Our personalities are not one solid thing. Rather, our personalities are a conglomerate of parts. Some of our parts come to be with us when we are young; some may be stuck in certain difficult periods of time, in our lives. Some of our parts work very well together and some fight with one another. When our parts oppose each other, we experience inner turmoil.

I remember many times in my life when, in one moment, I felt confident and positively about myself and the way my life was going and then, in the next moment, experienced a strong wave of anxiousness and self-doubt. I could not understand how things could shift so quickly, within me. This experience began to make sense to me when I was able to understand my feelings as parts of myself that had differing feelings and points of view. Everything in nature can be broken down into smaller sub-parts. Our bodies are an arrangement of different systems (i.e.: digestive, circulatory, respiratory etc.), our systems, in turn, have organs, and our organs are made up of cells. It does not make sense that our personalities would have a different structure than everything else in nature.

The Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of therapy enables people to become aware of the parts of themselves that are being triggered when they experience having their "buttons pushed" or when they are feeling emotionally out of sorts. IFS helps us to work with our parts with compassion and acceptance while at the same time, enabling us to tap into the calmer, more centered space within ourselves. In IFS this space is known as the SELF. Some liken the SELF to the Soul or a portal to the divine. In any case, we know we are tapping into self when we are experiencing one or more of the following qualities: calm, connectedness, confidence, clarity, creativity, compassion, and competence, wisdom, and humor.

Traditional psychotherapy or “talk therapy” has proved to be helpful to many people and can be an important tool in healing emotional and behavioral difficulties. However, sometimes talk can only go so far and is not able to reach the true source of the problem. This is especially true when dealing with longstanding misperceptions, core beliefs, or traumatic experiences that have been held in the body over time. Internal Family Systems Therapy enables us to gently and compassionately access and heal the experiences underlying the symptoms that have brought you here and connect to your truth.