What is IFS?

No, and the worry is common enough that it's worth answering plainly. Dissociative identity disorder is a specific clinical picture involving amnesia and identity states that take over without the person's awareness. What IFS describes is ordinary mental plurality — the thing you're doing when you talk yourself into something, or catch yourself in a mood you don't endorse. Everybody has parts. Having them is not a diagnosis.

Not at all, and this one of the single most common first-session worries. Some people get vivid pictures. Plenty of us get a pressure in the chest, a phrase that keeps repeating, a temperature change, a sense of direction with no image attached, or just a strong opinion arriving from somewhere. All of those are perfectly workable. If you have aphantasia, say so early and we'll work in whatever channel you actually have.

Then that is the material, and it's more interesting than it feels. "Nothing" is usually one of three things: a protector that isn't convinced this is safe yet, a part so familiar you don't register it as separate, or a system that's outside its window and has sensibly gone quiet. All three are worth being curious about. Blankness is a door, not a dead end.

No. Pacing is the craft, and going in at full intensity is a mistake rather than a milestone — we titrate deliberately, and stopping is always available. We'd rather do a small amount you can digest than a large amount that leaves you worse for a week. If a protector says not today, that's a legitimate answer and we take it.

The labels are genuinely confusing. The IFS Institute runs Levels 1–3 and service-marks the certified titles. Plenty of people describe themselves as "using IFS" with no formal training at all, which isn't necessarily bad — but you're entitled to ask, and a good answer won't be evasive. Ours, plainly: Pau is a Certified L3 IFS Practitioner. Alex has completed Level 2 training and works as an IFS-informed coach and facilitator. Neither of us is a licensed psychotherapist. If what you need is therapy — particularly if you're in crisis, or working with a diagnosis — we'll say so and help you look elsewhere. We'd rather lose the booking than take work we shouldn't.

We can do both. We both are trained in pure IFS, and we host sessions that follow the technique by the book. We also like mixing with other techniques, we have several articles about that. We are fond of Focusing, Mindfulness and metta practice, Open Space facilitation, and coaching, so they all can show up in sessions if they are appropriate, helpful, and wanted by the client. Our view is that IFS is one member of a family of parts-work approaches rather than the only one, and if a technique from somewhere else gets a part heard we're not going to refuse it on brand grounds.

To be honest: it is unknowable in advance, and anyone quoting you a number is guessing. Some things shift in one conversation because the part had never been asked. Some protectors need several sessions before they'll let anything near what they're guarding, and that time isn't wasted: it's the reason the later work holds.
What early progress looks like is like this: a part you've fought for years turned out to have a reason, and the fight going quieter.
What we can say is that you should feel something useful early on, and if after a few sessions nothing is moving, that's worth naming rather than pushing through.

Partly, and we're more encouraging about this than most. Mapping, journalling, and the small unblendings are genuinely doable solo — the resources page lists what we'd hand someone starting out. The honest limit: 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's the specific thing another person is for.

"Promising and growing" is the accurate phrase in 2026, and it is not the same as evidence-based. A 2025 scoping review in Clinical Psychologist covering 27 studies — seventeen of them case studies, two randomised controlled trials — found IFS encouraging for trauma, depression, stress, chronic pain and self-compassion, while saying plainly that more research is needed. In 2026 a Harvard-affiliated team published the first randomised trial of PARTS, a sixteen-week group programme derived from IFS, for PTSD: a genuine milestone and a single unreplicated study at once. The IFS Institute itself has softened its language and now describes early trials as suggestive rather than settled.

We say this because a lot of practitioner sites still claim "evidence-based" — it was the accepted framing a few years ago and hasn't been updated. We'd rather tell you the base is small and improving than have you find out later and wonder what else we oversold. The papers themselves, including the substantial published critique, are on the resources page.

Parts language can be unhelpful, and occasionally destabilising, for people currently experiencing psychosis or strong paranoia — an idiom about inner voices could be the wrong idiom there. We say could, since it could also be helpful and normalizing. If you're in acute crisis, that needs different support first, and it needs it sooner than this — including sooner than any of the solo practices we list on the resources page. Go to your local emergency service, or find a crisis line near you. And if the plural framing simply doesn't land for you after a fair try, that's information rather than failure; there are other good ways to work.

English with either of us. Italian with Alex. Polish with Pau if you ask nicely.

The ninety seconds at the top of this page is a real start, not a warm-up. After that: the glossary if you want the model, the Substack if you want to read us thinking out loud, the Unconference if you'd rather meet people doing this than read about it, and a session if you want someone alongside you. In roughly that order of commitment.