Creative Externalization How Expressive Arts and IFS Bring Your Inner World to Life Part II: Embodiment, Movement, and Role-Play
By Alicia Dabney, AMFT, APCC, ATR, and Clinician at the IFS Telehealth Collective*
Internal Family Systems℠ (IFS) is not a “one size fits all” process. It allows for a tailored approach to healing that encompasses various life experiences, backgrounds, personalities, and reasons for seeking therapy. External factors are not the only consideration. Each person has a uniquely individual internal system—not unlike a one-of-a-kind fingerprint—with different needs and responses that will inform the way IFS therapy unfolds.
The IFS model encompasses three main approaches to healing, thus allowing the therapy to unfold using any combination of in-sight, direct access, and externalizing depending on your unique individual factors both inside and out. This is the second blog in a three-part series specifically focused on aspects of embodiment, movement, and psychodrama in the externalizing approach of Internal Family Systems therapy. Click here to read about creative externalization through art and visual form.
Key Points of the IFS Model
The IFS model holds that it is the nature of the mind to be subdivided into distinctive subpersonalities or parts. These parts of you can offer valuable qualities, capacities, and resources that enrich your life in various ways. Parts in an unburdened internal system might be involved in accomplishing daily life tasks, nurturing interpersonal connections and interactions, contributing various talents to the world, engaging in self-care and nourishment—or by bringing an essence of humor, playfulness, passion, a thirst for adventure, delight, or a child-like curiosity to your life.
However, sometimes parts take on extreme roles inside in order to protect the most vulnerable, wounded, exiled parts of us that have taken on burdens and beliefs as a result of difficult or traumatic experiences. Different protector parts use different strategies to protect these emotional wounds: managers will seek to pre-empt emotional pain by keeping things in control, while firefighters will react to the emotional pain that has been triggered by trying to numb, distract, or otherwise douse emotions that arise in connection to painful memories and reminders.
An important aspect of IFS is that all individuals have a Self—a core, undamaged essence inside that carries qualities such as calm, clarity, compassion, curiosity, connection, courage, creativity, and confidence. This Self offers internal wisdom, guidance, and an inherent ability to heal from within. The goal in IFS therapy is not to eliminate parts, but to release them from extreme roles and restore harmony and balance so that the Self can lead the internal system.
What is Externalizing in IFS?
There are three main approaches to IFS therapy. In-sight is the approach most associated with IFS and is primarily featured in podcast interviews, articles, and video demonstrations. However, direct access and externalizing are equally valid and have much to offer. Let’s continue to expand into externalizing.
Externalizing in IFS involves representing your parts concretely using a variety of approaches, materials, and techniques. The first blog in this series focuses on expressive arts, art therapy, and visual form while this blog expands into embodied movement, sculpting, and psychodrama. Regardless of the direction taken, the process of externalization can make the inner world visible and tangible in a way that lends greater clarity and perspective. It provides an opportunity to “see” or interact with a part in new ways or to deepen understanding of the relational dynamics among parts. Those with a history of trauma, a highly rational mind, a guarded protective system, or who cannot visualize images in their mind’s eye are particularly receptive to the externalizing approach, but anyone can benefit from this.
Regardless of the individual factors at play, externalizing carries many possibilities for deepening the healing of IFS. It aids both therapist and client. Depending on your level of engagement in the healing process, it can support the work done both in and outside of a therapy session. Externalizing is accessible and adaptable in countless ways, encompassing various aspects of healing through IFS by:
Building trust in your internal system
Getting to know parts in a different way
Aiding in unblending from parts
Facilitating access to Self
Developing and deepening Self to part relationships
Tracking sequences of activated parts around a circumstance, decision, or goal
Revealing relational dynamics, polarizations, and alignments among parts
Allowing a part to express itself more directly through you
Providing witnessing by understanding a part or its experience on a deeper level
Supporting post-unburdening follow-up and integration
Embodiment and Other Ways of Knowing
There are other ways of knowing and communicating beyond words. Numerous studies have been conducted on aspects of verbal and nonverbal communication with most concluding that as much as 93% of all communication is nonverbal. Research and knowledge in the areas of trauma, neuroscience, art therapy, dance movement therapy (DMT), somatic experiencing (SE), and sensorimotor psychotherapy (SE) further demonstrate how these other ways of knowing and communicating are happening inside as well.
