Psychedelics and Internal Family Systems
A new fad or the perfect combination?
A few weeks ago, on a recent Huberman Labs podcast, Dick Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems (IFS), said, “I’m proud to say that IFS has been adopted as one of the primary models for psychedelic [therapy] now.” He went on to explain that psychedelics often put to sleep protective and controlling parts inside of us, and “this releases a lot of Self-energy,1 so you start to feel those C-word2 qualities emerging. And that’s a big invitation to all these exile parts3 to come and get attention.” (Footnotes added for those new to IFS.)
In the presence of a lot of Self-energy, these exiles can be compassionately and courageously held and witnessed. And when this happens, profound healing can take place. In this way, IFS can provide a powerful therapeutic framework for understanding what is happening in and after a psychedelic experience.
And it also runs the other way: psychedelics can provide a powerful catalyst for the steady, regular work of Internal Family Systems therapy. For those who’ve already built trusting, internal relationships with their parts, a psychedelic experience can take things to a whole new level.
It won’t come as a surprise to you that I don’t think psychedelics and Internal Family Systems are simply two great tastes that taste great together. I think they need each other. As powerful as each is on its own, I believe that only in combination can each reach its full potential.
Why psychedelics are like dentistry
I have a friend who has gone on ayahuasca retreats once or twice a year for the past decade. He recently told someone this and they responded: “If ayahuasca works so well, then why do you need to keep going back?” To which he responded: “If going to the dentist works so well for your teeth, why do you keep going back?”
There is A LOT of magical thinking surrounding psychedelics, and not just among its advocates. Even my friend’s skeptical interlocutor implied that psychedelics should be one-shot magical cure-alls and if they’re not, then why bother? But what if the proper analogy for psychedelics is not transformational fairy-dust, but rather a regular visit to the dentist?
I think the entire field of psychedelic medicine—from underground shamans to clinical researchers—would benefit greatly from shifting to this more pedestrian framing for what these powerful compounds, in the right set and setting, with the right facilitation, can do.
Admittedly, the homology between psychedelics and dentistry falters in a hundred different ways, but a few lines of similarity are worth pointing out:
For the vast majority of people, it is good to see the dentist occasionally but unnecessary and even counterproductive to see the dentist too often. Likewise, it is also good for the vast majority of people to occasionally experience a therapeutic dose of a classical psychedelic under the care and guidance of an experienced and reputable facilitator. It is unnecessary and counterproductive to do this too often.
You wouldn’t want to receive dentistry from any random person advertising themselves as a dentist. Fortunately, because dentistry is legal, you can easily find a professional dentist and be assured that they have a minimum level of training and professional oversight. Because psychedelics are not legal in many parts of the world, it’s difficult to be assured of the training and skill of facilitators. This makes it all the more important that you carefully vet any facilitator you choose to work with.
When you leave the dentist’s office, you have not been given a license to ignore your teeth until you come back. You must continue to care for your teeth on your own through a daily routine. And even if you are meticulous in your daily routine, you should still eventually go back for a deeper teeth cleaning and check up. Likewise, with psychedelics, when you return home, you have not been given a license to ignore your emotional, relational, and spiritual health. You must use the psychedelic insights and increased psychological flexibility to care for your inner world through regular routines.
If psychedelics are like a regular visit to the dentist, then what do we do afterwards?
These days, it’s hard to find anyone in psychedelic facilitation who doesn’t advocate for “integration.” But it’s even harder to find a common definition for integration. It can range from regular talk therapy to group processing (i.e., sharing your experience in a non-judgmental space) to meditation to journaling to art to just about anything that encourages expression and reflection.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with these. But in my experience, these modes of integration mostly help us land back home; they are rarely structured enough to help us continue working on whatever was opened up in the big psychedelic experience. And this is where Internal Family Systems comes in.
If, according to Schwartz, psychedelics act on our internal systems by taking managers offline and letting the young parts run loose, then we need a clear, repeatable framework for helping these young parts once they’re out.
The common modes of integration usually don’t cut it. They often (unknowingly) help manager parts come back online, make sense of the psychedelic experience, and put the young exiles back to sleep. This is why so many who have what seem like transformative psychedelic experiences can find themselves back at square one in a few weeks or months.
The problem isn’t that the dentist failed. The problem is that the post-dentist routine didn’t work. IFS is a way to keep cleaning our teeth long after we leave the dentist’s office.
IFS does this by helping us clearly identify managers as they come back online, build trust with these managers as they get to feel the C-word qualities of Self-energy in the psychedelic afterglow, and safely work with the vulnerable, young parts that have come out of exile.
This work is the slow, regular routine that we need in the months that follow a big psychedelic experience. It not only builds on the Self-energy that is often flowing post-journey, but it also helps our parts begin shifting into new roles in our system. It’s not a magical, over-night transformation, but rather a series of small, steady shifts into new ways of relating to ourselves and others around us.
Daily teeth brushing isn’t enough (or why IFS needs psychedelics)
Beautiful, important, and life-changing work can be done with IFS in the absence of any psychedelic experience. But I have consistently witnessed how psychedelics open new internal spaces for clients who have already done a lot of beautiful, important, and life-changing work with IFS.
There seems to be a level of access to parts that only comes from the profoundly non-ordinary states of consciousness that psychedelics can induce. There is also a level of Self-energy that I have only seen accessed on psychedelic medicine. I’ve found that it’s not as important that an IFS frame is held during the psychedelic experience — we can let that be what it is — but that afterwards, the part-to-self relationship building becomes richer, deeper, and more immediate.
Psychedelics also bring a gift beyond parts work. As Schwartz describes on the recent Huberman Lab podcast, psychedelics “open the door without these protectors so you can taste what I call the Big SELF, the non-dual state, what some people call God. As you come back, you have this sense I’m much more than this little body. There’s something much bigger.”
Obviously, people have experienced non-dual, ecstatic experiences without psychedelics, but what a gift to be able to experience this without years of training in a monastery or waiting for some random lightning strike of the divine. It’s possible, on a Tuesday afternoon in an Airbnb, to experience the sacred Oneness of everything.
Those are the experiences that we can anchor back into, remembering that YOU, the capital S-Self, are not just a drop in the ocean but, as Rumi tells us, the ocean in a drop.
Announcements
If you’re interested in learning more about the 10-week program I run with a therapist colleague that combines psychedelics and IFS, reach out directly to me and I’ll send more information.
If you live in Savannah, Georgia, join me for a daylong “mini-retreat” focused on opening up more Self-energy in our systems. We’ll be doing IFS practices, ecstatic dance, breathwork, and sound healing. More info and registration are here. It’s gonna be a blast!
If you’re new to my Substack and IFS, here’s my recent post about Self-energy.
The C-word qualities of Self are calmness, curiosity, compassion, courage, confidence, creativity, connectedness, and clarity.
Exile parts are vulnerable, sensitive, and usually young parts of us who carry the emotional pain from traumatic events or attachment wounds we’ve experienced earlier in our lives.