Weathering the Storm Inside: An Internal Family Systems Approach to Suicidality
Suicidal ideation and behaviour are often framed within models of risk containment and medicalised symptomology. Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy offers a new perspective. Understanding suicidality not as a symptom to eradicate but as a communication from within a conflicted system.
Applying IFS to working with clients experiencing suicidality involves reframing self-destructive urges as protective mechanisms. It integrates understandings of dynamic risk formulation, addresses polarisation between life-affirming and death-orientated parts and invites clinicians to adopt an approach of relational attunement and non-pathologising curiosity.
Those who are labelled with borderline personality disorder often intense interpersonal instability, self-harm, and chronic suicidal ideation. Rather than focusing on symptom reduction alone, an IFS informed approach allows exploration of the protective parts and their sequencing. One part may lash out to prevent abandonment, while another turns inward, punishing to avoid rejection. Beneath them may be exiles holding unbearable shame or loneliness. This work involves building compassionate contact with each part, allowing the system to shift from reactivity to allow moments of relational connection.
In cases of complex PTSD, a client might describe a suicidal part as a switch that “shuts everything off”. Through IFS, this part can be engaged not as an enemy but as a weary protector doing everything it can to quiet the chaos. Communication opens a pathway to understand the unmet needs and burdens behind the behaviour, supporting the part in discovering new roles within the system.
In my work, what looks like chaos is often a coordinated survival strategy. IFS allows therapists to follow the threads, to track the meaning behind impulses, and to understand without agenda.
Integrating IFS with Suicidal Frameworks
Internal Family Systems therapy provides a clinically coherent, trauma-informed framework that complements and expands existing suicidality models. Unlike traditional diagnostic or symptom-focused approaches, IFS encourages direct engagement with the suicidal part, minimising fear and approaching with genuine curiosity. When we view the part that wants to die as a firefighter protecting the system from exiles carrying unbearable burdens, we create space for dignity and complexity.
This aligns with Joiner’s Interpersonal Theory of Suicide, which identifies perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness as precursors to suicidal desire. In IFS terms, these experiences are often carried by exiled parts whose core wounds remain unhealed. Managers and firefighters then organise to protect the system, sometimes using extreme strategies. The acquired capability for suicide: reduced fear and increased tolerance for pain. Is often managed by a part that has become numb, dissociated or resigned, particularly after repeated invalidation or trauma.
CAMS (Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality) and prevention-orientated risk formulations also find naturally integration with IFS. These models emphasise a client-centred, collaborative relationship and recognise the importance of dynamic changeability over static risk labelling. IFS adds the inner landscape to this model: instead of asking only about external stressors, we ask which parts are activated, what are their roles, and how they relate to one another.
The IFS approach also facilitates a redefinition of internal safety. Rather than focusing solely on behavioural containment or safety contracts, therapists support the client in cultivating internal Self leadership, an anchor of calm, compassionate presence that parts can trust. As suicidal protectors realise they are no longer alone in holding the burden, there is less need for urgency.
IFS also deepens our understanding of how pain becomes unbearable. Where traditional models might focus on psychosocial stressors or individual pathology, IFS leads us inward, to the cumulative exile burdens, legacy burdens, and attachment injuries that shape a person's felt sense of inescapability. In IFS informed suicide prevention, the question becomes: What does this part believe is unsurvivable? And what resources, internal or external, could help it believe otherwise?
Polarisation Between the Will to Live and the Pull Toward Death
One of the most common conflicts I’ve observed in years of working in suicide prevention is the internal polarisation between a part that wants to live and a part that longs for death. These parts are often in fierce opposition, locked in a tug of war that leaves the individual feeling fragmented, overwhelmed and exhausted.
The part that wants to die may carry a belief that death is the only escape from what feels intolerable, indeterminable, or inescapable. These are not abstract descriptors; they are the lived experiences of people facing ongoing trauma, systemic oppression, unresolved loss and internalised shame. The problems are not just difficult; they are experienced by parts as unsolvable, chronic, and overwhelming.
Meanwhile, a part that wants to live may cling to the hope of healing, to connection with children or loved ones, or to a faint memory of Self-energy. But this part often becomes overshadowed, criticised, or silenced by protectors who believe survival equals suffering and vulnerability increases the risk of further emotional pain.
In IFS, we do not demand that the suicidal part surrender and become eradicated through treatment. Instead, we invite both parts into the room. We hold space for the belief that death might offer peace while also affirming the part that is fighting to remain. This dual witnessing can ease the internal war and create room for deeper healing.
From my work in suicide prevention, I have seen again and again that many suicidal crises are not about a wish to die but a desperate wish for something to change. The tragedy is not only in the pain itself but in the belief that pain is permanent and help is unreachable. IFS offers an alternative, not through reassurance, but through genuine internal connection and relationship. Parts that were certain they had to die, begin to imagine they might just be allowed to rest.
Suicidal crisis can become an invitation to deeper understanding. IFS offers a model of care that respects the inner knowing of each part, validates protective intent, and restores inner trust and relationship.
Clinicians are called to move beyond fear based risk management and into relational engagement. Suicidal parts are not enemies. They are messengers. And when we learn to listen, rather than label, we begin to offer our clients something rarer than advice or safety planning. We offer them the possibility of being seen.
This article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
If you are currently struggling with thoughts of suicide, please reach out for immediate support. In Australia, you can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14, or call 000 in an emergency.
You are not alone, and help is available. Please seek support from a qualified mental health professional or crisis service.
References
Anderson, F. S., Sweezy, M., & Schwartz, R. C. (2017). Internal Family Systems Skills Training Manual: Trauma-Informed Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, PTSD & Substance Abuse. PESI Publishing.
Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation. Routledge.
Fisher, J. (2021). Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists. PESI Publishing.
Joiner, T. (2005). Why People Die by Suicide. Harvard University Press.
Jobes, D. A. (2016). Managing Suicidal Risk: A Collaborative Approach (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Pisani, A. R., Murrie, D. C., & Silverman, M. M. (2016). Reformulating Suicide Risk Formulation: From Prediction to Prevention. Academic Psychiatry, 40(4), 623–629.
Schwartz, R. C. (1995). Internal Family Systems Therapy. Guilford Press.
Schwartz, R. C., & Sweezy, M. (2020). Internal Family Systems Therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
