Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy in Winter Park, Orlando & Online Across Florida
Every part of you makes sense. Even the ones you're at war with.
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Part of you wants to heal. Another part is terrified of what that means.
(You already knew that. This is just permission to listen to it.)
Maybe you found IFS through No Bad Parts, a podcast, or a late-night internet rabbit hole that finally made your inner world make sense. Or maybe you've simply noticed that you don't feel like one consistent person. There's the you who stays calm and capable at work, the you who spirals the second you're alone, the you who snaps at people you love and then drowns in guilt about it, and the you watching all of this unfold, exhausted, wondering which one is real.
IFS would say all of them are real, and none of them is the problem.
Internal Family Systems rests on a simple and honestly pretty radical idea: your mind is naturally made up of parts, and every one of them, including the ones you hate, is trying to protect you. The inner critic who tears you down before anyone else gets the chance. The people-pleaser scanning every room for signs of disappointment. The part that numbs out with your phone for three hours. Each of them took on that job a long time ago, usually when you were young and had no better options available. They aren't broken. If anything, they're loyal to a version of your life that ended years ago.
IFS therapy isn't about silencing these parts, fixing them, or evicting them. It's about finally listening to them with curiosity instead of shame, so they can retire from jobs they've been doing since you were eight.
You're not one thing. You never were.
In session, instead of asking why you keep doing something, we get curious about who. Which part of you is doing it, what that part is afraid would happen if it stopped, and what it's protecting underneath.
That might sound like a clever reframe, but something real changes when you stop treating your anxiety like a malfunction and start relating to it as a scared, hardworking part of you. Defenses soften. Shame loosens its grip. And underneath all that protection, you start to find what IFS calls the Self: the you that is calm, curious, and compassionate. You don't have to build it from scratch. It was there the whole time, buried under the noise.
Because I work somatically, none of this stays purely in your head. Parts show up in the body too, in the chest tightness before you set a boundary or the lump in your throat when you try to say what you need, and we work with all of that. When a part is holding something old and deep, hypnotherapy gives us another gentle way in. In my practice, IFS, somatic work, and hypnotherapy aren't three separate services on a menu. They work together as one approach.
IFS is especially powerful for...
Trauma, including complex and childhood trauma where simply talking about it never seemed to help
People-pleasing, especially the part of you that abandons yourself to keep the peace
A relentless inner critic
Anxiety, perfectionism, and chronic overthinking
Feeling fragmented, "too much," or like you're performing a self instead of living one
Self-sabotage patterns that make no logical sense (they usually make perfect sense to a part)
Grief, identity shifts, and the question of who you are underneath who you had to be
My training & expertise
I completed the IFS Institute's Level 1 training, the foundational program from the organization that developed the model. It's 89.5 hours of experiential learning, which means clinicians don't just study the theory — we practice the model from the inside, doing our own parts work under supervision. I don't think you can genuinely guide someone somewhere you haven't been willing to go yourself, and this training is built on the same belief.
You were never too much. You were carrying too much.
Frequently asked questions about IFS therapy
FAQs
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Internal Family Systems, an evidence-based model of therapy developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz. The "family" isn't your relatives. It refers to the system of parts inside you and how they relate to each other.
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Nope. You don't have to believe you really have parts any more than you believe your dreams are literally happening. It's a framework, and a remarkably effective one with growing research support, especially for trauma. Most skeptics stop caring whether it's literal the first time a lifelong pattern finally makes sense.
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It's one of the most respected trauma modalities in use today, largely because it never forces you to relive anything. Your protective parts set the pace, and we honor that.
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"IFS-informed" usually means a therapist has read about the model or taken a short workshop. Level 1 is the IFS Institute's official foundational training, which involves months of intensive, experiential learning. Both can be valuable, but they aren't the same depth of preparation.
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Yes. IFS translates beautifully to telehealth. In fact, a lot of people find their parts appreciate doing the work from the comfort of their own home. I see clients in person in Winter Park and online anywhere in Florida.
More questions? Check out my FAQs page.