Internal Family Systems (IFS) is the way I find compassion for my quirky, fearful, half-baked selves. I see it as a glittering telescope pointed inward, helping make visible the stuff inside you that's normally sealed shut. I started seriously engaging with it in 2023 and since then have been saving meaningful snippets on how to think about it and how to approach it.
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I love sharing IFS with a wide variety of people, so below I created IFS 101, a resource for beginners, and IFS 102, a resource for super pros (like me, hihi). Much of what’s most useful here probably comes from my work with Kaj Sotala, or was sparked by it, thank you! You can find other great practitioners I worked with and recommend at the end of this post.
IFS 101
IFS is a therapeutic modality that views the mind as composed of “parts” (everybody remembers this bit better) and a core “Self” (which most people miss at first).
What are parts?
A part can be any internal experience (emotion, tension, want) that you give an identity to, in whatever form feels most appropriate. It can really be anything.
If you feel tiny rage because you didn’t buy a delicious cupcake, for example, you can feel the feeling and notice that the most appropriate form might be a hairy, furious, rainbow-colored bear. What matters is that it feels like an accurate portrayal of the essence of the feeling. When you summon it, you can relate to it, comfort it, or have it communicate with your other parts, like maybe a health-yoda who really wants what’s best for you but, you discover, that it does in a “shouldy” way.
Putting identities on sensations may sound silly, and some people bounce off IFS because of it, but it’s actually optional. You can stay with raw sensation and do IFS on it directly. For me, though, putting identities works great, and I think for two reasons. One, our mind works really well with characters. It’s easier to imagine, relate, remember, and do all sorts of mental operations with a character than with a raw sensation. Second, it helps you stop treating a sensation like an object and gives you the option to start treating it like a subject (thanks Kant for the distinction): a conscious, independent ‘piece of consciousness’ that may want weird, arbitrary, random-seeming things. In my practice, I often default to experiencing sensations as things. But when I shift and can truly treat it as a subject, like an independent consciousness with its own wants and preferences, my IFS sessions are better.
A key thing in IFS is that there are no bad parts. It’s a non-pathologizing therapeutic modality (I personally think it makes sense to stay away from pathologizing ones). Every part has a positive intent, but some may get stuck in strategies that don’t work well anymore, and you may need some time to connect to them and untangle their motivations.
What is Self?
Self in IFS is the core essence beneath all parts. It’s where healing occurs. Not a part itself, but the innate healing, compassionate spacious field within everyone. When parts “step back,” Self naturally emerges. It’s described as a “field” larger than the individual—felt as love, trust, presence and 8 C’s: Calm, Curiosity, Clarity, Compassion, Confidence, Courage, Creativity, Connectedness.
Self heals by compassionately witnessing parts, without managing, fixing, or wanting any outcome. Self has parallel concepts in many spiritual traditions: Buddha-nature—the inherent awakened quality in all beings, Atman in Hinduism—the true self beyond ego, Christianity: the “Christ within”, Taoism: connection to the Tao
My favorite exercise to feel Self is “22: The Path Exercise,” an audio meditation in Greater than the sum of our parts (but you’ll probably need to do the previous exercises to really appreciate it)
How to start?
Greater than the sum of our parts is my favorite introduction to IFS, by its creator. It’s an audiobook where half the chapters are guided IFS practice and half discuss IFS. Richard Schwartz was asked what’s the best introduction to IFS and out of many things he wrote he pointed to this resource. I think you can go really far just by listening to it on loop. (It’s audiobook format only.) Or just set up a session with an IFS guide
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IFS 102
Notes / heuristics
The goal is harmony and ease of the system. Conflicted parts may block the flow of information in the mind. Because of this tension, other parts may not be getting information they need. Open the flow and you may be more attuned to self and others, and better able to read complex situations, or make better decisions.
Good guiding questions: How can conflicted parts understand each other? How to resolve internal conflict in a cooperative way?
How to distinguish if you’re in a part or in Self? Self often doesn’t have a mental image; it just feels like it is. If there’s a subtle flavor, that’s not Self. Say hello to it and see what happens. Does it have a positive or negative vibe? If positive, most likely in Self; if negative, probably not.
How to share from parts? You (Self) are the leader of the system. It’s often helpful, especially when experiencing difficult emotions, to let Self speak on behalf of parts. You may ask where the negative feelings come from and first develop compassion to parts experiencing them, and communicate them on behalf of parts.
Often parts disappear when you solve certain tension. Some may stay with you for a long time. Some parts may have formed long ago, for example in childhood, and it can be hard to access them and release their tension.
Cognitive fusion is when you fuse with a thought or emotion and perceive it as yourself or as objective reality. This fusion can lead to suffering, because you may perceive the thought as you and get trapped in its narrative. Through practices like IFS (but also for example meditation), you can learn to “defuse” from these narratives, resulting in better understanding of oneself and reduced suffering (more about it in Kaj’s article)
The goal is to get to know, understand a part, and build compassion. I think this part comes intuitively, questions like:
How are you? What do you need? What do you want to express? What would you like to do/achieve?
