BOOK REVIEW: “Transitioning to Internal Family Systems Therapy”

Clinicians trained in other therapeutic methods can sometimes find IFS bewildering at first. Emma E. Redfern’s Transitioning to Internal Family Systems Therapy: A Companion for Therapists and Practitioners (Routledge, 2023) guides readers into the model from the inside out, guided by the principle that we can only “learn IFS” by exploring and healing our own internal families.

“Parts ask us hard questions,” she writes. “We need to ‘know in our bones’ the answer.”

With kind yet uncompromising clarity, Redfern introduces the “Self-who-feels-no-fear.” In my experience as a non-clinical practitioner, mental-health professionals just beginning to practice IFS can find this transition to be very fearful indeed. Having made her own transitions from “integrative psychotherapist to EMDR practitioner to IFS therapist and supervisor,” Redfern addresses these fears from deep personal experience.

This experience gives her handbook its structure. Four sections explain distinct “barriers to transitioning” to IFS from other therapeutic modalities, providing clear guidance for surmounting them. To overcome the first barrier, “not buying into Self,” Redfern explains how and why we must experience Self-leadership internally in order to grasp the model. To address the barrier of “not grasping key IFS concepts,” she guides readers through the flow of the model by showing how the “6 Fs” work and how they feel from the inside, for both client and practitioner.

The second half of the book squarely addresses the initial “fear, loss, and frustration” clinicians often feel when they first learn IFS, which can be compounded by a scary sense of “professional isolation and loneliness.” Redfern’s advice for coming to terms with these hard feelings comes to life in vivid transcripts from supervision sessions. Appendices offer practical and wise “competencies for self-assessment” and questions to help clinicians reflect on their previous therapeutic training through the lens of IFS.

Transitioning to Internal Family Systems Therapy is a timely intervention during this moment of transition in the development of the model itself. Now that the IFS Institute has chosen to restrict Level 1 training to licensed clinicians, Redfern’s stern “health warning” for mental-health professionals is urgent. When you truly learn to practice this model, she writes, “the profound self-change necessary … may not only destabilize your external relationships and systems, but it will also necessitate some level of personal and professional deconstruction and reconstruction.”

On Redfern’s account, IFS cannot be learned theoretically and deployed externally, the way a psychiatrist might learn to prescribe a new drug. Instead, the transformative potential of the IFS model derives exclusively from our Parts’ lived experience of trust in “the Self-who-has-no-fear.” Redfern insists that the only way to learn how to practice IFS in a clinical setting is by practicing IFS within yourself—at depth, for healing and liberation. Clinicians with no appetite for the “profound self-change” that meeting and healing their Parts requires have no business messing about in the delicate internal ecologies of their clients.

Having spent more than a decade in 12-step recovery, I instantly recognized the wisdom of Redfern’s warning. As the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous says about sponsoring other people in recovery, “Obviously you cannot transmit something you haven’t got.” The idea is that, if you’re not sober yourself, it’s both unethical and impossible for you to help somebody else get sober. You simply don’t know how. Redfern makes the same point about IFS: “Therapists cannot take clients deeper than they have gone themselves.”

Her book makes this argument in many ways, and it benefits from repetition. While she allows that “busy health professionals may not invest the time and money in having their own IFS therapy,” Redfern brings the point home with bracing directness: “If you can’t personally offer genuine hope or optimism about an aspect of the IFS model, then wait until you can.”

Redfern practices what she preaches—although the wisdom of her own system and clinical experience is sometimes obscured by an insistent fidelity to what she calls “plain vanilla” IFS, which can feel a little doctrinaire. She presents frequent bullet-pointed notes from Continuity Circle sessions led by Dick Schwartz, which she attended. It vexed some of my Parts whenever these “nuggets I took from watching Schwartz” interrupted Redfern’s own teaching.

Faithful to Schwartz’s preferences, Redfern insists on the centrality of Self. But her way of teaching the model is distinctively, and helpfully, Parts-forward. Like anyone who truly knows and loves her Parts, she appreciates them for themselves. Throughout the book, Redfern uses the evolution of her own internal family to bring the model to life. The love and respect she has for her own Parts radiates from every page.

Her handling of dissociation, especially, shows this approach in action. Of her own dissociative Parts, she writes, “Looking back, I don’t believe I would have made it this far without such dedicated protectors … . I sing the praises of dissociative parts and how I wouldn’t have survived to be here today without mine and how I value their presence in me and in others.”

I imagine Redfern saying this to a client whose dissociative protector Part is currently in the room. I know from experience that this protector will be able to feel the “bone-deep” sincerity of the therapist’s praise. She isn’t merely validating this Part from a place of academic expertise: Her own life has been saved more than once by the courage of protectors just like them. Redfern appreciates Parts for who they are, for their actual labor and sacrifice.

Redfern’s appreciation for Parts, her own and others’, offers a much needed corrective to the Self-centered way the IFS Institute teaches the model. This shift in emphasis can benefit clinicians in particular. I sometimes observe what I call “therapeutic chill” among my licensed colleagues—an attitude of serene detachment, slightly unfocused eyes, speech and breath deliberately quiet, slow, and even. At such moments, clinicians’ “therapist Parts” are doing their level best to play the role of Self.

These “therapist Parts” make an understandable mistake, one that “plain vanilla” IFS, with its singular emphasis on the Self, can sometimes encourage. They believe that IFS practitioners must be “in Self” in order to practice, and that one is either “in Self” or “in a Part.” But as Redfern observes, “Using IFS with clients or oneself is not about working towards being in Self 100% of the time nor is it about achieving enlightenment. For me, the clue is in the title: Internal Family Systems.” In other words, your Self can only be “good at IFS” if your Parts are—a working harmony.

This is the first book I’ve ever read that emphasizes the “Family” in IFS. By doing so, it offers clinicians a new and liberating approach to the model. When you “transition” from other modes of therapy to IFS by experiencing it in your own system, you’re no longer just a therapist; you’re a family of Parts, each and all with wisdom to offer.

This book is an invitation to use what you’ve learned from experience in order to help other people’s internal families heal and get free—together.