IFS Therapy

I love using Internal Family Systems because it is such an effective and gentle modality. IFS focuses on the body because trauma cannot be healed with the mind alone. 

I often ask people if they have seen the movie Inside Out when I’m trying to describe IFS for the first time. Many people have seen the movie but didn’t know it was based on IFS! If you haven’t seen the movie, think about a time when you felt confused and had a lot of different thoughts. Did it feel like your thoughts and feelings were in a big jumble or knot inside your head and you couldn’t keep anything straight? If you’ve been feeling confused, conflicted, or having trouble making decisions, IFS can be incredibly helpful. It taps into our capacity for calm, clarity, and creativity. 

The primary idea behind IFS is that each of us is made up of multiple different parts of ourselves. If you ever said to yourself “I really want to go to that (concert, game, etc) but I know I should stay home and do my (housework, homework etc)” you’ve already experienced that there are often different needs and wants within one person. IFS takes this idea several steps further and suggests a model of our personality where we all have multiple parts or aspects of ourselves and this is normal and healthy. Using IFS we can learn to sort out these parts and untie the knots so we can think more clearly.