IFS THERAPY IN WISCONSIN
Internal Family Systems therapy with Zach Meyer, LPC
Some things are surprisingly difficult to change even when we understand them very well.
You may know why you become anxious and still become anxious. You may recognize that your perfectionism is excessive and still feel unable to lower your standards. You may understand where a particular fear originated, know that a relationship is different from relationships that hurt you in the past, or recognize that the way you speak to yourself is unnecessarily harsh.
Insight matters.
But knowing why something happens does not necessarily change the experience of it.
This is one of the reasons I value Internal Family Systems therapy.
A Different Relationship With Yourself
IFS begins from a fundamentally compassionate assumption: even the aspects of ourselves that create difficulty usually make more sense when we understand them.
The anxious part.
The critical part.
The perfectionistic part.
The part that shuts down.
The part that desperately wants reassurance.
The part that procrastinates until the last possible moment.
The part that wants intimacy and the part that becomes frightened when intimacy actually appears.
Rather than immediately trying to eliminate these experiences, IFS invites us to become curious about them.
What happens when we stop fighting ourselves long enough to listen?
Often, something changes simply because the internal relationship changes.
“Part of Me Wants To, But Another Part…”
Most people use the language of parts without ever learning IFS.
Part of me wants to take the job, but another part is terrified.
Part of me knows this relationship is safe, but something in me keeps waiting for it to fall apart.
Part of me desperately wants to rest, but I feel guilty whenever I stop working.
I know intellectually that I do not need to be perfect, but something in me still feels as though making a mistake would be disastrous.
These experiences can feel contradictory until we stop assuming that one side must be the reasonable one and the other must be defeated.
IFS gives us a way to slow down and encounter those different experiences with curiosity.
Often, the goal is not choosing which part wins.
It is discovering what becomes possible when neither one has to fight quite so hard.
An Experiential Kind of Therapy
IFS can be explained intellectually, but that is not primarily how I use it.
The work is experiential.
We may notice what happens inside when a particular subject comes up, become curious about a reaction rather than immediately trying to change it, or spend time with an emotion or part of yourself that is usually avoided, criticized, or overridden.
Sometimes that process leads somewhere unexpected.
A reaction that initially seemed irrational may begin to make sense. A harsh internal voice may feel different once its purpose becomes clearer. Something you have spent years trying to suppress may become less powerful when it no longer needs to fight for your attention.
You do not need to understand the theory behind IFS in order to do this work.
You experience it.
When You Already Understand the Problem
IFS can be particularly useful for people who have considerable insight into themselves.
Perhaps you understand your childhood and family relationships. You know why you are perfectionistic. You recognize your attachment patterns. You understand why criticism affects you so strongly or why you withdraw when someone gets close.
You may even have spent years in therapy developing that understanding.
And yet the pattern remains.
That can be profoundly frustrating. If you understand something this well, why does it keep happening?
Sometimes the answer is that understanding a pattern and experiencing it differently are not the same thing.
IFS creates an opportunity to move beyond explaining why something happens and encounter the experience itself in a different way.
IFS for Trauma & Painful Experiences
IFS can be especially valuable when painful experiences from the past continue influencing the present.
People adapt to what happens to them.
We learn ways of protecting ourselves, anticipating danger, avoiding vulnerability, staying in control, keeping other people happy, or preventing old experiences from happening again.
Those adaptations may have made tremendous sense at one point in life.
Years later, they may begin creating problems of their own.
IFS allows us to approach these patterns without treating them as evidence that something is wrong with the person who developed them. Instead, we can become curious about what they have been protecting and whether they still need to work quite so hard.
For many people, that creates a gentler way of approaching painful material because we do not need to force our way past the very things that helped us survive it.
IFS for Anxiety & Perfectionism
Anxiety and perfectionism often involve an exhausting relationship with oneself.
One part of you may constantly anticipate what could go wrong. Another insists that you should be doing more. You may recognize intellectually that a mistake would be survivable while experiencing it emotionally as though something much larger were at stake.
Trying to argue yourself out of these reactions often has limited effect.
IFS offers another possibility.
Instead of immediately trying to make the anxiety disappear or persuade the perfectionistic voice that it is wrong, we can become interested in what happens when we approach those experiences with curiosity rather than opposition.
That does not mean allowing anxiety or perfectionism to organize your life.
It means discovering whether change becomes easier when you no longer have to accomplish it by fighting yourself.
[ EXPLORE ANXIETY, OCD & PERFECTIONISM ]
IFS and Feeling Stuck
“Stuck” is not a diagnosis, but it is one of the most common reasons people seek therapy.
