Parts work is one of the most genuinely useful territories in psychological healing. The idea that we are made up of many inner voices, protectors, and wounded younger selves, all with their own perspectives and strategies, is not just therapeutically useful. It maps onto lived experience in a way that can feel immediately illuminating. Most people who encounter it have a moment of recognition: “Oh, that’s what’s been happening.”
Internal Family Systems (IFS), developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, deserves real credit for popularizing parts work and bringing it into mainstream therapeutic culture. I have deep respect for the model, and I used it for years before beginning my training in Aletheia. But I want to be honest about where I think it falls short, and why the Aletheia framework developed by Steve March has become my preferred approach.
What Internal Family Systems Actually Is
Internal Family Systems is a therapeutic model built on the premise that the human psyche is naturally multiple. Rather than a single, unified self, we carry a system of parts, including managers, firefighters, and exiles, all organized around protecting a core Self from pain and overwhelm. The goal in IFS is to help the Self lead the system with compassion, curiosity, and calm, so that wounded parts can heal rather than run the show. It has a meaningful research base, and for many people it is genuinely transformative.
Definition
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
A therapy model developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz in which the psyche is understood as naturally containing multiple parts, including protective managers and firefighters, and wounded exiles, all orbiting a core Self. The healing goal is for Self to lead the inner system with compassion and curiosity, rather than parts driving behavior from places of fear or overwhelm.
It’s worth noting something that often goes unmentioned in coaching circles: IFS is specifically a therapy model. For a period, coaches were permitted to train in and practice IFS. That’s no longer the case. The IFS Institute now designates it strictly as a therapeutic modality, meaning it’s intended to be practiced by licensed therapists in a therapeutic context. Aletheia, by contrast, was developed from the ground up as a coaching methodology. That distinction matters practically, and I’ll come back to it.
My preference for Aletheia is not a dismissal of IFS. It’s more that IFS is doing one thing, and Aletheia is doing four.
What Aletheia Is, and Why the Difference in Scope Matters
Aletheia is a coaching and development framework created by Steve March, founder of Integral Unfoldment. March trained extensively in IFS and used it for many years before developing Aletheia. The parts work in Aletheia would feel familiar to anyone with an IFS background. But Aletheia doesn’t stop at parts.
The framework is organized around what March calls the Four Depths of Cosmos, Psyche, and Soma: Parts Work, Process Work, Presence Work, and Nondual Work. Each depth is a different layer of contact with present-moment experience, and each calls for a different way of working.
| Depth | Inspiring Method | Primary Experience |
|---|---|---|
| Depth of Parts | Internal Family Systems (Schwartz) | Separate ego parts with distinct intentions, strategies & emotions |
| Depth of Process | Focusing (Gendlin) | Flow of felt meaning through bodily sensation & imaginal imagery |
| Depth of Presence | The Diamond Approach (Almaas) | Innate wholeness; qualities like acceptance, courage, love, peace |
| Depth of Nonduality | Mahamudra / Vajrayana Buddhism (Brown) | Non-separate, unconditioned awareness; unity consciousness |
IFS operates primarily at the Depth of Parts. That’s not a criticism; that’s its design. But a method that specializes in one depth will naturally become less useful when the client’s experience has moved somewhere else. Aletheia is designed to follow the client wherever they actually are.
The Problem with Parts That Won’t Talk
Here is something that happened to me personally, and that I’ve since seen repeatedly in my work with clients. When I first began using IFS, parts work felt almost effortless. I would sense something activate, notice a character or image, and we could simply have a conversation. The part would speak, I would respond, and something would shift.
That’s genuinely useful when it happens. But it’s not always how inner experience shows up.
Over time, I noticed my own process changing. The verbal quality of parts became less pronounced. What I was encountering wasn’t a character with a voice; it was sensation, pressure, heaviness, a kind of wordless aliveness in the body. And in an IFS container, there wasn’t a great answer for what to do with that. The model’s primary language is dialogue: you speak to a part, the part speaks back. When that loop doesn’t close, both practitioner and client can end up genuinely stuck.
I started hearing this from clients too. “There’s just something in my body, but it’s not saying anything.” And before I began the Aletheia training, I didn’t have much of a response to that either.
