Most people know the experience of feeling pulled in two different directions at once. You tell yourself you’re going to stop checking your phone before bed — and you pick it up anyway. You plan to speak up about something that’s bothering you — and when the moment comes, you stay quiet. You want to get closer to someone — and something in you pulls back without a clear reason why. It happens in small moments and in large ones, and most people chalk it up to a lack of willpower or consistency.
Parts Work starts from a different explanation entirely. Those moments of internal conflict aren’t failures of discipline. They’re what happens when different parts of you want different things — and one of them wins. It’s this idea that your mind contains multiple parts, each with its own logic, perspective, and desires, and while one part of you may want one thing, another part of you wants something else.
“Parts Work” is an approach to therapy that helps you get to know these parts, understand what they’re doing and why, and develop a different relationship with them.
The Internal Family Systems Model
Internal Family Systems is the most common therapy approach that uses and integrates this Parts Work. It was developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, who also personally trained many of the therapists at Heart in Mind Psychotherapy.
Internal Family Systems operates from the premise that the mind is naturally multiple rather than singular. Every person carries an internal system of parts, each of which developed in response to the experiences, relationships, and circumstances of their life.
Some parts took on protective roles — managing threatening emotions, keeping the person functioning, or preventing pain from reaching consciousness. Others carry the emotional weight of experiences that weren’t fully processed at the time they happened.
Beneath all of those parts, IFS identifies what Schwartz calls the “Self” – a core state of consciousness characterized by curiosity, calm, compassion, and clarity.
The Self is present in every person, regardless of history or difficulty. The goal of Parts Work isn’t to eliminate the parts that cause problems. It’s to develop a relationship between the Self and the parts so that the parts no longer have to work so hard, and the person can respond to their life from the Self rather than from a part that has been running things without permission.
The Three Types of Parts
IFS organizes the internal system into three broad categories: Exiles, Managers, and Firefighters. Each plays a different role in how the system manages pain, threat, and daily life.
- “Exiles” carry the emotional weight — shame, grief, fear, loneliness, the core wounds that formed from difficult experiences, often in childhood. They hold what was too much to fully feel at the time it happened, and they carry it forward into adult life. Exiles often feel young or stuck at a particular moment in the past. They want to be seen and understood, but the rest of the system typically keeps them locked away because accessing them feels destabilizing.
- Managers are the proactive protectors. They work preventively, keeping the person organized, in control, and away from situations that might allow exiles to surface. From the outside, manager behavior often looks adaptive — perfectionism, people-pleasing, emotional suppression, hypervigilance, over-planning. Managers developed for a reason, and they’re doing exactly what they were designed to do: keep the system protected from pain before it breaks through.
- Firefighters are the reactive protectors. When an exile breaks through the managers’ defenses and floods the system with pain, firefighters respond immediately to extinguish the emotional fire — through behaviors that provide fast relief at the cost of longer-term consequences. Substance use, binge eating, dissociation, self-harm, impulsive decisions — these are often firefighter behaviors. They are emergency responses from a part of the system doing its best to manage something unbearable.
Recognizing these three categories changes how behavior gets interpreted. A part that appears destructive from the outside is almost always protective on the inside — and approaching it with curiosity rather than judgment is where the work begins.
What Parts Work Treats
Parts Work applies broadly across presenting concerns, but produces particularly direct results in several clinical domains. The conditions where IFS and related approaches have the strongest evidence and clinical track record include:
- Trauma and PTSD — Exiles carry the unprocessed emotional content of traumatic experiences, and the protectors around them represent the system’s response to containing that content. IFS allows trauma to be processed without requiring clients to narrate it repeatedly in detail, which reduces the risk of retraumatization that extended verbal revisiting can carry.
- Anxiety — Many anxiety presentations involve parts in intense protective activation — managers working to prevent catastrophe, firefighters responding to any perceived threat. Parts Work identifies which parts are driving the anxiety and what they’re protecting, creating conditions for the anxiety to reduce at its source rather than only being managed at the surface.
- Depression — Depression frequently involves exiles carrying shame, grief, or worthlessness, and managers suppressing those feelings in ways that shut down the emotional range entirely. Parts Work accesses the exiles directly rather than only addressing the surface presentation of low mood.
- Eating Disorders — Disordered eating behaviors are almost always firefighter responses — parts reacting to emotional pain with food-related behavior that provides immediate but temporary relief. Parts Work addresses what the firefighter is protecting rather than targeting the eating behavior in isolation.
- Self-Esteem and Perfectionism — Critical inner voices, harsh self-judgment, and perfectionism are consistently parts — often managers that developed early to keep the person performing at a level that felt necessary for approval or safety. Recognizing them as parts rather than as the voice of truth changes the relationship with them fundamentally.
- Relationship Difficulties — Patterns that repeat across different relationships, the tendency to collapse or escalate under emotional pressure, difficulty with vulnerability or closeness — these often reflect parts that developed in early relational experience and are running their old programming in current relationships.
