The many parts of you

Internal Family Systems has become one of the most discussed therapy frameworks online, helping people make sense of competing thoughts and emotions

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You contain multitudes (and they need therapy)

When Pixar’s Inside Out opened in 2015, it set a record no one expected: the largest opening weekend in history for an original property (meaning no sequel, no pre-existing IP). Audiences, it turned out, were hungry for a story about the emotional conflicts happening inside a person’s head. But aside from the box office success, the film achieved something even more surprising — popularizing a therapeutic framework called Internal Family Systems, which until then had been the province of specialist mental-health workers.

The basic idea: Just as you have an external family, you have an internal one, a system of parts. These distinct parts of your personality may want contradictory things, even if you’ve only got the one face, the one body.

IFS was developed 40 years ago by Richard Schwartz, a family therapist, after years of treating patients with eating disorders who described themselves as both wanting and not wanting to get well. That paradox — wanting two opposing things at once — turns out not to be pathology, but something more........

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