A Beginners Guide to IFS Therapy
- Ben Ford
- Oct 1
- 5 min read
Internal Family Systems Therapy explained in clear points with examples in action. Just simple normal language. No psychobabble.
Warning: IFS is a deep and profound model of healing. So this guide is by no means comprehensive. There is lots missing.
I hope it gives you a flavour of what IFS in action looks like.
Welcoming and Meeting all Parts of Us
• IFS imagines clusters of emotions, body sensations, thoughts, beliefs and mental images as parts.
Client: “I feel a tightness in my chest, and at the same time there’s images of me crashing a car. I believe I’m not safe. I’ll call this my scared part”.
• A part of you is not the whole you.
Therapist: “OK, is this scared part always here?” Client: “No, not when I’m in bed”.
• The default for a lot of people is we want our suffering to go away/not exist/stop it.
Client: “ This scared part is bad. It stops me from driving far. I want therapy to make it shut up. Make it go away please therapist. Especially the intrusive thoughts”.
• Shoving down, denying, ignoring, running away from and rationalising these parts won’t make them stop. There are lots of other ways we can not be with our parts too.
Therapist: “How do you get around this scared part showing up in your life?” Client: “Well, I just avoid driving on motorways all together. I’m being stupid and I just need to get over myself".
• The Therapist might use their own parts detector to spot when you have a part that is showing up.
Client: “I think if I just man up a bit, I’ll be fine on the motorway". Therapist: “Huh. Sounds like your inner critic’s got something to say about solutions here…”
• All the parts that cause us to suffer need to be welcomed and listened to by you. They are not bad. When they are welcome, they can change.
Therapist: “Imagine a lost young child on the street. We’d probably approach that child with concern, care, compassion and curiosity. 'How can we help, what’s going on? Are you OK?' We approach our own inner parts in the same way".
Building Trust
• It’s actually very normal to have an entire choir of parts going on in any given moment.
Client: “I want to drive to the party. But I’m afraid I might crash [scared part]. I know I’m a good driver [rational part]. I’m so stupid, I should just get on with it [critic]. Actually sod it I’ll stay in and get a takeaway [part that eats instead of feeling].
• If we slow down and zoom in on any given part, it will have it’s own story their job, when it started doing the job, why it does the job, and what might happen if it stops.
Client: “Well, when I was young, my gran used to give me sweets when I cry. I guess I still search for junk food to stop the sadness coz I don’t like the feeling of crying. But it only kind of works these days…”
• IFS is a relational therapy. Client and Therapist relating to each other, and Therapist helping the Client build more healthy relationships to their parts.
Client: “I guess I feel some compassion and understanding for this scared part. It’s only trying to help, the poor thing. I can see it’s exhausted!” Therapist: “Yea, I bet it’s exhausting. Do you want to help the part have a rest?”.
• Building trust is the key to unlocking healthy relationships, between client, therapist, parts, and of course external relationships.
Therapist: “Perhaps once that scared part starts to trust you’re going to listen more, and take their concerns seriously, it might stop needing to shout so loud to get your attention?”.
Meeting the Original Pain
• Underneath the daily noise of these parts, there are ones that don’t really have a job. They just feel a lot of pain and emotion from stuff that happened in our past.
Client: “When I was a kid, my dad would leave me alone in the car when he went to Tesco. I remember feeling abandoned and alone and unworthy of his company” .
• Once we’re able to be with those original pains fully and we bring them resolution, the other daily noise parts often don’t need to chime up so loudly.
Client: “OK, I know deep down that I won’t be left in that car again. I’m an adult. I am worthy of company. My scared parts don’t need to offer up worst case scenarios anymore, because they genuinely feel more safe now I am paying attention to them. I’m going to give them a new role of keeping an eye on any genuine road threats, so I can act quickly. Yea. That parts loves the idea of it’s new job and helping me out. He can a badge too. He likes a badge".
• The parts with jobs and the parts just feeling pain work together as a system. It’s like an engine. If the tyres are flat, it affects other aspects of the car, like steering and fuel consumption. It’s the same internally: it’s all interrelated.
Client: “Yea… even though we worked on my scared driving parts last week, I noticed I chose healthier foods on my shop this week”.
Accessing Self Energy
• When people are suffering, they are often yurning to “just find myself again”, or “get back to how I used to be”, or “be more calm and have more fun”. In IFS this is called more Self Energy.
Therapist: “So if we were to help all these parts that are suffering, who is the you in there when they all calm down?”
• IFS firmly believes there is a you in their that is undamageable by trauma, no matter how harrowing it was. The challenge is we loose access to this self-hood due to all the parts that take up all the space in our mind and body.
Therapist: “I didn’t teach my dog to swim. She just knew how to swim. It was hard wired somewhere in that little brain of hers. I think that being a well functioning kind, loving connected human being is just hard wired into us. You don't have to learn it. It might be hard to believe, but it’s just there waiting. Life just massively gets in the way and piles on a bunch of sh*t that reduces our access to that Self.
• IFS says let's be with those noisy and suffering parts, give them the space they need. In turn, they will soften up and give you more space for the true you to be in the world more often.
Therapist: “how was the session today? Client: “Yea. Tough. I felt the feelings and it was hard. But in some way I’m clearer now. I know what I need to do this week.”
• IFS can be really secular and scientific, and it also maps onto lots of spiritual traditions and religious beliefs.
Therapist: “If the Self Energy stuff doesn’t really resonate with you that’s fine, we can just let that pass over us. If it does speak to you then I’m really open to hearing your beliefs and philosophies and whether IFS is compatible!”
And there ends my Beginners Introduction to IFS!
If this way of working resonates, and you’d like to explore IFS therapy together, I offer IFS sessions online. You can get in contact with me here.