How Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) Helps People to Change

At its heart, IFS therapy recognizes that human beings aren’t broken at their core. We all struggle at times, we’re all burdened by old feelings and outdated beliefs, and we all adapt to suffering with our own coping skills and protective patterns. But beneath all of that, each of us has the capacity to experience calm, clarity, curiosity, compassion, kindness, confidence, courage, connection, trust, hope, optimism, appreciation, love, joy, creativity, and the freedom to be our authentic selves. Those are some of the qualities that make life worth living.
 

The goal of IFS therapy is to help people reconnect to these qualities, despite the conditions of the external world.
 

IFS offers a hopeful and compassionate way of understanding how and why people suffer, and how everyone is capable of healing. Rather than seeing our coping skills, even ones that may be destructive to ourselves or others, as signs that something is wrong with us, IFS understands our coping skills as protective parts of our personality, helping us survive.

If you’d like a fuller picture of the kinds of struggles I help people work with in therapy, you can also visit What I Help People With.
 

Why people struggle
 

One of the first questions I ask a person in therapy is, “What’s in the Way of Feeling Good?” 
 

There are countless answers to that question. Sometimes what’s in the way is anxiety, stress, worry, fear, grief, sadness, and loss. Sometimes it’s self-doubt, self-criticism, hopelessness, resentment, anger, judgment, pessimism, shame, or a painful sense of not being enough. Sometimes it’s pretending to be happy, people pleasing, perfectionism, overachievement, caretaking, seeking approval, emotional withdrawal, or soothing pain through compulsive behaviors and distractions.
 

From an IFS perspective, these struggles aren’t evidence that a person is defective. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The struggles we carry are evidence that we’re alive, human, sensitive, and vulnerable. We all are.

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The problem isn’t that we are vulnerable. The problem is that far too many deny that they’re vulnerable, deny what sensitive beings they are. The human heart is tender and deeply affected by how one is treated and what one has experienced.
 

None of us gets through life unscathed. Over the course of our lives, we’re shaped by our families, our communities, our disappointments, our losses, and the ways we’ve been treated by others. Even subtle forms of mistreatment can leave deep marks: criticism, rejection, dismissal, exclusion, neglect, emotional invalidation, teasing, or simply not feeling sufficiently seen, valued, protected, or loved. We’re also deeply affected by how mistreatment compounds within us over the years, by how we mistreat ourselves, by witnessing others being mistreated, and by traumatic events, which directly threaten our emotional, social, and physical survival.
 

Over time, all the suffering we experience shapes us. And just as importantly, how we learn to cope with suffering shapes us. If you’d like to explore this idea more deeply, I write about it in Why So Many of Us Don’t Feel Good.
 

So the coping skills we use, even if they become destructive to oneself or others, are evidence that we’re survivors, not failures, and that humans can adapt and adjust to nearly anything in order to survive emotionally, socially, and physically. The intensity of our coping skills, which help us adapt to our surroundings, is always equal to the strength and intensity of the suffering we’ve experienced. It makes sense to me that this dynamic would provoke our empathy, our compassion, not judgment.
 

So, if you haven’t already, it’s time to give yourself a break, to consider going easy on yourself, and to have a little tenderness.

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Protective parts and coping skills
 

The IFS model of therapy understands that the psyche develops protective parts of the personality to help us survive emotional pain and prevent future suffering. These protective parts are what many people call coping skills.
 

Coping can take many forms. A protective part may become perfectionistic, self-critical, anxious, hypervigilant, emotionally withdrawn, people pleasing, attention seeking, defensive, resentful, overachieving, depressed, or compulsive, among many other possibilities. Some parts of us try to keep us safe by staying small and hidden. Others try to protect us by striving, controlling, caretaking, achieving, or keeping everyone else happy.
 

At first glance, some of our protective parts may seem irrational, frustrating, or self-defeating. But experience has shown that no matter how destructive or self-defeating a part of us may be, every part has a positive intention and is trying, in its own way, to help us survive emotionally, socially, and sometimes even physically.
 

