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How Sexual Repression Became a Part of Christianity

Jessie’s knuckles were now bleeding. So far, mother had hit the back of each hand a dozen times with the wooden spoon, and didn’t look like she was going to stop. Jessie was sobbing quietly, because she knew her mother would be more violent if she protested.

Eventually, after another few hits, she stomped out of the room and left Jessie to deal with her pain.

Jessie’s mother had come into her bedroom late one evening and discovered her masturbating. This had happened a year before and that time she had publicly shamed her before the pastor and his wife. This time, she decided her 15 year old daughter needed a stronger lesson.

Jessie reported these events to me during trauma therapy 20 years later. Through Internal Family Systems therapy, I had helped her stay in Self and not blend with the younger self in this memory. As a result, she was able to help 15 year old Jessie to feel better about life. She invited her to notice how she lived her life in the present day. She showed her that she was able to have the sex she wanted, that she had cut her parents out of her life, and she was feeling confident.

Back in teen years, her preachers and parents had peppered her with predictions of great destruction if she ever embraced her own sexuality. By the time we were in therapy together, Jessie was no longer married and was as sexually active as she wanted to be. She had not gotten an STI, been pregnant, or had mental illness.

The main emotional struggles she faced surrounded her strict upbringing in Purity Culture.

She asked me at one point: “Mike, I know you used to be a preacher. Why is Christianity so negative toward sex?”

At the time, I was only sure it had a lot to do with patriarchal culture. But in the years since, I have learned a lot more.

There actually is an historical reason that Christianity adopted a very strict moral viewpoint toward sexuality. It has everything to do with fear.

If you want a much deeper look at this and other issues regarding early Christianity and Sexuality, read this lengthy article I wrote earlier this year.

In this summary, I’m going to rely on the work of William Loader. Specifically, I am going to draw upon the historical evidence in his book “Sexuality and the Jesus Tradition” and his landmark article, “Not as the Gentiles”: Sexual Issues at the Interface between Judaism and Its Greco-Roman World“.

After the Jews returned from captivity around the ancient near east, they re-settled in Jerusalem and the surrounding area and rebuilt the temple. This is known as the Second Temple Era. For the next 400 years, the Jews faced pressure from an ever-changing landscape of nations wanting to conquer them.

The Greek armies under Antiochus Epiphanes finally did just that.

When the Greeks conquered Jerusalem and the Second Temple, they instituted new laws forbidding Jewish men from practicing circumcision, reading the scriptures, or worshiping in the temple. They also practiced a much different set of sexual standards, which included homosexuality in public bathhouses and gymnasiums, freer access to sex workers, use of young boys for sex (catamites), and an open policy on having sex with slaves in public places.

In short, the Greek conquerors exploded the Jewish male’s understanding of what was allowed sexually. When the Maccabees were successful in chasing the Greeks out of Israel during the revolt, a backlash started against all the Greek sexual practices. As I write about in the paper mentioned above, the Jewish religious leaders hated the incursion of Greek ideas about sexuality into the lives of the average Jewish male.

What was the concern about sexuality centered on? Why were they so afraid of allowing any Greek sexual practices to become part of their culture?

After the Jews returned from captivity to Jerusalem, they began to wonder: “Why did our god allow this to happen to us? Why did we go from such a free-spirited, powerful nation to become a nation that other nations trod upon?

The answer they came up with emerged from many sources. But the general gist is that they had not kept themselves pure. Because they were seen as impure, their god abandoned them to slavery and captivity. If they wanted to avoid being judged by their god again, they wanted to purify themselves. But that meant they had to figure out what purity meant.

One prophet said one thing–another prophet had another theory. But they all focused on the concept of syncretism. This is the practice of allowing the behaviors of other nations/cultures to become part of your own. The Hebrew word for “holiness” has the twin ideas of being pure and being unmixed with the practices of other nations.

Several religious sects formed to combat the slide into syncretism. The Pharisees began to emphasize the importance of following all of the rules of the Torah. By this, they hoped to garner their god’s favor and eliminate all Greek influences. The Saducees decided the way to approach this was to gain political power and enact laws and regulations to prevent any foreigner from influencing their nation. In this, they seized control of the dominant political structure.

Finally, a third group emerged, more home-spun and rural. It was known as the Essenes. This movement had a grass-roots appeal and it reached into the sensibilities of most Jewish families. Even Jewish communities as far-flung as the North African city of Alexandria were affected. We read the Jewish historian Philo and we can see the Essene influence in their lives.

Essentially, the Essenes believed that the wrong practice of sexuality is what caused god to be angry at them.

When Philo first begins to write about Jewish history, he has a very expansive view toward sexuality. He sees the legitimacy of men having sex with slaves, with sex workers, and even with foreign women. But over the years, as the sexual purity ideas of the Essenes caught hold of Jewish culture, he began to be more strict about what kinds of sex were legitimate.

By the end of his writing life, he recommended that Jewish men ONLY have sex for procreation. He considered a man having recreational sex with his wife to be akin to making her a prostitute. In this, he echoes the teachings of the Essenes.

The christian scriptures only makes a passing reference to this movement, and that is in the description of John the Baptist. He was the quintessential Essene male–and perhaps the most famous adherent to their approach to faith. He was unmarried, solitary, lived in poverty, and preached a message of repentance and moral purity. He was eventually killed by the king for criticizing the king’s sexual practices.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were collected in a place called Qumran and represented this community’s dedication to the Essene views. From these documents we learn that they believed the following about sex:

Sex was only to be practiced in marriage
Sex with foreigners was forbidden
Sex with another man’s slaves was forbidden
Masturbation was forbidden
Sex with one’s wife for any purpose other than procreation was discouraged
Sex with sex workers was forbidden.
Finally, the ultimate spiritual man was one who lived a celibate life. This was the highest ideal. Sex with a woman was considered an act that made a man impure. The book of Revelation reflects this attitude.

Many theologians, myself included, believe that not only John the Baptist was heavily influenced by the sexual mores of the Essenes, but also Jesus and the Apostle Paul. Paul’s viewpoints on sex and marriage in 1 Corinthians 6 and 7 reflect the party line of the Essenes.

Look at that list of names: Jesus, John the Baptist, Paul. These three represent the dominant leaders of the origins of the christian era. Add to this Peter, James, and John who were originally followers of John the Baptist and it is clear that even if they were not Essene members, they were sympathetic to the teachings of this group.

From the very start of Christianity, there was a repressive element to the faith. The first five centuries of the church reinforced this. By the end of the fifth century, most christian leaders considered celibacy to be the highest station regarding sexuality. In no wise were any christian leaders sex positive. There are occasional sex positive mentions in early christian writings, but these are almost completely from writers considered heterodox (heretical) by the early church.

In short, the early christians inherited their fear of judgment if people strayed from sexual purity. This was always fear-based. Repression is always more powerful when it is based on the fear of punishment. These are the roots of the christian approach to sexuality. They are the roots to the endemic sexual repression we see all over the church today.

In next week’s article in this series, we’ll look at what sexual repression does to a person and how it affects a person’s behavior.

