Part Inclusivity in IFS Therapy: When IFS Parts Don't Speak in Words
- Katie Helldoerfer
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
If you've ever sat with a client whose part simply won't respond - won't soften, won't speak, won't give you anything to work with through dialogue - you're not doing IFS wrong. You may just be meeting a part that doesn't speak that language.
One of the most important things I've come to believe about IFS therapy is this: all parts are relational. Every single one of them wants connection. Even the ones that go silent. Even the ones that harden, or lash out, or arrive like a blank wall and refuse to move.
The question isn't whether a part wants to be in relationship with us. It always does. The question is: how does this part need to relate? What does connection feel like in its native language?
That shift in thinking has quietly changed everything about how I work.
When IFS Parts Go Silent or Shut Down
Let me tell you about a part I have.
It comes in like a giant rock - or more accurately, like a blank space that somehow takes up enormous room. Its whole purpose is to get big. On a cognitive level, it doesn't care about much of anything. If you ask it how it feels toward me, it goes silent. If you ask it to give me a little space, it doesn't negotiate. It just refuses.
I remember being genuinely stumped by this part in my early IFS training. Some of the therapists who worked with me were stumped too. What do you do with a part that is simply unresponsive?
The temptation is to cave to it. And often, that's exactly what the part wants. It's big for a reason. Its whole way of being is made up of a certain kind of stuff, and it is not going to pretend to be something else.
There are other parts that look different but share something with this one. Parts that want to hurt — through force, through words, through a blunt impact that cuts right past language. Parts that harden. Parts that flutter. Parts that seem far more occupied with doing what they do than with explaining themselves to anyone.
Non-Verbal IFS Parts Are Not Broken Parts
The tempting clinical response - especially in IFS, where so much of the model is organized around language and dialogue - is to wait them out. Or work around them. Or gently prod until they speak in a form we recognize.
But I've come to believe that approach misses something essential: not all parts communicate in words, because words aren't their native language.
Some parts organize themselves in a way that's available for language, reflection, and dialogue. Others don't. They show up as pressure, as expansion, as force or stillness - not because they're resistant, but because that's how they're built. At times, these experiences may be preverbal. At other times, they may be learned patterns that simply aren't organized for reflection. Either way, they don't respond well to being asked to explain themselves. When we assume all parts can be engaged through dialogue, we can inadvertently miss the ones that need to be met through presence, contact, and shared experience instead.
Eugene Gendlin, the philosopher and psychologist who developed Focusing, spent his career thinking about exactly this. He called it the felt sense - that preverbal, bodily knowing that carries meaning before it has found words. The felt sense, he argued, is often fuzzy at first. It doesn't come in tidy categories. It comes in weight, in texture, in images, in the vague sense that something is there, alive in the body, waiting to be companioned rather than interrogated. Gendlin wrote that the body has "its own very subtle vision of what is happening" - a vision that doesn't always translate directly into language, and sometimes can't.
There are also nervous system reasons a part might be non-verbal. A part that is in something like sympathetic activation - braced, mobilized, scanning for danger - is not going to be interested in a reflective conversation. It has a job to do. When we ask it to pause and dialogue, we're asking it to do something that runs counter to its entire purpose in that moment.
But sometimes it's simpler. Some parts don't speak in words because words were never how they learned to communicate. They speak through weight. Through pressure. Through the felt sense of taking up space. Through a silence that isn't emptiness — it's fullness of a different kind.
These parts are not resistant in a pathological way. They are not failing at IFS. They are speaking. We just have to become bilingual.
All IFS Parts Are Relational - They Just Relate Differently
This is the piece I think is sometimes underemphasized in IFS work, and it matters: the desire for connection is present in every part. Even the most armored, apathetic, or seemingly violent ones.
What varies is how a part needs to relate, and what it needs from us in order to actually feel that connection as real.
For some parts, being understood means being held in their being — not asked to step aside, not encouraged toward Self-leadership, not talked with about their burdens. It means being allowed to fully arrive. To take up exactly as much space as they need. To do what they do, while someone stays present with them in it.
That is a form of relationship. It's just not the conversational kind.
Where Hakomi Changed My Practice
This is where integrating Hakomi methods into my IFS work has opened things up in ways I didn't expect.
One of the most useful concepts Hakomi has offered me is taking over — supporting a part in its role by entering into that role experientially alongside the client. If a part's job is to get big and take up space, we don't ask it to stop. We help the client be that bigness more fully. We hold it there together. A part that flutters gets to flutter more completely. A part that needs to push and press and feel its own weight gets to do exactly that, with the therapist as a steady, respectful presence.
What moves, we allow to move. What needs to be close, we help the client recognize they can hold -
provided there's enough Self present to be with it without being consumed by it.
And here is where this diverges meaningfully from more traditional IFS approaches: this doesn't require unblending. It doesn't require the client to cognitively step back and observe from a distance. Sometimes the most healing thing is not separation. It's contact. The part being held in its fullness, in its own language, by a Self that isn't threatened by it.
Parts that seem attacking or violent are doing something when they punch or harden or shut down. If they're not turning that force on vulnerable parts the way they usually do — if Self is steady and curious and genuinely not cowering — something shifts. Not immediately. Not always dramatically. But the message starts to come through differently. The part begins to sense that it has been received.
The Therapist's Job: Show Up, Stay Present
Because here is what I know about even the most armored parts: they have our best interest at heart. They are not our perpetrators, even when they mirror the behaviors of people who once hurt us. They are doing the only thing they know how to do, in the only language they have.
Gendlin put it this way: "A reassuring, reliable human presence, willing to be there with whatever emerges" - one that doesn't try to change or improve anything, doesn't add anything, just receives what's there - is one of the most powerful forces in therapy. That's not a passive stance. It takes real skill and real steadiness to stay present with something that doesn't want to explain itself, that only wants to be held in its being.
As a therapist, I've stopped trying to know in advance every way that every part speaks. Instead, I try to trust that connection is always possible - being to being - if I can create the right conditions.
Sometimes that means a simple orienting. Sometimes it means holding space and doing almost nothing. Sometimes it means entering into what a part is communicating through its very behavior, rather than asking it to step outside that behavior to explain itself.
Part inclusivity in IFS, for me, isn't just about making sure every part gets a seat at the table. It's about recognizing that some parts were never going to walk in and sit down. The table can come to them.
Becoming bilingual means learning to receive what's being communicated before we ask for it in a different form. It means meeting parts in their native tongue - whatever that is - and trusting that Self, when it's truly present, doesn't need translation. It just needs to show up.
Katie is a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor and board-certified art therapist specializing in IFS therapy, Hakomi somatic therapy, and trauma-focused care at Lacuna Counseling in Worthington, Ohio. She offers individual IFS therapy and clinical consultation for therapists.
