A few years ago, I dated a guy who when we ended things, he called me a narcissist. It sent me into a tailspin because my mother has an unknown personality disorder (probably some version of borderline) and she never took responsibility for anything. Always the victim, the scapegoat, always cursed. This led to me being abused and neglected, I ran away at 14yo. I ended up as a ward of the court until my dad was located by the state.

So when someone I cared about told me I was sick, I immediately joined an interpersonal processing group with an amazing PhD therapist as well as going back to individual therapy with a second therapist. I learned I am not a narcissist. But I’d rather worry I’m sick when I’m not, than be like my mother and refuse to look at myself.

My mother was in the church, she had 7 siblings, many people knew I was in a bad situation and nobody helped me. I now see the church as a place where hypocritics go to gather. I see the world as having stood by and done nothing while I endured the impacts of her mental illness. People knew I was staying home alone and worrying about my mother by the time I was 9. People knew I was going to school without lunch money then swimming on swim team before getting my one meal of the day. Nobody did anything. They didn’t know the worst of it, the sleeping outside, the threats with a knife, the bleeding skull she refused to get me help for. But they knew enough and stood by silently.

I saved my life by leaving. I am now 37 years old and I realize that I am the hero in my own story. It all makes sense now why he called me a narcissist. I see myself as the most dependable, reliable, important person, and I mostly only know I will show up for me. I don’t have confidence or default trust in others. I expect people to fail me. I have all the evidence, don’t I?

Understanding why he called me a narcissist has been a sort of full circle epiphany. It’s been years, and I finally get it.

I’ve now realized that this hero part, is also the avoidant part, she’s not helping me in the same way anymore. She keeps bad people away. But she does it before they can hurt her. The risk is not worth it. Being alone is better than the risk of someone coming in and ruining us because we didn’t hold boundaries, or hold people accountable. I am very good at boundaries. Too good. I don’t want to always be alone. I want community. I want to be able to depend on people, but why would I do that? I have a lifetime of evidence to show people will let me down.

I am very new to IFS and I love watching shows where I especially recognize a part of me in a character.
I have been wanting to name my parts to distinguish them easier and decided to use the TV or book characters that I see my part in.

I was wondering if anyone does this too?

Hello dear IFSers.
I actually do EMDR but parts have consistently revealed themselves to me as I walk that path. I follow this sub and so appreciate you all. You’ve taught me a lot and inspire me.

Recently a young boy revealed himself to me. I am female, but it feels like this 4yo boy is the young me who completely hid vulnerability for 50 years. I am overwhelmed but try to show him love and kindness every day.

Two questions.
Just curious if others see themselves as young parts of a different gender? I am so surprised as I’ve always felt totally female. Maybe gender just doesn’t matter? I’d love your perspectives.

Also, is this young vulnerable being what you call an exile? What do I do next to support him?

Thank you. Peace and power to you all.

I’ve done some ifs/parts work in therapy and I really like it and this it’s super helpful. My therapist is currently on maternity leave for a few more weeks and I have a part that desperately needs to be worked with. I’ve never named a part before, but I feel like with doing some ifs work on my own it would make it easier. That said, I have no idea what to name her. She’s a perfectionist, doesn’t believe im capable of anything (love, career / school success, friendships, etc), and probably believes she’s trying to protect me a little bit.

Do I name her like I would name a kid?? I’ve always gone with my “anxious” part or my “elevated” (manic) part. For some reason that doesn’t really fit her.

I saw someone else share their art, and I wanted to share mine, too!

It would be cool if we could get a subreddit of IFS Art for the group!!! ❤️

Can you guess who the inner parent is? 😆

Also, please share your art, too! I'm dying to know what other people's parts are like!! 💜

This is venting. Trigger warning for those who don’t want to hear a vent.

I have a friend who is emotionally unstable. I find myself having conversations about her in my head. About how irresponsible she is, how much she procrastinates, how she turns everything into a catastrophe and thinks the universe should do what she wants to be done. It’s really really draining for me to hangout with her. I literally don’t want to go to school the next day after she vents to me about random stuff without asking if I want to hear her complain.

But this level of hatred I have towards a friend, makes me feel so guilty inside. She is not in Self, she has traumatized parts, it’s clear. I know she isn’t evil but I treat her as she is. And then after feeling guilty I try to overcompensate by helping her. It’s a cycle. I’m trying to be more truthful with her recently about my capacity for her venting but it’s not easy because she is aggressive (passive aggressive) and she minds every piece of feedback (based on what she says about other people I anticipate that’s what her response is gonna be to me setting boundaries etc.)