What Aletheia calls the Depth of Process is exactly this territory. It’s the layer of experience where what’s alive in the body isn’t yet a part, isn’t a voice or a character, but is a flow of felt meaning. This draws on Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing tradition, integrated into a broader framework. When a part “melts,” when it releases its rigid identity and dissolves into sensation, imagery, and feeling, that’s not the end of the work. In Aletheia, it’s an invitation to go deeper.
That transition is something IFS, on its own, doesn’t map. The natural momentum is often pulling toward something more somatic and less verbal, but without a framework to follow it, the work tends to anchor back to parts whether or not that’s where the aliveness actually is.
The Risk of Getting Stuck in the Head
A common experience I hear from people who have tried IFS, and it matches my own at times, is that it can become quite mental. There’s a part, and that part has its own view of another part, and a third part is in conflict with the first, and you begin mapping a kind of inner organizational chart. The vocabulary is clear and useful, but after a while the whole thing can feel like it’s happening in your head. You are thinking about your parts more than feeling your way through them.
This isn’t a flaw exactly; it’s partly a function of how the model uses language. The map becomes the territory. And for people who already have a tendency toward intellectualization as a protective strategy, this can inadvertently reinforce what they’re trying to move through.
Aletheia’s approach to this is elegant in its simplicity. The somatic dimension is not a supplement to the parts work; it’s built into the framework as a distinct and equally important depth. The body is always in the room. If a session begins with a part and that part starts to soften, the work follows what’s happening in the body, in the imagery, in the felt sense, without needing to re-anchor in a part to make sense of it.
The Spiritually Oriented Practitioner’s Dilemma
This brings me to something I’ve heard from people who come from a Buddhist or more broadly contemplative background. A number of them are drawn to parts work initially, and then find themselves backing away from it. The reason they give is usually some version of: it reifies my separateness. It keeps making me more of a collection of parts when what I’m actually trying to move toward is unity.
I think this concern is legitimate. The Depth of Parts, as March defines it, is precisely the depth at which separation is dominant. Your experience of yourself is fragmented into distinct sub-selves with competing agendas. Working at that depth isn’t wrong, but if the method keeps reaching for more parts when the experience is naturally moving toward wholeness, something gets lost.
IFS has a beautiful concept of Self, the capital-S Self that is not a part and cannot be damaged. But in practice, a lot of IFS sessions spend most of their time at the level of parts and don’t offer a formal methodology for what comes when the parts quiet down. The Depth of Presence and the Depth of Nonduality in Aletheia are exactly that methodology.
For people whose healing path is also a contemplative path, this matters. The Nondual Work in Aletheia draws on Vajrayana Buddhism, and specifically on the Mahamudra tradition, an area that Dr. Daniel P. Brown engaged with deeply across decades of scholarship and practice. Brown devoted much of his life to Tibetan Buddhism, both as a practitioner and a scholar, producing translations and teachings on Mahamudra that remain among the most serious contributions to that literature in Western academic and contemplative circles. That continuity between the psychological and the contemplative is not incidental. It reflects something real about what depth actually is and where inner work can go when the conditions are right.
Parts Work Is a Depth, Not the Whole Journey
This, in my view, is the core issue. IFS was designed as a therapy for working with inner parts, and it does that well. But from a developmental perspective, parts work is the beginning of the inner journey, not the whole of it.
The goal is not to resolve all parts and arrive at a destination. It’s to have access to the full range of depth, moment to moment, so that whatever is arising can be met with the appropriate way of working. When you have that range available, the work doesn’t stall. It follows the client.
That’s what Aletheia trains for. And in my experience so far, that range is what actually allows transformation to be lasting rather than something that requires ongoing management.
What This Means in Practice
In my work with clients at Reparent Yourself, parts work shows up across a wide range of what people bring. Some come specifically for attachment healing. Others come because they keep hitting the same walls in their relationships, their work, or their sense of themselves, and nothing they’ve tried has produced lasting change. Parts work is relevant across all of it.