Parts Work doesn’t require a specific diagnosis to be the right approach. For any client whose presenting concerns connect to unprocessed experience, self-protective patterns, or the sense of being pulled in directions they can’t fully control, it tends to be a productive framework.
What Parts Work Looks Like in Practice
The following are hypothetical scenarios — composite examples to illustrate how Parts Work unfolds with different kinds of presentations. They do not represent real individuals.
A Person Who Can’t Stop Saying Yes
Consider a woman in her late thirties — call her Maya — who comes to therapy describing exhaustion. She agrees to things she doesn’t want to do, immediately, before she’s had a chance to think. She knows in the moment that she wants to decline. She says yes anyway, and spends the next days or weeks resenting both the commitment and herself for making it.
In Parts Work, a therapist would help Maya notice the part that says yes so quickly:
- Where does she feel it in the body?
- What does it believe would happen if she said no?
When approached with curiosity rather than frustration, that part typically has a specific fear — of disappointing someone, of rejection, of love becoming conditional. That fear connects to an early experience where compliance felt necessary for the relationship to hold.
The therapist would also help Maya get to know the part that carries the resentment — the part that feels trapped and unseen, that bears the cost of the people-pleasing. Over time, with enough safety in the therapeutic relationship, the work moves toward the exile underneath both parts — the one that originally learned her own needs mattered less than keeping the people around her comfortable.
As Maya develops a relationship with that exile from her Self — seeing it, understanding what it learned and why, helping it release the belief it formed — the people-pleasing manager gradually relaxes. The change doesn’t come from deciding to say no. It comes from the underlying part no longer needing to say yes.
A Person Who Returns to Drinking
Consider a man in his mid-forties — call him David — who has known for years that he drinks too much. He can go weeks without a drink and feel stable. Then something happens — a particular tone in a conversation with his father, a moment of criticism at work, a specific kind of silence in his marriage — and he’s drinking before he’s consciously made any decision to.
In Parts Work, the drinking is a firefighter. A part responding at extraordinary speed to an emotional experience that registers as intolerable. The question isn’t how to stop the behavior. It’s what the firefighter is responding to, and what sits underneath that.
When a therapist helps David approach the drinking part with genuine curiosity — not judgment, not an agenda to eliminate it — the part usually reveals what it’s doing. In many cases, it’s protecting an exile carrying shame so acute that even a brief moment of contact with it feels unbearable. The drinking extinguishes that feeling before it has a chance to fully surface.
The work involves developing enough capacity in the Self to approach the exile directly — to sit with the shame, trace where it came from, and help the exile release the belief it formed about David’s worth. As that process progresses, the firefighter has less to respond to. The drink at those particular moments — not all moments, but those specific ones — begins to lose its urgency.
A Teenager Who Shuts Down
Consider a sixteen-year-old — call her Sofia — whose parents bring her to therapy because she becomes unreachable during conflict at home. Not crying, not arguing — gone. Monosyllabic, flat, completely withdrawn. Her parents experience it as defiance. Her teachers experience it as detachment. Sofia experiences it as the only thing available to her in those moments.
In Parts Work, the therapist approaches the shutdown part with curiosity rather than a goal of eliminating it. When Sofia develops enough safety to explore it, the part reveals what it’s doing. In moments of conflict, it senses a level of emotional intensity that an earlier experience taught Sofia was dangerous — not necessarily physically dangerous, but relationally dangerous. Something that felt, at a younger age, like it might cost her something permanent and important.
The shutdown is a manager, removing Sofia from the emotional field as quickly as possible. Underneath it is an exile carrying fear — of conflict meaning something irreversible about the relationship, of being too much, of falling apart in front of someone.
The therapist works with Sofia to help her Self approach that exile, to understand what it carries and where it learned what it learned. As that exile receives the attention and understanding it needs, Sofia develops the capacity to stay present during conflict because the part driving the shutdown no longer has to work so hard to protect her.
Parts Work in Combination with Other Approaches
At Heart in Mind Psychotherapy, therapists use IFS alongside CBT, DBT, EMDR, somatic awareness, and attachment-based approaches. The combination of modalities depends on what the client’s specific presentation calls for. Parts Work often reaches what other approaches circle around without directly accessing — the early relational experience, the unprocessed emotional content, the belief that formed in a particular moment and has been running things ever since.
Arriving with knowledge of the model isn’t required. What Parts Work asks of a client is curiosity about the internal experiences that show up, about the parts that seem to be running things, and about what might be underneath them.
Heart in Mind Psychotherapy is located in Melville, NY and serves clients throughout Long Island. They accept NYSHIP and offer out-of-network options. To connect with a therapist and learn more about whether Parts Work fits what you’re looking for, call (516) 430-8362 or reach out through the contact form on the website.
