in a way that frees me to love others. Love stories are my favorite.

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Jesus snatched me out of the darkness and saved me from complete madness. If you want to hear more of that story, check out Demoniac, now available on Amazon.