IFS believes the mind is made up of multiple parts, and underlying these parts is our core or true Self, which can't be harmed and knows how to heal. Like members of a family, inner parts can take on extreme roles or subpersonalities. Each individual part has its own perspective, interests, memories, and viewpoint. A core tenet of IFS is that every part has a positive intent for the person, even if its actions are counterproductive and/or cause dysfunction. This means that there is never any reason to fight with, coerce, or try to eliminate a part; the IFS method promotes internal connection and harmony. IFS focuses on healing the wounded parts and restoring mental balance by resolving inner conflicts and connecting to our Self. Practitioners first help people access their Self and, from there, understand and heal different parts of themselves. There are three distinct types of parts in the IFS model:
Exiles carry emotional memories from childhood, often caused by trauma. They can become isolated from the system when protecting an individual from feeling pain, terror, fear, and so on. Managers and Firefighters try to exile these parts from consciousness in order to prevent the pain from coming to the surface.
Managers take on preemptive protective roles. They handle the way a person interacts with the external world to protect them from being hurt by others and try to prevent painful or traumatic feelings and experiences from flooding a person's awareness.
Firefighters emerge when Exiles break out and demand attention. These parts work to distract a person's attention from the hurt or shame experienced by the Exile, leading them to engage in impulsive behaviors like overeating, drug use, violence, or having inappropriate sex. They can also distract from the pain by causing a person to focus excessively on more subtle activities such as overworking or over-medicating.
IFS also sees people as being whole, underneath this collection of parts. Everyone has a true self or spiritual center, known as the Self to distinguish it from the parts. Even people whose experience is dominated by parts have access to this Self and its healing qualities of curiosity, connectedness, compassion, and calmness. IFS sees the therapist's job as helping the client to disentangle themselves from their parts and access the Self, which can then connect with each part and heal it, so that the parts can let go of their destructive roles and enter into a harmonious collaboration, led by the Self. IFS explicitly recognizes the spiritual nature of the Self, allowing the model to be helpful in spiritual development as well as psychological healing.
The internal system
IFS focuses on the relationships between parts and between the Self. The goal of IFS is to have a cooperative and trusting relationship between the Self and each part. There are three primary types of relationships between parts: protection, polarization, and alliance. Protection is provided by managers and firefighters, intended to spare exiles from harm and to protect the person from the pain of exiles. Polarization occurs between two parts when they are battling each other to determine how a person feels or behaves in a certain situation. Each part believes that it must act as it does in order to counter the extreme behavior of the other part. IFS has a method for working with polarized parts. Alliance is formed between two parts if they are working together to accomplish the same aim.
IFS method
IFS practitioners report a well-defined therapeutic method for individual therapy based on the following principles. In this description, the term "protector" refers to either a manager or firefighter.
Parts in extreme roles carry "burdens," which are painful emotions or negative beliefs that they have taken on as a result of harmful experiences in the past, often in childhood. These burdens are not intrinsic to the part and therefore they can be released or "unburdened" through IFS. This allows the part to assume its natural healthy role.
The client's Self is the agent of psychological healing. The therapist helps the client to access and remain in Self and provides guidance in the therapy process.
Protectors can't usually let go of their protective roles and transform until the exiles they are protecting have been unburdened.
There is no attempt to work with any exile until the client has obtained permission from any protectors who are protecting that exile. This makes the method relatively safe, even in working with traumatized parts.
The Self is the natural leader of the internal system. However, because of harmful incidents or relationships in the past, protectors have stepped in to protect the system and taken over for the Self. One protector after another is activated and takes over the system causing dysfunctional behavior. These protectors are also frequently in conflict with each other, resulting in internal chaos or stagnation. The goal of IFS is for the protectors to come to trust the Self so they will allow it to lead the system and create internal harmony under its guidance.
The IFS method involves first helping the client to access Self. Then the Self gets to know a protector, discovers its positive intent, and develops a trusting relationship with it. With the protector's permission, the client accesses the exile it is protecting and discovers the childhood incident or relationship that is the source of the burden it is carrying. The exile is retrieved from being stuck in that past situation and helped to release its burdens. Then the protector can also let go of its protective role and assume a healthy one.
Applications
IFS proponents claim to have a "complete" form of individual therapy that is used for the full range of human development, from the healing of trauma to personal and spiritual growth. It has also been applied in the following areas:
Trauma
IFS has been shown in multiple studies to be effective in the treatment of trauma. Richard Schwartz developed IFS while working with a population that had experienced considerable trauma, and IFS has evoked much interest among trauma therapists. In working with a traumatized exile, the client learns to reside in Self and witness the exile's traumatic memory without being flooded by it. In this way the memory is revisited and processed so it can be healed without the danger of retraumatization.
Couples therapy
IFS proponents claim to have successfully applied the method to couples therapy, investigating the interactions between the parts of the two people and how a part in one person can activate extreme parts in the other. The method incorporates short pieces of individual therapy in a couples session along with work on communicating from Self.
Self-help and peer counseling
Because the Self is the agent of transformation in IFS, it naturally lends itself to self-help. The IFS method has been taught in classes on self-therapy and peer counseling for the general public.
Inner critic
and Bonnie Weiss have applied IFS to working with the inner critic, showing how this difficult part is really an IFS protector that one can connect with and transform.
Criticisms
Some IFS proponents acknowledge that although this psychotherapy model can be effective, there are drawbacks and limitations. Dr. Alexander Hsieh points out that the method of self-discovery can take extensive time and effort, which can be multiplied when dealing with multiple family members. Deacon and Davis say that working with one's parts, "can be emotional and anxiety-provoking for clients," and that IFS may not work well with delusional, paranoid, or schizophrenic clients who may not be grounded in reality and therefore misuse the idea of "parts."