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Why ‘Amatonormativity’ is a Word You Should Know

Willa Cather was the world renowned author of “O Pioneers”. Edith Lewis was editor of several of New York’s better known publications. Over time, Lewis also edited all of Cather’s work. Eventually, the two of them moved in together. The world assumed they were two writers functioning as each other’s muses. In reality, though they hid this from many people, they were also lifelong lovers. But two became three. Later in life, they added socialite Isabelle McClung to their triad. The three of them traveled the world and reveled in their unique love for each other.

Virginia Wolfe was another famous author in love with another female writer, Vita Sackville-West. But this time, both women were married to men. Both couples had open marriages and both husbands approved of their relationship. In time, though Vita and Virgina did not have sex with each other’s husbands, a deep bond formed between the four of them. Eventually, they split up, which actually caused more pain for the husbands than the women.

Janeane Garofolo and Bradford Cord are much different people, one an actor and the other a singer. They are both asexual and very proud to be so. Though they have had many loves, each of them describes how they enjoy living as a person for whom sexual attraction has never been part of their lives. Because of this, both of them have met confusion and opposition from other people. In interviews, they both regret how their asexual status has closed doors for them in their professions and in life.

What do all of these famous people have in common? In essence, they have all bucked a belief system that almost all of us were given as a legacy. It’s called Amatonormativity. It’s a word you may not have heard before. Most people have not.

Amatonormativity is a word author Elizabeth Brake coined in her book “Minimizing Marriage; Marriage, Morality and the Law” to describe the widespread assumption that everyone is better off in an exclusive, romantic, long-term coupled relationship, and that everyone is seeking such a relationship.

There are so many implications of this for our modern world. Amatonormativity marginalizes so many groups of people: singles who want to stay single, asexuals, polyamorous, open relationships, triads and quad relationships, long-term nonsexual friendships, aromantic married people, divorced people, etc. In our American cultural setting, our laws are geared toward those who are in Amatornormative relationships.

Triads cannot have the same parental rights as couples.

Asexuals and single allosexuals are not afforded the same rights as renters compared to amatonormative couples.

Abiding friendships often must relinquish inheritance rights if adult children contest wills in court.

But beyond the legal stipulations against all these individuals, the culture itself looks down upon all people who do not buy into the idea that the ultimate goal in life is to find one person, fall in love, have children, and stay married until you die. Though most adults in our culture do NOT fit into this scenario, most movies, television shows, books, and songs have this concept as a bedrock belief.

In the 90s sitcom “Seinfeld”, the main characters were always quizzing each other on whether they had found “The one”. At times, they played around with other options, like never having kids, open relationships, remaining single. But they ultimately rejected all of those options. In one case regarding open relationships, Jerry remarks caustically,

“Don’t you know what it means to become an orgy guy? It changes everything. I’d have to dress different. I’d have to act different. I’d have to grow a mustache and get all kinds of robes and lotions and I’d need a new bedspread and new curtains I’d have to get thick carpeting and weirdo lighting. I’d have to get new friends. I’d have to get orgy friends.”
— Jerry Seinfeld, Seinfeld, Season 6: The Switch
ANNOTATION
After his girlfriend accepts the idea of a menage a trois with her roommate and Jerry, he has second thoughts.

Now that you know what the word and the concept encompass, spend a few days/weeks looking at the popular media and see how often these ideas still persist.

And challenge yourself: In our day when we are ridding ourselves of heteronormativity, gendernormativity, mononormativity etc., isn’t it time to at least question the philosophy of amatonormativity?

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Comeheregoaway! Intimacy and Isolation.

Joanne and Mick made out in the car at the drive-in every Friday and Saturday night. They made sure they were in all the same classes together. They ate lunch at the same time, in the same place, facing each other. They drove to school together and drove home together. They did homework together.

They shared every moment of their senior year of high school with each other.

And for some inexplicable reason, both of them resented all that time together. At the same time, they loved each other deeply and without reservation. This confused each of them so much–but their love blocked them from ever talking about it.

Mick decided to work longer hours at his after-school and weekend job. He told Jo that he had no choice, but he had volunteered to do it. Joanne had her own phone line in her bedroom–this was before the Internet age–and she chose to leave it off the hook more often in the evenings.

By the end of their Senior Year of high school, they saw each other less and less. This made Joanne sad and she started to put her phone back on the hook. This made Mick sad, so he told his boss he needed to work less hours so he could focus on end of the year exams.

By May, they were back to spending all their time together. It felt right and they were both happy to do it. But then again, in July, they both started to pull away. This went on until Mick went away to college and Jo got a job at a local food coop. They were still in the same town, but now their time was completely given over to post high school necessities. This made them all the more desperate to be together.

Finally, after months of yearning for each other, Mick proposed marriage. Joanne accepted.

Throughout the 44 years of married life, they have gone through many of these seasons of intimacy followed by isolation. In the numerous counseling sessions and marriage seminars they’ve attended, they have sought to figure out why they alternate between wanting to be with each other fanatically, and also wanting to isolate with the same amount of vigor.

Some day, I’d love to write an essay on the psychoanalyist, Erik Erikson. Even though he taught at Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley, his academic accomplishments consisted of a certificate from a Montessori school, and another certificate from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. He earned no advanced degrees.

But his understanding of human nature and the human condition far surpassed most of his contemporaries.

His most significant contribution to psychology was his chart of the psychosocial development of the human being. He broke down the human condition as a learning process of eight parts. Each of these parts highlighted a different tension between two opposites:

Trust and Mistrust
Autonomy and Doubt
Initiative and Guilt
Industry and Inferiority
Identity and Confusion
Intimacy and Isolation
Generativity and Stagnation
Integrity and Despair.

I want to focus attention on his sixth stage of development: Intimacy and Isolation. He recognized that all of us have this growing need to be connected to others. In later years of the development of Psychology, Dr. William Glasser would identify Love and Belonging as the second most basic human need behind only Safety and Security. After Glasser, others would notice that our early years define how we will attach to others–or in some cases, seek not to attach.

This gave birth to the Attachment Styles movement.

But no one denies we have a need for others in our life. This is the Intimacy Stage in Psychosocial development. At the same time, as Jo and Mick discovered, there are so many things that can make this stage difficult. We may have been betrayed by intimate friends or family, lied to, abandoned, rejected any number of ways, abused, neglected, or marginalized. Individuals may do this to us or collective groups may hurt us.

In addition to this, most people try to control our lives either actively or passively, and this makes us afraid or aggressive toward them.

In addition, a lot of time spent with another person can invoke boredom and a sense of over-familiarity.

Therefore, along with the need for intimacy we also develop a need for isolation from others.

All of our life reflects this tension between wanting to be close to others and wanting distance and agency from others. Each person finds their own path to it. But the balance of both intimacy and isolation is not easy. The reason we struggle with this path is that too much emphasis in our society is placed on the supremacy of intimacy.

Psychologist Esther Perel notes that

“I see others who believe that Intimacy means knowing everything about each other. They abdicate any sense of Isolation, then are left wondering where the mystery has gone.”
Esther Perel, “Mating in Captivity”

This is the problem that has plagued Mick and Joanne for years. They have a pendulum swing toward total intimacy, but it leaves them without any autonomy. When they swing back to isolation, they lose a sense of closeness.

