Internal Family Systems

IFS THERAPY

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a non-pathologizing therapeutic modality for healing the complex, and often challenging feelings and inner experiences that we may all hold. IFS believes that the mind is naturally multiple, offering a gentle, supportive guide for accessing the Inner Healer, or Self. IFS believes that this Self energy within each of us innately knows how to transform and heal the difficult feelings, distorted beliefs and other burdens various parts of us carry, fostering greater calm, clarity and connection, allowing a sense of spaciousness within to unfold.

If you consider your thoughts, emotions, urges, and impulses to be coming from an inner landscape, that's best understood as a kind of internal family, populated by sub-personalities, many of whom are child-like, and are suffering, then it makes more sense to take that next step of comforting and holding these inner selves, rather than just observing and objectifying them.

~Richard Schwartz

IFS allows us to:

· Develop greater conscious awareness of how we've had to cope

· Help burdened parts of ourselves to finally feel seen and heard

· Access “Self” – our compassionate, curious, confident inner leader

· Allow our burdened parts to transform and release what they’ve been carrying

· Begin to experience, or deepen, self-acceptance and self-compassion

· Support our nervous system and dysregulated parts to become more regulated

· Create external and internal solutions to the challenges our parts are carrying

When we develop the capacity to get to know the parts of ourselves that are protecting and managing our inner world of emotions and conflicts, we create the opportunity to help the parts of ourselves that are in pain and free them of their burdening roles to take on roles they desire and possibly originally held. We allow space to gently and respectfully hold curiosity about your inner landscape and inherent inner wisdom of parts and Self.

The IFS modality was developed by Richard C. Schwartz, Ph.D. in the 1980's and has been working tirelessly for decades to bring this powerful model to the world. The IFS Institute offers a number of workshops, resources and training available globally.

Life doesn’t have to be a game of, "Since it’s not nice in here, how do I find things to compensate for that in order to feel a little bit better? That is what everybody is doing. They are trying to find people, places, and things in the outside world that will unfold in a way that makes it more comfortable inside. We use things outside to try to fix what we are experiencing inside. Better to find out why it’s not nice inside to begin with.

-Michael Singer, Living Untethered

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