Unmasking Perfectionism: How Internal Family Systems Therapy Addresses the Root of Eating Disorders
Perfectionism in eating disorders isn’t just a personality trait it’s often a protector, guarding deeper emotional wounds. Explore how Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy helps identify and unburden the exiled parts that carry shame, fear of rejection, and trauma beneath perfectionistic behaviours. Examine the role of temperament, emotion avoidance, and self-worth in the development and maintenance of anorexia, bulimia, and orthorexia.
Parts on Fire: Recognising Anger as a Suicide Risk Factor
Anger is often misunderstood in the context of suicide. While sadness and hopelessness are widely recognised warning signs, it is internalised anger—particularly when suppressed or turned inward—that can quietly escalate risk. Studies have shown that individuals who routinely inhibit or ruminate on anger are significantly more likely to experience suicidal thoughts and behaviours. When a person is unable to direct anger toward its rightful source, it may be redirected toward the self. In these cases, the part carrying the rage may view death not as a desire to die, but as a desperate attempt to end intolerable emotional chaos.
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.