There's a scene that plays out often in my practice: a person shares with me — with shame, with guilt — that they keep doing, thinking, or feeling something recurrently, and that willpower alone hasn't been enough to stop it. Procrastinating, overeating, exploding in anger, shutting down right when they need connection most. "I know I shouldn't," they say, "but a part of me keeps doing it anyway."
That "part of me" is, to me, one of the most honest starting points in therapy. Because it already contains an important intuition: the one acting that way isn't you in your totality — it's something more. And there is a you capable of observing those different parts and embracing them.
The inner world has inhabitants
The Internal Family Systems model was developed by systemic family therapist Richard Schwartz. His original training was in a field focused on reorganizing families from the outside to resolve symptoms, without needing to explore the inner world. The turning point came around 1983, while he was working with a group of young people with bulimia and their families: despite rigorously applying the techniques of systemic family therapy, the bingeing and purging continued. Frustrated, Schwartz did something unusual for the time: he asked his patients why they kept doing it. And they began to describe an inner experience of "parts," in a cycle that felt very familiar to him: a critical part attacked them after something went wrong; the criticism struck directly at a wounded part that felt empty, alone, and worthless; to pull them out of that pain, a part appeared that turned to bingeing; and then the critic returned to attack them for the binge, closing the circle. Schwartz recognized in this the same interaction sequences he studied in external families: inside, too, we function as a system of interrelated parts. That's how IFS was born. Here you can hear him tell it in his own words:
Interview with Schwartz about IFS on Huberman Lab. (Source: YouTube, March 3, 2025).
Schwartz identified three broad categories. Exiles are the parts that carry the oldest wounds — shame, fear of abandonment, the pain we learned not to show. They're vulnerable, which is why the inner system works to keep them concealed and barely accessible; to avoid contact with them, it deploys a whole series of distractions and controls run by the other two categories. Managers are the parts that try to maintain control: the perfectionist, the one constantly tracking what others think, the one who plans and anticipates so nothing goes wrong. And firefighters are the emergency parts — the ones that step in when the exiles' pain threatens to overwhelm: the impulse to escape, to distract, to numb out with whatever's available.
None of these parts is the problem. All of them work as a team to protect the psyche, managing pain through patterns that are useful but frozen in time. The inner critic that won't stop pointing out your mistakes isn't your enemy — it's a part that learned that pushing you harder protected you from rejection. This is one of the most neutral and compassionate lenses I know and yet it allows us to question the logic of our defense mechanisms: they react out of date, still feeling and thinking that they inhabit a reality that is no longer today's. When you can see it that way, the relationship with that voice stops being a war and becomes a possible dialogue.
Pat Ogden, a pioneer in somatic therapy, has pointed out something that resonates deeply with this model: parts don't only live in the mind — they also live in the body. The tension in the shoulders, the tightness in the chest before speaking in public, the knot in the stomach when someone disappoints you — all of that is information from the parts, expressing itself through physiology. That's why in my work IFS integrates naturally with body-based therapy and with Somatic Experiencing: to dialogue — listening to what the parts say, observing how they inhabit and make themselves present in the body, and giving new meaning to their purpose without dissociating from them, allowing them to focus on more creative possibilities centered on rest, release, pleasure, joy, connection, and growth.
The Self: what is already whole in you
One of IFS's most radical premises is that at the core of every person there is a Self — a presence that isn't damaged, that can observe with curiosity, calm, and without judgment. No matter how much pain you've carried, how many layers of protection you've built: that Self is still there. Therapy doesn't install anything new in you. It helps that core reclaim its place of leadership within the system.
Brené Brown has explored with great honesty how shame leads us to hide parts of ourselves — to build an acceptable version of ourselves and bury what doesn't seem to fit. IFS proposes something complementary: that instead of hiding those parts, we invite them to be seen. As in Somatic Experiencing, this means approaching from our resources — from our mature parts and experiences — toward the vortex: our frightened, angry, wounded, or overburdened parts, to offer them containment in presence, in contact.
In session, this translates into something that can initially seem strange: dialoguing with a part. Directing attention to it — a sensation, an emotion, a voice — and simply asking it what it needs. That dialogue usually yields biographical information about each part: when did it arise? What had to happen for it to emerge? What was it protecting us from, or trying to protect us from? Sometimes that information isn't available with an exact date, and it doesn't need to be: what does appear is how the person lived through whatever led them to engender a protective part.
How IFS works in practice
In my practice, IFS never shows up as an isolated protocol. I integrate it with other approaches depending on what the moment of the process calls for. Sometimes the entry point is a recurring belief — "I'm not enough," "if I show vulnerability I'll get hurt" — and from there we explore which part holds that belief and what it's protecting. Other times the entry point is somatic: a sensation that arises in session — usually very intense, very hard to stay with, or simply something the person finds very difficult to bring compassion to — and that, when attended to, reveals a part that's been waiting for space.
It also connects fluidly with Tapping / EFT and with Polyvagal Theory, because the state of the nervous system directly influences which parts have access to the foreground and which stay blocked. When the nervous system is in threat mode, managers and firefighters take control. When there's enough physiological safety, the Self can show up.
What this model has impressed on me most — both in my own path and in the work with the people I accompany — is that transformation doesn't happen through elimination but through integration. It's not about getting rid of the critic, the anxious one, the one who flees. It's about those parts no longer carrying alone the weight they carried; about them being able to lay down the roles they took on out of necessity, give new meaning to their purpose, and open up to more creative possibilities — rest, release, pleasure, joy, connection, growth — while the Self takes the reins.
IFS is a model with several decades of history and today, it must be said, it's very much in fashion — there's a lot of marketing around it. Its real value lies elsewhere: it doesn't ask you to fix yourself; it offers you a path different from denial and dissociation. And that truly is new, because it speaks of control as something obsolete and of responsibility as something creative.
If you'd like to explore how this model works in session, you can also read What to expect from therapy? or learn about What's a first session usually like?