An Internal Family Systems Lens On Wounded Boundaries

A Basic Review of the IFS Model

In the last post Four Common Ways We Hurt Ourselves & Others With Boundary Wounded Parts, we mapped out the kinds of parts that commonly develop when children have had their boundaries wounded. In IFS, all of these tendencies would be considered “parts.” This means they are not fixed, they do not define you, and you need not feel flooded by or throttled by emotions as you consider whether you or your loved ones fit these categories.

We can all get flooded and paralyzed sometimes if we realize we’ve been behaving in self-destructive ways, failed to stop a boundary-violating perpetrator from continuing to abuse us, or caused harm to others with our boundary-violating behaviors. But IFS offers us some relief from that intensity by helping us understand that we are more than our parts and that all of our parts are not only all deserving of love, understanding, and healing; they’re also full of gifts, blessings, and valuable qualities once we free them from their extreme roles and heal the traumatized and burdened parts underneath. 

Through that lens, you may have a compliant part, a controlling part, a nonresponsive part, and an avoidant part, and you may even have parts that feel bad reading about those tendencies of boundary wounded people. You may even recognize elements of all four parts, or you may have other parts that aren’t listed. Some parts might ally with each other or gang up against each other. You may have some boundary-injured parts that don’t even fit in these boxes, because parts are so unique. The intention is not to shame ourselves or demonize someone else who you might recognize as having a part you don’t have. All parts related to boundaries can be healed, transformed, and liberated from their painful patterning so their natural gifts can shine through.

What kinds of parts might we have inside? Let’s review the IFS model briefly.

Preventive Protectors (aka “Managers”)

In the IFS model, parts are either “protectors” or “exiles.” Some protector parts are “managers” who are proactive. They try to preemptively protect you by warding off danger. Think Inner Critic part, Perfectionist part, Anxious part, Time Keeper part, Financial Manager part, Worst Case Scenario Catastrophizing part, or in the case of boundaries, People-Pleasing compliant parts, Self-neglecting Caregiving parts, Control freak parts, etc.)

Their main job is to be the first line of defense, protecting the vulnerable, wounded, hurting, traumatized “exile” parts from getting triggered and evoking intensely painful emotions that might take you out of commission. Their biggest fear is that these wounded parts who carry extreme burdens of traumatic memories, heavy emotions, painful beliefs, uncomfortable body sensations, or tormenting thoughts, will flood you and you’ll get overwhelmed and fail to function the way you need to. Preventive parts (managers) don’t realize that Self can do a better job taking care of those wounded parts than they can. So in IFS, we coax the managers into letting Self try to care for the exiles instead of the managers, showing up as “hope merchants for hopeless parts.” When our managers learn to trust us, they will let our Self take a stab at leading instead.

Extreme Protectors (aka “Firefighters”)

The next line of defense are the “firefighter” protector parts. While the managers are proactive in warding off danger, firefighters are reactive, showing up when the alarm bells goes off, ready to come out, hoses blaring, to put out the flames of emotion that might flare up from those burdened exiles that we’ve hidden in the dungeons of our psyches. These firefighters come online as emergency back up if the managers fail to keep the painful emotions of the exiles effectively locked up, repressed, and buried. They grab their firefighting tools if anyone (including you) gets too close to the pain the exiles are feeling when they’re locked away, usually buried in your subconscious, beyond your conscious awareness but nevertheless always influencing your behavior and experiences. 

The reactive extreme parts are saddled with intense roles which often don’t look like protection and are more likely to be pathologized by the medical and psychological world. When you think about firefighters, think “Addict part, Rage part, Eating Disorder part, Abuser part, Binge part, Dissociative part, Psychopath part, Suicidal part, Narcoleptic part, Psychotic part.” In other words . . . think pretty much everything in the psychiatric DSM-5 (Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,) created by the American Psychiatric Association as a way to label, diagnose, and standardize treatment for psychiatric disorders.

Extreme firefighters do not only show up as psychiatric illnesses. They can also show up as physical illnesses—or other parts that can use some physical vulnerability in your system to take you out. Think Migraine part, Back Pain part, Chronic Fatigue part, Asthma part, or even Cancer part. The IFS model does not suggest that these are purely psychosomatic illnesses. They are clearly real pathology in the body and some illnesses may not be related to parts. But parts can also use the body to get your attention or to get the needs of other parts met, like if you need a medical symptom to help you say no because you’re not comfortable saying no otherwise.  Because traumatized parts can chronically dysregulate the nervous system leaving it in a perpetual state of fight, flight, or freeze, this chronic nervous system dysregulation can do a number on the body, linking mind and body with very real medical illness that may have stemmed from trauma but is now absolutely crystallized in the body as organic illness.

