IFS Therapy: Trailheads, Transference, and Treating Firefighters
In this episode, John Clarke answers therapists' questions about applying Internal Family Systems (IFS) in real clinical practice. Learn how to begin an IFS session, recognize when your own therapist parts are activated, work skillfully with client triggers, and approach even highly protective parts with curiosity, compassion, and confidence.
Key takeaways:
1. How to naturally introduce IFS in a client's very first session.
2. Learn to tell the difference between therapist parts and Self-energy during sessions.
3. Why every protector, from scrolling to eating disorders, deserves the same compassionate approach.
Resources & Offerings
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Transcript:
John Clarke: [00:00:00] "My client's firefighter is a full-blown eating disorder behavior. Do I treat it any differently than a smaller firefighter like scrolling?" Do you treat it differently? No, in that all parts, especially the highly polarized ones like this, they need love and connection and understanding.
And at some point they may require unburdening
Going Inside is a podcast on a mission to help people heal from trauma and reconnect with their authentic self. Join me, trauma therapist John Clarke, for guest interviews, real-life therapy sessions, and soothing guided meditations. Whether you're navigating your own trauma, helping others heal from trauma, or simply yearning for a deeper understanding of yourself, Going Inside is your companion on the path to healing and self-discovery.
Download free guided meditations and apply to work with me one-on-one at JohnClarkeTherapy.com. Thanks for being here. Let's dive in
All right. Hey, everyone. Welcome back. My name is John Clarke. I'm the host of "Going [00:01:00] Inside." I'm a trauma therapist. I am a, uh, clinical director, the clinical director of Calm Again Counseling. It's my teaching practice in San Francisco. I'm also the host of "Pathways to Self," a weekly consultation group where you can get help becoming a better therapist, a better trauma therapist, and, uh, you can learn more about Pathways to Self at johnclarketherapy.com/pathways.
If you're here live, ask your questions in the chat. I'll bring them up on the screen one by one, and I'll also answer some pre-submitted questions. So I'll start with those first until I have some live questions. And thanks for being here. Question from Summer: "How do you actually start a first IFS session?
Talk through parts right away or get to know the client's history first and form ideas about parts later?" I am more in the camp of, uh... Well, if it's the start of therapy in general, I wanna hear about what's bringing them here. Um, [00:02:00] I want to hear about, yeah, what led them to reach out, what's going on in their life.
Um, people come to therapy when their typical ways of coping are no longer working to help them meet the demands of their life, right? So I wanna know a bit about that. If it makes sense to organically work in the parts work right away, then great. Uh, you could consider your intake session like a first session, and you could have them getting to know parts or as you're talking about this conflict with your mom, what's happening inside.
So I tend to let it develop organically. That being said, maybe they already know about parts work or maybe they want to learn about parts work, so you might do a little bit of teaching before you actually get into the work. Um, otherwise you might just kind of introduce the model by doing the model.
That's definitely my preferred way to do it. [00:03:00] Mark says, "When I invite a client to go inside and they just go quiet, how much space do I give them before saying anything?" This is a great question, and I love these technical questions. I'm a highly technical therapist and supervisor. Um, how much space should you give them?
With any intervention, ask your question, offer your intervention, and then study your client. Track them and notice them. If it seems like they're doing good work, get out of the freaking way. If it seems like they're lost or confused or stuck, help them. That's about as simple as I could put it. Mark says, "Sometimes I feel a strong reaction in session and I can't tell if it's my own part or me picking up on the client's system."
Also a great question, Mark. What you're talking about th- is basically the difference between parts and self, which is also the difference between you, uh, feeling a trigger or being in your intuition, right? In your wisdom. [00:04:00] If you're feeling tension, you're probably blended with a part. It's probably your transference, right?
If you're feeling calm and a lack of agenda with the client, you're probably more in self, right? So any strong reaction is basically you being triggered, and we all get triggered. A triggered is just a part of us that needs our attention, that needs our help. It's tapping into something in our own history, in our own system that is tender.
A huge part of becoming a good therapist is learning to monitor and notice and be mindful of your own reactions while also being with the client and keeping it about them. Most of my training in graduate school was really about this. It was really about, um, dealing with our own transference, understanding where those pitfalls were based on our history, and how to deal with them and how to work through them so that they don't get [00:05:00] in the way of the work.
That's a big part of your job above all else, is basically not allow your stuff to get in the way and impede the work. Melanie says, "How do you help a client find the trailhead when they say something just set them off but can't trace it back any further than that?" Great question. Um, what I do is I essentially expose them to their own trigger.
So if they were talking about a ti-- their difficult relationship with their mom, then I might kind of gently and gradually and strategically put them back there. I used to do a lot of clinical hypnosis. I use some of those skills and go, "So when you imagine being there in that house on Main Street, and you're sitting at that wooden kitchen table, and that as a little seven-year-old, you're looking up at mom, and you can tell [00:06:00] she's angry, what's happening inside right now in the here and now?
