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12. Unburdening and Exile Work: The Steps of Deep Healing in IFS

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12. Unburdening and Exile Work: The Steps of Deep Healing in IFS

This article explores the process of working with exiles in Internal Family Systems therapy, continuing the journey from the Six F's of working with protectors to the profound work of witnessing and unburdening exiles.

A Critical Warning Before We Begin

Before diving into these steps, an important caution: While the protective steps (the Six F's) are relatively safe to experiment with—protectors are pretty stable and solid, so even if you make mistakes it'll be okay—the attitude toward working with exiles is different.

These steps are really about getting to know exiles, witnessing them, and learning about the burdens and pain they're carrying. This is very vulnerable and tender work. These steps are good to know about and to have an overview of, especially if you're thinking about learning IFS therapy or finding an IFS therapist or coach. But I wouldn't recommend anybody try this by themselves and just go explore their own exiles alone.

As you get to these vulnerable, tender, hurt parts, it's really helpful to have somebody with you who's oriented, who's done this before, and who is skilled in this. That's critically important to understand.

Continuing Our Example

We'll continue the example from the last article: the session with the woman who came because of relationship problems and had the Hothead part that was exploding and raging. As we got to know the part and explored its fears, it was really about the fears of the woman not being respected if it wasn't so explosive, fear of people walking all over her, and her feeling worthless again.

That's where we left off—because this "worthless again" was what pointed toward an exile.

Step 1: Accessing the Exile

The first step in working with exiles is about accessing—getting access and getting a connection with them in a safe way.

Ensuring Protector Permission

Among other things, this means in a way where the protectors are okay with you, with your client, contacting and connecting with these exiles. In this first step, it's really about making sure that protectors that have been present, or that might be present but you don't even know about, are okay with you going there, are allowing you to connect with this part.

One of the ways you can do this is literally by asking: "Is everything, every part of you, okay with going there right now?"

One way to talk to protectors about this—if a protector says "No, don't go there, why would you?"—can be to ask: "What if this part didn't feel like this anymore? What if this exile didn't have to feel so worthless anymore?" See if protectors are willing to allow you to connect with the exile.

Don't Push Past Protectors

One really important learning here: Don't push past protectors. If protectors don't want you to go to an exile, you don't go there. That's the basic attitude in IFS, because the experience has been that if you push past protectors, it usually doesn't end well. They will have a strong reaction, and that can really create problems in people's lives.

Ensuring the Exile Unblends

The second element of accessing safely is making sure that the exile unblends. Especially when you're dealing with an exile that carries a lot of charge, it's important to have some separation between Self and the exile so that the exile doesn't overwhelm the whole system—which usually also doesn't go so well with the protectors.

That's the second element of connecting with an exile safely: making sure the protectors are okay with it and the exile unblends enough to safely connect with the exile.

Example: Accessing the Exile

Continuing the example, for the step of accessing and connecting with the exile, to safely create a connection, the question that was asked was: Once the part shared it's worried that she will feel worthless again, "Is there another part, another part that feels worthless?"

Asking the part about the fear, that feeling, that experience—if there is another part that feels like that.

In this case, the client said yes. What she saw in that moment was a picture of a little girl that was hanging her head. She saw that little girl hanging her head, and the immediate response was: "Oh, compassion. I feel so sorry for her."

But before doing anything with that little girl, the important step was to also ask: "Is it okay for the Hothead if we connect with that little girl?" Just making sure that we don't go beyond the boundary, we don't cross that border in the sense that the part doesn't want us to.

But for this part, it was okay. It was a little bit worried and it wanted them to go slow, but it was okay with going to that part. That's finding the exile and having the okay from the protectors to go there.

Step 2: Witnessing

After safely connecting with an exile, the next step is witnessing, and this is a very, very important step.

The Core Need of Exiles

The step of witnessing is really about being with the exile, seeing it, hearing its story, learning about it. This goes right to the core need that exiles have: Exiles want to be seen.

They want to be seen, and the best entity in the world to see an exile, to be with an exile, to be compassionately present with an exile is Self.

How to Witness

Witnessing is really about inviting the part to share its story, its feelings. One question that often works here is asking: "What does the part want you to know, sense, or feel?" This opens the door pretty wide because exiles communicate in different ways. Some tell you stuff, others send feelings, others send pictures. It's really about picking that up and witnessing it—seeing it, hearing it, feeling it.

Is there anything the part wants you to know, sense, or feel about what it experienced?

Understanding What Happened and How It Made the Part Feel

This is at its core—and this is a Jay Earley distinction—about understanding what happened to the part and how did that make it feel. These can be two different things. It's about making sure you get what happened to the part.