For example, let’s take a people pleasing part, the kind of part that puts everyone’s needs ahead of its own or says “yes” when it means “no.” On the surface, a people pleasing part like this doesn’t seem to have one’s best interests in mind. But when we get to know it better, we discover it’s trying to protect the person from conflict, rejection, shame, and abandonment.
 

Likewise, a perfectionistic part may be trying to help a person avoid criticism, failure, or painful feelings of worthlessness. A part with anxiety may be trying to keep someone alert and prepared to avoid being hurt again. An inner critic may be trying, in its own harsh way, to keep a person safe from mistakes, disapproval, or humiliation.
 

From a deeper perspective, it’s clear that all protective parts are trying their best to help, even if there may be better strategies to avoid pain and feel safe.
 

There are no bad parts
 

Because every coping skill and protective function humans use has a positive intention, it’s clear that there are no bad parts. This is one of the most relieving aspects of IFS, because it means change is about working with our protective parts rather than against them.
 

This doesn’t mean we should minimize the impact of our protective parts on ourselves or those around us. Instead, it means that, in therapy, we don’t change ourselves by aligning against our protective parts, controlling them, forcing them to change, or trying to get rid of them. Experience has shown that it’s simply impossible to force parts into lasting change and fundamental transformation.
 

Instead, IFS invites curiosity.
 

Rather than asking, “What’s wrong with me?” we ask, “What’s this part trying to do for me?” “What’s it afraid would happen if it stopped?” “What’s it afraid I would feel if it stopped?”
 

When protective parts are approached with curiosity, openness, and compassion instead of fear and judgment, they begin to relax. And as they relax, they reveal more of the suffering they’ve been protecting us from feeling.
 

How change happens in IFS therapy
 

The reason people don’t change simply by trying harder is that most protective parts don’t respond well to force. The more we force, pressure, judge, suppress, or demand that we act or feel differently, the more reactive our protective parts become.
 

IFS offers a different pathway.
 

Instead of pushing against a coping skill or protective part, we begin by turning toward it. We get to know it. We learn what its role has been, what it fears, what it wants for us, and what deeper pain it’s been trying to keep out of awareness.
 

In many ways, this process is like aikido, emotional aikido. In aikido, one doesn’t meet force with force. One moves toward the energy with steadiness, openness, and presence. In IFS, we do something similar internally. Rather than opposing our protective parts, we begin relating to them with openness, curiosity, and even compassion. In response, our protectors eventually open up and reveal their reasons for coping the way they do. This way of working with parts, moving toward them with curiosity rather than against them with force, is something I describe more fully in The Aikido of Transformation.
 

As this happens, deeper layers of one’s inner world begin to reveal themselves. Beneath protective parts, hidden away, are parts that carry different kinds of old pain, extreme feelings, and extreme beliefs.
 

As a result of what a person has experienced, and as a result of what we call legacy burdens, suffering passed down through generations, people can carry feelings of self-doubt, shame, worthlessness, fear, loneliness, heartbreak, grief, and other kinds of pain held inside from past experiences. These forms of suffering can be so painful that our psyche, in order to protect us from the overwhelming pain, hides painful feelings and memories away deep inside ourselves, where we can’t feel them, often from the time they first happened.
 

The good news is that an experienced IFS therapist knows how to guide a person through the process of witnessing, caring, and unburdening the parts of ourselves that carry extreme feelings and beliefs, without being overwhelmed and without making it worse.
 

By releasing the burdens we carry, our protective parts, the coping skills which once compelled us to begin therapy in the first place, no longer need to work as hard. This is how real change happens in IFS, not through coercion, but through understanding, loving-kindness, and healing at the root.

If you’d like a fuller explanation of the model itself, you can read The Internal Family Systems Model of Therapy (IFS).

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The kinds of problems IFS can help with
 

IFS therapy can be helpful for many of the struggles that bring people into therapy.
 

It can help with stress, worry, and anxiety. It can help with self-criticism, perfectionism, self-doubt, shame, worthlessness, and the feeling of being unacceptable or flawed. It can help with pleasing people, caretaking, striving, approval seeking, overachievement, and the pressure to hold everything together.
 

It can also help with grief, loss, abandonment, neglect, resentment, anger, emotional withdrawal, hopelessness, compulsive soothing, hiding behind masks, and difficulty being one’s authentic self in relationships and in life.
 

