IFS During Divorce: When You Know the Map But Lose the Way | Rudi Doku

I teach this stuff. I coach senior leaders through transitions, help people work with their parts, and run sessions where people learn to get out of their own way.

Then my marriage ended. I discovered -- slowly, painfully, with more humiliation than I expected -- how large the gap is between knowing something and being able to use it when your body is flooded and the person across from you knows exactly which buttons to press.

This is what I learned.

The Parts That Showed Up

In March 2020, in the middle of everything, I did an IFS session with Steve March. He asked me to name three to five parts that were present. I listed: anger, sadness, concern about money, curiosity, gratitude.

Steve flagged the gratitude immediately. He thought it might not be a part at all -- that it might be an expression of Self. He was probably right.

The anger and the sadness were definitely parts. So was the hurt -- the part that felt like my children were being taken away, that felt the nurturing role I'd built being ripped out from under me. And there was the numbing part: the one that says everything will be fine whenever things get overwhelming. The one that's kept me functional through a lot of hard years.

We started with the anger. I'd explain why I was angry -- about the move, about limited access to my kids, about things that had been said about me to people I cared about. Steve kept gently redirecting: stay with the angry part. Feel what it feels like. Don't explain it away.

I'm not good at that. I'm very good at narrating my emotions, at being articulate about what I'm feeling. Actually letting a feeling land in my body, without immediately managing it with words -- that's where I fall short.

The Gap Nobody Tells You About

Nobody tells you this when you study IFS: the model is intellectually elegant. It makes sense. It maps onto experience in ways that feel almost immediately recognisable. You read about protector parts and think, yes, I've seen those -- in clients, in friends, in myself.

What's much harder: when your own protector parts are fully activated, when your heartbeat is up and someone's coming at you -- you're in the actual situation, not a session about the situation. You don't have the same access to presence. The parts are running. Fast.

I remember a specific evening. My ex came at me with a lot of energy -- dismissive, confrontational. I could feel myself wanting to respond in kind. Instead I just stood there and took it. Not because I'd worked through anything. Because I was frozen. The part that suppresses my anger had kicked in hard, and I was stuck in a strange flatness -- feeling everything and showing nothing.

Afterward, in a session, Steve asked what I'd been feeling inside in that moment. Shocked. Disappointed. Angry. And then he observed something I'd missed completely: I'd shut the anger down, but not because I'd worked with the part. The part had just taken over. Those aren't the same thing.

Suppression that comes from a triggered part and suppression that comes from conscious choice look identical from the outside. They feel completely different inside. One leaves you depleted. The other leaves you with some sense of agency.

I'd been confusing the two for years.

What Actually Worked

Some things did land.

Body awareness as emotional practice. Steve suggested using Muay Thai -- not as a physical workout, but as an emotional one. Put the feeling into the movement. Stop. Notice what's there. I started doing that. It helped more than I expected. There's something about having a physical channel for anger that makes it possible to feel it without it going somewhere destructive.

A grounding phrase. In a later coaching session, I came across a phrase: "That may be true. But I can be here now. And I am here now."

I sat with it and felt something shift -- shoulders softening, eyes filling. It's IFS-adjacent: it doesn't deny what the parts are carrying. It creates enough space for Self to show up alongside them. I've used it many times since.

Anger's natural life cycle. What Steve said about anger stayed with me longest. Anger that you stay with -- that you actually feel all the way through -- matures into something different. Strength. Clarity. A connection to what you love and why you're fighting for it. Anger that you cut off stays reactive, immature, childlike. I'd been cutting mine off for a long time and didn't fully understand the cost.

Practising What You Teach

My son knows about parts. I told him, in broad strokes, some of what I was working on. He absorbed it quickly. At one point he said: "You guys are probably never going to be able to talk to each other normally, are you?"

I said that wasn't what I wanted. But it might be what I had to accept.

"My own suffering becomes my purpose." It sounds like a reframe -- the kind of thing you'd put on a motivational poster. It didn't feel like that when I said it. It felt true in a way that was both heavy and clarifying.

The things I'd been going through were teaching me what this work actually requires -- things I couldn't have learned any other way. Specifically: IFS isn't something you know. It's something you practise, repeatedly, in conditions that make practice very difficult, until it starts to become embodied rather than theoretical.

I'm not there yet. I know the map much better than I used to. And I know that knowing the map isn't the same as being able to navigate in the dark.

I'm less inclined to pretend otherwise now. What I can bring to the people I work with isn't an account of how well this went. It's an honest picture of what the gap actually looks like between reading about it and actually being in it.

That gap is real. And it's closeable. Just not on your schedule.

A Final Thought

IFS is genuinely useful for understanding how we get in our own way. But the model doesn't exempt you from the experience. It gives you a map -- and maps are only useful when you can read them under pressure.

Going through my divorce while teaching this work was humbling. It was also clarifying. Knowing something and being able to use it under pressure are two different things -- and that's true for everyone, including the people helping others bridge them.

If you're working through something difficult and finding that knowing what to do and actually doing it feel like very different things -- that's not a failure. That's just what it means to be human.

If this resonates and you'd like to explore what this kind of work looks like in practice, I'd welcome a conversation. You can book a discovery call here.