Part 1  ·  You Were Not Created Broken | Christian Internal Family Systems

Part 1 of 4: The image of God, what IFS is, and what trauma does to God’s likeness in us

You can love someone and want to leave the room in the same minute. You can want to pray and not be able to sit still long enough to do it. You can believe God is good and still hear a voice inside you that says He isn’t even real.

Most of us were taught that this kind of inner split means we are hypocrites, or that we were never whole to begin with. This series offers a different way to understand it.

Your soul starts out whole. Picture a smooth, unbroken surface with one image on it: the image of God in you. It is not a pile of pieces. It is one likeness, complete. Internal Family Systems (a type of therapy I’ll explain below) calls this whole center of you the true Self. You don’t need to understand the therapy yet. For now, hold on to one truth: God made you in His image. Trauma did not get the first word about who you are.

What trauma does

Trauma cracks that image. Over time, the cracks can make it look like a mosaic, a picture made of many broken pieces. The likeness of God is still there, but some of it is hard to see, and some of it may be completely hidden.

In IFS, each of those pieces is called a part. In my Christian reading of IFS, a part is a piece of you that split off during a painful time and took on a job to help you survive. Each part has its own fears and its own voice. Many of them are very scared.

God did not create you as a mosaic. The mosaic is what happened after the breaking. So healing does not mean admiring the broken pieces, and it does not mean throwing them away. As Christians, we invite our hurting parts to get to know Christ, so He can bring real healing. He gently brings the pieces back together so His likeness can be seen again.

Paul knew about the inner split

In Romans 7, Paul is honest about a war going on inside him: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do… It is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me.”

Notice that Paul describes two things. There is an “I,” and there is something at work in him that is not the whole of him. The “I” is the image of God in him, still speaking. The other thing is a part carrying a heavy load. IFS calls that load a burden.

When I use the word sin in this series, I mean that burden: anything that separates us from God or bends the image of God in us out of shape. The part itself is not garbage. The burden it carries is what distorts God’s likeness in us.

What IFS actually is

Internal Family Systems, or IFS, is a type of therapy developed by a family therapist named Richard Schwartz. It has nothing to do with multiple personalities. Schwartz noticed that his clients talked about their inner lives as if a whole family lived inside them: a worried part, a harsh and critical part, a younger part still holding the pain of the first hurt.

From a Christian point of view, these parts are not extra souls. They are pieces of the cracked image of God in us.

Without a way to understand our parts, Christians tend to make one of two mistakes. Sometimes we take the loudest part and decide, “That’s just my personality.” Other times we try to fight that part and crush it, and we call that growing in holiness. Either way, the wound stays in charge. IFS gives us a map, so we can say: “This is one part of me. It is not the whole image.”

Beauty and trauma

Years before I learned IFS, I read The Ethics of Beauty by Dr. Timothy Patitsas. He describes trauma as the opposite of true beauty. Beauty draws you closer to God. Trauma cuts us off from God and from each other. It wears away our ability to live out what is good, and it teaches us a lie that feels like the whole truth: that the image of God in us is destroyed and worthless.

That is the lie. The image is not destroyed. One painful event might leave just a few pieces covering it. Years of trauma might cover almost all of it. But you are not a ruined creation. You are a distorted one, and what is distorted can be healed.

Next time: the three kinds of parts most people meet first.

If you live in California

You do not have to sort the parts alone. I walk this work with California residents by telehealth anywhere in the state, and in person in Redding. We start where the foundation still is: the image of God in you. We treat every part as something to meet, not something to exile or display. If you want faith in the room, as Christians we invite wounded parts to befriend Christ, so that He can bring true healing.

Learn more about IFS-informed therapy in Redding and Christian counseling for women in Redding.