IFS Practitioner Sessions: My Origin Story

Get a peek inside IFS and how it found me.

I’m smitten with my parts. And I’m smitten with Internal Family Systems (IFS), a therapeutic model I have been finding incredibly intuitive and helpful in my journey to work with difficult emotions and habits. I’d like to show how it looks to be coached by an IFS practitioner. It might be helpful to those curious about IFS, so I’ll be posting notes and summaries of my personal sessions, one by one.

First, here’s an overview of IFS and how it fits together, so you can get a sense of the whole picture.

IFS shows us that we all have many parts within us with different behaviors, thoughts, and emotions. Every one of our parts has a good intention for some aspect of our system, even if what they do becomes unwanted or even destructive. They are trying to help.

That means that all of our parts are welcome, even the ones we don’t like. And IFS can help each of us take care of all of our parts and even heal them when needed, using tools that we already have inside. This last part is key. We all have, inside us, the ability to tend and mend our own internal system. We might need some guidance to awaken that sense and steer the journey, but the energy is all coming from US, not the therapist and not from medicine. That’s a beautiful thing about IFS.

Next post: How did I find IFS?