Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy works from the premise that the mind is made up of distinct internal "parts" — some protective, some wounded, some managing day-to-day functioning — and that behaviors which look purely negative from the outside (a harsh inner critic, emotional distance, chronic control) are often a protective part's attempt to shield a more vulnerable, wounded part from further harm. Rather than trying to eliminate the harsh or distant behavior directly, IFS works to understand what that behavior is protecting.
This reframe matters clinically because it replaces a battle against a symptom (suppress the inner critic, stop being distant) with a more productive question (what is this part afraid will happen if it stops doing this) — which tends to surface the actual underlying wound the protective behavior was organized around in the first place.
Van der Kolk describes Peter, an emotionally distant, arrogant hospital department head whose marriage was nearing collapse. Through IFS work, Peter discovered that his harsh, controlling inner 'critic' — the part driving both his professional coldness and his marital distance — was actually protecting a terrified child part of him, shaped by his own abusive, Holocaust-survivor father. Once Peter was able to identify and process what that child part had actually experienced, rather than continuing to battle the critic directly, his relationships and his chronic physical tension both measurably improved.