Resources
Things we actually use.
Everything here has been used by at least one of us, and each entry says something specific about why, including where we think a thing is overrated or has limitations. Where we haven't read it, we've left it out rather than padding the list. Want the ninety-second orientation first? Read What is IFS?. Ready for one-to-one? Sessions.
Free download · 13 pages
Mapping the past: a path to moving forward
A guided process for noticing where you are, how you got here, and where you'd like to move next — done with your parts rather than over their objections. We wrote it for a year-end, and the dark-evenings framing is still in there, but nothing about it needs January. It works whenever something is turning over.
No email required. It's a PDF; take it.
If you are starting from zero
The shortest path in
You don't need to read a guide or a book before your first session. Having an idea of the map can help explore the territory, and on the other hand can at times create pressure to get somewhere your system isn’t ready for. How you imagine helping your system can at times be very different to what your system needs to feel lighter.
In rough order of effort:
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Our quick intro to the model, with "in 60 seconds", "in 90 seconds", and "in 5 minutes" glimpses. Not authoritative. It would be strange for us not to link to it.
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Around sixty terms, cross-linked, with our disagreements marked as disagreements. Built because we kept spending a paragraph explaining 'unblending' in every article. Start at Parts, Protectors, Self.
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The flattest, least excited summary of the model on the open web, which is exactly what makes it useful. Parts, Self, protectors, exiles, in about four hundred words, written by people with no stake in whether you like it. Read this before anything by anyone who trains practitioners.
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Better than you'd expect, and the only overview that puts the model's intellectual debts and its criticisms on the same page as the description. If you want the shape of the thing plus a sense of what's contested, twenty minutes here beats a chapter of most books.
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Every few months, online, no keynote speakers, programme made on the day by whoever turns up. Cheaper and considerably faster than reading, if you can stand meeting people.
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Additional resources
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We list it because it's the source of truth on vocabulary, not because it's a good read. It's the model's owner describing the model, with all that implies: warm, confident, and never once uncertain. Use it to check what a term officially means. Don't use it to decide whether IFS is for you.
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Written for people who want to try it rather than for clinicians who want to bill for it. Plain, short, and produced by a group that runs free sessions twice a week — so the page and the practice are the same thing, which we like.
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Books
Get them where you usually buy or borrow them. Where a book is free to read on the web, we link that.
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No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz
The popular introduction, by the person who built the model. Warm, readable, a bit evangelical in places. If you read one book, this could be it ("You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For" from Richard Schwartz is the other, but older and without meditations/exercises). If the tone grates, that's not you, and the model is still worth having. We heard from clients and friends that the audiobook version is really helpful.
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Self-Therapy by Jay Earley
A very practical one. Trying to be more like a manual than a manifesto, with exercises that one can use to work alone, even touching work on exiles that most books warn you to never try at home.
The exercises are the reason to read it; the prose can be a bit of a slog and at least one of us bounced off it hard.
If you want to work with someone
Finding the right practitioner
We'd rather you found the right person than defaulted to us. Some guidance on looking:
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Questions worth asking anyone
What level of training have you completed, and with whom? Do you work in pure IFS or do you mix? What happens if I need something you don't offer? Anyone good will answer all three without getting defensive. Evasiveness on the first one is the signal.
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Pau is a Certified L3 IFS Practitioner, working in English (and Polish if you ask nicely.) Alex has completed Level 2 and works as an IFS-informed coach and facilitator, in English and Italian. Neither of us is a licensed psychotherapist; what that means is set out on the sessions page along with what it costs. If we sound like a fit, book a session.
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The official one. Filterable by level and location. Everyone listed has actually done the training, which is more than can be said for the open web.
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Founded by Derek Scott and still running, a hundred-plus practitioners, many trained through his programme rather than the Institute. Different route, comparable people.
Yes, you can do a lot of this alone
Self-practice
Most practitioner sites are quiet about this, for reasons you can probably guess. Our view: a great deal of parts work is genuinely doable on your own, and being able to sit with your own system is the point, not a consolation prize. There's one real limit, below.
