Go Inside.

WITH IFS

What is IFS?

Understanding Your Inner Family

Clients at Breathe On With Jo are given the sacred opportunity to delve deep within themselves, where they can courageously explore and lovingly connect with their inner parts. This journey serves as a profound means for healing and cultivating a sense of harmony, guiding individuals towards a path of self-discovery and inner peace.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy by Dr. Richard C. Schwartz is an evidence based approach that sees the mind as a complex system of multiple sub-personalities or "parts." These parts can interact in healthy or dysfunctional patterns. The goal of IFS therapy is to help individuals understand, access, and integrate their parts for a more harmonious internal system. Self-energy, in IFS therapy, refers to the innate healing power within each person. The Self serves as the wise, compassionate, and non-judgmental core, providing guidance to the different parts.

Connecting with Self-energy promotes calm, balance, and harmony. It resolves conflicts and fosters positive relationships. It unlocks inner resources like wisdom, creativity, and empathy.

In IFS therapy, the therapist guides clients to access their Self-energy through self-awareness, compassion, and leadership, promoting healing, integration, growth, and well-being.

Understanding Your Inner Family


You will learn to identify and explore different parts of themselves, such as their roles, behaviours, and emotions. Through this process, they will build relationships with these parts to foster empathy, understanding, and communication. As clients strengthen their connection with each part and their own energy, they can facilitate healing and integration, creating a more harmonious internal system.

  • According to IFS, the undamaged core Self is the essence of who you are. A person's parts can be healed, transformed, and better managed by the Self by achieving three goals of IFS:

    1. Free the parts from their extreme roles

    2. Restore trust in the Self.

    3. Coordinate and harmonize the Self and the parts, so they can work together as a team with the Self in charge

  • There are no ‘bad parts’

    According to the IFS model, parts often play three common roles:

    Exiles: Exiles are parts that hold hurt, fear, or shame from early experiences, and they carry the difficult emotions and memories associated with those experiences. Managers aim to keep exiles contained and hidden from conscious awareness to avoid distress and pain.

    Protectors:

    In order to survive difficult feelings, emotions, and experiences, protective parts develop. There are two types of protectors- Managers and Firefighters; they always have positive intent for us, essentially to keep us safe.

    1. Managers: Managers are protective parts that function to control people’s surroundings and manage emotions and tasks to navigate daily life.

    2. Firefighters: Are protectors that are activated when exiles produce overwhelming, painful, or threatening emotions. Firefighters aim to inhibit those difficult emotions by any means necessary, such as substance use or binge eating, shopping, sex, porn or anything that helps to extinguish difficult emotions.

    IFS also posits that everyone has a core Self, a genuine self, waiting to be accessed. The Self can identify, observe, and help these parts become less extreme, more productive, and coexist effectively.

  • IFS therapy can help with general life stressors like grief, relationship, and career issues, and improve resilience and self-esteem.

    Though it is non-pathologizing (does not reduce a client to their diagnosis), it may treat several mental health issues and conditions.

    Depression

    Anxiety

    Obsessive & compulsive behaviours

    Eating disorder

    Substance use disorders

    Power through self-leadership in achieving an internal balance

    Promotes self-compassion

    Depression symptoms are viewed as normal reactions to stressors or trauma, rather than a diagnosis

    Provides a better understanding of self

    Prepares for emotional difficulty in the future

    Improving phobia, panic, and generalized anxiety disorders and symptoms

    Physical health conditions and symptoms

    Personal resilience/self-concept

    Trauma

    Physical, emotional, or sexual abuse

    Body image issues

  • Self-energy plays a vital role in IFS therapy, as it helps individuals tap into their inherent capacity for healing, growth, and self-understanding.

    The 8 C’s of Self;

    calmness

    clarity

    compassion

    confidence

    connectedness

    courage

    creativity

    curiosity

IFS Intro for KIDS (and ADULTS too:)