Now, the narcissist converts the intimate partner into an internal object, but it’s a functional internal object. It has functions.

So, he converts the intimate partner into an ego resource.

Because the external partner, the real intimate partner, had been converted into an internal resource, this resource is available to the narcissist’s self-states.

That’s a crucial distinction because it’s crucial, because I love my voice. I’m going to repeat it again.

Then the borderline and the codependent convert the intimate partner into an internal object initially. Afterwards, the borderline projects the internal partner, but leave it aside for a minute. The borderline and the codependent convert the intimate partner into an internal object to avoid abandonment anxiety.

Then, once the intimate partner becomes an internal object, they convert this internal object into a self-state. The intimate partner becomes a self-state with the borderline and the codependent.

Later, they project the self-state onto the partner.

What they do, in effect, because it’s a self-state, they merge with a partner and fuse with the partner. So, they had converted the partner into a self-state.

Now, they can merge with it, of course, easily, and fuse with it. But they convert the intimate partner into a self-state.

The narcissist converts the intimate partner into an ego resource. He converts the intimate partner into a set of functions, a set of procedures, very similar to a complex, very similar to a subpersonality.

Then the narcissist takes this newfound resource, which used to be his external intimate partner, external intimate partner becomes an internal resource. The narcissist takes this internal resource and gives it to a specific self-state.

From that moment, their internal resource, which used to be the external partner, becomes a slave at the disposal of one or few self-states of the narcissist.

It’s a crucial distinction.

Ken Wilber defines subpersonalities as functional self-presentations that navigate particular psychological situations.

So, if you, for example, react, someone said something to you and you suddenly react judgmentally, you think bad things about that person, you’re angry, you develop feelings of superiority, you use critical words, critical speech acts, you wound and hurt that person, you become punitive, your physiology changes, you become anxious, you begin to sweat, your heartbeat increases, your blood pressure increases, your eye pupils die late, you’ve entered the harsh critic subpersonality.

You see, the subpersonality dictates what you think, how you feel, how you behave, what you say and even how the physiology of your body. So, it’s subpersonality of the harsh critic and the harsh critic is needed in specific confrontational situations only.

At that point, the mode of harsh critic takes over the unitary self, borrows resources like thoughts, like emotions, like the body, borrows resources and mobilizes them and the person becomes a harsh critic temporarily. It’s circumstantial, it’s situational, it’s environment dependent, exactly like self-states but self-states take over totally.

In the case of the harsh critic subpersonality, the person remains the person, the self remains the self, totally recognizable by others, there’s no massive change, there’s a behavior, the person behaves like a harsh critic but there’s no massive change and it’s marginal, it’s subtle in a way, it’s expected also. People can be harsh critics. I mean, it does not infringe upon the unitariness, the uniformity, the cohesion and the coherence of the underlying core identity and self in healthy people. Healthy people have sub-personalities.

David Lester, the psychologist, has written extensively about sub-personality and sub-self theory in healthy people and those of you who are interested can go and fetch David Lester’s works.

Now, everything I said is the orthodoxy, it’s a mainstream of thinking about sub-personalities although I must tell you that we no longer use this idea. I mean, this idea is not in vogue, it’s notnot in fashion but what I just described is a mainstream.

There are however some dissidents and dissenters, of course, like everywhere, psychologists like Russia, huge in many dissidents.

So, there are some schools and some psychotherapists who regard sub-personalities not as temporary, not as situational but as relatively enduring psychological structures or entities that influence how a person feels, perceives, behaves and sees himself or herself.

So, they equate actually sub-personalities with complexes but I think there’s a big confusion here, a conceptual confusion.

No one said that sub-personalities are temporary, transient, not even me.

What I did say, the appearance of the sub-personality is transient. The sub-personality makes an appearance only when it’s needed to cope with psychosexual stressors.

So, it makes an appearance for 10 minutes, for one hour, for one day and then it goes away and is replaced by another sub-personality.

So, the sub-personality is there, dormant, latent, awaiting, awaiting, awakening, awaiting to be triggered and in this sense it is permanent, it is enduring but it’s triggering, its manifestation is transient and temporary.

And so, if you want to learn more about sub-personalities, there’s a lot in literature about Jungian analysis, psychosynthesis, transactional analysis and Gestap therapy, they all deal with sub-personalities and even schools of hypnotherapy and inner child work by John Bradshaw and others, they all actually are constituted on a concept of sub-personality.

