Internal Family Systems, or IFS, is a family therapy-descended model of the psyche and psychotherapy method based on the idea that the mind is split between parts called exiles, managers, and firefighters. Therapy consists of methods for allowing these parts to “talk” to each other so, for example, exiles can be reintegrated.
Building up to an Internal Family Systems model offers a more thorough introduction to the IFS model.
For a related technique developed by CFAR, see Internal Double Crux. Rather than thinking of the mind as an entity with one set of goals and beliefs, IFS includes many independently acting components, each of which might have varying goals and beliefs; see subagents for the more general form of this idea.
Seems like this is what the Subagents tag is supposed to be about
While about subagents, Internal Family Systems is the name for a particular kind of psychotherapy, so I think it makes sense for it to have its own page (that links and references subagents).
Yeah, subagents is the general idea of modeling the mind in terms of independent agents, but IFS is a more specific theory of what kinds of subagents there are. E.g. my sequence has a post about understanding System 1 and System 2 in terms of subagents, while IFS doesn’t really have anything to say about that.
But I think it’d be bad to have the pages be duplicates of each other, so possibly this should be wiki-only but have in the text description mention posts explicitly about IFS. (I’m not sure the currently tagged ones meet that?) I’m not sure.