Have you ever felt so anxious in a tough situation that you didn’t know what to do next? That’s how Seth Kopald felt during his divorce. He worried that he’d lose connection with his kids. “How much time will I have with them?” he recalls thinking.
Would they be OK, he wondered. One night, as he was driving home, he struggled to catch his breath as panic took over. He pulled over to the side of the road, recognizing he needed help.
His therapist turned him onto an approach he’d never heard of called Internal Family Systems, or IFS, and recommended a book to get him started, written by its founder Richard Schwartz. “It was life-changing,” Kopald says. At the center of IFS — sometimes called “parts work” — is the idea that each of us has multiple parts, kind of like sub-personalities.
Getting to know them and treating them with compassion may help us manage our lives and our stress better, Schwartz writes in his book No Bad Parts . Schwartz came up with the idea for IFS more than 40 years ago when he was a family therapist treating adolescents with bulimia. His patients told him about different parts of themselves that were interfering with their treatment, like “the critic” who would make them feel worthless and alone.
As the scientist in him mulled this over, he also looked inward. “I noticed them in myself. Oh my God, I’ve got them too,” he recalls.
The premise of the IFS model is that our minds are not one-dimensional. “We’re all multip.
