Preparing for Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS) - As a Client

Transcript of video (please pardon the imperfect translation to written word):

Hi, everyone. My name is Tim Holtzman. I'm the director of Winding River Psychotherapy Services. In this video today, I'm going to be talking about how you as a client can be best prepared to do Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS). This video is not going to be so much about internal family systems therapy as a whole. There'll be other videos and blog posts for that. A disclaimer to start is that I always like to let consumers know that it's really important in videos like this to really not just take what you're hearing at face value, but to really let the information come into you and to really check it out, to really see is what is being said true for my healing and my growth. If you can say yes to that question, then you know you're on the right track.

Let's begin. With internal family systems therapy, we consider it a limbic system therapy or a right brain therapy. What this means is that there's less focused on prefrontal cortex or left brain therapy, which is more verbal content, more of the thinking mind, and more on the limbic system, which is more sort of the older brain, the more unconscious brain. The limbic system speaks less in verbal content and more in non-verbal content such as emotions, body sensations, imagery, memories, beliefs. It's really important to slow down in a therapy like internal family systems. We actually invite you, the client, to close your eyes, most sessions, and to slow down enough to be able to notice some of these more unconscious, automatic processes that happen inside you. That's where some deeper level change can happen. That's where some more deeper and more significant change can happen when we work on that level. The second thing is that we use the term “parts” in internal family systems. What a part is essentially is a mini program that might be operating within you. A good way to think about this is that we human beings are very complex systems. We have all kinds of different behaviors, all kinds of different strategies we need to live a life. Over time, we develop little mini programs or little parts of ourselves that work especially well when we first develop them. They operate unconsciously eventually and then they could be operating and acting out in our lives in ways that we don't even know. We treat these as parts. We'll talk more about that as we go in this video. Essentially, we treat them as parts so that we can hone in on them and we can perhaps update them so that they serve us better.

The first point I want to make is that you as the client who is in internal family systems therapy, it's really important for you to try to come into sessions and work on one thing each session. Of course, day-to-day stressors happen and there is room for you to come in and talk more generally about your life some weeks, but I generally encourage clients to try to aim for at least half the sessions or more where they're coming in and they're working on one specific aspect of their life that they want to see change on. With internal family systems, we generally want you to choose a part and you can either come prepared to work on a part of yourself or you can spend the first five or ten minutes using this session to kind of decide what's alive for you in that session, what feels important to work on that session and then spend the rest of the session talking about that choice or that part. It's also useful sometimes in internal family systems therapy to choose to continue working on a part from a previous session. Now a part is generally a sort of theme from your life that you keep running into or a challenge you keep running into or it could be a personality quality that you know about yourself that you're wanting to see change on. So the basic point here is that as an internal family systems therapy client, we want you to really try to focus on what matters most on what you really want to see change on.

So the second point I want to make is that it's really important for you the client to learn how to work with the limbic system. As I mentioned earlier, the limbic system speaks less in verbal content and speaks more in body sensations, emotions, imagery, memories, beliefs, and so it's a less familiar part of the brain for most of us. We're all pretty good about talking about our thoughts. Some of us are good about talking about our emotions, but less of us are good about accessing sort of more of this non-verbal content of the limbic system. And so one of the tricks is that in order to really talk about our experience of the limbic system, we often do need to put words to it. So we kind of use the verbal brain to interpret the non-verbal brain and your therapist will help you get good at that. So another key of working with the limbic system is that it often requires you, the client, to take some intuitive leaps to even perhaps let yourself be a little bit creative in describing some stuff. An example is that maybe you notice a body sensation and we as a therapist try to keep you with that body sensation. Maybe it's like a feeling in your chest or in your stomach and we might ask you like, okay, are you noticing any heat there or coolness there? Does it seem to be a more of a pushing sensation or pulling sensation? And so it requires you to kind of really feel into your experience and to maybe to name some things you're not comfortable with. Same thing with images is we might ask you to stay with the image and see how it unfolds in your mind. Now the thing about working with the limbic system is that it sometimes does require some kind of slightly woo-woo language. When we're working with parts, what we're really doing is we're working with neural networks, sort of parts of your brain that have stored memories and experiences and kind of built up some strategies. And we often try to have your different parts become more in harmony or cooperate more. And so this often will require some questions that you're not familiar with and see if it feels okay to answer those questions. And then if something just feels too strange, you know, you're always welcome to just say so.

