Internal Family Systems therapy seems to work mainly by training one skill: noticing a reactive state, stepping back from it far enough to get curious, and then meeting it with compassion instead of a fight. IFS calls this unblending and Self-leadership. The language of parts is a useful map of experience, not a picture of brain wiring, and the research on IFS itself is promising but still small.

That is the argument of this piece, and it is a narrower claim than the one this page used to make. An earlier version said brain scans had found competing neural networks that correspond to IFS parts. They have not. What does have research behind it is the set of moves IFS asks people to practice: stepping back from a feeling instead of fusing with it, speaking of a reaction as something you have rather than something you are, and treating the critical or frightened side of yourself with curiosity. IFS packages those moves into a structure people remember and can use between sessions. That is a good reason for it to help, and a good reason to be honest about where its evidence ends.

What IFS says the mind is

Richard Schwartz developed IFS in the early 1980s, while he was working as a structural and strategic family therapist. By his own account, clients kept describing their inner lives in terms of “parts,” conflicting voices that argued with one another, and he began tracking the sequences between those parts the way he had tracked the interactions between family members.^1,2 He describes the model as a synthesis of two older ideas, systems thinking and the multiplicity of the mind, and says it brings concepts and methods from the structural, strategic, narrative and Bowenian schools of family therapy to the study of subpersonalities.¹

The IFS Institute’s outline of the model lays out its working assumptions. The mind is naturally subdivided into parts. Every part intends something positive, even when its strategy is destructive. Parts become extreme when they carry “burdens,” extreme beliefs, emotions or fantasies that do not belong to the part’s nature, and they can be helped to put those burdens down. Everyone has a Self that can lead the system.³ The outline also states that experiences affect parts but do not create them; in Schwartz’s account, circumstances force parts that already exist into extreme roles.^1,3 That detail matters, because popular accounts, including the old version of this post, often say trauma creates parts. The model itself does not claim that.

IFS sorts protective parts into two groups. Managers try to keep life under control and pain out of awareness by striving, criticizing, caretaking or keeping people at a distance. Firefighters react after pain breaks through, with whatever puts it out fastest: drinking, bingeing on food or work, cutting, or dissociating. Both protect exiles, the young, hurt parts that carry the shame and fear from earlier experiences.^1,3 The Self is described as a different kind of thing from the parts, with qualities the IFS Institute lists as the “8 Cs”: calm, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, courage, creativity and connectedness.⁴ Our history of Internal Family Systems therapy covers how the model grew from there.

Where the idea of parts comes from

The plural mind was not new in 1980, and Schwartz does not claim it was. He names Freud’s id, ego and superego, the internal objects of object relations theory, the ego states of transactional analysis, the subpersonalities of psychosynthesis and the schemas of cognitive therapy as earlier versions of the same observation. What he claimed as new was attention to how the parts relate to one another.¹

Jung belongs on that list. In “A Review of the Complex Theory,” collected in volume 8 of his Collected Works, he treats complexes as split-off fragments of the psyche that act with a degree of independence, much like small partial personalities. In “The Transcendent Function,” in the same volume, he describes holding a conscious attitude and its unconscious opposite in tension until something new can emerge between them.⁵ IFS’s habit of mediating between polarized protectors has a family resemblance to that idea, and our piece on how post-Jungian therapy became experiential traces where those ideas went. Academic psychology has its own version. Hubert Hermans’s dialogical self theory describes the self as a set of positions that speak to and answer one another, rather than a single narrator.⁶

Two corrections to the old version of this article. It said Schwartz built IFS by combining Fritz Perls’s Gestalt therapy with Jung’s map of the psyche. Schwartz’s own accounts credit family systems therapy instead.^1,2 It also said IFS was drawn from the perennial philosophy. Schwartz writes that he found his way to the Self through what clients reported in session, and that he recognized its overlap with spiritual traditions only later: “I didn’t realize this until years later.”¹ The resemblance is real. The line of descent is not.

