Inside Out—Internal Family Systems, Therapy, and High-Performing Protectors with Jenna Riemersma

Do you ever feel like you're wearing a mask, hiding how you really feel from others?

Do you find yourself in conflict with different aspects of your personality, struggling to find harmony?

In honor of the new Pixar movie, Inside Out 2, we're diving into Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy in a brand new series this week! Today's guest, Jenna Riemersma is an amazing human, an expert IFS clinician, and the bestselling author of 2 books on IFS.

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Here's what we cover:

1. What is Internal Family Systems (IFS)?
2. The hidden cost of high-performance armor
3. Are kids truly resilient or just coping?
4. 3 signs of a good therapist
5. Jenna's journey of writing her book on IFS
6. Innovative Practices for ongoing healing

Jenna Riemersma is a popular author, speaker, and certified Internal Family Systems therapist whose groundbreaking IFS books have repeatedly topped Amazon’s best-selling new release charts.

• Connect with Jenna at: https://jennariemersma.com/
• Get Jenna's free Insight Timer IFS meditations
• Read Altogether You and Altogether Us
• Boundaries For Your Soul by Dr. Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller

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Thanks to our sponsors:

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• Go to thrivemarket.com/bestofyou for 30% off your first order, plus a FREE $60 gift!

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If you like this episode you'll love:

• Episode 39: Boundaries For Your Soul: How to Navigate Your Overwhelming Thoughts & Feelings
• Episode 40: 5 Steps to Healing Painful Emotions
• Episode 43: How to Tame Your Inner Critic & Why All Parts Are Welcome

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Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author.

While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.‍

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Transcript:

Alison Cook: I am so thrilled to bring you my conversation with Jenna Riemersma. Jenna is the author of the bestselling IFS books, Altogether You: Experiencing Personal and Spiritual Transformation Through Internal Family System Therapy, and All Together Us: Integrating the IFS Model with Key Modalities, Communities, and Trends. 

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Like Boundaries For Your Soul, Jenna's book, Altogether You, is a faith-based integration of the IFS model with a Christian faith perspective. She shared with me for the first time her experience of writing Altogether You as Boundaries for Soul was coming out and what that was like for her.

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She is so real and so candid and so beautiful. I love this woman. I love the work that she is putting into the world. Everything Jenna does is so helpful and so grounded in the fact that she has done the work herself. Please enjoy my conversation with Jenna Riemersma. 

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Alison: Everything about you, I have so much respect for, and I'm so excited to have you here today. This is the week that the new Inside Out movie came out and in honor of that, I was so excited to have a few conversations with some of the IFS therapists and clinicians who I respect the most in the world about this inner landscape that we all have. 

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Your first book, Altogether You, is about IFS. It's a faith based approach to it. It's different from Boundaries for Your Soul, but there's a similar theme of taking IFS and integrating it with a faith perspective. I highly recommend it to all my listeners. But Jenny, you describe your experience growing up as an only child in a military family, moving around a lot. I have listeners who write to me about that experience.

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It's more common than one would think which understandably creates challenges in a child's inner world. You describe masking through perfectionism in performing. I would love to go back in time to that younger you, thinking of Riley in the Inside Out movie in those preteen years. What were some of the characters or parts that developed inside your inner landscape to cope with some of those challenges? 

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Jenna: I feel like I am Riley because watching the Inside Out movie, I resonate with absolutely everything and I cannot recommend it highly enough to your listeners. It's an amazing representation of a beautiful world. An IFS approach to understanding our inner worlds. Riley is a young pre-adolescent who's going through a really challenging move from this idyllic place where she's lived into a completely different environment and being able to come to terms with acknowledging all the different parts of herself and not joy.

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It's been a really interesting thing to watch in her journey. Joy went from being what we call in internal family systems, an unburdened part of the pure essence of joyfulness, to a burdened part where joy had to start being in control of everything. There's this amazing scene where Joy draws a circle around sadness and says, “Sadness, I've got the perfect plan for you. On the first day of school, you stay in this circle and don't move”. 

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It's a perfect example of exiling and spiritual bypassing and I had that going on in my inner world as an only child who moved every year or two my entire life. What I knew would be well received in my world was doing things perfectly, pleasing people, and trying to exile all the parts of me that were feeling and doing things that weren't very shiny, like Joy tried to exile sadness. I looked really good on the surface, but I was coming apart at the seams inside, which was very similar to what Riley experienced in the movie.

