What is IFS therapy good for?

Internal Family Systems, or IFS, is a unique style of therapy, and it’s hard to get a feel for what it is or what it’s good for until you’ve experienced it yourself. Words will never quite capture it. But in my previous post, I gave a basic overview of what IFS is, and in this one, I want to focus on what it’s good for and who might benefit from it.

Starting with a concrete answer to this question, here’s a non-exhaustive list of issues IFS can help with:

• Trauma and PTSD, including the subtler traumas that build from years of difficult experiences rather than a single event
• Anxious and avoidant attachment
• Anxiety, worry, and panic
• Depression
• Shame, guilt, and a harsh inner critic
• Inner conflict and tension
• Addictive patterns and compulsive behaviors
• Relationship struggles
• Grief and loss
• Low self-worth, or a sense that something about you is fundamentally broken

In reality, IFS can effectively treat many common mental health issues, with a few caveats.

Why IFS helps with so many things

Something that makes IFS unique is that it focuses less on managing or overriding symptoms—like anxiety, depression, or PTSD—and more on how those symptoms came to be and what needs to change for them to resolve on their own.

IFS is built on the idea that we all have different parts, each with different needs, emotions, and motivations, and each carrying unique strengths and wounds. For example, someone might notice they pull away the moment a relationship starts to get close. This might be confusing and painful, and might create the very distance they don’t want. But the pulling away is protective. Underneath it might be a younger child self that experienced abandonment a long time ago and came to believe that letting people in is how you end up getting hurt. Rather than overriding the urge to pull away, IFS turns toward this younger part and helps heal the wound it carries. Once that wound is healed, the urge to pull away has nothing left to protect, and is able to resolve on its own.

IFS can help with many common mental health issues because it offers a process for following symptoms back to—and for healing—the underlying wound. IFS is focused on the process of healing rather than the specifics of what’s being healed. And while this process can look completely different from one person to the next, or one session to the next, it’s fundamentally the same process underneath.

What IFS isn’t good for

For all the ground IFS can cover, it isn’t a good fit for everything. There are specifically two categories of exceptions: struggles that don’t come from a past wound, and moments when healing a wound isn’t the top priority.

Not every mental health condition starts with something that happened. Some have more to do with how a person’s brain is wired or how it functions. Conditions like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, OCD, ADHD, and autism generally aren’t the result of a wound waiting to be healed, and in this case, IFS isn’t the right starting point. These issues usually call for medication, skills-based therapy, or some combination of the two.

This doesn’t mean IFS can’t be helpful to people experiencing these conditions. Someone managing OCD, for instance, might do exposure-based therapy first to get the symptoms under control, and then use IFS to work through the emotional weight of living with OCD. The same goes for ADHD and autism, where skills and support tend to come first, and IFS is used as a support.

The second exception is about timing. IFS asks you to turn toward old pain, which can be hard to do if you’re not in a somewhat stable place in life. If someone is in acute crisis—in immediate danger or barely keeping their head above water—the priority is building steady ground. In this case, approaches like DBT, which focus on skills for managing intense emotions and staying safe in the moment, are more suited. Once solid footing is established, then IFS can come in.

IFS is also not always the best fit for dissociative disorders—like dissociative identity disorder (DID). IFS can help here, but these conditions call for a therapist with specialized training and a slow, carefully paced approach that not every therapist has.

You may be a good fit for IFS if:

• You’re interested in doing deep exploratory work, healing wounds, and releasing stories and patterns you’ve picked up from your past.
• You experience inner conflict. For example, if you’ve ever felt like one part of you wants one thing while another wants the opposite, and you’re stuck somewhere in the middle.
• You’ve done therapy before and found that it didn’t quite get you the relief you were looking for. Many people find IFS to be strange at first, but it’s exactly this strangeness that produces results when other therapies haven’t.
• You’re ok taking things slow—especially in the beginning. IFS is highly effective, but it isn’t a quick fix, and the work tends to reward patience more than effort.
• You have enough day-to-day stability to do the work safely. Life doesn’t need to be in perfect order, but if your nervous system is running on overdrive around the clock, it can be hard to find the calm, focused attention needed for IFS.

Curious about IFS?

I provide IFS therapy in person in Seattle’s University District and online throughout Washington. If you’re curious whether IFS might be a good fit for what you’re going through, I offer a free consultation where we can discuss whether IFS might be right for you.