IFS stands for ‘Internal Family Systems’. It’s a model of psychotherapy that was developed by Richard Schwartz PhD in America since the 1980s and it has become extremely popular since then.
At the time, Dick Schwartz was working as a real family therapist, ie with parents and children. By then it had been recognised that a family was a system, just like any other structure consisting of separate but related parts. To help an individual member of the family, it was very helpful to keep sight of the family as a whole; a so called ‘problem child’ was very likely just expressing problems fitting into the wider family, perhaps in the context of a troubled relationship between the parents.
Dick Schwartz’s insight was that one could apply the family systems approach to individual psychotherapy clients too. Psychologically, each of us consists of multiple separate but related parts – this is what he called the ‘internal family system’.
When interacting with his clients, he saw that for instance in a bulimic teen there might be a part who wanted to cram themselves with food, another part who tried to control and hide this behaviour and a third who subjected the teen to vicious self-criticism for doing it. The object of their attention was invariably a largely hidden part, often very young and helpless, who might be carrying feelings of intense shame or worthlessness or distress because of trauma they had experienced. Usually this had occurred within their family at an age when the child had not been able to overcome it, and their parents had not been able or available to help them.
Destructive, painful and counterproductive though these behaviours might often seem, the different parts were actually trying to help the individual to hold it together, or they had done so in certain circumstances in the past and not been updated since then. There are therefore ‘no bad parts’ in the IFS point of view, strange though this might seem at first sight.
IFS therapy was born when Schwartz found that he could put these different parts (whom he termed ‘firefighters’, ‘managers’ and ‘exiles’ respectively, vividly describing their behaviour) into relation with each other (‘all parts are welcome’). And, crucially, in relation with the client himself or herself – with the client who was not one of these parts, but prior to all of them – a stable, conscious, capable and self-regulating presence that was always there underneath all of the parts and their problems.
The core being of the individual he called the ‘Self’, and the problems of the parts, their ‘burdens’. The goal of IFS then is to liberate the troubled parts from their burdens (‘unburdening’) in the presence of the loving and secure attachment of the Self (‘Self to part and part to Self relationship’) and to let them find order in that relationship going forward (ie to bring them under ‘Self-leadership’).
These are the aims and the way of working of IFS therapy for individual clients, as practised by a great number of clinicians around the world. The profound results that IFS can achieve, often in a relatively short space of time compared with other therapies, explain its popularity today.
Because we all consist of parts and Self, whether we are on our own or in a relationship of any kind, the same IFS principles can successfully be applied to couples therapy – and, in full circle, to family therapy too. This is because in a social context, as in our own life, we are usually ruled by our parts (‘parts-led’). Dick Schwartz has compared this situation to an orchestra without a conductor. Once Self holds sway, the cacophony of the individual musicians turns into sweet harmony and they can play together, or solo, at the right time and in the right way.