Author: Marc

Last post I promised to share some ideas for breaking the feedback cycle of addiction. Today I want to suggest a three-part intervention strategy for doing just that. In a nutshell, (1) tune into your emotions, (2) see what “parts” (in IFS terms) those emotions belong to, and (3) help those parts calm down and work together. Help them to understand each other rather than disrupt and hurt one another.

[Please note that I’ve revised this from its original form, posted two weeks ago — 8th November]

This little three-part exercise can be led by a therapist or coach or else pursued solo. Note that this is not classical IFS therapy (which I’m still studying). Rather, it’s a hybrid I’m playing with and continuing to explore. It’s by no means a nicely packaged and approved therapeutic system. Rather, it may point to an approach for helping people who need more direction and guidance (more “coaching”) than IFS normally provides.

Over the past year, and using IFS principles more and more, Maya and I explored the conflictual relationships among her parts. Besides Madam Z, the internal critic, and Piya, the “firefighter,” Maya’s parts included a very sad girl who could not give up her preoccupation with the tragedy of her life (which hinged on her mother’s rejection and self-denigration). Much of Maya’s internal conflict triggered excessive waves of grief and self-rebuke. It would take up too much time and space to explore these themes in a blog post. It took a lot of time to discover them in therapy. But meanwhile, Maya kept drinking large amounts of cheap wine, almost every night, wrecking her health, and reinforcing her sense of hopelessness. It seemed urgent to find an exercise that could help, with me or without me, starting now.

So this is what we came up with:

1.Tune into your feelings — your emotions — as they come and go. (Starting with deep breathing and body awareness is helpful!) This is mostly just standard Buddhist “Vipassana” meditation — the practice of paying attention to whatever arises. But it’s directed toward feelings more than perceptions, thoughts, and bodily sensations. Follow the emotions, surf them, watch them come and go, don’t think about them too much. You might expect oodles of shame and anxiety. Practice your ability to discern, because some of these emotions might be so common that they seem like background noise. There may also be streaks of unexpected emotions, such as bolts of anger when you thought you were generally “nice”. With emotions like anger and fear, which have a definite object, try to be aware of who/what that object is. Is it self or other? Stay at the surface of awareness. Don’t “go deep.” Let the emotions come to you. You don’t have to go hunting.

2. Notice that each emotion may be felt by one or more parts. Which part is revving up now? Anger might go with the harsh internal critic, but anger might also go with the defiant “fuck you” rebel part. Get a sense of which part is becoming activated. Shame probably goes with a very young part — perhaps a part that (in IFS terms) remains an exile…not fully conscious, perhaps actively shunned or rejected. Anxiety also may be felt by young “exiles” — cringing, alone, scared, helpless — or by “managers” (e.g., parts who organize, take care, or judge) when they sense that they’re losing control. These managers can also be young. (A deeper discussion of what these parts actually are has to await a later post.)

Note that anxiety will usually not be experienced by firefighters. They are more reckless, and they tend to feel excitement, desire, or triumph. Notice that parts are sometimes very stuck (unchanging); other times more fluid and perhaps even growing, evolving before your eyes. Notice how some parts reliably trigger other parts. It’s very common for the firefighter (let’s get drunk!) to trigger the internal critic (how could you?! After last night!?!). And vice versa — but that needs to be saved for a future post too.

3. The last step is to act on this internal world, i.e., to guide it as it evolves and changes. This way of framing things deviates from IFS orthodoxy, but the underlying goal and the net effect could be almost identical. Now comes the sense of being a coach…or even a parent. IFS stresses the power of the Self — “Self” with a capital “S”. That’s the part that’s not a part. The Self is viewed as a compassionate, perceptive and aware place within oneself — a centre — that recognizes and accepts the various parts along with their needs and concerns (e.g., their emotions, their goals). So, from this place, you can soothe the anxious child, comfort him or her so there won’t be so much loneliness or dread. You can also connect with the Firefighter, and coax it (in a friendly way) to relax, to look before leaping for that bottle or that pipe. You can help antagonistic parts disengage, lay down their arms for awhile. For example, judging, critical parts can be asked to back off: we can tell them we appreciate their vigilance, but they’re coming on too strong and it’s not helping (e.g., too much shame, augmenting the Firefighter’s urge to drink or take drugs).