Compliant parts who can’t say no or avoidant parts that won’t allow you to receive care may need the body to say no instead or force you to say yes to receiving caregiving from others. Controlling parts or Nonresponsive parts that blow a fuse when someone else fails to be 100% compliant can also make you sick. Think of the classic Type A lawyer or Wall Street trader screaming and turning red in the face, their hearts so closed and their blood pressure so through the roof that they’re vulnerable to heart attacks. Nonresponsive parts might also be failing to respond to the needs of loved ones because someone has attachment wounding and chronic dissociation. The Dissociative part may be taking you out of the body, where it’s much harder to attune to or respond to the needs of others. This chronic dissociation and disembodiment can also impact the health of the body in long term ways. As such, healing boundary wounding isn’t just good for your relationships and your mental health; it can also be genuine medicine for your body.  

Wounded Parts (aka “Exiles”)

When it comes to boundary wounding, parts that might be compliant, controlling, nonresponsive, or avoidant might be either managers or firefighters. Typically, these would be proactive manager parts, but as you’ve likely witnessed when those managers fail to keep relationships going smoothly, the reactive firefighters might be right underneath, ready to spring to action at the slightest provocation.

Just think about how you might have reacted if you’ve been “blending” (IFS language for what happens when a part hijacks the wheel of the bus inside you or when you getting overtaken by a part) with an overly caretaking, enabling compliant part.  Then you hit your limit of resentment when the person you’ve been caretaking fails to appreciate your efforts or takes one liberty too many. Your passive aggressive parts might shift into full on aggressive firefighters who suddenly throw a dish across the room, or you might blend with an abandoning part that just walks out on your partner with no warning, leaving them confused and devastated. The parts that get violent or walk out are usually firefighters, hidden just beneath the surface of more socially acceptable manager parts.

Or maybe you identify more with being controlling or nonresponsive. Then what happens when the person you’ve been successfully controlling rebels, and you feel out of control, or your nonresponsiveness provokes the one who feels entitled to more responsiveness from you?  Now all hell breaks loose. Maybe you lose your temper or go on a drinking binge or feel suddenly suicidal or threaten to abruptly cut someone off financially or lock yourself in a room and refuse to come out. Those would be reactive firefighter parts. 

How can it be possible that parts who pull such potentially harmful stunts might think they’re helping you? Why would they use violence or abandoning a loved one or running away or anorexia or an addiction or cutting or dissociation or even cancer to try to protect you? Because they know not what they do. Until there is Self-leadership, they are acting as autonomous sub-personalities whose only goal is to make sure you don’t get overwhelmed by painful feelings, beliefs, and memories from the burdened, hurting, locked away inner children who have been exiled to interior dungeons, far away from your conscious awareness. 

No matter how idyllic you think your childhood was, we all have vulnerable wounded parts (exiles). No one is exempt from the “burdens” these exiles carry. Our exiles might have different stories and different wounding, but they tend to have the same painful feelings—worthlessness, unlovability, “not enough-ness,” shame, powerlessness, helplessness, feeling damaged or broken or thinking they are fundamentally flawed. Because your protector parts don’t like the feelings these exiled parts evoke, and because they don’t like how it feels when these exiles believe the limiting beliefs they tend to cling to, protectors unwittingly exacerbate the problems, locking these exiles in a kind of inner prison, so they’re crying and screaming and begging for your attention all the time. The more traumatic the wounding, the more the exiles will pull out all the stops to get your attention, so the more powerful the protectors must become. The proactive managers might be able to keep things under control for a while, but over time, as the exiles get more unruly and the managers fail to keep the exiles under wraps, the reactive firefighters might be needed to further shut down these intensely wounded parts.

All the exiled parts want is your love, your care, your nurturing, your understanding. They want you to listen to how much pain they experienced and witness the heaviness they carry inside. They want you to remember what happened to them and acknowledge them, rather than pushing their feelings, memories and extreme beliefs away. They want an ally who will stand up for them and love them, not a jailkeeper who locks them up and silences them. 

