Your Inner Child and Internal Family Systems

Inner child work was very popular in the mid to late 80’s, and in the early process of my own healing journey, it was part and parcel of the therapy world. How I see and work with my inner children or “my littles,” continues to change over time. 

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From a practical perspective, I think about my inner children as parts of me that had intense experiences, both beautiful and difficult, that made an impression on my psyche and nervous system. In fact, I think of them as wired into my nervous system as the developers or co-creators of my internal working models. 

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Because of this, I do my best to collaborate with them, find out what they need, and work to heal and integrate them, allowing them to soften and add their unique gifts to my grown-up wise Self.

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The best theoretical framework I have found to inform and systemize this part of my practice is Internal Family Systems (IFS). IFS therapy is a psychotherapeutic approach developed by Richard C. Schwartz that focuses on understanding and working with various parts of an individual's personality. Its baseline assumption is that multiplicity is a normal part of the human psyche. 

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The fundamental concept of IFS is that individuals have an "internal family" of different parts, each with its own unique beliefs, emotions, and behaviors. The parts fall into three categories: 

1. Exiles: the young parts of us that have sometimes overwhelming emotions and needs
2. Managers: slightly older parts doing their best to make sure that the exiles do not overwhelm the system and make sure we can function in our day-to-day. Usually, this means keeping the exiles under control. 
3. Firefighters: who come in when they feel the system is threatened and work to distract the other parts through often unhealthy behaviors like addiction or risky behaviors

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Of course, it’s not all inner child in IFS, there is also the whole, wise, curious, courageous part of ourselves that IFS refers to as the Self, or what I would refer to as the True Self our Soul. In the IFS approach, the therapist or practitioner helps the client identify and communicate with these parts, facilitating a deeper understanding of their roles and intentions. 

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The goal is to establish a harmonious relationship among all the parts, leading to increased self-awareness, self-compassion, and emotional healing while increasingly becoming "Self-led." This is similar to part of the process we are working toward. There are exercises throughout The Anjuli Method that will help you to identify, understand, and work with your ‘littles”. 

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The goal is to establish a harmonious relationship among all the parts, leading to increased self-awareness, self-compassion, and emotional healing while increasingly becoming "Self-led."

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These are a result of my own journey, and more recently informed by some of the ideas from IFS. If there is anything directly from IFS, I will attribute it accordingly. I am grateful for this framework because it introduced me to the idea of how to identify managers, firefighters, and exiles. 

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While I have worked with all three categories of inner littles over the years, I didn’t have the IFS framework which helped me understand how they tend to show up differently in their roles and actions. It also helped me identify where in the body they tend to show up. This has helped me be more systematic about my approach to my littles as well as noticing that certain patterns of symptoms or mood states can be an indication that a part is trying to take over and drive the bus!