IFS and Time Travel

Check your time zone: Have you been in the present for the last minute? If not, you’re in good company. From the perspective of internal family systems (IFS), we all have subpersonalities or parts, and our parts don’t travel the way we do. They don’t move across land spaces or within mutually synchronized time zones; they travel within time and can also get stuck at certain points in time. If you hear things like, “You shouldn’t have…” or “Why didn’t you…” or “If only you had…” a critical part of you is trying to get you to travel into the past and undo something that has already happened. Undoing can’t work literally, and it doesn’t work emotionally for a few reasons.

First, although we (especially when we’re young) may need to ignore or forget bad things that happen for a while, over time, not knowing becomes dangerous. Do you know why? It’s not because we need to keep going back and suffering bad memories. On the contrary, it’s because the vulnerable parts of you who got hurt and left behind in time need your help to get out of the past and stop suffering.

When we comply with a protective project of forgetting, we allow our fearful parts to banish our hurt parts. We collude with keeping them out of their rightful community inside, blocking them from feeling loved not despite but because of their innocence, openness, curiosity, and spontaneity, and we deny them the benefits of access to the greater knowledge and skills of developmentally older parts. What do I mean by “we?” I mean the resource in all of us that is not a part. IFS calls this “you” the Self, with a capital “S” to differentiate this meaning from others. Even if you haven’t felt this way lately, your Self is centered and compassionate. With the bird’s eye view, it can love and care for your parts no matter what happens to them or how bad they feel.

Exiled parts feel lonely and despairing. Their suffering becomes the bleak wallpaper of our lives: the depressed mood, the anxiety, the unstoried dissatisfaction, the wondering why life matters, the unhatched tears, the blaming others, the too much suffering with others, the wishing it hadn’t been like this that undoing parts so doggedly pursue.

There is a better option. You have two forces in your mind—two different forms of consciousness: your parts and your Self. With access to both, you are whole. When your protectors can stop causing you to relive the bad experiences they want to undo, when exiled parts feel loved without fixing, polishing, improving, or redacting, you will be free to embrace the life you’ve had and all the parts who got you here. You will be able to travel around in time together and always come home to the present.