October 2024 – Internal Family Systems and Depression: The Exiles

In this short run of articles about Internal Family Systems (IFS) and depression, we covered last month (see here) the Protector who deploys depression in the service of exiling unwanted parts of the personality. These parts who are ostracized are known as “Exiles” in IFS, and they will be the focus for this month, what they are and how they are related to depression. (To explore in more detail, see No Bad Parts, by Schwartz.)

As another summer is drawing to a close, may you have the space to reflect on these endless cyclical changes, and if you feel any loss with this transition, may you be able to feel that measure of grief and listen to it respectfully. The more we do that, the less our griefs get stuck.

IFS, depression, and the nature of the Exile parts.

Last month, I wrote about Internal Family Systems Theory (see here) and what depression looks like as seen through the IFS lens. The main take-home points were that depression is not a part/subpersonality per se, but a phenomenon like a physical illness (a coherent cluster of symptoms that the body-mind can organize around) which is used by the part of the psyche called the Protector. This Protector is the part of the psyche charged with defending our whole system from the ill effects of being out of alignment with our environments. What is dangerous to exhibit in our environments, or too painful to feel or know while growing up (e.g., emotion, intelligence, vulnerability, need for connection) gets split off and suppressed in the service of survival. These split off parts—what IFS calls the Exiles—are controlled by a Protector part with various measures (fear, shame, guilt, and depression), not because the Protector is cruel or punitive, but because it understands the containment of the Exile as the only way to keep our whole self safe (which, in our histories, it was). So, this month we will look directly at the nature of the Exile as related to depression.

Firstly, the exiling of the Exiles can happen throughout the lifespan, but tend to be clustered in our childhood at particular stages. Humans move through different developmental stages throughout their life, each with its own dynamics and goals (as the psychologist Piaget described), and the Exiles often present a lost part at a particular stage. As a rule of thumb (there is lots of nuance), there is an Infant, a Child, Adolescent, Young Adult, and Adult (plus the Self, which we’ll discuss next month), and their goals (and therefore vulnerabilities) are, respectively: survival/bonding, connection, autonomy, “adulting,” and parenting. This is by no means a complete description, but it’s a useful map because it allows you to identify and locate parts of you according to their developmental stage, which come with different requirements for healing the Exiles.

Again, the Exile is a part (whatever age it might track to) whose qualities were disruptive to or disallowed by our environments. Sometimes that’s the literal environment, as when a child is growing up in a famine situation, where emphasis on, say, creativity is going to be pushed aside in the interest of survival. Often, though, the exiling comes from the emotional environment, primarily the parental milieu. For example, if when we were a 6 year old child and traditional gender roles were enforced, the Exile for a female child would be her (archetypally) masculine side, for the male child his feminine qualities, and for a non-binary child the Exile is the gender-fluid self. For an adolescent, the Exile is typically either their connection-seeking child, or the autonomy seeking adolescent; and so on.

Depression and the Exile

There are two ways depression intersects with the Exile. First, the child part becomes exiled from the main part of the psyche because it itself is experiencing a depression which cannot be tolerated in the environment (either because the parents can’t support the child, or attack/abandon the child). The second form is that the child part is not itself depressed, but is holding goals, needs, or emotions which the environment cannot tolerate, such that a Protector is summoned to make that part experience depression, to shut down the needs that cannot be met.

For the first form of the “depressed Exile,” it can be a process of discernment and consultation with the Exile itself to know whether what the child part is experiencing is a native or imposed depression. With a “native” depression, what that child would be holding is a natural response to loss which is not the same as a clinical (Protector-involved) depression. Kubler-Ross’s model (here) includes “depression” as one of the modes/stages of grief, but what she was pointing to was what Alcoholics Anonymous labels “hitting bottom.” That is, the stage where one realizes the truth of loss in a glaring way and are not able to pretend otherwise. So here, a child might lose their favorite pet, or a friend might have moved away or died, and what they then experience is the natural reaction of “depression.” If supported and empathized with, they will be able to metabolize the loss, and continue living, no Protector necessary. But if their environment (parents, school, extended family) cannot or will not tolerate the grief (either not knowing how to support or themselves feeling threatened) then the child gets the message that that part of them is not welcome. At that point the child part is exiled, and a Protector stands guard against it returning. Maybe the Protector uses shame, or guilt, or numbness, or maybe it turns that “native” depression into clinical depression (rife with self-doubt, judgement, fear). One way or another, though, there becomes a depressed Exile.

