Part Two of Three
In the first part of this series, I wrote about the importance of reframing behavior as communication rather than as defiance. That reframe changes a great deal for a family, but it leaves a further question unanswered. If behavior is communication, then who or what is doing the communicating?
Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems model offers one of the more useful ways I know to approach that question. IFS asks us to consider that what we experience as contradiction, resistance, impulsivity, anger, avoidance, or self-destruction may not represent the whole person at all. It may instead represent a part of the person, and that part is very often working to protect something. For families and for clinicians alike, this distinction can fundamentally change the way difficult behavior is understood.
We Are All Made of Parts
One of the foundational ideas in Internal Family Systems is that multiplicity is normal. All of us have multiple components or parts. There may be a part of us that longs for connection while another part is frightened of it. There may be a part that desperately wants change while another part quietly resists it. There may be a part that wants sobriety and another part that reaches for a substance the moment distress becomes unbearable.
Within a single person there may be a competent professional, an angry adolescent, a frightened child, a perfectionist, a caretaker, a relentless critic, a rebel, and a part that wants nothing more than for everyone to leave them alone. These internal contradictions do not in themselves indicate pathology. They are a feature of being human.
Schwartz’s work invites us to become curious about these parts rather than moving immediately to eliminate them. Instead of asking why someone would do such a thing, we can ask what this part is trying to do for them. That is a very different clinical question, and it tends to produce very different answers.
The Protective Intention Beneath Destructive Behavior
One of the most important premises in IFS is that behaviors that have become profoundly destructive often originated as attempts at protection. Families understandably struggle with this idea. It is difficult to see how the part that drinks could be protective, or how the part that lies, lashes out, refuses treatment, isolates, restricts food, spends compulsively, takes sexual risks, or disappears into the internet for days at a time could possibly be trying to help.
The answer is that protection and health are not the same thing. A protective strategy can become dangerous and badly outdated while continuing to serve a real function. A substance may quiet an anxiety the person cannot otherwise tolerate. Anger may hold vulnerability at a safe distance. Control may create predictability in a world that once felt chaotic, and perfectionism may stand between a person and their shame. Withdrawal may guard against rejection, while lying may guard against the punishment or abandonment that person learned long ago to anticipate. Refusing help may protect against the terror of having to depend on someone else.
The behavior may be causing enormous harm in the present while the protective system that generates it remains organized around a danger the person learned about in the past. Recognizing this tells us where the intervention actually needs to go, and it does so without lowering anyone’s expectations of the person.
Managers, Firefighters, and Exiles
IFS describes several ways that parts attempt to organize and defend the internal system. Some parts function as managers, working proactively to keep pain from breaking through in the first place. They tend to show up as perfectionism, hypervigilance, people pleasing, intellectualization, achievement, rigidity, or unremitting self-criticism, and their underlying message is usually some version of the belief that if everything can be kept under control, nothing terrible will happen.
Other parts function as firefighters. They come online after the emotional pain has already broken through, and their task is to put it out as quickly as possible. Substance use frequently operates this way, as do compulsive eating, self-harm, rage, risk taking, excessive gaming, compulsive sexual behavior, impulsive spending, and the retreat into an online world. The firefighter role has no interest in tomorrow because its entire purpose is to stop the pain now.
Underneath both groups of protectors, IFS describes vulnerable parts called exiles, which carry the experiences the whole system has organized itself to keep at bay: fear, shame, grief, loneliness, humiliation, abandonment, and trauma. Once that structure becomes visible, behavior that appeared irrational begins to reveal an internal logic.
The Family Has Parts Too
The framework becomes considerably more powerful when we extend it past the identified loved one, because families have protective parts as well. A frightened mother may have a part that monitors everything. A father who is terrified of losing his child may have a part that becomes angry and demanding. A spouse may have a part that rescues, removing consequences as fast as they appear. A sibling who has lived through years of chaos may have a part that has concluded there is nothing left to care about. Other family members become the researcher, the fixer, the peacekeeper, the financial rescuer, or the one who insists that everyone simply needs to move on.
Underneath most of these behaviors sits fear. What if they die? What if this happens again? What if I say the wrong thing and it turns out to be the thing that pushes them over? What if I stop helping and everything falls apart? What if I trust them and get hurt all over again?
When our attention stays fixed on the loved one’s behavior, we miss the extraordinary amount of adaptation taking place throughout the rest of the family. Everyone develops a strategy for surviving the crisis, and in time those strategies begin to interact with one another. One person’s pursuit activates another person’s withdrawal. One person’s fear activates another person’s anger. Rescuing invites dependency, and control invites rebellion. Before long, the family has become organized around protection rather than connection.
