Internal Family Systems

12 Days of Girly Juice 2022: 8 Brilliant Books

Kate Sloan

Ever walked into a really great bookstore and felt a chill go up your spine that was almost erotic? Yeah, me too.

Gosh, I love books. I don’t know if I agree with John Waters’ famous quote on books, “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em,” because people consume the written word in so many different mediums now – but I know that I’d be hesitant to date someone who couldn’t at least converse with me about the books we each enjoyed.

Goodreads tells me that I read about 31 books this year, and as is tradition, I’ve picked 8 of my favorites to tell you about. Here they are, in the order that I read them:

 

Missing from the Village: The Story of Serial Killer Bruce McArthur, the Search for Justice, and the System that Failed Toronto’s Queer Community by Justin Ling

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I remember how it felt to be a member of Toronto’s queer community a few summers ago, when there were vague rumblings of a serial killer on the loose amongst us. Several people had disappeared mysteriously at gay bars and other areas in the Village, many of them queer men of color. The police didn’t seem to be doing anything about it, unsurprisingly. My queer friends and I would tell each other even more emphatically after nights out, “Text me when you get home safe, okay?” because we just didn’t know what was going on, and we were scared.

Through a series of events which are diligently described in this book, it was eventually discovered that the serial killer walking among us was a landscaper and former mall Santa who was targeting queer men of color, particularly those who were immigrants and whose far-away friends and family might not notice they’d gone missing. While the killer is in prison now, and will be until he’s at least 91 years old if he even lives that long, the damage he had done to our community, to his victims and to their friends and family was insurmountable and could never be taken back.

Justin Ling is a Canadian investigative journalist who took an interest in this story, and in this book he digs into what exactly happened, why police were so negligent in this case (hint: racism and homophobia were big factors, as you’d expect), and how the killer was identified and apprehended. It’s a fascinating and harrowing look into crimes that should never have been swept under the rug.

 

No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model by Richard C. Schwartz

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I really can’t overstate how much Internal Family Systems therapy has helped me this last year. I had struggled for over a decade with managing the torrential emotions that would sweep over me whenever I got triggered, and IFS is the only modality that has given me tools which have actually helped with this problem. It has helped me learn to be more compassionate towards myself and others, and to comfort myself when I am upset in addition to asking for what I need from the people in my life.

Richard C. Schwartz is the inventor of Internal Family Systems. Trained in family therapy, he took his knowledge of dynamics amongst groups and couples and began using those same paradigms on the individual self, seeing each person as being made up of “parts” which have conflicting desires, fears, motivations and tactics. What all of these parts have in common, though, is that they all ultimately share the goal of keeping you safe and protecting you from difficult emotions – it’s just that they sometimes do this in ways that seem baffling or counterproductive. The “parts” inside a person who’s endured trauma, Schwartz says, are essentially just children, frozen in time at the point in your history when you experienced that trauma – so if you notice yourself feeling like a snivelling 6-year-old girl or a tantrum-throwing 8-year-old boy when you’re triggered, what is needed is the care and compassion you would show to an actual child of that age who was having that level of emotional response.

No Bad Parts is one of several books Schwartz has written about IFS, and it’s a good introduction to the model. I’d still recommend that beginners to IFS see a therapist trained in this modality if they’re at all able to, because it can be extremely helpful to have a calm, wise person steer the ship through your tumultuous emotions with you when you haven’t learned how to do so yourself yet. But even if you can’t access therapy, I still think this book could be transformational for many people. It certainly has been for me, by helping me understand better what my therapist is actually doing when they implement certain IFS techniques, and how I can implement those techniques myself when I’m alone.

 

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I picked this up because several people I follow online had mentioned that they “couldn’t put it down” once they started reading it. I literally didn’t know anything about it going into it, and that’s probably the ideal way to consume this book.

So how do I explain why I loved it so much, without giving spoilers? All I can really say is that if you’re a fan of old Hollywood – the movies, the celebrity culture, the glamour of it all – and are a romantic, you’d probably enjoy this, especially if you’re queer.

It made me want to wear a green satin ballgown every day. It made me want to pursue the things I want, and the people I want. It made me want to be the loudest, boldest, bravest version of myself, if just in honor of the people who came before me who weren’t able to do that. I loved it and cried through most of it, which (coming from me) is a huge compliment.

 

You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For: Bringing Courageous Love to Intimate Relationships by Richard C. Schwartz

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I wasn’t sure whether to include another book I read by the Internal Family Systems founder about his therapeutic model, but honestly both of these books have changed my life so much that it would be weird not to mention them!