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Alison Cook: How did you, as a younger woman, whether as a teenager or even in young adulthood, how did you experience that dissonance? You had it all together. You were thriving.

Whereas internally you were feeling like you were coming apart at the seams. How did you experience that back then?

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Jenna: I did not have an understanding of what was happening, nor words for it. What landed in my inner system was this deep-seated belief, which I now know to be a burden of a part of mine in exile, that believed I'm broken. I'm not good enough. Something's wrong with me. If anybody ever saw through this outside facade and saw who I really was and how I really felt, how much anxiety and shame I really was carrying, they wouldn't love me. 

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They would reject me. My internal system became heavily burdened with those beliefs. And then my protective inner system became very involved and invested in making sure nobody ever saw that, all outside of my conscious knowledge. I knew that I wasn't comfortable in my own skin, but I didn't understand why or what was happening or how to fix it.

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Alison Cook: You're saying something so I want the listener to hear this, I often say the stronger the armor, the more tender the heart. The armor in your case, Jenna, this perfectionism, pleasing, performing, I'm assuming and imagining similar to my own experience, was socially acceptable.

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Jenna: Yes.

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Alison Cook: It wasn't the kind of armor that was going out and doing drugs or acting out or being delinquent in some way. It was the kind of armor that folks probably respected in many ways. Is that accurate?

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Jenna: Absolutely. It made a lot of sense for the parts of me that took on this high performing, achieving, people-pleasing kind of armor because it was very well received in my environment, in my home. It was one of the only ways that I could feel positive feedback. And I kept trying to jump higher and try harder and do all the things and finally graduated from Harvard with a master's degree and it still felt empty.

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I realized, “something is really wrong here”. I can't jump any higher. I can't do any more and this is not working. It is not working. I am still miserable inside.

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Alison Cook: You answered my next question–when did you begin to realize that this wasn't working? So it sounds like it was all the way after your master's degree, that the misery inside of you would not go away, no matter how much you achieved.

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Jenna: Yes, and from an IFS perspective, we know that is true because when we have exiles, the vulnerable parts of us that carry these core beliefs come up from our trauma and mine were, I'm all alone. Something's wrong with me. If you really knew me, you wouldn't love me. Those don't go away with time.

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One of my pet peeve phrases is “children are so resilient”. No, they're not. Children have strong protectors that learn how to cover up their exiles and function in a way that looks very, very functional in a variety of ways. I certainly did, but my exiles were not healed. In fact, with every experience I had, they became more and more burdened because somehow it still wasn't good enough.

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I stopped striving outward and began to turn my focus inward to connect with my own parts and my own system and welcome all the different parts of me, no matter what they were feeling or doing. Which is the opposite of what I'd spent my whole life doing, which was moving against them. I started moving toward them with curiosity and compassion. That's when everything shifted. 

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Alison Cook: You've achieved everything externally that people would assume would make you feel healthy or successful or happy inside. You realize it's the opposite. You're not. How did you reach out for help? And what did you find, whether from a therapist, from a faith community, from friends?

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Sometimes you reach out for help and it's not helpful. Sometimes we have to wrestle for good help, the kind of help we actually need. I'm curious, in that moment where you realized things aren't working, I need to change, what was it like for you? I know in my own experience, when I've had those key inflection points where for me, anxiety started to rush up to the surface. 

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It was very similar. It was almost to the end of a doctoral program. I'd literally never taken an incomplete in a class, and suddenly I'm having panic attacks, and not able to attend class and you start scrambling for support and you find out really quickly where help actually comes from and where it does not. What was that like for you in those moments when you started to reach out for support? Because I'm assuming at this point you didn't yet know about IFS. 

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Jenna: In fact, I was not a therapist at this point in my journey. My first degree, what I went to Harvard for, was public policy. I was working on Capitol Hill and creating legislation and I was in a completely different world and I knew nothing about therapy or clinical work. I had never even been in counseling and no, I didn't know anything about the clinical world, but what really brought it to the surface for me was having this big career on Capitol Hill that was moving very quickly in an advancing direction, having a master's degree from Harvard, being married to my dream husband and having two kids in the white picket fence and the golden retriever.

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It was very shiny on the outside. Then some deep dark challenges started to emerge in our marriage that blindsided me. I had no way of making sense of what was happening and I was absolutely devastated. All of my coping strategies at this point were worthless because I couldn't pretend everything was okay. There was no way to pretend everything was okay, and it was a mixed bag of responses.

