Anxiety can feel like a constant buzz in your body and mind. Your thoughts race. Your chest tightens. You feel on edge, even when nothing obvious is wrong. Finding calm feels impossible.
While traditional therapy approaches like cognitive therapy focus on challenging your anxious thoughts (i.e., fighting against them), more modern approaches instead explore the function of your thoughts (i.e., working with them).
Internal Family Systems, or IFS therapy, offers a compassion-forward and root-cause-focused way to understand and calm your anxiety. I’m going to share an overview of the model and how It can support anxiety in a different way than you may have experienced in therapy.
What Is Internal Family Systems?
IFS views the mind as made up of different “parts.” Rather than our Self being unilateral, it contains multiple. For instance, you might have a part of you that wants to leave your relationship because you can see it’s not working, but a part that fears being alone and decides to stay. You might have a part that loves adventure and meeting new people, and another part that craves security and predictability.
You also might notice parts that do not work well with one another, which results in internal stress for you. For example, you might have a part that worries constantly. Yet, another part might try to push those feelings away, creating internal conflict. These parts create an “Internal Family” with dynamics similar to the ones that play out in an external family system.
However, there’s no need to fight these parts. Each one developed for a reason. There are No Bad Parts, only parts that, for one reason or another, developed into extreme, ineffective roles. Yet, each one is trying to help, in the only way they know how, even if it doesn’t feel that way.
So, instead of working to challenge, silence, or otherwise fight against anxious thoughts, IFS invites you to get curious:
- What is this part afraid will happen?
- What is it trying to protect you from?
- What would happen if this voice in your mind quieted? What could go wrong?
IFS Therapy For Anxiety
What Is Anxiety?
Anxiety usually comes from protective parts. They show up to keep you safe from pain, shame, or failure- because at some point, in some experience in your life, you needed them to. Yet, over time, they can become overactive. That’s when anxiety takes over and feels all-consuming in your body.
For example, perhaps when you were a child in school you had to give a presentation and you were humiliated by your peers. Experiences such as humiliation can overwhelm the nervous system, representing shame and not belonging in a peer group.
As a result, as an adult you become crippled with anxiety whenever you have to lead a meeting a work, despite having years of experience and success in your career. This anxious part may not yet trust that you are able to lead on your own and take over to warn you of the possibility of humiliation that occurred when you were young.
Anxiety and Internal Family Systems
In IFS Therapy for Anxiety, we slow things down. You learn to notice the anxious part without becoming all-consumed by it. You actually learn to realize that this is just a part of your experience- not who you are.
You might say, “A part of me feels anxious,” instead of “I am anxious.” From there, you become curious about this part. why is it nervous and what is it afraid of? What experiences in your life taught the part that it had to be this way?
With practice, you build understanding and discover the function of the parts of you. With the support of an IFS therapist, you learn to transform those parts so that you can redirect the energy in ways that are more supportive of your current situation.
If you are interested in working with a therapist to get to know your own parts, reach out to our practice to inquire about availability.
Why This Approach Matters
While some therapeutic models try to “get rid of” anxiety, this approach actually misses the mark by skipping over exploration of why the anxiety exists in the first place.
On an intrapsychic level, this is similar to someone telling you not to be sad when they see you crying (traditional therapy models) instead of turning toward you, asking what you are sad about, and offering you comfort (IFS therapy).
From this frame of thought, you can see your anxiety as a part that’s doing its best. Instead of fighting it, you create a relationship with it. This relationship gives you the ability to regulate these charged emotions inside of you so that you become less consumed by them.
So, IFS doesn’t offer a quick fix. But it gives you a deeper way to work with anxiety. One that builds deep self-trust and compassion instead of quick-fixes or coping skills.
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