There are techniques like voice dialogue, empty chair, chair work, ego state therapy and John Rowan’s work that I mentioned before and this leads me to an internal family system and the therapy that is attendant on internal family system, it’s known as shockingly and inventively internal family system therapy. It was developed by Richard C. Schwartz.

Schwartz said that there’s a continuum, the one end of the continuum, the pathological end, there are DID alters. Alters are personalities, almost full-fledged personalities within a multiple personality structure now known as DID, dissociative identity disorder.

So, these people have alters, each alter is very, very distinct. So, some alters could be children, other alters could be women, even if the person is a man. Some alters can be artistic, some alters could be sluttish, some alters could be super hyper conservative like Donald Trump.

So, he believed there is a continuum. He said that everyone has what he called parts. Parts, many people think that parts is like sub-personalities and even for example Wikipedia is saying this, it’s wrong. The internal family system parts are not sub-personalities. They are much more polarized, they’re split off from other parts.

So, the parts are pretty autonomous and the sharing of resources is much similar to self-states. Each part has its own repository and inventory of dedicated, proprietary, exclusive resources within the internal structure of the mind.

Schwartz’s big insight was to say well the mind is like a family and exactly like in a family there are many members of the family and exactly like in a family each member has functions and roles including emergent roles, roles allocated to him or to her by the other members of the family.

He said if we take the mind and we think about it, we regard it as a family, we can gain amazing insights.

So, the internal family system model is an integrative approach and as I said it was developed by Richard C. Schwartz in the 1980s. It involves systems thinking because it’s a therapy that describes internal processes as systems processes, not discrete but involved in a system.

The mind is made up of relatively discrete parts each with a unique viewpoint and unique qualities, unique, exclusive.

The internal family system IFS, okay, from now on to make it shorter, internal family system model, let’s call it from now on, IFS.

The IFS uses family systems theory, especially Bowlen’s family system theory and describes, may I add magnificently, it’s an amazing intellectual feat.

Regrettably, one of those things in psychology that fell by the wayside and didn’t gain the recognition that it should have had because I think it’s as revolutionary as Jungian psychology for example.

Okay, enough plug and promo, back to the topic.

So, there are all these parts and they’re in a framework and there’s some principle of organization and it’s very much like a family and these parts are like members of the family. They interact with each other, they communicate with each other, they have roles and functions, they allocate to each other roles and functions and so on.

And the IFS has five basic assumptions.

One, the human mind is subdivided into an unknown number of parts.

Number two, each person has a self and the self should be the chief agent in coordinating the inner family.

Here we see the first problem.

Many personality disorders, in many cases, the self has not constellated. We don’t have a self in effect.

Ironically, the narcissist is a selfless person. He doesn’t have a self and is the exact opposite of an egoist because he doesn’t have an ego.

That presents a crucial exception, crucial problem to the IFS.

The IFS relies almost exclusively on the self.

The IFS assumes that everyone has a self and that the self acts as a chief agent and the self is coordinating the inner family.

What do you do when someone doesn’t have a self? What happens to the family?

The next principle in IFS is that the parts, the parts engaging in non-extreme behavior are beneficial to the individual.

But actually IFS says that there’s no such thing as a bad part. All parts are well-meaning. All of them want to help the self. All of them want to help the host, which is the person.

They’re all, none of them is malevolent or ill-intentioned. In other words, the IFS rejects, this model rejects the notion that there is a bad internal object.

The notion that was first floated by Melanie Klein and then enthusiastically adopted by the vast majority of object relations theories, the concept of bad objects, per-secretary objects, malicious objects, malevolent objects, which are internal, this is rejected by the IFS.

IFS says they’re only good objects or at the very least well-intentioned objects.

Personal growth and development leads to the development of the internal family. Interactions between parts become more complex, allowing for systems theory to be applied to the internal system.

Reorganization of the internal system may lead to rapid changes in the roles of the parts.

Adjustments made to the internal system result in changes to the external system and vice versa.

So if you change yourself, you change how other people behave as well.

So both the internal and the external systems need to be adequately assessed.

IFS is a contextual model, contextual theory. It’s not enough to study the individual. You need to study the individual’s human environment.

People around the individual, external objects, significant others, parents, intimate partners, children, colleagues, you need to learn everything because the individual is embedded in a human environment and derives many functions from it and regulates other functions and internal processes exclusively via environmental feedback and input.

This is taken to extreme in the case of the narcissist, in the case of the borderline, in the case of the codependent, in the case of the paranoid. They have external locus of control.

