Internal Family Systems is a trauma-informed therapeutic modality that models one’s psyche as consisting of an “internal family” of “inner children” with your adult self being the “parent”. Different forms of trauma - physical, emotional, sexual - result in the creation of these “inner children” or “inner child parts”. These parts of your psyche are created between the ages of 0 to ~12. Most people live “fused” with their inner children ie they are unable to distinguish what desires come from their adult selves and what desires come from their inner children. Different environmental triggers/situations activate different “inner children” who then snatch the steering wheel of your life from you causing you to behave in ways that you later feel regret towards. So in order to live a life free of regret, one needs to develop this discernment, and then know when to act in the external world on a desire impulse and when to turn inwards and just soothe in the inner child that is the source of the desire impulse.

The IFS model categorizes 3 main types of “inner children” - Exiles/Wounded, Protectors, Managers. The Exiles are the parts that get separated (“exiled”) because of the trauma event/situation. They hold the pain of the trauma. The Protectors emerge when the pain becomes unbearable for the child to hold. These Protectors often carry anger. The anger is meant to serve establishment of healthy boundaries for the child but often lags behind when the setting of healthy boundaries is actually needed and may end up causing more difficulties for the child. So to manage the Protector, Manager child parts emerge. These inner children are parts of your psyche and as such can be placed in various parts of the nervous system that extends throughout the human body. There can be multiple interrelated sets of these parts. Thus you end up with a “family” of “inner children” by the time you become an adult.

As an example, I have an inner child in my genitals who is ~5y old from one of the first significant moments of sexual abuse from my first perpetrator. He is an exile. Sometimes if I sense meditatively into my genitals, I can see his face which is really my face from 5y of age. I have Protectors carrying rage in my hips. There’s another Protector in front of my heart who is ~8y old. I have also encountered a Manager part in the tightness of my jaws.

How does one discern and connect to these varied inner children?

In the moment of a heated desire impulse that is causing you to feel ungrounded, one turns inwards and asks “How old is this part of me?” and then just waits for a response. The first time that you see an “inner child” emerge, it can be a very trippy experience. When I experienced the Protector ~10y old in front of my heart emerge, I was in an IFS session where I had just expressed mistrust towards the therapist I was working with. “I am noticing that I don’t trust you in this moment” as I trembled with the edginess of revealing the mistrust. “I hear you and I wonder how old you are feeling right now and where this mistrust sits in you”, she responded. “I can feel it in front of my heart and.. and.. I feel 10” and suddenly I saw an image of 10y old me fuming with fury staring her down from the my left chest region. I had successfully “unfused” from him. And regained composure.

Post “unfusing”, whenever an anger impulse emerges in this part of me, I have more conscious choice to exercise that impulse or not. Pre “unfusing”, the part would just act out on my behalf and I might have just closed up completely and not shared anything further with the therapist.

Having conscious choice is critical. You may still choose to act on that desire impulse - what I refer to as “externalizing the child part”. These “inner children” are HIGHLY intuitive, as children are. When they are split of from your psyche as a child, they hold within themselves some of the supercharged intuition that children possess. And their intuition can help you make better choices. However, it helps for your adult self to have the ability to choose whether to act on their intuition or not. The essence of spiritual work is to develop conscious choice in how you respond instead of being driven by reactive impulses and that principle applies here too.

Once an inner child is unfused, you will have a better sense of when they get activated instead of getting lost in the activation yourself. When this happens, you can ask “what does this part of me need right now?”. Often times, these inner children just need you to pay attention to their “tantrums”. Initially you might have to drop whatever you are doing to tune the attention inwards. Over time, you’ll be able to do whatever you are doing while also attending to the needs of your inner children and leveraging their intuition to make better life choices. Often for me this has involved an ease of setting up boundaries and only interacting with someone to the extent that I truly desire.

The needs of the inner children can often be conflicting. For example, the Exiled/Wounded part might be drawn to an exciting, dangerous situation to relive an essential aspect of the trauma that created it. While the Protector would be alarmed at the idea of you deciding to enter a situation like that. If you are fused with these parts, then you may end up finding yourself rushing into the exciting adventure (fused with your Exiled part) and if the adventure goes south, feeling annoyance and anger at yourself (fused with your Protector). The end result is a cycle of regret. Once unfused, you are better equipped to act in a manner that takes care of all the conflicting needs of the parts. This could look like leaning into (“externalizing”) the needs of one part while simultaneously soothing the other. Or leaning into neither and soothing both or some other combination.

I hope this post gives you a sense of how the model works and how you could apply it to reduce regrettable choices in life.