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Mindmapping crossed with parts mapping. Put the situation in the middle of a page and write down whatever speaks up, without arguing with any of it. Our most-used solo technique, and the one that survives contact with a bad week.
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When something bad happens, write it down with the date and what you expect to follow. Set two reminders, weeks and months out, then read it back. Accumulates evidence about your own forecasting. Humbling.
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Say the nice sentence, then pay attention to whatever objects. The snort, the eyebrow, the sudden tiredness. Those are the trailheads and they are the good part.
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How a large share of people first properly learned IFS, including one of us. Derek died in 2024; the channel remains and remains excellent. Unfussy demonstrations of what the work looks like when it's going well.
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The limit of doing it alone
It's very hard to notice when you're blended. And the parts most likely to volunteer to run your solo practice are managers who like checklists and want to fix you — those aren't Self. That specific blind spot is what another person is for, in addition to other things.
If you're in acute crisis, none of the practices above are to answer that. We suggest that you get a different kind of support, and soon. Go to your local emergency service, or find a crisis line near you. More on who this work doesn't suit is on What is IFS?.
The papers themselves
The evidence — the sources
Our position on the research lives on What is IFS?, so we won't repeat it here. These are the three documents that position rests on. Read them and form your own.
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The whole literature as of 2025, counted: twenty-seven peer-reviewed studies, of which seventeen were case studies and two were randomised controlled trials. Signals reported for chronic pain, depression and PTSD; the review itself says more research is needed.
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In 2026 a Harvard-affiliated team published the first RCT of PARTS, a sixteen-week group programme derived from IFS, for PTSD. One trial, not yet replicated.
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The most substantial published critique: that IFS spread through social media and self-diagnosis faster than through evidence, and that separating your experience into named parts can go badly for some people. Read it alongside the two above.
Our own method, written up in full
Align Your Life
The process we use for work that points outward — a stuck decision, a career, a life that doesn't fit. It borrows the OODA loop from somewhere unexpected, and combines IFS with design thinking, Focusing and mindfulness. All free to read, in order.
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Aligned to what, exactly? The honest answer is that you find out by doing it. Sets up the loop — observe, orient, decide, act — and the posture-and-bones analogy for why you can feel misalignment long before you can name it.
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Deciding and acting, which is where the parts turn up with opinions. Contains the standard we still use for any real decision: some supporters and no vetoes.
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The same method at the scale of a year rather than a week. Pairs with the Mapping the past workbook above.
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The four movements of a year-turn review, and what each is actually for. Shortest of the set.
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Doing it with someone rather than alone, which mostly helps because it's very hard to notice when you're blended. Mostly Alex's corner.
For commutes and washing up
Podcasts
Two we return to, and one caveat about the genre.
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Aisha Shabazz and guests, mostly practitioner-facing. The most consistently substantial IFS podcast, and unusually willing to sit with the awkward parts of the model rather than smoothing them.
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The One Inside by Tammy Sollenberger
Shorter, gentler, closer to the ground. Good for hearing ordinary people describe their own systems, which is oddly harder to find than expert commentary.
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A caveat about IFS media generally
The genre skews toward transformation stories, because those are the ones worth recording. Real sessions contain a lot more waiting, and a lot more of nothing much happening, than a podcast can afford to include. If your own practice feels less cinematic than what you're listening to, that's the format, not you.
Free, peer-run, not ours
Initiatives we like
People giving this away for nothing — practice groups, recovery meetings, directories, newsletters, one very large free guide. We think this is the most interesting thing happening in IFS and the least visible from the official sites. Times, links and opening hours move; check before turning up.
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Free, confidential online meetings for people healing from trauma and addiction, grown out of PATH and openly modelled on twelve-step structure — their Ten Statements are worth reading whatever you think of the lineage. Also runs affinity groups, including a queer one.
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Levi's public notebook on trauma recovery, four years in and still edited almost daily — a choose-your-own-adventure wiki where IFS now sits alongside CPTSD, anxiety, ADHD, OCD and Aletheia, which they also trained in. It began much more IFS-centred than it is now, and the parts-work material is still one of the more thorough free treatments anywhere: the terms, the six Fs, meditations, and a long list of one-line keys that are worth reading on their own. Written by someone who got tired of being sold healing, which is why there is no paywall and no upsell. IFS-informed rather than Institute-trained, and plain about the difference on the page.
