While Focusing offers a potent organic approach to somatic partswork, Internal Family Systems (IFS) provides a powerful framework that identifies certain kinds of parts: managers, firefighters, exiles.

As its name attests, IFS stems from “family systems” therapy that works with parts’ habits of deflecting, collapsing, attacking, hiding—slipping into whatever reactive patterns we have used to cope with hurt. A great strength of IFS is in how it maps our parts (patterns), identifying systemic tangles, and resolving the often paralyzing and constricting conflicts between them.

In IFS, parts are more like frozen forms that emerge in the river when triggered by conditions; they don’t completely melt back into the river but are freed to shift their energy into healthy and helpful functions.

Synonymous with the “Focusing attitude,” or “therapeutic presence” in EMDR (and counseling more broadly), IFS relies on what it calls “Self/Self energy”—compassionate, curious, calming connectedness that is big enough to hold, hear, and help the parts let go of their burdens. 

As with other modalities, such as Family Constellations, that work with awareness of epigenetics and interpersonal neurobiology, IFS includes formalized steps for unburdening from intergenerational traumas that confine and contract our lives. (And it should be said that these recent approaches for releasing inherited pain are long preceded by venerable indigenous traditions.)

Somatic IFS, like Focusing and somatic EMDR, includes practices of embodied awareness and resonance, breath, movement and touch that make the work transformative.