Not back then, but what's happening now?" Or, "How connected to you-- how connected are you to that little girl at the table?" Et cetera. So, you know, the trailhead has to be activating enough for it to be a trailhead at all, for it to produce a reaction at all for these parts to come alive
So within reason, sometimes you have to kind of, um, walk client, walk clients up to, uh, their own pain, right? Their own tenderness
Aaron says, "Are the eight Cs something you actively name for clients or more just internal markers for me, for the therapist?" Um, I'd like to say at least some of them, maybe like my favorite ones when I'm introducing the model to a client
compassion, curiosity, creativity, connectedness, et cetera So I might use at least some of them or say, "You know, in my system, I notice when I'm more in self, uh, when I feel more [00:07:00] curious about something or someone, I'm more in self. When I feel calm, it helps me know I'm more in self." You might notice out of this list of all eight which ones you notice more when you're more in self.
So it can be, it can be helpful Yeah. But I don't get too caught up in the whole protector, uh, manager, firefighter, exile thing. If it helps, great. If not, it, it, it's just that language is more for us to understand what kind of parts we're working with. So don't get too caught up in trying to orient them to all of this like shop talk
IFS is simple but not easy. On the surface, it's about parts and self. But when you're in the room with a client, things can get complex fast. Helping someone meet a protective part or wounded exile, that takes skill, and most importantly, it takes safety. My name is John Clarke, trauma therapist and IFS therapist, and in this free webinar for therapists and practitioners, we're gonna explore the subtleties that make IFS so [00:08:00] powerful and how to navigate them with more clarity and confidence.
You're gonna learn why safety is everything and how to do it well, what trips therapists up when applying IFS in practice, and a simple tool that you can begin using right away. If you wanna go beyond theory and truly embody the work, then this is for you. Join the free webinar today. Link is in the description.
Amara says, um, "My client's firefighter is a full-blown eating disorder behavior. Do I treat it any differently than a smaller firefighter like scrolling?" Hmm. Well, do you treat it differently? No, in that all parts, especially the highly polarized ones like this, they need love and connection and understanding.
And at some point, they may require unburdening. And they-- The reason they're more active is, one, it's habitual. Maybe they've just had more time habitually, um, in this disordered eating behavior. Number two, they might [00:09:00] be more burdened than another part. The scrolling, y- you know, or it might be the same part doing both.
The part that helps the client numb, helps numb by either scrolling and/or the disordered eating or sometimes drinking or vaping or whatever. They're parts that help us to not feel too much, right? And so it could be a different part, it could be the same. It, you know, if you wanna know, if you wanna find out, you would just ask, "I- is this the same part or, or another part?"
Yeah, but do you treat it any differently? No. You treat them all the way you would want to be treated. Curiosity, compassion, understanding, listening, empathy. Yeah. We don't overcomplicate the model, right? W- w- the goal, quote-unquote, of IFS is we're just trying to, [00:10:00] um, we're just trying to increase the amount of understanding in the system the amount of compassion and understanding inside. And by doing so, we create more harmony inside, which creates more harmony outside and less symptoms inside That's kind of how it all works. The team is more peaceful and cohesive, and the leadership is more solidly and consistently in place by self That's basically the whole model And by basically I mean not really, but I like to distill things down as succinctly as I can so I can then unpack them and understand the nuances of them, of which there are many in IFS.
But it's essential that you understand the essence of the model so you can do it and do it flexibly and do it in a way that's not so rigid where you're like, "What F am I on?" The Fs are not-- Use them or don't use them. They're not meant to be used sequentially. If you meet a new person, you don't do all the Fs, right?
If you have, meet a new client, [00:11:00] you go, "I gotta do all the Fs." Um, they can be helpful questions in getting to know a part, but they are not, um, to be used robotically.
Um, that might be it for today unless the folks here have any live questions. That's all the questions I had pre-submitted, so, um, that might be it for now. Um, like I mentioned at the beginning, if you're interested in working with me, the best way to do that is by jumping into Pathways to Self. It's my weekly consultation group that's largely focused on IFS, but also focused on everything else.
It's focused on, uh, working through your transference with clients. It's focused on working the here and now, being present, uh, using mindfulness, u- using creative interventions. Um, we talk about EMDR, we talk about somatic work, you name it. So if you're interested in that program, you can always jump in at any time and work with us at johnclarketherapy.com/pathways to join Pathways [00:12:00] to Self.
Um, otherwise, I'm gonna do this again in a week. So on the 21st I'll be here same time and place. That's 12:00 Pacific and I look forward to, uh, seeing you then. All right. Thanks for the questions. Thanks for being here. See you soon
Thanks for listening to another episode of Going Inside. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching and share your favorite episode with a friend. You can follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok @johnclarketherapy and apply to work with me one-on-one at johnclarketherapy.com.
See you next time