Lately I have seen a few posts, and sat in a few conversations with therapists, who are critical of IFS and constellation work. Their concern is that these maps create an unhealthy compartmentalisation of parts within a person. Name the inner child, the protector, the exile, the argument goes, and you risk leaving someone more fractured than when they arrived.
I understand the worry. A map held rigidly can harden into a set of rooms with locked doors. And I want to push back on it, a little, because this is not the way I use these practises; the way I use these maps leads somewhere else entirely.
A brief lineage of parts work
Parts work is the practice of meeting the many selves within one person: the protector, the critic, the wounded child, the one who keeps the peace. It is far older than any single modality, and its history is a long conversation between healers who each saw the psyche as a living community.
The thread begins in the late nineteenth century with Pierre Janet, who documented how overwhelming experiences can split away from ordinary memory and live on as dissociated fragments. Carl Jung carried it forward through the early and mid twentieth century, describing a psyche populated by complexes, archetypes and the Shadow, and inviting dialogue with these inner figures through active imagination.
In Italy, Roberto Assagioli traced the roots of his idea of subpersonalities to a talk he gave in Bologna in 1911, later publishing Psychosynthesis in 1965. His map is especially close to my own. He saw subpersonalities as natural patterns of identity, each with its own drive, and described a path through awareness, acceptance and cooperation toward synthesis: a unity in diversity, gathered around the I and the Transpersonal Self.
From the 1950s, Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis gave us the Parent, Adult and Child ego states. In 1972, psychologists Hal and Sidra Stone, who had come together to work with Assagioli’s guided imagery, began speaking directly to their own inner selves. That first conversation with an Inner Child became Voice Dialogue and the Psychology of Selves, later deepened by their work on the Aware Ego.
Internal Family Systems was born in the early 1980s, when family therapist Richard Schwartz ran an outcome study with teenagers struggling with bulimia and their families. When the family techniques failed, he asked his clients what was happening inside them, and they described inner voices that behaved like members of a family: forming alliances, polarising, protecting one another. IFS names these managers, firefighters and exiles, and beneath them a core Self marked by calm, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, courage, creativity and connectedness.
Family Constellations arose in parallel, in the late twentieth century, through the German therapist Bert Hellinger. He drew on family systems therapy, phenomenology and the Zulu relationship to family and ancestors that he encountered during his years as a missionary in South Africa, and placed the individual within the larger field of their lineage. It remains the most contested of these maps, and its critics question its scientific grounding.
These lineages of work agree on a number of things. Janet’s fragments, Jung’s complexes, Assagioli’s subpersonalities and Schwartz’s parts all point toward a centre that can hold them, a Self or an I around which the many become one. Integration beyond identification has always been a central focus point of these works.
Seen, then returned to the whole
When I see clients and work with “parts”, a part is brought forward so it can finally be seen. It is given a face, a voice, a place in the body where it lives. Then, once it has been witnessed and met, it is allowed to dissolve back into the whole.
The naming of the part is a doorway, not a destination. What waits on the other side is integration, the felt sense of being one body again, with the part folded back into the larger field of the self. A map of parts, used this way, becomes a map home.
The framework and the practitioner
Like any map or model of care, there is the framework, and there is the practitioner. The two are inseparable in practice. The same model can fracture or heal depending on the hands that hold it.
The transmission of a method falls largely upon the practitioner and their unique way of carrying a map into the room. Their nervous system, their presence, their capacity to stay with what arises: these shape the work as much as any protocol on the page. When we critique a modality, it is worth asking how it was transmitted, and by whom.
An emergent way of working
Admittedly, I have never been one to stick strictly to any rule or protocol around a therapy model. I take parts and I make them my own. Over the years I have gathered maps from many lineages, and each one has been digested, tested in the body, and woven into something that lives and breathes.
My way of working is emergent. I work with, and am informed by, the field. The session tells me what it needs, and the map serves that listening. And that is what I teach.
The Self Holding Method
This is what we encourage in the Self Holding Method Training. We give you many ways to work, a wide repertoire of maps, practices and somatic tools. Then we teach you how to listen deeply, track sensation, and hear the story the body is telling beneath the mind. From that listening, you learn to transmit your own medicine.
Our next cohort commences in February 2027, and I would love you to join us. Early bird pricing is open until 14 November, as Venus and Mercury station direct.
The training is internationally accredited with the International Institute for Complementary Therapists (IICT).
