Parts Work / Internal Family Systems Therapy for Trauma, Anxiety, and Identity Struggles

What is Internal Family Systems?

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a type of therapy that sees each of us as having many parts—protective parts that try to keep you safe and more vulnerable parts that carry hurt from your lived experiences.

Wait, what do you mean by “parts”?

Have you ever felt “of two minds” about something? Imagine you are in the middle of something important and your phone lights up with a long text from a friend. One part of you might get anxious, wondering if something is wrong. Another part might feel urgency, wanting to drop everything and check it. Another part might feel frustrated because you need to stay focused and cannot answer right now. Later, when you finally read the text and it turns out to be nothing urgent, a part of you feels relief, while another part feels annoyed at the pressure to always be available, and suddenly you are experiencing a whole mix of emotions over just one text. Now, what if each one of those parts of you had information to share with you, memories and images and feelings that inform how you react and show up in your every day life?

For many queer, BIPOC, Asian, immigrant, and third‑culture adults, there can be parts of you that have never felt welcome in therapy spaces before, parts that you feel you need to check at the door. There may be parts of you that have learned to code switch, mask, and perform as a way to survive. There may be parts of you that you have inherited from your ancestors, carrying burdens from generations past. There are parts of you that have been formed as a result of the ongoing and consistent trauma of racism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, colonization, fatphobia, and cultural dissociation. IFS therapy makes room for all of these parts and offers a way to understand them with more compassion.

Who might benefit from IFS therapy?

Internal Family Systems normalizes and gives gentle language to the experience of having conflicting or contradictory feelings. There might even be a part of you right now that feels skeptical reading about this approach or notices how often the word “part” appears—and that is okay. One of the core principles of IFS is that every part has a good intention, even if the impact is not always helpful. Some parts get “stuck” doing what they have always done, like people‑pleasing, shutting down, or lashing out, because at some point those strategies helped you survive. Here, we view these parts not as something bad that you need to get over, or push further down, or get rid of altogether, but as parts of you that have been hurt, parts that we can witness, care for, and unburden.