Internal Family Systems Therapy
I invite all of you into the room, the parts you like and the ones you keep hidden. Humans are wonderfully complex beings and therapy can be a place for you to get to know yourself on a deeper level and find healing for your wounded and traumatized parts. Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS) can help you build an inner sense of harmony and ability to be responsive and intentional, rather than being mired in conflict, fear, anxiety, depression, or shutdown.
IFS is based on the truth that we all have multiple parts of ourselves. You’ve probably experienced this. You feel conflicted or ambivalent about a choice. Part of you—maybe an anxious or depressed part—seems to be running the show, but you find yourself wishing you could do things differently. Part of you sees something from one perspective, and part from another.
“Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.”
IFS also gives us a path to heal the cultural and legacy burdens we received from family or social structures: those internalized narratives around gender, race, ability, class, or around perfectionism, emotional repression, and fear of abandonment, to name just a few. IFS is a model that supports liberation work.
Talking to parts of myself? Yes, it can seem silly. But even clients who feel weird about it find that IFS helps them develop insight, find self-compassion, improve self-worth, become more resilient, and create new relationships to their own experiences and goals.
By building relationships with your parts, you can help them work as a team rather than in conflict with each other. All your parts hold wisdom and have much to offer to your healing, well-being, and capacity to face the challenges that life holds.
Clients often find that Internal Family Systems therapy helps them develop more awareness, confidence, clarity, and connection with others and the world around them.
“No matter how much pain or dysfunction you have to deal with in your life, every part of your psyche is doing its best to help you.”
— Jay Earley
Resources
Internal Family Systems—Meet Your Inner Family is long but has a great explanation of the history of the multiplicity of mind concept as well as the core IFS concepts.
This super-short video is a good overview of internal parts.
This six-minute video is a good overview of the model as a whole.
This eighteen-minute video talks about the model, the neuroscience behind it, and how this type of therapy differs from other types of experiential therapies.
And finally, the funny video If My Brain Held a Morning Meeting gives a snapshot of what a client’s internal system might be like when they’re first coming to therapy.