Ten years ago, when I first read Internal Family Systems, (IFS) founder Dick Schwartz’s book You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For, it was a game changer for me. The premise of the book, which is about applying the principles of the IFS model to intimate relationships, rests on the idea that many of us make a grave error when we expect our intimate partners to be the healers and caregivers of our wounded inner children. We all have wounded inner child parts- every single one of us. And it’s those wounded inner children who pick our romantic partners. For better or for worse, limbic resonance causes us to be the most attracted to the people who are the most likely to play out traumatic reenactments, triggering our core wounds.
If you’re with a partner who’s game for personal growth, including couples therapy and trauma treatment, this means you can help each other heal your core wounds by being what Harville Hendrix calls the perfect “imago.” If you’re not, you’re likely to retraumatize each other and wind up miserable, with your wounded inner children getting more and more heartbroken and betrayed.
With the IFS model, one of the goals of IFS inner work is to bond your wounded inner children (exiles) to your wise, mature, and unconditionally loving adult Self. Because Self is often not present when our parts get traumatized, we have to reparent those young parts, not by expecting our partners to be Magnificent Mommy or Dreamy Daddy, but by becoming that ideal mother/ father/ caregiver for our own parts. “You are the one you’ve been waiting for” turns the quest for resolution of our traumas back inside of us. By doing the YOU-Turn, coming back to our own inner attachment bonding, we take some of the pressure off our partners and take responsibility for healing our own wounded inner children, instead of allowing them to project all over our partners or act out in hurtful ways.
If you’re interested in learning more about the basics of the IFS model, I’m teaching my first 6-week Zoom class for beginners, starting June 25. Doctors and therapists are welcome, but it’s not a formal certification, so you don’t have to have any professional licensure to participate. This class is for anyone who is interested in learning to work with the IFS model, either one your own, with peer support, or between therapy sessions.
Learn more and register for IFS For Self-Healing here.
What might this look like in real life, to be the caregiver of your own wounded inner children? How might that be different than expecting your partner to be the primary caregiver of your hurt parts, which is what so many of us expect from our partners? Let me give you an example.
When We Need Excessive Validation
All children need the unconditional positive regard, love, and validation of our caregivers in order to grow up healthy, happy, and satisfied in life. When kids get that “good enough” unconditional love, we grow up knowing our value, knowing our worth, knowing we’re good enough, even if we mess up or fail at something. Even though it feels good to receive attention, validation, approval, and praise from other people, we aren’t dependent on that external validation to be okay. We don’t have to rely on people outside of us to constantly affirm our value, because we know in our bones that we’re valuable.
Sadly, many children do not get those core needs met, so they grow up with the “not enough” wound. Maybe they find a way to get a cheap substitute for unconditional love- approval. The problem is that approval is just another form of judgment. It’s positive judgment, but because it’s judgment nonetheless, it can be taken away and used to control a person. Kids will jump through any hoops necessary to win someone’s approval if we didn’t get unconditional love. We will sell out our authenticity to please others, if need be. That’s how much kids need others. This creates a dependency on external validation, because we don’t have a rock solid sense of stable worthiness, the way someone who grew up securely attached would feel.
That becomes a nightmare for our future partners. Because if you expect your partner to always approve of you, to always validate you, to always make you feel good, you’ve now set your partner- and yourself- up to fail.
Because we all blend with parts and let down our partners sometimes. All of us. 100%. If you are dependent on your partner to mirror back to you a valuable human being, a lovable person, a kind, good, decent, honest, admirable creature, you’re going to suffer when reality sinks in. Because our partners, more so than anyone, will mirror back to us our very worst traits. The character flaws we like to pretend we don’t have will stare back at you from the eyes of the person who is supposed to love you the most.
I howled with laughter when Terry Real said that no married couple he’d ever met had questioned him or asked for clarity when he used the phrase “normal marital hatred.” It’s normal that our partner will sometimes reflect back to us looks of hatred. And if we’re dependent on them to be our validating mirrors, things are going to go south from there.
But here’s where the YOU-Turn can be so handy. Let’s say shit goes down, and now our partner is looking at us with normal marital hatred (which does not require marriage, by the way.) The parts of us that feel not good enough, not valuable enough, not worthy enough start kicking up some emotional dust in our psyches and now we’re flooded with unbearable exile emotions of worthlessness, helplessness, unlovability, not enough.
Typically, what happens next is “firefighter” activity. In IFS, firefighters are the reactive protectors, the survival strategies that help us avoid feeling the pain of our wounded inner children and all the unworthiness they carry. To our partner, this might look like defensiveness, criticism, contempt, or stonewalling, the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” relationally speaking, according to couples therapists and Love Lab researchers John and Julie Gottman.
