When Your Parts Finally Get to Speak
How Internal Family Systems and the Enneagram Changed Everything for Me
There's a particular kind of clarity that arrives when two different maps of the human experience suddenly overlay perfectly. For me, that moment came gradually over five years of therapy, as my therapist skilfully wove together Internal Family Systems and the Enneagram in ways that slowly opened my eyes to what was actually happening inside me. Then recently, reading Richard Schwartz's No Bad Parts, something clicked into place with stunning clarity: the Enneagram defence mechanisms I'd been studying for years are no longer concepts and perspectives - they're living, breathing parts of our internal systems, each with its own agenda, its own pain, and its own desperate attempt to keep us safe.
I've spent years now immersed in the Enneagram, earning certifications with The Narrative Enneagram, Russ Hudson's Holy Ideas and the 27 Subtypes. Over the same period, I've been integrating this work into my coaching practice, accumulating over 2000 hours of experience with individuals, groups, and teams, while simultaneously engaging in my own therapy with Sarah Cumings. These parallel journeys, my professional development and my personal and professional healing since leaving Social Bite, have been deeply intertwined. I started to see that our patterns aren't just tendencies or personality quirks. They're parts of us - exiled parts, protective parts, managing persona parts, reactive firefighting parts - all trying their best with the tools they developed when we were young and the world felt overwhelming.
I love how this process overlaps with neurobiology and the development of the nervous system too: The nervous system does most of its development from the embryonic stage through early childhood, with rapid changes continuing into adolescence and gradual maturation into the mid-twenties. Most of the work is done in early childhood, and our adolescence and early adult experiences solidify certain programming that our childhood set up. This means our reactive parts (which by definition, are responding to what life throws at us) are often about 7 years old. But when we consider how we would want to soothe a 7 year old child who is scared, anxious, upset, feeling like the odd one out, or even frustrated, that's rarely how we meet ourselves in those moments. All too often, we bring about other parts to manage our vulnerability, because at some point this emotional experience was too painful to face.
So instead of responding to ourselves compassionately and patiently, like we would a child, instead we have the inner critic that says "That was so stupid, you should know better by now!" or the drill sergeant that says "Move, move move! Get on with it!", or the fire fighter says "Let me do whatever I can to make this right!". All of these parts are there with the best of intentions, to protect us from tender experiences that feel too much to bear - or to manage our persona successfully enough so we can avoid that vulnerability all together. The personality starts to form in such a way that it is constantly contorting around these vulnerable, young parts, trying to protect us.
I saw something recently that said "You don't marry your adult partner, you marry their inner child". These insights from IFS, the Enneagram and our nervous system make that clear. Having been with my husband for 10 years now, I couldn't agree more - which is why it's so important that we choose our life partner wisely, entrusting them with our surprisingly fragile inner child, and them trusting us with theirs.
I'm still very much in the middle of this journey. Even as I write this, even as I facilitate IFS-informed breathwork with my coaching clients, I still get swept away by my own nervous system responses despite all I know. I still catch myself people-pleasing, still feel the pull to fix things that aren't mine to fix, and I still get frustrated when there is a lack of reciprocity, as is the life journey of a Type 2. This work isn't about arriving at some perfect healed state or psychically amputating parts of ourselves we don't like. It's about developing a different relationship with the parts of ourselves that have been running the show for so long, and aren’t going anywhere. These parts are what Carl Jung called our “shadow”.
The Enneagram as a Map of Our Protective System
The Enneagram describes nine distinct personality structures, each with its own basic fear, basic desire, and defence mechanism. What becomes clear when we view this through an IFS lens is that these parts are sophisticated survival strategies that our parts developed in response to our earliest experiences of the world.
Each type has its own particular way of organising the internal system. The Type 1's inner critic, the Type 3's achievement-oriented drive, the Type 4's emotional intensity, the Type 5's withdrawal into the mind, the Type 6's vigilance for threat, the Type 7's pursuit of stimulation, the Type 8's need for control, the Type 9's avoidance - these are all Manager parts doing their best to keep us safe in the way they learned worked at one point.
Let's take Type 2 as an example, since that's my own type. The Type 2 defence mechanism is called "repression"- specifically, the repression of one's own needs in service of attending to others’. The often unconscious basic fear is being fundamentally unlovable just as you are, that love must be earned through giving, helping, and making yourself indispensable to others.
From an IFS perspective, this isn't just a personality quirk. These are Manager parts who learned early that being needed was the safest way to secure love and connection. There's the Helper part, scanning constantly for opportunities to be useful. There's the People Pleaser, monitoring others' reactions to ensure they're not pulling away. There's the Caretaker, who genuinely does love supporting others but has lost touch with her own need to receive care.