When Parts Become Polarized
This is one of the places where IFS proves especially useful in family work, because protective parts can become polarized against each other. One part insists that they have to be saved while another insists they have to be allowed to hit bottom. One parent argues for compassion and the other argues for consequences. One sibling cannot bear the thought of abandoning them, and another cannot bear to keep living this way.
Families come to believe that one of these positions must be right and the other wrong. In my experience, both positions are usually organized around fear, and both are attempts to protect the same person. When that becomes visible, the conversation changes. Rather than asking who is right, we can ask what each person is afraid will happen if they stop doing what they have been doing. That question tends to take a family somewhere considerably more useful.
The Self Beneath the Protection
At the center of Schwartz’s model is the concept of Self. Self is best understood as the grounded, compassionate, and connected presence that becomes more accessible as protective parts are relieved of the burden of running the entire system. It is not itself another, separate part. Schwartz describes the qualities of Self as curiosity, compassion, calm, clarity, confidence, courage, creativity, and connectedness.
Of these, curiosity may be the most immediately practical, because curiosity creates room. Asking why someone is doing this to us closes a conversation, while asking what happens inside them just before the behavior occurs opens one. Asking why they will not simply accept help invites defensiveness, while asking what feels dangerous about accepting help invites an answer. Asking why they are lying again is an accusation. whereas asking what they were afraid would happen if they told the truth is an inquiry.
These questions do not remove accountability. They make accountability more useful, because we are no longer responding only to the surface of the behavior.
Understanding Is Not the Same as Permitting
This distinction matters enormously in work involving addiction, severe mental illness, eating disorders, self-harm, violence, and other high-risk behavior. A compassionate lens cannot mean the absence of boundaries. A family can understand that a part is desperately trying to protect their loved one and still say clearly that the behavior cannot continue.
We can understand why a person uses substances and still realize it is important to interrupt their access to substances. We can understand why a person becomes aggressive and still protect others from that aggression. We can understand why someone refuses treatment and still recognize that there are circumstances in which safety requires decisive intervention. Compassion and containment work together rather than against each other. Understanding what the behavior is for is precisely what allows us to determine what kind of containment, treatment, boundary, or support is actually called for.
From Resistance to Protection
Perhaps the most important application of this lens is what it does to our understanding of resistance. In clinical work, we describe people as resistant to treatment all the time, and we rarely become curious about what the resistance itself is protecting.
A person may resist treatment because treatment means surrendering the one coping mechanism that has reliably numbed their pain. They may resist because a previous treatment experience was coercive, humiliating, or frightening. They may resist because trusting professionals has not historically been safe for them, or because accepting help would require admitting how serious the problem has become. Sometimes a protective part simply believes that giving up control will mean not surviving.
None of this means that resistance should dictate our clinical decisions. Rather, means we can stop treating resistance as a character defect.
The Lens Changes the Intervention
Seen this way, intervention becomes less a matter of defeating resistance and more a matter of understanding the protective system well enough to work with it. The question shifts from how we get this person to comply toward what would need to feel different before this person’s protective system could allow help in.
Sometimes the answer is trust, and sometimes it is safety, dignity, or the restoration of some genuine choice. Sometimes it is a different clinician or a different treatment environment. Sometimes it is medication, stabilization, and structure long before any deeper therapeutic work becomes possible. And sometimes the family has to change its own responses before the system can change at all. There is no single answer here, because no single lens is capable of explaining every human being.
Curiosity Before Judgment
In Part One, I suggested moving from asking what is wrong with this person toward asking what this person has adapted to. IFS allows us to take that one step further and ask what this part is trying to protect. That question can transform a clinical encounter, and it can transform a family, because once we become curious about the protection underneath the behavior, we usually find something quite different from what we expected. Behind anger there is often fear, and behind control, helplessness. Avoidance frequently covers shame, substance use covers distress the person cannot survive feeling, and resistance covers a long history of not being safe.
Often enough, behind the family member who appears controlling or enabling or angry or simply exhausted, there is another frightened part doing everything it knows how to do to keep someone they love alive.
None of this means allowing protective behavior to run unchecked. We work to understand it precisely so that it is no longer required. That is the deeper invitation of this lens: to become curious enough about what the behavior has been trying to accomplish that we can then help both the individual and the family find safer ways to meet the same need.
Sometimes the behavior we most want to eliminate is the very behavior we first need to understand.
References:
- Schwartz, R. C. (1995). Internal family systems therapy. Guilford Press.
- Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No bad parts: Healing trauma and restoring wholeness with the Internal Family Systems model. Sounds True.
- Schwartz, R. C., & Sweezy, M. (2020). Internal family systems therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
