Political Division Hurts All of Us. Tools from Psychology May Help.
Internal Family Systems, or IFS, is a therapeutic approach that was originally developed to support individuals. However, it also has much wider applications. IFS states that while we do have an internal core called a Self, we also consist of many parts, which can also be called sub-personalities, and which have arisen in response to life challenges in an attempt to help us better navigate the world. These parts take on roles that they naturally wouldn’t take on in order to help the system survive traumas and stresses.
IFS Founder Dr. Richard Schwartz explains that parts can be found not only within people, but also within larger systems, including political ones. He states, “Clients and the rest of us didn’t come to be dominated by those striving, materialistic, and competitive parts by accident. Those are the same parts that dominate most of the countries on our planet and particularly my country, the United States.”[1]
Given that political polarization continues to increase, and that emerging research finds that polarization is not an “ideological, policy-based phenomenon,” but rather “an issue of emotion,” psychological tools are essential in our greater work to heal the divide.[2],[3]
One recent example where IFS can offer a different perspective was the renaming of U.S. army bases. At the end of 2023, the army completed a process to rename the last of nine bases from Confederate generals. To be clear, I fully supported this measure. I do not believe we ought to elevate, and thus condone, the actions of men who were fighting for the right of Southern states to continue exercising slavery. I believe that the decision to expand base names to include the contributions of female and BIPOC military leaders, was long overdue.
For me, this reason to rename bases is sufficient: slavery was wrong, we shouldn’t celebrate the leadership of those who fought for its continued existence. However, in an NPR interview, the lead historian of the commission responsible for renaming the bases offered a different rationale for why the bases were renamed. He explained that the new names were more historically accurate, because Confederate generals were leaders of a group of states that were not part of the U.S. at the time.
The historian, Connor Williams, rationalized, “[After the Civil War], United States soldiers…were going to allow the Confederates back into the nation. But they were very clear that the United States Army had defeated treason and that it was not the North and the South. It was the U.S. Army versus this domestic insurrection. And so by changing these bases, we're just getting back to the reality as it was in 1870 and 1890.”
It's certainly true that the Union and Confederacy were two separate entities, with the Confederacy seceding under its own government. Yet, the rationale that we should rename U.S. military bases because Confederate generals weren’t part of the U.S. at the time still gives me pause. Within these words I hear the sentiment that, “The South committed treason. The North defeated the South. The South is bad, the North is good.” What gets lost here is a much more complex reality, that both the North and the South were responsible for the underlying cause of the Civil War: slavery.
While slavery was relegated to the South, Northern industrialists enabled its continued existence, through economic ties with the South. On the eve of the Civil War, South Carolina exported 70% of its cotton to foreign countries, but 30% was exported to factories in the North, where it was processed into fabric. The Southern states also exported greater amounts of rice and lumber to the Northern states than to foreign countries. Cotton and other commodities may have been grown by Southern hands, but these materials created the bedrock for Northern economic growth.
IFS provides one avenue to help us see beyond the North/South, Good/Bad binary. The main groups of parts in IFS are exiles, managers, and firefighters. Exiles are young parts. They experience trauma and become isolated from other parts in an effort to protect the person (or larger system) from feeling pain, shame, and terror. One way to think about an exile is as the part of a ship that gets torpedoed. In this event, the captain can seal off the bulkhead doors to the damaged compartment, hopefully preventing the incoming water from flooding (and sinking) the rest of the ship.
Managers are responsible for day-to-day operations of the person. They really, really want to enable the individual to avoid unpleasant feelings of rejection or hurt and will utilize various coping strategies to maintain an internal sense of control over the exiled part that holds these uncomfortable feelings.
Firefighters, like managers, want to keep exiles away, but they are deployed at a later stage than managers. While the job of managers is more one of avoidance and prevention, firefighters come online when exiles are activated. Their goal is to extinguish unpleasant feelings, through anger, rage, addiction, and violence against self or others.
In the case of slavery, the North might be thought of as a manager and the South might be thought of as a firefighter. The exile is the shame that no one wants to feel around the collective responsibility for a history of slavery. Managers are often given a position of greater social status in our society. They control, they bring order, they ensure that things don’t get out of hand. Northern managers may be quick to banish the parts of American identity that they don’t like, saying, “That’s not us,” but this approach is usually quite counterproductive. In No Bad Parts, Dr. Schwartz explains, “We often find that the harder we try to get rid of emotions and thoughts, the stronger they become. This is because parts, like people, fight back against being shamed or exiled.”[4]
Firefighters become more vocal and extreme, out of a fear of their own erasure. The South exhibits many traditional firefighter behaviors. The five U.S. states with the highest mortality rates from drug overdose are all in the South. Four out of the five U.S. states with the highest homicide rates are in the South. Three out of the five states with the highest mortality rates from firearms are in the South. The South also has higher numbers of mass shootings per capita.
While Northerners may be quick to demonize Southern violence, the important point here is that both managing and firefighting are coping strategies grounded in avoidance. Managers and firefighters become focused in defeating each other, which enables them to avoid engaging with our collective, exiled history of slavery.
Unlike many other countries that have grappled with deep histories of human rights abuses, the U.S. has yet to enact measures such as a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission or to provide reparations to the descendants of slaves. I believe both policy options would offer important steps in the country’s continued quest to heal. The history of renaming bases also demonstrates that both the motivation behind the policy, as well as the policy itself, matter in mapping a path toward repair. In the case of base renaming, the new naming convention could have been an opportunity to acknowledge and raise awareness around the history of slavery, rather than simply seeking to erase its proponents. Regardless of which policy options we pursue in the future, I believe a first step is to be honest about our collective responsibility in perpetrating injustice, and in taking an active role in healing. If we hold any one part of the country responsible for these injustices, we will only remain fractionalized.
[1] Richard C. Schwartz. No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model (Boulder: Sounds True Press, 2021), 1.
[2] Drew Desilver. “The polarization in today’s Congress has roots that go back decades,” Pew Research, March 10, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/10/the-polarization-in-todays-congress-has-roots-that-go-back-decades/.
[3] Rachel Kleinfield. “Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States: What the Research Says,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 5, 2023, https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/09/05/polarization-democracy-and-political-violence-in-united-states-what-research-says-pub-90457.
[4] Richard C. Schwartz. No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model (Boulder: Sounds True Press, 2021), 10.