Are you ready to unlock your inner resilience, strength, and joy?

Can you relate?

  • You’ve done “all the things” that others have suggested to help you, but nothing has worked the way you want.
  • You’re tired of the same internal monologues that lead to the same dead ends and repeating cycles.
  • You crave freedom from the emotional pain of your past, but doubt that’s possible
  • You want to go deep and finally address issues at their roots.
  • You want to be able to really love yourself, but some days it feels hard to even like who you are.
Man in the woods

IFS Therapy is a Journey Inside, Where Healing and Transformation Begin

IFS therapy begins with the understanding that inside every person there is an internal family of different “parts.” If you’ve ever said something like “There’s a part of me who wants to call off work today and stay home on the couch, but another part who knows how far behind I’d be tomorrow if I did that,” you already get the idea.

Within all of us are parts with different roles, characteristics, ways of feeling and thinking, personalities, and responsibilities. This is a good thing. We need all of our parts. We need parts who manage our time and energy, and who worry about making sure everything gets taken care of. We also need parts who are more child-like, playful, vulnerable, as well as parts who focus on keeping us safe, meeting our needs, and much, much more.

IFS recognizes that all your parts are important and deserve respect, compassion, and to be valued. However, stress and painful life experiences can disrupt the inner harmony of our different parts and create internal conflict. This can lead to parts feeling unimportant, neglected, without a space to show up in your life, unsafe, misunderstood, scapegoated by other parts or people in your life, exhausted, overwhelmed, and more. When parts live this way over time they can become angry, depressed, chronically anxious, and ashamed, and these feelings can become so intense that they take over our day to day experience and become what we feel most of the time.

IFS Therapy is a Journey Inside, Where Healing and Transformation Begin

IFS therapy begins with the understanding that inside every person there is an internal family of different “parts.” If you’ve ever said something like “There’s a part of me who wants to call off work today and stay home on the couch, but another part who knows how far behind I’d be tomorrow if I did that,” you already get the idea.

Within all of us are parts with different roles, characteristics, ways of feeling and thinking, personalities, and responsibilities. This is a good thing. We need all of our parts. We need parts who manage our time and energy, and who worry about making sure everything gets taken care of. We also need parts who are more child-like, playful, vulnerable, as well as parts who focus on keeping us safe, meeting our needs, and much, much more.

IFS recognizes that all your parts are important and deserve respect, compassion, and to be valued. However, stress and painful life experiences can disrupt the inner harmony of our different parts and create internal conflict. This can lead to parts feeling unimportant, neglected, without a space to show up in your life, unsafe, misunderstood, scapegoated by other parts or people in your life, exhausted, overwhelmed, and more. When parts live this way over time they can become angry, depressed, chronically anxious, and ashamed, and these feelings can become so intense that they take over our day to day experience and become what we feel most of the time.

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What to Expect

Laptop on a table by the mountains. Online IFS therapy in Ohio

In your therapy we will address problems by exploring and getting to know what different parts of you think about a situation, what they feel, how they see their role in your life, what they need more of, and what is making things so difficult. From there we support those parts by responding to them compassionately in ways that help relieve the tension or distress of their situation, meet their needs, shift out of confining roles and entrenched conflict with other parts, and heal from any ways they’ve been hurt.

Over the course of  therapy your parts will start to return to a more natural and relaxed inner harmony and balance as they release and find healing for the ways they have been burdened. All of this work is supported from within yourself as we tap into innate capacities in your being for greater awareness and growth, curiosity, compassion, confidence, and more.

IFS recognizes that these capacities and energies are an essential part of every human being, no matter what, so essential that they are the core of your true “Self.” As the different parts of your personality experience connection with this “Self”, powerful change, growth, and healing are not only possible, but become real.

IFS Sessions

In most sessions we will spend some time talking about what is going on in your life, concerns you are having, and places where you are stuck, then we will use these experiences as “trailheads” or starting points to begin our work of focusing internally to address these concerns at their roots. Often we will weave what is going on in the present into issues explored in past sessions to build on previous work.

