Internal Family Systems

Do You Want To Live A More Balanced And Embodied Life?

Are you struggling with perfectionism or a harsh inner critic?
Does scarcity, the unknown, and fear of losing control make it hard to relax?
Are you prone to people-pleasing, excessive caretaking, and conflict avoidance? Do you feel responsible for keeping others happy?

Deep down, perhaps you want to lead a more balanced and embodied life, but you’re not sure how.

If this is the case, then Internal Family Systems (IFS) may be right for you.

What Is IFS?

IFS is an experiential form of talk therapy that seeks to cultivate a healing relationship between what I call your Higher Self – your eternal, unwoundable, pre-trauma self that is inherently calm, compassionate, and curious – and the unique sub-parts of your personality. Each of these parts holds their own belief systems, body language, and emotional patterns, which are informed by past wounding experiences and unmet needs. These self-parts (commonly abbreviated to “parts”) make up the “family” that’s inside you.

IFS therapy views mental health issues like anxiety and depression as a result of when one or more parts predominate your life or are in conflict with each other about how to best protect you. For instance, a depressed part may protect you from disappointment by ensuring you never get your hopes up. Or, a part of you may rely on self-criticism to motivate change, or perfectionism to achieve success. Or, an older part of you may want to express yourself, but a younger part, who learned early on that it’s not safe to express emotions, may be afraid of rejection.

One overarching goal of IFS therapy is to befriend these parts of you through a healing, experiential dialogue with them that seeks to understand and repair the wounding experiences and limiting belief systems that your parts are stuck in. Befriending them can help you rediscover your true Self as distinct and separate from the parts controlling your life, while at the same time fostering an appreciation for how they’re trying to help you.

This whole process can help you heal their emotional wounds and adapt their outdated protective strategies to today’s circumstances. This leaves you feeling more integrated, whole, and recentered in your Higher Self. Rather than your parts hijacking your nervous system and reacting to past triggers, you can respond to your parts’ feelings and needs with compassion and curiosity, and ultimately be the one who decides your life choices. This is empowering, and deepens your capacity for connection, calm, and joy.

How Does Somatic IFS Work?

Somatic IFS takes a body-based approach to working with different parts of the self. Together, you and I may get curious about the different ways that your body signifies what your parts are saying. For example, we may bring curiosity to how your shoulders get tense and your voice speeds up as you talk about a stressful situation at work or in your relationship.

In studying this bodily pattern, we may discover a vulnerable child part who braced herself for rejection and developed protective strategies of people-pleasing to restore connection. After all, a key concept in somatic therapy is that the body is a doorway to the subconscious. By exploring sensations, postures, patterns of breathing, and other forms of body language, you can unearth forgotten memories and the deeper meanings you’ve created about your life.

In Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Somatic Internal Family Systems, the goal is not merely to understand the different parts of yourself, but to reset the entire nervous system with techniques that help release stored trauma and meet the emotional and physical safety needs of your parts. We may do this by experimenting with mindfulness of sensations and impulses, engaging different gestures and movements, and the expression of words, breathwork, and boundary-setting exercises.

For instance, if you grew up in a home where love and praise was conditional on performance, we may experiment with talking directly to the child part: “Notice what happens when I say these words to this child part: ‘You are loved for who you are, not what you do.’” Or, if you grew up in a household where you felt alone and unsupported, we might experiment by saying, “Notice what happens to this child part when I extend a helping hand to her and say, “I’m here for you.” We may then study how the body yields into the new experience of support and the felt sense of worthiness, releasing tension patterns associated with old self-reliant strategies that protected beliefs of unworthiness. In this way, we not only heal the attachment wounds of your inner child, but help the body realign itself with new beliefs of self and others.

Because of the emphasis on attunement and repair, somatic IFS is a deeply relational and collaborative approach. Throughout the process, I will actively engage with you in different somatic and relational experiments that restore balance and help you heal the parts of yourself that were wounded and overburdened. By bringing a quality of presence that is compassionate, curious, and open to your parts’ vulnerabilities — showing up for them in a way that they needed but never experienced before — we can help you release the burdens they’re holding and negotiate new ways that these parts can support you today.

Why Should I Choose Somatic IFS Over Other Approaches To Therapy?

Conventional talk therapy can be helpful, but it can often lead to rumination about a situation or increase our awareness without spearheading meaningful change. The beauty of somatic IFS is that can help us drop into our bodies, where some of our life’s stories—particularly our earliest ones—may be nonverbal or sensation-based, unable to be told in words, emotions, or even images.

Many of these nonverbal stories, “frozen” in the body and exiled from awareness by protector parts, are just waiting to unfold and be told through sensation and movement. Through a series of somatic interventions that bring attention and movement to the frozen or numb sensations, the story can “thaw,” and the emotional expression and thwarted movements from our past experience can sequence and move freely through the body. The result of this process leads to a calmer, more embodied, and empowered sense of self.

“Drop Into” The Body’s Innate Wisdom

I became interested in somatic therapies like Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Somatic IFS because I experienced conventional talk therapy as too “heady.” It left me in a state of “analysis paralysis” – thinking that lead nowhere! Even the original IFS therapy process of talking to my parts, while helpful, felt too much like a mental exercise. But when I worked with my parts somatically—feeling them in my body, staying with different sensations, experimenting with different movements or words—a lot of the thoughts, feelings, and insights I had emerged more naturally and effortlessly. Instead of thinking about what my parts need – then or now – the answers arose from my body through simple attunement between myself and my therapist.

As a certified Sensorimotor Psychotherapist with training in Somatic IFS, if you’d like to try a more body-based approach to Internal Family Systems that goes deeper than talk therapy, I encourage you to get in touch with me here.