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Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy in Washington, DC
Internal Family Systems isn’t a diagnosis or a technique applied to you—it’s a lens for understanding your inner world. It gives us a map for what’s happening when a protective part of you wants to move forward, but another part is digging in its heels to keep you safe.
I am Ariel VanDoren, a Licensed Professional Counselor practicing in Washington, DC. IFS is one of the frameworks I draw on in session. This page is about how I actually use it, so you can decide whether that way of working sounds like it would help.
The basic idea: you have parts
The premise is that a person is not one single voice. You have parts, and the parts have different jobs.
One part wants to leave the job. One part is frightened of what leaving would mean. One part has been keeping score on everything you have done wrong since you were fourteen.
Some of those parts are extreme, loud, rigid, and punishing. In this framework, that intensity usually is not a defect. It is a sign the part is protecting something.
That tracks with how people actually experience themselves. Most people do not arrive describing one, unified feeling. They describe a conflict. Having language for the conflict gives us somewhere to start.
The stance is non-pathologizing
This is the part of IFS I like most.
Even a harsh inner critic is usually trying to protect you. It may be going about it in a painful, heavy-handed way—running an old strategy that made sense in childhood, but no longer fits the life you live now. But it isn’t trying to sabotage you. It’s trying to shield you from a threat it believes is still real.
That realization changes everything. If the critic is your enemy, therapy becomes a war with yourself—one where you are on both sides of the fight. But if the critic is simply a part of you doing an outdated job, we can stop fighting and start asking better questions: What is it afraid will happen if it stops? What is it trying so hard to prevent?
Curiosity beats confrontation—both in the therapy room and inside your own mind.
Getting some distance, and leading from Self
When a part takes over entirely—when anxiety isn’t a feeling you’re observing, but the lens you’re seeing everything through—you are blended with it. When you’re fused like that, it’s almost impossible to find traction.
The goal isn’t to get rid of the part or debate its logic. It’s simply to help you create enough space to step back—moving from looking out from inside the feeling to looking at the feeling itself.
From that small distance, your Self can emerge. This is your naturally steady, compassionate core—the part of you that can sit with fear or anger without being consumed by it. It transforms “I am overwhelmed” into “A part of me is overwhelmed, and I’d like to hear what it needs.”
That subtle shift changes the entire dynamic. That is most of the work right there.
Where this fits with everything else I do
I do not work with only one framework, and I would not want to.
Most of the people I see are in pain because of a major life event: a death, the end of a relationship, the birth of a child, a career change such as going back to school or retirement, or family of origin trauma.
The way our brain and body experience these shifts causes our emotions to feel chaotic, and our nervous system needs to reset. We can work on that reset in therapy. Much of how I practice ties our somatic experience, what is happening in the body, to the narrative we use to process what has happened.
IFS sits naturally inside that. When a life event scrambles things, the parts that show up loudest are usually the ones working hardest to hold everything together.
Working together in Washington, DC
I am a Licensed Professional Counselor in the District of Columbia (LPC #PRC 14494) and I see clients in the DC Metro area. My office is at 1555 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 401A, near Dupont Circle.
You do not need to know anything about IFS before we begin, and you do not need to have decided it is the right approach for you. If the language of parts is useful, we will use it. If something else fits you better, we will work that way instead.
If you would like to talk
There is no pressure in reaching out. The first conversation is mostly me listening to what is going on, and you deciding whether I sound like someone you could work with.
Call 202.599.0522 and we will find a time.
True North Psychotherapy
1555 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 401A
Washington, DC 20036
202.599.0522
