Reclaim Your Life With Internal Family Systems Therapy

The basis of the model is that we all have parts within ourselves, little sub personalities with different goals and motivations; they have different levels of maturity, excitability, wisdom and pain.

How we get along with these different parts of ourselves depends on our internal leadership skills – how we listen to our parts, how we take care of them, and most importantly, how we keep them from sabotaging each other. Positive parts like warmth, creativity and caregiving lie within us but we may also have more difficult to manage parts like anger, self-loathing or a harsh inner critic.

IFS sees consciousness as composed of various “parts” or subpersonalities, each with its own perspective, interests, memories, and viewpoint. A core tenet of IFS is that every part has a positive intent for the person, even if its actions or effects are counterproductive or cause dysfunction. This means that there is never any reason to fight with, coerce, or try to eliminate a part; the IFS method promotes internal connection and harmony.

Parts can have either extreme or healthy roles. IFS focuses on the parts of us that are in extreme roles in need of therapeutic healing. Parts are divided into three types—Managers, Exiles, and Firefighters.

IFS sees the therapist’s job as helping the client to disentangle themselves from their parts and access the Self, which can then connect with each part and heal it, so that the parts can let go of their destructive roles and enter into a harmonious collaboration, led by the Self. IFS explicitly recognizes the spiritual nature of the Self, allowing the model to be helpful in spiritual development as well as psychological healing.