But they have a hard time getting through to your Self, the one who can help them heal,  because the two lines of protection (managers and firefighters) do their best to keep you from even remembering, feeling, or being present with these sweet, young, tender, hurt exiles.  These exiles are crying for the love of the part that’s not a part, the inner healer, therapist, mentor, parent, and Divine Beloved that has what it takes to heal these wounded parts, if only your protector parts learn to trust that your Self can care for them better than these jailkeeper protectors can.

In other words, in order to learn healthy relational boundaries without strict, rigid concrete walls that are not necessarily considerate to the other person and can boundary against the intimacy we actually crave, we need to heal our managers, our firefighters, and our exiles, so Self can help us navigate relationships in a healthy way that respects relational boundaries, not only our own boundaries, but the boundaries of other people. 

How do we do this? No rule book about boundaries will help us have healthy, intimate, connected, safe relationships as long as it’s just our managers trying to memorize and regurgitate rules about boundaries that are meant to help us avoid danger. Many of the books I read about boundaries were full of these kinds of rules. Do this. Don’t do this. Get your language right. Memorize the script. Perfect your communication tools. But if you don’t heal the exiles, you know what happens when your exiles get lit up?  Those managers and their perfect rules they learned from books about boundaries go right out the window and next thing you know you’re crashing right through someone’s boundaries again, or you’re letting them get away with crashing through yours!

We need something more than a bunch of manager-led rules if we really want to heal our wounded boundaries and improve our relationships. No matter how much you tone police yourself, commit scripts to memory, or follow the rules, if you’ve had your boundaries significantly wounded, you’ll wind up right back where you started once you’re in the flush of an acute trigger with a loved one.

If we want long lasting healing, we need to get to know our protectors well enough, earn their trust, help them relax, and bring the healing of Self to the exiles our proactive managers and reactive firefighters protect. Those exiles need to get  integrated into the wholeness of our being so we can learn to relate, Self to Self, with other people who are also committed to healing and integrating their own parts. This way, we can dance together in the field of love with other people in the outer world while maintaining our separate, sovereign, autonomous Self-led inner worlds, resisting the temptation to either fuse and enmesh with others in a boundaryless way or to boundary against intimacy altogether by turning into hermits too scared of being devoured by relationships, erecting walls as fortresses to keep intimacy out.

The Solution: Unburdening The Exiles

While protecting the exiles with managers and firefighters might help to keep your internal family system safe for a while, it requires a great deal of energy to keep those exiles locked up. All the energy your protectors expend trying to keep the exiles under wraps could be used for creativity, self-healing, service, spiritual connection, playfulness, intimacy with others, and general vitality.

Because that energy is getting used up by protectors, you might feel chronically tired, depleted, depressed, anxious, lacking inspiration, lonely, spiritually disconnected, or sick. It makes sense that freeing up these exiles through the IFS “unburdening process” liberates all that trapped energy and functions as a kind of energy healing or shamanic soul retrieval, freeing up all that extra life force so the life force can work its magic in other aspects of your life.

In an ideal world for those who can afford a one-on-one therapist and can find one with openings, the unburdening process is best facilitated by a skilled IFS therapist. But over time, it’s something that can learned through the Write To Heal practice I co-developed with IFS lead trainer and Harvard-trained psychiatrist Frank Anderson, MD. (I’ll be teaching the Write To Heal model in Malta in November. Learn more and apply for the live workshop here.)

With experience, some IFS practitioners and therapy clients can learn to practice the unburdening process as a self-help tool or with a peer support person experienced with IFS. Unburdening your exiles requires getting permission from all the protectors that will keep you (or the therapist) from getting access to the exile. Once the protectors trust that you’re Self-led enough to allow this inner healer to make contact with the exiled parts, demonstrating the “8 C’s of Self- curiosity, compassion, confidence, calmness, creativity, clarity, courage, and connectedness,” your Self can reassure the exiled part that the real YOU is finally here. Once Self and the exile make contact and are bonded and reunited, once all of the managers and firefighters have given their blessing and stepped back a bit, the unburdening process is ready to begin. 

This allows for the real treatment of the underlying boundary wounding. As long as the traumas that caused the boundary wounding go untreated, no amount of reading books about boundaries or trying to get the rules right or advice from your therapist will fully support relational intimacy with healthy boundaries. Rules your managers learn in books about boundaries, healthy communication, and trigger management are always at risk of getting tossed out the window the minute you get hijacked by firefighters just waiting to betray the rules because those flames of emotions from your exiles flare up! 

