therapy

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.