You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For is much more relationships-focused than No Bad Parts. In particular, a lot of it is about how trauma can make us more susceptible to viewing certain people as our “redeemer,” someone whose love will somehow “fix” us and make it so that we’re never sad or lonely or rejected ever again. This can be a highly damaging way to view your relationships, both for your loved ones and for yourself, and yet it’s how a lot of people think about love. It’s even how our culture encourages us to view love, if the many many media depictions of “romance = happily ever after” are to be believed.

This book discusses the ways that IFS techniques can be used to heal negative relationship patterns, like always trying to change a partner so they’ll be who you want them to be, or always trying to change yourself to fit what you think your partner wants. And although this book wasn’t written with polyamory or other forms of non-monogamy in mind, I think it dovetails nicely with a lot of resources on polyamory and trauma, because it can help you address the root causes of your strong reactions to jealousy, rejection, and the threat of abandonment.

 

Tampa by Alyssa Nutting

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

Someone described this book to me as “a gender-swapped Lolita” and I was intrigued. Lolita is one of my favorite novels, not just because the writing is beautifully lush and witty, and not just because it launched a thousand erotic tropes, but because of how skilfully it makes powerful statements about consent and control via its unreliable narrator Humbert Humbert. While often interpreted by critics as a defense of pedophiles and their crimes, I see Lolita far more as a warning to the world about what can happen when we trust “unreliable narrators” just because they’re male/white/well-to-do/[insert other markers of systemic power and privilege here]. Much like Missing from the Village, Lolita points out the ineptitudes of authority figures whose unexamined biases lead them to ignore, dismiss and belittle the disempowered people most in need of their help.

Tampa is indeed, in many ways, a gender-swapped Lolita. It’s a novel about an adult woman who is sexually fixated on young boys, and the lengths to which she will go to scratch her pedophilic itch. Like Lolita, it forces the reader to grapple with their own notions of consent, control, agency, desire, and justice. And also like Lolita, it encourages us to understand the problem of pedophilia from a more humanizing angle, without letting abusers off the hook for the terrible things they do.

While obviously quite disturbing, Tampa was a compelling read. I especially found it interesting to note the ways that women who abuse their power can so often be viewed as less of a threat than men who do the same, for obvious reasons, even though they can behave just as horribly and can be every bit as morally bankrupt as their male counterparts.

 

Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

Since I enjoyed her previous book The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo so much, I decided to check out Taylor Jenkins Reid’s newer novel, Carrie Soto is Back. It’s about the comeback tour of a fictional female pro tennis player – why she decides to return to the game after some time away, and what happens when she does.

I’m not a sporty person at all, but some of my few forays into the land of athleticism have been into racquet sports, including tennis, badminton, and volleyball. So, while I found the athletic aspects of this book mildly interesting, mainly what pulled me in was the relationships between the characters, and the way that Carrie is so driven by her desire to be the best that she often ends up pushing people away and hurting herself in the process.

I think this story is instructive for anyone who measures their value by their professional success. I’ve certainly been there, and it was affirming to see those struggles reflected in these pages, even though Carrie is a world-famous tennis star who tours the world, and I am a freelance writer who reviews dildos from my bedroom. (One thing we have in common, at least, is that we both know a thing or two about balls.)

 

On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

Oliver Sacks is one of my all-time favorite writers. He was a neurologist, and rose to fame for his gorgeously-written case studies compiled in many books, which examined the relationship between neurology and the human condition. I loved, for example, his book on how music affects the brain and vice-versa, Musicophilia, and his tales of visual and ocular disturbances in The Mind’s Eye.

On the Move is quite different, though: it’s one of his memoirs. It was published the year that he died, and shows him reflecting back on his life and the wisdom he’s accrued from it. In particular, this is one of the few Sacks books where he discusses in detail the fact of him being gay, and the ways that homophobia shaped the course of his life. But there are also lots of fun stories in here, tales of zooming across the country on a motorbike, playing chess on LSD, and falling in love for the first time. It’s a beautiful book, written by a beautiful man, and is one of the most intimate glimpses available into one of the great minds of the 20th century.

 

Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price, Ph.D.

Available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

I haven’t even actually finished reading this yet, but it’s already changed my life, so I feel compelled to mention it.

The provocative title of this book is indeed its central thesis. Laziness does not exist. Read that slowly, word by word, and notice the resistances and arguments that start coming up immediately in your mind. Do they sound like you? Or do they sound like your dad, your 4th-grade teacher, your first boss, or the disembodied booming voice of capitalism itself? More than likely, those voices aren’t coming from you – and more than likely, those voices are wrong.

