Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy for LGBTQ+ Adults and Adult Children of Immigrants in Oakland & Online in California
Learn to embrace every part of you—the ones that over-achieve, people-please, and chase perfection.
All parts deserve to be witnessed.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy is about meeting the different parts of ourselves with openness and compassion. Leading with warmth and respect, we create relationships with parts where they can feel seen, understood, and supported. We learn about how they came to be and what they do for us. What facilitates this connection is our inherent capacity to be kind, compassionate, and present with ourselves and others.
In Oakland and online in California, I meet with LGBTQ+ adults and adult children of immigrants who developed parts that learned to cope with trauma, abuse, and oppression by over-achieving, people-pleasing, and being responsible for everyone and everything.
What do you mean by parts?
Just like the creatures that make up a diverse ecosystem, our parts have distinct thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We often casually talk about our parts, like “a part of me wants to quit my job, and a part of me wants to stay.”
Or, more specifically, we might have an anxious part, a part that struggles to emotionally regulate in relationships, and a high-achieving part that chases success in order to feel good enough.
We can also have creative, flamboyant, funny, spontaneous, spiritual, adventurous, and playful parts. We can have parts that work together, like a time manager part and a spreadsheet wizard part. We can have parts in opposition, such as a part that wants things to change and a part that wants things to stay the same.
By connecting with our parts more presently and intentionally, we can better understand why they do what they do, explore how they got their roles, and work with them to resolve internal emotional conflicts. In Oakland and online, I work with you to move from a place of self-blame to self-compassion, from restriction to flexibility.
Every part of us has good intentions.
Each part is doing its best to help us, either by preventing future harm or distracting from intense pain. While the way they help isn’t always beneficial, they represent wise coping strategies to dealing with experiences of trauma, abuse, neglect, and oppression.
When we recognize how our parts try to take care of us, we can meet ourselves with greater compassion, openness, and curiosity.
For LGBTQ+ adults and adult children of immigrants who learned to suppress our emotions, push past the pain, or self-sacrifice to keep the peace, we might notice more internal harmony and self-compassion.
“It isn’t that you’re flawed because of what happened, it’s that you’re hurt.”
Natalie Y. Gutiérrez
We move slower to go farther.
When we are taught to rescue other people from their emotions, caretake to avoid discomfort, and abandon ourselves in service of over-achievement, people-pleasing, and hyper responsibility, we might feel unsure or scared at the idea of meeting the unresolved emotions beneath these behaviors.
The parts of us that want to resume the status quo might come in with some intensity—I just need to figure this out now. I have to get it together so that people don’t see that I’m struggling. I still need to appear and feel in control.
Sometimes our parts chase the breakthrough moments. They feel skeptical about the process. They groan at what it takes to heal on a deeper level.
In my therapy practice with LGBTQ+ adults and adult children of immigrants, I respect and honor these parts of you. By making space for these parts and building trust, I invite them to experience what it’s like to not have to manage so much anymore.
If there’s any part of you that feels a sense of relief at that possibility, then IFS therapy might be a good fit.
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In Oakland and online across California, I use IFS therapy with LGBTQ+ adults and adult children of immigrants to:
Distinguish thoughts, feelings, and beliefs held by parts (as opposed to set definitions of who you are)
Soothe emotional triggers
Relax anxiety and feelings of urgency
Calm inner critics and release feelings of shame
Use a balanced approach to navigating decisions and challenges
Release unrealistic or harmful narratives held about yourself (I am unlovable, I am unworthy, I am bad)
Transform patterns that no longer work for you (people-pleasing, perfectionism, peacekeeping, freezing, shutting down)
Restore qualities of yourself that have been hidden away due to experiences of rejection, criticism, humiliation, and neglect
Decrease bodily tension by creating more internal harmony
IFS therapy can help you increase trust in your ability to lead a life that feels right for you. Reach out today.
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IFS is an approach that has room for all the parts of you that you learned to hide or discard in order to stay safe.
For us LGBTQ+ and trans and non-binary adults, we are intimately familiar with needing to protect ourselves. IFS recognizes that there are outside forces—both systemic and interpersonal—that might hurt us no matter how much we work with our parts.
We cannot promise to prevent harm from ever happening again, but we work to build internal trust so that when we do get hurt, we are able to meet our hurt parts with love, compassion, and acceptance. We can honor the pain without trying to change it or our parts.
As your therapist, I can help you reintegrate wounded parts in a way that feels empowering and harmonious, allowing you to return home to yourself even in the face of ongoing institutional violence.
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IFS therapy can make space for the parts of us that hold feelings that we didn’t get to express in our family systems.
In my work with adult children of immigrants, I use IFS therapy to support people with voicing feelings of anger, guilt, and fear in response to childhood experiences and expectations. They get to meet the parts of them that learned to prioritize achievement over personal choice and please others over advocating for themselves.
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IFS is an inherently somatic practice. In IFS, we accept that parts can and do express themselves through the body. We can notice and feel our parts as bodily sensations, such as an anxious part that causes stomachaches or panic attacks, or a part that feels too exposed and takes us out of the moment through dissociation.
We also have parts that react to body sensations. For example, parts can feel frustrated, sad, betrayed, and helpless in response to chronic pain or illness. Parts might also want to urgently fix or distract from pain.
Together in my office in Oakland and online, I invite you to notice sensations that may or may not be connected to a part. We can work with parts to not overwhelm our bodies without shaming them for wanting to do so.
By including the body, we give parts a chance to show us their full selves.