The parts can also act on each other directly. For example, Maya’s internal critic, Madam Z, is conscientious and determined. Her eagle eye is tuned to drinking behaviour and related cues, especially late in the afternoon, and she’s full of suggestions as to how to override the urge. “Wouldn’t this be a good time to start your yoga? Stop thinking about the store’s closing hours!” Maya came to realize that Madam Z wasn’t always punitive. Sometimes she was more like an athletic coach, authoritative but supportive. And she gradually learned to use Madam Z’s industrious, exacting manner to organize her behaviour and negotiate with other parts — especially the firefighter, who only wants to drink. Wait! There’s more to do. You don’t have to start drinking now. You can drink as a reward after completing your assignment.

It seems to me (though it deviates from  IFS orthodoxy) that this internal “friendliness” can be understood as a continuum or spectrum of self-care, with soothing or compassion at one end and firmness or self-direction — let’s call it guidance — at the other end. As with good parenting, a balance is needed. IFS suggests that different parts (as well as the capital-s Self) flesh out that continuum, from one pole to the other. In fact, in the mysterious language of the internal landscape, it may be the sense of “we” that’s most beneficial. Parts often feel alone — and in that they are relatively helpless, bound by habits they’re not skillful enough to overcome. But once there’s a we involved — a source of care that’s bigger than just this present-tense state of drive, this wish, this moment — they can feel taken care of, they can feel stronger, more secure, and they can more effectively promote their own well-being.

People who use drugs (or drink) addictively are caught in a feedback loop. The addiction makes us feel like losers, blameworthy, perhaps worthless. We carry around this negative self-concept almost constantly — and it’s painful! Perhaps ironically, using or drinking seem the only way to relieve that pain. Yet the net result is that we feel even worse by tomorrow.

This is common knowledge in addiction circles. Yes, the thing that we are compelled to do to get relief is the thing that increases the need for that relief. In this post I want to ask what, if any, additional perspective is offered by IFS (Internal Family Systems) — to help us get out of this cycle.

If you haven’t followed my recent posts, please review, starting here, to get a sense of how IFS works.

The first and perhaps biggest step is to start a dialogue with the part of us that does the escaping. They call it the Firefighter, because its job is to put out the fire of anxiety and self-abuse, as quickly and as effectively as possible, with no regard for the mess it leaves behind. We’re used to reviling that part: that pernicious, irresponsible urge to get loaded, high, smashed. That part is almost always the object of criticism (both from ourselves and from others).

But what would it be like to offer “the firefighter” acceptance rather than scorn?

First, IFS goes looking for the source of the criticism. And there it is! It’s that familiar internal critic, whose job it is to root out and blast everything that’s wrong with us. That wasn’t hard to find. But now we’ve uncovered an internal war that seems unresolvable. Like the Arab-Israeli conflict. So let it lie for now. Let the combatants sit across from each other, the critic glaring at the Firefighter, and the Firefighter looking right back, snide and arrogant perhaps, knowing that it can win every battle, simply by smoking, shooting, snorting, swallowing pills, or drinking. Again. Tonight? Now!?

It’s no wonder people with addictions feel that their internal world is fragmented.

I have a psychotherapy client I’ll call “Maya”. Maya’s internal parts include a Firefighter (whom she calls Piya — again, a pseudonym), and “Piya” came into being (or at least into her awareness) during her reckless teenage years. She was a resident at a dance school in India. Her teachers were strict and the school had a patriarchal, top-down structure. Maya felt trapped and oppressed by all that discipline. So she’d break out at night. Wearing her sexiest clothes, with a cigarette dangling from her lips, she’d hang out with other teens on the street corner. There was drinking, and smoking, cannabis, and sex. Piya took over at night, with the express purpose of having fun, feeling free, and saying Fuck You! to the authorities that ruled Maya’s life.

Now Maya goes straight to the supermarket to buy wine, almost every afternoon, when the anxieties of her day threaten to overwhelm her. It’s Piya, once again, who’s in charge. After she comes back from the store, she goes out on her deck, with a sense of excitement and purpose, and starts drinking. She drinks and smokes cigarettes until, by late evening, she feels sick.

In our therapy, guided by IFS principles, I encourage Maya to do two things: first, notice that Piya is made to feel dirty and blameworthy by a critical voice in her own head. She calls the critical part Madam Z (…not her real made-up name. Yes, even internal voices need pseudonyms) who has the character of a strict school teacher or aunt. Madam Z has much to contribute. We don’t want to banish her. But we don’t need her badgering Piya every time she appears. The second thing is to engage with Piya, not from the perspective of Madam Z but from the perspective of Maya’s peaceful, accepting self. Her compassionate core — what IFS calls Self with a capital-S. That Self becomes more present, more tangible, when Maya takes a few minutes to do some deep breathing, to feel what it’s like simply to be inside her own body, alive and perceptive. Ironically or mysteriously, this Self may the same thing as the non-self identified by Buddhism.