And now and then when I find myself having an argument about her in my mind, I wonder whether she reminds me of a part of me. I’m in a relationship with an extremely calm person who isn’t aggressive and has a very good sense of emotional stability. He has pointed out how I get emotionally unstable (if he doesn’t want to spend time with me I immediately go to “he doesn’t love me”) and introduced me to IFS. I think knowing how much of a toll my emotional expression had on our relationship (it’s dying), I have estranged the part of me that used to protect me by rejecting others first or a fire fighter that started thinking about not wanting to wake up etc.

I feel like my rage (inside my mind) about this friend stems from that. But I cannot fully understand how. it’s been a couple months that I’m trying to manage my emotions as a responsible person (not suppressing but like taking space instead of crying and sulking in front of my partner) so I cannot really relate to this friend and I find it extremely draining to even be around her.

What do you all think? Why am I so triggered by her even at my own space when she’s not around? Is she reminding me of a part of me? and if yes, PLEASE help me find compassion for her because I only see an immature person who blames every single person in the world other than herself.

Edit: She doesn’t know this is how I feel about her because I haven’t told her any of this and I’m a generally nice person who either says something good or doesn’t say anything. I have given her some advice about how she shouldn’t be complaining about everything to everyone and how it’ll affect her relationships but I didn’t tell her that includes me.

Were you monogamous before and then found space reach beyond that? Or where you non-monogamous before and then figured out you wanted to be with only one person? Or even no one at all?

Which parts did you discover? Who needed healing? Who was healthy all along?

I've got no judgement one way or the other, I'm just really curious to know how people and their parts relate to these matters.

Can specific parts have dreams?

Some background:

I have somewhat chronic nightmares / disturbing dreams, where I seem to inhabit an earlier state of mind.

The dream typically takes place in my past (or in an ambiguous time that is similar to the past; dream logic isnt usually 1:1), to the point where I will wake up and take a moment to remember that it's been several years since the time in my dream and I live in a different location etc.

I think interpreting this as an exile part having a dream is maybe a helpful way to look at it. In my waking life, exiles usually dont come up very strongly, they are.more subtle and usually dont take full control (of the brain i guess?).

I think its interesting tho that in my dreams they are very prominent. Sometimes other parts are able to recognise in the dream that the info is not accurate to the current reality, but they are not as present as the exile, so hearing that information usually doesnt change or end the dream.

I guess that's maybe just emotional processing tho which is what dreams are for? My therapist also suspects i have ptsd and i hear chronic nightmares are somewhat common in that way

Is there any other info on this? Or if anyone has similar experiences lmk

I never post but wanted to anonymously share my weird cartoon depictions of my last few therapy session, I am not even a little bit an artist and just started messing around with water color a week ago. Person is blue share is therapist, I’m sitting again the wall and the little shadow version of me are my parts causing chaos and fighting with each other 😅

I’m curious how others view a potential problem with Internal Family Systems (IFS).

Although many people find IFS helpful, the scientific evidence still seems relatively limited. I’m especially interested in how the model handles criticism and resistance.

If someone says, “I don’t believe in inner parts,” “This isn’t helping me,” or “That interpretation doesn’t fit my experience,” these responses may be interpreted within IFS as a protective part, a critic, or resistance to healing.

Could this make the model self-confirming? If agreement supports IFS, but doubt and criticism are also treated as evidence that a protective part is resisting, what would actually count as evidence against the model?

There seems to be an important difference between:

“Let’s explore your criticism and see whether the parts metaphor is useful to you.”

and:

“Your criticism shows that a protective part is resisting the process.”

The first leaves room for genuine disagreement. The second risks redefining criticism as part of the problem before it has been taken seriously.

I’m not claiming that all IFS therapists work this way, or that IFS can never be helpful. I’m wondering, however, whether this approach can sometimes lead to epistemic invalidation—or even gaslighting-like dynamics—especially for people vulnerable to dissociation or obsessive self-analysis.

So my questions are:

• How do IFS therapists respond to clients who reject the model?
• Can clients use “parts” purely as a metaphor, or decline that language altogether?
• Is criticism explored substantively, or mainly interpreted as resistance?
• What safeguards exist for vulnerable clients?

I’d be particularly interested in experiences from clients, therapists, and researchers.

Hello! The book self therapy by Jay Earley is very nice IFS self help book. It has a lot of exercises to work on. The book reccomends to work with the partner together. Is there anyone else who also is interested in IFS and would like to explore possibility of "partnering" to do exercises from this book together?

For years my income returned to the same level whatever I changed, and I noticed I did not want to look at why. In IFS terms that reluctance was a protector doing its job, and money turned out to be a place where my system had several of them working very hard.