So this is the sin que non of healing your boundary wounding. By healing from the root of how our boundaries first got hurt, usually during those childhood developmental stages we didn’t get to experience the way we should have, we can begin to change our behaviors, not by memorizing a bunch of rules, but by becoming intimate with and Self-leading one healed exile at a time.  While most people cannot safely or effectively unburden their own exiles without the help of a community of practice or an expert one-on-one facilitator, let’s review what that process includes, just so your curious parts don’t feel ripped off or die wondering. 

Steps of Unburdening

STEP ONE: RELAX AND EARN THE TRUST OF PROTECTOR PARTS Managers and firefighters, including those that might be boundary wounded, such as compliant, controlling, nonresponsive, avoidant or other parts that participate in boundaryless relationships, usually do not want unburdening of the exiles to happen. In Internal Family Systems, we don’t bully, coerce, or shame the protectors inside because doing so only strengthens them and exaggerates the harmful behavior. The only thing that works is to approach these protectors inside and find out what scares them, discover why they think they’re protecting us, and why they behave the way they do, even if those behaviors might be sabotaging our health, relationships, or safety in some way. 

We ask protectors the 6F’s of IFS:

1. Find

2. Focus

3. Flesh out

4. Feel towards

5. BeFriend

6. Fears

FIND: Find the protector part in, on, or around your body. This will be your “trailhead” to explore. If early developmental trauma has been severe and you live in a state of chronic disembodiment or dissociation, finding the part in your body may not be possible, and other somatic embodiment practices and somatic healing methods might be needed before moving on. Or you can try working with the part that keeps you out of your body or dissociates you as a protector part.

FOCUS: Focus on the part in your body. Inhabiting your Self energy, turn your attention to the part and let it know you’re with it and that you feel curious about how it thinks it’s protecting you.

FLESH OUT: What does this protector look like, feel like, smell like, sound like? What emotions does it carry? Does it have an image, a name, an age? How close will it let you get?

Assess how you FEEL toward it. This is your compass for assessing how much Self energy is present. If you don’t like this part, find the part that doesn’t like it and ask it to step aside. Your Self can be curious about any part without judgment, but some parts polarize with other parts, so make sure to protect the part that is revealing itself to you from other parts that might attack it. Once any polarized part steps aside, check in with how you feel towards the part now. If all the parts are relaxed, you’ll feel one or more of the “8 C’s of Self”- curious, compassion, clarity, calmness, confidence, connection, courage, and creativity.

BeFRIEND the protector part by getting curious and finding out more about it. Engage in a series of inquiries to earn the trust of this part as part of the befriending process.

Questions To Get To Know Your Protectors

• How did it get this job?

• How effective is the job?

• If it didn’t have to do this job, what would it do instead?

• How old is this part?

• How old does it think you are?

• What else does it want you to know?

• What does it want for you?

Ask this part what it FEARS. Often, the answer to this last question will reveal an exile. Usually, the biggest fear of the protectors is that the extreme emotions of the exile will flood the system and make you incapable of functioning in your job, your parenting responsibilities, etc. They fear that if you actually came face to face with all those feelings of shame, worthlessness, helplessness, terror, powerlessness, grief, and sadness, you’d dissolve in a puddle and never recover.

When a part reveals what it’s afraid would happen if it stopped doing whatever it does- complying, controlling, nonresponding, avoiding, etc, we allow Self to validate that it makes sense why it’s been doing what it’s been doing for so longer. We may even feel moved to thank this part for working so hard for so long to try to keep us safe. Usually our protectors are exhausted, especially our tired managers, and they feel grateful and open-hearted when they are acknowledged and appreciated for their hard work. Sometimes I let my managers know that I’m not only not going to fire them. I’m going to give them a raise and a bonus, but also a sabbatical, so they can take some much needed time off. Firefighters, on the other hand, are so often used to being bullied and shamed that it feels like an amazing relief to get some love and understanding for why we do what we do, even if our behaviors hurt ourselves or harm our relationships or even behave abusively.

When protectors realize you’re not going to shame them, bully them, demonize them, try to get rid of them, or otherwise force them to stop doing whatever they’re doing, we can become “hope merchants for hopeless parts.” We simply let them know that Self can heal the exiles and then the protectors don’t have to work so hard. We reassure them that Self can do a better job helping to make sure the exiles don’t overwhelm the system, and we let them know nobody is going to make them leave, that they can stay in our internal family systems and get reassigned, doing other jobs they might like better. We earn their trust and try to relax their hold on us, comforting them, letting them know we’re grateful for how hard they’ve tried to keep us safe, and reassuring them that nobody is going to force them to change. We promise won’t let bullying managers try to discipline them into doing better. We tell them their cooperation is purely voluntary, and we won’t approach the exiles until they all say yes. Then we systematically make sure all protectors are consensual before proceeding with the next step. Otherwise, we might get “backlash”- firefighters that pull out more stops to punish us for going to exiles we don’t have full permission to approach and heal.

