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].)

Depression, the Psyche’s Parts, and IFS

Looking at depression through the developmental IFS perspective of Parts.

In the last months of newsletter articles, I’ve been detailing the different developmental stages as they relate to the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model, to give a map of the different parts or subpersonalities of the psyche. With all the primary categories (Infant, Child, Teen, Young Adult, Adult, and “Super-Adult/Self”) described, I wanted to tie it all together by explicitly relating this map to depression. My essential point here is to explain how depression often comes from early (developmental) losses, which represent important goals that were lost but never grieved.

But first, let’s review the bare bones of depression.

Depression Basics

Depression is a systemic shutdown (i.e., it shuts down multiple aspects—biological, motivational, relational, etc.—of ourselves) that is triggered in response to the inability to accomplish important goals. But it is not just the “futility” of a goal (i.e., a goal that is impossible to obtain) that triggers depression; rather, it is that the goals cannot be grieved because they are, in some important way, too critical to our functioning be let go of.

When we become aware of the futility of our goals, our system is designed to evoke the grief response. This is analogous to how when a wound is registered in our bodies, it initiates a natural and automatic healing process. The reason for this is that at the mental/emotional level, to keep pouring resources (e.g., energy, hope, a vision of the future) into a goal that cannot make a return on that investment is to threaten to bleed out our limited energy in a dangerous way. Hence, a futile goal is like a physical wound: it needs to be healed and that healing is the process of grieving. (You can find much more detail in these past articles here, here, and here; as well as in this interview, here. And if you want a real deep dive, see the academic papers here and here.)

Here are two contrasting examples to clarify the difference between “situational” and “clinical” depression, or more colloquially, between a funk and misery. First: Joe was hoping for the promotion at work but got passed over by a capricious boss. His home life is positive, a good relationship and healthy children, and he feels connected to his community. That is, he has multiple places where he gets a sense of his own value and worth, not just work. Nonetheless, he goes into a funk for a few days, dragging his way to work but otherwise watching TV or staring at the bushes in the yard. But he knows throughout that his worth and future are not dependent on the promotion…it just kinda sucks.

Then contrast this situational depression (which is depression, but not clinical) with Jane, who also was passed over for promotion but does not have much of a life or relationships outside of work. For her, work is her life, as it’s where she gets a sense of worth, community, and a better future. In other words, all of her self-worth is tied up in and referenced from her performance and feedback at work. She had the vision in her head in which she would keep progressing up the corporate ladder, but when she did not get the promotion and the next rung, to her it meant that her future was in jeopardy, as well as her access to being a meaningful person in the world and her community. Normally (like with Joe) such a loss initiates grief. But when grieving (the emotional process of letting go) is of a loss that is fundamental to self-esteem and social worth, then it can’t be let go of because that would be dropping into a world which feels (and in some experiential ways is) void of meaning and value, both of the world and one’s self. So, for Jane, grieving the promotion wouldn’t just mean disappointment—it would mean admitting she has nothing else to build her worth on. In this situation you get clinical depression, in which depression serves to shut down the fundamental grieving process that threatens to expose the person to this meaning void.

Depression, then, is that which happens in response to “ungrieved futility,” that is, to losses that are too threatening to grieve. What’s important to see about losses is that they are always of things (people, places, beliefs) which we are attached to, which means we are invested in them and the goals they embed. If I see a pretty cup in a store, and someone else knocks it to the floor, I don’t start grieving the destruction of the cup because it meant nothing (it was not embedded in any goals) to me. But if my favorite “World’s #1 Dad” mug breaks, which was a symbol of my being a positive parent, and which anchored part of my self-esteem, I do feel grief. The goals of, “Maintain self-esteem through upkeep of positive self-image,” and, “Maintain positive sense of being a positive parent in future” are going to be undermined by the breaking of this symbol. Even at this scale, grief will happen because grief is the response to meaningful and consequential loss. Presumably the mug destruction will create a little funk that will pass quickly, but if you scale up to the loss of a partner, or parent, or career, you can see how all the deep goals embedded in these relationships (e.g., “Maintain access to resources,” “Have a meaningful life,” or “Don’t re-experience shame through loss of status”) are threatened by their loss. If the threat is great enough, then depression.

Thus, in a nutshell: grief responds to loss, and loss of the “objects” we are invested in/attached to is the loss of their ability to support relevant goals. If the loss threatens to overwhelm the most basic life goals (such as, “Don’t die,” and, “Be a good person,” “Maintain relatedness”) then depression shuts down the grief process.

IFS and Depression

So, with that primer (or refresher) in place, we can talk about IFS and depression in relation to the different parts.