The most useful philosophical move in IFS is not metaphysical. It is a stance of interpretive charity toward symptoms: assume the behavior you hate is trying to protect you, and ask what it is protecting you from. Schwartz began working with the positive intentions behind his most difficult clients’ harmful behavior while he was still practicing as a family therapist.² IFS turns that stance inward. Whether the Self is an undamaged core present in everyone, as the IFS Institute puts it, is not something research can settle.⁴ Clinically, the assumption gives a frightened person somewhere to stand.

What the brain science does and does not show

The old version of this article claimed that quantitative EEG and fMRI studies had found competing neural networks with their own goals and memories, matching IFS parts. We could find no such studies. That claim borrowed the authority of neuroscience for something neuroscience has not shown.

What brain research does support is more modest. Michael Gazzaniga’s split-brain research describes the cortex as “a patchwork of specialized processes,” held together in experience partly by a left-hemisphere “interpreter” that builds explanations for what we do and feel.⁷ Vinod Menon’s triple network model proposes that faulty engagement and disengagement among three large-scale brain networks, the default mode, salience and central executive networks, is a common thread across depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and other disorders.⁸ Both lines of work fit the general idea that a unified self is assembled rather than given. Neither shows that a “critic part” or a “seven-year-old exile” is a network you could find on a scan. Brain networks do not have intentions or ages.

Joseph LeDoux’s work offers a better frame. He argues that the circuits that detect and respond to threat are not the same as those that give rise to the conscious feeling of fear.⁹ Applied to IFS, a frightened part is best understood as a recurring, conscious package of sensation, emotion, belief and impulse that a person learns to recognize, built on top of defensive responses that run below awareness. That is a real thing to work with, and it is the level IFS actually works at: experience. Our article on Joseph LeDoux and trauma therapy goes further into why the distinction matters.

The likely mechanism: unblending, then compassion

Schwartz’s own account of how he found the Self shows the mechanism plainly. A client he calls Diane asked her pessimistic inner voice why it kept telling her she was hopeless. It answered that it was keeping her from taking risks and getting hurt. She stayed angry at it until Schwartz realized that another part, one that had long fought the pessimist, was doing the talking. When that angry part agreed to “step back,” he asked how she felt toward the pessimist now. She answered calmly that she was grateful to it and sorry it had to work so hard.¹

Two things happened there, and both have research behind them outside IFS. The first is unblending: stepping out of a state far enough to observe it. Psychologists call the general capacity decentering. Amit Bernstein and colleagues propose that it rests on three processes: meta-awareness, disidentification from internal experience, and reduced reactivity to the content of thoughts.¹⁰ The standard IFS question, “How do you feel toward this part?”, is in effect a check on whether decentering has happened. If the answer is anger or fear, another part is still blended.

The vocabulary helps. Saying “part of me is terrified” puts a sliver of distance between the person and the terror. In a series of laboratory studies, Ethan Kross and colleagues found that people who reflected on a stressful situation using their own name or non-first-person pronouns, rather than “I,” showed less distress and performed better under social stress.¹¹ Naming a feeling may also help on its own. In an fMRI study, labeling the emotion in a picture reduced amygdala responses compared with other ways of processing the same image.¹² Neither line of research tested IFS. They suggest why its language is more than decoration.

The second move is compassion. Once a client is unblended, IFS asks them to get curious about the part: what it does, what it fears would happen if it stopped, how old it thinks the client is. A meta-analysis of 21 randomized trials of compassion-based interventions found moderate effects on self-compassion, depression and anxiety compared with controls, though most of the trials were small.¹³ Emotion-focused therapy’s two-chair work, which descends from Gestalt, uses a similar move with self-critics, and a small pilot with nine clients found less self-criticism and more self-compassion after treatment.¹⁴ Other experiential approaches, such as accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), make a related bet: a felt experience of being understood changes more than an explanation does.

