Disarming Your Dragon & Repairing Fiery Fallout
An IFS Guide to Working With Your Impulsive Firefighter Parts After They've Gone Full Blast
“If we are hostile to the unconscious, it will become more and more unbearable, but if we are friendly – realizing its right to be as it is – the unconscious will change in a remarkable way.” – Barbara Hannah
One of my favorite stories is The Lindworm as told by mythologist Martin Shaw. The story begins with a queen who longs for a child. She is instructed by a witch to enter into a garden beyond the kingdom, speak her longing into a cup, and then return in the morning to eat the white flower that emerges under it, not the red. But the moment when it most matters, the queen gobbles up the red flower spontaneously, an act that Martin Shaw explains as defying reason, but nonetheless is something we do in life.
The queen’s random act sets off the tale of an exiled monster and his quest for redemption, and demonstrates how spontaneity is sometimes the necessary missing ingredient in the greater myth of our lives.
This past month, I had my own gobbling-the-red-flower moment and was re-introduced to a firefighter part that I carry a lot of shame around. In Internal Family Systems (IFS), firefighters are a group of protectors similar to managers except for their more extreme measures. Richard Schwartz says they “react when exiles are activated in an effort to control and extinguish their feelings” (if you are new to parts work and want to understand more of the basic framework, read The Internal Family Systems Model Outline). Firefighters are single-minded in their quest for protection for an often forgotten exile (vulnerable part) that the managers disregard.
The order of events went like this: I said yes to a job that some parts wanted but other parts did not feel good about, well after I honored my commitment to stay at a stressful job for the past year, this firefighter leaped to action and re-negotiated the job’s roles and responsibilities without considering who this would affect or other parts’ desires, leaving this impulsive part satiated but the rest of my system horrified, de-stabilized, and un-settled.
In the fallout of this part’s one grand act, shock circulated that I could perform such a sudden, bold gesture irrespective of valid life concerns and professional goals I’ve worked so hard to maintain and protect. As a person in long-term recovery from addiction and someone with ADHD, I’ve had to shift from leading with impulsivity to buffing up my other managers, building strengths like making informed decisions, de-escalating reactivity and learning to respond skillfully, and putting principles and well thought out plans ahead of my timeline and wants.
My IFS mentor says that anyone in recovery has to work on not just building the Self to part relationship, but building up the Self-energy of their managers and bringing their managers into balance. Looking back on my 14 years in recovery, I can attest to the necessity of moving into healthier means of protection instead of resorting to fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants reactivity. The 12 Steps and basic DBT and CBT skills have helped my managers take the center stage of my day-to-day functioning, often to the extent where I don’t look like my story and people who don’t know me are surprised that I am in recovery or have ADHD.
Thus a firefighter taking center stage and having its Daenerys Targaryen burning down Kings Landing, scorch-the-earth moment is terrifying to the parts of me who have learned impulsivity = bad, practicality = good.
But looking at the situation with more Self, through the IFS lens that all parts are welcome, all parts matter, and all parts deserve a seat at the table… this spicy pistol of a part has something to say that warrants my attention (even if other parts hate it).
On a more practical level, if I don’t listen to it, I collude with the managers who are insisting on more control of the system, which only increases the polarization and ensures this part will use more extreme measures somewhere down the line from being shunned.
In hindsight, this polarization and imbalance has been brewing longer than I care to admit. My managers are attractive, Self-like parts that show up in my career as an intelligent, poised, and articulate presence. They’ve been reinforced by their accomplishments to not only safeguard my recovery, an important job, but also to dominate my professional life, which pushes the impulsivity and risk aversion associated with my ADHD to the backburner of my psyche where these parts live in shame-infested badlands until they can no longer take it and leap forward in surprising ways (hence my radical un-doing of a professional opportunity a month ago).
What is exiled always demands redemption. And when redemption isn’t offered, retribution is extracted.
Going back to the story of The Lindworm, the queen in our tale eventually gets a wish and has her perfect princely son. The night that she gives birth, however, what comes out of her womb first is not her little prince but a ghastly red worm that the midwives throw out the window before delivering her human boy. She thinks nothing of it and moves through the next two decades unawares and contented, until her son becomes of age for marriage and the monstrous worm, now grown to the size of a dragon, starts terrorizing the kingdom with a foreboding message: “The eldest son marries first!!!”
While the mechanics of a talking worm who wants to marry a human don’t quite make sense, eventually the king and queen come to their senses and realize they have to pacify this menacing worm if their prince is to marry. They line up several suitors, all of whom the worm eats, until he finally meets an enchanted princess who, unlike the others, is not afraid of her human-eating husband. Not only is she not afraid of being eaten, but she demands the worm to take off his scales, one layer at a time, until there is nothing left but a shivering, naked man who she bathes in milk and song and lives with happily ever after.
