IFS was developed in the 1980s by Richard Schwartz, a family therapist.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a form of psychotherapy that views each of us as being made up of parts which take on different roles and different tactics to serve us. Some ‘hurt parts’ of us hide away deep in our subconscious to avoid reliving traumas or painful memories. ‘Protector parts’ will try to look after the hurt parts - some of them through proactive management strategies e.g. always trying to control; others through more reactive approaches e.g. anger. Sometimes these parts collaborate, but sometimes their strategies work against one another.
If we take an example of weight loss (I’m using weight loss here as an illustrative point, but we could be talking about any type of desired change) - it may be that we have a hurt part that was made fun of at school due to weight. One protector part might have a strategy to lose weight in order to avoid being made fun of again; whilst another protector part might adopt a strategy of evading weight loss in order to avoid being the centre of attention. Both of these ‘parts’ are acting with noble intentions. They’re both trying to protect us from being hurt. But it’s clear that their opposing strategies can’t be successful at the same time.
In an IFS session you get into conversation with each of the parts, acknowledge them for the role they play, and build a sense of trust that they can step back from that role and we’ll still be ok. Through this process of there is an internal softening and integration that tends to take place over time, allowing for significant shifts in thinking and behaviour.
So much of who we are and how we behave is hidden from our own view. The best estimates from the world of neuroscience suggest that we’re conscious of only about 5% of our cognitive activity. There is a lot of coaching that happens at a very surface, cognitive level, but our most entrenched ways of being are rarely going to be shifted through a surface level approach. IFS is a great way to shine a light into the darkest corners of ourselves and is typically used when people are seeking a deeper level of personal transformation.