Lucas Forstmeyer

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1. Introduction to Internal Family Systems (IFS): A Comprehensive Overview

Last updated on 23 Oct 2025

This article provides a foundational understanding of Internal Family Systems (IFS) theory, exploring its core concepts and offering a clear framework for visualizing how our psyche organizes itself.

What is Internal Family Systems?

Internal Family Systems is simultaneously two things: an approach to psychotherapy and a theory of the psyche. It provides a step-by-step framework that therapists, coaches, and bodyworkers use when working with clients, while also offering a comprehensive theory of how our minds are structured and how both problems and solutions emerge within our psychological system.

Both the therapeutic approach and the underlying theory were developed by Richard Schwartz, who continues to lead the IFS Institute and advance this work. While IFS encompasses practical therapeutic techniques, understanding the theoretical model of the psyche is essential before diving into specific interventions and questions used in practice.

The Multiplicity Paradigm: A Revolutionary Perspective

The most important starting point for understanding IFS is grasping that it operates from a multiplicity paradigm. This means that IFS views the human mind as naturally organized into multiple sub-personalities, which the approach calls "parts."

Rather than seeing healthy humans as having one unified personality that should remain consistent, IFS recognizes that we have different parts that become active or influence us at different times. When different parts are active—or "blended" with us, as IFS terminology describes it—we display different characteristics that belong to these various parts.

Importantly, the multiplicity paradigm wasn't born from philosophical speculation or theoretical abstraction. Instead, it emerged from what Richard Schwartz observed people naturally expressing when he listened to them describe their inner experiences.

The Discovery: Listening to Patients

Richard Schwartz's discovery of parts emerged from his work with eating disorders. Working with patients who had been in serious psychotherapeutic treatment for years but continued struggling with bulimia, anorexia, and other self-harming behaviors including cutting, Schwartz moved beyond his family therapy background to ask patients directly about their inner experiences.

What he found was remarkable: patients naturally described their inner behavior in terms of parts. A client might explain, "Yesterday I had a bad day, and once I got home the cutting part just took over and it cut me, and through that I could feel better. I actually felt the pain, I felt myself again, and that was good for a moment."

But the story didn't end there. The same client might continue: "The problem was, once I was feeling myself again, suddenly another part started criticizing me for being so weak, for falling into the same patterns and problems again, and I started feeling a lot of shame."

Patients consistently described their inner world as populated by different parts that had different influences, that interacted with each other, and that sometimes created reactivity between themselves. Even when one part's action helped with some symptoms—like the cutting part helping someone feel present again—another part might then create its own symptoms through criticism and shame.

Types of Parts: Functional Definitions

By following what he called "the evidence," Richard Schwartz explored these parts more deeply and discovered different types that would show up in patients and connect to their symptoms and problems. Crucially, these aren't rigid categories like "inner child" or "good child" or "bad child." Instead, IFS offers functional definitions—different functions that parts can take on in our psyche.

Protectors and Exiles: The Foundational Distinction

The most fundamental distinction Schwartz discovered was between protectors and exiles.

Protectors are parts actively doing things to protect us and our system. They try to ensure that people like us rather than dislike us, and they work to prevent certain unprocessed emotions from surfacing. Protectors are essentially active parts implementing strategies to prevent specific experiences from happening to us or specific feelings from emerging within us.

Exiles, in contrast, are not actively doing something or trying to protect us. Rather, they are parts stuck somewhere, carrying old burdens—old feelings, beliefs, and experiences from the past that we couldn't digest at the time. These exiles often hold strong emotions or beliefs about ourselves.

This distinction reveals the inherent systemic organization of our inner world: exiles carry unprocessed material, while protectors work hard in various ways to ensure these feelings don't resurface and that situations don't occur in our lives that would make us feel similarly again.

Returning to our earlier example, we can now understand the cutting part as trying to create a certain reaction—cutting can be soothing, can help people feel themselves again, producing what the part views as positive results. The part engages in this behavior to avoid feeling the exile, to prevent experiencing shame, annihilation, or deep sadness that the exile might carry. Similarly, the critical part is trying to protect the system by saying, "This isn't helpful—do something different."

