Why Am I Talking About Parts All of a Sudden?

If you've read any of my recent blogs, or indeed you are one of my clients, you may have noticed a recurring theme. Parts. A part called Teddy. A Catastrophiser. A Mind Reader. A Fortune Teller. Parts of the mind that protect, that limit, that emerge at particular moments to manage particular kinds of threat.

You might have wondered where this language is coming from, and why a psychologist is talking about internal characters rather than thoughts and behaviours.

This blog is an attempt to answer that honestly.

How I Got Here

A couple of years ago, a clinical supervisor introduced me to the idea of parts through a simple but striking image: a babushka doll. The idea being that within each of us, nested inside one another, live parts of ourselves that emerged at different points in our lives and never quite left. Some of these parts are young. Some are frozen at the age at which they first appeared, still responding to the world as though that earlier time is now, still trying to protect us from something that may no longer be the threat it once was.

That image stayed with me. It changed how I saw my clients. It changed some of how I saw myself.

Then, recently, I attended several days of intensive training with Oliver Brooke, an IFS practitioner whose depth of experience and quiet, grounded way of working genuinely moved me. What I came away with wasn't just a richer understanding of a therapeutic model. It was something closer to a shift in how I understand what's happening inside people, including inside myself, and why the approaches I've been drawn to throughout my career make the sense that they do.

What IFS Actually Is

Internal Family Systems, or IFS, was developed by Richard Schwartz, an American therapist who originally trained as a family systems therapist. Working with clients in the 1980s, Schwartz began noticing that people naturally described their inner experience in terms of parts. "Part of me wants to, but another part is terrified." "Something in me just shuts down." "There's a voice that tells me I'm not good enough."

Rather than treating these as figures of speech, Schwartz began exploring them as though they were real, distinct aspects of a person's inner world. What emerged was a model that has since developed into one of the more significant approaches in contemporary psychotherapy.

The model proposes that the mind is naturally multiple. Not in a pathological sense, but in the way that any complex system contains different functions, different histories, different priorities. Within this internal system, Schwartz identified a central Self, not a part, but the core of the person, characterised by qualities like curiosity, compassion, calm, and clarity. And around that Self, a family of parts.

Some parts are what IFS calls managers: the ones who run day to day life, who keep things organised, who work to prevent pain or vulnerability from surfacing. The perfectionist. The people pleaser. The overachiever. Parts whose job is to keep the system functioning and the person acceptable to the world.

Some parts are firefighters: the ones who act impulsively when pain does break through, who reach for whatever provides fast relief, whether that's alcohol, distraction, rage, dissociation, or numbing out. Their job isn't to prevent pain but to extinguish it quickly when it arrives.

And underneath both of these, the parts that managers and firefighters exist to protect: exiles. These are often young parts, parts that carry the emotional weight of difficult experiences, the shame, the fear, the grief, the sense of not being enough. Exiles hold what was too much to process at the time. Managers and firefighters, in their different ways, work to ensure these parts are never seen, never felt, never allowed to surface.

The system is, in its own logic, coherent. Every part has a protective function. Every part, even the ones that cause us the most difficulty, is trying to help.

Why This Matters in the Room

I want to be clear about where I stand. I am not a fully trained IFS therapist, and I wouldn't represent myself as one. IFS certification is a significant undertaking, and I'm at the beginning rather than the end of that process. What Oliver's training gave me was a meaningful deepening of something I'd been working with intuitively, and a more coherent framework for understanding what I was already seeing.

What I can say is that this way of understanding people has genuinely changed my work.

When someone sits across from me and describes an inner critic that won't let them rest, I'm no longer just looking at a cognitive pattern to be restructured. I'm curious about that part. How old does it feel? When did it first appear? What is it trying to protect? What would happen, in its view, if it stopped?

When someone describes a part of them that shuts down in conflict, or that reaches for wine at the end of a hard day, or that catastrophises every uncertain situation, the question I'm now more interested in is not "how do we stop this" but "what is this part carrying, and what is it protecting the person from having to feel?"

This shift, from seeing difficult patterns as problems to be fixed to seeing them as protective responses with their own logic and their own history, changes the therapeutic relationship in ways that are hard to fully articulate but very easy to feel in the room.

The Connection to What I've Already Written

If you've read my piece on imposter syndrome, you'll have met Teddy, a part I named as a way of making this framework personal and accessible. Teddy is, in IFS language, a manager. He keeps things safe by keeping them small. He limits risk and in doing so limits exposure to the thing he most fears: the devastating experience of being found inadequate.

Grace, Teddy's supposed nemesis, isn't really his enemy at all. She's just less afraid of what he's been protecting against. And the work isn't to eliminate Teddy but to understand him, to thank him for years of trying, and to gently show him that the person he's been protecting has grown since Teddy first took up his post.

If you've read my piece on cognitive distortions, the Catastrophiser, the Mind Reader, and the Fortune Teller are all, in their different ways, managers or firefighters. Parts doing their protective work with the tools they have, operating from an often old and narrow understanding of what the person needs to be safe.

The language of parts isn't new in my writing. What's new is having a more developed and grounded framework to understand why it works.

Why I Find This Hopeful

The thing I keep coming back to, what sat with me most from Oliver's training and from my own time spent with this material, is what the IFS model implies about the possibility of change.

If a difficult pattern is a disorder, something broken or deficient in a person's fundamental wiring, the question of change is heavy. It implies fixing what's faulty.

But if a difficult pattern is a part doing its protective job, often from a young age, with limited information about who this person has become since, the question of change becomes something different. It becomes about building a relationship with that part. Updating it. Showing it that the Self, calm, curious, compassionate, is present and capable of handling what the part has been managing alone for years.

That's not a small thing. For many people, the idea that there is a Self underneath the parts, something intact and capable that was never destroyed by what happened to them, is genuinely new. It's sometimes the most important thing I can offer someone in a room.

I'm continuing to learn this model. I'll keep writing about it as I do. And if something in this piece resonates with your own experience of your inner world, I'd be glad to talk.

You can find out more about my work at www.mindharbour.com.au. I'm based in Hillarys and work with people across Perth's northern suburbs including Sorrento, Duncraig, Padbury, Ocean Reef, and Joondalup.