Within Christianity, the goal of monogamous marriage is stated this way: “That a man shall leave his father and mother, and be joined to his wife. And the two of them shall become one flesh.” Many modern interpretations of “one flesh” teach that this one flesh concept applies to more than just bodies joining together sexually. The idea is that two people would be dyadic–which means they will find all of their emotional, sexual, and psychological needs met primarily through this person they married.

Since this ideal supposes that the couple will meet most, if not all, of their psychosocial needs through each other, isolation feels like failure. Even couples who take a break from sex, sleeping together, or even hanging out with each other are seen as “in trouble”.

But many couples find seasons of isolation from each other to be rejuvenating and restorative. This is not just true of people in long-term relationships, but can apply to friendships, family relationships, and even co-workers at job sites.

I have spent many hours with couples in crisis in my counseling practice. Though I don’t give this advice to many of them, I have suggested some pairings do in house separations where they do not spend much time together. Almost all of them found this period of time therapeutic.

Perel writes about this in “Mating in Captivity”. In working with one couple, she noted that the husband was doing so much care for his sick wife that they had lost the closeness seen in other elements of their relationship. Here is what she advised them:

“To John I said, “You are such a caregiver that you can no longer be a lover. We need to reestablish a degree of differentiation and re-create some of the distance you had in the beginning. It’s hard to experience desire when you’re weighted down by concern.”

In the next few months Beatrice did move out. In a remarkable turnaround she found her own apartment, sent in her application for a PhD program, took a trip with her friends, and started earning her own money. Gradually, as John became convinced that she had two feet to stand on, and as it became clear to Beatrice that she did not need to abdicate her own person to merit love, they created a space between them into which desire could flow more freely”

Excerpt From
Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

Not every couple needs that degree of separation. There are many reduced levels of isolation that can be helpful.

Here are a few:

Have one day every weekend where each person just does their own thing with no expectation of getting together and no need to account for what was done.
Adopt markedly different hobbies
See your own therapists, not for relationship work, but for personal growth and fulfillment
Take separate vacations occasionally.

Many people reading that will immediately think this is a recipe for people having affairs. But that fear is based on a false presupposition. Many affairs are chosen because a couple already feels isolated from each other. Rarely do affairs happen with people who feel too close to each other.

I worked with Jo and Mick on two occasions. Once when they had been married just over 30 years and the second time coming up on their 40th wedding anniversary. They both noted they felt over-enmeshed with each other’s lives and were becoming bored. During our discussion, Jo mentioned she had always wanted to take a three-month sabbatical. Her profession allowed for paid time off to do this, so she asked Mick what he thought.

He answered, “But I can’t take that amount of time off.”

“I know” she said.

“That’s why I want to do it.”

In the end, Mick agreed to her sabbatical and to the relative isolation from him this would bring.

During those sabbatical months, Jo did a lot of things that Mick was not included in. I met with them at the end of that time, and both of them told me it was so refreshing. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t see each other, but that they felt no pressure to spend time together. Several times, Jo went away for a weekend with friends or by herself. She went mountain biking and slept in a tent for three days without Mick.

He told her when she returned how impressed and turned on he was with her independence.

They are still going strong together at 44 years. Perhaps we do need a balance of intimacy and isolation in all our relationships.

Bravo, Erik Erikson.

The Snow Made Me Do It

In 2021, three people died because snow had piled up in their driveways.

That’s the story.

Or is it?

Here is the ABC News version of what happened, which also raises as many questions as it answers. [I also watched the security video of the event, but I won’t put that link here because it depicts gun violence which I will not glorify. I watched it in order to understand more of how the event could have taken place].

Before analyzing this event any further, let’s address a key objection in examining the rationale for violent crimes. People criticize psychologists for trying to determine the reasons someone committed a crime. They feel this will be used as a pretext for excusing their criminal behavior. The reasoning is that no one should spend any time trying to understand a criminal. The full focus of understanding should only be on the victims, not the perpetrators.

But is this a healthy approach for modern society to take?

In seeking to understand why anyone can commit a violent crime, social science attempts to delve into the mindset that results in people being hurt. If crimes were only committed by gangs, organized crime, or “evil” people, the search for meaning behind crimes would be a wasted effort.

As social scientists have looked deeply into crime statistics worldwide, here is what they found:

The majority of violent crimes are committed by males (90%)
The majority of violent crime victims are male (80%)
50% of violent crimes are committed by organized crime members
50% of violent crimes are committed in relation to domestic disputes

Too much of the study involving violent crime and the policing of it has focused on the gang type violence. Not enough has gone into discovering what causes the average person to become violent. I think this is more intriguing and holds the answer to solutions to some of crime’s origins.

I’m a trauma therapist. My job is to delve into the parts of the psyche that cause people to manifest the type of behavior and thoughts which cause problems. One of the tools I use in pursuit of accomplishing this job is called Internal Family Systems. In this therapy approach, we believe the mind is an amalgam of many Parts. These parts each have their jobs and every part functions mainly to protect the individual. Parts like Anxiety, Shame, Depression, Justice, Fear of Rejection, Abandonment, Rage seem to have their own agendas based on the roles we originally gave them. Many of these roles began in childhood. Some of the roles are grounded in traumatic experiences.

Back to the violent snow story. The facts are simple: A single male neighbor lived across the narrow lane from a married couple. Every time it snowed, the couple would shovel the snow from their driveway in front of the driveway of the single man. Over time, this became the basis for their animosity toward each other.

On the day of the murders, the couple did the same thing after a snowfall. The single man happened to be home. He came out and started to shout at them. The two men started to exchange angry words filled with expletives. The longer this went on, the woman also began to shout at her neighbor. The addition of her voice seemed to enrage the single man who retreated into his home at one point.

That’s when he emerged with a gun.

He slowly walked over to the woman and shot her several times. From the video, it is clear this is either a pellet or bb gun, for she doesn’t seem to be seriously hurt by the shots. But the more he shoots, she begins to react physically to the pain. Her husband runs over and the single man shoots him several times as well. They are both left bleeding on the ground. As I watched it, they were moving freely, suggesting they were not seriously hurt.

A minute later, the single man walks out of his house with a different gun. This one is larger and looks more lethal. In fact, he walks over to the woman and shoots her once, killing her. He also shoots the husband. Then, he calmly walks back into his house.

According to the story in the news account, when the police arrived at the scene, they went to the shooter’s house and knocked on the door. That’s when they heard a gunshot. He killed himself before they could enter and arrest him.

Some will watch this video and just shake their heads at the bizarre nature of this violence. Who gets this upset about snow? Who reacts to an argument by getting two different guns to take down their neighbors? Why were they all acting badly in the first place?

As a trauma therapist, my questions are different. What parts of their protective psyche were activated in this scene? What parts had been active in the months prior? As we have analyzed young men who commit multiple murders, we note mitigating factors such as bullying, isolation, or injustice in their background. Are these events what cause a person’s psyche to create violent parts that need to hurt others?

And why do some people create these violent parts to protect themselves and other people do not? This we cannot answer. Every person’s internal system is created differently and uniquely. Many people are bullied in school, but very few come back and shoot up the school with automatic weapons. Why do more men create parts that feel the need to retaliate violently than women do?

This year in America (2022), we have had more than 600 mass shootings. All 600 have been committed by men. Why men? We do not have an answer for this. But the question must be asked. And, in order for the answers to be helpful, we must answer the question with as few preconceptions and biases as possible.

