Frequently Asked Questions

Hello folks! This is Fil, and I’ve answered your burning questions when it comes to working with me:

1. What is Trauma?

Trauma is any experience we haven’t fully processed. Picture this: something difficult or scary happens to us in childhood, like a confusing experience with peers, or a stressful situation at home. In a healthy scenario, a parent or caregiver attunes to us (sees how we feel, senses our internal state, and synchronizes with it to acknowledge what’s happening), then helps us cope and process it. When we’re little, we don’t yet have the skills to process emotions on our own, so we need that outside support.

But in a different scenario, the adults around us aren’t attuned to how we’re feeling, or they’re themselves the source of our stress and confusion. When that happens, we’re left to our own devices — our only resource is to internalize the emotions — keep them inside, wrap them in protective packaging, and store them somewhere in the body. That memory, full of difficult emotions, becomes trauma, an experience we couldn’t fully process, that lives in the body, and that gets triggered at the most inopportune moments. Maybe our boss says something offhand and we spiral into despair for two days before we even realize what happened. Or our partner makes a simple request and we explode like it’s life or death.

These are our wounded parts, buried deep underneath, acting out in a desperate call for help. In IFS, we tend to these younger parts by revisiting the situation and stepping in as the responsible adult who attunes to them, helping them finally finish processing what happened. This frees them from the job of holding packaged explosives, and it frees us from navigating internal landmines in our personal and professional lives.

2. What is Healing?

Healing means processing traumatic events from the past so we can move forward. Healing means letting go, and letting go means forgiveness. And we can’t forgive until we understand. The process of healing is releasing the overwhelming negative emotion around an event, while keeping the memory itself as wisdom for the future.

Surviving something difficult doesn’t mean we’re broken for life. It also doesn’t mean the event never happened, or that we can return to being a blank slate. The goal isn’t to reach a place where the trauma never occurred, but to turn our scars into gold, the way the Japanese art of kintsugi turns points of breakage into “beautiful golden elements worth celebrating” (Emi Joyce).

3. What is IFS?

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a therapeutic approach that has taken the psychotherapy and personal development worlds by storm over the past several years. Developed in the 1980s by Richard Schwartz, PhD, IFS is built on the idea that we’re all made up of inner parts that function like a kind of internal family. There are three types: managers, firefighters, and exiled inner children. Each one carries its own role and story of how it came to be, and may be stuck or frozen in time.

For example: if our parents divorced when we were eight, we might carry a wounded eight-year-old part that secretly believes the divorce was our fault, and that we’re therefore not worthy of love. We might also have a protector part that pushes us toward major professional success to compensate for that unworthiness (a proactive, or “manager,” protector). Another protector takes over the moment we get close to feeling the guilt and shame around the divorce, pulling us into hours of scrolling Instagram to avoid the wound underneath (a reactive, or “firefighter,” protector).

Healing in IFS happens by getting to know all of these parts — nonjudgmentally, open-heartedly, with patience, compassion, and presence — so they can be freed from roles that circumstance often forced on them. Once liberated, they’re free to rest, play, and simply be, without coercion or pressure, and you get full access to the driver’s seat of your own life.

4. How safe is this work?

Safety informs this work from beginning to end. IFS is built on the principle that healing can only happen once the client’s system feels safe. That’s why we move slowly — as slowly as needed — checking in for consent at every step. If something doesn’t feel safe, that itself becomes valuable information and the new focus of the work. Sometimes all a part needs, in order to experience healing, is permission to slow down, to say “no,” or to pause without being pushed forward. If anything doesn’t feel safe, we immediately stop to reassess what works better.

5. How do we decide what to work on / what to work on first?

As your practitioner, I’m not the one deciding what we work on. Instead, we check in with your system and your parts about what’s alive for you and what’s ready to be witnessed and heard. In that sense, it’s always you and your system that dictate the focus and pace of the work, with my guidance and support.

6. What is the price & recommended regularity of sessions?

A 90-minute IFS session is €80 (or the equivalent in your currency: USD, CAD). I also have sliding scale pricing for people of varying financial experiences based on the Green Bottle Method. The initial 30min session is free of charge. We can meet weekly, twice a month, or just for a one-off session now and then, whatever fits your healing goals and capacity.