IFS: A New Way to Understand Your Dreams

Source: Brenda Clarke, artist/Flickr Creative Commons

For most people, decoding deep-seated personal messages in their dreams isn’t simply difficult, it’s impossible. Dreams, after all, rarely can be taken literally. At a non-metaphorical level, they’re usually bizarre, nonsensical, indecipherable. But if they’re appreciated as figurative, taking curious poetic liberties in portraying the psychological truth of your experience, better understanding them requires you to dismantle their symbolic overlay.

From Unconscious to Conscious

Freud claimed that dreams were the “royal road to the unconscious,” and though theories on the physiologic/psychic significance of dreams abound, there’s still ample evidence that many of Freud’s empirical findings accurately depict what’s going on beneath one’s consciousness. And that’s perhaps best revealed through a non-biased perception of the dream’s elements.

Obviously, unless we’ve learned to “lucid dream,” we’re not conscious when we dream. But if we can grasp that when we’re in a dream state our unconscious is trying to get through to us—though generally in a cryptically disguised way—we can begin to penetrate its depths, making consciously accessible what’s not yet emotionally resolved in us.

In various ways, virtually all therapy revolves around making conscious that which, unconsciously, has been driving our behavior. Only when we’re able to discover how outdated and dysfunctional programming may still be controlling us are we at liberty to change it. I’ve written earlier about talking to your defenses to persuade them to loosen their hold on you. And however obliquely, dreams can disclose their identity, and what (albeit wrongheadedly) they’re trying to accomplish for you.

The present post will describe the basic tenets of Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), uncannily designed to help bring these defenses into full awareness. Learning about IFS fundamentals can enable you to appreciate how this innovative approach to dream interpretation represents an important advance in getting to the semantic root of seemingly meaningless nighttime imaginings.

Parts 2 and 3 of this post will provide examples of how, beginning with the unvarnished narrative of a dream, then searching for its veiled themes and motives, can assist you in extracting meaning from what’s presented to you symbolically. And one example of this is a client who shared how the breeze-blowing branches of a tree suddenly transformed into the waving arms of women beckoning her—as it turned out to offer her help she didn’t realize she needed or could safely ask for.

What’s crucial to discern is that all dreams are “normal hallucinations.” Yet diligently scrutinized such that we’re able to perceive their underlying import, these hallucinations aren’t at all delusional. What I’ve found is that the natural knowing of the client will resonate powerfully when the meaning pregnant in the dream shifts from hopelessly mysterious to helpfully translucent. And that transformation delineates the very essence of an “ah-ha!” experience—integrating intellectual awareness with intuitive, emotional recognition.

How IFS Offers a Fresh Way to Decode Dreams

IFS, taking its cue from Family Systems Theory, is the brainchild of Richard Schwartz, Ph.D., its founder and chief spokesperson. Having dramatically increased in popularity in the last decade and lauded by several eminent neuroscientists, it postulates that we’re all made up of parts—in a sense, endowed with multiple personalities, or better, sub-personalities.

What’s most pragmatic about the model is that these ancillary personalities can also be understood as old defense mechanisms “volunteering” originally to safeguard our welfare but, far too often, now unknowingly operating against it. These defenses function in a broad variety of ways, but what they all have in common is their endeavor to eliminate the emotional pain we originally experienced that seriously compromised our coping capacity.

Dreaming Essential Reads

Behind the Magic and Mystery of Dreams

A Jungian Approach to Understanding Your Dreams

Most of these protective mechanisms came about in childhood to rescue us from frightening feelings of insecurity. And as a young child, so dependent on our caretakers’ unconditional acceptance (pretty much impossible for any parent to unfailingly provide us), whenever we had cause to doubt their caring—or the caring of others emotionally critical to us—our primal sense of vulnerability emerged.

That’s when a sub-personality, or defense mechanism, interceded to alleviate our anxiety-laden quandary. It may have taken the form of self-castigator, self-sacrificer, self-pacifier, or—more generally—harshly judgmental inner critic. And most typically it led to avoidant behavior, putting off whatever we were afraid we’d fail at or be criticized for.

There are actually two types of so-called “protectors.” The one just described is preemptive, or managerial. The other is reactive and, rather than urging passivity or subordination in the face of perceived threat, prompts you toward potentially dangerous divergences or to aggression, warding off threat by attacking others to head off their (supposedly) attacking you.

