E78: A Complete Explanation of Internal Family Systems and How it Can Heal you Mentally and Emotionally

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is like inner child work on steroids. With inner child work, you go into your imagination as the loving, supportive inner parent to help heal the hurt parts of yourself. IFS is similar in that it views your mind as made up of various parts, each with its own unique thoughts, emotions, and roles. But it’s more structured—like a whole blueprint of your inner world. It all revolves around three main parts: your conscious self, your protector parts, and your vulnerable parts. Your conscious self is the calm, compassionate, wise part of you that feels curious and caring toward your pain. There’s only one of these, and it’s kind of like the inner parent in inner child work. Then there are your protector parts, which have all sorts of creative ways of shielding you from pain, fear, shame, or anything uncomfortable. Finally, there are your vulnerable parts—often the wounded, tender parts of you that have been hurt by negative experiences.

The whole point of IFS is to help you understand these different parts, heal through them, and move toward feeling more whole and emotionally balanced. The reason it works so well is that it addresses the real system that exists inside you. You might wonder why these parts exist at all. Basically, when you go through something painful or traumatic as a kid and don’t have the tools to process it, your mind creates parts to help you cope. Some parts might take on the role of protecting you from emotional pain by making you procrastinate, overthink, avoid relationships, or even drive you toward addictive behaviors. These protector parts mean well, but they often end up creating more problems than they solve. And all of this is happening on a mostly unconscious level, but it can have a massive impact on your life, your emotions, and your relationships.

What IFS helps you do is reconnect with your conscious self so you can approach all your parts with curiosity and compassion. For me, the first time I consciously turned toward my pain with kindness was life-changing. It was like I finally had access to this deeper, wiser part of myself that could gently guide me through healing. The wild thing is, these parts of us often live in specific areas of our bodies or affect us physically, like causing stomach pain or brain fog. When you learn how to recognize, understand, and heal these parts, your whole system starts to work better. It’s powerful stuff because instead of fighting against yourself or trying to shut down uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, you’re learning to work with all the parts of you. And that’s where real healing happens.

Listen to the podcast episode on "The Aware Mind" on any podcast app. This episode was published 3/11/25.