When Maya addresses Piya in this way, she can empathize with her. “Of course you want to get us out of this state. Of course you’re set to take off to the store, buy some booze, and start drinking. It’s effective, it works. In fact, that’s the only thing you know how to do!”

To forgive and embrace the part that’s simply waiting for a chance to get stoned…that’s radical. It flies in the face of conventional approaches to addiction, which demand that we get rid of this part, cast it out, or at least ignore it until it finally shuts up. So what’s the result? Doesn’t that just give us permission to get stoned more often, to drink more, to fully surrender to the addictive impulse? To do more push-ups in the parking lot (an infamous 12-step slogan).

No, that’s not (necessarily) what happens. What happens is that the Firefighter gets some relief — a chance to relax. It’s not used to being accepted. It’s certainly not used to being understood. So when it perceives that that’s what’s coming down the pipe, the urge softens, the strength of the impulse or compulsion is diminished. Now that it’s not being attacked, this part can hang around and explore other options. Now there’s a chance to wait and see. Maybe tonight things aren’t so terrible. Maybe it’s not necessary to douse the flames and make a huge mess that (it knows very well) will make tomorrow even worse.

And there’s a bonus that you won’t really get until you try this approach. Using, drinking, putting out fires, real or imagined, day after day, is a lot of work. The part that rushes into this role, ready to do it all over again on a moment’s notice…that part can use a break. Sometimes, even the crazy parts of us just want to sit back, relax, and do some channel surfing, play a game, browse the net, or take a nap. In the next couple of posts I’ll explore further steps we can take to break the feedback cycle of addiction.

The concept that a person is either authentic or inauthentic (either a liar or not) is based on the premise that people have unitary, coherent personalities. In contrast,  IFS takes the view that people’s inner worlds are made up of parts, or sub-selves, each of which has its own distinct style, motives, and beliefs. Interestingly, this idea corresponds with the idea — quite familiar in psychology — that people’s fundamental attributes (e.g, racist or not, selfish vs. generous, flexible vs. rigid) vary hugely, depending on their social context — who they’re interacting with, whether they feel safe or insecure, what they feel is expected of them. Just having a trusted friend nearby can make all the difference in how one thinks, feels and behaves.

According to IFS, different parts become activated at different times, especially when triggered by painful emotions. When you feel threatened, your scared child self comes to the surface. You become hypervigilant and/or you retreat. When you feel like you’re not good enough, the critical part takes over. You become hard and punitive, maybe angry and controlling, toward yourself (selves?) and/or others.

So maybe the idea of having a unitary personality is just wrong. In which case, there’s no such thing as being an inauthentic person. Instead….there are situations in which it becomes necessary to hide stuff, and that’s when a distinct part comes online.

Instead of seeing someone (or yourself) as inauthentic, try thinking of them as being afraid of rejection, so that the part that takes over is the hiding part — the same part that hid the remains of the cookies you shouldn’t have eaten when you were a kid and mom was in a bad mood. The urge to hide one’s bad behaviour — or unattractiveness, or neediness, or aggression — is not inauthentic. It’s authentic. It’s an authentic effort to stay safe.

(Of course there are other ways to define “authentic”. If by “authentic” or “truthful” you mean someone who should be trusted, then we enter very different conceptual territory — territory defined by social contracts or rules. But if you think that simplifies matters, think again. No one can be trusted entirely, about everything; in other words, we all have secrets. In fact, most people can be trusted about some things and not others — try asking someone about their sex life or toilet habits! — which is why we often make a distinction between people’s private worlds and public worlds. So everyone lies or at least misleads…at least sometimes or about some things. And we end up at the same place: everyone hides what they fear will lead to humiliation, denigration, or rejection. Once you see this, you see that those referred to as drug addicts aren’t more or less “authentic” than anyone else.)

People with addictions are almost constantly struggling to stay safe — safe from other people’s opinions. So it’s not surprising that they try to hide the thing that will make the world even more dangerous.

In IFS terms, the hiding part is not inauthentic. It’s authentically trying to protect you. Whether that works well or not is a different matter.

