IFS Therapy in Oakland

All parts of you are welcome.

Want to go beyond traditional talk therapy

and experience deeper healing?

You’ve been to therapy before. It helped at the time. You left with much more self-insight, but self-love is still hard.

Many days, your inner world feels like a courtroom of competing thoughts, feelings, and desires. It’s difficult to get any space from it or find a way through. Luckily, IFS therapy offers a powerful method of addressing these tensions. It can help you work effectively with the conflicts inside and strengthen your relationship with yourself in surprising ways.

I can get behind it so easily because—hands down—it’s made the biggest difference in my own journey of healing and for so many of my clients.

What is IFS?

IFS stands for Internal Family Systems, an evidence-based psychotherapy model developed by Richard Schwartz in the 1980s. It’s been recognized for its effectiveness in treating a variety of mental health concerns, including trauma and PTSD, anxiety, depression, and addictions.  

It sees the mind as naturally multiple—meaning: we have many sub-personalities or parts that make up who we are. As the poet Walt Whitman put it, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”  We often express this concept in everyday speech: “a part of me feels this, but another part of me feels that.” 

You may have parts who hold artistic energy, intellectual capacities, activist zeal, or other naturally valuable qualities. 

But few of us get through life without some kind of wounding or trauma. We usually have parts who carry painful experiences from the past. It’s as if they’re frozen in time with their unmet needs, feelings, and beliefs.

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We also have parts that take on extreme roles to protect the vulnerable ones.

These parts might compel you toward perfectionism, self-criticism, overworking, people pleasing, numbing out, eating or drinking too much. There may be parts who have internalized harmful messages from society about race, gender, the body, sexuality, etc. IFS assumes that all parts of us have a good and healthy intention (even if their strategies produce painful consequences)

Transformational healing occurs as you get to know these parts and help them release the heavy load they’ve been carrying. 

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What’s the driving force behind all this?

Your deepest Self: an inner well of qualities like compassion, curiosity, and calm. It doesn’t matter what you call it—some use terms like wise self, soul, source, or core. It’s not a part, but rather, relates to your parts.

Therapy can help you gain greater access to Self and build the connection between this Self and your parts—inner relationships that last long after therapy ends.

IFS can help to heal the parts themselves who have been using symptoms as protective strategies, which creates lasting change in the system.

What to Expect:

IFS is an experiential approach to therapy that tends to the whole person. 

It looks at cognition and behavior but also includes other essential aspects of your experience and intelligence. In sessions, this will look like: paying attention to your body, your emotions, what’s happening inside in the present moment, and listening internally. IFS invites you to actively engage with internal parts, rather than just talking about them (which is a place some talk therapies can stall out).

I’ve found that IFS has a way of taking you pretty deep pretty quickly. Of course, it takes time to build trust in any therapeutic relationship, and you’re never pressured to go anywhere or any faster than you’re ready for. But, many people have been surprised at what they learned or got to experience even within the first few sessions of trying it out. 

Another plus? You don’t have to be in therapy forever! You can always come back to do targeted exploration. But this model incrementally equips you to work with your own system and make it more of a continuous practice if you want it to be.

IFS Therapy can help you:

  • Relate to all parts of yourself in healthy, new ways

  • Transform old wounds

  • Learn how to practice self-love

  • Become emotionally resilient

  • Free up inner energy for new pursuits

  • Improve your relationships with others

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Find freedom from constant inner battles

and uncover the source of peace.

FAQ

  • Every person’s internal world is different, but certain types of parts tend to show up in many people’s inner systems. 

    Exiles: These are wounded parts of us who hold painful emotions and memories usually from childhood. They carry burdens like shame, fear, or grief and are usually “exiled” from our consciousness most of the time.

    Managers: These parts are proactive protectors. They work hard to prevent the pain of exiled parts getting evoked in our lives. Some examples include an inner critic, people-pleaser, or parts that keep you very busy. 

    Firefighters: These parts are reactive protectors. They jump in when the pain of exiled parts have already been triggered and it feels overwhelming. They put out the emotional “fire.” Common examples include distraction or numbing behaviors (such as binge-watching TV, emotional eating, or substance abuse). 

    These types of parts are connected to each other and sometimes get stuck in cycles that create suffering. There are many moments when we feel completely taken over or “blended” with a part. A particular part might run the show so much of the time that you think “that’s not a part, it’s just me.” From an IFS perspective, it’s true that it is you, but not all of you. The one you’re focusing on can be understood as just a dominant part of you.

    The goal of IFS therapy is not to fight against or get rid of these parts, but to help them heal, find healthier roles in your system, and to trust Self to lead in life.

  • Influenced by the medical model, mental health struggles can often be treated as illness, dysfunctional, or something that’s “wrong” with a person. By contrast, IFS starts with the assumption that all parts of us have a positive intent (even if the impact is negative). I’ve witnessed and personally experienced how radically healing it is to really embody this attitude. It also shifts the focus from simply eradicating symptoms to working at the root level (which more effectively addresses the symptoms anyway).

  • Of course, IFS is not a perfect fit for every situation. It’s not recommended for severe conditions with psychosis or paranoia, such as schizophrenia. It’s not appropriate to use when someone is in an actively unsafe situation or their essential needs are going unmet (like food and shelter). Those things must be addressed first and stabilized. It’s not the best treatment option for someone with a TBI (traumatic brain injury).