Internal Family Systems (IFS), developed by the family therapist Richard Schwartz, works with the many parts of a person, treating none of them as bad. It offers shamanic work a respectful way of getting to know the parts of the inner tribeInner Tribe. The community of parts-of-self that a human being actually is. Health is not one part’s triumph but a well-run tribe: every member honoured, every member doing its proper job, the Adult in charge. Read the full answer, and especially the protective parts that Therapeutic Shamanism calls fort-holdersFort-holder. A protective part of the self that stayed behind to ‘man the fort’ when we were wounded: the inner critic, perfectionist, pusher, pleaser: the loyal soldier still fighting a war that ended long ago. Usually the part that sent an orphan away, so no deep healing holds without its consent; befriended, never extracted. Read the full answer, whose consent decides whether a soul retrievalSoul retrieval. Finding an exiled soul-part and inviting it home. In the modern psyche the fort-holder who sent it away must consent first, and the retrieval itself is a beginning: the real work is integration. Read the full answer will last.
What is Internal Family Systems? #
A psychotherapy that sees each of us as a family of parts. Richard Schwartz began working this way with clients “in the early 1980s”.1 He calls the usual view of ourselves the “mono-mind belief system”, meaning “the idea that you have one mind”.2 In IFS, managers and firefighters are protective parts, and exiles are young, hurt parts that carry painful feelings and beliefs, which IFS calls burdens. Underneath them all is what Schwartz calls the Self, which he says “cannot be damaged”. A guiding principle of IFS is in the title of his book No Bad Parts: “They’re all good parts forced into roles they don’t like.”3
How Therapeutic Shamanism relates to IFS overall, and where it differs, is the subject of a separate answer: How does Therapeutic Shamanism relate to IFS, Voice Dialogue and Gestalt? This answer looks at what IFS can bring to shamanic work.
Why does a shamanic practitioner need to work with parts at all? #
Because shamanism, too, holds that we are many. We are not a single ‘I’ but are made up of different parts of self, and, as with any tribe, for our inner tribe to be healthy, each of its members needs to be honoured and understood. “We need to get to know each of our inner parts, listen to them, and honour their needs.”4 IFS has spent decades developing ways of doing this, and a shamanic practitioner can learn a lot from them. See What is the inner tribe?
How can IFS help with the fort-holder? #
By showing how to win a protector’s trust. In Therapeutic Shamanism the fort-holder is the part that stayed behind when a soul partSoul-part. A small-s, middle-world part of the self that can be lost (sent away) and can be retrieved. Not the capital-S Soul. Read the full answer left, and kept us safe the best way it could. “No deep or permanent change happens without the fort-holder’s consent. If a fort-holder part is resistant, then they are implacable.” Yet Paul Francis has come to have the utmost respect and admiration for the fort-holder. They are there to protect us.5 So “there is usually a process of negotiating with the fort-holder that needs to happen first”, and after a soul retrieval “a time of integration to be managed, as the fort-holder adjusts to the soul part being back”.6
IFS works in the same spirit. One of its rules is: “We don’t go to exiles without permission from protectors.”7 Its long experience of befriending protective parts, rather than overriding them, is a natural fit for this side of shamanic healing. See What are child, orphan, fort-holder and protector parts?
What does it look like to talk to a part? #
Something very simple. When someone says they are anxious about something coming up at work, Paul first lets them know he hears how anxious they feel, because “each part-of-self needs to feel that it is listened to, respected and understood.” Then he might wonder aloud which part of them he is talking to: “which part of them is it that is feeling anxious?” The person may find that it is a child part, their five-year-old self, and see why sending that part to work is a problem.8 This is the kind of question IFS asks all the time, and it is just as useful before and after a journey.
What does “no bad parts” offer shamanic work? #
A way of meeting every part with kindness. Schwartz’s view that every part is doing its best, in a role it never chose, matches the Therapeutic Shamanism view of a healthy inner tribe, in which every member has a place. Hierarchical ‘spirituality’ tells us “the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer and middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer parts are “corrupt” and not to be listened to or trusted.”9 IFS offers a practical way of doing the opposite.
It also guards against using spiritual practice to escape our feelings. Schwartz writes that he finds “the use of spiritual practices to transcend one’s exiles to be rampant in the communities I treat.”10 Therapeutic Shamanism makes the same warning about spiritual bypassing. See What is spiritual bypassing and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
Does IFS owe anything to shamanism? #
One senior IFS trainer thinks so. Writing on what IFS calls legacy burdens, “the intergenerational transmission of constraining, negative feelings and beliefs”, Ann Sinko traces the IFS idea of unburdening to “Shamanism, the spiritual discipline from which the IFS concept of unburdening hails.”11 Schwartz himself does not make that link, but he does write, about legacy burdens, that “Each of us carries legacy burdens inherited from our families and cultures.”12
Therapeutic Shamanism works with the same territory under the name of ancestral burdensAncestral burdens. Unresolved grief, shame, anger and trauma passed down the family line: never ours to begin with, but shaping us. Healed through recapitulation and disentanglement, becoming a ‘link-breaker’ so the burden stops here. Read the full answer: the emotional, psychological or cultural challenges and traumas that are believed to be passed down from one generation to the next within a family or community. See What are ancestral burdens and how are they passed down?
Does IFS take parts seriously as real? #
In its own way, yes, and this is one reason it sits well beside shamanism. Schwartz writes: “Parts are not imaginary products or symbols of your psyche; nor are they simply metaphors of deeper meaning. They are inner beings”.13 Therapeutic Shamanism goes one step further, in holding that not every inner being is a part of us at all, and that some parts have left altogether. That is the subject of the companion answer: What can shamanism offer IFS work?
