Managers and Firefighters - understanding the logic of your own defences

One of the most quietly revolutionary things about Internal Family Systems (IFS) is the way it reframes the parts of us we like least! The procrastination. The rage that arrives from nowhere. The drinking, the checking, the compulsive busyness. The withdrawal. The part that eats when it isn't hungry, or works when it should rest, or picks a fight at the exact moment connection was becoming possible.

Most therapeutic approaches and most of our own internal narratives treat these as problems to be solved. Symptoms to be managed. Failures of character or discipline to be overcome.

IFS says something different. It says these parts have a logic. They developed for reasons and they are trying to help us.. and understanding those reasons, rather than simply trying to eliminate the behaviour, is where genuine change begins.

Managers and firefighters

In the IFS model, the protective parts of the system fall into two broad groups.

Managers are the proactive protectors.. the parts that run the day-to-day operation of keeping things under control. The inner critic that keeps you effortful and self-improving. The people-pleaser that maintains harmony at its own expense. The workaholic that ensures you are too busy to feel. The controller that imposes order on environments that feel threatening. These parts are working constantly, often invisibly, to prevent the exiled parts the ones carrying pain, shame, or vulnerability from surfacing.

Firefighters are the reactive protectors… the parts that activate when the managers' control breaks down and a tender feeling … an exile.. threatens to overwhelm the system. They are less subtle than managers and considerably more alarming. Binge drinking. Rage. Dissociation. Compulsive sexual behaviour. Self-harm. The firefighter's only priority is to put out the fire to extinguish the feeling, by whatever means necessary, as quickly as possible. Consequences are not its concern. Relief is.

Why this is important to get..

Understanding that our moves are protective rather than pathological changes the therapeutic conversation entirely. Rather than asking why do I keep doing this in a tone of despair or self-condemnation, we can begin to ask what is this part protecting, and what is it protecting it from? That is a question that leads somewhere. Because when you understand what the firefighter is extinguishing, you can begin to work with the exile it is protecting. And hen the exile receives what it actually needs acknowledgment, understanding, the experience of not being alone with what it carries the firefighter begins to relax.

In my own life, I have had a close acquaintance with firefighters. Parts that found highly effective, and highly costly, ways of managing what I wasn't able to feel directly. Understanding them not condemning them, not simply trying to stop them, but genuinely getting curious about what they were carrying has been some of the most important work of my adult life.

The invitation

The next time a part of you does something you'd rather it hadn't reaches for the drink, withdraws from the conversation, loses its temper, disappears into the screen try, if you can, a moment of curiosity before the judgment arrives.

What is this part doing? What is it trying to protect? What might it be that it doesn't want you to feel?

You don't have to answer those questions alone. But asking them is the beginning of a very different relationship with yourself.

Jonathan Edwards is an IFS therapist and psychotherapist, Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society, based in Bloomsbury, London and Stroud, Gloucestershire.