I don’t know why these people were in a dispute about snow. But I guarantee their disregulated internal reactions had little to do with snow. Their parts were convinced this snow dispute encompassed larger principles. Perhaps one or all of these people had been abused as children and felt power taken away from them. Perhaps one or all of them had witnessed their own parents react with violence toward neighbors or relatives. Perhaps one or all of them had a fear of other people taking advantage of them because it happened to them when they were young.

There are reasons we create the protective parts inside of us.

I remember as a boy being surrounded by six older boys, tied up and beaten underneath the bridge near our house. That immobilization for years brought blind rage inside of me when someone would hold me down or cause me to feel panic.

This emerged my first year of college. The guys who lived on my dorm floor decided to attack the floor above us in a pillow fight. We thought about going room to room pummeling them with pillows. But someone had tipped them off. When I lead the charge up the back stairs, I came around the corner on their floor and was set upon by ten guys with pillows. My floor-mates got away but I didn’t. They beat on me for a minute or so.

There was no real pain. But the panic got a hold of me. I dropped my pillow and started to punch and kick the two guys closest to me.

I’ll spare you the details. As a result of my actions, I was suspended from classes for several days. I could not believe I had become that violent. But now that I work with people who have these kind of parts, I recognize that a Protector broke through to keep me “safe” and could not see that there is any difference between a pillow and fists.

I wonder what might have happened if I had access to a gun?

I also wonder what might have happened with the snow shovel people if no guns had been available. I speculate we may never have heard of them. I challenge anyone reading this to begin looking beyond the headlines these days. What makes people so protective of themselves? What would it take for you to lose control and have your internal Protectors take over?

What makes any of us have such bizarre reactions when we feel insecure or attacked?

Move Past the 5 Love Languages

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Starting in the early 1990s, I had couples in therapy start to mention something about their “love languages”. As a trained therapist, I was confused by this term “love language”. I had never heard it used in any context before, and I asked my clients to explain it to me.

Eventually they pointed me to the book by Gary Chapman called “The Five Love Languages”. I did a quick read and felt it reflected the approach taken by many pop-psych books. I mistakenly predicted it would have no impact on the counseling world.

I was wrong. At least, I was wrong about one aspect. It certainly does have an impact on the counseling world, if one refers to people going to marriage counseling. It has virtually no impact on therapists. There are some pastoral counselors who made extensive use of the material in their pastoral offices. But the concept itself does not line up with any therapy modality accepted by psychologists.

The premise of the book is very simple.

There are five ways we show love to others
Each of us prefers two of these languages
Our partner will appreciate us more if we express love in their language.
Couples should buy the book, identify their love languages, share this information with each other, and have a happy life together.

Boom! Instant marital success. Well, to Chapman’s credit, he never says this is a panacea to solve all difficulties in long-term relationships. Though, after reading the book, that implication is not hard to pick up. More to the point, desperate people in difficult relationships viewed it as a fix-all for their relationship. And on the surface, following this formula can improve some elements of a marriage.

But it can also make some existing relationship problems worse.

Long-term relationships are difficult and nuanced. Tricking out one element of the relationship may mask other problems. Following the principles in this book produce only a temporary fix. And when a couple puts all their hope in a temporary fix, the result can be devastating.

Chapman’s concept, and all the subsequent spinoff books, has several significant problems connected to it.

It is a Reductionistic List

Some people claim that Chapman never said this was a comprehensive list. But he actually does claim that. He goes into detail explaining his background in pastoral counseling and that the love languages that made the cut are the five he sees most often with couples. In fact, he claims several times that all expressions of love can be placed in one of these five categories.

To be fair to Chapman, research psychologists are always trying to reduce relationship and personality characteristics to three, four, or five categories. And Chapman may have seen that and wrote his thesis accordingly.

So in essence, these are five love CATEGORIES. But he doesn’t say that.

My first caution about the book is that it is dead wrong. Not only are these five love languages not the only ones, they may not even be the most important ones.

Let me give several examples of other love languages. Note that these are not even close to being all of the remaining love languages. There could be thousands of love languages for all I know. The five that Chapman chose are very Americo-centric, cis-heteronormative, and very much based in white culture. I am sure that individuals from other cultures would have a tough time identifying Chapman’s five as their subset of love expressions.

Sex: Chapman mentions several times that sex is just a type of Touch. But in this, he is wrong. There are many people that come into sex therapy with me who distinctly don’t like being touched. But they love sex. And then there are some who love to be touched and held, but do not have any desire for sex. Sex would never mean love to them, but touch would.

Sex is a completely different category on its own. Some find rough sex to be loving. Others find the same with oral sex, slow sex, BDSM, group sex, ethical non-monogamy. There are ways that other people find some sex to be unloving. As a love language, sex can have many expressions. But it is ludicrous to place sex under the Touch category.

Respect: Some would say Respect is different than love. But that argument could be made about quality time, and any of the other love languages. Many people believe that if a person shows respect, this shows their love for a partner. And there are hundreds of ways respect can be offered.

Example: A University of Washington study showed that couples married more than 40 years had one thing in common more than any other: The husbands respected their wife’s opinion. That is the only common identifier they found in interviews with these couples. Yet it does not show up on Chapman’s list.

Gentleness: In this sense, I am using the word “gentleness” as the opposite of “violence”. This is one of my major criticisms of Chapman. He does not differentiate between the five love languages shown in a gentle atmosphere versus a violent home. If a person is violent and then buys their partner gifts, the gift does not equal love. Neither does quality time if there is violence. Affirming words do not mean much if someone has bruises from last night’s fight. On their own, gentleness and safety are important ways that love is expressed. Most people would identify that as their first love language if they knew it was an option.

Partnership: This is the willingness to partner with someone you love as they attempt something difficult or painful. There are many examples of this. Being willing to sacrifice money, time, and effort to see your partner get a degree or a better job. Going with them to a funeral. Standing by them as they confront a difficult person. All of these rise above and beyond Chapman’s limited categories of ‘acts of service’ or ‘quality time’.

Listening With Understanding: One of the most loving and effective things a partner can do is to listen in a conflict with the goal of understanding. Most of us in conflict get defensive or want to win. But when someone listens with the goal of understanding, this shows the partner there is a greater goal; to love and work through the issue. The Gottmann Method, a standard in partner therapy, claims this is the greatest of the expressions of love.

There are too many more love languages to mention. Food, giving space for your partner to have time alone, inability to be easily offended, telling the truth, living in integrity; these are all love languages in their own right and should not be diminished because they didn’t make Chapman’s five.

The Basic Premises are Simply Not True

Since the book has now been in existence for over 30 years, it is not surprising a number of studies have been done to determine if the book is accurate.

This study looked at the questionnaire that Chapman uses, the five languages themselves, and whether participants could adequately measure their own preferences from the list. Their study showed that one could not determine their love language consistently from this questionnaire. So, the bottom line is that Chapman’s questionnaire is not accurate by any metric.

You should be aware that Chapman is not a psychologist. Neither is his theory based on any scientific research at all. He never claims it is. He simply says that the book is based on his own observations as a marriage counselor with no degree in counseling. That’s it. He is very up-front about it. So it should not surprise anyone that his results cannot be reproduced by scientific research.

