The Voices in Your Head

The Voices in Your Head

Alison Escalante M.D.

What is the self? It’s the core of us. To children, it’s often explained as “the real me.” When the parts feel safe enough to let it, a profound healing energy emerges in people that seems to know what they need. Far from being deficient and needing the help of the therapist, IFS posits that people are equipped with self already, and the goal is to access that self. The self is noted to have a list of remarkable characteristics, including 8 Cs and 5 Ps. The 8 Cs are calmness, clarity, compassion, curiosity, confidence, courage, creativity, and connectedness. The 5 Ps are presence, patience, perspective, persistence, and playfulness.

So Schwartz is claiming that we all have an essentially ideal human inside of us already. While the self is the natural leader of the family, harmful incidents in the past created exiles and protectors who wrested control away. The goal of IFS therapy is to restore the internal family’s trust in the self, even as the pain of the past is healed by allowing the exiles to tell their stories and be freed from the burdens they carry. When the parts trust the self to lead, the internal family reorders itself in a healthy way.

Most of us don’t know we have a self.