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5. Understanding Burdens: Why They're Central to IFS Theory

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5. Understanding Burdens: Why They're Central to IFS Theory

This article explores the concept of burdens in Internal Family Systems theory, examining why burdens are so fundamental to the approach and identifying the different types of burdens that exist.

Why Burdens Are Central to IFS Theory

To understand why burdens occupy such a central place in Internal Family Systems theory, we need to grasp one key perspective: according to IFS, parts create problems because of burdens.

This is a crucial distinction. Parts don't create problems simply because they exist. Parts don't create problems because it's their nature to create problems. Rather, when a part is burdened, it is not in its natural and healthy state. Parts that are burdened don't have access to their natural healthy qualities—qualities that, when accessible, actually help the system. Because they lack access to these qualities, burdened parts create problems.

This perspective fundamentally reframes how we view problematic behaviors and symptoms: they emerge not from inherently flawed parts, but from parts carrying burdens that prevent them from functioning in their natural, healthy way.

What Are Burdens?

In IFS, burdens are extreme beliefs, feelings, or somatic states that developed from undigestible events in our life or body.

This definition encompasses a wide range of experiences that parts can carry when they haven't been able to process what happened to them or what they witnessed.

Two Types of Burdens

There are fundamentally two types of burdens that parts can carry:

Type One: Burdens That Hold Pain from the Past

The first type of burden means holding onto the pain or the undigestible elements of the past. These are usually the burdens that exiles carry.

Something happened in the past. The part couldn't digest it. The feelings, emotions, and beliefs from that experience are still present, still active. Those are the burdens of exiles—unprocessed pain, emotion, and belief from experiences that overwhelmed the system's capacity to integrate them at the time.

Type Two: Burdens from Dealing with Pain

The second type of burden—equally important—consists of extreme beliefs, feelings, somatic states, or behaviors that come from dealing with the pain. These are protector burdens.

This represents a key perspective in IFS: not just exiles are burdened. Protectors are equally burdened.

Protectors Are Burdened Too

The burdens in IFS are both:

  1. The pain carried from past events by exiles (visually represented in IFS diagrams as band-aids on exile parts)
  2. The roles protectors have to play, along with the beliefs, feelings, and behaviors that belong to these roles

This second category might seem counterintuitive at first. Why are protective roles considered burdens?

Because protectors are trying to protect from the burden—the pain held by the exile—they have to engage in certain behaviors. They are stuck in those roles. The role itself is a burden because through this role, the protector doesn't have access to the healthy qualities it would usually have access to.

An Example: The System Organized Around Burdens

Consider again the example of a system organized around an exile:

The exile might carry a burden—the feeling and belief that he, she, or it is unlovable. That's the burden the exile carries: the feeling and belief itself, "I am unlovable."

But because of this belief and the amount of pain that comes whenever this exile floods the system with those beliefs and feelings, protectors must adopt specific protective roles.

One protector might work really hard to be acceptable. For this protector, this role it has to play—in this case, a managerial role—is itself a burden. It is burdened through the extreme behavior it has to demonstrate.

Similarly, a firefighter protector might zone out and avoid feeling. This role—the zoning out, the avoiding feeling—is the burden that this part carries.

Parts Are Not Their Burdens

What is critically important to understand about all of this: in none of these cases is the part the same as the burden.

The part is carrying the burden. The part is carrying either:

  • The pain from the past, or
  • The protective role it has adopted

In all these cases, the part would have other healthy qualities that could emerge if it were not for the burden. Parts have inherent healthy qualities that become obscured or inaccessible when they're carrying burdens, but those qualities remain present beneath the burden.

Personal Burdens vs. Legacy Burdens

IFS recognizes an important distinction between two sources of burdens: personal burdens and legacy burdens.

Personal Burdens

Everything discussed so far relates to personal burdens. These are burdens that arise from our own life experiences:

  • An exile not receiving the love it needed creates undigestible pain, and the exile continues carrying this pain—this is a personal burden coming from the past
  • Protectors dealing with that pain by taking on protective roles—these are also personal burdens, meaning personal protective strategies that these parts developed to deal with that specific situation

Personal burdens come from events and experiences in our own lives that we couldn't digest at the time.

Legacy Burdens

Legacy burdens represent a second type that operates differently. Legacy burdens do not always trace back to a specific situation or specific challenge in our own life. Instead, they can be taken on from family, culture, or ancestors.

This means there can be specific undigested events from the past—for instance, a feeling of being unlovable and a belief of being unlovable—that have existed in the family for generations. That feeling has been passed down because it is so strong in the family field that one generation hands it to the next, which hands it to the next. We can carry the burden of being unlovable because it has been passed down in the family, even without a specific personal event that created it.

The same pattern applies to specific protector strategies. Perfectionism, for example, can be a defense—a protector's role. This perfectionism can be passed down because it is so strong in one generation that the next generation has to develop perfectionism to protect themselves, and then the next generation again develops perfectionism to protect themselves. Protective strategies, like burdens themselves, can be transmitted across generations.

How Legacy Burdens Are Transmitted

There are two primary ways to understand how this legacy element works:

Transmission through osmosis: These burdens are passed down almost automatically. The feelings and perspectives are so normal, so all-encompassing in the family system, that they simply get passed on—they just become part of us. This resembles what other psychotherapies call introjection: material from the environment coming into the system without conscious processing.

Transmission through imitation: Parts will try to imitate the environment to learn how to survive in that environment. They begin imitating certain protective behaviors and even certain burdens because it seems like this is part of what being normal means in this family or culture.

Conclusion: The Centrality of Burdens

Understanding burdens as central to IFS theory transforms how we view psychological suffering and dysfunctional behavior. Problems don't arise from fundamentally flawed parts but from parts carrying burdens—whether pain from the past (in exiles) or protective roles adopted to manage that pain (in protectors).

Both exiles and protectors are burdened. Neither type of part is the same as its burden. Beneath every burden lie natural, healthy qualities waiting to be accessed once the burden is released.

Burdens can be personal—arising from our own undigested experiences—or legacy burdens, transmitted across generations through family systems and culture. Regardless of their source, burdens prevent parts from accessing their healthy qualities and create the symptoms and struggles that bring people to therapy.

This understanding opens the path to healing: by helping parts release their burdens, we allow them to return to their natural, healthy states and contribute their authentic gifts to the whole system. The goal of IFS is not to eliminate parts but to unburden them, allowing the full system to function with all its natural qualities accessible and integrated.

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