I want to tell you about something that happened in my course of therapy in 2023 and 2024 when my EMDR therapist started weaving IFS into our work together.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
EMDR is an evidence-based psychotherapy that helps the brain reprocess traumatic memories so they no longer trigger the same emotional and physiological distress. It uses bilateral stimulation — typically eye movements — to help the nervous system move stuck trauma from a state of active threat into integrated memory.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Internal Family Systems is an evidence-based therapeutic model developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz. It views the mind as naturally multiple — composed of parts that each carry their own perspectives and feelings. IFS helps you develop a relationship with these parts from a place of curiosity and compassion rather than judgment.
Summary
When Annie’s EMDR therapist began weaving IFS into their work, she discovered something she hadn’t expected: a CEO part who had been running her internal organization since childhood, refusing to take breaks, treating her life like a company to be managed. This essay traces the arc from first hearing about IFS at Esalen at 26 to finally understanding—at 43—what that CEO part was protecting, and what became possible when she finally got to rest.
Table of Contents
When I First Heard About IFS and Parts
It was 2008, and I was 26, working at Esalen Institute as a work scholar (a place I’d go on to live and work at for nearly four years. Also met my husband there). If you haven’t been there, it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth—the home of the Human Potential Movement, 27 acres on the Big Sur coast where since the early 1960s people have been coming to do deep transformative personal growth work. The acres are among the most beautiful in the world with hot springs, organic food, and land that’s truly healing.
Parts Work (IFS)
Parts work, drawn from Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, is the understanding that your psyche is made up of distinct sub-personalities — protectors, managers, exiles — each with their own beliefs, feelings, and strategies. These parts developed to help you survive, and healing involves getting to know them rather than overriding them.
When I arrived in 2007, I felt pretty broken and was heavily decompensating as my childhood trauma started to catch up with me. My service in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan had initiated that decompensation—stories for another time. I’d come to Esalen hoping to put myself back together.
Back in those days, many of the big-name teachers we know today were teaching workshops there, and Richard Schwartz was one of them. He was teaching his framework on Internal Family Systems at the time, and though I wasn’t in his workshops, people would come out of them looking moved, softer, very impacted. I remember watching them walk into the Esalen Lodge where I was a work scholar working in the kitchens.
I never did end up taking a class with him there, only knew of his classes and ran into him several times in the Lodge. He was always so kind—I definitely remember that about him.
IFS was a philosophy I certainly knew about but didn’t study in graduate school, and it wasn’t part of my post-graduate training. But of course, the longer I was a trauma therapist, the more I heard about it—colleagues training in it, the power of it. I started to read about it but hadn’t really immersed myself in the topic.
Finding My Parts in Therapy
In 2023, I went back into my own EMDR therapy to work on new issues that were surfacing for me. I worked with a therapist who was highly trained in both EMDR and IFS. That’s where I really started to get introduced to the concept more deeply.
My stress, anxiety, and quite honestly, workaholism was at its peak when I was running my therapy center. My 3 AM wake-ups had become 2 AM, then 1 AM—full of anxiety about all the work I had to do, worries about keeping the center afloat, all of that. I knew I really needed to get a grip on this anxiety. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t normative. And honestly, it was torpedoing my mental health and my physical health.
That’s why I went into that round of therapy. And in the course of working with that part of me that was very workaholic and very panicked, my therapist started to weave in IFS content to help make sense of what was going on.
The Boardroom Discovery
I won’t go into all the clinical details, but what I ended up discovering was this full boardroom of my own exiles, manager, and firefighter parts. Putting categories and labels to them helped me make sense of certain patterns I had—maladaptive patterns—that I hadn’t really looked at quite so much before.
I was, to use an IFS term, blended with one of my primary manager parts—the workaholic, the one who couldn’t slow down at any cost, believing everything would collapse.
