r/InternalFamilySystems

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.

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.

TLDR: If anyone has any tips on how to work with a part that believes they are not good enough or capable of succeeding in anything, please let me know.

Reaching out to Reddit because my therapist is on maternity leave through the end of this month and I have a part very much in need of some support right now.

In the last 6 weeks I (28f) started nursing school pre reqs (I have a bachelors in PR) and started a brand new job. I also am trying to maintain friendships and date. It’s been a lot and it’s really starting to affect my mood, I have bipolar 2 so my mood is something I try to keep in check.

I have a part of me that truly doesn’t believe in good enough for any of this and is pushing for perfection in every area and it’s just getting to be too much. I got a 79 on a test two weeks ago and this part essentially shut me down for a week because it’s not good enough. This part has me spiraling into self shame spirals if I get one point off. Obviously, perfection isn’t possible and this isn’t challenging me in a healthy way. I know that this isn’t helpful, but this part is just taking over and being pretty relentless.

Until my therapist gets back, I’m kinda on my own. Today I attempted to talk with my mom who is very solution focused which is really, really unhelpful for this part and I missed a group run that could’ve been helpful for me socially and instead just broke down (which was probably also needed). If anyone has any tips on how to work with a part that believes they are not good enough or capable of succeeding in anything, please let me know. My first thought is it create an accomplishment log sorta like a habit tracker. Like, I texted a friend (proof I’m capable of friendship) and I went on a date (proof I’m capable of love). Like , this part needs basic care right now.

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?

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 have cptsd from csa
He’s always saying “NO SLEEP!! Not safe!! HOLD ME ROCK Me!!! How do I make him feel safe? All he does is scream from the second the sun goes to bedtime. My anxiety is through my heart goes crazy I sleep with a nightlight and a stuffed weighted whale shark plush

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.

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.

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

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