The Expansive Influence of Internal Family Systems Therapy

My parents were atheists. My mother did take me once or twice to a small Unitarian church in New Hampshire. I must have been 5 or 6 years old. I remember the hard pew, the dust motes menacing in long shafts of sunlight (I’m allergic to dust), and the stale, antique smell of old wood. I was antsy and bored. Years later I wondered out loud why a classmate went to church with her family every week when her father was a renowned astrophysicist. I don’t recall getting a useful answer or even engaging my mother’s curiosity. In my household, music and visual art were omnipresent, spirituality wasn’t mentioned, and the topic of religion mostly elicited political analysis or personal pity.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered infinity (for lack of a better word) in myself and others while learning internal family systems (IFS) therapy. This made me into a pantheist, which means that I now find “god,” or inherent surpassing immanence, in everything.

Author Alec Wilkinson writes that we can find immanence (the sense that there is “something immaterial behind everything”) in math and nature, which brims with numerical relationships, but I have dyscalculia (a common companion to synesthesia, a condition I also have—and, parenthetically, enjoy) so numbers would never have been my route. I needed something different and was lucky to stumble into IFS and the experience IFS calls unblending. Since then, I’ve helped many people to the same experience.

In the parlance of IFS, one can find this immaterial immanence inside, in the Self or in Self-energy. We also have psychic parts (a.k.a. subpersonalities), who blend and unblend, words that signify how these two kinds of consciousness (parts and the Self, which is not a part) meld or separate on a continuum.

Here is how unblending works. First, you turn your attention inside and notice a sensation, feeling, thought, belief, an urge to act, or an action. This indicates the existence of a part in your body or your mind. Next, you say, Hello, I see [feel, hear notice] you. Then, the chosen part becomes aware of you. It will either pay attention or ignore you. In either case, you can’t make it unblend and you can’t do the unblending. It is the active party in this process. It knows how to blend and unblend and does so all the time. Our quotidian, proactive manager parts, for example, take turns (they blend and unblend) performing the kaleidoscope of daily behaviors required for living. One gets you up in the morning and prepares for the day, another happily ponders your breakfast options, another shows up at work or school, and so on.

But our protective parts have the grander job of guarding the palace gates, preventing chaos, and preserving the status quo from fear of worse outcomes. When we come to them with a revolutionary proposal (meet someone inside—the Self—who can free you and those you protect from fear and inhibition), what do they do? Well, it is their job to be conservative, so sometimes they scoff or even refuse to talk, but mostly they hesitate. In either case, we must persist, kindly and respectfully, with curiosity, gratitude, and confidence that the Self in us has what they need. Eventually, sometimes very, very slowly, they become willing to try something new, and they unblend.