IFS can also provide a powerful framework for spiritual growth and integrating meaningful or transcendent experiences. For a more detailed overview of the specific issues I work with, you can visit What I Help People With.
 

Whatever form the struggle takes, the deeper aim is often similar: to help people reconnect with the beautiful qualities of Self they’ve lost access to.
 

Through IFS therapy, people don’t just make superficial behavioral changes. They make profound and lasting changes that lead to experiencing more calm, connection, clarity, confidence, optimism, hope, trust, appreciation, joy, and loving-kindness for themselves and others.
 

The people who often seek therapy
 

Most people who seek therapy are thoughtful, capable individuals who feel stuck in patterns that no longer serve them. They may be functioning reasonably well on the outside, yet inwardly they feel burdened, constricted, overwhelmed, or far from how they want to feel.
 

Often, before turning to therapy for help, many have spent years managing life, coping, striving, adapting, and trying to hold themselves together. They may appear competent and high functioning, yet still feel blocked from feeling good about themselves and about the world around them, and they may struggle to find peace, connection, meaning, and pleasure in life.
 

IFS therapy helps people understand these patterns with curiosity and compassion, so real and lasting change can begin.
 

Why I have so much trust in IFS therapy
 

After receiving my graduate degree in counseling psychology 27 years ago, I began, shortly thereafter, two years of intensive training in IFS therapy with Richard Schwartz, PhD, the founder of the IFS model. Over the years, I went on to assist in IFS trainings, host IFS workshops, and provide clinical supervision to other IFS therapists.

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Having worked with hundreds of individuals over the last three decades and having seen people make profound changes in their lives, I trust that anyone with sufficient time and desire, along with guidance from an experienced IFS therapist, can become the person they want to be.
 

What I continue to appreciate most about the IFS model is how respectful, compassionate, empowering, and non-pathologizing it is. IFS trusts that people have within themselves far more wisdom, healing capacity, and goodness than they often realize.
 

Because of this, IFS therapists don’t focus on providing insight, wisdom, or answers to the people they work with. The most valuable focus is helping a person in therapy access their own resources, their own wisdom, and find their own pathway toward healing.
 

My confidence in this work also comes from my own experience. Like many people drawn to this field, my professional path grew out of my own healing journey. While my education, credentials, and decades of experience certainly matter, what’s most deeply equipped me to help others is the years I’ve spent doing my own inner work and changing my relationship to suffering.
 

There is hope
 

One of the most important things IFS offers is hope.
 

None of us were born self-critical, ashamed, perfectionistic, guarded, disconnected, or burdened by all the patterns that trouble us now. These ways of being developed as a result of life experience. They made sense in the context of what we lived through, what we absorbed, and what we needed to do to survive.

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And because they were learned, they can change.

That possibility of healing and change is one of the central reasons I trust this work so deeply, and it’s also something I explore further in Everyone Has The Capacity to Feel Good.
 

Therapy cannot eliminate all suffering from life. We’re human, and there will always be some amount of loss, pain, uncertainty, and challenge. But therapy can profoundly change our relationship to suffering. It can help us care for what hurts instead of staying ruled by it. It can help us access more calm, trust, compassion, clarity, courage, gratitude, and joy even in an imperfect world.
 

To me, that’s what healing is about.
 

Working together
 

If you’re looking for a therapist in Olympia, WA, and are ready to begin the journey of therapy, I’d be happy to offer you a free phone consultation to see if I might be the right therapist for you.

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I work best with people who are curious about their inner world and open to the possibility that within their suffering there may be the seeds of profound transformation. My role isn’t to fix you, but to help create the conditions in which your own curiosity, clarity, wisdom, compassion, and loving-kindness can emerge so that you can be the future self you want to be.

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Under these conditions, change and healing can happen.

 

 

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About Olympia

Olympia is Washington’s capital city and home to a thoughtful, creative, and civically engaged community. Many people here are balancing work, relationships, family life, loss, uncertainty, and the deeper questions that come with being human. In a place like Olympia, therapy can offer a grounded and compassionate space to slow down, turn inward, and reconnect with the qualities that make life feel more meaningful and more alive.