The second version of the depressed Exile is where the child is experiencing something—emotions, needs, values, but not depression per se—which their environments fail to understand, or reject, ignore, or condemn. In this situation, the child part that is experiencing those unmet needs is Exiled by virtue of an imposed depression, i.e., it is made to feel depressed to keep it deflated, deenergized, worthless, and unentitled to its needs. The child’s impulse to reach out to get its needs met—which have proved to be painfully futile—are still there, but muffled and constrained by the Protector’s use of depression as a phenomenon. The Protector tells the Exile that it is worthless, that life is pointless, and therefore that its needs will not be met, which has the effect of keeping the Exile inert and away from the harsh environment that exiled it. An example of this version is the child who grows up with parents who are not rejecting, but are always working and unavailable. That child’s need for connection and attachment with their parents (which is how we’re all wired as humans) is chronically frustrated, and their protests and pleading draws responses like, “We have no choice,” “We’re so tired, maybe later,” or, “Don’t be so needy.” The message sinks in that their needs are not going to be met, so the connection-focused part of the child becomes Exiled, and the Protector follows its remit to protect from the endless painful frustration of disappointment via imposing depression.

The child part that is exiled by either these forms of depression is not erased or put in stasis. Rather, it is lonely, and feels guilty or ashamed, since in a child’s logic if there was not something wrong with it why would they have been ostracized? They are both burdened with all the original pain and loneliness of their situation, as well as with an imposed sense of the futility at ever getting to rejoin the inner family or the outer world. The “depression story” that is used by the Protector to control the Exile—i.e., that life and you are worthless—mesmerizes the Exile into a belief in their own badness and the world’s dangerousness. The Exiles do not stop longing for release, but nonetheless have come to believe the Protector’s story that they are not safe out in the world, and that their badness will draw rejection and attack. Staying small and cloistered—what the depression Protector constantly asserts—appears to the Exile to be the safest option.

Conclusion

So, if that’s the origin story, and state, of the depressed Exiles, what is the healing? How to “repatriate” the child part when it has been deemed unsafe, and when the Protector is committed to keep the whole system safe (including that child part itself) through its exclusion?

The answer essentially comes down to changing the conditions by which the exiling happened. The Protector enacts a survival response to a circumstance in which the parents/caregivers/social milieu were not able to meet the child’s needs directly, essentially making the Protector a backup parent. But, unlike a parent, it is only tasked with the child (and system’s) survival, not with its nurturance, which burdens the Protector with endless vigilance. However, it does hope that one day some Adult will show up to do the job of caring for the Exile which it cannot do, thereby freeing both it and the Exile from their burdens.

The growth and installation of the Adult (related to and embodying the Self, as we’ll see next month) is the key to bringing the child back from its exile. When the Protector starts recognizing (usually with some degree of resistance and disbelief) that there is an Adult who can both protect and nurture, it begins to hand over its job. What one typically sees then is how that Protector is another part of the psyche who got stuck in the protecting role (often a teenager part in adult garb), and that if they can understand that life is now safe for the child, they will gladly step out of the Protector role and become who they actually are. As the Adult takes over, they will express how exhausted they are and how unsuited they were for the protecting role in the first place, but how necessary was their job since there was no Adult to do it.

With this emergence of the Adult who becomes the center of the psyche, the need for depression as a tool of the Protector can abate. Why? Because the environmental danger that initiated the exiling of the child part is recognized to have passed, and what is left is safely managed by the Adult self. Hence, the “tool” is no longer necessary.

Admittedly, depression as a phenomenon is complex, and although this description above is essentially correct, it also makes the process sound overly clean and simple. It is not. Nonetheless, when we the Adult come to see the Protector for what it is and why it uses depression, and can develop an Adult response to both the Protector and its Protectee (the Exile), then the underpinnings of the depression inevitably begins to decay. Unlike the child’s original environment, the current Adult-mediated world is demonstrated to be safe, a place where the  Exile is welcomed and valued, and in which it is safe for that child to reemerge and play.