In this book, social psychology professor Devon Price makes an incredibly persuasive argument for the idea that “lazy” people always have their reasons for being lazy, whether those are related to depression, anxiety, chronic illness, neurodivergence, trauma, burnout, or some combination thereof. But this book isn’t just theory – it’s packed with advice on how to materially change the circumstances of your life so that you will have more energy and take more initiative in the areas that actually matter, while also forgiving yourself for needing rest and making sure you get enough of it.

 

What were your favorite books you read this year?

How My DD/lg Kink Helps Me with Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy, and Vice-Versa

Kate Sloan

Two of the most important concepts I’ve ever learned in my life both go by an acronym: DD/lg, and IFS.

DD/lg, as you probably know if you’ve been reading this site for a while, stands for daddy dom/little girl roleplay, and it’s been a central part of my sexuality since I was about 23-24 (though there were certainly hints of those inclinations in my behavior and fantasies earlier than that). For those unaware, DD/lg is a specific type of D/s (dominance and submission) involving a nurturing, caretaking dynamic between a sub inhabiting a “little girl” role (that’s me!) and a dom inhabiting the role of a wise, nurturing caretaker (that’s my spouse!).

It has nothing to do with incest or (the way I do it) even the fantasy of incest – it’s rare that my partner and I roleplay as a literal daddy and daughter, since that “taboo” aspect is generally not what turns us on about it. Rather, the safety, caretaking, supportiveness and love involved in this dynamic both turn me on and lessen the factors that turn me off (anxiety, body image issues, depression, etc.), creating a psychological environment in which comfort and arousal can both abound.

IFS, on the other hand, stands for Internal Family Systems, a therapeutic modality for healing trauma. IFS is one of the key tools in my current therapist’s toolbox, which is how I got introduced to it – and I’m incredibly glad I did, because it’s truly one of the only things that has actually felt healing and helpful from all my ~16 years of therapy with various different practitioners.

Instead of encouraging you to “logic your way out of” depression, anxiety, and other trauma responses (as in cognitive-behavioral therapy) or to repeatedly relive your traumas aloud as if simply retelling a story could help you heal from it (as in standard talk therapy), IFS teaches you to see every uncomfortable emotion and outsized reaction as a “part” of yourself, who you can have a dialogue with, as if this “part” was an actual human being. In learning to do this work, you can learn to comfort your parts when they need it, instead of letting them flood you with emotion (or “blend with” you, in IFS parlance) whenever you get triggered.

Every “part” represents an earlier version of you who was frozen in time somewhere along the line due to trauma, so a lot of them talk/think/behave much more like children than like adults. But through IFS, you can learn to more and more often inhabit what the model refers to as the Self, with a capital S – the most evolved, integrated part of yourself, essentially the adult who can do the caretaking within your “internal family system” of traumatized childlike parts.

Because I’m a nerd, I’ve supplemented my IFS work in therapy by reading several books on IFS, so I can understand the model better and apply it more effectively in and out of therapy sessions. (The ones I would recommend are No Bad Parts and You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For, both by the creator of IFS, Dick Schwartz, as well as Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors by Janina Fisher, another IFS practitioner whose work is more explicitly trauma-focused.)

One of the many things I learned from these books is that dealing with so-called “protectors” or “managers” is a big part of the IFS process. These are parts who take on the role of protecting you from feeling the big, deep, scary feelings that can come up when an “exile” (a young part still holding onto old feelings of sadness, shame, rejection and/or aloneness) gets triggered. Protectors and managers might, for example, cause you to fly into a rage when you feel excluded, because anger feels easier and safer than those more vulnerable emotions; they might push you to drink, do drugs, or self-harm in order to block out the exile’s feelings; they might act as an “inner critic,” insulting you and judging you in the hopes that you won’t get hurt as badly if your confidence stays low.

Learning about protectors and managers has been transformative for me; I can recognize now when these types of parts are triggered in other people, which helps me have compassion for what they’re going through and why they might be acting in seemingly odd or irrational ways. But more importantly, I’ve learned a lot more about myself through this lens, like that the parts of me I’ve often hated most – the parts that can be judgmental, mean, and cold – are really just helpless young parts who started acting that way because they didn’t know how else to protect me from feeling sad, worthless and alone.

That being said, I noticed that many of the session transcripts in the IFS books showed a long process of gaining protectors’ trust, convincing them it’s safe to step down from their roles at least temporarily, before the therapist and client would be able to dialogue more directly with an “exile,” the type of young and vulnerable part they’re actually trying to heal. Dick Schwartz emphasizes again and again in his books that if you try to skip straight to a conversation with an exile before first establishing trust with the parts that protect it, havoc could ensue – such as the protectors forcibly taking over, thinking they have no other recourse. (This is why, for example, someone might storm out of therapy after a session or two, saying angrily that it’ll “never work” or it’s a “waste of time” – that’s a protector stepping in and using anger and “logic” as defensive tools to keep the person from feeling the deep, sad feelings of their exile parts.)