Three Types of Memory

Sometimes what the part will show you is a very explicit memory, and then maybe you're like "Oh yeah, I remember that. I get it. That was painful."

But sometimes these things that the part may show are more symbolic. They can be a lot of experiences put into one. An example could be "It's like I was invisible"—that's a symbol, and that symbol can contain thousands of experiences in this one symbol. But still, only through exploring that symbol and getting that can we understand what happened and how it made the part feel.

A third type of memory parts can share is somatic states—which can be sensed and felt. This is where it is really important to make sure not to get overwhelmed by it, but to really experience what the part is sharing in a somatic way. This is often the case with very young parts—they don't really have words yet, they don't sometimes even have symbols yet, but they have these body sensations that they can send and that they're trying to show their story through.

Compassion vs. Empathy

One very helpful distinction around this can be between compassion and empathy.

Compassion: The need for compassion an exile might have is the need to be seen, to be validated, to be heard. This means I need to be open enough to be impacted in a way by the part, but I don't have to feel exactly as it's feeling. I don't have to feel the depth of pain, but I can be with it. I can feel touched by that, I can feel sorry for it, I can get how hard that has been without having to take all of that charge in.

Empathy: On the other hand, empathy can be more of feeling felt for the exile. Sometimes it's really important for the exile to know you feel what it felt. Maybe you don't have to feel the whole charge, but you need to know what it felt like. This is more of a need for empathy—that the part feels felt—compared to feeling understood and validated.

One rule of thumb can be to try to keep some distance from the exile, to not blend constantly, but to offer that conscious blending when it is needed. But in general, stay with the part rather than consciously blending with it.

Example: Witnessing the Little Girl

Continuing the example with the witnessing: The first thing that happened as she was with that exile, as she was open toward the exile and invited the exile to share anything, was that rather than having a memory come up or a specific situation, she suddenly started feeling very small.

A lot of times these feelings that come up in clients and patients around exiles contain a lot of information around the part itself. She started feeling very small, and as she stayed with that feeling, a memory came of being with her siblings.

This memory was the part showing that to her. Those siblings were bullying her—they were pushing her to do things she didn't want to do. She remembered that, and she realized "Yeah, that was actually what happened so much around playing with her siblings, around trying to be involved." It was always her siblings wanting her to be different or trying to get her to go along with what they wanted.

She realized that was really painful. The part then showed her—and this was a mixture of an embodied feeling but also it just telling her—that when that happened over and over and over again, it made this part feel so hopeless and worthless. Because that was the only explanation this part had: "If I don't get to play along, if I'm not important enough to be involved in the play in a way that is good for me, then I must be worthless. And then it's hopeless, then I don't even have to try."

That is how this exile, this little girl hanging her head, feels.

Step 3: The Do-Over

If witnessing has been done enough—when a client gets what the memory or what the part has experienced, when they get how that was for the part—the next step is to move to what IFS calls the do-over, which is making a helpful different experience for this part.

Time Travel to Help the Exile

One slightly cheeky way to put it could be to time travel to help the exile. In the theory part, we talked about exiles being stuck in a memory or a symbol or an experience—they are just stuck in that place. One way to help them out of there can be to internally time travel back and see: How can we help that part?

The questions for that are often: "What would the part have needed back then? And can you do that?"

This can mean either as the Self traveling back in time—kind of in imagination—and doing that, or making sure whatever the part would have needed back then happens in the past. Through this we can help the part have a new or corrective or nourishing experience that helps as an alternative, or sometimes as a change, to the thing, to the memory the part has been so stuck in.

Example: The Do-Over

Continuing the example: When exploring what the part, what the exile, would have needed, the first thing was she would have needed to just be involved—to not always be outside of the play, or when she was in the play, to be bullied and pushed around and to not matter. She needed to be involved in such a way that she's a part of it.

But what the part also shared is that for that to be the case, she would have needed somebody to protect her, because the siblings were so much bigger, so much more powerful, that as things went wrong she never could push against that, stand up for herself. So she would have needed somebody to protect her.

As the client connected with that and saw that in her inner eye—"Oh, she would have needed somebody to protect her"—the step in the do-over is: "Can you do that? Can you help the part with that? Can you help the part be involved and also protect her?"

That's the invitation for the Self, for her as the adult Self, to travel back there and make that happen. This is a weird mixture of imagination, but also it often feels so real.