I did really rigorous work with my EMDR-IFS therapist to unblend so many of these parts, to invite dialogue between the firefighters, the exiles, and the managers. To get to know my internal boardroom, so to speak. To cultivate and develop my capital-S Self.
The work was extremely powerful in giving me this very concrete clinical change: more choicefulness around how much I work, the level of anxiety I have when I see numbers dip at the center, or when I feel completely overwhelmed by deadlines and obligations. Doing this work with all my parts helped me have a different relationship to work.
Other tangible impacts were seeing less reactivity among my firefighter parts when my manager parts would fail—when I couldn’t control every scenario, when things, as they always do in a company, go a little bit sideways.
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Relational Trauma
Relational trauma is the psychological injury that results from repeated experiences of feeling unsafe, unseen, or unvalued in significant relationships — particularly early ones. It doesn’t require a single catastrophic event; it accumulates through patterns of emotional neglect, inconsistency, or control in the relationships that were supposed to teach you what love looks like.
Relational Trauma
Relational trauma is the psychological injury that results from repeated experiences of feeling unsafe, unseen, or unvalued in significant relationships — particularly early ones. It doesn’t require a single catastrophic event; it accumulates through patterns of emotional neglect, inconsistency, or control in the relationships that were supposed to teach you what love looks like.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is IFS therapy and how does it work with trauma?
Nervous System Dysregulation
Your nervous system is the body’s threat-detection apparatus. When it’s been shaped by relational trauma, it can get stuck in patterns of hypervigilance (always scanning for danger) or hypoarousal (shutting down to cope). Nervous system dysregulation means your body’s alarm system fires too easily, too often, or not at all — regardless of what your conscious mind knows to be true.
Internal Family Systems therapy works with the different ‘parts’ of the mind—each of which carries its own feelings, beliefs, and protective strategies. In trauma work, IFS is particularly valuable because it doesn’t try to eliminate protective parts but instead helps them trust that the healing work is safe. When combined with somatic approaches like EMDR, IFS can address both the narrative and the physiological dimensions of relational trauma.
What is a ‘CEO part’ in IFS and why won’t she take a break?
The CEO part is a manager part—one of the proactive protectors who runs operations, maintains control, and keeps the system functional. She won’t take a break because her job is never finished: there’s always more to manage, more to optimize, more potential problems to prevent. For women with relational trauma backgrounds, this part often developed early—taking on an organizational role in childhood because the adults in the environment weren’t reliably doing it. She doesn’t know how to stop because stopping never felt safe.
Can EMDR and IFS be used together?
Yes—and this integration is increasingly common in trauma therapy. EMDR addresses the physiological processing of specific traumatic memories, while IFS provides a framework for understanding and relating to the parts of the system that were shaped by those experiences. Together, they can address both the stored somatic trauma and the protective structure that developed around it.
Why did I need to be 43 to understand something that happened when I was 26?
Because understanding trauma often requires both time and the right context. At 26, you may have had the intellectual framework but not the emotional or physiological capacity to integrate it. By 43, with more life experience, more healing work, and—critically—a therapeutic relationship that could hold the complexity, the same material becomes accessible in a different way. This is not a failure of the 26-year-old. It’s the nature of deep healing.
What’s the connection between early relational trauma and the development of controlling inner parts?
When early environments were unpredictable or required a child to manage more than was developmentally appropriate, the mind created organizational structures to maintain safety. A child who had to manage a parent’s emotional state, anticipate conflict, or perform beyond her years often developed highly sophisticated manager parts to handle the complexity. Those parts are brilliant adaptations. They’re also exhausting to live with, and they don’t automatically retire when the childhood environment is behind you.
This is part of our comprehensive guide on this topic. For the full picture, read: When Being Good Isn’t Enough: Overcoming Perfectionism.
DISCLAIMER: The content of this post is for psychoeducational and informational purposes only and does not constitute therapy, clinical advice, or a therapist-client relationship. For full details, please read our Medical Disclaimer. If you are in crisis, please call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line).
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