Two limits keep this honest. Whether self-compassion is the active ingredient, rather than a marker that change is happening, is not settled. A meta-analysis of mediation studies in mindfulness programs rated the evidence for self-compassion as a mechanism “preliminary but insufficient.”¹⁵ And the IFS step called unburdening, in which an exile releases what it has carried, is sometimes explained as memory reconsolidation. Richard Lane and colleagues have proposed that change across many therapies comes from reactivating emotional memories and pairing them with new emotional experience.¹⁶ That is a plausible hypothesis. It has not been tested in IFS.

What the research on IFS shows so far

The direct evidence is smaller than the model’s popularity suggests.

• Rheumatoid arthritis, 2013. Seventy-nine patients were randomized to a nine-month IFS-based intervention or to mailed education materials. The IFS group reported less overall pain and better physical function at the end. A year later, gains in self-rated joint pain, self-compassion and depressive symptoms held, while anxiety, self-efficacy and disease activity showed no sustained improvement.¹⁷ Mailed materials are a weak comparison.
• Depression, 2017. Thirty-seven college women were randomized to IFS or to usual treatment with cognitive behavioral or interpersonal therapy. Depressive symptoms fell in both groups, with no significant difference between them.¹⁸
• PTSD after childhood trauma, 2022. Seventeen adults received sixteen 90-minute IFS sessions in an uncontrolled trial. PTSD symptoms, depression and related problems such as dissociation dropped sharply, and self-compassion rose.¹⁹ Without a control group, those effects cannot be credited to IFS alone.
• Online group IFS for PTSD, 2024 and 2026. A 15-person pilot of an online program called PARTS found lower PTSD severity alongside gains in decentering, self-compassion and emotion regulation.²⁰ The randomized trial that followed assigned 60 patients to PARTS or to a matched nature-based stress reduction program. PTSD symptoms fell significantly in both arms, with no difference between them; PARTS participants attended more group sessions and reported higher satisfaction with the group.²¹ A secondary analysis found that a reduced sense of isolation contributed to improvement in both groups.²²

A 2025 scoping review found 27 peer-reviewed IFS studies: 17 case studies, five quasi-experimental studies, three qualitative studies and two randomized trials. It called IFS promising, particularly for chronic pain, depression and PTSD, and described the evidence as limited in scope.²³ The IFS Institute’s own research page is similarly careful. It says depression is the only condition where statistically significant improvement has appeared across multiple pilot randomized trials, and that the risk of harm or adverse events needs to be studied systematically.²⁴ You will still see IFS called evidence-based because SAMHSA’s National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices listed it in 2015. That listing rested on the single rheumatoid arthritis trial, and SAMHSA later disbanded the registry.²⁵ Several of these studies have Schwartz or his co-author Martha Sweezy on the author list, and the PARTS team reports funding from the Foundation for Self Leadership.^17,19,21,22 That is common while a therapy’s research base is young, and worth knowing.

Put together, the pattern fits the thesis. IFS tends to do about as well as the active treatments it has been compared with. That is what you would expect if much of its effect comes from ingredients good therapies share, delivered in a form people find engaging. Across 295 studies, the strength of the therapeutic alliance correlates with outcome at about r = .28, whatever the approach,²⁶ and Bruce Wampold’s review of the common factors concludes that they are important for producing the benefits of psychotherapy.²⁷ None of this is a knock on IFS. A method that teaches decentering and self-compassion while keeping people engaged is doing something worthwhile. It is a reason not to sell IFS as uniquely powerful.

What this looks like in therapy

Who it tends to help

IFS fits people whose distress feels like an argument with themselves: the part that wants to change and the part that sabotages it, an inner critic that sounds like a parent, a drink or a binge that seems to arrive to protect against something else. It is often used for complex and developmental trauma, sometimes alongside approaches such as NARM for developmental trauma. The research so far, all of it small, points most often to depressive symptoms, PTSD symptoms and chronic pain.²³ It is not a substitute for medical care, for medication your prescriber recommends, or for crisis stabilization.

