February 2025 – Internal Family Systems: The Adult Part
Apparently I’ve gotten very inspired by Internal Family Systems Theory, because I’m writing again on it here, in this case on the nature of the “Adult” part. I wrote last month about the Young Adult, distinguishing it from the Adult, but did not detail what I meant by that Part. So read on for that clarification, and as ever, I welcome feedback if you are moved to send it.
(If you need a refresher, the previous articles are here: Protectors, Exiles, the Self, the Young Adult, the Divine Child, and World Events. And for the deep dive: No Bad Parts, and the clinical manual, Internal Family Systems Therapy, both by Richard Schwartz.)
May your February be cozy and not bleak, may you see the subtle shades of grey rather than the lack of color, and may you be finding community, support and courage in these chaotic times.
A detailing of the Adult part of the psyche, per IFS.
The Self we find in IFS encompasses a strange and wonderful duality….[where it can be] either an active inner leader or an expansive, boundaryless state of mind. To comprehend this duality, think of light: Quantum physics has demonstrated that the photons that make up light sometimes act like particles and sometimes like waves in a pool of water. Similarly, the Self can be experienced either as an “I” or an expansive sense of space and energy. For example, when we interact with our parts or with other people the Self is a boundaried individual, but when we are instead with our parts (or with other people) the experience of being “in Self” is expansive and inclusive—paradoxically, a kind of “no self” state of mind. (Schwartz, 2020. Internal Family Systems Therapy, 2nd ed.)
The Self (as described in a previous article, here) is the centerpiece of Internal Family Systems Theory (IFS), being the function of the human mind which is not a part of the psyche, but is the function that serves to organize the parts into a harmonious collective. Its qualities are: curiosity, compassion, calm, confidence, courage, clarity, creativity, and connectedness (the “8 C’s”). As the quote above describes, it has two dimensions, being the “executive function” which acts in the world (and I contend, in relation to the Parts), and the more abstract impersonal function, essentially the “witnessing function.”
Because I am heavily influenced by developmental psychology (i.e., the understanding of human psychological growth as happening in distinct stages), and as you can see in the recent run of articles on IFS (on Protectors, Exiles, the Self, the Young Adult, the Divine Child, and World Events), I see the mind’s Parts as usefully laid out in a developmental sequence. The backbone of Parts that I use is: Infant, Child, Teenager, Young Adult, Adult, and Super-Adult. Although there are lots of nuance and individual uniqueness in the Parts, I have found over the decades that this backbone keeps showing up across different people, in such a consistent and repeated way that it seems to just be a given. This does not seem particularly surprising, as these stages have been researched and described for decades (e.g., the Piaget you read about in Psych 1A), and are understood as features of both human development and the psyche’s structure. Or shorter: the stages are real, and the psyche does not forget them.
The benefit of understanding these stages of development is that they give an accurate shorthand to understanding who is who in your own psyche. When you understand the core features of each of these developmental stages then you can understand quickly who in you is talking, or who has hijacked your Adult self. For instance, if you find yourself acting in a confrontative and bluntly boundary setting way, as backed up by black and white thinking about right and wrong, that’s most likely the Teenager part. But if you find yourself being super sensitive to light, sounds, and textures, that is probably your Infant part speaking up. And so on.
So, what I want to sketch out here is the Adult part, which I see as implicit in psychic development, but which is not broken out into its own Part in IFS proper. This is the “active inner leader” referred to in Schwartz’ quote, but understood as the Part which is able to be more and more guided and informed by the Self (which, in its role of supporting the Adult/Parent, I call the Super-Adult). It is not the abstract, expansive, “witness” Self but rather the Part that executes the coordinating and relating function in the world at large, and the same (as parent) in the inner world. The King (the Self) sets the tone and agenda, and the Prime Minister (the Adult) carries it out with varying levels of success.
You might say, “Hey, why is the Adult not just the Young Adult pretending?” Good question. One reason they are not the same is that the Adult marks a (fuzzy) age range from about the late 20’s through the 40’s (in Western cultures), rather than the early 20’s for the YA. But more importantly: if you look back on the Young Adult article (here), you will see that the YA marks the developmental stage where the capacities and skills of adultness are not yet developed. It is not just that the YA is pretending to be an adult: they actually do not have the ability. The Adult, in contrast, marks the stabilizing of the raw ability to navigate the internal and external worlds with a decent regulating capacity. The Adult can get stuff done that the YA simply cannot.
But what guides the Adult is not a given, whereas what defines the Self (the “8 C’s”) is immutable (hence Self as the abstracted, impersonal, “un-worldly” dimension of the psyche). The Adult can be effective in the world, and accomplished at keeping the internal world from being chaotic (which the YA cannot), but can at its core still be ruled and pushed by the logic of one of the Parts.