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I had the good fortune of being a part of a wonderful faith community with some really incredible friends who I didn't realize, but I had never really let get close to me. They were friends. I was there for them and their struggles, but I don't know that I really knew that I could share my struggles. I didn't know that was allowed.

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It was not part of my protective armor that I could be vulnerable. I had some dear friends who I was able to open up to and who were able to see all parts of me, all the pain, all the mess, and really embrace me and allow me to be in the mess without any agenda. It was incredibly healing and transformational.

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I had experiences of reaching out to perhaps the more formal faith community and receiving, unfortunately, some well-intentioned, but very damaging, very hurtful platitudes. I needed to pray more or if I would be a more godly woman or recite the scripture, then I wouldn't feel this anxiety. Or I need to give it to God or a whole variety of what I now know to be spiritual bypass, which was more about creating comfort for the person who was sitting across from me than really tending to my wounds.

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That experience really reinforced my protective system that said, aha, it's not actually safe to let people see when you're hurting and wounded and vulnerable. That whole experience led me to therapy. Which was thankfully good therapy and deeply transformational and healing. In the middle of the darkest moments of that whole experience, I had a very clear encounter with God who said, I am calling you to do this work.

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I said, oh no, you're not. This is awful. The last thing in the world I want to do is spend any more time in this world of trauma and grief and loss. God said, oh, yes, I am. I fought that for a year or two as I was going through my own healing, beginning a healing journey, which I've now been on for the better part of 30 years.

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Gratefully, God was right and I was wrong and my resistance was overcome. I went and got a whole different master's degree and started working in the field. Then I encountered IFS and that encounter was the change point for me. That was really where the healing began because I had never before heard the message that all parts of me could be welcome.

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I had always verbally and nonverbally gotten the very clear message that only the shiny parts of me were welcome and all the rest of the parts of me needed to stay locked in the basement and IFS said, no. The same way that Jesus brings his loving kindness and healing outside of us, he wants to bring it to all parts of you.

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I said, I don't even know how we do this. I began to open into that process and it was absolutely life changing to me, spiritually, emotionally, in every possible way. That led me to where I am now as a clinical consultant and writing books and teaching and speaking and helping other people experience that and the way that it really transformed my life. I'm very grateful that was my path.

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Alison Cook: I love that Jenna. I love the layers of healing that you describe, and I think it's so important for the listener here. There are layers. Initially, you had friends who loved you and who honored your experience; it wasn't deep, trauma-informed work at the beginning, but when you cracked open a little bit, there were some friends who honored you and loved you that brought a little healing in to those exiled parts before you even knew what they were.

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Then you said something I'd love to double-click on–you said, “I thankfully got in with a good therapist”. You've now been a therapist for decades now, you have a huge center in Atlanta, you are training so many therapists, you're deep in it. Back then you knew nothing about it. I'm curious on behalf of the listener, how do we know when we're with a good therapist, with someone who's really going to help us? How did you know?

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Jenna: Yeah, that's such a rich question. I was really blessed. The first person I landed with that someone recommended to me was the right person for me at that stage and I knew, because all parts of me were welcome in the room. When you're with someone like that, I now know that person had a lot of Self energy on board, or what I would call the image of God inside of them, what IFS calls self.

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When that is present in the room, no parts of you have to mask and pretend and defend. You can simply be present with all the different parts of you with no judgment and no shame. That was critical for me. That was so powerful in my healing. Obviously training and experience matter.

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Presence, I would almost say matters equally as much. The issue of faith or not faith is a really significant one that comes up a lot when people are coming to me looking for referrals or different things. There seems to be this sort of polarization in the Christian community that we don't hesitate if we're diagnosed with cancer to immediately go to the best cancer specialist wherever they are, whoever they are, and not really discern if we're going to work with them in our chemotherapy and surgery because of their faith orientation. 

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There seems to be a divergence between our physical healing and our emotional healing. Many people feel that the Christian component is the most significant and the clinical is second best, but we don't feel that way about our dentist or our doctor or any other healing entity.

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A piece of wisdom that I encourage people with is that a really skillful clinician will honor and integrate your faith perspective. I would argue that their clinical skill is more important than a specific faith orientation or if they're Methodist or Presbyterian or Catholic or whatever they might happen to be. Be willing in the same way that you would if you had a cancer diagnosis to look for and screen for the person who is the most clinically qualified.

