Meet The Family…

If you’ve heard talk of “healing your inner child” or similar ideas, then today’s featured type of therapy takes that to several extra levels, in a way that helps many people.

It’s called Internal Family Systems therapy, often “IFS” for short.

Here’s a quick overview:

Psychology Today | Internal Family Systems Therapy

Note: if you are delusional, paranoid, schizophrenic, or have some other related disorder*, then IFS would probably be a bad idea for you as it could worsen your symptoms, and/or play into them badly.

*but bipolar disorder, in its various forms, is not usually a problem for IFS. Do check with your own relevant healthcare provider(s), of course, to be sure.

What is IFS?

The main premise of IFS is that your “self” can be modelled as a system, and its constituent parts can be examined, questioned, given what they need, and integrated into a healthy whole.

For example…

• Exile is the name given to parts that could be, for example, the “inner child” referenced in a lot of pop-psychology, but it could also be some other ignored and pushed-down part of oneself, often from some kind of trauma. The defining characteristic of an exile is that it’s a part of ourself that we don’t consciously allow ourselves to see as a current part of ourself.
• Protector is the name given to a part of us that looks to keep us safe, and can do this in an adaptive (healthy) or maladaptive (unhealthy) way, for example:
  • Firefighter is the name given to a part of us that will do whatever is necessary in the moment to deal with an exile that is otherwise coming to the surface—sometimes with drastic actions/reactions that may not be great for us.
  • Manager is the name given to a part of us that has a more nurturing protective role, keeping us from harm in what’s often a more prophylactic manner.

To give a simple illustration…

A person was criticized a lot as a child, told she was useless, and treated as a disappointment. Consequently, as an adult she now has an exile “the useless child”, something she strives to leave well behind in her past, because it was a painful experience for her. However, sometimes when someone questions and/or advises her, she will get defensive as her firefighter “the hero” will vigorously speak up for her competence, like nobody did when she was a child. This vigor, however, manifests as rude abrasiveness and overcompensation. Finally, she has a manager, “the advocate”, who will do the same job, but in a more quietly confident fashion.

This person’s therapy will look at transferring the protector job from the firefighter to the manager, which will involve examining, questioning, and addressing all three parts.

The above example is fictional and created for simplicity and clarity; here’s a real-world case study if you’d like a more in-depth overview of how it can work:

American Journal of Psychotherapy | The Teenager’s Confession: Regulating Shame in Internal Family Systems Therapy

How it all fits together in practice

IFS looks to make sure all the parts’ needs are met, even the “bad” ones, because they all have their functions.

Good IFS therapy, however, can make sure a part is heard, and then reassure that part in a way that effectively allows that part to “retire”, safe and secure in the knowledge that it has done what it needed to, and/or the job is being done by another part now.

That can involve, for example, thanking the firefighter for looking after our exile for all these years, but that our exile is safe and in good hands now, so it can put that fire-axe away.

See also: On Being Reactive vs Being Responsive

Questions you might ask yourself

While IFS therapy is best given by a skilled practitioner, we can take some of the ideas of it for self-therapy too. For example…

• What is a secret about yourself that you will take to the grave? And now, why did that part of you (now an exile) come to exist?
• What does that exile need, that it didn’t get? What parts of us try to give it that nowadays?
• What could we do, with all that information in mind, to assign the “protection” job to the part of us best-suited to healthy integration?

Want to know more?

We’ve only had the space of a small article to give a brief introduction to Family Systems therapy, so check out the “resources” tab at:

IFS Institute | What Is Internal Family Systems Therapy?

Take care!

Reading, Better

It is relatively uncontroversial to say that reading is good for cognitive health, but we don’t like to make claims without science if we can help it, so let’s get started:

There was a 2021 study, which found that even when controlling for many other factors, including highest level of education, socioeconomic status, and generalized pre-morbid intelligence:

❝high reading activity, as defined by almost daily reading, was associated with lower odds of cognitive decline, compared to low reading activity❞

~ Dr. Carol Chan

Source: Can reading increase cognitive reserve?

However, not all reading is the same. And this isn’t just about complexity or size of vocabulary, either. It’s about engagement.

And that level of engagement remains the key factor, no matter how quickly or slowly someone reads, as the brain tends to automatically adjust reading speed per complexity, because the brain’s “processing speed” remains the same:

Read more: Cognitive coupling during reading

Everyone’s “processing speed” is different (and is associated with generalized intelligence and executive functions), though as a general rule of thumb, the more we practice it, the faster our processing speed gets. So if you balked at the notion of “generalized intelligence” being a factor, be reassured that this association goes both ways.

Read more: The unique contribution of working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and intelligence to reading comprehension and reading speed

So is the key to just read more?

That’s a great first step! But…

The key factor still remains: engagement.

So what does that mean?

It is not just the text that engages you. You must also engage the text!

This is akin to the difference between learning to drive by watching someone else do it, and learning by getting behind the wheel and having a go.

When it comes to reading, it should not be a purely passive thing. Sure, if you are reading a fiction book at bedtime, get lost in it, by all means. But when it comes to non-fiction reading, engage with it actively!

For example, I (your writer here, hi), when reading non-fiction:

• Read at what is generally considered an unusually fast pace, but
• Write so many notes in the margins of physical books, and
• Write so many notes using the “Notes” function on my Kindle

And this isn’t just like a studious student taking notes. Half the time I am…

• objecting to content (disagreeing with the author), or
• at least questioning it, or which is especially important, or
• noting down questions that came to my mind as a result of what I am reading.

This latter is a bit like:

• when you are reading 10almonds, sometimes you will follow our links and go off down a research rabbit-hole of your own, and that’s great!
• sometimes you will disagree with something and write to tell us, and that’s great too (when this happens, one or the other or all of us will learn something, and yes, we have published corrections before now)!
• sometimes what you read here will prompt a further question, and you’ll send that to us, and guess what, also great! We love questions.

Now, if your enjoyment of 10almonds is entirely passive, don’t let us stop you (we know our readers like quick-and-easy knowledge, and that’s good too), it’s just, the more you actively engage with it, the more you’ll get out of it.

This, by the way, was also a lifelong habit of Leonardo da Vinci, which you can read about here:

How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day – by Michael J. Gelb

a very good book that we reviewed last year

How you read (i.e. what medium) matters too!

Are you reading this on a desktop/laptop, or a mobile device? That difference could matter more than the difference between paper and digital, according to this study from 2020 that found…

❝The cumulation of evidence from this and previous studies suggests that reading on a tablet affords different interactions between the reader and the text than reading on a computer screen.

Reading on a tablet might be more similar to reading on paper, and this may impact the attentional processes during reading❞

~ Dr. Ugo Ballenghein et al.

Read more: Cognitive engagement during reading on digital tablet: Evidence from concurrent recordings of postural and eye movements

What if my mind wanders easily?

You can either go with it, or train to improve focus.

Going with it: just make sure you have more engaging reading to get distracted by. It’s all good.

Training focus: this is trickier, but worthwhile, as executive function (you will remember from earlier) was an important factor too, and training focus is training executive function.

As for one way to do that…

Mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and GRE performance while reducing mind wandering

If you’d like a primer for getting going with that, then you may enjoy our previous main feature:

No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness

Enjoy!