March 2025 – Internal Family Systems: The Teenage Part
Continuing on with the series on the Parts of the psyche seen through the lens of Internal Family Systems Theory, here is the entry on the Teenager. The Teen is routinely misunderstood, if not maligned, by adults and parents, who themselves have not come to terms with who and what the teenager is in themselves. This rejection leads to the teenager’s dynamic self turning chaotic, because it is left with no other option for self-expression. This is not to say that the Teen’s nature, and the teenager stage of development, doesn’t encode an unstable relationship between order and chaos, belonging and autonomy. It does, as Dan Siegel (Brainstorm) makes clear. But whether there is a relatively elegant maturing through this stage, and an integration of the Teen Part in later years, depends a lot on how accepting parents are (externally and internally).
Regarding IFS and depression, there are some of these IFS articles which poke at it, but in a few months I will do a summary of “depressed parts” to bring it all together.
May your Springs be coming with some relief from Winter’s severity, and reminding your various parts about the inevitable relatedness of dark and light.
(If you need an IFS refresher, the previous articles are here: Protectors, Exiles, the Infant/Divine Child, the Young Adult, the Adult, the Self, and World Events. And for the deep dive into IFS’s progenitor, Dick Schwartz: No Bad Parts, and the clinical manual, Internal Family Systems Therapy)
A detailing of the Teenager part of the psyche, per IFS.
Brain changes during the early teen years set up four qualities of our minds during adolescence: novelty seeking, social engagement, increased emotional intensity, and creative exploration. There are changes in the fundamental circuits of the brain that make the adolescent period different from childhood. These changes affect how teens seek rewards in trying new things, connect with their peers in different ways, feel more intense emotions, and push back on the existing ways of doing things to create new ways of being in the world. Each of these changes is necessary to create the important shifts that happen in our thinking, feeling, interacting, and decision making during our adolescence. Yes, these positive changes have negative possibilities, too…. Yet when adults lose the four distinguishing features of adolescence, when they stop cultivating the power of novelty seeking, social engagement, emotional intensity, and creative exploration, life can become boring, isolating, dull, and routinized….It seems we adults are prone to just cruise on auto pilot. Why? It can be difficult coping with life’s circumstances, to face the world’s stresses. Sometimes it’s easier to just shut down these essential aspects of a vital life that come during adolescence and instead try and stay in “survival mode” as we develop a routine we can rely on to function. (Daniel Siegel, 2014, Brainstorm)
If parts are like people, they get stuck, both emotionally and in time, when they feel unlovable. Why do they change? The answer—at least in the practice of IFS—is unequivocal: They change when they have been heard, understood, and feel validated. A lonely, angry teenage part will not feel or behave better for being managed, controlled, or banished. In all likelihood, it will want to talk about feeling hurt. It may need to hear about the way the world works. And it will certainly need to feel connected with the Self and the rest of the inner system. Meeting a part’s need for validation, sense of belonging, and security is not hard when we see it as an inner adolescent, or a young child, or a lonely 25-year-old. It is much harder if we view the part as a mental state or an abstraction like an internal object. (Schwartz and Sweezy, Internal Family Systems Therapy 2nd ed., 2020)
Introduction
The human psyche moves through different stages of development, which becomes pretty obvious if you are around children at all. The difference between the six-month-old and the six-year-old is vast, and between that six-year-old and a sixteen-year-old is another huge gap. Personality is a relative constant through these developmental stages—the shy baby tends to be a shy six-year-old—but the expression of that personality is very different at the different stages because the needs and requirements of these stages change (and change and change…).
