Inner Child Archives – Marty Cooper, PhD, MFT

June 8, 2025June 8, 2025 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

June 2025 – Internal Family Systems and Depression

This month’s article should be the last in the run about Internal Family Systems (IFS), as it is intended to tie all the previous articles together in relationship to depression, which of course is why we’re all here. Specifically, I’m discussing how my basic point that losses of things that are too important to our survival (mental, emotional, or literal) cannot be normally grieved, and thus invite depression. Or simply: depression is a defense against grief when a loss is too important to let go of.

I hope you find this, and all the IFS writing, useful. May your late Spring be giving you an abundance of flowers and only an appropriate number of challenges.

(If you need an IFS refresher, the previous articles are here: the core parts: Protectors, Exiles, Self; and the developmental parts: the Infant/Divine Child, the Child, the Teen, the Young Adult, and the Adult. And for the deep dive into IFS: No Bad Parts [the lay introduction] and Internal Family Systems Therapy [the clinical manual].)

April 2025 – Internal Family Systems: The Child Part

This month is the second to last installment in the recent series of articles on IFS; next month will be the roundup and the direct relating of it all to depression. Specifically, I’m rounding out the Parts with a discussion of the Child (distinct from the infant/toddler), which more than others is the Part who plays. It’s also a part that is commonly shut down, either during its time as a child because the environment could not tolerate its aliveness, or during adolescence or early young adulthood, when the Child is seen as an obstruction to the serious business at hand. I hope you find it helpful in further locating who’s who in your own psyche.

(If you need an IFS refresher, the previous articles are here: the core parts: Protectors, Exiles, Self, and the developmental parts: the Infant/Divine Child, the Teen, the Young Adult, and the Adult. And for the deep dive into IFS: No Bad Parts (the lay introduction) and Internal Family Systems Therapy (the clinical manual).)

I hope your spring is starting out well, and the childlike exuberance of new growth is finding its way into your life.

August 2024 – Depression and the Divine Child

I try to give a “pointillistic” view of depression in these newsletters, from the very pragmatic (as with here) to the rather abstract (like here), to give multiple ways to think about this complex experience. Today’s newsletter will be more of the latter, although in a weird sense (as hopefully you’ll see) fundamentally pragmatic. So, this month I’ll be describing what Carl Jung called the archetype of the Divine Child, specifically seen through the lens of a Jungian analyst named Donald Kalsched.

Kalsched writes about what he calls the “self-care system”, which is essentially the way our psyches protect themselves from damage when in contact with a threatening or caustic outside world. We’re all aware of the normal protections, such as defensiveness (“I didn’t do anything wrong!”), but Kalsched unpacks a more primal phenomenon, a defense system at the level of the basic archetypes which is organized around the protection not of the personal “Inner Child,” but of the more fundamental Divine Child.

Take a read and see if or how this idea might apply to your own life. Once you get the concept, it can be a very useful addition to the pragmatics of dealing with depression.

May your summer be progressing with the right mix of comfort and challenge.