Both parts are attempting to do something helpful for the system. They may have different specific goals, but they share a crucial characteristic that forms a cornerstone of IFS theory: all protectors, no matter how dysfunctional, painful, or extreme their behavior, always have positive intent. They want to prevent bad things from happening to us in real life, or they want to prevent specific emotions and exiled beliefs from surfacing and making us feel bad again.

A Non-Pathologizing and Empowering Perspective

This framework—recognizing that parts carry undigested material from the past while other parts work to protect us from bad outcomes and from these old emotions resurfacing—offers an incredibly non-pathologizing way of viewing what happens in people.

Instead of viewing symptoms as stupid or something to fight against, we can understand behaviors like cutting, eating disorders, overworking, or being excessively nice to people as parts trying to do something positive and helpful for our system. This perspective fundamentally transforms how we view what happens in ourselves and others.

IFS provides not only a non-pathologizing perspective but also an empowering one. By recognizing ourselves as having these different parts, we can suddenly understand our inner world far better than when we simply wonder, "Why am I behaving like this one day and like that another day?"—a question that can be profoundly confusing and challenging to answer. As we'll see in deeper explorations of IFS, this perspective also reveals a clear path of action we can take internally and with clients or patients to facilitate healing.

Two Types of Protectors: Managers and Firefighters

Richard Schwartz discovered that protectors come in two distinct types: managers and firefighters.

Managers are proactive protectors. They try to organize and often control our lives proactively so that bad things don't happen to us and so that old emotions and exiles don't emerge from the depths. By proactively working and controlling—for example, maintaining a very long to-do list and constantly working through it—these parts attempt to ensure we're safe, well-off, and that old emotions stay buried.

Firefighters, on the other hand, are reactive rather than proactive. Firefighters are parts that emerge once certain emotions start coming to the surface, once certain exiles begin rising up. They try to do everything reactively to stop that process. Reactive behaviors might include watching excessive television, numbing out, zoning out, binge eating, excessive exercise, or sex—anything that helps us avoid feeling what's coming up.

In visual terms, managers look outward into life and the world (though they view that world through lenses learned in the past), while firefighters look toward the exiles, ready to react when necessary if the exiles start emerging.

Understanding Symptoms Through Parts

With this perspective—that exiles carry old pain, that protectors (both managers and firefighters) work to prevent bad things from happening and old pain from surfacing—we can begin understanding that the symptoms people display and the dysfunction in their lives, relationships, and inner psyche are caused by parts with positive intent.

These parts might create problematic, symptomatic behavior in our lives because we're still carrying vulnerability in our system. They found ways—often years, even decades ago—of dealing with that charge, that unprocessed material. This is the simple, non-pathologizing way of understanding the problems people experience in their lives.

The Self: A Paradigm-Shifting Discovery

Beyond parts, IFS offers one additional element that proves incredibly helpful, transformative, and truly paradigm-shifting: the Self.

IFS holds the perspective—and practitioners experience—that all humans possess a Self, a spiritual core that isn't merely present somewhere in the background but can be actively present and actively involved when working with someone. The Self is not just another part; it should be an active participant in the therapeutic or coaching process.

Discovering the Self actually surprised Richard Schwartz. He didn't enter this work assuming a self must exist somewhere. Instead, he discovered that when different parts—particularly protectors, but also exiles creating challenges—relax, when they're not taking over the system but instead step aside even slightly, the Self becomes present.

One quote captures this discovery powerfully: "They were all the same person underneath." When the parts step aside, something within us—this spiritual core, the Self that we have and that we are—emerges and changes how we interact, react, and relate to other humans and to our own parts.

This concept of the Self represents a vital element of the IFS perspective and will be explored in much greater depth in further study of this approach.

Conclusion: The Foundation

The entire Internal Family Systems framework rests on these core concepts: we all have many different parts, and we all have one Self. From this foundation, we can explore in greater depth what protectors are and how they work, what exiles are and what we need to know about them, what the Self is and how it functions, and much more.

This multiplicity paradigm, the functional understanding of parts, the recognition of positive intent, and the discovery of the Self together create a comprehensive, compassionate, and practical framework for understanding the human psyche and facilitating genuine healing and transformation.

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Introduction to the IFS Model - Lucas Forstmeyer

Introduction to the IFS Model - Lucas Forstmeyer.pdf