Internal Family Systems (IFS) has given me so much personally and professionally. Learning that we are all made of many parts—each trying to help—allowed me to accept the inner system and shift the focus from fighting to understanding. Mostly, IFS taught me how to hold Self presence: a calm, compassionate, curious presence with no agenda but to connect. Over the years, I have developed my own way of practicing Internal Family Systems (IFS) called Relational IFS: a person-centered approach to parts work that flows in and out of the IFS protocol based on each client’s needs. In this article, I will describe the parts (no pun intended) of the IFS protocol that I struggled with and how I practice differently.

 

The first step of the IFS protocol is to listen to the client’s story and reflect it back in parts language. Throughout my time in official IFS trainings, this was the step that felt the most unnatural to me. I just wanted to BE with the person, not immediately break everything down into parts language. ChatGPT often does this to me because it knows I practice IFS, and it doesn’t feel good. When I share something personal, I just want to be validated. When we’re told, “So a part of you feels this, and a part of you feels that,” it can feel disruptive—like being dissected instead of being heard.

 

Instead of listening to a client’s story and immediately reflecting back the parts I hear, I simply listen to them as a whole person. I validate: “That makes sense.” Then, if it feels helpful, I might name some parts. Or I might wait for the client’s system to pick a part or show us the direction. When we stop trying to "do" the model and start simply "being" with the person, their system guides us to where we need to go. With enough safety, the system starts unblending on its own.

 

Which brings me to my second point: Another part of IFS trainings that bothered me was the strong emphasis on insight. In IFS language, insight means “going inside” and connecting directly to parts. Every day during the trainings, there was a demo session with one of the participants. Instead of simply being with the person until a clear part emerged, the therapist guided them to go inside early on. In many sessions, it became a balagan: parts jumping in all over the place. If the therapist stayed with the client longer in the beginning, just talking and listening, their system probably would have naturally unblended until a clear part emerged, and the process would have been much smoother.

 

With some of my clients, we stay “on the outside” talking for half the session. The spaciousness often creates enough safety for their system to guide us to “go inside” when they are ready. But I don’t take them there unless their system is asking for it. With some clients, we stay “on the outside” for the whole session, engaging relationally. Much healing can happen here, inside the healing container of Self. For many clients, we weave in and out of insight work and relational engagement based on the needs of the moment. My point is that insight is not “better”—it is ALL healing.

 

The third part of the official IFS protocol that trips practitioners up is the unburdening process. If protectors are extreme because of the pain carried by the exiles underneath, it makes sense that we would want to go to exiles and help them unburden. But the very structure of the protocol can lead practitioners to develop an agenda to reach the exile and move through the healing steps. This agenda can diminish the amount of Self presence available and actually impede healing.

 

A tremendous amount of healing can happen simply by being with the client. Protectors can relax just by being heard. Exiles don’t necessarily need to go through the official unburdening process—a guided imagery practice of releasing painful feelings and beliefs into a natural element. Parts are always present in the background asking, "Am I heard? Do I make sense?" They can heal naturally in a safe, attuned environment that implicitly tells them, "I hear you. You make sense. You are not alone." This might be called a “spontaneous unburdening” in IFS.

 

Overall, unblending from the IFS protocol gives us more Self presence and more flexibility. IFS provides a brilliant framework that can help guide us—without us becoming slaves to the model. When we loosen our grip on the protocol, we create more spaciousness to hold our clients and be guided by their systems. And when we drop any agenda—as one IFS trainer said, “There’s nothing to do here”—the possibilities are endless.