So the belief is that studying the individual as an atom, atom, a unit, is wrong. It gives you the wrong picture.

It’s a contextual theory. The mind is made up of multiple parts and these parts are navigated, coordinated, controlled by an underlying core. And this core is what Winnicott called the true self.

What do you do when the true self is either atrophied and fossilized, ossified and dead, or when the true self had been supplanted by a false self?

What do you do then?

The IFS, in these cases, is largely inapplicable, actually. The IFS says that like members of a family, a person’s inner parts can take on extreme roles, extreme modes, remember? Subpersonalities.

So some parts can take on extreme subpersonalities.

And in the IFS version, the subpersonalities is what I call pseudo identities. What is observable? What is immediately obvious?

Each part has its own perspective, its own interests, memories, its own viewpoints. Every part has a positive intent, so there are no bad internal objects. Even when the actions are counterproductive, self-destructive, dysfunctional, self-trashing, self-defeating, it’s because the part is insufficiently evolved or received the wrong information or is trying to act in ways which are not very helpful, constructive and productive.

But the intention is always good, always to sustain and nourish the self, always to enhance personal growth, always to increase self-efficacy of the individual.

There is no need, says the IFS, to fight with any part, to coerce any part, to force, to cajole, to eliminate any part.

On the contrary, the IFS says we need to establish internal connections, a harmony between the parts, because when the parts are in harmony, the mind is in balance.

And yes, there are wounded parts, there are stupid parts, dysfunctional parts, we need to heal them to restore the mental balance. And we need to, the first thing therefore, we need to access the core self.

And from there, we can understand the different parts and how to cure them, how to restore them to functioning.

Again, there’s a problem with narcissists, for example, borderlines, others.

IFS says that there are three types of parts, three categories of parts.

There’s the exile. The exile is internal objects, constructs generated by psychological trauma, especially early childhood trauma. These internal objects, they carry the pain. They are reservoirs of fear, they’re containers of negative affectivity and emotionality. They gradually become isolated from other parts. And as a result, they polarize the system, they break it apart in effect.

And so other types of parts, the managers and the firefighters, I love IFS, it’s very childlike, managers, firefighters, okay, the managers and the firefighters to other categories of parts, they try to protect consciousness, to protect the person’s consciousness by isolating, exiling the trauma related internal objects. They want to shield the person from the pain. They don’t want the pain to come to awareness.

So the exiles are what probably Freud would have called the unconscious.

The managers and the firefighters push the exiles away, isolate them, sequester them, firewall them, exile them so that the consciousness of the person has no access to the extreme threatening negative emotions contained within the exile parts.

The managers have a protective and preemptive role. Whenever an exile, whenever a psychological trauma related internal object comes too close to awareness and to consciousness threatens to unbalance, disbalance the person threatens to create the compensation and acting out, switching between self states, whenever this happens, the managers preempt the exile part. They protect the individual from the trauma related exile part. They influence the way a person interacts with the external world. They protect the person from harm. And they prevent painful and traumatic experiences from flooding the person’s conscious awareness.

The firefighters, firefighters, the third category of inner parts, they emerge when the exiles do break out, when the managers had failed, the managers tried to contain the exiles, the managers tried to firewall the exiles, the managers tried to isolate the exiles, but sometimes it doesn’t work.

For example, in case of triggering, it fails to work and the exiles break through and they are on their way to consciousness. Or sometimes they have rich consciousness.

The firefighters take over when exiles break through and demand attention. The firefighters work to divert attention away from the pain and the hurt and the shame and the guilt of the exile, from the depressive schizoid elements of the exile, from the paranoid hues of the exile. They try to divert attention away and this leads to impulsive and inappropriate behaviors.

So, if we see, for example, promiscuity, overeating, substance abuse, violence, defiant violence, reactance, these are all attempts, desperate attempts by the firefighters to create a diversion so that the individual’s energies, the individual’s attention, the individual’s focus, everything goes to the manufactured situation and the individual doesn’t have time to experience the absolutely life-threatening emotions buried within the exiles.

So the exiles break through, firefighters take over and make you do something stupid so that you’re in a pickle and you’re in trouble and you don’t have time to think about the exiles and their message of hurt, devastation, ruination, and self-destruction ultimately.

The firefighters distract a person from pain by excessively focusing attention on more subtle activities such as overworking or over medicating.

Freud would have called it sublimation.