Hello and welcome back to our book club read-along of Unlocking the Emotional Brain. If you’re new here, I release a new podcast episode every two weeks where we slowly and thoughtfully explore this book together. You can also listen on Spotify. These episodes are meant to help translate dense theory into everyday language and to connect the science to real life, real patterns, and real change. We also gather twice during each book for live meetings where you can connect with others, share reflections, and ask questions in real time. If you’d like to learn more about getting unstuck and making lasting change in your life, I have two upcoming classes: 5 Steps to Change and Finding a New Story.
This book takes us deep into the science of memory reconsolidation, one of the most important mechanisms for understanding how lasting change actually happens. It helps explain why insight alone is rarely enough, and how healing can occur after trauma, attachment wounds, or growing up in environments where our emotional needs were not consistently met.
If you’ve been wanting to go deeper into this work, becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the full book club experience. That includes our live sessions, ongoing discussions, and the complete archive of past reads like No Bad Parts, Healing Developmental Trauma, and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Your support makes this space possible, and I’m genuinely grateful you’re here and reading along with me.
This week, we’re continuing into Part Two of the book, where the authors begin walking us through different therapy modalities and showing how they create transformational change through memory reconsolidation. Today, we’re focusing on Internal Family Systems. This section of the book is especially meaningful to me because one of the most common questions I get is how to know what kind of therapy actually helps people change. What matters most is not the name of the modality, but whether the therapy engages the mechanisms of change the brain requires in order to update old emotional learnings.
Different therapies can look very different on the surface. They may use different languages, structures, or techniques. But underneath, when real change is happening, they are often doing something very similar. They are helping an old emotional learning become active while something genuinely different is experienced at the same time. That process is what allows the brain to reorganize and let go of patterns that once made sense but are no longer needed.
In this episode, we’ll walk through case examples from IFS to see how this process unfolds in real sessions. We’ll look at how observing and being with ourselves in an emotion can help rewire old learnings we may have held for decades. My hope is that by the end, you’ll have a clearer sense of what to listen for, whether you’re choosing a therapist, doing your own inner work, or simply trying to understand why certain approaches finally help when others haven’t.
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Hello and welcome back to our read-along book club where we are reading Unlocking the Emotional Brain. It is the book about memory reconsolidation and coherence therapy and we’re walking through it together where I guide you and translate the information in this book, talk a little bit about what it really means beneath all of the technical terms, and share with you how you might apply this in your life. I think this part of the book is one of the coolest parts of the book because it’s where they take their time and they go through these different models of therapy.
This week, we’re going to look at internal family systems and examine how that transformational change of memory reconsolidation takes place using that model. I love this so much because one of the most frequent questions I get is about what type of therapy should I do if I’m an intellectualizer, if I’m a professionist, if I’m self-sabotaging, and of course the answer is at the end of the day there is no one right type of therapy modalities. And even the type of therapies discussed in this book, the therapist may not always be using the steps for transformational change, but it is possible because these modalities have all the things required to make that memory reconsolidation process happen.
When we’re talking about these types of therapy, we’re not talking about the organization itself. There’s been a lot of things in the news recently about internal family systems and things that have happened within that organization. Just know when we’re talking about IFS, what we’re really talking about is parts work applied in this specific way.
Parts work also comes from schema therapy. Coherence therapy in its own way uses parts work, though it may not refer to it as such. But when we think of parts work, parts are really a story humans have given to bundles of thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviors in our brain.
So all of those rules of engagement that we develop over our life, all of those implicit learnings are stored with context. And that context is the thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviors that we experienced when they were happening. The choices we had to make about how to show up in our lives, to stay safe, to stay in connection.
All of those things are stored in our predictive brain. And they’re bundled together often in these patterns that go together. So for example, an intellectualizer part may be a part of you, quote unquote, that is a bundle of implicit learnings where you learn to turn down your emotions, disconnect from yourself.
Maybe you feel sort of numb or nothingness in your body. You analyze and ruminate and think all of the time. And the behaviors might be that you never slow down, you never fully connect with yourself.
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You’re always going to the next to-do list, the next planner, the next thing. So we might call that a part in certain types of therapies. We might call that a schema in coherence therapy.