There are several other studies that debunk his hypothesis, but I’ll just mention one more. In 2013, Polk and Egbert published this study in which they proved that people do not have two primary love languages, that they do not respond better if someone shows love in those languages, and that it can’t be proven that learning about and utilizing love languages helps relationships.

That pretty much says it all.

‘Love Languages’ Concept is Manipulative

We manipulate others when we do something for the purpose of getting them to behave the way we want them to. This is the underlying premise of Chapman’s book. He is telling us that if we learn another person’s love language and use that love language with our partner, they will respond better to us. This is manipulative and many people have identified it that way.

I was in therapy with one person who made it quite clear how he felt about his partner doing this. He knew when his partner was trying to get him to agree with him when he bought him expensive gifts over a short period of time. His partner would always follow it up with a big “ask” for something he wanted him to do. It was blatant manipulation. He wasn’t buying gifts out of love or concern.

Now, not everyone does this. But the book lends itself to this kind of use. And though this is an obvious misuse of the book, Chapman’s only caution about it shows up in a subsequent edition, suggesting that he didn’t see this kind of misuse until long after people were trying to implement the book into their relationships.

(Note: It is impossible to find original copies of the book unless you already own one. The book has been revised many times due to outlandish claims in the original edition).

Many therapists have written about the co-dependent nature of the Five Love Languages. They note that many people who are already co-dependent can be easily manipulated via love-bombing using this format. Though I would hope Chapman would be mortified by narcissists and other abusers using the Love Language modality in this way, it is exactly what love-bombing does. Nowhere in any edition of his many derivative books on the Love Language subject does he warn about love-bombing.

Nowhere is Trauma/Abuse Accounted For

One classic symptom of those who have been abused as children is the inability to trust that they are safe with other people. Therefore, a traumatized/abused person will notice how someone is using love languages and will immediately distrust it. If the person who is trying to love notices that the response is distrust, this will create further tension from the non-traumatized partner.

The best way to love a traumatized person is to keep checking in with them, holding space with them, and ask them how they would like to be shown love at any given juncture of the relationship. This is much better than trying to read your trauma-affected partner and guess what their love language might be on any given day.

Sometimes, the best expression of love is for one partner to leave the other partner alone for awhile.

Deconstruction and Our New Core Self

I taught a course to teens on how to write Adventure Novels. In that style, there are several foundational rules. One of these is the concept that the adventure itself must alter the nature and focus of the main character.

As an example, let’s look at the story “The Lord of the Rings” and the main character, Frodo Baggins. Though it is certainly not the first significant adventure novel—I think Homer’s “Odyssey” qualifies better—it is the standard by which all modern adventure stories are modeled.

At the outset, Frodo is a dedicated follower of his uncle Bilbo. And though Frodo may be a leader among his friends, he is not a community leader. He is a quiet hobbit, a gentle soul, with a reflective though anxious personality. He loves home and hearth, the food and drink of his youth, his close intimate circle of friends. In short, he feels safe with familiarity.

And as the quintessential adventure novelist, Tolkien shakes Frodo’s world seismically. He sends Frodo on a quest far from home. At each juncture in the story, he is removed further from his friends. At one point, even his best friend Sam is distanced from him in many ways. His questing task requires that he give all of himself and to do it alone. By the end, he has nothing left to give out. He has given all of his old self and much more to the quest of destroying the Ring.

From the moment the quest ends and he starts to make his way back home, he comes to grip with his new Core Self. This Self has been emerging all along, he just never noticed it much. From the moment he agreed to carry the ring to Rivendell, he set his foot on a Deconstruction journey just as vast and far-reaching as the journey to destroy the power of the Ring.

His journey was the retiring of his old Core Self and the discovery of his new Core Self. The old Self became a memory and though it still influenced him for the rest of his life, it was not the decision-making part.

In short, like Frodo, we build our new Core Self by deconstructing our old Core Self and allowing a new Self to emerge.

The term “deconstruction” ironically has gone through a massive change in meaning over the past 80 years. In its original sense, coined by Jacques Derrida, it was a process of examining philosophical writings to determine the many various meanings in the original text.

Years later, writers like Barbara Johnson and Hillis Miller began to use the term to mean significant changes in areas like social sciences, philosophy, law, psychology, architecture, anthropology, theology, feminism, and political theory.

Now, the term applies loosely to the process of abandoning traditional thinking in order to explore the implications of new ideas and behaviors.

I want to apply this concept of Deconstruction to the area of psychotherapy I specialize in: Internal Family Systems. In IFS, we teach that the most critical part of our being is the Core Self. This is what we call the executive function of the neocortex or frontal lobes. This is the part of our mind that makes the final decisions and sees the big picture of who we are.

In a healthy human being, the Core Self regularly evaluates our life and determines what is true NOW for us:

What do we believe now?

Who is most important to us now?

What do we want to accomplish now and from now on?

Where do we want to live now?

To understand this, let’s look at a unique ability of the snake. The snake goes through a process called ‘ecdysis’ where they shed their skin whole. They do this for two reasons. First, the skin does not grow like the rest of the snake body grows. Snakes continue to grow all through their lives. But the skin does not. In order to keep growing, the snake must shed the last layer. They do this a couple of times a year and during reproduction seasons.

But the second reason for ecdysis may be more important. The old skin collects parasites and bacteria that could kill the snake. By shedding the skin, these unwanted travelers are sloughed off.

This is also what the human mind can do, though not as often as the snake. Our Core Self is the center of our being. As I said, it decides who we are at any given time. In IFS, we teach there are other Parts to our mind also. There are Manager Parts that keep us from feeling old painful memories, as well as keep us focused on ways to keep us safe and whole. But these Manager Parts do not want us to change. They fight change. They fear the future and are wary of the past. They want a predictable life that can be managed.

Deconstruction of anything is difficult for the Mind’s Managers. They fear this kind of whole-mind change more than anything. They fight our Core Self all along the way. But the Core Self sees change as necessary for growth into maturity. Our Core is growing larger and needs to shed off the old structures in order to arrive at this new place.

Managers oppose this with all their tools: Anxiety, depression, shame, guilt, loneliness, physical reactions, dissociation, and many other tactics. Some people will give in to the Managers and never let their Core Self grow past a certain point. They live a locked-in existence with their Parts. Though this may seem safer, it is destructive. Just like the snake gets rid of the parasites when the skin is shed, so too our growing Core Self gets rid of harmful ideas and behaviors when we allow it to grow.

I used to be a pastor; for 36 years. Approximately 25 years ago, I began to re-think the doctrines I had endorsed when my denomination licensed me. These were the classic doctrines of the evangelical faith tradition with some more about healing and the Holy Spirit added.

My fear parts didn’t want me to re-think them. What if I did that and then decided I didn’t want to be a pastor any more? What would I do for a living? I was technically a counselor also, but I had put most of my time and energy into pastoring, and my Fear parts didn’t think I could make enough money just as a counselor.

My Manager that loves to be accepted and belong told me that my Christian friends would reject me if I didn’t hold to these truths. This Acceptance Manager predicted that if other christians learned I had let go of any core doctrine I would be summarily rejected.

By the way, it turned out this Manager was ultimately correct. Very few of my evangelical friends will even speak to me now.

