“Part of me wants to go to the party, and part of me wants to stay home in sweatpants.”
Everyone has said some version of that. Internal Family Systems takes that ordinary way of talking literally and builds a whole therapy around it.
I bring IFS into most of my work, so I get asked about it constantly. This is the explanation I give people in consultations.
The Basic Idea
IFS was developed in the 1980s by Richard Schwartz, a family therapist. He noticed his clients described their inner lives the way families describe each other. Different members with different jobs. Alliances. Old fights. Someone who always gets blamed.
So he started treating the mind like a family: a system of parts, each trying to help in its own way, instead of one self with a pile of symptoms.
The hopeful claim at the center of IFS is that every part has a good reason for what it does, even when what it does causes problems. Your anxiety, your inner critic, the part of you that eats a sleeve of crackers at 11 p.m. None of them are the enemy. They’re doing a job, usually one they took on a long time ago.
Three Kinds of Parts
You don’t need to memorize these, but they make the rest easier to follow.
Managers try to keep things under control so nothing bad happens. The planner, the perfectionist, the critic, the people pleaser. They work ahead and they’re usually exhausted.
Exiles carry old pain: shame, fear, loneliness, the feeling of being too much or not enough. They tend to stay stuck at the age the hurt happened, and the rest of the system works hard to keep them out of sight.
Firefighters jump in when an exile’s pain breaks through anyway. Their job is to put the feeling out fast, by any means available. Scrolling, drinking, bingeing, picking a fight, going numb. They don’t care about consequences. They care about right now.
A lot of people recognize their whole week in those three paragraphs.
And Then There’s Self
Underneath all the parts, IFS says, everyone has a Self: a calm, curious, compassionate center that isn’t damaged, whatever happened to you. It can’t be broken. It just gets crowded out.
You’ve felt it. It’s the steadiness you have when you’re comforting a friend, or the clear head after a good cry. Schwartz describes it with eight qualities that all start with C: calm, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, courage, creativity, and connectedness.
The goal isn’t to get rid of parts. It’s to help them trust Self enough to step back, so you’re leading your life instead of your most frightened part leading it.
What a Session Looks Like
People expect something strange. Mostly it’s a conversation, slowed way down.
Say you come in because you snap at your kids every evening and hate yourself for it. I might ask you to notice the part that snaps. Where do you feel it in your body? If it had a shape, what would it be? Then the odd, important question: how do you feel toward it?
The first answer is usually “I hate it.” That’s another part talking, a critic that’s angry at the snapping part. So we ask the critic for a little room. Eventually, often faster than people expect, something softens, and you can get curious about the snapping part instead of disgusted by it.
Then you ask it what it’s worried about, and it tells you. Maybe it’s terrified of chaos because chaos meant something scary when you were small. Maybe it’s been running on empty since 2 p.m. and it’s the only part willing to say so.
Once a part feels understood, it often doesn’t need to shout. The deeper work of healing the exiles those protectors are guarding comes later, at whatever pace your system can handle. That pacing is one of my favorite things about IFS. Nothing gets forced.
Who It Tends to Help
- People who’ve done plenty of talk therapy, understand their patterns perfectly, and still can’t change them.
- Trauma, especially the slow, chronic kind.
- Perfectionists and recovering people pleasers, whose managers are working overtime.
- Anyone with a loud inner critic.
- Struggles with food and body image, where parts are often at war over eating.
It also pairs well with other approaches. I often combine it with EMDR, and IFS ideas show up in our couples work constantly, since two partners’ protective parts are usually the ones having the fight.
Is It Evidence-Based?
The research is growing, but it’s still smaller than the research behind CBT or EMDR. Early studies on depression, PTSD and some chronic pain conditions have been encouraging. I’d call it a promising, well-structured approach with a lot of clinical support behind it, and I’d be skeptical of anyone who sells it as a miracle. No therapy is one.
Trying It
You don’t need any of the vocabulary to start. Most of my clients pick it up as we go, and some never use the official terms at all. At Full Bloom, I use IFS throughout my work, and Kelsey Bennett is completing her IFS Level 1 training. Ask about it in a free consultation.
And the next time you hear yourself say “part of me,” it might be worth asking which part.
