Is IFS Right for Me? How to Tell

What Is IFS Therapy?

Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy is a powerful approach that views the mind as an inner community made up of many different “parts.” These parts often carry distinct feelings, needs, and roles. For example, one part of me may want to go out with friends, while another longs to stay home and recharge. Neither is wrong—each simply reflects a different aspect of your inner landscape.

When parts become burdened with pain or locked into protective roles, we can feel “blended,” as though one part takes over and colors our entire experience. This might show up personally as chronic fatigue, physical tension, irritability, or road rage. In relationships, blended parts may drive impatience or contempt. On a broader scale, blending reveals itself in cultural patterns such as environmental disregard, white fragility, and systemic oppression.

IFS offers profound hope. It teaches us how to gently unblend, turn toward our parts with curiosity, and cultivate a compassionate relationship with each one.

If you’re asking yourself, “Is IFS right for me?”—the signs below may help you recognize whether this model could be exactly what you’ve been seeking.

If You Feel “Stuck” or Overrun by a Part (Blending)

Have you ever reacted in a way that felt bigger than the moment? Maybe you lashed out at a partner, shut down in a meeting, or compulsively scrolled late into the night—even when you didn’t want to. In IFS, these are signs of blending, when a part takes over.

• Managers may overwork, plan obsessively, or push for perfection to prevent pain.
• Firefighters may step in reactively with numbing strategies like drinking, overeating, or binge-watching.
• Exiles carry deep wounds, often hidden away until protectors feel safe enough to let them surface.

IFS doesn’t pathologize these responses. “Psychopathology in IFS is viewed as a behavioral manifestation of activated protective parts.” Instead, it creates a safe space for you to unblend from these parts so you can lead with calm, clarity, and compassion. The consequence is integration and wholeness.

If You Want Growth Beyond Symptom Management

Many therapies focus on reducing symptoms—less anxiety, fewer panic attacks, better sleep. While these goals matter, IFS goes further by aiming for core healing.

As one of our IFS-trained therapists explained:

“In IFS, you can actually get to the root of the pain and bring healing, not just manage it.”

IFS can be transformative if you want:

• To move from coping to healing
  
• To experience more self-leadership and emotional balance
• To expand beyond survival into self-actualization and growth

If You Prefer Compassion Over Self-Criticism

One of the most freeing aspects of IFS is its de-pathologizing lens. Instead of labeling behaviors as “bad” or “weak,” IFS asks: What is this part trying to protect me from?

For many clients, this shift reduces shame and invites compassion. Research shows IFS can reduce anxiety, depression, and negative self-perceptions while increasing openness and curiosity.

As our IFS therapist described:

“IFS allows people to see themselves—and their loved ones—not as broken, but as human.”

Who Benefits Most from IFS?

In addition, research has shown IFS is helpful to highly effective with:

• Complex trauma and PTSD – IFS research has shown it to be a comprehensive treatment model for various trauma experiences, including complex, developmental trauma from childhood, addressing traumatic thoughts, memories, emotions and somatic symptoms from a mindful and compassionate perspective.
  
• Anxiety and depression – studies correlate IFS with decreased ruminations that are associated with depression. As protector parts trust and shift their negative cognitions and reactive behaviors, clients experience authentic hope. Decentering parts increases emotional and mental flexibility and leads to an experience of freedom and wellbeing.  This happens through the IFS processes of unblending and befriending. How does this help? When we decenter those filters that protect us, we become awake and aware of a goodness and hope that has existed all the while, even while parts of us feel hard things. We befriend them these parts with negative perceptions. Then, when they are no longer the center of our identity, and we feel compassion towards them, we become free to flow in a river of awareness with qualities like love, joy and playfulness. So instead of attempting to alter negative thoughts by managing them, IFS techniques foster mindfulness and self-compassion instead. 
• Dissociation – dissociative states or experiences are really just protector parts that have taken on extreme roles to protect the person from feared pain. Often dissociation occurs where there is complex trauma or relationship trauma with significant wounding. IFS works for clients with dissociation because of IFS’s relationally oriented, non-shaming and non-pathologizing approach. 
• Chronic and somatic pain – Several years ago, IFS entered into the evidence-based modality scene from a study with patients with long standing rheumatoid arthritis. The study, by Harvard IFS researcher, Nancy Sowell, showed that IFS could reduce symptoms of pain in both the short and long term. In addition, IFS Lead Trainer, Susan McConnell has developed an extensive curriculum using IFS with the body. These developments, along with the testimonies of clients who have experienced pain reduction or resolution, are extremely hopeful for offering evidence-based, western psychological interventions for these often challenging to treat body conditions. 

In addition, IFS can also help with: 

• OCD and ADHD – IFS Certified Therapist, Melissa Moses, LMFT, in partnership with Hannah Soumerai, IFS Clinical Director for the Program for Alleviating and Resolving Trauma and Stress (PARTS) at Cambridge Health Alliance, where she leads the clinical implementation of groundbreaking research on group-based IFS therapy, are developing integrative approaches using IFS that can gently and effectively support clients with OCD and anxiety. Exposure to behavioral changes for clients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is gentle in IFS and therefore many OCD clients love this approach for facing their fears and compulsions. This is an exciting option for OCD clients who have resisted engaging the Exposure Therapy model.