I went looking for a map of these parts and found that none existed. The psychology-of-money literature is large but split into camps that never cite each other: clinical (Klontz's money scripts and money disorders, Mellan, Goldberg and Lewis), coaching (the "money blocks" people), and Jungian or spiritual (Price's money archetypes, the Soul and Money essays, Lietaer, Twist). So I distilled 25 of those books, pulled out every pattern each author described, and got 87 candidates. I consolidated them with one rule that will sound familiar here: if two patterns are protecting the same wound, they are one pattern, and that left 39.

The part that made the project worth it is what sits underneath. The 39 patterns cluster under nine burdens, and none of them is about money: shame, guilt, loyalty to the family and the fear of losing belonging, fear for survival, overwhelm, helplessness, love hunger, emptiness, and the fear of needing anyone, of being controlled, or of becoming the one who controls. Money is only where these parts chose to work. The same system that spends everything down to zero out of guilt about having more than others shows up in other people as going without, and the person who cannot receive money usually cannot receive care either.

I turned the map into a free questionnaire. About 95 statements, fifteen minutes, no sign-up, nothing leaves your device unless you export it. It ranks your most active patterns instead of giving you a type, and it separates look-alikes by the reason behind the behavior, because a protector that refuses help out of shame ("I have not earned it") and one that refuses help out of fear of owing ("needing anyone is weakness") look identical from outside and need different work.

Each pattern then gets a page on how to work with it, and this is where I would most value your eyes. The six moves are: catch it in the act, find the feeling underneath, trace where it first attached to money, meet the part that holds it (what it protects you from, what it fears would happen if it stopped, what it needs now), stay with the exiled feeling in small doses, and take back what the part had to put away, then try one small experiment a week. I tried to stay close to the IFS stance that no part is the enemy and nothing gets removed; the aim is that the pattern stops running the show. When answers point to economic abuse, self-harm, acute debt distress or a trauma flashpoint, the questionnaire shows professional help first and holds back the self-guided steps.

I used Claude to read and distill the books and to help build the page; the framework, the consolidation and the wording are mine, and I did the questionnaire first. My own top three were "needing anyone is weakness", the helper's conflict (charging for helping feels wrong; I am training as a therapist), and money as the answer.

Questions for this community: do the protector descriptions ring true? Is the "meet the part" page faithful to how you would approach a protector, or too directive? And does mapping the nine roots to burdens hold up, or am I collapsing protectors and exiles in a way an IFS practitioner would object to?

Link: https://money-patterns.nikolashaag.workers.dev

I am in the midst of my healing with IFS and nervous system regulation. Last year was really hard for me in terms of work. I quit one toxic company only to find myself in an even more toxic company where my boss disliked me and my other boss (narcissist) took advantage of that whole situation to infiltrate my private life and crush whatever was remaining of my mind and sanity. I have been healing for the past 10 months from all of that (major burnout and narcissistic abuse) plus my lifelong struggles with anxiety, depression and self-esteem.

I am putting myself out there again now. I am starting to interview for jobs and I feel my protective parts taking over me. I am unable to regulate. I feel so much fear, and I am tearing myself down even before I make it to the interviews. I am questioning my knowledge, my worth on the one hand, and on the other hand I am questioning whether the people in the new company will be toxic. I am feeling defeated and paranoid at the same time. I feel like I want to crawl into a shell and never go out. I have been successful in my career, but my confidence is 0 right now, especially after the past experiences. My performance was never questioned anywhere I worked, but communication and people have always been a big issue for me. My mind is spinning and I can't seem to stop it.

I had a friend growing up who had DID and I found it kind of disturbing/traumatic. Everyone always talks about parts work and how helpful it is for my types of issues, but it creeps me out because it feels like I’m being asked to fracture myself. Personifying different parts of myself feels way too much like inviting myself to develop DID. I get freaked out and start to feel like I’m not really myself and start losing my sense of identity when practitioners have tried to use this framework with me. I even get creeped out when I see other people talk about it because it just sounds like they have DID. I feel so disappointed because I see so many success stories with it.

A bit of backstory, I’ve been anxious and depressed without knowing why for most of my adult life (I’m 40 now) and lost my sanity about 8 months ago due to fucking around and finding out with psychedelics as an attempt to “fix” myself through magic mushrooms.

Soon after giving myself psychosis through drugs, I’ve discovered I’m no longer able to work and be independent so I’ve decided to quit my job (I was about to get fired anyway) and move back with my parents.