When I think about this story, I think about how even the most terrifying, intense parts of us hunger for a circle of belonging. I think about German poet Rilke’s sentiment that:
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
I think about my efforts to exile all the unsavory lindworms of my ADHD, such as my object impermanence, time blindness, and sensory dysregulation. I think about my shame in forgetting to pay a bill on time, in forgetting to put money in the parking meter, in forgetting to text someone back, in forgetting to submit my notes on time. This is the not-so-fun legacy my ADHD sometimes leaves behind, a legacy that keeps my managers from letting this part of my identity into the kingdom of who I am.
I also think about the “princess awaiting rescue,” the quivering, contact-seeking humanity at the core of what’s been shunned. I think about the importance of my boldness in my life – it’s what’s helped me start a business at age 29, start a successful Instagram platform without a degree or any idea what I was doing, or start this Substack and assert that I’m going to do the thing and make a claim for my writer self beyond privately attending to a diary. I think about my comfort with risks and how this has encouraged flexibility in facing challenges in my life, such as losing my yoga studio over Covid and pivoting into a counseling career, or having the courage to leave relationships that weren’t in alignment with what poetry teacher Chelsea Diane calls “my truest true". I think about the grace that being in recovery and living with ADHD has taught me to give myself, and how it has made me more empathetic and curious with other people and less harsh with my assumptions and expectations.
Working with my firefighter part means I have to bring this part into balance but I also have to take responsibility for its impact. Navigating this dialectic space is tricky. I have to invite the lindworm into the castle but I also have to set some boundaries and not let it eat my other parts. Practices of repair and practices of curiosity are crucial in this endeavor as they address the root of its retaliation as well as its impact. Compassion with accountability is necessary to de-escalate firefighters from their rampages and tantrums, and this shows up as welcoming them home, helping them address their needs, and repairing the wake they leave behind.
If you’ve resonated with this personal example, I’ve included these practices below.
Disarming Your Dragon & Repairing Fiery Fallout: How to Work With an Impulsive FireFighter Part After It’s Gone Full Blast
Contain the part and un-blend. Offer this part some Self-energy through breathing with it, opening your heart, and sending some curiosity and compassion. Work the 6 F’s with this part: locate it in your body, stay present with it in Self, ascertain the message, un-blend from other parts and offer it Self energy, get to know its job and agenda, and get to know what it is afraid.
Get to know this part’s job and fears, asking these questions in meditation or journaling:
What is this part’s job?
How did this part get its job?
When did it start doing this job?
How old is this part?
What is this part afraid would happen if it stops doing its job?
^And what would be so terrible about that?
Soften the polarization. Get to know other parts that have feelings about this one using the above questions from #2. Remember that all parts are entangled within an inner ecology, and healing from a systems-focused lens is about finding harmony and balance, thus softening inner conflicts or polarizations, rather than changing, fixing, or targeting just one part. Read more about this principle here:
“The parts or subpersonalities who inhabit our inner world relate to, and react to, each other. Instead of living as disconnected parts of a balanced but sterile system, they live as both interconnected and autonomous beings. These parts, like members of an external family, vie for control, interact sequentially, organize into alliances, and at times go to war with each other.
Identifying and communicating with individual parts may ultimately have little effect if they are not accompanied by earnest attention to the continuous fluctuations in the entire internal system. So, it is not enough to try to change a single, isolated helper or hidden observer, one punitive or aggressive part, a solitary inner child, one numb part, a part pretending “as if” she’s functioning normally, or a single self-hating or guilt-ridden part. An effective treatment model must consider the entire inner ecology. The IFS model tracks the sequential changes within the internal family, helps relationships among parts incorporate change, anticipates which parts are likely to be adversely activated, and then directly and respectfully addresses the concerns of those parts.
A systemic approach views the internal world through a wide-angle lens - an ecological perspective. This in turn helps both therapist and client understand how parts have become mired within the system as a result of various constraints… Typical examples of constraints occur when (1) the leader is not available or is discredited; (2) a part is frozen in time; (3) a part holds extreme beliefs or feelings; or (4) a part is burdened by a sense of shame, worthlessness, rage, or perfectionism” (from The Mosaic Mind - Goulding, p. 61-62).
Repair with people and other parts where there has been negative impact. See below PDF for a 5-step template using the IFS model.
And as always, feel free to share your experience in the comments!