When one looks at the psyche through this developmental lens, combined with Internal Family System’s (IFS) understanding that the psyche has multiple parts (i.e., it is not a “mono-mind”), you get a core structure of parts, a kind of “Parts backbone”. The main Parts are: Infant, Child, Teenager, Young Adult, Adult, Super-Adult (aka Self). This is not a definitive map, but it proves to be a pretty good a rule of thumb to help to get to know and quick-identify which part is which in oneself. Because each Part, when seen as manifesting a developmental stage, has a distinct set of goals and orientations to the world, knowing the nature of these “developmental Parts” helps one to pattern match and to engage the particular Part in a way that matches its nature. This helps with understanding, and everyone, person or Part, wants and needs to be understood for who they are. When they feel heard, they will open up and relax.
The Actual Teenager
So, this month I wanted to clarify what the Teenager Part is all about, to help you see it in yourself (everyone has one) and to learn to respect it on its own terms. As Siegel describes in the quote above, the teen stage of development has a lot to offer. Though teenagers can be chaotic, black-and-white in thinking, and demanding, those are just the other side of dynamism, clarity, forcefulness (particularly with critiques), which are all qualities that are deeply needed in a psyche of any age. The instability and lability of these years is also the ground from which the teen’s gifts emerge.
Understanding this is the origin point for empathy: without understanding, empathy becomes very hard to find. So in service of that, Siegel usefully puts the adolescent mind in the context of evolutionary psychology, in which the qualities of risk taking, paradigm challenging, and novelty seeking were all necessary to keep the species from stagnating. He explains that the adolescent brain is built to assess risk relatively accurately, but to privilege the positive rewards over the negatives, basically, “I know there’s a danger to driving fast, but the rush is so worth it!” Without this risk-taking bias based on a positive reward bias, new ways of engaging problems would not have been discovered. Also, the strong emphasis of the teen on their peer group and the pushing away from family is the necessary qualities to prepare for going out into the world, needing to both begin practicing autonomy and cultivating a “safety in numbers” community. Balance and integration become the guiding principles of the Adult part of the psyche, but the Teen is there for dynamism, exploration, challenging received wisdom, and growth.
Thus, the teenager in families is often edgy, somewhat chaotic, vacillating between dependency and rejection, disputing conventional wisdom and authority without yet having a stable base internally or with peers (who are also adolescents). In evolutionary terms, this is a feature not a bug. Any trait needs to prove its survival value to be conserved in the gene pool, so, since this adolescent stage of development was not weeded out of the human gene pool, it means that it had and still has use in the survival of the species. Although the direct experience with the adolescent is daunting (especially by the parent who has nowhere to go), the dynamic instability is supposed to be there and needs to be understood and empathized with.
The Internal Teenager
For each developmental level (Infant, Child, etc.) the internal Part is the mirror of that external stage; that is, the teenager in real life has the same structure as the internal teenager Part. That does not mean that your teenager Part has the exact same expression as another person’s, just that the fundamental structure (drives, pitfalls, talents, biases) of that Part is the same. As with the physical skeletal structure in which each person has multiple variations of the same template, the Parts are variously different expressions of the same structures.
One important variation from person to person with this Teenager part is how integrated or disintegrated it is from the Adult part. For instance, your parents may have been comfortable with you as a literal teenager, guiding the chaos without trying to suppress it, understanding the purpose of this stage without being distant, in which case your Teenager Part is likely to feel safe and welcomed by the Adult. If the opposite were true, where your parents either did not guide sufficiently, or tried to suppress the teenager with judgement, then it’s likely that your Teenager part will veer towards chaotic rebellion or sullen (or frozen) submissiveness. In this case, a Protector part will be present to protect by defending against “untrustworthy authority,” or alternately, by being the voice of guilt and shame directed at the “hurtful and selfish” behavior of the Teen. (There can also be multiple linked Protectors and Exiles related to the Teen—everyone is unique in their expression of the fundamentally similar developmental structures.)