And beneath all of these protective strategies are the Exiled parts - young parts carrying the unbearable belief that they're unlovable or might be left alone if they’re not being useful. The Manager parts developed precisely to keep these Exiles from being present, felt or experienced, all because when you're young and dependent on caregivers, these beliefs feel life-threatening.
The Managers, the Firefighters, and What They're Protecting
In IFS, our internal system organises around three main categories of parts:
Manager parts work proactively to keep us safe. They plan, control, perfect, achieve, caretake, analyse, withdraw - whatever strategy your type learned would protect you from your core fear. For Type 2s, this might be compulsively people pleasing and contorting themselves around others. For Type 1s, it might be rigorous self-improvement and criticism or judgement towards self and others. For Type 8s, it might be staying in control and never showing vulnerability.
Firefighter parts are the emergency responders. When the Managers' strategies fail and we start to feel the pain of our Exiled parts, the Firefighters spring into action with more extreme strategies: numbing out, reckless behaviour, dissociation, binge eating, overworking, rage - anything to extinguish the overwhelming feelings quickly.
For Type 2s, Firefighter parts might show up as possessiveness when someone seems to be pulling away, or self-righteous anger about not being appreciated, or physical collapse when the body can no longer sustain the constant giving. For Type 6s, it might be panic or spiraling by obsessively imagining all potentially harmful scenarios so they can create a plan for what they’d do if the worst happened. For Type 7s, it might be frantic activity or seeking more intense experiences to avoid pain or discomfort, staying distracted from important matters that need to be dealt with at all times.
Exile parts are the young, vulnerable parts carrying the burdens - the shame, fear, worthlessness, or pain that our protective system developed to keep us from feeling. Each Enneagram type has its own flavour of exiled parts:
Type 1s exile the belief that they are fundamentally flawed or bad
Type 2s exile the belief that are not loved unless essential to the picture
Type 3s exile the belief that they're worthless without achievement
Type 4s exile the belief that they're fundamentally deficient or abandoned
Type 5s exile the belief that they're incompetent or will be overwhelmed by the world
Type 6s exile the belief that they're unsafe and unsupported
Type 7s exile the belief that they'll be trapped in pain and deprivation
Type 8s exile the belief that they're vulnerable and will be controlled or harmed
Type 9s exile the belief that their presence doesn't matter and they'll lose connection
When we understand our Enneagram type through this lens, we begin to see that we're not just "a Type 2" or "a Type 9" - we're a whole system of parts organised around protecting these young, vulnerable Exiles from being felt.
What Integration Looks Like: Meeting Our Parts with Compassion
Here's what's revolutionary about combining IFS with the Enneagram: we're not trying to transcend our type or eliminate our patterns. We're learning to meet these parts with curiosity and compassion, to understand what they're protecting us from, and to help them heal and relax into less extreme roles.
When a Type 2 begins to meet their Helper part, they might discover that this part is a young child who learned that being needed was a reliable form of connection and love. Through IFS work, we can get to know this part, and thank it for trying to keep us safe (even if their strategies aren’t great, they are well-intentioned), acknowledge how hard it's been working, and gently help it understand that we're safe now from the situations it experienced a long time ago - for a type 2 that means learning that we don't have to earn love through constant giving.
The People Pleaser part might relax its hyper-vigilance when it realises that authentic connection actually requires showing up as we truly are, not just as what we think others need us to. The Caretaker part might discover that receiving care doesn't make us weak or selfish - it actually models healthy interdependence for others.
And most importantly, we can begin to unburden the Exiled parts. That young part who believes she's unlovable? She needs to hear (and feel, in an embodied way) that she doesn’t have to earn her place in people's hearts by changing who she is or ignoring what she needs.
This same process applies to all nine types. The Type 1 can meet their inner critic and discover it's trying to protect them from the unbearable feeling of being fundamentally bad - because we all make mistakes sometimes, and to be imperfect is to be human. The Type 8 can meet their controller and discover it's protecting a vulnerable child who learned that showing softness led to being hurt - because we all need softness in safe places so we can be connected to each another. The Type 9 can meet their avoidant part that feels overwhelmed by other people sometimes, and discover it's protecting a young part who believed their presence didn't matter enough to cause waves, and that flying under the radar would be better - because we all need to take our place at the table (or in the cosmic order!) to realise our potential and be part of something bigger than ourselves.
The Body Knows: Breathwork and Embodied Practice
One of the most powerful discoveries in my own work and in working with clients is that this isn't just intellectual understanding - it requires embodied practice. Our protective parts live in our nervous system, in our bodies, in our automatic responses. We can understand our type intellectually for years without changing, because the parts that need healing aren't accessed through the thinking mind alone.
This is where practices like breathwork become so valuable. Using techniques like the 7-11 breathing pattern (breathing in for 7 counts, out for 11) calms the nervous system enough that we can actually access these parts without the protective system immediately shutting us down.
