Inherited Hunger: Eating Disorders, Legacy Burdens, and Internal Family Systems Therapy
We understand legacy burdens as emotional, relational, and cultural debts carried by parts of the system that were simply trying to survive. Eating disorder behaviours often emerge as protectors, following these old rules to avoid pain, rejection, or perceived danger.
When we meet these parts with curiosity instead of control, and when we begin to name the inherited messages they carry, the system can begin to breathe. We don’t force healing; we make space for it.
When Food Feels Unsafe: IFS Therapy for Eating Disorders, ARFID and Childhood Trauma
When food has been paired with fear, shame, or scarcity, eating is no longer a simple act; it becomes a conversation between parts. Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy helps us understand avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID), binge eating, and childhood food trauma not as defiance but as protection. Beneath the picky eating or urgent binges are parts doing their best to survive a past that once made nourishment feel unsafe. IFS offers a compassionate roadmap to listen inward, meet those protectors, and help the system trust that nourishment no longer has to hurt.
Not Just the Client: Navigating Our Own System When Working with Suicidal Parts
Learn how Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy supports therapists working with suicidal clients. This compassionate guide explores the U-turn, a core IFS practice for self-reflection and presence, helping clinicians respond to suicide risk with clarity, connection, and care.
Safety Planning in IFS: Replacing Suicide Behavioural Contracts with Internal Agreements
What if safety planning didn’t silence the suicidal parts, but invited them into conversation? Explore how Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy offers a compassionate alternative to no suicide contracts, helping clients build internal agreements, engage protectors, and listen to the parts that are hurting. A new way forward: curious, connected, and grounded in hope.
IFS for Eating Disorders: How Internal Sequences Drive Disordered Eating
Eating disorders aren’t just symptoms they are survival strategies. Explore how IFS therapy helps unpack the inner patterns that keep us stuck, and how healing begins with understanding, not blame.
Weathering the Storm Inside: An Internal Family Systems Approach to Suicidality
When parts of us are in pain, they often speak through extremes. In Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, suicidal thoughts are not signs of disorder. They are signals from protectors trying to shield us from what feels unbearable.
Integrating suicidology and lived clinical experience, it invites clinicians to move beyond labels and listen deeply to the parts that want to die, the parts that want to live, and the Self that can hold them both.