At the same time as my managers were kicking up dust, my Core Self was growing, and I could not deny I wanted to be authentic to the changes in my belief system.

In order to be true to this emerging Self, I had to deconstruct evangelical Christianity. It all started innocently while reading Numbers 31, which I have written about here. By the time my wife and I had processed the heinous “acts of God” written about in that chapter, I realized I could no longer accept the Old Testament as without error. Therefore, since the Old Testament is part of the Bible, I could not accept the Bible as without error.

My belief “skin” was beginning to shed. Everything within me fought doing it and therefore I kept much of the process a secret. My wife and two oldest kids knew, but no one else. When I let go of Inerrancy as a doctrine, I felt something drop off me. I had a new Core Self. This Core Self remembers the old one. In fact, that Core Self remembers all the old ones.

Every time we continue to grow in our understanding and our values, we shed off the old self and put on the new self. This does sound similar to what Christianity calls being “born again”. We still share a history with the Old Core Self. But we are fundamentally changed and we cannot easily go back to what we once were.

I guess when I consider it, this is similar to that concept of being Born Again.

I started “shedding my skin” of Inerrancy slowly. First, I began to devalue most of the Old Testament. In particular, I discovered that the so-called “historical” books of the Hebrew Bible were actually compiled oral traditions, legends that had endured since the beginning of the nation of Israel. Contemporary scholarship, even among conservatives, shows that these books were all compiled after the Israelities returned from Babylonian captivity. There is very little proof the stories are true. They are therefore considered Religious History, a retelling of the origin stories of their people.

I also noted many of the themes of the Bible are antithetical to ethical behavior. The Bible condones, or at least does not condemn slavery, genocide, sexual assault, misogyny, patriarchy, racism, violence, aggressive warfare, and class systems of economics. As I shed off the skin of biblical inerrancy, my new Core Self felt free to grasp some of the glaring weaknesses of the Bible while holding onto some of the truths which run counter to those.

During that time, I also noticed that the Pro-Life movement had been completely manufactured for political purposes. It seemingly sprang out of nowhere onto the political landscape and was then embraced by one of the main parties. Most christians I associated with endorsed this political movement.

Despite the fact that the biblical basis for life beginning at conception is completely anecdotal and marginal, the evangelical church joined forces with one political party and shunned anyone who supported the other political party.

I could not allow the Pro-life movement to control who I was. Since its start, I stood against the Pro-life movement, even though I am a Pacifist. The movement is not particularly Pro-life since most of its members own guns and support Capital punishment. They also do not actively support programs for impoverished single parents and do not support programs for feeding the poor. They are simply Pro-fetus.

Admitting all of this gave space for my Core Self to leave behind absolute allegiance to my church and its political machinations. The more I grew out of my old beliefs, the more I found health and strength.

Each person who continues to shed old versions of themselves finds this strength building in them. And let me be clear: It is not primarily beliefs and practices we are shedding. We are letting go of who we think we are to more completely match our current life with what we want, need, believe, and do right now.

For the Core Self of the individual to lead the rest of a person’s Parts, this deconstruction of the former Self and the embracing of the new self must take place. But it is difficult and can be very painful. And the pain only increases when people around you—even your personal support system—do not like what they see in your changes.

I remember one day when a woman I love and admire told me I was cursing babies to death and would suffer unimaginable pain and torture because I saw the Prolife movement differently than she did. This woman had been like a mother to me and supported me for years as I sought to be both therapist and pastor with all the tensions that those two professions can carry with them.

And now, because I was no longer politically aligned with this movement, she saw me as an enemy.

Around that time, I read Cheryl Strayed’s excellent autobiographical story of her hike along the Pacific Coast Trail, “Wild”. She tells about how she spent three years seeking to recover from her mother’s death, often resorting to self-destructive means of coping. At one point, after drug and alcohol dependency and broken relationships looked like they would kill her, she decided on a whim to hike one of the longest continuous trails in the lower 48: The PCT.

She was ill-equipped, both literally and figuratively, for this journey. She carried too much stuff with her, most of which was the wrong equipment for this journey and had to be abandoned along the way. It was a metaphor for her life she soon realized. Her old Core Self was carrying so many things that were messing her up. She was carrying so much baggage she would have to rid herself of before she could keep going.

At one point, after losing toenails and finding massive gaping blisters from poorly fitting boots, she knew something had to change. It was at that point, in the fits of despair, that she finally started to move forward in her grief. By the time she finished her journey at the Washington-Oregon border, her new Core Self had emerged completely and she had deconstructed who she used to be.

Every culture, religion, and philosophy has a name for this journey. But whatever you call it, the key to it is to embrace the process. The more you fight the New Core Self emerging, the more you feel stifled and unhealthy. And even though the process of deconstruction is painful, it is a pain that brings personal expansion.

Blending and Unblending our Inner Parts

Janine’s ex-boyfriend called the HR department of the marketing company she worked for. He believed that her co-workers were lying about him, and this is why she broke up with him. In his call, he threatened to initiate a lawsuit against the company.

Her friend in HR told her about all his nonsense and laughed it off. She assured Janine that this kind of thing happens, but they were going to ignore it completely.

Janine heard all the HR person said, but she could not ignore it for some reason. She had persistent thoughts of being fired from her job, dragged into court, ending up in the newspapers, and having her career completely destroyed. By the next day, her thoughts carried her into ideas of being homeless and living in her car.

She even went so far as to entertain the obsessive idea that she needed to take her car in to be serviced in order to be ready when she had to live in it permanently.

As she was being bombarded with these thoughts, she felt a gripping feeling low in her stomach. She felt paralyzed and unable to move very quickly. All her breathing slowed down too far. She was also flooded with fear and terror. It felt like she was trapped and would die.

All of this because of an over-reaction by an ex-boyfriend. By the way, he never did follow through on any of his threats.

In Internal Family Systems therapy, we call the process she was experiencing a “Blending”. Blending happens when an internal mid-brain part of our psyche—either a Manager/Protector, Exile, or Firefighter—takes over the Core Self and seems to be in control of all emotions and thoughts.

In order to understand this, let’s do a little bit of brain physiology. Please note: This is a huge over-simplification. But it helps to see some of what is happening in the mind.

I believe the “mind” is a metaphoric extension of our brains. Our brains cannot see their own functions until played out in the mind. All the brain knows is biochemical reactions, neural networks, lobe structures, and electrical currents. But when the mind gives meaning to these things, the brain knows how to change and rearrange its own structures.

The mind gives the brain meaning and direction.

The prefrontal cortex is at the front of your brain. This complex of lobes and structures has many functions. You have your sense of self here. You make decisions here. You apply logic, reason, structure, pathways, plans, goals, meaning and purpose here. You also command all the mid-brain functions from here. The prefrontal cortex is your Executive Brain. No decisions can be made without it.

The mid-brain complex (made up of over 60 structures) is where your emotions, sensory data, memories, and body feedback loops reside. These structures are all controlled and manipulated by the prefrontal cortex, but they are separate from it.

In terms of Internal Family System (IFS), the Prefrontal/frontal cortex is where your sense of the Core Self exists. The mid-brain functions are where all your Managers, Exiles, and Firefighters live. This is how we can have complex conversations with ourselves. We have a Core Self, but many sub-personalities. These sub-personalities cannot make decisions, so they have to influence/overpower the Core Self to achieve their goals. And the Parts have goals, to be sure.

