Rosa: An IFS Consult Case Study

Rosa had been a counselor at a residential adolescent crisis center for almost 7 years when she scheduled a consultation with me. She explained that recent changes created a work environment that had become, in Rosa’s words, “toxic and dysfunctional.” She was almost ready to resign but was reluctant to leave her adolescent clients and felt that there must be another solution.

“I love my kids but I feel like I’m doing them a disservice and really should move on. It feels like the system is doing them more harm than good, and I’m participating in that!” She went on to describe with dismay that validation is used as a behavior management strategy, “to manipulate the kids.” 

“I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. I care about those kids but I don’t know how long I can keep following the protocol of the center when I know it is counterproductive. I feel like I’m betraying them and myself,” Rosa said. Her clients told Rosa that they felt disrespected and invalidated by staff. Rosa and I agreed: if adolescents are not validated by those who are providing therapeutic services in the center, then the providers have recreated the same dynamics that brought them to the residential center. 

In the past Rosa had been able to be creative and responsive, incorporating appropriate practices and strategies, not explicitly outlined in the treatment plans, that supported adolescent development. With the new management, this creativity and freedom were curtailed. Additionally, having been trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS), Rosa understood that what are perceived as misbehavior, delinquency, and pathology are, from an IFS perspective, normal protective responses to abnormal circumstances. Her colleagues, not trained in IFS, unquestioningly followed the organization’s protocols, much to Rosa’s frustration. Without peer support, Rosa was at her wit’s end.

The consultation

While I was tempted to move right into problem-solving with Rosa, I turned instead to The Shiftless Wanderer’s four tools:

• The process and practice of validation

• Compassionate curiosity

• Love and Courage as antidotes to fear

• And the essential nature of Adolescence

With Rosa, we both began with compassionate curiosity, turning our focus to Rosa’s internal landscape and experience: What is troubling Rosa? What parts were active? Rosa named:

• a part that was beginning to despair and believed there was no effective way forward except to resign;

• parts that were frustrated and angry;

• and a part that was derisive and judgmental toward her colleagues. 

I wondered out loud if Rosa also had an idealistic part that was railing against the injustice of the situation and a rescuer/savior part that wanted to save her clients. Rosa agreed. As we talked about the situation at the center, Rosa also identified a part of her that feared for her clients. 

As I listened to Rosa, I recognized in me many of the same parts I had when I was the education director and teacher of a small urban alternative high school which served street-involved youth. These were teenagers who were either living on the streets, couch surfing, or were living in unstable conditions. I often despaired at the injustices, the enormous odds against my students. Before I understood that many of my decisions and behaviors came from parts of me, I would too often try to rescue and “save” my students. Their traumas evoked my traumas. I got stuck, my students got stuck, and eventually, I knew I had to resign from the job. I appreciated Rosa’s consideration for resigning and felt her heartache at the thought of leaving these kids she deeply cared about. 

Validating those parts of me that were activated and the problem-solving parts that were eager to jump ahead and fix this for Rosa, I was then able to be more present with Rosa. She knew that these parts of her had positive intentions, but the impacts of these parts were not helpful in navigating the dynamics in her organization nor were they effective for her clients. 

Once Rosa was able to discern and be with her parts, my job was to facilitate access to her own wisdom, knowing, and experience. She is the expert in this situation and helping her get some space inside for clarity and calm would allow her to be with her clients, her colleagues, her situation, and with her own parts more effectively.

Rosa validated her parts as I co-facilitated this process. Then we identified some trailheads for her personal work, and only then did we focus on the challenges—what to do, how to go to work while accessing Self energy, interact in a Self-led way, and where could she step forward as a leader in this organization with Courage as an antidote to her despair and fear.

Self Energy

Self energy, according to IFS, is present when there is a critical mass of one or more of the following “C” qualities: 

• Calm

• Choices (the ability to make them) 

• Clarity

• Compassion

• Confidence

• Connectedness

• Courage

• Creativity

• and Curiosity. 

Now able to access more Self energy, Rosa and I were able to see how she could have authentic conversations with her clients so they could begin to get curious about their experiences of not being heard or validated. Rosa felt that with some creativity on her part these conversations could become part of the treatment. Not only that, but knowing the essential nature of Adolescence helped Rosa understand that one of the tasks of adolescing is to learn how to deal with situations where some choice and power are taken from us, how to make meaning from those situations, and how to keep finding our way back home to ourselves—to Self energy.

Rosa began to understand, from this wider perspective, that her colleagues, too, were simply acting from their own parts in response to the dysfunction of the organization. The beauty and power of IFS, I have found, is that we can change the dynamics in relationships simply by showing up with Self-energy. No longer mired in judgment and frustration, Rosa could be with her colleagues with more curiosity and perhaps even compassion. That changes everything.

The possibility for systemic change

As Rosa’s consultant, I had the advantage of a bird’s eye perspective and could see where there might be opportunities for Rosa’s professional and personal growth and for the residential center. I offered Rosa the image I saw in my mind’s eye—the crisis center a dying wetlands, flowers never coming into full bloom, leaves dying on the branches, plants withered and browning. Rosa, with her compassion, courage, and curiosity, would return to work bringing life to this landscape. New spaces could open, sunlight could filter in, maybe a flower here and a flower there would come into its own, a tree might leaf out. 

Rosa no longer had to participate in or be subjected to the withering. Because the crisis center is a system, when one aspect or feature of the system changes, everything will shift—for better, worse, or laterally. But change will occur. Certainly, change would come to her own internal system. But even more than that was the hope and trust that simply by her presence, from being Self-led, it was entirely possible that change would come to the staff and the center, that a validating ecology might be created, and the adolescents to whom they were in service to would be gifted by these changes. 

Image by: Berlin23