Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)

How does IFS therapy work?

In IFS, certain parts of you hold the distress and wounding from difficult past events and painful experiences. Maybe you experienced bullying as a child, for instance, and you have a young part that still holds the humiliation, shame, confusion, rage, and sadness from those memories. These parts that hold immense pain, called exiles, may have been walled off, pushed down, and silenced in order for you to get through childhood, survive a difficult family situation, or feel socially acceptable.

However, the exiles’ vulnerability and their deep desire to be healed is often bubbling just below the surface, no matter your current age. Because exiles are burdened with painful feelings, body sensations, and negative beliefs, tripping an exile’s wires can quickly ignite panic, despair, rage, and other intense emotions. In the childhood bullying example, you may experience the exile now, as an adult, when you feel a familiar sense of brokenness during a group conversation, or when you feel a deep sense of humiliation from your partner’s offhanded comment.

In response to the exiles’ pain, other parts of your system take on protector roles. Protectors either try to prevent the pain of the exile from breaking through or take out the pain when it does get triggered. The parts that proactively prevent the pain from getting activated are called managers. These are the parts that get us out of bed and to work on time, or that use self-effacing humor to thwart the bullies. They are the ones that often drive behaviors such as perfectionism, self-criticism, or people-pleasing. Their job is to help you avoid re-experiencing shame, failure, abandonment, humiliation, and other forms of exile pain.

Like managers, firefighters are also protective parts that try to prevent the pain of the exile from flaring. They work in a more reactive way, though. Firefighters swoop in to dampen the intolerable exile feelings of terror, shame, abandonment, unlovability, or sadness that have broken through, and they do this in whatever way works. Substance use, addictions, dissociating, doom-scrolling, overeating, raging, and the impulse to hurt yourself may be protective firefighters doing their key job: distracting you from the pain of the exile coming to the fore. It’s important to recognize that no parts are bad. In contrast, all parts intend to help you, but some may do it in an extreme or impulsive way that ultimately causes you more distress and suffering, not less.

IFS works by helping you get to know all these different parts of yourself with curiosity and compassion, rather than judgment and criticism. You can unburden the exiles of the pain they’e been carrying and free protectors from their extreme roles.

You might wonder how this is possible when you so hate certain parts of yourself or when the wounds feel so deep. In IFS, the Self is a core part of all of us that is able to lead with clarity, creativity, courage, curiosity, compassion, confidence, connectedness, and calm, qualities known as the 8 C’s. Your core Self is able to develop a healing relationship with all your parts, and it is this Self-to-part connection that leads to growth and change.

As an IFS therapist, I facilitate this process but the healing comes from within you.