Extreme firefighters

[This post is a work in progress]

There are different newer forms of psychoterapy that refers to the mind or psyche as comprised of multiple parts. Historically C.G. Jungs model of the psyche allready included this multiplicity and refered to the parts as archetypes. Today the most famous form of parts therapy is called Internal Familly Systems and was established by Richard (Dick) Schwartz.

This article will be about parts called firefighters in their most extreme forms. A working definition will be the special firefighter that haunts us. It might be so extreme that we sort of project it out into a place where we treat it as a foreign part of out system. A part that should not belong. Actually in IFS lingo we do have escape routes for these more extreme parts that will do this trick for us. One of those tricks is the concept of ‘legacy burdens’. Even though IFS says that all parts are welcome the concept of legacy burdens offers an escape mechanism in our system in which we can declare parts or their burdens to be alien to the system and it allows us to burn them on the alchemical bonfire. Maybe not enough attention are payed to the problems of these mechanisms.

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