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If they happen to be a person of faith, that's a bonus. I find that has been a useful tool for me in discerning kind of helpful and less helpful counseling. 

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Alison Cook: You said that so well. I love what you're saying about being qualified for this specific thing. If you're dealing with deep trauma that you've never worked with, you want to be with someone who has worked with a lot of trauma, has expertise and experience.

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If you're dealing with extreme anxiety, if you're dealing with a marriage fracture, you want to work with someone trained specifically in deep trauma and who has experience and expertise. I really love that. Thank you so much for sharing a little bit of that background.

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I want to ask you a little bit about Altogether You. You ended up becoming a therapist. You became trained in IFS. We have similar trajectories in some ways. I happened upon IFS very late in my own training in some ways, or not late, but certainly not at the beginning of it. It changed everything for me. I think both of us in parallel, we're absorbing IFS and then trying to figure out how this assimilates with our faith background, because it has a very spiritual component. 

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What led you to write Altogether You? I love how you refer to that Self, that place inside as the Imago Dei. I see both. We come down in it as the Spirit-led self, the place where the Holy Spirit lives, where the Spirit of God comes to live. I think they're theologically very similar. The idea is there's a place inside of us that is that sanctuary for the living God.

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Jenna: Yes.

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Alison Cook: Tell me a little bit more about that process of writing Altogether You.

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Jenna: There's a part of me that wants to give a surface level pat answer. There's another part of me that's hilarious, that tells the real story. So I'm inclined to tell the real story because I don't think I've ever shared this with you in our years of friendship, but you're actually integrally involved in this story. I don't think you know this. 

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I encountered IFS. It changed my life. And, again, it was the second time I've had that kind of an encounter with God where God said, write this book. I said, are you crazy? I am not an English major. I have never written a book. I have no idea how to write a book. I don't know anything about publishing. What do you mean write a book? So I argued with God and as always, God won and so I sat down and said, okay I will write this book.

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I felt like when I was able to get into a flow state, that deep sense of connection with the Holy Spirit came through me. I'm guessing you resonate with that in the writing process. It came through me and onto the page. I said, okay, God, I wrote the book. Now what? He said, go publish the book. I said, I don't know how to publish a book. Are you kidding me? What in the world? 

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So anyway, I put it out in the world and immediately, multiple publishers were interested, which I was shocked about. I went under contract pretty quickly with a very large publisher and had been under contract for a year, not having any awareness of you. Not knowing that you were working on a similar book. A year into the process, the publisher, out of nowhere, pulled the contract.

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About a day later, your book came out. I said to God, are you kidding me? Why? Why did you tell me to write this book? Somebody else was already doing it. Now I don't even have a contract. It was one of those crises of faith. I went back to the drawing board and sat in silence and said, I'm going to sit here, God, until I hear your direction for the next step. I sat and I sat in silence. Long story short, God led me to a whole different direction of publishing. 

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Now I've published multiple books and I'm working on my next book. It was an incredible process, but it was really a gift to me to see your book come out. I thought, I'm worthless. I have nothing to contribute. This has already been done. But your book has met this beautiful need in the world and has been incredibly well received. It is an incredible book that I highly recommend. 

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My book has done incredibly well and reached a lot of places and been translated into many different languages and all the things. It was very healing to my system that really believed in black and white thinking that there's only one best and everything else is worthless. To realize, no, we each bring our giftings and our talents and our perspective to the world and it all matters and it all can be used in the service of God in different ways. 

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It's mutually compatible. Here we are, friends, publishing books on the same path and it's really been quite a lovely journey. That piece of it was really healing for my inner system of, hey, my voice could still bring something that matters even if someone else has a voice. That's not a message that I got in my inner system and that my exiles received when I was growing up. So it's really been a sweet and a healing journey for me. That's the first time I've shared that story with you. 

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Alison Cook: Literally, we were probably working with the same light bulb, because that was very similar with Kim and I. We were thinking, we've got to write about this from a faith perspective, and the way that God works in our hearts can seem so mysterious to us. I would say to the listener, read both. I always tell people that they are very similar books, but very different. It's that beauty of the diversity of the human experience. 