The third point I want to make is that it's really important for you, the client in IFS therapy, to try to be as kind and gentle to yourself and to all of your different parts of your personality. So what we know from ancient traditions such as Buddhism is that when we react with criticism or react with frustration towards ourselves, we tend to inflame our emotional system in unproductive ways. The analogy I always like to give is like when you throw a rock on a lake, you can see this really nice, neat, clean, you know, sort of ricochet on the lake. You see the ripples really cleanly. Throw one rock and then throw a second rock and it's just complete chaos, such as the mind too. And so if we can practice meeting our various parts with kindness and gentleness, we can see more clearly, we can feel more clearly, and the sessions go much more productively. Of course, that's not always possible. We will at times get upset at ourselves or feel frustrated towards ourselves. That's welcomed as well.

The fourth point I want to make is that for you, the client coming into IFS therapy, it's really important that you are willing to embrace feeling some emotional pain in sessions on a scale of one to 10 with one being very little emotional discomfort and 10 being very high emotional discomfort. It's pretty important that you're feeling at least a three to a six, because if you're not feeling some discomfort, some emotional discomfort, then you're probably not getting much out of the session. We also encourage clients to let us know if the emotional discomfort is too high. If it's getting to an eight, that probably means it's too much and that the session might not be helpful. So one of the beautiful things about feeling emotional discomfort is that it is very likely to be a sure sign of growth. We know when we're feeling some emotional difficulty that we're sort of headed in the right direction. It doesn't mean that some pain is not useful because that is the case sometimes, but if you trust your therapist and you feel like the therapy is productive, then most likely feeling pain in session is a good sign.

The good news here is that after a good IFS session, you're more likely than not to actually feel really good to feel like you did do some good work and to feel like you have released some emotions that are in your way. We're going to of course be as gentle as possible and try to not have you feel pain that you don't need to feel. But again, the most important thing is that you're willing to come in and look at things that aren't easy and to feel some emotional pain.

The fifth point I want to make is regarding allowing your therapist to guide you through the process of IFS therapy. What this means is that we encourage you, the client, to try to let yourself be led and to kind of flow with what the therapist is leading you through as much as possible. This doesn't mean that you are passive and you don't speak up. It's very important for you to speak up and to name it when something doesn't feel right to you. However, as much as possible, try to flow with it. With IFS, it's almost like a psychological surgery. If we use the analogy of someone getting physical surgery, perhaps to reset a bone in their leg. What does the doctor do? The doctor first cuts the skin, then kind of folds it out of the way, then accesses the bone from the right angle and resets it. So it is the same with IFS therapy is that we're first getting to know certain parts of you where then having those parts kind of make way and kind of get out of the way and then access some of the deeper wounds or hurts that you've experienced in your past and then help heal those wounds. Now with blocks, there will probably be some blocks that come up psychologically as you go through the process and it is so much more helpful for the therapist if you are able to be explicit about blocks to the process versus some clients might unconsciously or unknowingly exert some passive resistance and that passive resistance is going to delay the results of therapy much more than if you speak up about what's going on for you.

That's what I have for you today. I hope it was helpful and if you want to learn more about internal family systems therapy or other types of therapy that we use, you can stay in touch with us via our blog and our website is windingriverpsychotherapyservices.com. We're mainly an online therapy group. We specialize in online IFS therapy, EMDR therapy, anxiety therapy, and couples therapy. So thanks again for stopping by and be well.