We might call that a survival strategy in NARM. But all of those things mean the same thing, which they are those rules of engagement of the way that you learn to be in the world. And we can have different experiences of those rules of engagement based on what’s happening in front of us.
For example, you might be an intellectualizer, quote unquote, that might be the part of you that you’re most familiar with. Those might be the strategies that you’re using in your everyday life. But you may also have a part that is a people pleaser.
So based on the relationship you have the person who is in front of you, you may shift out of that intellectualized state and shift into this part of you that is very hypervigilantly attuned to other people and trying to make things okay for them. Or you may also have a part of you that is very critical alongside of an intellectualizer. Remember, again, these parts are just bundles of thoughts, emotions, and body sensations.
So when we’re talking about these therapeutic modalities like internal family systems, we’re not talking about the organization itself because I’m not really qualified to make comments on it because I’m not involved in that organization. But we’re talking about the modality and how parts work might be used to make transformational change. Now one last thing before we dive in, we’re actually getting pretty close to the end of this book.
We have a couple more weeks of talking about these different therapeutic modalities. But then there’s a really interesting part three where they go through some of these cases. And so I’d love to hear from you if you would like us to go through some of these cases together.
I think it could be really interesting to really dive into some of these cases and look at these unique ways that they’re using coherence therapy. And so as long as that sounds good to you, then we will keep going. But if you would rather curtail part three and not go into the cases and move on to another book, it’s okay to let me know that too.
So please feel free to comment, hear a reply, and let me know about going into part three. If we go into part three, it’s if we don’t, it might be closer to the end of March. And then you can also let me know if there’s another book you’d like to see about what comes next.
I have some ideas in mind, but I’d love to hear from you. Is there a book about a therapeutic modality or boundaries or having needs or whatever it might be that you’re curious about? You would want to know how we can apply this lens to it of implicit learning, survival strategies, and making change? Let me know and we can start looking toward what comes next. So back into chapter 10, which is talking about internal family systems, and they lay out for us here right off the bat, how much this idea of parts or sub-personalities has been used in the therapeutic world.
Of course, this very early idea from Jung, which many of you may have heard of, of the archetypes, right? But this has been a part of many types of therapy, transactional analysis, ego state therapy, gestalt therapy. There’s been parts work and sub-personalities and ego states all throughout the history of psychotherapy. If you were with us when you read No Bad Parts, then you might already be familiar with this, but Internal Family Systems was developed by Dr. Schwartz using that parts language to talk about parts of our experience that carry that emotional memory, referred to as a burden, of these unresolved intense sufferings, of these ruptures that we’ve experienced in our lives.
And so they are kept away from our consciousness. And so the parts of us that are kept away in Internal Family Systems are called exiles. And then there are other parts that operate to protect those exiles, to prevent them from being accessed.
And we have those two parts called managers. And so managers are kind of like those intellectualism, perfectionism, people-pleasing parts. And then firefighters, which are the emergency response part of us.
And so those parts might hold bigger experiences like dissociation, rage, substance use. They’re really trying to suppress any distress that might come up because, again, they’re all protecting those exile parts of us. The exiles are the part of us that hold the deepest, hardest emotional memories of the sufferings we have experienced in our lives.
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In IFS, the therapist is working with the client to access the self, the consciousness, the observer in NARM, the adult consciousness, so that we can unburden the exile. We bring the exile into our direct awareness by observing it, and it can be unburdened by feeling and expressing all of that distress that it has held for so long. And much like the other therapies we’ve explored so far, the client and therapist relationship is a key piece for potentially facilitating this therapeutic process.
But the primary experience in IFS is the relationship between the self and the parts. So this is actually an interesting case because the client themselves is a therapist, and they are coming to see this therapist for supervision, because they noticed when they were doing work with a client who was feeling rage, she started feeling a very intense fear within herself that she knows doesn’t make sense in the present context. She knows the client’s not dangerous, she’s not at risk, but she really notices this reaction in her body, specifically in her stomach.
So remember, the first step of identifying something to make a change using memory reconsolidation is to figure out the what and the when. And so we can see in this case here, the what and the when is this tension and upset in her stomach that feels like fear when her client starts to get rageful. And so we can see that in internal family systems, much like the modalities of therapy we’ve explored together in this book and in the past, there’s this curious observation.
