The way IFS works with addiction is 180° away from the way most therapy modalities look at it, or did look at it.
I talk about conflicts with our parts as Civil Wars – internal Civil Wars. Addiction is almost always an internal Civil War. Take alcohol addiction. There is some voice saying ‘I want a drink, I want a drink. I feel terrible. I need a drink now!’
There’s another voice saying ‘You pig! You got drunk last night, we’re not going to get drunk again tonight!’ And these two are going at each other, and it seems absolutely insoluble. It seems like you’re absolutely stuck.
What most therapists have done is to join this voice that says ‘You pig, don’t drink, you know you’re drinking too much; I hate you!’ and then shuts up and exiles this other Part. But of course, this isn’t an effective way of working with these Parts in conflict.
So what was realized in IFS is that it’s not only these two Parts there. If it was only these two Parts, it would be insoluble, just as the Parts think it is, but there are also Self and Exiles. The first two mentioned are Protectors, both protecting hurt Exiles. So in IFS, the first thing we do is develop and access a Self-to-Part relationship with each of these.
The manager Part who’s saying ‘don’t drink’, and what we call a firefighter Part, who’s saying ‘we need a drink we need a drink’, so you have a Self-to-Part relationship. Once we understand what those Parts are doing and why, we can then offer respect and care for them.
Let’s get clear on the details of the cycle.
With addiction, there’s a lot of distress in the system and that’s why a Part wants to drink. So the manager starts saying ‘You’re an idiot, no more drinking, no more drinking’. What is the impact of that? It immediately begins to increase the distress, and when the stress gets high enough this Part starts drinking. It then drinks until at some point, there’s no more distress, but the addict is now drunk.
Next comes the hangover, and then the manager will come in again, ‘You did it again, you did it again, you’re horrible you’re horrible, you’re horrible!’ and it will begin to increase the distress in the system until this Part starts drinking again and around and around it goes and the person begins to feel powerless over.
In IFS we realized that if you can intervene at this point with the Manager you can stop this whole cycle from accelerating.
So instead of joining that Manager and trying to beat up the Part that wants to drink, we work with the Manager and say ‘Hey would you be willing to give us a chance to work with that other Part and help it so it doesn’t want to drink? Would you stop calling it names and being angry at it? Just back off enough so that we can do that.’ That can almost always be negotiated.
We then work with the drinking Part and say ‘Hey, you’re drinking to control some pain, huh?’ and you find out what it can tell you about the pain and then we negotiate with this part: ‘If you let us, we can go to those very tender, hurt Parts you’re protecting and we can get them out of where they’re stuck and we can heal them and then you won’t have to be drinking anymore. You won’t be stuck in your old job.’
Almost always, those Parts say ‘Yeah, well if you can do it that would be great, but you can’t!’ and we just say ‘I can see how you’d feel that way. Would you be willing as an experiment to let us prove to you we can? Just give us the room and let us prove that we can actually do what we’re saying.’
We then work with the Exile, get them out, safe, unburdened, and after that, we come back to this Part and say ‘How was that? Did we live up to our word? Do you still need to drink?’ ‘Nah, not so much.’ And then we go back and negotiate with the Manager. As you can see it’s quite the opposite of what everybody else was doing.
IFS sort of got its start in working with Eating Disorders which is a form of very serious addiction. Anorexia, which results in mostly young women starving themselves, has a higher death rate than breast cancer. Many people don’t realize the seriousness of this addiction. Among women of that age, group teenage to early twenties, Anorexia kills a higher percentage of the people who get it than breast cancer does. So it’s really, really serious and IFS works really well with it and other eating disorders.