​[00:00:00] Suzanne Bindels: Lately I have been hearing more and more about IFS; a form of therapy called 'internal family systems', the founder of which is Richard Schwartz.

And today Isabelle van Dooren is here with me. I’m so curious to hear from you what this form of therapy is all about. In any case, could you lift the veil a little bit; what is the first thing you would like to say about IFS?

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[00:00:31] Isabelle van Dooren: 

Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is that it is a very friendly way to deal with our inner world. We’ve often heard something - from other psychological forms - about the ego or superego and that it is something ‘bad’. And I think it’s so beautiful that IFS shows us that all the voices that you hear within you or all ‘parts’ are welcome and deserve to be heard and seen.

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S.B. : So it's about a kind of self-compassion.

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I.v.D. : Yes, that's right, beautifully said. It’s also about how you’d like to treat yourself and the people around you, if you want to hear and see people for who they really are you can ask yourself: "Where do all those voices come from?”

And there’s a richness to them. Because every voice, even if it is very negative or causes a lot of inner struggle, it often has an underlying desire for goodness or... How can I put it best, let me think for a moment…

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S.B. : Take your time.

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I.v.D. : ​All parts always have a core of ‘goodness’ within. And even though there are some parts of whom you might think, “I'd rather not have those”, or: "Let me push them away", IFS invites us to embrace everything or at least not to push parts away, but to see and experience them without necessarily having to get them out of your system, because every part has the potential to transform and start functioning in a positive way. 

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[00:02:18] S.B. : Your answer provides me with such a good amount of follow-up questions: 

I'm going to put that aside for now, but I will certainly come back to them, also to those multiple voices in your head. But for now I’d love to hear something about your background, because you are also a musician. 

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I.v.D. : Yes, that's right.

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S.B. : Tell us something more about you: what do you do in life?

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[00:02:37] I.v.D. : I'm trained as a classical pianist. And you actually come across that a lot in music: 

those different characters or parts in the music. 

Of course there is Schumann, Robert Schuman, for example he wrote the 'Carnaval'. 

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S.B. : With all those animals? 

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I.v.D. : Well, in that piece, mainly personalities or parts are being portrayed, actually. He also talked about his inner personalities and at that time people thought, "He's schizophrenic," or, “There must be something wrong with him." But he tried to express those personalities in music and created beautiful pieces about them.

But whatever you play: one often hears a certain character in a piece of music. 

Or it’s like a person who comes to life. And you actually try to breathe life into it, with your own breath and your own way of playing. And in that sense it has a lot to do with an inner family, which you meet in every piece of music. 

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S.B. : Yes, it's great that while you're making music - without spoken language - you're also seeing, in your imagination, all those different voices in a person. And when did your interest in not only music, but also the human psyche begin?

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I.v.D. : Well, I think it started quite young because my mother is a yoga teacher and also had a lot of books about it, about consciousness etc. And through my aunt and uncle I came into contact with homeopathy at an early age, they are homeopaths. 

Homeopathy actually has a lot in common with IFS; in the sense that you look at a disease as a part that has a problem, or a personality. And you try to see: "What does that personality need? Which remedy is suitable for that part?"

And then - each session - you actually solve a part of the problem until the entire problem or symptom is solved. So that was the first time, at least for me, to come into contact with: how can you look at the inner world.

And I have experienced many haptonomy-sessions.

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[00:05:09] S.B. : And that has also something to do with touch, right, or can you tell us more about that?

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I.v.D. : Yes, haptonomy is beautiful: it is about the search for tensions in the body - personalities or parts can often cause all kinds of tensions in the body - and haptonomy detects those tensions. Just by breathing very calmly towards it and learning to 'be' in it, one can relieve some of that tension. 

It can also help with fear of failure; I went there because I suffered from fear of failure because of all the concerts and the conservatory world and the pressure there. But that pressure also allowed me to get to know that part of myself, and to try to solve it, in all kinds of ways.

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S.B. : ​Beautiful; so it really brought you something: that attention for the body and the principle of 'parts', ‘parts’ within yourself. Is that a concept you have been familiar with for a long time? 

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I.v.D : Yes, it is. And one can say: those are 'parts' in myself, other people prefer to talk about 'personalities', or 'pieces' of themselves. Richard Schwartz talks about 'The mosaic mind'. This is increasingly being recognized in psychology these days: that the mind consists of different personalities or 'parts' or 'pieces'.

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[00:06:29] S.B. : Very interesting, because when I was a psychology student, we received a lecture by a woman who was diagnosed with ‘multiple personality disorder’. So it was definitely seen as a 'disorder', from the perspective of psychiatry.

And she told us very vividly - it was a very fascinating story - about how all those personalities within her had their own voice, how they could also argue, how they could be destructive and some parts could also bring something positive. And what I remember is that she learned - in the therapy that was given to her at the time - to allow those voices to talk to each other in a more harmonious way and to achieve a better integration of all parts.

But yes, this is actually a very psychopathological view on ‘voices in the head’: because it was labeled - if people have this in an extreme form and act from multiple personalities - then something must be seriously wrong. While I have the feeling - also when I read about it - that Richard Swartz is looking more from a kind of health-perspective.

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[00:07:25] I.v.D. : ​Yes, I agree. Although there may of course have been very serious trauma in a life and Schwartz emphasizes then that parts can become really dissociated from the Self - so much so, that there seems to be almost no contact anymore between the Self and the parts. In that case,  the parts can completely go their own way.

What then helps is to calmly introduce every part to the Self: “Oh, there is a healthy core”. Schwartz calls it the Self, you can also call it ‘consciousness’. When parts are seen by this consciousness, they eventually relax and regain the ability to function in a healthy way.

But the more trauma there is, the longer that process sometimes takes and the more intense the parts can sometimes be.

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[00:08:43] S.B. : Is this form of therapy suitable for people who have had intense traumatic experiences?

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I.v.D. :  ​Yes, it is. I would recommend…I really enjoy guiding people on their path who are interested and curious about IFS and about their inner world and who may have already done some orientation in the field of consciousness.

If one has a more heavily traumatized past, I would always recommend to go see a psychologist who is also familiar with IFS.