For clients with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), IFS can help by helping parts with negative self-talk, low self-esteem and perfectionistic traits to consider other strategies. It can be helpful for understanding what is keeping ADHD clients stuck and unable to implement other therapeutic modalities. As well, IFS can be effective in addressing impulsivity. Finally, IFS can help with very common anxiety symptoms in folks with ADHD. 

• Relationship struggles – While IFS has an entire branch dedicated to couples therapy, it is also useful for individuals seeking therapeutic guidance with their relationships. Because IFS is a relational approach, it can be used successfully as the basis for parent coaching and family therapy, as well. IFS masterfully identifies the key players in patterns of conflict and with openness and understanding disarms parts who are stuck in unhealthy dynamics by supporting their needs for connection and safety. 
• Life transitions and grief – IFS has a special capacity for supporting clients with grief and loss issues by cultivating a deep positive regard and presence for parts that feel vulnerable. IFS Lead Trainer and grief and loss expert, Jory Agate, says that the process of “being with” parts is powerfully healing in contrast to a mainstream culture that tends to encourage a stiff upper lip or other coping strategies for ‘getting through’ grief. If you are struggling with grief and loss, IFS may be an excellent modality for supporting your grief process.  

Finally, a powerful choice for people who feel generally stable but want to deepen self-understanding, heal lingering wounds, or grow into their fullest selves. IFS is attractive to clients who want to not only feel better, but want to feel wholeness and wellness. IFS focuses on overwhelming affect and symptoms directly and early in treatment that is not reliant on grounding and stabilization techniques. Instead, it gives clients a recipe for how to bring their own relief in between sessions. One client remarked that since coming for IFS Therapy, there was more space inside to listen and act in healthy ways. This same client had only months before been caught between self-criticism and alcohol addiction. An ingredient to the secret sauce of IFS is that it helps address internal patterns of functioning. It’s like getting an operating system upgrade: once a client learns how to tune in and notice these patterns, they can be acknowledged and responded to in healthy ways when future challenges arise. In this way, we can say that it’s context, not content that matters to IFS healing. 

Who is not a good fit for IFS???
The IFS approach may not be indicated for clients with traumatic brain injury (TBI), those in unsafe living environments (e.g., current domestic violence for example), or for clients who are unable to attend to their internal experience to any degree.

What Clients Experience with IFS

Clients often describe:

• Relief and clarity about long-standing patterns – it’s not uncommon for a client to leave the first few sessions of their IFS therapy in amazement. As clarity unveils, clients feel increased hope and control of no longer being stuck. 
• A shift from self-blame to self-compassion – Do you have an Inner Critic??? Most people have at least one and these well-intentioned protectors can overfunction and keep us locked in shame and doubt. IFS gently partners with these protectors and helps them to see other options and strategies for keeping us safe or protected. 
• Stronger, healthier relationships – IFS is a modality that reaches far beyond the individual, for when we learn how to tap into our own Self-energy, our ability to implement healthy boundaries and enhanced compassion towards ourselves and others follows. 
• Feeling empowered to create inner safety and cultivating healthy interdependence on others – Dick Schwartz’s book, You Are The One YOu’ve Been Waiting For, shares this unique perspective on how tending to our needs first from our Self allows us to either partner more successfully with greater security and understanding, or conversely, to compassionately uncouple when needed.

Therapists also note that IFS feels sustainable: instead of directing every session, they follow the client’s system with curiosity. This makes the process collaborative and empowering.

Is IFS Right for Me?

Group KAP: Shared Healing and Peer Support

Group ketamine therapy offers connection and collective renewal:

• Community: Normalize the need for healing among peers
• Mutual Reflection: Gain insights from others’ journeys
• Professional Resilience: Reaffirm purpose through shared vulnerability

Some therapists find that alternating between individual and group KAP provides the best of both worlds—private, in-depth processing alongside the shared wisdom of a supportive professional community.

You may be ready for IFS if you:

• Feel stuck in survival patterns despite years of effort
• Struggle with an inner critic or constant shame
• Long for healing, not just coping
• Want a therapy that emphasizes compassion, curiosity, and growth

IFS isn’t about being “fixed.” It’s about learning to stay in relationship with yourself, no matter what part is present.

Next Step: Explore If IFS Is Right for You

Not sure if IFS is the right fit? That’s okay. Healing is personal, and the best way to find out is to talk it through.

👉 Book a free 15-minute consultation. Together, we’ll explore whether IFS therapy is the support you’ve been seeking.

Interested in exploring Ketamine Therapy for Therapists?

Contact The Catalyst Center to learn more about our individual and group KAP offerings designed specifically for healing professionals.

Call schedule a free introductory call or contact us.