Take Janine as an example. Janine has an Anxiety Part that scans the future for danger. This Part saw that her ex-boyfriend was threatening her job and reputation. This caused an Exile who had been betrayed by loved ones in the past to act up. The Exile triggered the Anxiety Manager, who then flooded the Core Self with fear and dread.

Janine also has a Catastrophizing Firefighter. When the Anxiety Manager could not keep the Exile quiet, this part came in to completely flood the mind with worst-case scenarios. As Janine focused on those, the Exile’s cries could not be heard. As she obsessed, her mind was not focused on past hurts and pain. The purpose of all Firefighter parts is to distract the Core Self when there is too much inner reactivity.

She also had a Isolation Manager who was working to keep her feeling that others would not help her. Every time someone tried to cheer her up or assure her, she isolated from them. She refused to talk to them until all things had been resolved. This manager was helping an Exile who found that friends in high school had used information she had shared with them to reveal her problems to a vice-principal. This resulted in her being forced to see the school counselor. She vowed to never let anyone know about her problems that deeply. She stopped seeing her therapist during this time.

She was experiencing Blending. The Managers and Firefighters are seeking to get her to do things her Core Self didn’t want to do. The Blending often has three signs:

The body experiences polyvagal response. Somewhere in the body, the person will experience some kind of involuntary reaction. This is usually an uncomfortable feeling that they can’t shake. In Janine’s case, it was a parasympathetic freeze response where she felt her whole system shutting down when the Anxiety Part gripped her.
The brain is flooded with emotions. These are more than passing emotions. They are overwhelming feelings. In her case, it was fear, panic, catastrophe and helplessness. These feelings would only stop if she did something to distract herself. Binge-watching television, porn viewing, and cannabis helped alleviate the flooding. Often, firefighting responses mess our lives up as much as the Blending does.
Persistent and obsessive thoughts. These thoughts do not leave but grow in intensity. When this happens, the Parts try and get the Core Self to think in particular pathways. In Janine’s case, they wanted her to plan for a future of homelessness.

She was experiencing Blending. The Managers and Firefighters are seeking to get her to do things her Core Self didn't want to do. The Blending often has up to three signs that it is happening: Click To Tweet

Why do our Parts, which are supposed to be protecting us, act this way? Simple: The Parts do not have the whole story. And they were originally created to deal with our lives when we were children or teens. Many times, these sub-personalities still think we are young. This entire system was created by young people for young people. The system doesn’t work that well with adults.

But it is our system. We cannot ignore what our Parts do to try and influence the Core Self.

The Core Self is the most up-to-date version of who you are. Because most people do not update their parts–or even know they need to–the Parts act like belligerent children inside of us. We feel “childish” when our body and emotions are influenced by the Parts. How can this be changed?

Internal Family Systems was designed to do just that. In this article, I am only addressing Blending and Unblending. But understand the Parts really do care for you. They are trying to protect you. They don’t want to hurt you–but they often do just that. The most pain is felt when they blend with the Core Self. The cure for this is to unblend them.

A simple unblending starts with acknowledging the Part and asking it to back off. I usually start with the effects on the body. I might say, “Thank you Part for wanting to protect me by speeding up my heart rate and causing my stomach ache. But you’re hurting me. I want to talk to you, but not until you let go of my body.”

Then wait until the Part lets go. It may take a little while if you have never talked to your Parts. Once the Part lets go of your body, then move on to the emotions if they are using those also. Also be pleasant with them. Assure them you will listen and help them out. But be firm on two things:

You won’t listen to them until they stop hurting you.
Make sure they understand they are hurting you.

If they won’t let go, ask them how this is protecting you. Be insistent you will not approve this activity. In many situations, the Parts will unblend. Then, you can listen and dialogue about their concerns. Often the part is trying to convey something they are afraid of. Listen to them as you would a teenager or a child. Let them know you have heard them and appreciate their help. Then ask them to turn the volume down.

If you find you agree too much with them, then maybe see a therapist to help sort this out. It is possible a permanent blending has occurred because of trauma.

But most of the time, if you unblend the Part, you can get separation from them. This helps you to lead the process. Ask the Part what they do for you. What is their role? What are they afraid will happen to you if they aren’t doing their job?

But most of the time, if you unblend the Part, you can get separation from them. This helps you to lead the process. Click To Tweet

This helps the Part know the Core Self cares about them and is listening. It may not stop them from blending in the future, but they will often unblend easier if you have befriended them.

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Understanding Internal Family Systems – Part 1

My granddaughter looked thoughtful. She took more time than I thought a 5-year-old would take to answer the question “What’s your favorite movie?” I shouldn’t have been surprised. This girl thinks things through.

“I’m ready Papa. I know my favorite.”

I waited. “So, which one is it?”

“I just love “Inside Out”. Don’t you? It is so beautiful and I like that the girl has all the same parts inside her that I do. Can we watch it now?”

And so we watched it. “Inside Out” tells the story of a young teen girl. It charts her progress since the moment she was born. The movie shows her brain and how various parts of her psyche (Anger, Fear, Disgust, Joy, and Sadness etc.) develop and create relationships even with each other.

One reason I love the movie is that it serves as a great starting place for discussions on a therapy method I love called Internal Family Systems.

Internal Family Systems is part of a larger branch of psychology called Complex Systems Psychology. The basic idea is that our inner psyche is a complex amalgam of Parts, Structures, and Systems all designed to move us toward our full identity.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) focuses on how the Parts of a person’s psyche work together, much like the various characters in “Inside Out” relate to each other. In this article, I want to introduce you to those Parts and explain how each of them works. In subsequent articles we will address more of the problems which IFS seeks to help with.

The very basic idea of IFS is the concept that most people initially struggle with: That our sense of personal identity is not just one part, but is a multiplicity of various sub-personalities or Parts. When I tell people that, they assume I am saying that these Parts are all fully formed personalities with Ego Power equal to all the other Parts. But this is not true. Let me illustrate.

Have you ever been thinking of doing something and then another part of your thinking totally disagrees with that? And then, in the midst of those competing thoughts, a third thought–more an emotion–reacts to the ideas of the second thought. If we were just one Part, we would always think in a straight line. But our sub-conscious contains many opinions and reactions to the events and ideas of our lives. These opinions and reactions are some of what we in IFS call Parts.

To make it simple as possible, let me outline the four basic Parts that make up our psyche:

The Core Self: This is the decision-making part of our mind. It is the part of us that makes the final designation on what our true identity is. This is the only Part of us that really knows the entire breadth of our life to that point. This is where all the wisdom, knowledge, and experience is centered.

Many sacred writings, including the Bible, Koran, and Baghavad Gita call this Part our Heart. It truly is the heart of who we are and will be. But it is not the only Part.

Exiles: IFS is one of the therapies which believes in Ego States. An Ego State is a snapshot of who we are at any given age. We have a 6-year-old Ego State, another one at 7 and maybe another one a few months later. We are constantly evaluating who we are as we grow up. At significant moments of existential examination, we conclude “This is who I am”.

If those moments coincide with pain, loss, abuse, or injustice–as they often do–we develop a very reactive Ego State that IFS calls an Exile. These Parts are called Exiles because they represent events and emotions we never want to relive in any way. In fact, the entire Internal Family System from those moments forward exists to keep the Exiles quiet.