For her it was: She closed her eyes and she realized "I can do that." In front of her inner eye, she saw her younger part playing with her siblings, and she talked to them and she made sure they realized what she needed and she made sure they realized what it means to her to be involved. In this scene, the siblings were like "Oh!" and when the siblings went along and the young part realized "I am safe right now," something shifted in the body.

These shifts were quite powerful, so it took some time to be with her, to explore what happened then. For this part it was like "That's what I always wanted, that's what I was always looking for." When the part got what it was looking for, something in her body relaxed. This actually took a few minutes of just staying with that, allowing this to unfold, allowing this part to have this experience, and allowing the impact of that experience in the body.

Step 4: Retrieving the Part

If the weight falls off from the part, the part has a helpful new experience, oftentimes an additional step that can be so helpful is to retrieve the part.

Bringing Parts to the Present

When it has had a different experience, we can ask: Does it want to stay there or does it want to be brought to a different place?

As we talked about, exiles are stuck in the past, they're stuck in these memory symbols. We can bring them to the present—meaning bringing them to the place we live, the life we have now. We can bring them more to a place in our imagination now, or put them somewhere in our body where they're safe.

This means that not only has this part had a new experience, it actually gets taken from that place it's been stuck for so long—sometimes decades. Through that, it's a symbol to the part that something has changed.

It's as simple as asking the part: "Does it want to go somewhere?" and then bringing it there. It's very intuitive for most people.

Example: Retrieving to Her House

Continuing the example: After this change in experience, the next step was to ask the part if it wanted to be retrieved from that situation. Because this part that had been longing for this—being involved, being safe—for so long had been stuck in this situation.

Sometimes it can be helpful to stay there because now the situation is different, but this part was like "No, I've been here so long, I don't want to stay here."

When asked where it wants to go, the answer was: "I want to be with you. I want to be with you where you live, where you are."

She took the part to her house and she allowed the part to look around and see: "Where do you want to be?" The part found a little corner in the room—a corner that to her, to the client, wasn't very meaningful, but to this part it was like "That's the place where I want to be."

It took some time to be there, but once the part was there it was like "Yeah, that's where it belongs, it feels right."

When the part was there, the question was: "Does it need anything else?" And the answer was yes—it needs to regularly connect with the adult, it needs connection. "Can she do that?" "Absolutely."

The place in the room, the corner that the part chose, got a different meaning through it being there. The part got retrieved to her house.

Step 5: Unburdening

These are already a lot of the steps, and they're actually very powerful. It's often easy to underestimate how profoundly transformative it can be to witness a part, to offer a part a new experience, to bring the part somewhere and make sure it's not stuck in the same place. Those steps already create very deep, meaningful experiences for ourselves and for the parts.

Now we get to the step that many people are most curious about: unburdening. This is maybe the thing people are most curious about, and understandably so—"I want to help unburden my parts, I want to let go of burdens."

But at the same time, it's the last step of a whole series of very important elements.

When and How to Unburden

Within the Internal Family System, it's been found that parts can let go of their burdens, transform their burdens, and this can actually be something that can be facilitated.

It doesn't make sense to connect with an exile, to have the first connection, and go "Oh, so do you want to let go of your burden?" This is not the place where that step works. But when an exile has had a new experience and is in a better place, we can see: Is there anything now that it has had that experience, that it is in this place, that it can let go of?

Basically a good question for that is: "Does the part now still carry anything from the past that it can let go of?"

The experience is that a lot of times parts do—even though parts have been retrieved, even though parts have had very beautiful do-overs and experiences, they are still carrying beliefs or feelings or perspectives on the world that are painful, that are burdens from the past.

The Unburdening Ritual

In this step we can help parts through the unburdening process, through a little ritual, to let go of that. It's been found that when parts are offered and guided through that, they can really let go of a lot of these burdens they are still holding on to by giving it to one of the basic elements: by giving it to water, to fire, to earth, to the air/wind, or to a more spiritual source.

By doing that, by guiding parts through that ritual, it can really help them to realize "Oh, something's over, something's different."

In this unburdening process—which has its own magic to it and which can be very simple or very elaborate—parts can let go of some things in this symbolic realm. But it really makes a difference for people's bodies, for people's psyche, when something is let go in that way.

Example: Unburdening "I Don't Matter"

Continuing the example: Once the part was retrieved to her house, the question was: "Does it still carry anything from the past, any burden, anything that's left over from then?"

The part was like "Yes, there is still this feeling that I don't matter."

Once the part said that, the client felt in her own body the sense of like there's absolutely no power in her body when she doesn't matter.

Asking the part: "Are you ready to let go of that feeling, of this 'I don't matter'?" The part was like "Yes, I don't need to carry this."