However, to be more and more effective in the inner and outer worlds, the Adult must come to be more and more informed (given form) by the Self. This is the growth of the Adult itself as a Part; it becomes more mature when it both acts out the qualities of the Self (the “8 C’s”), and relies on the guidance of the Self (as “Super-Adult”). This is the contrast between the competent Adult (say, the parent or business owner) who is able to execute and balance their respective tasks but is ongoingly tense, and the mature Adult who does the same tasks well but channels through them the “8 C’s”, and routinely connects (through whatever practices, meditation, mentorship, etc.) with the Self for recharge, guidance and support.
If you look around, you will be hard pressed to identify a lot of mature Adults. You will see many competent Adults, who have Adult chops, and many many more Young Adults who are looking like Adults but panicked inside about being outed. But not many full Adults. Why? Essentially because it is really difficult. There are both external factors (e.g., cultural obligations to look a certain way, a lack of good role models) and internal ones (the Parts have learned to mistrust the supposed adults, and they do not want to give up their authority or power) that pull against maturation. In other words, immaturity is a norm, not a failing.
That said, the developmental pull of the psyche is towards maturation, and inevitably that means that the Adult channels the Self more and more, and the Parts take that Adult (as infused by the Self) as their primary attachment figure, trusting it to protect and guide. This is what separates an immature but competent Adult from a mature Adult; the more the executive Adult is infused with the Self, the more maturity.
Example
So, to put some meat on these bones, I’ll give an example in the form of Ricardo (not a real person) and his progress from YA to mature Adult.
Ricardo is a 35 year old father of two, married, who owns and runs a small restaurant. He had a relatively standard childhood, with parents who were kind but always working. His parents were “spiritual but not religious” in self-description, but did not do any particular practices or work around spirituality. In his mid-20’s, when he started his family and business, he was constantly stressed and waiting for the bottom to fall out, or to be discovered as a fraud, and compensated as his parents did, which was to pour his energy into work and survival (i.e., the Young Adult). But towards his late 20’s, this strategy started showing its weakness, as he felt distant from his kids, and his wife complained more and more about his workaholism. At the same time, his YA stage was waning, marked by his gathering through experience familiarity and competence with the mechanics of running a family and a business. But he was always tense and, though then he would not admit or even see it, was driven by fear.
However, under the pressure of his family’s negative feedback, and some decent advice from a mentor, he recognized that he needed to grow up more to become a fuller Adult, not simply a functional one. He engaged (with trepidation and courage) psychotherapy, for himself and with his wife, and in those realized that he held a belief that he had to go through the world only on his own willpower. He began a meditation practice and a business mentoring peer group which helped him feel, for once, that there was something larger than himself to rely on and take support from. In all of this work, by 35, he was feeling himself to have, as family and employees were reporting, a sense of greater security in the world and greater access to compassion and care and creativity.
Conclusion
Typically, people do move out of the Young Adult phase as the realpolitik of life gets familiar and their skills build. But it’s only from doing the required work, like Ricardo, that one moves from a competent Adult to a mature one. He was fortunate that he was not so defended as to shut out the feedback he was getting, but rather could admit there was a problem and engaged in finding the solution. He learned that there was a Self that was an aspect of him, which he could channel into the beliefs and behaviors of his Adult self that was tasked with navigating business and parenting. That is, his Adult functional self became more and more infused with, guided by, and gathering support from the abstract Self with its pure collection of the “8 C’s”. He had to learn how to skillfully deploy those qualities in the grungy adult world, and if he continues on this maturation path, he will more and more elegantly both behave from those “C’s”, but come to embody them as traits. Taken far enough, you get an enlightened person, but even there there needs to be an executor of worldly life. For the rest of us, it’s the commitment to stay on this path of maturation, and surrender to the input of the Self.
As noted at the start of this article, this developmental structure of the Parts is not emphasized in IFS, and the Adult as a distinct Part is not directly addressed. I don’t think this is an error, but more of a difference in inflection. There are pros and cons to every way of framing the inner world, with some capturing some dimensions but not others. The psyche, after all, is a very big space. But I have found with clients that this developmental framing that includes the Adult (the executive part of the psyche) has been helpful to clients in locating which Part is which in a way that tracks with the nature of those Parts. If, though, this framing does not work for you, that is completely fine. The whole core of IFS is to know you have Parts, to be able to untangle your Self from them, and to establish your Self as the center of the psyche. Whatever understanding helps you to do that is the right one for you.