An understanding of the interplay of implicit memory, somatic memory, and sensory input clarifies the potential benefits of externalizing through embodiment and movement. Implicit memory is linked to somatic memories held within the body, where sensory input is transmitted from the nervous system to the somatosensory area of the cerebral cortex to process and encode those memories. In other words, sensory input is linked to the five senses and plays a large role in memory formation. This sensory input is considered to be both interoceptive and exteroceptive, where interoception is centered on the internal physiological and emotional environment and what is going on inside you, and exteroception takes in the external surroundings and experiences around you.
Susan McConnell, a Lead Trainer for the IFS Institute, has expanded the IFS model into Somatic IFS using her knowledge of these other ways of knowing as a way of embodying the internal family. IFS connects to this experience with invitations to notice what is happening in and around your body. Bringing your presence and awareness to that, in the present moment, might be the first step in getting to know more about that part. Externalizing this experience might include an invitation to embody, or take on the essence of that part. What is its posture? How does it move or navigate? Where does it want to be located in conjunction with you or another part? Peter A. Levine, who developed SE, describes embodiment as our “capacity to feel, to our depths, the physical reality of aliveness embedded within our bodily sensations”. Connecting into awareness of the physical and emotional sensations of a part, then finding ways to express and externalize that is one way to fully embody a part.
Embodiment is a bottom-up process facilitated by using nonverbal, external, and creative means. Bottom-up processing describes taking in sensory information and integrating that into meaning, while top-down processing describes the way cognitive information is used to interpret sensory information. The IFS model can be approached as a top-down or bottom-up process with its three main approaches in-sight, direct access, and externalizing. There is an added dimension of outside in, or inside out in the IFS model. Externalizing, most often, will first tap into these aspects of bottom-up processing.
Moving Through the Many Possibilities of Embodiment, Movement, and Role-Play
Parts will often signal their presence as thoughts, images, emotions, body sensations, impulses or outward actions, and reactions. Tuning into these nonverbal communications creates an anchor that allows you to get to know the part on a different level. This is where externalization can be invited into the process. Connecting to your parts through various forms of embodiment and movement provides an external, sensory, interactive, or visual perspective of your internal world so that you can better see, hear, experience, or connect to them.
Among the many possibilities of externalizing through embodiment and movement are:
Using finger puppets, figurines, or stuffed animals to demonstrate relational dynamics among parts
Identifying objects to represent parts and arranging them around the room or a table
Sculpting by arranging others around you and inviting them to take on the posture, movement, attitude, or energy of a part
Embodying a part and allowing it to move through you, whether through dance or simple movements
Role-playing sequences of parts through role-play
Facilitating a “conversation” with parts using the Empty Chair technique
Externalizing carries the abundant potential for deepening the healing that is possible with IFS therapy, allowing you to follow your internal system’s rhythm and pacing for healing. No skill or training is necessary to do powerful externalizing, whether on your own or in the hands of a skilled IFS therapist. Allow yourself to connect inside and deeply listen to whatever your parts want to communicate with you.
A therapist at IFS Telehealth Collective can help you find and connect with those parts that need to be seen, heard, and ultimately healed by you. If you live in California, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, or Oregon, please contact our Client Care Coordinator or call 503-447-3244.
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*Alicia Larsen Dabney is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist #119864, Associate Professional Clinical Counselor #8016, Level 3 Trained IFS Certified Practitioner #0877, and Registered Art Therapist #20-261. Supervised by Andrew Pflueger LMFT #86223.
