You Are the One You've Been Waiting For: Applying Internal Family Systems to Intimate Relationships

by Richard C. Schwartz

The ability to hold the multiplicity perspective about yourself and your partner is enhanced by the simple (but often difficult) act of speaking for, rather than from, your parts.

There is something magical about trusting that all of you is welcomed in a relationship.

So the exiling of a vulnerable part is akin to first shaming a child and then locking them in a dark dungeon. A young child in that situation feels terrible—rejected and abandoned, scared and needy, unlovable and desperate for redemption. That’s exactly how many exiled childlike parts of us feel.

Because our exiles are so desperate, easily hurt, and terrifying to us when they are upset, we have other parts that protect them by using one of the three projects: (1) changing our partner, (2) changing ourselves to please our partner, or (3) giving up on our partner and distracting or numbing.

We each have a source of love within us called the Self. From this place, we can retrieve our exiles from our inner basements and heal their wounds sufficiently so that they trust us to care for them. When this happens, our protectors relax and cease to give our partner such a hard time. We can become our own parts’ primary caretaker.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The condition which high friendship demands is the ability to do without it.” The same is true for high love—to do without your partner’s physical presence, if necessary, because you support their life’s journey, even when it departs from yours.

It is only when you are able to calm your abandonment anxiety by caring for the parts that carry it that you can truly love your partner because you can put their growth above your need for security. I call this courageous love.

Each of these four forms of intimacy—describing parts to each other, Self-to-Self relating, part-to-part relating, and secondary caretaking (a.k.a. Self-to-part relating)—is powerful by itself. When all four are available in a relationship, it takes on a vitality that allows both partners to rest because they know they are home.