But if we can slow the whole thing down, if we can pause and take a deep breath, if we can acknowledge the parts that feel unworthy in the moment when their dust kicks up, we can contain those hair-trigger sensitive protectors. Put some boundaries around them so they don’t “blend” and instantly act out in ways that might harm the relationship. If we do the “Get To Know Your Protectors” work, we can be curious about and compassionate with our protectors, even the ones that hurt ourselves or hurt others, once we befriend them and come to understand why they do what they do and how they’ve adapted to help us survive.
If we can cut the trip wire that makes us react so automatically, if we can pause, do the YOU-Turn, and go inside, we’ll usually find a whole litany of parts inside making a ruckus when our partner isn’t thrilled about us. An angry look, words protesting our behavior, an accusation about something we’ve done wrong- all of these can get our parts in a tizzy.
The romantic comedy fantasy of intimate relationships can mislead us into believing that our partners should always be gazing at us with ga ga admiration. Since that’s often how they look at us early on, during the honeymoon period of “cathexis,” we think something is wrong when all of a sudden normal marital hatred sets in.
But that’s normal. Occasional aversion to the people we’re the most intimate with is normal. If we don’t realize that, and if we haven’t learned how to validate ourselves when our partner isn’t happy with us, we might be tempted to go find someone else who will gaze at us with ga ga admiration. This leads people with excessive needs for external validation (who have not done their IFS inner work to bond their hurt inner children to their wise adult Self) to hop from one relationship to the next, have affairs, escape to a workplace where they get a lot of external validation, get addicted to the “come hither” gaze of porn stars, or otherwise seek validation outside of ourselves.
The onus is on us to map out which parts kick up when our partner isn’t looking at us with enraptured adoration. We are the one we’ve been looking for. Because we are the one who will never turn away from our own parts. No other human being is capable of being that solidly validating of our own inner children. It’s just too much pressure, and it’s a setup for failure and heartbreak.
Without IFS work, we often feel so much shame, embarrassment, and humiliation because of our reactive protectors that we try to pretend we don’t have these shadowy parts. We deny, minimize, invalidate, rationalize, and justify our bad behavior, which feels like gaslighting to our partner, who can see very clearly that we are guilty of doing something hurtful or wrong. And if defensive behaviors fail to shut up our partners, we might practice blame-shifting, pointing the finger at them instead of owning up to what we’re doing. We project all over our partners and try to shift the blame.
These are all parts of us. They’re not all of us, but they can destroy relationships if we don’t get a handle on how they’re acting.
With IFS, we can begin to understand why we’re so hair-trigger sensitive when our partner doesn’t look happy with us. Instead of pulling that trigger and gunning off with the defenses, we can feel the pain of our wounded inner children that carry burdens of unworthiness and we can give them the unconditional love, acceptance, and reminding of their precious value, which our caregivers couldn’t or wouldn’t give us, the way they should have.
We can hug them in our inner worlds, cradle them in our arms, rock them when they’re scared or feeling unlovable, and be the one we’ve been waiting for. We can take responsibility for tending to our own inner children, rather than carrying the unrealistic expectation that our partner is always going to look at us lovingly and mirror back our core preciousness. We can stop outsourcing our dependency on external validation and start giving ourselves what we need on the inside, rather than unrealistically expecting our partner to be the ideal parent we never got.
We don’t usually admit it to ourselves, but that’s what we’ve been conditioned to expect from our partners- Perfect Mommy, Perfect Daddy. And then, when our partner turns out to be human, we feel betrayed.
Mothers and fathers are supposed to love our kids, even when they act out, even when they mess up, even when they let us down. But partners do not have to put up with us if we attack them every time they don’t gaze at us with loving eyes! Adult partners do not have to unconditionally tolerate bad behavior (stemming from out-of-control reactive protectors) from people who aren’t demonstrating the willingness to do their own work to create real change.
The burden of that work is on us, not our partners. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Which is such a relief! Because our mature adult Self is the only one that will never turn on us or let us down, no matter what.
Being loved by Self does not excuse the behaviors of our protectors or let us off the hook of accountability for acting out in ways that are damaging to our relationships. We can love our protector parts and still restrain them. Like any good parent, Self has to have boundaries and discipline our inner children in fair, loving ways. Self has to contain parts that are acting out, just like we would co-regulate, hold our boundaries, and contain a tantruming child who feels entitled to candy in the grocery store. Just because we love our parts doesn’t mean we let them do whatever they want, without owning the behaviors and acknowledging the suffering we’re putting our partners through.
While you are the one you’ve been waiting for, it’s also true that you still need other people. In Part Two of this series, I’m going to burst any magical thinking fantasy parts’ notion that bonding Self to parts means you no longer need other people to help you heal, to co-regulate you, and to meet some of your attachment needs. So stay tuned and make sure you’re subscribed to my newsletter so you don’t miss the next part!
If this resonates with you and you’re new to IFS or want to deepen your practice of IFS, please join us for IFS For Self-Healing.
The post You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For (& You Still Need Others), Part 1 first appeared on Lissa Rankin.
Lissa Rankin