So when your managers fail at their task and the wounded child inside you begins to tremble with fear or shame, these more desperate protectors, which Schwartz calls “firefighters”—much less concerned about causing collateral damage than managers—barge in to deal with this deeply felt psychological emergency. And they frequently resort to risky addictive behavior or reckless impulsive activities to distract you, in order to get your now revivified, suffering child part to retreat back into their remote, “ostracized” location.

In IFS, neither of these protective parts can heal the psychologically wounded child, which is why he or she was sent into “exile” in the first place—that is, to minimize the chance that the child’s suffering would be repeated, afflicted by such feelings as fear, terror, helplessness, unworthiness, inferiority, rage or shame.

Consequently, childhood spontaneity, wonder, and joy gradually are replaced, or numbed out, by a defensive vigilance, with all its limiting behavioral constraints. Native aliveness, exuberance, and awe get overtaken by an overblown idea of what’s needed to feel safe and secure.

Bit by bit, these sub-personalities, protective parts, or defense mechanisms end up taking control of your life—and at the great cost of your evolution and personal/interpersonal fulfillment. And what’s saddest about what unfortunately is all-too-common in childhood development is that these well-meaning protectors never grow up.

Originating mostly in childhood, if a sub-personality transformed its initially invaluable role into a more problematic protective one, then, if say it's "revised" function came about when you were 6, many years later it will still be 6, think you’re 6, and be oblivious to your now possessing far more resources than when it first emerged. That's why it’s critical to become aware of it and learn how to persuade it to back off and allow you healing access to the child, so you can then become who, in essence, you truly are—or would have been without its (unintentional) growth-denying interference.

The Almost Limitless Power of Self as It Relates to Dream Deciphering

Only your essential Self can work with your inner family of hurt children and, one by one, afford them the healing they continue to crave (the reason that, despite their obstructionist protectors, they keep springing forth).

So what exactly is the Self, and where does it derive its power? Put simply, it’s the unadapted you—the innermost core of the unique individual you are.

In most of us, the Self regrettably has become blended with our protective parts. So if we’re to distance ourselves from them we need, ironically, to first befriend them.

Since our wounded children are now in their protectors’ custody, and either these protectors don’t know about Self or don’t trust Self, we must start by showing appreciation for their enduring devotion to our wounded children—regardless of the unintended negative consequences of their efforts.

Curiously, to date, IFS has nothing in print or videos that elucidates dreams as another entry point in dealing with protectors. Which I’ve found particularly valuable when otherwise protectors resist clients' accessing and dialoguing with them.

In an email to IFS's founder, Dick Schwartz, inquiring about this lack, he responded (04/01/21) that the omission of dreams from IFS literature was “a big oversight” and that in his workshops he’s actually taught participants how to use this venerable tool to engage parts not ordinarily available.

If done correctly and the parts feel safe with you, recognizing that you don’t want to get rid of them, only to help them because their no-time-off roles have left them exhausted, they’ll start conversing with you.

That is, once you awaken from your ostensibly “far-out” dream and, lying quite still, review it, you can ask each dream “character,” animate or not, whether (1) they represent one of your sub-personalities, (2) what their role is in the dream, (3) where they’re located in or around your body, and (4) what, surreptitiously, they’re trying to tell you. And once you can alleviate their suspicions about your motives, they’ll be willing to share what their “mission” is all about.

In other words, you approach them in the same way you would in employing IFS in other contexts. And there’s now available a great deal of literature and lectures on the web that describe how this is best done (including several Psychology Today posts of my own).

Your goal is to convince them that you can heal the hurt child they’re so arduously protecting, so they don’t have to work so hard to keep that child in exile. And when they’re ready to reveal the situation that compelled them to “run interference” for the child and to make that child accessible to you, you can begin dialoguing with that child—and be the healing “fairy godmother” or “-godfather” the child never had.

To conclude, doing this unprecedented dreamwork isn’t simply about comprehending the hidden meanings in your dream. It’s about doing the reparative work that can’t happen until the concealed psychological significance of the dream is available to consciousness.

Note: Here are links to Parts 2 and 3.

© 2021 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.