Internal Family Systems is a type of therapy that believes each one of us contains multiplicity, that each of us is made up of multiple parts. There are parts of you that are protective, and parts of you that are vulnerable, carrying hurt from your lived experience.

Have you ever felt “of two minds” about something? Imagine you’re in the middle of something important, and you see phone lighting up. There is a text from a friend, and the text looks like it’s a long one. A part of you might immediately get anxious, wondering what the text is about, if there’s something wrong. Another part might carry urgency, feeling like you have to drop everything to check it. Another part might feel frustrated, because the thing that you are in the middle of demands your full attention, and you can’t answer the text right now. Then, the thing you are in the middle ends, and you check the text, and it’s nothing urgent, and everyone is okay, and now there is a part of you that feels relief, but also another part that carries some frustration towards the text, the friend, the pressure of immediate accessibility that comes with having a phone on you all the time, and before you know it, you’re caught up in a ton of different emotions over just one text.

Oftentimes, there are parts of you that haven’t 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.

Internal Family Systems normalizes and provides compassionate language to the experience of having and feeling contradictory feelings. Right now, there might be a part of you carrying some skepticism reading about this approach; you may find yourself thinking, “the word “part” is certainly getting repeated over and over”. And that’s okay! One of the main principles of IFS is that every part has a good intention behind what it is doing, ultimately trying their best to help you. Sometimes parts may get “stuck” in doing things as they have always done them, and their intention may not carry over to have the desired impact. 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.