What a session involves

A session usually starts with something concrete, such as the dread that arrives before you open work email. Your therapist helps you find that part as a sensation, image, thought or impulse, and then asks how you feel toward it. If the answer is irritation or fear, that is another part, and you ask it to step back. When some curiosity is available, you ask the first part what it does for you and what it is afraid would happen if it stopped. Protectors are approached first, and their concerns about pace are respected.³ Only with their permission does the work move toward the exile they guard, which is witnessed and, when it is ready, unburdened. Nothing is forced, and a good IFS therapist slows down whenever a protector objects.

Many clients carry parts in the body: a clenched jaw, a collapsed chest, a numbness that arrives on cue. Susan McConnell’s Somatic IFS adds breath, movement and body awareness to the model.²⁸ At Taproot, IFS is sometimes combined with somatic work, Brainspotting or Lifespan Integration. Brainspotting and Lifespan Integration have thinner research behind them than IFS does. The mechanism proposed for Brainspotting, for example, was published as a set of testable hypotheses, not findings.²⁹ We use them as options, not upgrades.

What to watch for

Parts language can be misused. In 2025 a New York Magazine investigation reported allegations from former patients of the Castlewood Treatment Center, a Missouri eating-disorder clinic that advertised IFS expertise, that parts work there helped produce false memories of abuse. Former patients sued the clinic and its co-founder and co-director, Mark Schwartz, who is no relation to Richard Schwartz. Richard Schwartz did work at Castlewood as a consultant and staff trainer.³⁰ The IFS Institute says he joined some patient sessions but never served as a therapist to its clients and was never named in the lawsuits. Its response also says the practices described run contrary to the model and that IFS “does not accept previously unknown, unrealized, or ‘recovered’ memories as fact until corroborated by evidence.”³¹ A 2026 survey of a representative UK sample of 1,507 adults found that client reports of recovering memories of previously unknown abuse during therapy were most associated with primal therapy, IFS and psychodynamic therapy.³² Good practice follows from that. Images and stories that come from an exile are experiences to be witnessed, not proof of what happened, and a therapist should never suggest abuse or push a client toward memories.

Having parts does not mean having multiple personalities. Dissociative identity disorder is a specific condition, and people with severe dissociation need slower, specialized work; our page on dissociation therapy in Hoover describes what that involves.

IFS at Taproot in Hoover and across Alabama

Two of our clinicians are trained in IFS. Sessions run 50 to 80 minutes, at our Hoover office off I-65 at the Riverchase exit or by secure video anywhere in Alabama. We accept Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama for most clinicians and offer an income-based sliding scale. If you are not sure IFS is the right fit, our page on parts-based therapy in Alabama covers the wider family of approaches, including ego-state and Jungian parts work.

If the argument you keep having with yourself sounds familiar, you can read more about IFS therapy in Birmingham and Hoover or contact us to set up a free 15-minute call. We will tell you plainly whether IFS, another approach or a referral makes the most sense.