If you’ve been following along these IFS articles these last months, you’ll remember that a good way to parse out our inner parts is by using a developmental lens (I particularly like Erik Erikson’s model). Developmental models simply say that things unfold in a particular pattern over time and move in definable stages towards a condition of maturity. The acorn predictably moves through germination, sapling, immature, and mature oak tree stages just as a human moves through infant, child, teen, young adult, and adult stages, maturing most fully when that adult is infused with the “Wise Self”.

A big part of what differentiates these stages (and therefore the parts that embody those stages in an individual) is the different goals that are embedded in each stage. Here’s Erikson’s map (here), with each stage’s developmental challenges:

• Stage 1: Trust vs. Mistrust (Infancy from birth to 18 months)
• Stage 2: Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt (Toddler years from 18 months to three years)
• Stage 3: Initiative vs. Guilt (Preschool years from three to five)
• Stage 4: Industry vs. Inferiority (Middle school years from six to 11)
• Stage 5: Identity vs. Confusion (Teen years from 12 to 18)
• Stage 6: Intimacy vs. Isolation (Young adult years from 18 to 40)
• Stage 7: Generativity vs. Stagnation (Middle age from 40 to 65)
• Stage 8: Integrity vs. Despair (Older adulthood from 65 to death)

Each stage defines a goal and the consequence of not meeting that goal. For instance, in stage one, infancy, the embedded developmental goal is to develop trust in life, and if that is not accomplished (for whatever reasons) then the result is the development of an attitude of distrust towards life. For the toddler, obtain autonomy or suffer shame/doubt. And so forth. The point being that each Part of the psyche represents a developmental stage and therefore has both personal and developmental goals, the obstruction or futility of which causes negative consequences. Like depression.

For “funk” depressions, these deep developmental goals are not involved, hence they are time limited, tend to pass on their own like colds, and don’t become chronic. But for the entrenched and repeating clinical depressions, what I have found is that these foundational goals seem to always be present, buried underneath the presenting issues. One person’s depression will primarily derive from a failure in the toddler Part’s having obtained a sense of autonomy of self, while a 60-year old’s depression could arise from a sense of pointlessness to their elder years. (Often there are several developmental sources for an individual: the 60-year old’s stagnation ties into the toddler Part’s having failed to secured autonomy.)

For a person who experiences a chronic, deep depression, even if loss seems to be about, say, a late-career failure, the deeper root generally ties back to the loss of the life and possibility offered by a successful completion of the particular developmental challenge. Or said another way, each stage offers the possibility of a future life characterized by trust, autonomy, etc., a future which is wired into us the same way the matured state of an oak tree is wired into the oak. We know that future in our bones, and feel grief at its loss, but unless we work on healing, it will be a loss that cannot be grieved because it would then mean an essential component in a “life worth living” is gone. Hence chronic depression: when some relative loss triggers that deep, developmental, existential, life-sustaining loss, grief tries to come, but it cannot be tolerated, and depression then arrives to rescue us from the void.

Per the IFS language, depression itself (the shutdown of multiple domains of oneself) is not a Protector, but is a phenomenon that is used by a Protector to guard a Part (and the system as a whole) against destruction. The Teenager Part who could not secure their sense of identity cannot be allowed to run untethered in the Adult’s world, lest they’ll collapse the ability for the Adult to meet their developmental goal. In that situation, a Protector is summoned (or a Part is assigned the Protector role) to exile the Teen (an “exile” being a Part which is ostracized or suppressed in the overall system of Parts). The Protector can use various strategies to keep the Teen down, but depression is one of the really powerful tools to keep suppressed the Teen’s grief over the loss of a world where its identity would feel secured (as they, in their basic wiring, expected).

Conclusion

The backbone of the psyche is the system of Parts, as described by the normal developmental phases of a human. Although there is nuance, and Parts that are not versions of developmental phases, this developmental lens works really well in identifying the main players in the who’s who in one’s psyche. Also, because these sequential stages have been so well mapped by people like Erikson, these stages also tell us quite precisely where to look for the tap roots of chronic, clinical depression. That is, when depression is repetitive, and is not solved by the grieving of a particular loss, we need to look for the core “ungrieved futility” in the loss of the worlds that we expected to happen when we were at a certain stage.

Hence, combining IFS (which does not use an explicit developmental lens) with an understanding of developmental goals allows us to see more specifically where the primary loss is that has not yet been grieved. Knowing this allows us to know the wound of the particular Part, and what medicine it needs to heal. This is not at all an easy process; it requires a lot of support, courage, and time to repair these early losses. But, like any journey, it also requires an accurate guide, and I think that this developmentally-informed IFS map can fit the bill.