Hello readers. Are you still out there? I haven’t gone near my blog for over two months. So no new posts, a few comments dribbling in, and of course not as many readers. Something had to give. Having to sell our house in the Netherlands, buy a house in Toronto, move goods, furniture, children, etc, from Arnhem to Toronto…all the crap you go through in moving, made so much more complicated by the pandemic, having to cancel services and contracts…in Dutch…was just overwhelming. So I took a break from non-essential duties. And that seemed to include the blog.

More than that, I wasn’t sure I had anything new to say about addiction — the science, treatment approaches…anything. I didn’t want to just recycle earlier topics. So my last post, on Internal Family Systems (IFS)  therapy for people in addiction, was looking like my last hurrah. But lately I started thinking I may have more stuff to share. IFS has changed the way I look at almost everything in psychology. It’s changed how I see emotional habits, “dysfunctional” behaviour patterns of all types, and of course the way I understand addiction. I’ve used it pretty methodically with myself — sometimes as an alternative to meditation. And it’s had a major impact on the way I practice psychotherapy.

So, moving on: the next set of posts will apply IFS theory and related ideas to our understanding of addiction — broadly — and find out where that takes us. If you haven’t read my last post — maybe take a look at that first to get the basic idea.

………………………

I was talking with my wife about how common it is for people to feel inauthentic. It’s a big issue for adolescents in particular (that’s her field — adolescent development). Teens are always trying on different styles — different clothes, ways of talking, ways of seeing themselves. Who are they? Straight, gay, or bi — meaning what? — geek or jock, reserved or outgoing, serious or casual? And as they’re trying on these new identities, they often wonder if they’re being fake or real. It’s a big issue.

For people in addiction, the problem of “authenticity” is amplified and extended. We all know that stupid riddle: How can you tell when an addict is lying? His lips are moving. Insulting, of course, but there’s something to it. We addicts do lie. We lie because we don’t think we’re okay. We know that taking drugs is frowned on, to say the least. We lie because we continue to do something that most others disapprove of. Bye mom, I’m off to score some heroin, see you later. It’s just not something you’re going to hear.

My first big lie to my parents seemed necessary. I’d just used the money they’d given me for a winter coat to buy smack. I was 18, and I was anxious, depressed, and very lonely. Heroin helped. Gradually lying became habitual. I lied to romantic partners, parents, relatives, friends, work-mates, bosses — just about everyone — when the necessity arose. Being truthful about being a drug user — seriously? — is sure to invite heaps of social rejection, scorn, contempt, and often, serious consequences for one’s lifestyle and personal safety.

So addicts (I use that word to describe, not to shame) see themselves as inauthentic or untrustworthy. It’s a self-concept we acquire almost seamlessly. That’s not a great foundation for building self-esteem, and self-esteem can be crucial for developing self-care. In fact, seeing ourselves as inauthentic amplifies the shame and self-doubt that got launched in adolescence and boosted by drug use itself. What a drag.

But what if the idea of “being inauthentic” is just wrong. Like a map from the middle ages, what if it’s just totally inaccurate?

PLEASE NOTE THAT I AM HAVING SOME TECHNICAL PROBLEMS. TO GET AROUND THEM, I’VE DIVIDED THIS POST INTO TWO HALVES, PART 1 AND PART 2.

Please see Part 2 for the rest of this discussion!

On January 28 I started a series of posts reviewing promising psychotherapeutic approaches to addiction. I managed to cover a few, though with stops and starts — mostly due to Covid hassles and anxieties. So today I’m continuing the series with a post on Internal Family Systems (IFS). I wanted to understand it better before trying to explain it, and I think I finally do.

For years my online therapy with people in addiction has relied on my early training in psychodynamic therapy, dobs of mindfulness-meditation, what I’ve picked up from emotion-focused psychotherapy, ACT, Gestalt and other gems, plus my own personal experience of addiction. Add to that 30 years studying developmental psychology with a focus on emotion regulation, and what I’ve learned about the brain processes that underlie addiction and drug use. All of this came together in my own hybrid style of therapy. And it usually helped. Yet there were people I couldn’t help at all. There were brick walls and false leads and levels of trauma, chaos and heartbreak that left me gaping, and left my clients no further ahead. I knew I needed more training.

Internal Family Systems has been around since the 80s, and more and more people are becoming aware of it. It’s not easy, primarily because its premises go against the grain of mainstream psychology. Instead of trying to fuse the parts of the person into one coherent whole, IFS allows the parts to remain parts, it sort of honours them, so that you can get to know them, listen to them, understand them, and eventually take care of them. With respect to addiction, you never hear “you must stop.”