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Free seventy-five-minute practice sessions on Wednesdays and Sundays, open to anyone, running for years now. Clear about what it isn't: not therapy, no diagnosis, no promotion during sessions. They also keep a video channel explaining what happens in the practice groups, plus workshop material — more about doing this in a group than one-to-one.
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IFS-based recovery meetings for people struggling with addiction and what's underneath it, worldwide, facilitated by trained and IFS-informed volunteers.
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A maintained list of free online IFS groups — demos, study groups, case consults, meditations. The most efficient way to find out what's actually running this month without joining six mailing lists.
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Ash Chudgar's newsletter on multiplicity and community, which is where we send people who find the IFS world a bit airless. Their write-up of what nine peer-group organisers had learned is the single most useful document about group parts work we've found — not least because its headline finding is that purely leaderless peer practice doesn't work, which was not the answer they wanted.
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Sid Friedman’s synthesis of IFS with Byron Katie’s inquiry and Rosenberg’s NVC, given away as free weekly Zoom gatherings that anyone can join. Nondual in emphasis, closer to Loch Kelly than to the manual. The movie-clip library is an unusual teaching device, and it works.
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The noticeboard where the smaller events, demos and one-off gatherings actually get announced, and because a list of three annual conferences would otherwise imply the field is quieter than it is.
Unconferences and gatherings
Unconferences and gatherings
Open Space works on IFS people, and several groups have found this independently. Two differences worth naming before you get your hopes up: these are in person, and most of them are gated behind formal training. Ours is online and isn't. If you want to come to ours, you're the right person — that's not a slogan, it's the Open Space principle applied straightforwardly rather than selectively.
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The longest-running of these, since 2018, a spring weekend at the Penny Brohn Centre near Bristol, priced to cover costs and nothing more. Genuine Open Space, warmly run, and it sells out fast. Open only to people who have completed or are partway through an IFS Institute Level 1 — the organisers say plainly that this is about a shared foundation, and are plainly a bit sad about it. If you have a Level 1, go.
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Running since 2022, organised by the Polish team of programme assistants behind SelfEdukacja, held in the countryside — singing, river, fire, the things a conference centre can't give you. Aimed at IFS therapists and practitioners. Polish-speaking; ask if you're not.
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An annual autumn gathering in northern Michigan, ten years running, describing itself as a festival of friends rather than a training. Included because people keep telling us about it, and because the model has more of this kind of thing than its official calendar suggests.
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Online, free, every few months, no training required, no keynote, agenda made on the morning. The gate is the difference. We understand why the others have one and we've chosen not to: the risk of someone turning up underprepared is real, and smaller than the cost of only ever talking to people who have paid for Level 1.
Actual conferences, for real
Actual conferences
Programmed, paid, mostly for professionals, mostly excellent at what they are. Dates move; check.
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The official one, now alternating virtual and in-person years — online in October 2026, back in person at the Q Center in Illinois in September 2027. Keynotes, workshops, CE credits, and the largest concentration of IFS people anywhere.
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Two days online, first held June 2026, organised by and for the Canadian community with everyone else welcome; an in-person edition is planned for 2027. Note this is a separate thing from IFSCA, whose practitioner list is above — IFSCA is Derek Scott's training organisation.
Beyond IFS
The things next door
IFS is one member of a family of approaches, and we have benefited from many. These are the neighbours we lean on most — you can see more via the Related section of the glossary.
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Nonviolent communication
NVC is a robust communication technique that can be used both with people and with parts. A grammar for saying what is actually going on without an accusation smuggled inside it. A way of finding the need underneath our parts’ strategies, and at times a way to enable different and better strategies for meeting those needs.
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Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall Rosenberg
The original, and still the clearest statement of the four steps — observation, feeling, need, request — which are far harder to do than to remember. Rosenberg writes like someone who has watched a great many people get it wrong kindly, and the worked dialogues are the reason to own it. The missionary tone is real; read past it.
