Daniel Goldberg interviews Richard Schwartz, PhD

Accessing Disowned Parts of the Self:

An Internal Family Systems Approach to Couples Therapy

September 28, 2014

Daniel:  There are so many models for doing couples therapy today. Can you say something about what's drawing so many therapists to your model of Internal Family Systems or IFS?

Richard:  well, I think that many therapists sense from their clients the existence of what I call "parts" and are actually looking for a way to help clients work with these parts that get in their way so much.  Most couples can learn communication skills and do well with that and they feedback what they hear from their partner and so on, but as soon as their partner touches something, it feels like an invisible bone bruise on their arm or their body. As soon as the topic goes to one of those [sensitive places], it's like this big explosion occurs inside of us.  All the skills go out the window and they just go off on each other in a big reaction. Unless you have a way to actually go to those wounds and heal them, then the communication skills are only of limited use.  So IFS is a very clear path to helping people get to those wounded parts and then healing them. That's one answer, and we'll talk about more ways that IFS is useful in the workshop.

Daniel: So often couples are caught in this cycle of blame, and maybe couples therapy more than anything else attempts to redirect that blame which is being directed towards one's partner to see what's getting activated inside one's self.  Is that what you're trying to talk about in trying to explain how these parts get triggered?

Richard:  yes, that's part of it.  When we find a partner and an intense infatuation develops, it's often because the other person looks like they could actually take care of these very sad or hurt parts of us. Finally, we've found the one who will make those parts feel a lot better.  And these parts are kind of exiled because we tend to lock those parts up. Those exiles attach to our partner who then becomes the kind of "good" caretaker that they finally have found. Unfortunately, because these parts are stuck in the past with parents or caretakers and they'd carry a lot of pain from those times, they're looking for someone who resembles those people. Our partner. Inadvertently, often hurts us in one of those bone bruise kind of reactions, and cannot consistently take care of those parts in the way we feel that we need. So, inevitably these other parts of us try to protect those exiled parts and they'll jump into our relationship and will either try to force our partner to change back into the one who can take care of these [exiled] parts, and that would be the blaming kind of thing, or will try to get us to change so that our partner will go back to being the kind of person they're "supposed" to be. So we might try to lose weight or we might try be nicer, whatever, or when these things don't often work, there's a protector that will come in and have us give up on this partner and try to find the real one whose supposed to really take care of us...or give up on the healer being another person and we get into work or drinking or something like that.

So couples come in, usually, in one of those protective places. One partner is blaming the other, one may be blaming themselves, or maybe they're blaming each other.  Maybe one partner has a foot out the door and the other is terrified of that and is trying to change, so the common patterns you see in couples can be accounted for by which protector each partner is in.  But each of them is trying to have the other one be what I call the "primary caretaker" of them.

Daniel:  So would you say that generally one of your goals is to have people turn towards self as opposed to their partner?

Richard:  Exactly. So, we're trying to achieve what I call a "u-turn" in focus so that they focus on themselves as being the primary caretaker or their own parts as opposed to their partner who now can be freed up to be a secondary caretaker rather than the primary caretaker. And when you can achieve that, it makes a huge difference.

Daniel: It probably takes the pressure off of the partner and increases a sense of aliveness.

Richard:: Exactly.  The partner feels this huge relief because they feel all this controlling [energy] and reactivity and that every little move they make doesn't create another big storm.

Daniel:  so, one last question, Dick.  You're presentation is sponsored by the Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (CPPNJ) and the New Jersey Center for Couples Therapy Training (NJCTTP), so many in the audience will have psychoanalytic sensibilities. The couples therapy training program within the institute has a systemic-psychoanalytic framework at its core and I think there's some synergies with what you describe in IFS.  Psychoanalytic approaches to couples therapy look for enactments, i.e. how objects live inside each of us and how partners recreate neglecting or rejecting scenarios with the other, with these enactments eventually leadIng couples to feel unsafe, to fight or flee from the other, in order to protect themselves.  I wonder whether you think IFS has a similar (or different) perspective?

Richard: I would say both.  Similar in the sense that what analysts call "objects" are what we call "parts" except that the idea in analysis, I think, is that these are purely internalizations or introjects that are bundles of energy that came into us, or maybe are the energy of our parents in some form or another. My experience is that these internalizations or what we call a "burden" attach to the parts and drive the way they operate, but aren't who they really are. So if you've got a part, like a critical voice like your mother inside, for example, and went to that voice and got curious about it and asked a lot of questions, it would tell you that it's not really your mother. It may just be a part of you that's trying to keep you safe by making you feel bad, keep you from taking a risk, and it's using your mother's voice to do that by carrying her energy.  If you were to unload that mother energy, it would transform into this naturally valuable asset of you.

Daniel: Do you mean the part of you that could be more risk taking and access more core aspects of yourself?

Richard:  Often, yeah, or it might just become a kind of advisor as opposed to being a critic all the time. So, there's room in IFS for internalization and inner objects, but they sell the parts short if you think that's all they are. So the parts have a function and sometimes they get stuck with that mother [or father] energy in an effort to do its job.

Daniel:  Thank you, Dick, and we look forward to hearing more from you on November 8.