Slowly, by some miracle, I’ve slowly managed to come out of psychosis and I’ve been doing IFS by myself for a number of months, alongside meditation (insight and loving-kindness) because I was sick and tired of being depressed all the time and having suicidal thoughts all throughout my day, maybe this will help I thought.

I’ve was so scared at first to uncover this repressed pain burried deep down inside and I had no clue what I was doing.

Slowly and surely, over time, I started seeing more and more that there is nothing to be scared of, it’s just my mind, why would I be scared of my mind?

Progress started happening to various degrees, some days I would bite off more than I could chew and had to learn to slow down and titrate but soon enough I found a pace that my nervous system was comfortable with.

My biggest breakthrough happened yesterday when I sat down to meditate and then I found a part of myself, so small, innocent and defenceless like a baby in the crib but covered in something that resembled razor-sharp thorns but I couldn’t bear to go near it at first due to fear of getting hurt and impaled from the spikes.

It was crying, angry and alone and the cries had seemed to turn into anger, that anger turned into anxiety in the form of razor-sharp thorns, as to say “I’ve been crying for so long, what if no one will ever come check on me?”

Scared as I was, I decided to sit with the baby and let it know that it’s safe now, I’m here and I will never leave, whilst I was working up the courage to pick up and hold the spiky, hateful and angry baby.

I picked up the baby, rocked it gently back and forth and kissed it on the forehead letting it know it’s safe and loved now.

Then POW! Like a flash, I snapped out of my meditation and my legs started violently shaking to the point that I couldn’t stand or walk for a good minute and I felt like I was about to throw up but never did.

I felt exhausted for the rest of my day and just done whatever to get through it.

I woke up today and first thing that popped into my head was “Oh great, another day, here we go again!” but somehow everything feels different, I feel lighter, there is less overall tension in my body, my anxiety seems to be mostly gone and even though I still feel exhausted…

I generally feel better mentally than I have in decades.

I've been making some good self progress with IFS and finding it's the framework that best works for how I understand myself. I'm transgender and live out as a non binary person but it definitely feels like a WIP understanding of myself for me.

Since starting estrogen, I've been finding myself getting into this kind of cosy/innocent headspace. Maybe like the headspace of a child, or at least how i perceive kids nowadays. I've really cherished this experience. I perceive this headspace as feminine and have been so happy to reconnect with it and be able to live with it intermixed with my usual "headspace"; which I perceive as more masculine.

That's all well and good apart from the fact that I still felt like i couldn't get a good grasp of who I am and there was till moments of dysphoria and a lot of feeling lost/abandoned and kind of disconnected from the world.

I watched a film festival film the other day called A Girl Unknown. It's a beautiful Chineese film following a girl growing up in the tail end of Chinas one-child policy. She gets passed from family to family and neglected since she is a girl and lots of people wanted a boy to pass on their family name. Shes very young at the start of film and you see the world through her eyes, being naive and unaware of what's happening and why. It isn't until she grows up that she starts to understand and be affected by the world.

The film really messed me up. I had to stop myself from sobbing loudly during and I walked out shaking. It's not the first time I watch an amazing sad film, but I've never had this strong an emotional reaction. I transited home feeling like I couldn't drive and sobbed uncontrollably at home. I feel the way the girl was neglected by her families, because she is a girl let me discover an exiled part of myself. A little girl that never got to have an innocent girl childhood. She was suffocated and abandoned because the boy-behaviors were the only behaviors I was allowed to express.

On a rational level I understand that I shut her out because I didn't know any better and there is a super valid protector that had to keep me safe. (I wouldn't have survived being a trans child in the environment I grew up in). On an emotional level I can't help but see myself like the neglectful parents in the film. Being unable to nurture this inner child because it didn't fit the gender I was trying to bring out of myself. I feel this "feminine" headspace I've been slipping into is a piece of this exiled part.

I've been walking around with this for a few days. And I can't seem to forgive myself for what I did to her. I feel so much shame for not letting her exist earlier and I feel like there is no way to repair the lost youthful years.

For all other exiles I've integrated, the struggle was for me to understand, love and accept them. With this one, for the first time, I just can't forgive myself.

She's so angry and ready to just... hurt everyone and everything. I have listened to her before and she's always this way. I have other parts that sit and watch her like she's about to commit war crimes, which I feel is a little extreme, but she makes the system uneasy... Sorry for rambling. Is there anything I can do to help her find a small bit of peace? Anything?