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Say What You Mean by Oren Jay Sofer
Where to start if Rosenberg's register puts you off. Sofer comes to NVC through mindfulness practice, so the first instruction is to notice your own state before you open your mouth — which is unblending under another name, arrived at from a different tradition. The most usable NVC book we know.
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Three hours of Rosenberg in a room, with the two hand puppets: a jackal for the language of blame, a giraffe for the other thing. It is exactly as awkward as that sounds. It is also the best demonstration of the practice we know of, because you watch him do it with real conflicts brought by people in the room rather than explain it at you.
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Pau's own NVC teacher, based in Amsterdam, teaching in English, French and Hebrew. Live practice rather than a book, which for this material is the difference between knowing the four steps and being able to find them while somebody is annoyed with you. We mention him because we learned from him, not because anyone asked us to.
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Pragmatic dharma
Maps of hard practice, and what goes wrong when meditation goes badly.
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Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel Ingram
Not an IFS book at all. We list it because it maps the hard stretches — the dark night, the spiral where the same theme returns deeper — more plainly than anyone tiptoeing around them, and because it insists that growth is usually bumpy.
A warning about how it reads: the chapters describing where you are will be the clearest thing you’ve encountered, and the chapters past that can feel like gibberish. Both at once, from the same book, on the same afternoon. That’s not a flaw in the writing, and the boundary moves. Alex has fifteen years of going Daniel is wrong about this, re-reading the chapter, and finding he’d already put the disclaimer in.
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The best way to find out whether you can stand Ingram before committing to seven hundred pages of him. A psychiatrist reads the book as Buddhism for ER doctors — practical, fast, and quietly convinced everyone else is an idiot — and treats the stage taxonomy the way you’d treat a cardiology classification, which turns out to be exactly the right register. He rates it as an antidote to the vague hippie-ism that surrounds most writing on this, and still comes away finding parts of it unsatisfying, which is roughly where we would have landed if we did not read the book after 10+ years of practice. That verdict is a good gauge of where a reader is standing: the book reads as overconfident taxonomy right up until the territory it’s mapping turns up in your own practice, at which point it reads as the plainest description available. Read the review first, decide whether you can stand him, and don’t take anyone’s dissatisfaction — his or ours — as settled.
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The short answer to "what is Ingram doing and why does he write like that." Vince Horn's summary: take Buddhist practice, ask only what works, discard what doesn't, and break the taboo on saying out loud what happened to you. Read this before Mastering the Core Teachings, not after.
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Set up by a Brown neuroscientist to help people whose meditation practice went badly wrong, back when the polite position was that this doesn't happen. Their catalogue of fifty-nine documented difficult experiences is the thing to send someone who has been told their symptoms mean they're progressing.
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Ten years, a hundred-plus interviews with Western Buddhist meditators, seven domains of difficulty. The finding we quote most: the same experience can be transformative or destabilising depending on context and support. Which is also true of parts work, and is the argument for not doing all of it alone.
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Facilitation
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Open Space Technology by Harrison Owen
The format behind our Unconference, invented by a man who noticed the best part of most conferences was the coffee breaks and built an event that was mostly coffee breaks. Does to a group roughly what Self does to a system.
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Focusing
Getting information from your body. Listening to "the system", to the felt sense.
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Focusing by Eugene Gendlin
Where the felt sense comes from, and still the best training available in not deciding too early what a sensation means. If you get more from your body than from images, starting here rather than with IFS can be useful. We often mix the approaches.
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Gendlin's own instructions, lightly edited, free on the International Focusing Institute's site. The Institute is the closest thing Focusing has to an institution and it is refreshingly unbothered about being one — the free material is the good material, which is not the norm in this field.
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Duncan Sabien's explanation, written for people whose first reaction to "the wisdom of the body" is to leave the room. It reframes the felt sense as information your brain couldn't get into words, so it put it in your chest instead. The best on-ramp we know for engineers.
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Kaj Sotala on the thing Focusing is actually reaching for, with enough examples that you stop wondering whether you're doing it right. Its central correction is the one we most often have to make in sessions: the felt sense is not exotic, you are having one now, that's the point.
