New Service — Now Available

Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS)

and IFS-Informed CBT

A deeper, more compassionate lens on the patterns that shape how we think, feel and behave. Now offered alongside CBT at Sinodun Hill Therapy Centre.

For many clients, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy provides a clear, practical and highly effective path through anxiety, depression and low self-esteem. For others - particularly those with complex histories, persistent self-critical patterns, or difficulties that have not fully resolved through cognitive approaches alone - something more may be needed.

Internal Family Systems offers that additional dimension. It does not replace the rigour and structure of CBT; it deepens it, providing a framework for understanding not just what we think, but why certain parts of us hold so firmly to the thoughts and beliefs they do.

How IFS and CBT Work Together

CBT is a structured, evidence-based therapy that helps you to identify and change unhelpful patterns of thinking and behaviour. If you have worked with me in CBT, you will be familiar with the concepts of negative automatic thoughts, cognitive distortions, core beliefs, and the connections between thoughts, feelings and actions. This framework remains central to my work.

IFS adds a further dimension of understanding.

Working with the Inner Critic

In standard CBT, the inner critic is a target for cognitive restructuring: we examine the evidence, challenge the distortion and build a more balanced perspective. This is valuable work. IFS offers a complementary approach. Rather than treating the critical voice as an adversary, we become curious about it. What is it trying to prevent? What would it need so that it didn't have to work so hard.? This shift - from challenging the critic to understanding it as a protector with a history - can make the work feel more sustainable, and less like an ongoing argument with oneself.

Understanding Persistent Core Beliefs

A common pattern in CBT: a client identifies a core belief such as "I am fundamentally inadequate." Careful cognitive work helps to challenge the evidence and construct a more balanced view. Yet sometimes, even after thorough and thoughtful cognitive work, the belief returns. IFS helps to explain why. There is often a part - typically a younger, exiled part, until that part is genuinely understood and helped to update, the belief may remain stubbornly tenacious. IFS provides the means to reach it.

Avoidance, Exposure and Compassion

CBT's evidence-based approach to anxiety typically involves gradual engagement with feared situations, building tolerance and disconfirming unhelpful predictions. When a protector part is genuinely frightened, however, asking it simply to face the fear can feel incomplete, or too much. An IFS-informed approach first acknowledges the protective intention of the part, understands the fear it carries, and gains permission to proceed. Behavioural change then tends to feel less like an act of willpower and more like a natural development from within.

Trauma and PTSD

For those presenting with trauma or PTSD, the IFS model provides a particularly coherent and compassionate framework. The distinction between protective parts and exiled parts maps closely onto our understanding of trauma responses - why certain memories and feelings remain cut off, and why the system works so hard to keep them at a distance. This supports a paced, carefully sequenced approach to trauma processing that respects the functions those protective strategies have been serving.