You may know what you want and remain unable to move toward it. You may repeatedly make the same decision and regret it. You may want greater intimacy while pulling away whenever someone gets close. You may want to create something and find yourself avoiding the work required to create it.
Sometimes stuckness reflects genuine conflict within us.
Different things matter.
Different things feel dangerous.
Different parts of us may be trying to move in different directions.
IFS creates room to understand that conflict without assuming that progress requires overpowering whichever side appears to be getting in the way.
Often there is a reason movement has been difficult.
Finding that reason can change what movement requires.
IFS & Relationships
Relationships have an extraordinary ability to bring different parts of us to the surface.
A partner becomes quiet and something in us becomes anxious. Someone offers criticism and defensiveness appears before we have had time to consider whether the criticism is fair. A parent asks an apparently innocent question and we suddenly feel considerably younger than we are.
IFS can help us notice these reactions without immediately becoming consumed by them.
Over time, that can create more space between what we feel and what we do with what we feel.
It can also help us become more compassionate toward the places in ourselves that relationships expose: the places that fear rejection, crave reassurance, become angry, protect independence, or find vulnerability difficult.
The goal is not to stop being affected by other people.
It is to have more freedom in how we respond when we are.
IFS for Adolescents & Young Adults
IFS often works naturally with adolescents and young adults because their internal experience is already complex.
A teenager may genuinely care about school while another part of them refuses to do the work. A college student may want independence while simultaneously wanting the security of home. A young adult can feel excited about a future opportunity and terrified by what accepting it would require.
None of those experiences needs to be resolved by deciding which feeling is the “real” one.
Both can be real.
Parts language can give young people a way to become curious about internal contradictions without immediately interpreting those contradictions as evidence that something is wrong with them.
[ THERAPY FOR TEENS & ADOLESCENTS ]
[ THERAPY FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS & YOUNG ADULTS ]
You Do Not Have to “Believe in Parts”
Some people encounter the language of parts and immediately recognize their own internal experience.
Others find the terminology a little strange.
Either response is fine.
You do not need to adopt a particular theory of the mind for IFS to be useful. You do not even need to use the language of parts if another way of describing your experience feels more natural.
The language is useful when it helps us encounter something that was difficult to encounter before.
If it stops being useful, we do not need to force it.
IFS Is One Part of How I Work
IFS strongly influences the way I practice therapy, but I do not believe every experience needs to be translated into IFS language.
Sometimes we need to slow down and listen carefully to something happening internally.
Sometimes we need psychoeducation.
Sometimes we need to understand a relationship pattern, tolerate an emotion, change a behavior, practice an exposure, establish a boundary, grieve something that happened, or make a difficult decision.
I integrate IFS and other parts-oriented work with psychodynamic therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Exposure and Response Prevention when treating OCD, narrative approaches, psychoeducation, and practical behavioral interventions.
The approach should follow the person rather than requiring the person to follow the approach.
IFS Therapy with Zach Meyer, LPC
I use Internal Family Systems extensively with adolescents, college students, young adults, and adults dealing with anxiety, perfectionism, trauma, emotional regulation, limiting beliefs, relationship patterns, creative blocks, and the broader experience of feeling stuck.
I am drawn to IFS because of the quality of attention it encourages.
When something in a person seems irrational, contradictory, or self-defeating, my first assumption is usually that it makes sense somehow.
We may not understand the reason yet.
But we can become curious about it.
That posture creates a different kind of therapeutic work. Instead of dividing the person into the parts that need fixing and the parts doing the fixing, we can approach the whole internal experience with considerably more patience and compassion.
And often, when people stop needing to fight themselves, they become much freer to change.
[ MEET ZACH ]
In-Person & Online IFS Therapy in Wisconsin
I provide in-person IFS-oriented psychotherapy from our office in Glendale, Wisconsin, serving Milwaukee and surrounding communities including the North Shore, Mequon and Thiensville, Wauwatosa, Brookfield and Elm Grove, and the greater Milwaukee area.
Online IFS therapy is also available throughout Wisconsin, including Madison and surrounding communities.
For clients elsewhere in Wisconsin who are specifically seeking an IFS-oriented therapist, virtual therapy makes it possible to choose based on therapeutic fit rather than proximity alone.
Looking for an IFS Therapist?
If you already know that you want to work with an IFS-oriented therapist, tell me a little about what brings you to the model and what you hope to work on.
If you are simply curious because something about IFS resonates with you, that is enough too.
You do not need to understand the model before beginning.
In fact, you may find that understanding it is considerably less important than experiencing it.