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Other forms of parts work
Worth exploring precisely because the vocabulary is different — it makes clear which bits of IFS are the insight and which are the packaging.
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Feeding Your Demons by Tsultrim Allione
Parts work out of Tibetan Buddhism, arrived at independently and centuries earlier.
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Voice Dialogue by Hal and Sidra Stone
Subpersonalities, an "aware ego," and a facilitator talking to one voice at a time — in the early 1970s, a decade before Schwartz.
We've skimmed it rather than worked with it, and we list it for the history. A precursor worth knowing about.
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Ego State Therapy by John and Helen Watkins
Parts work out of hypnotherapy and the dissociation literature, a generation before IFS. Ego states are organised and coherent, each with an age and a job, and you negotiate with them rather than remove them — all of which will sound familiar. The difference is the middle: it builds up a functioning adult rather than assuming a Self that was always there and cannot be damaged. We think the IFS claim is the more useful one, because a system told its calm centre is destructible won't go near the hard material. But the careful writing on dissociation, and the habit of resourcing thoroughly before approaching anything young, are better developed here and worth borrowing.
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The Way of Effortless Mindfulness by Loch Kelly
Kelly teaches with Schwartz and has built the most worked-out bridge between IFS and nondual practice — short "glimpses" that drop you into something that behaves a great deal like Self, without going the long way round through a protector. Treat the glimpses as the content and the neuroscience framing as packaging.
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Therapies next door
Three clinical approaches that arrive at recognisably the same places by different routes. None of them talks about parts, and all of them have something IFS doesn't.
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Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) by Marsha Linehan
Built for people who were repeatedly in danger, which shows: concrete, drilled, and designed to be usable at three in the morning. It is also an accidental parts model. Emotion mind is very nearly all the firefighters at once, reasonable mind very nearly all the managers, and wise mind — the overlap, described as quiet and settled and arrived at rather than argued into — is Self, or close enough that we've stopped being surprised.
The distress tolerance skills are the reason to have it. IFS asks a firefighter to trust you and step back, which is the better deal and needs a relationship that doesn't exist yet during a bad night. DBT gives the system something else to do in the meantime, and a firefighter handed a workable alternative is much easier to negotiate with later. -
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) by Steven Hayes, Russ Harris
The closest cousin, and the one whose vocabulary translates cleanest. Fusion and defusion are blending and unblending under other names — cruder than asking a part to step back, and they work in about nine seconds, which sometimes matters more. The observing self is Self-adjacent, reached through exercises rather than relationship. And values are the payload: ACT is uninterested in feeling better and very interested in what you'd do if the feeling stopped being in charge.
We love that it teaches almost entirely in metaphor — the passengers on the bus, the tug-of-war with the monster — because metaphors reach parts that arguments don't and survive being remembered badly. A good deal of the dharma is in there unattributed, repackaged for a randomised trial, which is either shabby or exactly how a good idea reaches people who'd never have gone near it. Mostly the second. Where it stops: no witnessing, no unburdening, nothing for the child holding the thing. Very good at the outer loop, silent on the inner one. Russ Harris is the readable way in. -
Schema Therapy by Jeffrey Young
Schemas are protectors with a catalogue. Eighteen named early patterns — abandonment, defectiveness, unrelenting standards — a validated questionnaire to find yours, and a set of modes (Punitive Parent, Detached Protector, Vulnerable Child, Healthy Adult) that map onto the IFS cast almost one to one.
We list it for the inventory, which is the thing IFS deliberately doesn't provide. "Any part can be anything" is honest about how varied people are, and it leaves anyone who came for structure with a blank page. Recognising your own pattern in a list written by someone who never met you is a specific and useful jolt. The cost is that a catalogue is a set of priors, and its labels carry judgement that "no bad parts" refuses — so use the names to point at something, then drop them and ask the part directly. -
Other things we love
On systems, and being a system one self.
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Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity by Gregory Bateson
Nothing to do with IFS and everything to do with why it works. Bateson's question is what makes a system a system, and his answer — pattern, difference, circuits of information rather than chains of cause — is the reason "internal family" is a better metaphor than "broken machine." Hard going. Worth it.