by Ash Chudgar, [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])
Prepared for Helen Lees, editor, [Parts & Self](https://partsandself.org)
Draft August 4, 2023

# Consent in IFS Practice

## How I learned about consent

I was 40 years old when I learned about consent.

At the time I was part of a team helping a Christian nonprofit explain the concept of psychological trauma to faith leaders around the world, most of whom had never encountered the idea before. “I’d love it if we could explain trauma the way the tea video explains consent,” the project leader explained. Tea? When I shook my head in confusion, she instantly pulled up [this video](https://youtu.be/pZwvrxVavnQ), and we watched it together on the spot.

“See what I mean?” the leader said afterward. “Now just imagine if you’d never had consent explained to you before. You’d get it now, right?”

“I sure would,” I said, reeling. In fact, that’s exactly what had just happened.

“Consent and Tea,” written in 2015 by [Emmeline May](https://linktr.ee/emmelinemay) and animated by [Blue Seat Studios](https://www.blueseatstudios.com/home), has become a popular resource for of sex education in middle and high schools across the English-speaking world. It’s hardly a perfect account of sexual consent, to be sure. It’s too often [the only training students get](https://redwoodbark.org/s64380/opinion/heres-the-tea-consent-education-needs-to-change) on the subject — which is troublesome, because the tea-party metaphor obscures the strong influences of [power and privilege on sexual consent in the real world](https://www.sfu.ca/sexual-violence/education-prevention/new-blog-/consent/are-tea-and-consent-simple-.html). (I’ll return to that subject later.) But for middle-aged me, the video was nothing short of a revelation.

For me and everybody else, as somatics teacher [Staci Haines observes](https://books.google.com/books?id=ok-HDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA223&lpg=PA223&dq=%22The+pressures+of+our+conditions+do+not+train+us+in+consent%22&source=bl&ots=NWm6AGqKHZ&sig=ACfU3U3v0sZc0V5Ms6MVeU3elv_AS5fOEA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjn1-mK46WAAxVVkIkEHSrNA5MQ6AF6BAgOEAM#v=onepage&q=%22The%20pressures%20of%20our%20conditions%20do%20not%20train%20us%20in%20consent%22&f=false), “the pressures of our conditions do not train us in consent.” Along with the other kids in my American public school in the ’90s, sex-ed classes taught us that boys couldn’t control their perpetual eagerness to subject girls to sex, girls had to resist getting “peer pressured” into it, and girls who failed to stop boys from doing sex to them would destroy their own futures by getting an STD, getting pregnant, or (likely) both. Like many queer people of my generation, I also grew up thinking that gay sex, even between consenting adults, was an unnatural perversion justly punishable by death from AIDS — less a choice to make than a crime to premeditate. Like lots of neurodivergent people, I learned young to want what other people seemed to want, and ignore my own weird preferences. And like at least [one person in every ten](https://www.d2l.org/child-sexual-abuse/prevalence/), I was sexually abused as a little one, which taught me quickly that sex wasn’t something I got to choose. After all that, in just shy of three minutes, the charming stick figures in “Consent and Tea” transformed a lifetime’s understanding of what sexual consent could be.

Even more importantly, the video made me start wondering about consent _beyond_ sex, in every department of life. If I had spent decades without understanding my own power to consent, had I been violating the consent of other people without knowing it? If everybody has the inalienable right to choose to have sex or not, including me, then where else might I have more freedom than I thought I did? Wrestling with those questions was challenging — so challenging, in fact, that it provoked the kind of existential crisis that leads people to search for a whole new paradigm. For me, that arrived in the form of the Internal Family Systems model — which is, among many other things, a powerful theory of human agency.

## IFS as a practice of consent

The deepest insight of Internal Family Systems is that each of us is internally multiple — not in the way a machine is engineered from many gears, but in the way a community is home to all the people who live in it. “Parts are not metaphors,” [as Richard Schwartz and Robert Falconer explain](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17ifty5ZefYwFVG0mSQtj_rbev0_ay2NQrj_OzaCPstU/edit#gid=0&range=B40): “instead they are real sub-minds, _each with autonomy_ and with power to influence and sometimes take over the person’s perspective, emotional state, or actions” (my emphasis). If our Parts are autonomous agents, as IFS asks us to believe, then our Parts’ intentions should _matter to us_ — just like the intentions of any person we’d encounter in the world outside us. From the very start, IFS invites us to extend to our Parts the dignity of having preferences that matter. And in IFS practice, we and our clients respect the dignity of our Parts by learning not just to ask for their consent, but also to hear and honor their answers.

Focusing on consent in this way lets us think about psychological suffering in a powerfully liberating way. In a harmonious internal system, every Part of us is a full member of the community of our Self, whose consent _matters_. When we’re suffering — feeling anxious, conflicted, shut down, or overwhelmed by strong emotions — it’s likely that at least one Part of us does not consent to the choices we’re making. Healing this sort of suffering, then, is the process by which we come to know all the Parts of our internal community, understand their intentions, honor their preferences, take accountability for past violations of their inherent dignity, and learn how to ask for their consent in the present. When you think about it this way, consent is at the heart of every step in the flow of the IFS model, and unburdening is nothing less than a formal restoration of a Part’s inalienable power of choice. A harmonious and unburdened system, like a true democracy, derives its power and stability from the full consent of all its constituents.

## The limits of consent

In IFS as in sexuality and everywhere in life, [consent is everything](http://www.consentiseverything.com/#Home) — but it’s also not enough to capture the full range and complexity of human agency at any scale. By itself, the idea of consent is a binary yes-or-no decision, which makes it easy for people and Parts to assume that a _yes,_ once granted, can never be revoked. (When I got into uncomfortable or flat-out scary sexual situations when I was younger, I remember thinking along these lines: “Well, I got myself into this, so what can I do but get through it?”) In reality, though, unless we’re signing a contract or making a solemn vow, we all have the absolute right to change our minds. That’s why sex educators increasingly emphasize that consent must be granted explicitly and continuously, so that every party to a sexual interaction gets to opt out at any time, for any reason. In IFS practice, too, it’s important to remind people and Parts that they _always_ get to change their minds, at any time, for any reason.

Even if we emphasize that consent can always be withdrawn, it’s vital not to assume that consent _alone_ can protect people and Parts from harm. As philosopher [Rebecca Kukla cautions](https://aeon.co/essays/consent-and-refusal-are-not-the-only-talking-points-in-sex), emphasizing consent in sex education can inadvertently suggest that “rape and assault, understood as nonconsensual sexual activity, as the only sexual harm we need to worry about.” Because of how power works in the real world, people _frequently_ consent to being harmed, sexually and otherwise, by people who have power over us. Bosses, teachers, or beloved grown-ups can and often do secure the continuous and explicit consent of employees, students, or children in their care — which makes the harms of such abuses of power all the more traumatizing. Centering consent in IFS practice, in a similar way, can narrow our Parts’ scope of independent action to merely saying “stop,” when in reality all our Parts have the power and the wisdom to make many more choices than that.

Because of the limits of the concept, consent alone can’t tell us everything we need to know about what human freedom can be. But for many people — particularly those of us who’ve been trained by trauma and oppression to disavow our own power of choice — consent can be a powerful way into the liberating power of the IFS model. 🟧