IFS suggests that you can experience the exiles, managers and firefighters in your mind as something akin to subpersonalities - entities with their own names, visual appearances, preferences, beliefs, and so on. Furthermore, this isn’t inherently dysfunctional, nor indicative of something like Dissociative Identity Disorder. Rather, even people who are entirely healthy and normal may experience this kind of “multiplicity”.

In the book Richard Schwartz, the developer of IFS, notes that if a Person’s subagents play well together, then that Person is likely to feel mostly internally unified. On the other hand, if a Person has lots of internal conflict, then they are more likely to experience themselves as having multiple parts with conflicting Desires.

I’ve frequently been very dysfunctional, and have always found very intuitive the notion of the mind being split into very parts. Yet I mostly still don’t seem to experience my subagents anywhere near as Person-like as some others clearly do.

I now think that “being in Self” represents a state where there no particular subagent is getting a disproportionate share of voting power, and everything is processed by the system as a whole.