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You and I've talked about this in other ways, where your voice brings insight and wisdom and healing to the page. Just as a clinician, there are different ways each of us is going to approach something that are each really valuable and fill out the whole picture. There are so many other people out there doing it too. We're all bringing a little bit of the light to this huge, complicated thing of trying to understand the human psyche in relationship to God. 

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I love that you shared that Jenna, because it also ministers to me because I have those feelings all the time. Why do I need to keep using my voice? So to hear you say that, I'm shocked by that because I see you as such a formidable, courageous leader in the IFS community. So I would have had no idea that was your experience.

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Jenna: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I mentioned that not so much about my experience, but for listeners who may be listening and wondering, does what I have to bring to the world matter? Does my voice matter? Do my unique giftings matter? Yes they do. In fact, oddly enough, Dick Schwartz developed IFS out of his greatest professional failure. It emerged from an utter failure of the way that he was approaching therapy and out of his ability to be present to that with curiosity and compassion to really lean into his uniquenesses, IFS emerged, which is incredible. 

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To any listeners who may be navigating those types of life experiences and questionings and self doubt, what you have to say and who you are and your giftings in the world absolutely matter.

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Alison Cook: I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. I feel really honored that you would share on behalf of the real story there. That means a lot. I would love Jenna, before we wind down here, I would love to ask you. Because you are a mom, I know your kids are now out of the house. You're essentially an empty nester, but you do a lot of writing, you run a clinical practice. 

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What practices help you stay in tune with these young parts of us that are still with us. We're still trying to lead these parts of us. What practices help you do that?

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Jenna: Yeah, it's really a daily practice for me and I find for me and the way my system is wired, it works best if I start my day with prayer and meditation and a turning inward to acknowledge all the different parts of me that are present. I will do guided meditations. I have many of them free on insight timers.

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Several other IFS practitioners have guided IFS meditations on insight timer, which is a free app. So I often will use that. I also use parts mapping which is really helpful for me. If I've got some parts at war over a particular decision or some parts that are struggling, I use parts mapping as a wonderful tool to connect with my system.

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I'm always in my own IFS therapy. That feels really important to me. I cannot lead people where I am not going myself. I do session swaps with my dear friend, Tammy Sollenberger. 

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Alison Cook: She's going to be on the podcast!

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Jenna: Wonderful. Yeah. We swap sessions every couple of weeks and have for a long time and different ways of continuing to do my own work and bring divine love to all the different parts of my own inner system. Because if I am not doing that, then I can't be trying to lead other people and help other people do that. So it feels really like a double gift to me. It's an ethical imperative and it's such a gift to my system to continue to be on that journey. 

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Alison Cook: I love that. We’re always still in process, even as we're leading others. What would you want the younger version of you to know? That young, achieving, high performing girl who's headed out to conquer the world? What would you want her to know that you know now?

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Jenna: I Would want her to know that all parts of you are welcome and all parts of you are good. Even parts of you that have gotten stuck, carrying burdens of painful feelings and behaviors and beliefs because of life experiences, I would love for her to know, I would love for every listener to know, all parts of you are welcome and all parts of you truly are good.

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Alison Cook: Thank you for that. I love that. Tell us how we can connect with you, your books, your work. How can people find you?

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Jenna: Sure. My books are available wherever books are sold. Amazon is a great spot to find Altogether You. My second book is called Altogether Us. It's a pretty comprehensive IFS integration book. So if you're curious about this IFS model and how it integrates with parenting and sexuality and communication and all the many different things, that book is available at Amazon as well.

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My website is Movetoward.com because I think that's the spirit of the IFS model–to move toward all parts of ourselves with curiosity and compassion. So people are welcome to connect with me there at Movetoward.com.

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Alison Cook: I love that. You've got so many great resources on your website, links to IFS therapists, Christian IFS therapists, resources, all sorts of things. So please go check out. Jenna's work. Jenna, one last question that I try to ask all my guests: what's bringing out the best of you right now?

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Jenna: Wonderful friends who understand that all parts are welcome and who are present with non-judgment and with love and curiosity and compassion, like you are with me right now. So I would say in this moment, you bring out the best in me and I'm so grateful for you and your beautiful heart and your beautiful work.

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Alison Cook: I am so grateful for you, Jenna. In so many ways I could share some return stories with you and toward that, we'll have you back on the podcast. Because there's a wealth of wisdom here. Thank you so much for being with us today.

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Jenna: Thank you for having me.

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