Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy in SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA
IFS Therapy for Profesionals, Business Owners and High-Achieving Adults
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You might be feeling that one element in your life is out of alignment with the rest
You’re successful at work and meeting the wrong partners in friends. Or you know what needs to happen and you might even enjoy your work, you just can’t get yourself to do it. Maybe everything seems to being going great but you’re having anger outbursts or panic attacks. Wanting one thing but doing another, feeling pulled in completely opposite directions, or sabotaging the very things you care about most? The IFS perspective is that you're experiencing the natural tension between different parts of yourself that need understanding, not judgment.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy helps you make sense of these internal conflicts and discover the calm, clarity, and self-compassion that already exist within you.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy helps you make sense of these internal conflicts and discover the calm, clarity, and self-compassion that already exist within you.
What Can IFS Therapy Help You Achieve?
In my practice, I've witnessed clients experience profound transformation across multiple areas of their lives. IFS therapy can help you:
• Finally understand why you end up with the same types of partners or friends even though you are a person who gives your all to others.
• Make sense of the behaviors, thoughts, and emotions that sometimes feel like they are defining you even though they couldn’t be further from how others see you
• Discover the positive intentions behind even your most challenging patterns
• Understand why specific situations trigger intense reactions that seem out of proportion
Gain Deep Self-Understanding
• Unburden yourself from painful childhood memories and experiences that might link to your current behaviors
• Create new, corrective emotional experiences that rewrite old patterns
• Process trauma in a gentle, self-paced way that honors your system's wisdom
Heal Past Wounds and Trauma
• Explore your rich inner world with genuine curiosity instead of harsh criticism
• Befriend the inner critic that's been driving you relentlessly
• Get to truly know and genuinely like yourself, perhaps for the first time
• Build unshakeable trust in your own judgment and intuition
• Significantly reduce the exhausting internal tug-of-war
Transform Your Relationship With Yourself
• Decrease or completely stop self-sabotaging patterns that derail your progress
• Reduce perfectionism that leaves you exhausted and never satisfied
• Break free from people-pleasing that leaves you resentful and depleted
• Address procrastination, self-neglect, irritability, and rage at their roots
• Respond to challenging situations with calm and compassion rather than reactivity
Change Problematic Behaviors
• Deepen intimacy and connection with partners, family, and friends
• Stop the confusing pattern of running hot and cold in relationships
• Communicate from a grounded, authentic place instead of from fear or protection
• Show up more consistently as the person you want to be
Improve Your Relationships
What Is Internal Family Systems Therapy?
Internal Family Systems is a powerful therapeutic approach that recognizes a fundamental truth: we all have different parts. These are aspects of our personality expressed through feelings, thoughts, body sensations, and beliefs.
Think about the last time you told yourself you couldn’t handle something when, if you really thought about it, you’d notice you handled something with even higher stakes already today. You might have noticed one part of you pulling in one direction, another part resisting, and yet another part criticizing you for not having it figured out already. Something that feels like a rush of creativity and drive can end with days of numbing without the ability to pick up and keep going with the same momentum.
They're your internal system trying to protect and guide you, often based on lessons learned long ago. Something that feels like a rush of creativity and drive can end with days of numbing without the ability to pick up and keep going with the same momentum.
Sometimes these parts work in harmony. But often, they're seemingly at odds with one another, creating emotions and behaviors that feel confusing and frustrating.
IFS therapy helps you understand these dynamics, heal the wounded parts creating the conflict, and find the clarity and calm that's been buried beneath the noise.
Think about the last time you told yourself you couldn’t handle something when, if you really thought about it, you’d notice you handled something with even higher stakes already today. You might have noticed one part of you pulling in one direction, another part resisting, and yet another part criticizing you for not having it figured out already. Something that feels like a rush of creativity and drive can end with days of numbing without the ability to pick up and keep going with the same momentum.
They're your internal system trying to protect and guide you, often based on lessons learned long ago. Something that feels like a rush of creativity and drive can end with days of numbing without the ability to pick up and keep going with the same momentum.
Sometimes these parts work in harmony. But often, they're seemingly at odds with one another, creating emotions and behaviors that feel confusing and frustrating.
IFS therapy helps you understand these dynamics, heal the wounded parts creating the conflict, and find the clarity and calm that's been buried beneath the noise.
How Does IFS Therapy Work?
IFS therapy helps you understand and heal the different “parts” of yourself through compassionate curiosity rather than judgment.
Instead of trying to eliminate difficult thoughts or emotions, we get to know them — and understand what they’re protecting.
Instead of trying to eliminate difficult thoughts or emotions, we get to know them — and understand what they’re protecting.