Let me give an example. A five year old boy witnesses his parents fighting more and more. Each day, he comes home from school wondering what horrible emotions he will feel because of their fights. Already, he is feeling chaotic emotions. He fears the disintegration of his home. He is angry at both of them for not loving each other. One day, he returns home from school and he witnesses the biggest fight of all.

At one point, Mom demands that Dad leaves the home. Dad screams at her and hits her. Then, he grabs his coat and runs out the door. The boy is left with an explosive mixture of emotions and ideas that are overwhelming. He will spend the next two years pondering what all of this means.

But at that moment, he decides one thing. It must be his fault! His 5-year-old brain takes all the evidence and reactions and this is what he comes up with. It is not accurate at all, but this is what he concludes. He doesn’t tell anyone of course. He is too ashamed to do so. But he still believes it. And that’s when this little boy develops a Part which represents the third group of Parts: The Managers.

The Managers: Managers are Parts whose job it is to keep the Exiles from reacting to any current events. To see how this works, let’s return to the little boy again.

He doesn’t like feeling that this is all his fault. So he develops a Part of his psyche–a Manager–who will remind him when he is about to make a huge mistake that will cause other people to get angry and leave. We might call this Manager a “Perfectionist” or maybe even “Shame” or “Obsessive-Compulsive”. Any of these Managers might accomplish the task of keeping that Exile from getting emotionally reactive.

Here is how this works out in adult life. This 5-year-old has grown up and is now married with kids. One of his sons is doing poorly at school. His wife simply suggests the two of them spend more time helping their son with his homework each night, perhaps taking turns.

At that moment, the 5-year-old Exile inside of him starts to react. She is saying that this is his fault, and he is not doing his job as a dad and the boy will be a failure in life because of it. He feels all of this in just a fraction of a second.

Immediately, a “Perfectionist” Manager jumps in to save the day. This Manager takes over and causes him to become obsessive about planning out the homework program. He buys a new desk for his son. He creates a very elaborate chart for homework which includes rewards and punishments. He buys four books for his Kindle on how to manage homework with elementary students.

And now, the Exile quiets down. The Manager has done his job. Unfortunately, the Core Self was not really involved in any part of this process.

Some IFS therapists call the Managers by a different name. They call them Protectors. This is mostly an accurate term. Most of our internal Managers are trying to help protect us from the real and perceived threats in our world. I prefer Managers because Protectors is only one role of these Parts. There are many others.

There are indeed Protector Parts

There are also Shame and Guilt Parts

There are Anxiety Parts. (Some people have lots of them).

Most people have Anger Parts

These are the more negative Managers. But we also have more positive Managers. We have parts that deal with our relationship needs (Sex, romance, communication skills). We have Parts that deal with other needs (achievements, freedom, fun).

There can be Healing Parts, Numbing Parts, Hero Parts, and Spiritual Parts

But for all their well-designed characteristics, the Managers are sometimes not enough. Let me give an example.

Let’s stay with the man whose parents split up when he was five. Let’s talk about another time in his marriage. Let’s say that his wife, when she gets angry, calls him a name that his mother used to call his father. The Exile of that age is apoplectic and out of control. The Managers that normally can keep this Exile out of sight can’t do the job any longer. This Exile is setting fire to the emotional center of the man’s mind. He can’t sleep at night. He can’t concentrate at work. He doesn’t know what he will do.

After work one day, his supervisor asks what is happening with him. His work performance is suffering. The two of them decide to go to the bar after work. After three beers, for the first time in weeks, he no longer hears the crying of the Exile inside. He is no longer in a constant turmoil. He likes the difference.

From that point on, every time this Exile gets out of hand, he drinks enough so he won’t have to hear that Exile any longer. Alcohol then becomes the next type of Part in the psyche.

The Firefighters: Firefighters are Parts we develop whose job is to calm down the entire Internal Family System when the Managers can’t do the job. Firefighters have one job: Distract the entire system so thoroughly that the Core Self cannot hear the Exile.

It is amazing how ingenious the brain is at creating these Firefighters. The distraction can be as simple as video games, eating more carbs, watching television or working out hard at the gym. It can be more advanced with actions like drinking too much, smoking too much weed, working too hard into the night, watching porn constantly, or bingeing on carbs.

Firefighters can be deadly. They may resort to harmful behaviors like self-harm, eating disorders, heavy drug use, unsafe and adrenaline-producing behaviors, complete dissociative shutdowns, and extreme violence toward others. Remember, the job of the Firefighter Part is to distract the Core Self when the pain of the Exile cannot be ignored any other way.

I think you can see if a person has Exiles who were abused sexually, physically, or emotionally that Firefighters can be quite common. And they are. Often, people come to the IFS therapist because they have a Firefighter problem. All that tells us is there are Exiles that need some loving.

In summary, here are the four main groups of Parts with each person:

Core Self

Exiles

Managers

Firefighters.

Why I Work with Sex Offenders

This short article is part rant and part catharsis.

A common question I am asked is how I can be an advocate for those who have been horribly victimized in sexual assault and child sexual abuse, and also be a therapist for sex offenders.

Isn’t this, at the very least, a conflict of interest? Shouldn’t there be a separation of duties where one therapist focuses completely on one group, and a different therapist works with the other group?

I don’t see it that way. Please keep an open mind and heart.

In 1984, I was finishing up courses in abnormal psychology with Northwest Baptist College and University of British Columbia. As part of my study, I had to do an internship in related fields. Since one of those fields was sexual deviance, I enrolled in one of the programs the Province of British Columbia offered. I lived in a remote region of Eastern B.C. They were giving paid internships to anyone willing to work with men who had been incarcerated as sex offenders.

For six months, I met with seven different men. All of them had been convicted as child molesters. In addition, I also did case study interviews with three more men who were spending the remainder of their lives in jail for molesting children. One of those men had admitted to over 250 molestations; he kept a journal of all of it. That journal was the basis for his life conviction.

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A Polymath and the Pain

A polymath (Greek: πολυμαθής, polymathēs, “having learned much”; Latin: homo universalis, “universal man”) is an individual whose knowledge spans a significant number of subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.

–Wikipedia definition of “Polymath”.

This past year, I have learned a hard truth about myself. I’m not who I thought I was, and who other people may still think I am. And it hurts me to have to admit that to myself. It is painful but cathartic to admit it to you.

Around this time last year, I had a minimal existential crisis. A certain SiriusXM radio station broadcast their list of the 1000 greatest rock and roll songs of all time. Because I was on the road a lot that month, and because they kept repeating the 1000 songs, I got to listen to various sections many times. There were so many songs that I didn’t bother arguing with where they should be placed on the list–until we got to the top 150.

That’s when I had my crisis. I actually only knew a few songs here and there. At one point, I listened for an entire hour and never heard a song I knew. The critical point came when I realized that the top 150 had five songs by The Who, and none of them were “Pinball Wizard”. And, I knew none of those songs. Not one. I also knew only two of the five Rolling Stones songs, none of the Grateful Dead songs, none of the Grand Funk Railroad songs (though I called them GFR like I was their biggest fan), and only a single Jimmy Hendrix song.

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