So the part was asked to find that in her body, and it was really this sense of heaviness and weakness in her whole body. When asked "What does she want to release this to? Is there an element she wants to release this to?" there was immediately giving it to the water.

The client, in her imagination and together with the part, found a beautiful lake to go to. The part, the little girl, walked into the lake, and it was like the water took that feeling and it washed it out.

As the water was washing out that burden, what immediately happened was that where there was space, it was almost instantly filled with strength. There was this sense of strength that filled as the weakness and the lack of energy got washed out—it got filled with something else.

This actually took again a few minutes of just allowing that washing, filling. But when it did, the part felt completely different. Not only did the part not feel like it didn't matter anymore, there was also not this sense of weakness. Instead, instead there was this supple and beautiful power and strength.

Step 6: Integration

Once we've gone through all of that, the last really important element of this step is to integrate—not just "unburdened, done, gone," but to really make sure that has a chance to land.

Two Aspects of Integration

For me, the integration has two qualities, or two elements:

  1. Integrating the qualities that have emerged—either that have emerged naturally or that the part has invited
  2. Integrating the protectors now that something has changed

How to Integrate

To me that has a few elements:

Allow qualities to spread: If something like this flowing worth comes, I think one very powerful way of staying with that is to see: Now that that's there, how does that impact the system? What happens then? Really allow that to spread and have its natural way of implementing, integrating into the system.

Check with protectors: The next thing that is standard would be to see: Did the protectors witness this? Did they watch this? Are they aware that this happened? If they are aware, do they still need to do their job in the same way? Because now that the exile has changed, do they still need to do what they did until now?

Follow up: Really important also—after this session, in the next session, make sure to follow up. When something has changed like that with exiles, it really takes time to integrate into the system.

Help the client revisit: Afterwards, integrating, making sure the protectors know, but then also making sure the client or you know how to revisit this part so that it has a chance to really sink into the system.

All of those are steps of then integrating whatever happened into the system.

Example: Integration

Continuing this example: With integration, in this case the most important element of integration was just allowing that stability, that strength, to have time.

Actually what happened in her was that as that strength grew stronger, as the part was releasing the feeling of not mattering, the part grew stronger, she grew stronger, and there was a sense of stability and safety going with that.

It took almost five minutes of just staying with it, seeing what happens, how is this in the body, how is this for the part, to really allow that to spread. It felt complete after that.

Then the next step of integration was to check in with the Hothead if it had witnessed this. It was like "Yes, I have witnessed this. I'm like 'Whoa!'" It was actually really happy that this part was finally not worthless anymore, that it didn't feel like that. It was happy about that.

When asked whether it still sensed that it needed to do its role the same way, the response was: "No, if this part is more integrated and is more of an element or a part of life, being in the home, it can relax, it can get smaller." But it also wanted her to know that if she ever needs the Hothead, it's there and it can stand up for her.

But what she literally saw was this part growing smaller visually and being okay with not being as explosive, not being as much in the foreground, but that there's more space.

The Lasting Impact

What happened over the next few weeks with this client was that actually the Hothead was still a part of her. There were still moments where it rose and she had to stand up for herself, but it was way, way, way less. She still had the capacity to do it, but there was more of a sense of "Things are okay. I don't have to fight everything. I have a sense of stability. I can stand up for myself if I need to, but I can also trust."

This was really a huge step in her life and for her relationship.

Conclusion: The Steps of Exile Work

Those are the steps for working with exiles, the steps of the unburdening process:

  1. Accessing: Safely connecting with the exile with protector permission and ensuring unblending
  2. Witnessing: Being with the exile, hearing its story, understanding what happened and how it made the part feel
  3. Do-Over: Providing a corrective experience, meeting the needs the part had back then
  4. Retrieving: Bringing the part from the past to the present, to a safe place
  5. Unburdening: Helping the part release burdens through ritual with the elements
  6. Integration: Allowing new qualities to spread and integrating protectors into the changed system

This work is profound and transformative. It's vulnerable and tender, requiring skill, care, and often the support of a trained practitioner. But when done well, it offers genuine healing—not just managing symptoms but actually releasing the burdens that have been carried, sometimes for decades, allowing parts to reclaim their natural qualities and the whole system to reorganize around Self-leadership.

The example we followed shows how exile work naturally flows from protector work—the Hothead's fears led us to the little girl who felt worthless, and healing that exile allowed the Hothead to relax into a healthier role. This is the power of the IFS approach: by addressing the root vulnerability rather than just managing protective strategies, we create sustainable, systemic change that allows for genuine self-leadership and balance.

Sources

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