A Compassionate Way to Understand Yourself
Understanding Your Internal Parts
In IFS, we recognize three main types of parts. Each one plays a protective role.
Exiles are vulnerable parts that carry pain from past wounds and difficult experiences. These parts hold intense emotions like shame, fear, sadness, or unworthiness. They often got pushed down or walled off so you could survive difficult situations, but they're still active beneath the surface, waiting to be healed.
01. Exiles
Managers work proactively to prevent exile pain from breaking through. They're the parts that drive perfectionism, people-pleasing, control, overthinking, and other strategies designed to keep you safe from re-experiencing old wounds. Many clients who seek out Lorain Moorehead Therapy and Consultation have manager led systems, which means they focus on having a top notch output, they lean toward perfectionism, and they aim to avoid letting anything or anyone down.
02. Managers
Firefighters react urgently when painful feelings do break through. They focus on putting out the fire of unbearable emotion right now, using strategies like substance use, dissociation, rage, binge-watching, or other behaviors that distract from the pain. They might cut people off with little warning, shut down or comeback with biting remarks or tones that, while at times are humorous or ‘needed to be said’ can also result in shame or divides in relationships.
03. Firefighters
The punchline: no parts are bad.
All parts are trying to help you, even when their methods cause suffering.
When you understand what they're protecting and why, healing becomes possible.
When you understand what they're protecting and why, healing becomes possible.
Learn more: Understanding the Three Types of Parts in IFS Therapy
The Power of Self: Your Internal Healer
The goal isn’t to be perfectly motivated, kind, and enthusiastic at all times, of course, because as we just determined, there are no bad parts and thus no parts that need to be entirely avoided. At your core exists what IFS calls the Self—your essential nature that embodies qualities like clarity, compassion, curiosity, calm, confidence, courage, creativity, and connectedness.
Ideally however, we will strive to spend more and more time in our “Self Energy” At your core exists what IFS calls the Self, your essential nature that embodies qualities like clarity, compassion, curiosity, calm, confidence, courage, creativity, and connectedness. These are the elements that IFS refers to as “The 8 C’s”. Think about a time when with your family, your employees, or even yourself you were able to sit calmly, listen, not feel the least bit agitated, and maybe even arrive at an amazing conclusion. This doesn’t happen all the time right now, but maybe you can think of a time it did. Our goal here is to have more moments like that and fewer that you’re outside of this Self energy.
When you access your Self, you can develop healing relationships with all your parts, even the ones you've been fighting against for years. Your Self provides the wise, compassionate leadership your parts have been waiting for.
Ideally however, we will strive to spend more and more time in our “Self Energy” At your core exists what IFS calls the Self, your essential nature that embodies qualities like clarity, compassion, curiosity, calm, confidence, courage, creativity, and connectedness. These are the elements that IFS refers to as “The 8 C’s”. Think about a time when with your family, your employees, or even yourself you were able to sit calmly, listen, not feel the least bit agitated, and maybe even arrive at an amazing conclusion. This doesn’t happen all the time right now, but maybe you can think of a time it did. Our goal here is to have more moments like that and fewer that you’re outside of this Self energy.
When you access your Self, you can develop healing relationships with all your parts, even the ones you've been fighting against for years. Your Self provides the wise, compassionate leadership your parts have been waiting for.
Learn more: What Is Self in IFS Therapy?
How Healing Happens
Through IFS therapy, we help you:
• Recognize when you're in Self versus when parts have taken over
• Get curious about parts you've been trying to eliminate or control
• Understand what each part is protecting and what it needs
• Unburden exiles from the pain and beliefs they've been carrying
• Help protective parts find new, less extreme roles
• Strengthen your ability to lead from Self in daily life
• Get curious about parts you've been trying to eliminate or control
• Understand what each part is protecting and what it needs
• Unburden exiles from the pain and beliefs they've been carrying
• Help protective parts find new, less extreme roles
• Strengthen your ability to lead from Self in daily life
The healing comes from within you, from your own innate wisdom and compassion. I facilitate the process, but you're the healer.
My Approach to IFS Therapy
I’ve been working with smart, driven, articulate clients long enough to realize that they’ve been able to do many things just by putting their mind to them. They come into therapy having made a lot of connections for themselves and thus, if the solutions were as easy as thinking or acting differently, they’d likely already have been accomplished. That’s why I love approaches like IFS and EMDR (Link EMDR page) for my clients. They speak to the bottom or “old” part of the brain, to adapt things like survival instincts rather than the top or “new” part of the brain to “think” our way out of the current challenge.