STEP TWO: WITNESS Unburdening always begins by making sure all the protector parts- managers and firefighters- give consent for the unburdening. Self (or Self plus an IFS therapist or community of practice) does not proceed until all protectors have relaxed and made space to grant their blessing and allow the unburdening to happen.  When the exile has made itself known, Self approaches the exiled part with at least curiosity, if not also compassion, calmness, connectedness, clarity, confidence, courage, and creativity (the other 8 C’s of Self). If anything other than these kinds of loving qualities emerge, that is likely another protector part and needs to be addressed before moving on, going back to Step One.

Self then negotiates with the exile to make sure the exile agrees not to flood the system with more emotion than the nervous system can handle. Exiles are usually happy to agree to these terms, because they’re just so happy to finally be getting out of their inner prisons and being given the chance to be seen, heard, attuned to, witnessed, and let out of jail. Assuming the exile agrees to the terms, Self then witnesses what the exile went through- listening or watching as exiles share flashbacks, imagery, emotions, beliefs, sensations in the body, or whatever else the exile wants Self to witness. 

As this is happening, Self keeps checking with the parts to make sure the pace is slow enough and the nervous system stays regulated and safe from flooding. Self then validates, reassures, and lets the exile know that Self is getting this and that it all makes sense, comforting, co-regulating, and calming the exiled part as it needs, giving the exile a new experience, one utterly different than the painful experience it originally had. (Neurologically, this is when neural pathways are labile and old memories can be overridden with new, more positive ones, rewiring the neural pathways through neuroplasticity, thereby neutralizing the past memory.) 

Whenever it seems the exile is done, Self asks “Is there anything else?” until the exile feels complete and validates that Self really gets what that exile went through. When the exile expresses completion, the exile is invited to experience a “redo” in the inner world.

STEP THREE: REDO When the exile has shown you everything it wants to, Self offers to enter the scene from the past and participate in whatever should have happened, from the point of view of the exile.  With a kind of active imagination in your inner vision, you redo the scene, following orders from the exile and giving this little one what he or she really needed, which didn’t happen back then but can happen now. Anything goes in the inner world. If the exile wants you to get in a fight or kill someone or perform some impossibly heroic act of rescue, Self just does it. There’s no harm in the outer world when we redo what the exile needs in the inner world. And you definitely want to make sure any spiritual bypassing parts or premature forgiveness parts or church-going parts stay out of this part! The exile is allowed to feel whatever it feels, and Self’s job is to protect the exile from any parts that want to clean up the redo and make excuses for the abuser or neglecter.  Genuine forgiveness can come after the unburdening of the exile, not mid process. If the exile hates the mother and wants to beat up the father, let it hate and let Self beat up Dad!

In the case of boundary wounded parts that become compliant, controlling, nonresponsive, or avoidant, the redo may include giving the exile a contradictory and restorative experience of whatever phase of childhood development got interrupted. Maybe the part needs an experience of healthy attunement with the parent in a way that lets parts get their needs met in the inner world. Or perhaps it includes letting the part take more risks or be more assertive in testing limits if the child got overprotected. Or perhaps it means letting Self set stricter boundaries and offer more safety precautions so the exile feels safe and well guarded, so other parts don’t have to spend the rest of life practicing limit testing or rebelling against authority. Or maybe it means letting the parentified child be a kid again so caregiving parts can relax, allowing Self to reparent the exile and receive the care that child deserved by an inner parent.

This process can be quite tender and heart opening, as Self reunites with wounded child parts and makes not only a connection, but a real loving, intimate bond, Self to exile. This can feel just as much like falling in love as we do when we meet a romantic partner, only this love cannot be lost, because Self and parts never have to part ways, even in death. As such, “You are the one you’ve been waiting for,” as IFS founder Dick Schwartz says. This Self-to-parts bond is what fills the emptiness many boundaryless relationships (or addictions) unsuccessfully seek to fill. 