I’m currently in the first level of Aletheia training, and it has already meaningfully shifted how I work with clients. I’m discovering more as I go deeper into it. What I want in a parts framework is something fluid enough to move with what’s actually present, not one that requires experience to stay verbal and dialogic in order to be workable. Aletheia gives me that. I can meet a part where it is, let it express itself at whatever depth it’s alive in, and follow it as it moves, whether that means working with it directly as a part, feeling it in the body, sitting in the qualities of presence it reveals, or touching the spaciousness underneath everything. The work stays alive that way.
Aletheia Parts Work vs. IFS: A Quick Comparison
| Feature | Internal Family Systems | Aletheia |
|---|---|---|
| Modality type | Therapy (licensed therapists only) | Coaching methodology |
| Scope | Parts work only | Parts, somatic, presence & nondual work integrated |
| Somatic integration | Limited; not a core feature | Central to the methodology at the Depth of Process |
| When parts dissolve | Model anchors back to parts dialogue | Work follows naturally into Process or Presence depths |
| Spiritual depth | Self concept; limited contemplative integration | Explicit Nondual depth drawing on Mahamudra & other traditions |
| Parts that won’t speak | Limited tools for non-verbal somatic activation | Process Work addresses exactly this territory |
| Model complexity | Rich vocabulary with many categories to track | Single depth-tracking orientation; simpler in practice |
Working with Both, Preferring One
IFS and Aletheia are not in opposition. They share a lineage. Steve March trained in IFS, and Aletheia’s parts work is clearly in dialogue with Schwartz’s model. People who have done IFS work will find the parts depth in Aletheia familiar, even if the wider framework takes some adjustment.
My own view, developed through the Aletheia training program, through working with clients at Reparent Yourself, and through my own ongoing inner work, is that Aletheia is a more complete tool for the kind of deep, enduring transformation I’m interested in supporting. It can do what IFS does, and then continue from there, following the client wherever their experience actually leads.
If your experience of parts work has left you feeling like there’s something more just below the surface, something somatic, something more spacious, something that the work keeps almost touching but not quite reaching, Aletheia might be what you’re looking for.
Dan Lemp is an attachment healing coach and the founder of Reparent Yourself, where he works with clients navigating insecure attachment, relational patterns, and the inner blocks that keep people from their fullest expression. He is currently completing Level 1 of the Aletheia training program through Integral Unfoldment, and uses the Ideal Parent Figure protocol developed by Dr. Daniel P. Brown as his primary modality for attachment healing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main difference between IFS and Aletheia parts work?
The main difference is scope. Internal Family Systems is a parts-focused therapy; its entire methodology addresses the inner system of sub-personalities. Aletheia is a four-depth coaching framework that includes Parts Work but also integrates somatic (Process) work, Presence work, and Nondual work. In practical terms, this means Aletheia can follow experience wherever it goes, including into territory that is more bodily, more spacious, or more contemplative in nature, without needing to anchor back to a parts dialogue.
Is IFS a therapy or a coaching method?
IFS is currently designated as a therapy model by the IFS Institute and is intended to be practiced by licensed therapists in a therapeutic context. Coaches were permitted to train in IFS for a period, but that is no longer the case. Aletheia, by contrast, was developed from the ground up as a coaching methodology, which is one reason it is more accessible for practitioners working outside a licensed therapy context.
Why do some people find IFS too intellectual?
IFS works primarily through dialogue with parts, which requires holding a relatively complex inner map in mind. For people who already tend toward over-thinking as a protective strategy, this dialogue-heavy approach can inadvertently keep experience at the mental level. The somatic dimension of what’s arising doesn’t always translate easily into the IFS vocabulary. Aletheia’s Process depth addresses this directly by treating felt bodily experience as its own valid territory, not as a translation problem.
What happens in Aletheia when a part dissolves?
In Aletheia, when a part releases its rigid structure and dissolves, the work naturally follows whatever is now alive, whether that’s a flow of somatic sensation, imagery, a quality of presence, or a sense of open spaciousness. This is understood as movement into a deeper depth, not as the end of the session or a gap in the method. IFS generally re-anchors to parts at this point, whereas Aletheia is explicitly designed to work at whatever depth the experience has moved into.