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.
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.
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, Evergreen Counseling. 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.