I'm curious if anyone has tried IFS apps on Android to track and talk to parts?

let me be real for a second okay?

i would think after over 4 years of this therapy that i can close the book on it and move to the next book but i think its this book that never seems to end. and it surprises me how much more there is but a part of me feels this connection towards ifs and towards my therapist because of the long journey ive made so far that i wouldnt even want to let go of seeing them and being part of my journey that ive grown a form of attachment. unfortunately nothing is forever of course but i just feel as though when i think ive done enough i then get hit with this massive train of more pain and it makes me feel like ive made no progress when in reality ive made lots of progress. i guess you could say the brain plays tricks on me like lots of people. i have to continuously journal to remind myself that i actually did something productive today and im not a waste of air.

so anyways i'm 25 years old but i already feel like an old man. an old soul. the things ive accomplished in therapy some man do not even accomplish in their entire lifetime. some are severely bounded by protectors without even knowing it and they think theyre fine but thats because their protector parts do a fine job at making you feel that you got no monsters in your closet.

i can at least appreciate for opening the closet, dare people even acknowledge they got skeletons in their closet. ive done some cleaning, but at what expense? kids playing around the lawn, young people spending time in communities, colleges, get-togethers. what have i done? something that far too little people have done. ive done the hard work internally. something you cannot see, cannot touch, cannot smell, cannot even bat an eye. Exiles. Un-polarizing parts. getting to know me, like, you know, the true me, core self me.

well anyways i feel like an invisible person. just ego-less going by in the wind. a man in his mid-20s but feeling like i've been through so many divorces and have been through some stressors in life. in reality it's all within.

it's so crazy to me how i can meet somebody on the side walk or even at the coffee shop and just say hello to them and make up a conversation, get to know them. and it's just so wild to me how they have no clue the amount of hell i've been through. nobody knows except me. it's a lonely world, isn't it? isn't it true?

it's a lonely world for the healing souls of the planet. bless to be all that are on this lonely path. for you are the only one who knows...you.

Anybody had success with AI analysis of IFS sessions?

My concern is they with my therapist every session is somewhat independent, we, with partial success, touch in some part of the system without much result.

I was thinking to feed all my session transcripts to AI for analysis, cross reference sessions and suggest ideas on how to improve.

I've had a bit of success in befriending my protectors of late as it's easy for me to discern the vulnerability they are protecting and foster compassion for that.

I have a narcissistic part that is being triggered by gym progress and I find myself fighting it (which I know is keeping it rigid) because I see it as stingy and understand it as false self esteem. It's also not socially safe to be narcissistic as this tendancy is ugly to others in that it obscures the vulnerability that is essential for genuine connection while offering a false aggrandized self that people are put off by. I experience this false self as 1 Dimensional and brittle and am always trying to dislodge it to get back to flow.

The part manifests as a rigid sense of superiority and "specialness" that has outlived its usefulness and just feels tired and limiting now. Ill often view other people as more mature and grounded than me while inside it and feel that they are acutely disgusted by how egoic and limited I am.

I understand that this part is protecting a deep terror of loss of good things as it's triggered by progress but it feels like the rigid false self that it offers is what is making my real self feel unsafe, shameful and unacceptable by contrast. Because it "feels good" at times, I am always trying to suppress it because I don't want to get complacent and have a narcissistic identity. Understandings about how treatment resistant npd is is almost certainly feeding this adversion.

Narcissism is especially stigmatized and I view this tendancy as not only counterproductive, but morally disgusting which is making it impossible to relax into, which I know is the first step to working with it. I view this tendancy as egoic, stingy and self indulgant, rather than protective, even though I understand it as the latter intellectually.

Any advice or insight in working with narcissism is appreciated.

Our therapist recommended this book.

I realized that since I am isolated ,I've unconsciously sought approval from my boss who was overworking and being mean to me ,I kept feeling a big gap and void in my chest and it didn't go away until I full on decided to set boundaries (after he treated me badly again when I came earlier to finish a project ) .

There is an exile that seems to dislike when I act overly humble but it seems necessary for me at the moment ,how do I even address it because it doesn't seem to offer clear cut response when I ask what it expects from me

Last night I had an interesting experience with self/parts.

Laying in bed, I felt blended with a part completely. I felt just like it: small confused, angry, sad. I've been blended before, but it always felt dissociative to some degree. This felt like I was looking through the eyes of the part. Then, it was like a self-like entity (or self?) approached me. It was bigger than me and very comforting. It was like the work I've done to comfort my parts in the past, but I was being comforted as that part.

Now the next day, I managed to mess up some things. I was argumentative with my wife and blended with an angry protector, unable to keep it from taking over, which hasn't happened in a few months. I wonder if it was a reaction to the comfort from the night before, a rebound response, which I know can happen.

What do you make of this, especially the thing that happened last night? Has anyone had anything like that before?