What is Internal Family Systems (IFS)?

“Internal Family Systems is a powerfully transformative, evidence-based model of psychotherapy. We believe the mind is naturally multiple and that is a good thing.  Our inner parts contain valuable qualities and our core Self knows how to heal, allowing us to become integrated and whole. In IFS all parts are welcome.”

IFS Institute

IFS is a model of psychotherapy and philosophical framework through which individuals can understand, unburden, and harmonize both internal and external systems.

IFS is based upon the idea and observation that all people are made up of subpersonalities, or “parts,” which interact with each other and guide us toward security and away from pain.

Although parts often play specific roles, they each have a wide range of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and behaviors. In IFS, we don’t define parts by the role they play. There are no bad parts.

While the experience of IFS can be deep, expansive, and spiritual by nature, the model is practical and user-friendly, emerging in our regular vocabulary often. For example, in the morning you may notice a part of you wants to stay in bed and be comfortable, while another part of you wants to get up and prepare for the day.

When we experience trauma, our parts become more extreme in their roles and polarized with each other, creating much of the pain and disharmony that follows us thereafter.

In IFS therapy, we help you access your Self, the innate and naturally healing inner resource inside of us all, in order to witness, hold, unburden, and heal your parts.

Through this process we bring harmony and balance to your internal system, and by extension, your external system.