References

1. Schwartz, R. C. (n.d.). Evolution of the Internal Family Systems model. IFS Institute. https://ifs-institute.com/resources/articles/evolution-internal-family-systems-model-dr-richard-schwartz-ph-d
2. Brenner, E. G., Schwartz, R. C., & Becker, C. (2023). Development of the internal family systems model: Honoring contributions from family systems therapies. Family Process, 62(4), 1290–1306. https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12943
3. IFS Institute. (n.d.-b). The Internal Family Systems model outline. https://ifs-institute.com/resources/articles/internal-family-systems-model-outline
4. IFS Institute. (n.d.-a). About us. https://ifs-institute.com/about-us
5. Jung, C. G. (1969). The structure and dynamics of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.; The collected works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 8). Princeton University Press.
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11. Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304–324. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035173
12. Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
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15. Gu, J., Strauss, C., Bond, R., & Cavanagh, K. (2015). How do mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and mindfulness-based stress reduction improve mental health and wellbeing? A systematic review and meta-analysis of mediation studies. Clinical Psychology Review, 37, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2015.01.006
16. Lane, R. D., Ryan, L., Nadel, L., & Greenberg, L. (2015). Memory reconsolidation, emotional arousal, and the process of change in psychotherapy: New insights from brain science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38, Article e1. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14000041
17. Shadick, N. A., Sowell, N. F., Frits, M. L., Hoffman, S. M., Hartz, S. A., Booth, F. D., Sweezy, M., Rogers, P. R., Dubin, R. L., Atkinson, J. C., Friedman, A. L., Augusto, F., Iannaccone, C. K., Fossel, A. H., Quinn, G., Cui, J., Losina, E., & Schwartz, R. C. (2013). A randomized controlled trial of an internal family systems-based psychotherapeutic intervention on outcomes in rheumatoid arthritis: A proof-of-concept study. The Journal of Rheumatology, 40(11), 1831–1841. https://doi.org/10.3899/jrheum.121465
18. Haddock, S. A., Weiler, L. M., Trump, L. J., & Henry, K. L. (2017). The efficacy of internal family systems therapy in the treatment of depression among female college students: A pilot study. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 43(1), 131–144. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmft.12184
19. Hodgdon, H. B., Anderson, F. G., Southwell, E., Hrubec, W., & Schwartz, R. (2022). Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among survivors of multiple childhood trauma: A pilot effectiveness study. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 31(1), 22–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2021.2013375
20. Comeau, A., Smith, L. J., Smith, L., Soumerai Rea, H., Ward, M. C., Creedon, T. B., Sweezy, M., Rosenberg, L. G., & Schuman-Olivier, Z. (2024). Online group-based internal family systems treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder: Feasibility and acceptability of the program for alleviating and resolving trauma and stress. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 16(Suppl. 3), S636–S640. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0001688
21. Joss, D., Comeau, A., Chevannes, R., Parry, G., Rea, H. S., Barria, J., Bumpus, C., Rector, A., Rajan, A., Rosansky, J., Rice, F. K., Ward, M. C., Tobiasz Veltz, L., Ally, D., Rosenberg, L. G., Sweezy, M., Lovas, D., & Schuman-Olivier, Z. (2026). A randomized controlled trial of an online group-based internal family systems treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder: The Program for Alleviating and Resolving Trauma and Stress (PARTS) study. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0002089
22. Joss, D., Comeau, A., Rea, H. S., Rajan, A., Sweezy, M., & Schuman-Olivier, Z. (2026). The role of reduced sense of isolation in group-format PTSD treatment. Scientific Reports, 16, Article 30077. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-62570-8
23. Buys, M. E. (2025). Exploring the evidence for Internal Family Systems therapy: A scoping review of current research, gaps, and future directions. Clinical Psychologist, 29(3), 241–260. https://doi.org/10.1080/13284207.2025.2533127
24. IFS Institute. (n.d.-c). Research and bibliography. https://ifs-institute.com/resources/research
25. Center for Self Leadership & Foundation for Self Leadership. (2015, November 23). IFS, a practice with emerging evidence. Foundation for Self Leadership. https://foundationifs.org/news-articles/79-ifs-an-evidence-based-practice
26. Flückiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., & Horvath, A. O. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 316–340. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000172
27. Wampold, B. E. (2015). How important are the common factors in psychotherapy? An update. World Psychiatry, 14(3), 270–277. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20238
28. McConnell, S. (2020). Somatic internal family systems therapy: Awareness, breath, resonance, movement and touch in practice. North Atlantic Books.
29. Corrigan, F., & Grand, D. (2013). Brainspotting: Recruiting the midbrain for accessing and healing sensorimotor memories of traumatic activation. Medical Hypotheses, 80(6), 759–766. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2013.03.005
30. Corbett, R. (2025, October 30). The truth about IFS, the therapy that can break you. The Cut. https://www.thecut.com/article/truth-about-ifs-therapy-internal-family-systems-trauma-treatment.html
31. IFS Institute. (2025, November 4). Response to New York Magazine article. https://ifs-institute.com/news-events/news/response-new-york-magazine-article
32. Patihis, L. (2026). Client-reported prevalence of repressed memory recovery in therapy: A representative U.K. sample. Memory. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2026.2714175