I’m new in town, so I’m trying to make new friends and I met someone today who had never heard of IFS. She was a longtime seeker with a tough past who had worked on herself for decades. She’d been in therapy here and there but she hadn’t tried any of the cutting edge methods I’ve been studying for a decade. We met up for a second time at the Sebastopol Grange for the bimonthly farm swap, where I was offloading tomatoes, lettuce, apples, squash, and homemade cider from my garden.  When she asked how my day went, I made an offhanded comment about a class I taught today about Internal Family Systems.

“What’s Internal Family Systems?” she asked.

Her question took my breath away for just a hot moment. It was a moment I could have shooed away. After all, I was with a bunch of gardeners talking about canning and fermenting extra produce from our gardens. Not exactly the appropriate venue for a conversation about trauma, spirituality, and getting to know your parts.

All I said about IFS was that it was a healing method that had been a game changer for me because it helped me learn how to mother my own inner children the way my mother didn’t know how to. I said it had helped me off ramp from my spiritual bypassing tendencies that had caused me to neurotically tolerate being mistreated by people in the name of unconditional love and compassion for the hurt people who hurt me. I explained that I was teaching a class for people about how to protect their vulnerable parts from people who run roughshod all over them and how to teach people how to treat us and get justice without being unkind- to ourselves and others. I said I was grateful that IFS taught me how to be as unconditionally loving to myself as I had been to people who had perpetrated harm against me that I was just tolerating, instead of standing up for myself.

I started unloading zucchini from my farm basket and was loading up some cantaloupe when I looked back up at her, and she was in tears.

I had a part that felt bad for evoking her vulnerability in an inappropriate setting and apologized, but she waved my apologies away. 

“No, no,” she said. “It’s good tears. You just gave words to something I’ve been doing for years but never languaged that way. What I’m feeling is relief.”

I was hit with a wave of gratitude and even a little bit of envy. I felt jealous that she was just learning about IFS for the first time, kind of like I’m jealous every time I meet someone who has never seen my favorite movie Cinema Paradiso or read anything written by Isabel Allende. I’m envious of having that first time experience of Self reuniting with parts it didn’t know were exiled, and experiencing the loving bond that starts to form when long imprisoned parts of you meet up with your wise divine Self for the very first time. I was jealous of the love affair I knew would lay ahead for her if she got curious and decided to explore IFS further. But I tried to hide my enthusiasm, since I didn’t know her that well and I had a part that didn’t want to look like some evangelist recruiting someone into a cult.

So I just smiled on the inside when she asked me where she could learn more about it and I shared some of my favorite resources, including IFS founder Dick Schwartz’s parts processing meditations on Insight Timer.

What I didn’t tell her (because I want to keep my friends as friends and have good boundaries between friends and students) is that I’ll be teaching another round of IFS For Self-Healing on Zoom for beginners who are new to IFS or intermediate students who want a refresher course. We taught the first round as a six week class but this time, we’ll be doing an intensive weekend for those who work during the week and don’t want to miss the chance to learn the self-help practices of IFS and participate live. You don’t have to be a therapist for this deep dive into the self-healing practices of IFS. You just have to be curious and open to learning some of the daily practices you can use to get to know your parts and begin to deepen your intimacy with them.

Learn more about IFS For Self-Healing 

Not sure what I’m talking about? If you’re brand new to Internal Family Systems (IFS), welcome. This might be the most life-changing framework you ever encounter for understanding yourself and others. Most of us come to therapy, healing work, or spiritual practices because we know something inside isn’t working. We’re stuck in self-defeating patterns. We sabotage relationships. We numb out. We overwork, overeat, overgive, or overachieve. We beat ourselves up and then wonder why self-love or making relationships with others work feels impossible.

If that sounds familiar, I want you to take a deep breath right now and hear this: there is nothing “wrong” with you. You don’t need fixing. You’re not broken. You are made up of many “parts,” and all of them have good reasons for existing. The problem is not the parts themselves—it’s that they’ve been forced into roles they were never meant to play.

What Are “Parts”?

IFS founder Dick Schwartz, PhD, noticed that when his therapy clients described their inner experience, they spoke as if different subpersonalities were inside of them. One part might say, “I hate myself,” while another part might whisper, “Please don’t let anyone see how broken I am.” Another might be running the show by keeping them working 70 hours a week so they never have to stop long enough to feel or hitting the bar scene every night to try to get laid so they could feel good enough through someone else’s eyes.

At first glance, this can sound like pathology. But this is normal. We all do this. We all have inner parts, just like we have roles in an external family. Some parts protect us from pain, while others carry the pain and get forced into the underground of our psyches so we can survive. None of them are “bad.” They all developed to keep us safe in the environments we grew up in.

Why We Need a Good Enough Attachment Figure

Here’s the kicker: most of us didn’t get the attuned, responsive, safe caregiving we needed as children. Some of us had loving parents who were distracted, overwhelmed, or inconsistent. Others had parents who were outright abusive or neglectful. Either way, our parts adapted to the reality we faced.

When we didn’t have a reliable primary attachment figure, our nervous systems never learned what safety feels like. Our parts took over to compensate. Maybe a perfectionist part drove you to be “the good child” so you could earn approval. Maybe a dissociating part helped you check out and escape when things were unbearable. Maybe a people-pleasing part kept you attuned to everyone else’s moods so you could avoid conflict and make sure nobody around you got upset.

These strategies worked—until they didn’t. As adults, those same parts keep running the same playbook, even when it’s destroying our health, our relationships, or our ability to feel joy.

The Revolutionary Promise of IFS

Here’s where IFS changes everything: it teaches us that we can become the good enough attachment figure we never had. Sometimes we need a third party, like a therapist, to model how a good enough attachment figure behaves, by mirroring our painful emotions, validating what we’ve been through, modeling repair without defensiveness when they get something wrong, and loving us even if we mess up or are imperfect.

But at some point, we realize we already have that ideal attachment figure inside of us. Every religion has a different name for it- Christ Consciousness, Buddha Nature, Atman, Great Spirit,or the Tao. For many years, I called it my Inner Pilot Light, which I wrote about in my book The Daily Flame. But in IFS, we call it the “Self.”

Inside each of us is not just a collection of parts, but also a core essence of Self that is calm, compassionate, curious, connected, creative, confident, courageous, clear, and when needed, confrontational. When Self is leading, our parts can finally relax and not work so hard to try to keep us safe. They don’t have to keep running the show. They can be listened to, cared for, and healed by the good enough parent we can be for ourselves. A part of me wants that kind of loving inner nurture for everyone.

If this resonates with you and you’re new to IFS and wanting to understand it more and learn how to work with your parts, please consider joining us for IFS For Self-Healing.

Learn more & register for the IFS For Self-Healing Weekend Edition October 4-5.