Meeting Your Inner Child

— Inner child-work is often talked about off handedly, mentioned in passing as a part of talk therapy. Unsurprisingly, the concept came from Carl Jung as he worked on the concept of the Divine Child archetype. For those who have read his autobiography, they will be familiar with his detailed stories of his childhood psyche. And for those who haven’t read his book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections — it is an exceptionally good read and I cannot recommend it highly enough. There are many accounts of important transformative points in his childhood. Jung placed great care and attention on pivotal moments in the psyche’s development, we see this in his descriptions of Personality 1 and Personality 2. We see it in his torment as he avoids a blasphemous thought, his religious terror at a jesuit priest, and of course how the adults in his life relate to him - especially his parents and teachers - and how this leads him as a child to understanding neurosis. Much of the book focuses on these early moments as a map to the development of one’s adult mind. Great empathy is given to the inner child, and it is clear that Jung felt there was a great deal of tenderness to be offered to these impressions of self.

— One of the reasons why Internal Family Systems blends so well with Jungian psychotherapy is because IFS works with ‘parts’. IFS came about in the 80s through the work that Richard Schwartz was doing with patients with eating disorders and who were self harming. He felt at a loss with one particular patient and desperate to find a way to help her, he began using the same concepts of Family Systems applying them internally. Family Systems is a psychoanalytical method that works to resolve conflict within families, Schwartz applied these techniques and principles internally, that is, imagining that all of the different parts of a patient’s mind act as a family, they have different roles and functions and personalities, much like external families. He found that the effects were rapid and long lasting. He began studying and refinding this new method of Internal Family Systems over the next few decades. Since then, IFS has quietly been growing in popularity until more recently, when there has been an explosion of interest in the last few years. 

— A quick description of how IFS works. These parts I mentioned before, they come along and take over as we need their expertise. Every feeling that comes up in response to us just going about our lives is a part. Some of them are major players, considerable aspects of our persona, and easily identifiable, especially to the people in our lives, the stingy part, the self-pitying part, the overly trusting part, the people pleaser and so on. Then there are parts that IFS calls exiles. Exiles are parts that we have split off and hidden away, often eclipsing them with what we call a Protector part. The Protector part often engages in compulsive behaviour in a misguided attempt to protect the exiled part. Compulsive spending, compulsive pornography watching. These protector parts are governed by beliefs that no longer serve us and were often formed when we were young and had a limited scope of the world.