Post 2 — An Internal Family Systems (IFS)–Inspired Reconstruction
An Internal Family Systems (IFS)–inspired digitalfoot project
Curated by: Latasha Pennant | Morgan State University, Urban Educational and Leadership Doctoral Program
Murray, P. (2018). Song in a weary throat: Memoir of an American pilgrimage (V. Schomburg & P. Ware, Eds.). W. W. Norton & Company.
Healing is not linear — it is energetic, cyclical, and transcendent. It moves through time, across generations, and within community.
As with ancestral reverence, we draw on the wisdom, teachings, and resilience of those who came before us to support our healing. In turn, the healing we cultivate in the present can ripple backward in time, soothing the wounds of our lineage, and forward through generations, offering restoration to those yet to come.
We heal in relationship — with self, with one another, and with the ancestors who continue to speak through memory, sensation, and spirit.
This digital exhibit is a reimagined conversation across time — between therapist and ancestor, history and healing. Through Pauli Murray’s Song in a Weary Throat, archival materials, and documentary narratives, we enter her world not just as readers, but as witnesses to her becoming.
Here, therapy meets theology. Trauma meets tenderness. Each “session” invites us to see Pauli not only as an activist, scholar, and priest, but as a human being navigating the wounded parts formed in childhood — parts that would later shape her brilliance and her faith.
This work is an offering: an invitation to trace the intergenerational echoes that live within all of us, and to imagine what healing might look like when our ancestors, too, are allowed to rest.
“One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement.” — Pauli Murray
Graphic: “The Internal Family Systems (IFS) Model.” (Depicting the Self at the center, surrounded by Exiles, Managers, and Firefighters)
Understanding the Framework: What Is Internal Family Systems (IFS)?
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a non-pathologizing therapeutic model that understands the human experience as inherently multiple — composed of many “parts” that live within us. Rather than viewing these parts as signs of dysfunction, IFS honors them as natural expressions of our system’s creativity, protection, and wisdom.
These parts are not confined to the mind. They can appear as sensations in the body, emotions that rise and fall, images or memories that surface, impulses to act or withdraw, or internal voices that carry specific tones and messages. Each expression is a way the system communicates its history and needs.
IFS recognizes four key elements:
Exiles – Carry our deepest wounds: the parts that felt abandoned, afraid, or unseen.
Protectors – Strive to prevent those wounds from being re-opened.
Managers maintain control, perfection, and vigilance to keep the system safe.
Firefighters act impulsively to soothe or distract when pain breaks through.
Self – The calm, compassionate, and connected core that exists beneath all experiences — not a singular identity, but the spacious awareness capable of holding every part with curiosity and care.
IFS holds that healing begins when we befriend our parts rather than battle them. Through compassionate witnessing, the system reorganizes around Self-leadership instead of trauma.
This model reminds us that people are not broken — they are beautifully multiple, and every part, whether mental, emotional, or embodied, carries a story worth hearing.