Much of the time in your therapy sessions will be focused on expanding and deepening your awareness of your internal makeup. Rather than just “talking about” your problems each week we will work together to facilitate growth and healing within yourself so that you begin to experience those problems differently and feel more able to respond to different situations in your life. I will support and guide you in this process at every step. IFS therapy is very intuitive and has a flow that you will begin to get accustomed to as we progress.

IFS Therapy can help you…

Understand your emotions better.

Have greater confidence and clarity as you address challenges in your life.

Feel more calm, and experience greater compassion for yourself and others.

Experience relief as you start to feel less stuck or powerless.

Accept your past while freeing yourself to move forward.

Love who you are.

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Your Questions Answered

Two important differences that set IFS therapy apart from other approaches are the recognition that our individual personalities are composed of multiple distinct “parts” and the reliance on an inner Self that has the capacity to support, care for, and heal the parts of us who have become hurt or stuck in our lives.

Lots of therapies focus on creating change by teaching you to think and feel more rationally, positively, or realistically, so that you can override “irrational” and “unrealistic” thoughts and emotions and find relief. IFS believes it is more helpful to better understand those parts of us who are having these thoughts and feelings, why these are there, where they come from, and then support our parts in finding what they need to relax, heal, or shift out of their distressed state by accessing the resources of Self.

It is common for other therapy approaches to lean heavily on the insights, reflections, and interventions of the therapist. While IFS therapists are active and directive in facilitating the IFS therapy process, we believe that your healing and growth come from within your Self.  We focus on guiding you in your unique healing process, not on generating or repeating our own solutions or suggestions to your problems, because we know that is ultimately not what is needed.

This, of course, can vary widely based on your goals and your unique situation and circumstances. Change and growth can and do often occur within the first several sessions. At the same time, the deepest and most difficult problems or wounds our parts experience may take months or longer to more to fully address and work through. How long you continue in therapy is always your choice.

Frequency of sessions can depend on your situation, needs, and preferences. As a general rule, one hour per week is a good baseline rhythm that can support steady progress. You may find one session every other week can work for your needs as well. I also offer extended 90-minute sessions for individuals who want more time in sessions to go further than a normal 50-55 minute session allows.

IFS was founded by Dr. Richard Schwartz in the 1980s and 90s. Dr. Schwartz was trained in classical family systems therapy and became a leader in that field. His family systems training and perspective helped him recognize that even individual clients would often speak or act as though there was a family of different parts and perspectives within them, and that using this insight in his individual work with clients helped them experience progress that had not been achievable before.

Schwartz writes that he discovered what he calls Self through a process of listening deeply to his clients and observing that while recognizing the different parts of themselves they routinely identified their “True Self” with a state of clarity, calm, curiosity, compassion, creativity, confidence, courage, and connectedness (what he calls the “8 Cs of Self”). Schwartz found these qualities of Self to be present in every person, regardless of their issues or history, and developed IFS therapy as a process for helping people experience these qualities more in support of healing and growth.

Since then, the field of IFS therapy has expanded rapidly and IFS has become an in-demand form of therapy for clients seeking experiences of inner healing and liberation.

I have completed official IFS Institute Level 1 and 2 trainings and have been listed in the IFS Institute’s directory of trained therapists since 2021. I have participated in numerous other IFS based trainings and workshops and enjoy opportunities to continue developing my skills as an IFS therapist. I participate in regular consultation work with a certified IFS consultant. I also have served as a program assistant in Level 1 trainings to help teach the model to other therapists.

I have over a decade of experience as a licensed therapist and during that time have been trained in a wide variety of approaches including cognitive and mindfulness based approaches, emotion-focused therapy, and EMDR. Often the insights and experiences from working with other models can inform my practice of IFS. I use IFS as my main therapy lens in working with my clients because I find it intuitive, powerful, and capable of supporting a deeper and more transformative therapy process for clients.

The IFS Institute is a helpful place to start. The book No Bad Parts by IFS founder Dr. Richard Schwartz is a very good introduction to how IFS principles can help you. There are also a number of educational IFS based podcasts such as “The One Inside” hosted by Tammy Sollenberger.