Patients have found it equally liberating. In the last few years, IFS has begun popping up everywhere, from the bestselling new memoir by Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness to an essay on Oprah.com by Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love fame to podcasts by Alanis Morissette and Van Ness to Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle site Goop. British cartoonist Mardou is publishing an ongoing series of comics about it. Pioneering neuroscientist Ed Boyden recently revealed that although he has devoted his professional life to studying the brain using optogenetics (genetically modifying animals so their neurons can be controlled with light), he studies his own mind using IFS therapy. An enthusiastic online community has begun sharing stories of ongoing IFS work and tips for working with recalcitrant parts.
“I bring it up as much as I can because it’s really changed my life for the better,” says Nancy-Lee Mauger, an artist and French hornist in Boston, who first encountered IFS after receiving a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder in 2010. “There’s an old idea of [DID patients] being shattered or fractured from a single entity, and then to bring something new to the table, to say, ‘No, no, everybody’s built this way, and they have parts that have different roles,’ it has been life-changing and life-saving.”
In the IFS view, DID represents the extreme point of a spectrum we all lie on, typically developing in response to severe childhood trauma. Mauger was abused by a houseguest as a child and suffered further sexual trauma in adulthood. IFS therapy has helped her develop a positive relationship with an alter ego named Sally who used to engage in various destructive behaviors. It has also helped her get in touch with parts she hadn’t been aware of.
“For me, the most amazing thing was learning about a part of me that was suicidal and knowing that that was just a single part of me. It wasn’t my entire being. That changed my world. I try to share that with a lot of people because I know a lot of people who get very depressed and sometimes feel suicidal. If you can step back from that feeling and realize that it’s just a part of you that’s trying to take away your pain and suffering, then you can move through it and find a different way to deal with it, to help that part.”
If there is indeed a spectrum of internal multiplicity, Maya Bourdeau, founder and co-CEO of a neuroscience-based market research and strategy firm in San Francisco, lies at the opposite end of it from Mauger. She had no sense at all of being anything but a unified personality when her therapist first suggested IFS.
“I was resistant to it,” she recalls. “I just thought it was strange. I’m such a rational person — I’m not a woo-woo person at all. I do spreadsheets.”
A Harvard Business School graduate with an undergraduate Harvard degree in psychology and an illustrious business record, Bourdeau was presenting global market research reports to major multinationals in her twenties despite being so depressed she could barely get out of bed.
“I was kind of like the textbook definition of a successful career woman, and yet on the inside, I was a complete mess,” she says.
After two years of work on her depression, her therapist brought up IFS again. Bourdeau finally trusted her enough to try it.
“I think once the trust is there and you’re able to let go, our minds naturally do this,” she says. “All of a sudden, I saw in my mind such vivid, vivid things.”
In her first sessions, she worked with a despairing part that thought there was no reason to go on and a crusading part she calls “Joan of Arc” that rushed in to try to help others, often doing more harm than good. Describing the way she came to love and understand them and the transformations they underwent in response still brings tears to her eyes. IFS no longer seems so strange to her; she has even managed to reconcile it with her neuroscience training.
“For me, the most amazing thing was learning about a part of me that was suicidal and knowing that that was just a single part of me. It wasn’t my entire being. That changed my world.”
“We naturally think in stories and metaphors,” she says. “It’s how we encode memory, so in a way, going through metaphor to access the subconscious is the most natural way to do it.”
She also credits IFS with helping her connect with and heal an angry part that came near to destroying her marriage.
“[IFS] absolutely changed my life,” she says. “If more people knew how effective it was, how wonderful that would be.”
Robert Fox, a therapist in Woburn, Massachusetts, also wishes more people knew about IFS. Diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder at age 21 after a lifetime of unusual compulsions, he spent 23 years receiving the standard care: cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and exposure response prevention (ERP). Neither had much effect, especially ERP, which involved repeatedly exposing himself to things he was anxious about in the hopes of gradually habituating to them.
“When you think about it, it’s a very painful method of therapy,” he says.
Fox discovered IFS in 2008. Before, he had always been encouraged to think of his compulsions as meaningless pathologies. Now, for the first time, they began making sense to him as the behavior of protectors who were trying to manage the underlying shame and fear of exiles.
After two particularly powerful unburdenings, his symptoms abated by 95% and stayed that way.
“[OCD] used to be almost like kryptonite around my neck when I would have serious flare-ups,” he says. “I feel a lot of freedom and peace and I really owe it to Dick [Schwartz] and the model.”
Fox now practices IFS with his own OCD patients. He is haunted by a memory of a germophobic woman with OCD whom he met once while she was hospitalized. As part of her ERP therapy, the therapists took her into the bathroom and had her wipe her hands over the toilet and sink and then rub them through her hair. She wasn’t permitted to shower until the next morning.
“I would love to see a study on IFS and OCD,” Fox says, “because if we were to march over to your local hospital, they would still be doing ERP in the unit with their clients, and it just doesn’t need to be that way. There is this other model of therapy that I think works wonders.”
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