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There’s not an assuming or an immediate trying to make meaning or manage what’s happening, but there’s this curiosity, this noticing. And so there’s this meeting of this part that feels scared, and it’s felt scared for so long. And so this might indicate in some way that that emotional learning, that anger from other people is dangerous, has been with her for a very long time.
And so we’re identifying this in internal family systems as a part, and so we’re letting that part know that we’re the adult now, we’re here now, we are the self. Just the same way as we might identify our adult consciousness in Narm, or our self, our consciousness in any other work, we want to make sure a foot of us stays in the part of us that is observing, even if the rest of us feels very intensely of that other part. And so we’re just asking and we’re being curious, what does this part want us to know? Why is it holding all of this fear? And so in IFS, this is a key piece to look at the distress held by the exile.
We want to know why this part is holding on to all of this fear, this exile part, so that we can move toward the therapeutic reconsolidation process of step B, the emotional learning. Remember, the reason why it’s so important to get to that emotional learning is because that emotional learning is what is requiring the symptom. The emotional learning is the thing that says this bad or dangerous or hurtful thing will happen if I let myself, whatever it may be, in this case, if I let myself be comfortable around other people’s anger, something will happen, something dangerous will happen if I’m around other people’s anger.
That is the emotional learning that requires the schema, the schema that brings up fear, anxiety, and terror anytime someone else feels anger. This cannot be addressed behaviorally. No amount of telling ourselves, it’s okay if other people are angry, it’s okay if I have a need and it upsets other people is going to address that.
Because remember, there’s this idea of two sufferings or in Narm, the core bind. That’s what we’re going to explore here in this case to figure out what is this suffering that she is avoiding when this part of her is choosing to brace and be afraid. We have to figure out what that emotional learning is to see why the schema or the part is bracing so hard against the anger.
And that’s key in our own process too. We might think we have a sense of why we do this. We might think we know what the quote unquote core belief is, but without really identifying specifically what that learning or learnings are underneath, we can’t target them with this process.
No behavioral change, no thought reframing, no regulating your nervous system will shift that emotional learning without targeting it specifically. So in this case, when she’s asking this part, what’s happening, this part is saying that she learned it’s safer to be silent, not to make demands, not to stand up for herself. So making demands would be standing up for herself and it wouldn’t be safe to do that.
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So we see this emotional learning coming out that standing up for herself is unsafe. And so that feeling is powerlessness. But right now we don’t know the full emotional learning because we don’t know a full description of the suffering she’s trying to avoid.
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So they’re going to continue to be curious about that, right? This young part that’s frightened, a close part that’s saying, don’t make demands, don’t stand up for yourself. And in IFS, that is the manager. The manager is the one saying, don’t make demands, don’t stand up for yourself, because it’s trying to prevent the distress that would come for the exile part.
And here’s a really important piece to understand here. In this therapeutic reconsolidation process, there’s an idea that there are two things we learned when something hurtful happens. Number one, this hurts.
And number two, here’s what I do about it. And those two learnings get fused together. So in internal family systems, the exile is the hurt part, the part that says this hurts, it’s vulnerable, it’s wounded, it’s feeling all of the pain.
And it got tucked away because it was too hard, too much to feel all that pain consciously. The protector part is the other response. What do I do about this? It is the coping part, the behavior, the strategy, the defense, however you’d like to think about it, that developed specifically to prevent that hurt from being felt again.
They’re not actually separate problems. They’re two sides of the coin. The protector exists because of the exile.
The what do I do about it exists because of the hurt. So we’re really noticing when we’re observing ourselves in this way, we’re looking at is what I’m seeing the hurt itself? Or is it the armor protecting it? Often the thing we might notice first is the armor, the intellectualization, the people pleasing, the perfectionism. But we know that’s not there for fun.
It’s not because we enjoy walking around in those strategies. It is protecting us from whatever the hurt is that lies beneath. And so that’s why we get curious about what is the deeper emotion, the deeper learning underneath the strategy.
The strategy is armor, the hurt is underneath. So again, things like intellectualization are not the problem, but we often target it as the problem. Intellectualization is the solution.
