Internal Family Systems (IFS) + Spiritual Counseling

What is Internal family systems?

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a Parts-Work healing modality with deeply spiritual roots. This experience-based, client-centered therapy recognizes that we contain a multitude of parts that express themselves as voices, thoughts, body sensations/symptoms, feelings/emotions.

These parts are often carrying core beliefs, unconscious patterns and other such burdens that seem to keep us stuck in certain behavioral or attitudinal ruts. 

IFS sees our inner community as a system that operates much like a family in that our parts are in relationship with each other, sometimes in polarizing conflict while at other times working together to “protect” our system from core wounds. 

IFS also believes that each of us is endowed with the inner resourcefulness to heal and transform the burdens + beliefs that our parts carry and that we can repair the relationships between our parts. In IFS language this inner resource is called the Self, and refers to the loving all-embracing presence of awareness itself. Self like the Bodhisattva of Compassion Avalokiteshvara can be in relationship with all of our parts, can help them unburden and discover the freedom and possibility of life without being stuck in a role or belief.

Zen, Meditation and Internal Family Systems (IFS)

As a Zen teacher and long-term meditator I have found the work of IFS to be groundbreaking and a natural compliment to my meditation practice. In meditation we learn to sink below the level of thought, to feel our emotions and feelings as energy. We learn to let thoughts and emotions liberate themselves, by resting back in awareness itself–which is vast, spacious without reference point.

In Zen / meditation practice we can come to know ourselves prior to experience, as vast, pure potential energy. We can see the illusory, ungraspable nature of all experience, and taste the freedom that isn’t dependent on conditions.

Illuminating the Unconscious

Yet, without realizing it, unconscious patterns can continue to drive us. Or perhaps we are aware of certain habits of mind, or long-standing fears that affect our ability to truly be intimate with another human being, or that affect our ability to to bring creativity into our work and daily life. 

Voices or thought patterns like the inner critic, shame, fear of failure, feelings of “not being good enough” or of “doing it wrong”--can linger deep in our psyches waiting to be seen, understood, and freed from that role in our system.

It is possible in a meditation practice to deceive ourselves. Just as it is possible in an IFS practice to deceive ourselves. Meditation and IFS compliment each other because they highlight these two aspects of ourselves. Meditation helps us see how we are vast potential energy, it opens us up to the timeless, the unconditioned–where we are not our thoughts, emotions, body sensations. Where life is whole, and flowing and all is process.

We are Human

IFS reminds us that we are also human. We are relational beings, we are particular. We exist in time, embodied. And while we are open systems we are also individuals with unique talents, gifts and perspectives. IFS highlights the compassion/relational dimension of our being. It gives us a tool for navigating conflict, for liberating fixed beliefs, for getting to know ourselves, and all that we contain.

So often in meditation practice, we fall into a trap of pursuing what we like, and continuing to grind against, ignore, push away or banish what we don’t like. And while the teachings invite us to embrace, to move toward, to include–sometimes the habit energy of resistance and avoidance is just so strong it is almost unconscious. 

With IFS we can make some of those unconscious movements more conscious by focusing on them and seeing what happens–a skilled facilitator can help guide us in staying with parts, in unblending from parts and in noticing when resistance or ignorance steps in. 

Is IFS for you?

This beautiful modality reminds us, there are no bad parts. There is nothing wrong with you. All is workable. All is worthy of your attention.

If you are currently aware of an inner conflict, challenge or fixed belief and would like to explore it, IFS can offer support in this exploration.

If you are a meditator and are interested in getting to know some of the parts of you that habitually come up in meditation or your daily life IFS can be a compatible modality to your meditation.

If you don’t consider yourself a meditator but are spiritually curious and would like to get to know your inner system, IFS is a gentle client-led modality that can aid you in this exploration.

IFS is healing and transformative, if you are willing to stay with it and practice the insights it offers. IFS can help you get to know yourself, including the parts of you that you find unacceptable–in time it can offer your inner system a new way of being. And it transforms you. I notice that through IFS people connect with their inner light, their inner knowing, self-compassion and kindness for others emerges naturally, and many people experience a deepening in their spiritual practice as they come to recognize the Self, and let it lead their lives.

I love using this modality in Spiritual Counseling + Coaching. It compliments my other modalities well, as it is grounded in mindfulness/meditation and works with the unconscious or semi-conscious in thoughts, emotions and body sensations/symptoms (just like dream work and process art). Are you interested in giving IFS a try? Want to learn more?