So, if you had the well-connected parents, the Teenager Part of you will be integrated into your psyche, and its gifts of dynamism, exploration, and creativity will be available to your whole psyche. If the Teen Part starts getting out of balance, then it will be trusting of the Adult to help it rebalance. But if that was not the case, then you will be aware of your Teenager either in periods when you feel particularly rebellious and resistant (probably resentful, defensive, and/or boundary pushing), or by a sense of depression, heaviness, or sullenness that is accompanied by burden, sluggishness, and quiet resistance. Both will be accompanied by some Protector or Protectors, who will be doing their jobs to either permit or suppress the Exiled Teenager. As ever, the difficult work is then to develop one’s own Adult/Self part, who needs to work to understand the history and value of the Teen Part, freeing up the Protector from its job and allowing the Teenager part to rejoin the internal family.
An Example
Karl (not a real person) grew up in a family of self-identified progressives, parents who were dedicated to social activism and worked in non-profits throughout their career. He and his siblings were educated in Gandhian non-violence, cooperation within communities, and service, and the family was part of a spiritual community which emphasized those values. Karl spent his adolescence accompanying his parents on service projects and did a semester of high school building houses in Latin America.
His parents and community saw anger as categorically negative, as leading inextricably to violence, essentially the same attitude they held towards activities not service-directed. As Karl got into his teen years and inevitably began experiencing the inwired changes of that stage, they subtly or not so subtly insisted he put aside his “negative emotions” and “self-centeredness” in order to be a “good member of society.” They were well meaning and loving but had not come to terms with and acceptance of their own Teenager Parts, so of course they unknowingly passed that on to their children. While his sister went into rebellion against her parents’ values, Karl was more vulnerable to his parents’ judgements and suppressed his teenage drives to be seen as a “good kid.”
Of course, this never works for long; the exiled Parts become increasingly hard to suppress as we get older, and tend to enact what IFS calls “jailbreaks.” So moving into his adulthood, he continued social activist in his 20’s, and met and married a woman who was a fellow activist, but more of a firebrand. In starting a family, he recognized he needed a stabler income, and went into a corporate job. Now in his mid-thirties, the symptoms of the repression of his Teenager Part looked like problems in his marriage (in his expressions of random anger and withdrawal) and a chronic low-grade depression. His Teenager was trying to express itself (to be, as Schwartz puts it, “heard, understood, and feel validated”), and when Karl continued to suppress him, the Teen was not happy about it and let it be known. Karl’s Protector kept trying to numb and judge the Teen into submission, as he was trained, but the Teen now wasn’t having it.
This impasse resulted in a crisis: his wife had had enough and was threatening divorce. Karl got some good advice from an older mentor, and subsequently went into therapy. He began learning about this Teen part of him, and the history and context of his childhood that drove the Teen into exile. His Adult/Self began to come on-line more, whence the suppressing Protector got a break from his job suppressing the Teen, and then the Teen began to be not only heard but relished. In this reintegration of the Teen, Karl’s life began to both become more settled and more dynamic. Instead of being passive aggressive with his powerful wife, he began to use the Teen’s feistiness to engage her creatively and rough-playfully; instead of either spastic anger or sullen depression, they began to learn how to regulate each other and use their fieriness (a Teen-fire that Karl didn’t know he had) to add to the aliveness of the relationship. He let her know about this Teen and she began to love that part of him as well. He shifted jobs, still within the “conventional” world, but to a large non-profit the paid a salary but also was more socially meaningful. The Teen felt more recognized, loved, and included, so he didn’t need to bring the house down anymore.
Conclusion
As with all the other Parts, the Teen has a valuable, meaningful, and contributive place at the table. When it is left out, inevitably and unavoidably there become symptoms of its exile. When it comes out it is unsupervised, which means it acts chaotically rather than dynamically (either through an overuse of force, or a withdrawn and depressed attempt to communicate). But it is not trying to damage or break anything; the Teenager is to be welcomed and relished for its gifts, which are legion if the Adult can be open-hearted and understanding of what they are. A well-loved, and well-integrated, Teenager is an essential and beautiful part of the whole inner family.