What are these parts? Maybe you’ve thought of them as voices, or selves, or subpersonalities — it doesn’t matter. They appear as habitual perceptions or expectations with distinct emotional loadings (e.g., anxiety, anger, longing) — and they can be intrusive in the background or they can seem to take over.

In working with addiction, the parts are not hard to find. Addicts often identify at least two. One is the “addict self” who just wants to get high (or to binge or have sex). That part is powerful, it overtakes the system, it has no regard for tomorrow, and it’s very difficult to resist. In AA, it’s said to be doing push-ups in the parking lot. In psychology jargon, it’s called compulsion. NIDA calls it a diseased brain. But I don’t find any of these concepts at all helpful. From a neuroscience perspective, I can point to the part of the brain that “does” compulsion — the dorsolateral striatum — but all that’s really doing is putting a habit into play. And as we know, addictive urges are all about habit. So what happens if we consider this to be a part of a person that is young, energetic, one-track minded, and determined to overcome negative emotion in the only way it knows how? When you think about it that way, it’s hard to negate it or to hate it.

The other part addicts often identify is the voice that gives you royal shit for doing it, thinking about it, planning it, having done it (drinking, drugs, gambling, whatever) last night or every night for the last week or the last month. We often call this the internal critic, and its specialty is self-blame and self-contempt. So what happens if we see this part as a younger version of ourselves, who learned to be our caretaker or disciplinarian? You better be good! Don’t you dare goof up again! You’re going to be in real trouble if you do that!! Once we see this part as trying to help keep us out of trouble, it’s hard to feel alienated from it or even victimized by it. Instead, IFS asks us to open a dialogue with this part. For example: You come out whenever I’m likely to do something “bad” (like call my dealer), don’t you — I guess that’s been a full-time job lately. But then you get so upset with me that I get seriously depressed, and then I just want to get high all the more. Let’s try reducing the pressure a bit.

And there lies the problem for most addicts. (I use that word for convenience, as you know.) The critical voice and the “let’s get high” voice activate and augment each other. Endlessly. In IFS, both these parts are called “protectors” because their job is to take care of you. Neither one is evil. They just have radically different styles. The critical voice or “manager” thinks only of the future. The “getting high” distractor voice thinks only of the present. These two parts branched off and solidified, earlier in development, because you needed them. Or so it seemed. How many times a day do you suppose the average 6-year-old thinks about NOT getting in trouble? How many times did you do bad shit anyway? The trouble now is that those two parts are so busy trying to shut each other down that you can’t get anywhere. Neither part will stop doing what it’s doing. It all seems so hopeless.

IFS recognizes a third class of parts called “exiles”. These are (usually) the really young parts that have experienced trauma or abuse of one kind or another. They are terrified. They’ve been hurt or shamed beyond their capacity to heal. We normally can’t or don’t want to re-experience that hurt, so we keep it buried. Hence the term “exile” (what psychoanalysts call the unconscious). But we don’t bury all of that pain…the hurt rises up inside us when we feel desperate, alone, misunderstood, or threatened. Addiction itself can trigger these feelings! And that’s exactly when the distractor — the “I need to get high” voice — gets activated. I can take care of this awful feeling, it says. Right now! Which of course triggers the manager part: Don’t you dare! You promised. Then the savage back-and-forth between these parts pushes the exiles further down, hides them even more, and douses them with more shame and fear…in case there wasn’t enough already.

Having practiced IFS as a therapist now for several months, I am sold on its efficiency and its power. (I’ve even begun as a client, myself, with an IFS therapist. What better way to learn the ropes…not to mention some timely self-improvement.) My clients “get it” almost at once. I don’t have to sell them on the rather esoteric imagery and jargon. They just take a look inside and say, Um yeah, that’s pretty much what’s happening. And then they start to change.

This is just a bare-bones intro. Let me end by saying that the goal of IFS is to let your Self (they spell it with a capital S) start to take care of your parts — appreciate them, comfort them, ask them to turn down the volume, to step back a bit. And reassure them that you — the present whole you, the Self, the calm centre that you may find in meditation — are going to take care of things, and take care of them — so they can begin to relax.

It’s pretty remarkable to feel that start to happen. You don’t feel so desperate. And all those layers of hopelessness begin to lighten and float away.