“Internal Family Systems”

I’ve never really done therapy with the Internal Family Systems method but I am familiar with the concepts and tools from it. And I think I’ve been living or enacting it in my life lately, partly even unawares.

Lately, I’ve been having lots of (not unpleasant) dreams in which my sister and/or my mother appear together with myself at different, younger, ages. I’ve also been thinking a lot about my various identities lately: how I miss my “bro-time” and my athlete identity, especially the “climber me”, because of the lack of opportunity to climb with my buddies; how the queer parts of me have had so much more space to express themselves and explore because I’m spending so much more time in different queer environment and with my queer friends/families; how the more “professional me” has been quite subdued or absent because I’ve been unemployed and/or unmotivated in my latest job; how the more childlike, and often specifically boyish, parts of me have had more space because of my experiences and exposure with the gay men’s chorus, which are still so new to me. 

This “fractionality” in me has felt more pronounced lately and in some ways uncomfortable, almost leading me to not recognize myself. Within the gay men’s chorus, for instance, I’m not the “PhD scientist” or “STEM professional”: they might see me as a trans guy who sings and is an avid athlete, but really there I’m mostly a teenage gay (trans) boy trying to find himself in a new, mostly unknown, world. That’s also how I felt, for instance, when I hooked up with the gender-expansive guy from the chorus who is fifteen years younger than me: in many ways, I can feel I’m older, more mature, more experienced than he is (e.g. when it comes to jobs I’ve had and places I’ve lived); but close up, in that specific type of intimacy, I’m a teenage boy and in many ways much “younger” and less experienced than he is. When I chose to hang out with him and to hook up, I instinctively made the choice of allowing my teenage-boy-self to have that experience, somehow feeling instinctively that he was safe even if it felt a little scary.

And it’s probably going to be similar with other guys from the chorus if we hang out as friends. 

I think this answers part of my question: what do I want from this chorus, from being part of this chorus? A big part of what I want, or need, is letting myself live some of those experiences as a young gay boy that I didn’t have two decades ago. 

I guess that’s actually living the Internal Family Systems method: I can be my young gay boy self at chorus; be my “PhD scientist” or “STEM professional” at work; be “bro-y” with my climbing buddies… And I think that I was my own mother and sister in my recent dreams, the way I felt profoundly that I was — or could be — my own father last spring & summer. By allowing myself to be all these different parts of myself, all of these different roles in my life, I can help heal some of my wounds.

So, although it might sometimes feel like I’m made up of fractions, I think I’m still a whole after all…