You And You And You

You are not one person.

In psychology, this idea is known as Internal Family Systems (IFS) theory. The basic premise is that human minds are made up of distinct ‘parts’. These parts can be different drives or different ages of our personality that remain in us. The splits can also be created by other contexts, like intense emotion or demanding, disjointed lifestyles.

There are echoes of IFS in the earlier work of psychoanalysts like Carl Jung. Jung emphasised that improvement was about bringing together and ordering the different aspects of ourselves. In his model, this was known as integration.

What Family Systems Means For You

Sometimes we find that we can’t trust our own behaviour to fulfil our promises to ourselves. We say “I’ll finish that task”, or “I’ll quit smoking this week”, or maybe “I’ll get in shape in the New Year.”

Internal Family Systems theory points us to the fact that there is no one ‘you’ to make promises or receive them. Instead, there is a coalition of ‘you’s all vying for their time on the microphone. And until you start to really try to say your feelings (out loud and in detail), the parts will continue squabbling and getting in each other’s way.

The aim is not just to learn what your parts are trying to say, but also to foster a compromise between these internal agendas and your daily lifestyle.

Internal Family Systems and Self-Hatred

Internal Family Systems can help us understand harmful patterns like self-hatred. Let’s leave aside for the moment the philosophical question about how self-hatred is possible when there is no singular ‘self’. In practical terms, self-hatred is lamentably common and very dangerous as a mindset.

IFS helps us shift our agenda from eliminating negative emotions to coordinating them.

If there is some part of you or your past that you just can’t forgive, then know that it is not going anywhere. It can only be reasoned with and given its proper place.

Self-acceptance is far more productive than so-called self-improvement. We have to learn to stop fighting ourselves and build with the materials we are given.

Maybe (under IFS) you are not one person, but if you bring your competing drives together, you can be more than the sum of your parts.

“IFS helps us shift our agenda from eliminating negative emotions to coordinating them.”