And there are questions that do the same but are harder to think of:
What are you afraid will happen if you don’t do what you’re doing?
If you could act exactly as you want, if nothing held you back, what would that look like?
When you look at me, what do you see?
How old are you?
I invite you to share whatever needs to be shared.
What exactly creates this reaction in you?
Ask yourself: How do you feel toward the part? Ask the part: How do you feel toward me? (if you feel tension towards a part OR a part is feeling tension towards you—you may be in part and not in Self. Talk to the part, witness it or try to understand who the part is speaking to?)
How well do you feel understood? Is there anything else you want me to know?
(when you stumble on a particular belief worth investigating) Where does the belief come from?
How would you like to be shared? (be attuned to nonverbal answers) via Michael Tong
What’s wrong about the wrong thing?
If that what you protect would be healed what role you want to perform? What do you protect? (parts may get scared of not having a role)
(if the part feels scared) How to approach/contact/relate to you that feels safe?
What’s a proper distance between me and you?
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Witness over manage
IFS healing comes from being in Self, not managing, but compassionately witnessingw parts and others. The below fragment comes from Derek’s Goodbye (timestamped to 12:44) via Daniel Thorson‘s tweet: “watch … the core of IFS, which is also the core of unfolding, and circling, and love”
the key element in the healing of IFS is not from mapping parts … recognizing the protector parts and recognizing the exile parts—that's very important, that's a road map of the psyche—but the healing the magic comes from our capacity to hold our self energy, who you are at your core, to hold that in the presence of somebody else …. to hold our Self energy with another person. By fully trusting the client’s system, you communicate: I fully trust you—and how rarely do we hear that in life? This Self energy feels like the foundation of everything and it feels like love. Many practitioners operate from manager parts … they figure out the model, they figure out the interventions—but the felt sense of it on the other side is that I’m being managed. What people actually want is to be witnessed, seen, felt—receive compassion so that I can feel compassion for my parts that are suffering, so they don’t suffer alone.
If I find some stuck energy in my body that doesn’t want to talk (eg sadness) to me or work through it I’ll go inside and try to reconstruct a center next to it and empty myself out of as much as I can (desire to fix etc) and ask if it’s okay with me feeling what it does, than I just sit with it and the energy flows into me and I’ll let it pass without clenching and usually this dissolves the energy quickly without having to do any ifs kind of thing
importantly it’s not “can I have your energy” or “can I have the feeling instead of you to fix you” it’s “can it be with you and just sit here also feeling what you’re feeling” and I think that togetherness and visceral understand is enough to heal the contracted part/energy
as a ballpark range we’re talking 30 seconds by the way, it can surely take longer but ime it’s usually pretty fast
last ~2yrs this ~replaced “parts work” for me. few words in the system anymore (no inner voice, no reified parts), more manipulation of energies, decentralized, flowing together, each area specialized (eg heart=connection) like a non-dual/decentralized liquid computing system
feels something like this, diff energies with diff type signatures flowing together, causing eddies that block flow then unblock, diff “centers” (eg heart, gut) with diff specialties, like diff types of computers. I promise you I wanted the chakras to be woo bs but here we are
I give full freedom to any one part to stop me, I am just supporting them, if I feel off I will ditch whatever I am doing, put my eye mask on and get inside me to process …
Since I’ve already been obscenely open, a month ago I was doing a sexual thing that nearly all my parts were for but one was against (it was scared and disgusted). So I immediately stopped and apologized to my partner and said I couldn’t do it, which was hard and embarrassing
If you both “want to get good at running” and also never want to get up off the couch ... one part of your belief set has concluded that running will help achieve your goals, and another has concluded that it doesn’t. ... Rather than summarizing this situation as “I’m just lazy,” it’s instead productive to think “in addition to my belief that it’s good to run, I apparently also have a belief that it’s good to watch Netflix.” This isn’t just a cute, permissive reframe; it’s what’s actually going on. Some part of you believes that Netflix is exactly the Thing To Be Doing. ...
The part of you that is generating pressure-toward-Netflix is doing so because it thinks that staying on the couch will make for a better life, and bring you closer to your goals. It’s not lazy or stupid, it’s tunnel visioned, failing to take into account things like long-term health, or the value of following through on your self-commitments
(Just as the part of you that’s clamoring to get off the couch also has tunnel vision, and is discounting the value of relaxation or hedonism.)
At CFAR, we often characterize these internal disagreements as “shoulds.” Given any default action, a should is an urge or a pressure to do something else instead
In this view a “should” is a signal that parts are in tension. Instead of overriding one with willpower, you may find it helpful to feel into what each part needs and what’s most unburdening for the whole system.
Thanks / practitioners
A big chunk of the knowledge in this doc comes from my work with Kaj Sotala. I also learned a lot from, and recommend, other practitioners I worked with: theo, Amanda Ngo, Eliot Red, and Marta Hankiewicz. There is also the IFS Institute’s list of guides and their level of training.
Good luck! You are the one you've been waiting for.
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