STEP FOUR: RETRIEVE When the redo is complete, Self rescues the exile from that stuck place back in time and takes the exile someplace peaceful and relaxing. The exile will communicate where it wants to go- real or imaginary- to feel safe, held, nurtured, and peaceful. I’ve had exiles that want to go to sit on clouds with cherubs in heaven, to sit in hot springs at Esalen Institute, to swing on swingsets at Grandmother’s house. Anywhere they want to go- you take them there, by magic carpet, helicopter, teleportation- however they like.

STEP FIVE: UNBURDEN  Once the exile is safely settled in its new abode, free from where it was stuck in the past, Self asks the exile if it’s ready to be free of all the heavy burdens of emotion, negative core beliefs, body sensations, and painful memories, inviting the exile to let go of all toxicity which has been stuck in the nervous system since the original traumatic event. Your exile will usually be happy to give it up to the elements—wind, water, fire, earth, light, or some other way of letting go. Energy psychology techniques like Advanced Integrative Therapy (AIT) can also be useful at this point to clear negative core beliefs energetically from the body more systematically.

STEP SIX: INVITE You invite the exile to invite in new supportive, positive qualities to fill the space created by the unburdening. Again, energy psychology techniques like Advanced Integrative Therapy (AIT) can be useful at this point to install new realistic positive beliefs that may not have developed because of the trauma, as an energetic way to anchor the new beliefs in the body.

STEP SEVEN: PROTECTOR CHECK-IN Once the exile is safely in its new place with its newly installed qualities and programs, the protectors who stepped aside to give permission for Self to offer healing and unburdening to the exile are invited to come see how the exile is doing. Usually the exile is pretty relaxed or even blissed out and the protectors feel happy and relieved and maybe even surprised that Self could do such a great job freeing the exile from its stuck place in the past without overwhelming and flooding your nervous system in a way that makes you incapable of functioning.

STEP EIGHT: FOLLOW UP Because neural pathways that have been opened up are made labile and available for memory reconsolidation for a window of time, exiles can flip back into stuck places in the past unless Self makes a commitment to show up, lovingly and consistently, every day for 30 days in a sort of inner world check in. Usually if the exile goes back to the past, it’s because there’s something that did not get appropriately witnessed, and the exile may have more to share. If so, the process starts over again with whatever else needs to be witnessed.

Assuming the exile stays happily relaxed in its new setting, a simple daily check in meditation, asking the exile what it might need from Self that day, helps to ground and secure the healing and rewire the pathway in the brain that was overwritten neurologically. Self can offer hugs, love, reassurance, ice cream, a swing on the swing set- whatever that part might need as it integrates into the system and finds its way towards healing, almost as if you’re earning the trust of a foster child that might not know you very well but desperately wants to be loved.

This daily check in anchors new neural pathways, and hopefully the healing and integration process for that particular exile is complete, including having laid down new neural pathways with a restorative memory replacing the traumatic memory, such that the original memory, while not forgotten, gets neutralized of its intense energetic and emotional charge. When it does, the natural gifts every exile holds get liberated and freed up to bless the system with previously suppressed qualities- like imagination, playfulness, creativity, fun-loving qualities, and other beautiful gifts that may have gone underground because of the trauma.

Anchoring A New Way Of Being Self-Led

Protector parts, including Compliant, Controlling, Nonresponsive, or Avoidant parts- or the firefighters they may polarize with- learn over time that Self does a better job protecting exiles than the (usually young) protectors do. Parts ultimately learn that they don’t need to discipline, bully, harass, or even attack these boundary wounded parts into submission in order to avoid the damage they can do in boundaryless relationships.  As any person who has tried wrestling with out of control firefighters (like addict parts or violent parts) can tell you, managers exerting their willpower is usually not enough to sustain permanent change.

Demonizing our parts only tends to ramp up their extreme behaviors. 

Why? Because they genuinely think they’re helping you—and in some way you may not understand yet—they are. The goal of Self-leadership is to allow Self to become intimate with all of your parts and go through this unburdening process with all the exiles your protectors care for. Only then is it possible to engage in Self-led relationships with other Self-led people who can negotiate needs, desires, wishes, fears, and aversions so two people can determine what’s okay and not okay (aka Boundaries 2.0) that are fair, kind, respectful, and considerate to both people’s internal family systems.

If you’re interested in a deeper dive about IFS-informed boundaries, you can sign up for the self-paced, online Heal Your Wounded Boundaries program here. For more about an IFS approach to healing wounded boundaries, consider becoming a paid subscriber here as well to access content I’ve been releasing from my unpublished manuscript The Boundaries Handbook.

*Photo credit Monique Feil