What I noticed, in my own IFS work, was that I didn’t have to work as hard as many other people do to keep my protectors mollified. Often I could just dialogue directly with my little exile, maybe after offering some brief reassurance to one or two protectors who came up. I would find myself thrown into the emotional world of a sad ~six-year-old girl, as if she was right there, just under the surface and eager to be engaged with, instead of locked away in some deeply-buried emotional basement chamber. And because I could commune with my exiles relatively quickly upon getting triggered, my healing work – both the in-the-moment process of soothing hard feelings within myself, and the larger-scale project of easing those burdens permanently – seemed to progress more quickly too.

But why were my parts allowing me such close contact with my exiles, without needing to jump through so many hoops and earn so many parts’ trust beforehand? I think it’s because of my experiences with DD/lg.

(I should clarify here that my therapist and I only started seriously diving into IFS work after about a year and a half of working together. Before that, we’d used IFS concepts here and there, but we didn’t really use the IFS process in earnest all that much until I became more interested in it earlier this year. So, I imagine that feeling comfortable with my therapist, and with accessing difficult feelings generally, has also made IFS easier for me than it might otherwise be. And protector parts may, in some sense, have observed the work I was putting into the process and been more willing to “step aside” because of that.)

I think part of why my protectors would “step down” more easily, allowing me more access to my exiles, was that they’d already seen me engage with younger, more vulnerable parts of myself in ways that were healthy, loving and supportive. Through years of doing DD/lg scenes – and just being in a DD/lg dynamic generally – I’d cultivated a strong sense of my “little self,” the version of myself I inhabit when I’m in “little space.” Dick Schwartz talks about a few different key types of intimacy in his books, including “part-to-part” and “part-to-Self” intimacy, and I think my exile has these types of intimacy not only with my partner (who has taken care of her in many different situations, both in and out of scenes) but also with me.

For instance, for years, when I’ve been having a hard time, I’ve sometimes talked to myself as if I was a parent taking care of a little girl, e.g. “Okay, little one, time to clean your room,” or, “We just have to get through this one work assignment and then we can rest, okay, bbgirl?” Over the years I’ve mostly seen this as me “domming myself,” especially at times when I either didn’t have a dom or my dom was physically not present. But in retrospect, I can see that through those interactions, I was cultivating a connection with younger parts of myself – and that in doing so, those parts may have learned to trust me more, and to trust me sooner, than they otherwise would have.

It’s not that I was always a competent adult in my relations with my little self. There were times when I self-harmed, drank too much, went out with people who treated me badly, etc., in an attempt to block out the seemingly unquellable wailing from within (“No one loves me,” “I’m worthless and stupid,” “There is something wrong with me,” and so on). Part of the work I’ve been doing in IFS is making amends with all my parts for the times I was not there for them in the ways they needed me to be. But I do think I had a better-than-average relationship with my exiles upon beginning IFS work, which has made the process feel easier and less scary.

I think one of the reasons I was drawn to DD/lg in the first place, even if I wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time, was that I had this infinitely sad little girl inside me and dreamed that someday, someone would show up and take care of her so well that it would take her pain away. She would no longer have to wonder if she was loveable, or worthy, or good, because someone wise and strong would tell her so. This is what Dick Schwartz calls the search for a “redeemer” – someone who will permanently end your misery and doubt, someone whose adoration finally proves your value in the world, someone who will love you so hard that it undoes all your trauma in one fell swoop.

But the fact is, that person doesn’t exist – even though my spouse is fucking amazing and loves me better and more deeply than I ever could have expected or hoped. No: the best caretaker for my parts, the one who understands them best, the one who loved them first and will love them last, the one who knows what they need and can give it to them day after day after day – that person is, has only ever been, and will only ever be me.

There are times when that feels hard, or impossible; there are times when that makes me angry or sad, because believing in the illusion of an external “redeemer” was easier and in some ways more comforting. But if DD/lg has taught me anything, it’s that patient love and care can be transformative, and can make more room in your life and mind for not only arousal and excitement, but also for comfort, safety, and a sense of wholeness. And just as I took care of myself in the early days of my DD/lg kink by putting a collar on myself and lovingly bossing myself into doing household tasks, so too can I take care of myself now, by being the “redeemer” I need and deserve.