In my coaching work, when I guide participants through IFS-informed breathwork visualisation, they don't just think about their parts - they meet them. The Type 3 encounters the achiever part and feels in their body the tension of never being enough and needing to strive for the next thing all the time. The Type 6 meets the anxious part and recognises the chronic tension in their chest that has been living there, untended to. The Type 9 encounters the part that checks out and feels the familiar fog that descends when focus is put on them or conflict arises, a vanishing from the body.
And crucially, they meet their younger selves - the Exiled parts carrying the original wounds. They see the child who learned to achieve to feel worthy, or the child who learned to always scan for danger to feel safe, or the child who learned to disappear to keep the peace. And in that embodied encounter, they can offer these young parts what they actually needed all along: presence, compassion, the message that they were always enough and don’t need to bear the weight of these traumas anymore.
The Integration That Becomes Possible
When we combine the Enneagram's map with IFS's method, something profound becomes possible. We move from "I'm a Type 2, so I'm doomed to people-please" to "I have parts that learned people-pleasing as a survival strategy, and I can help them heal and find new ways of being with them."
This isn't about eliminating who we are though. The capacity to care for others, to notice others' needs, to create connection -these are gifts of Type 2 that we don’t want to disappear. The Type 1's commitment to integrity, the Type 3's capacity for achieving great things, the Type 4's depth of feeling the full spectrum of the human experience, the Type 5's insight, the Type 6's loyalty, the Type 7's enthusiasm, the Type 8's strength, the Type 9's peaceful presence—all of these contain real gifts.
What needs to heal are the extreme protective strategies and the burdened Exiles underneath. When a Type 2's Exiled parts heal and no longer believe they're unlovable without being needed, the Helper part can relax. Helping becomes a genuine gift freely given, not a desperate strategy to secure love. The same transformation is possible for every type, but we have to keep showing up to this work, because we aren’t just triggered once and healed once. We are all walking nervous systems constantly being triggered, or constantly being presented with the opportunity to meet our younger selves for the healing they really need.
Continuing the Journey
Reading No Bad Parts crystallised something that had been building through years of therapy and coaching practice: there are so many tools that can support this integration. Somatic practices, polyvagal-informed approaches, trauma-sensitive breathwork, bodywork - all of these offer pathways to access and heal our parts in embodied ways.
The Enneagram gives us the map, showing us the georgraphy of our personality structure and our predictable patterns. IFS gives us the method, offering a way to meet these patterns as parts, build relationship with them, and help them heal. And embodied practices give us the access point, allowing us to work with our parts through the nervous system and body, not just through the thinking mind.
This is why I've decided to specialise in Internal Family Systems as I complete my psychotherapy qualification. The model honours that all our parts have positive intent, even the ones that cause us trouble. It invites us into compassionate relationship with ourselves rather than trying to fix or eliminate aspects of who we are.
For anyone working with the Enneagram, adding IFS opens up a new dimension of healing. We can finally understand not just what our patterns are, but who is carrying them and why - and most importantly, what these parts actually need in order to heal. Over identification with our Enneagram type is a very real and common problem with the Enneagram, and this is where people often stop with Enneagram work.
An Invitation to Meet Your Parts
If you recognise yourself in any of these descriptions - if you see your own type's patterns playing out in your life, if you notice the protective strategies that keep you safe but also keep you stuck - I invite you to get curious about the parts carrying these strategies.
What are they protecting you from? What do they fear will happen if they stop doing their job? And beneath them, what young, vulnerable parts are carrying burdens that aren't theirs to carry?
This isn't work that happens quickly. It's not about fixing yourself or arriving at some perfect healed state. It's about building relationship with all the parts of you, thanking them for keeping you safe, and gently helping them discover that you're safe enough now to try something different. I am yet to come across a more effective or sophisticated way of carrying out Carl Jungs’ shadow work.
The integration of IFS and the Enneagram offers a path toward genuine healing - not transcending your type, but liberating the parts of you that have been trapped in extreme protective roles for so long. When those parts can relax, when the Exiles can be unburdened, you don't have to lose yourself. You actually become more fully who you are, instead of being trapped in nervous system responses.
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Alice Thompson-Boyd is an Enneagram & Purpose Coach, co-founder of Social Bite, Pride of Britain award winner, and host of the 'How to Be...' Podcast. She is certified with The Narrative Enneagram, the Enneagram’s Holy Ideas and the 27 Subtypes. Alice works with individuals and teams through one-to-one coaching, group programmes, and workshops, integrating cognitive behavioural coaching, insights from neurobiology, breathwork, and the Enneagram. She is currently training in psychotherapy with plans to specialise in Internal Family Systems.