You can understand your patterns and still feel stuck in them.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is an experiential therapy approach that helps you understand the different parts of you that overthink, criticise, push through, withdraw, please, protect or become overwhelmed — and build a different relationship with them.
A way of understanding the inner conflicts that make sense from the inside.
Most of us contain competing impulses. One part wants change while another avoids it. One part wants closeness while another expects to be hurt. One part knows you are capable, while another is relentlessly critical.
IFS treats these responses as meaningful rather than simply defective. The work involves becoming curious about what a protective response is trying to accomplish, understanding what it fears, and creating enough inner space for something different to become possible.
The aim is not to force difficult parts away. It is to understand the role they have been playing so that they no longer have to work quite so hard.
IFS may be useful when you keep meeting the same internal pattern.
Overthinking & anxiety
Your mind keeps scanning, rehearsing, predicting or trying to prevent the next mistake.
Self-criticism
You achieve a lot, but an internal critic keeps moving the standard or attacking you when you fall short.
Relationship patterns
Part of you longs for connection while another becomes angry, guarded, pleasing or distant.
Feeling stuck
You understand where a pattern came from intellectually, but insight has not changed your reaction.
Inner conflict
Different parts of you want incompatible things and decision-making becomes exhausting.
Loss of self
You have spent so long performing, coping or meeting expectations that it is difficult to know what you want.
IFS is part of a broader experiential approach.
I am an NZ-based therapist and IFS practitioner. I use Internal Family Systems alongside Coherence Therapy and other relational and experiential approaches. I am particularly interested in helping people move beyond simply understanding a pattern toward experiencing meaningful change.
Sessions are available online in New Zealand. You can read more about my background, approach, training and current therapy options on my main practice website, Live A Spirited Life.
Individual sessions are 75 minutes. A six-session package is $630 ($105 per session).
Wondering whether IFS is the right fit?
You do not need to know the terminology or arrive with everything worked out. Send me a short note about what you are struggling with and we can decide whether this approach makes sense.