Have you ever felt so anxious in a tough situation that you didn’t know what to do next? That’s how Seth Kopald felt during his divorce. He worried that he’d lose connection with his kids.
“How much time will I have with them?” he recalls thinking. Would they be OK, he wondered. One night, as he was driving home, he struggled to catch his breath as panic took over. He pulled over to the side of the road, recognizing he needed help.
His therapist turned him onto an approach he’d never heard of called Internal Family Systems, or IFS, and recommended a book to get him started, written by its founder Richard Schwartz. “It was life-changing,” Kopald says.
At the center of IFS — sometimes called “parts work” — is the idea that each of us has multiple parts, kind of like sub-personalities. Getting to know them and treating them with compassion may help us manage our lives and our stress better, Schwartz writes in his book No Bad Parts.
Schwartz came up with the idea for IFS more than 40 years ago when he was a family therapist treating adolescents with bulimia. His patients told him about different parts of themselves that were interfering with their treatment, like “the critic” who would make them feel worthless and alone.
As the scientist in him mulled this over, he also looked inward. “I noticed them in myself. Oh my God, I’ve got them too,” he recalls.
The premise of the IFS model is that our minds are not one-dimensional. “We’re all multiple,” Schwartz says. We all have multiple perspectives within — for example, people often identify an inner critic, worrier, or striver. And some parts tend to dominate our lives, while others are more hidden. IFS teaches a process to embrace all your parts, bring them into balance and find a sense of wholeness.
Parts work has exploded in popularity recently — with a growing number of books, apps and social media accounts highlighting the system. There are now more than 6,000 IFS-certified therapists and practitioners.
IFS is used by therapists working on a range of issues, from couples therapy, to coping with the death of a loved one, or other traumas.
Some therapists say the popularity has gotten ahead of the evidence base and are calling for more research. There are several small studies showing IFS can benefit people with specific problems, including symptoms of PTSD and stress; the pain, discomfort and depression from living with rheumatoid arthritis; and depression. And more studies are underway.
To learn more ways to manage stress, join NPR’s Stress Less: A quest to reclaim your calm. And get five weekly newsletters full of tips and strategies to manage stress and boost positive emotions: Sign up here.
For Seth Kopald, parts work was key to taming his anxiety, as he began to recognize that it stemmed from fears of feeling unloved in childhood.
With IFS, he could now acknowledge the hurt child within, and begin to unburden from the pain and shame.
“There’s a big difference between, ‘I am the anxiety and fear versus I am here with the fear, I’m here with the anxiety,’” he says. And in that realization his natural state of “confidence, courage and compassion” resurfaced. “It’s almost like I have a new operating system now,” Kopald says.
So, if you’re dealing with stress — around relationships, tragedy, or any life challenge — you may want to learn more about parts work. Here are highlights of how the IFS process works.