My style is gentle and self-directed with lots of call outs to the research that guides us.
Beyond IFS training, I bring EMDR, DBT and the personal experiences of bringing calm curiosity, creativity, compassion and connectedness into my own experiences of running a business for more than a decade.
My style is gentle and self-directed with lots of call outs to the research that guides us.
Beyond IFS training, I bring EMDR, DBT and the personal experiences of bringing calm curiosity, creativity, compassion and connectedness into my own experiences of running a business for more than a decade.
What to Expect: Working Together
In our first session, we'll start in a manner similar to the other appointments you’re used to. Determine origins, family history, getting a holistic perspective on what the elements are and more importantly, where you’d like to go from here. This can take up to two sessions and we can begin to integrate some of the IFS language. I tend to provide a lot of education along the way unless it feels less suited to the work we’re going to be doing.
Your First Session
Learn more: What to Expect in Your First IFS Therapy Session
Ongoing Work
From there, our work becomes an ongoing exploration. Sessions might involve:
• Developing awareness of when you're in Self versus when parts are activated
• Getting to know individual parts: what they feel, what they fear, what they're protecting
• Identifying and healing exiles carrying old wounds
• Helping protective parts find new, less extreme roles
• Building your capacity for Self-leadership in daily life
• Getting to know individual parts: what they feel, what they fear, what they're protecting
• Identifying and healing exiles carrying old wounds
• Helping protective parts find new, less extreme roles
• Building your capacity for Self-leadership in daily life
Session Logistics
Session length:
Frequency:
Format:
Investment:
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How IFS Differs From Other Therapy Approaches
If you've tried traditional talk therapy or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) before, IFS will likely feel quite different.
Rather than trying to change your thoughts or challenge cognitive distortions, IFS invites you to get curious about why those thoughts are there in the first place. We're not trying to eliminate parts or symptoms. We're trying to understand them and heal what they're protecting.
Unlike some trauma therapies that require you to repeatedly revisit painful memories, IFS allows healing to happen at your system's own pace, always with your Self in the lead. The process can be deep and emotional, but it's also surprisingly gentle because we're never forcing parts to do something they're not ready for.
Rather than trying to change your thoughts or challenge cognitive distortions, IFS invites you to get curious about why those thoughts are there in the first place. We're not trying to eliminate parts or symptoms. We're trying to understand them and heal what they're protecting.
Unlike some trauma therapies that require you to repeatedly revisit painful memories, IFS allows healing to happen at your system's own pace, always with your Self in the lead. The process can be deep and emotional, but it's also surprisingly gentle because we're never forcing parts to do something they're not ready for.
Learn more: IFS Therapy vs. CBT: Which Is Right for You?
Learn more: IFS Therapy vs. Traditional Talk Therapy
The Origins of IFS Therapy
Internal Family Systems therapy was developed by Richard Schwartz, Ph.D., in the 1980s. Dr. Schwartz, originally trained as a family therapist, began noticing that his clients seemed to have "inner families": different aspects of personality that related to each other much like members of a family system.
Over decades of clinical work and refinement, IFS has evolved into a comprehensive therapeutic model now recognized as an evidence-based practice for treating trauma and other mental health conditions.
What started as one therapist's clinical observations has become a global movement, with thousands of certified IFS therapists worldwide and growing research supporting its effectiveness for PTSD, depression, anxiety, and various other challenges.
Over decades of clinical work and refinement, IFS has evolved into a comprehensive therapeutic model now recognized as an evidence-based practice for treating trauma and other mental health conditions.
What started as one therapist's clinical observations has become a global movement, with thousands of certified IFS therapists worldwide and growing research supporting its effectiveness for PTSD, depression, anxiety, and various other challenges.
Begin Your Journey Toward Internal Harmony
If you've read this far, whether because someone recommended IFS therapy or you heard about it somewhere, or because you’re looking for a different approach to things you’ve tried in the past, I think that’s exciting.
I’ve completed more than 100 hours in IFS training through the Internal Family Systems Institute including experiential work, which means I’ve done the work that you’re curious about.
I’ve completed more than 100 hours in IFS training through the Internal Family Systems Institute including experiential work, which means I’ve done the work that you’re curious about.
Ready to Explore IFS Therapy?
I invite you to take the next step. [Book your first session] to discuss what you're experiencing and whether IFS might be a good fit for you.
You deserve to spend more time feeling those things that feel good, exciting, and in alignment. The journey begins with curiosity, and you've already taken that first step.
You deserve to spend more time feeling those things that feel good, exciting, and in alignment. The journey begins with curiosity, and you've already taken that first step.
Book your first session →
