IFS Therapist in Portland

You’ve been trying to change yourself for a long time. You’ve been putting in great effort toward trying to think differently, calm down, be less reactive, stop overthinking, be more confident, be easier to be around, be more disciplined, be less sensitive, be more productive, be more okay, be less, be more… Despite all your valiant effort, something in you keeps pushing back. As an IFS therapist in Portland, I help adults who feel anxious, torn inside, or deeply hard on themselves approach their inner world with more compassion and clarity.

Have you noticed that maybe one part of you wants rest while another tells you not to be lazy? Or that one part of you longs to be more open and connected, while another pulls away or shuts down completely? It could be that you know you’re doing your best, but that never seems to stop the inner pressure from building. You look capable and like you have your shit together on the outside while feeling torn up and worn down inside. You’re exhausted from carrying a constant load of anxiety, self-doubt, people-pleasing, or harsh self-judgment.

You may have even tried all sorts of different modes of therapy before. Or self-help. Or pushing harder. Or pretending things are fine because that feels easier than trying to understand and explain what is happening inside.

If you’re here, some part of you already knows there has to be a kinder, more humane way to approach all of this.

There Are Reasons This Feels So Hard

When you’ve been feeling anxious, conflicted, or hard on yourself for a long time it’s so easy to assume something must be wrong with you. Right? It must be that you’re “too sensitive,” “too complicated,” “too much,” “not enough” or some other thing. Other people seem to handle their stuff ok, maybe not perfectly but they function (seem being the keyword here but that’s a topic for another time).

Many people will come to therapy already carrying some form of belief that they need to “fix” themselves. Heck, some people may come to therapy because someone (or someones) in their life has used that exact phrase at them. Even some forms of therapy can, at times, reinforce that idea, focusing so much on “reducing symptoms” or “correcting thoughts” that it ends up echoing the same inner message: something about you needs to be improved before you can feel okay.

What if the goal of therapy wasn’t to fight yourself into becoming someone easier to manage?

What if your anxiety, self-criticism, overthinking, perfectionism, people-pleasing, or emotional shutdown were not signs of personal failure, but attempts to protect you in the only ways they know how? If you’re feeling skeptical that’s all cool, welcome that skepticism to read along with you.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy offers a non-pathologizing way to understand what is happening inside you. What do you notice happens when you ask yourself “What is wrong with me?” Now try asking yourself, “What is happening inside me?” Feel any different? IFS invites you to explore how you can relate to yourself with more clarity, compassion, and trust.

Again, if that skepticism is still raising an eyebrow, all good. Let me share a bit more.

What Is IFS Therapy?

Internal Family Systems, often called IFS, is a therapy model that understands that each of us naturally has different inner parts or responses. In other words, those inner conflicts you experience are a sign that you are deeply human and in good company, because we all experience them. What makes each of our inner systems distinct is based on our different lived experiences, relationships, genetic makeups, interactions with systems, etc.

Most likely, you’ve already been noticing this in everyday life. One part of you wants to speak up, while another tells you to stay quiet and small. One part of you wants to be closer to others, while another puts up walls or defenses for distance. One part of you feels hopeful, while another anticipates disappointment after disappointment. One part of you pushes you to do more, improve more, and get it right, while another feels overwhelmed and wants to just stop.

IFS helps you to understand these different parts and begin to make sense of those inner experiences.

Instead of seeing these reactions as random, irrational, or indications of being “broken,” IFS understands them as meaningful. For example, some parts of us work hard to keep us functioning, protected, productive, emotionally guarded, or safe from rejection. While other parts of us carry pain, fear, shame, grief, or vulnerability that feel challenging to face.

The goal of IFS therapy is not to get rid of these parts or to force a change within. An aim with IFS is to help you build a steadier, more compassionate relationship with them so you can feel less driven by fear, pressure, and outdated survival strategies.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy is a compassionate, non-pathologizing approach that helps you understand different inner parts of yourself, including the ones that feel anxious, critical, protective, or overwhelmed. As an IFS therapist in Portland, I use this approach to help adults build more self-trust, self-compassion, and clarity.

Throughout this process, many people begin to make connections with something deeper in themselves. Through these connections a clearer, calmer, more grounded way of relating to their inner world begins to take shape. Through this growing relationship clients will often begin to feel more confident and able to weather life’s storms whether internal or external.

Hi, I’m Eric Goodwin, an IFS Therapist in Portland

I’m a Licensed Professional Counselor and IFS therapist in Portland, offering online therapy in Portland and throughout Oregon. My passion is helping adults who are living with anxiety, self-doubt, identity-related stress, and harsh self-criticism build more self-compassion and self-trust.

I ground my approach with a person-centered foundation and integrate Internal Family Systems (IFS), mindfulness-based psychotherapy, and self-compassion-oriented approaches. I’ve completed IFS Level 1 training through the IFS Institute, which matters to me because I believe clients deserve therapists with meaningful training in the models they use.

Therapy With a Present Focus

One of the reasons I value IFS so much is that healing can happen in real time. We have a collective image of going to therapy to explain our experiences in vivid detail or to have to revisit trauma in over and over in order to heal. And yes, there are some therapies that do work that way…but…for many of us, especially those of us who are already feeling overwhelmed, raw, or self-protective, that kind of exploration can create more barriers toward healing. An IFS instructor I’ve learned from said “When we’re talking about it, we’re not healing.”

The IFS approach is different than many other talk therapies. Within this approach you’ll turn your focus toward what is happening inside of you right now. What you’re noticing, what is getting activated. This approach becomes active and relational by working with what is alive in the present. This helps facilitate building self-trust in the here and now. Healing is not something that only happens after you say the perfect thing or fully explain your history.

Why Work With an IFS Therapist in Portland

You may have been in therapy before and left feeling unseen, overanalyzed, or like you were somehow doing therapy wrong. To be clear, I’m not speaking against therapy that is solution-oriented or more closely aligned with the medical model. I am acknowledging that those models aren’t for everyone. And if you have had invalidating experiences in therapy, you are in good company.

Some therapy can be focused on symptom management, strongly structured, or quick to organize your experience into a diagnosis before there has been enough room to actually understand what your inner world is actually like. That kind of approach definitely has its benefits and is very purposeful and useful for some people. It is not the only way and for those of us who feel pulled in many directions, balancing many roles, identities and lived experiences we may be searching for something else. IFS can feel different because of how it makes room for our human complexities.

With IFS we won’t try to push past inner conflict as quickly as possible. Instead, we will go at a pace that facilitates your understanding it. We won’t treat anxiety or self-criticism as enemies, but we will get curious about what roles they have been trying to play. We won’t assume every reaction needs to be corrected; we will explore it in relationship.

There is a freedom in the “no agenda” spirit of IFS. I say this knowing full-well that some of your planner parts may be having some strong reactions to this idea.

To clarify, this does not mean our therapy will lack direction and focus. We just won’t be forcing your inner world into a pre-decided script about what healing is supposed to look like. We are not trying to optimize you into a more acceptable version of yourself. We are making room for discovery, relationship-building, and the kind of change that can happen when there is less “efforting” and more understanding. That shift can feel life-changing for those of us who have spent much of life performing, adapting, masking, or trying to stay ahead of criticism.

What Happens When the Pressure Begins to Ease

It’s understood with IFS that one part nearly everyone has is an inner critic. Or critics…plural, if you’re like me and many others. Many of us have strong and mighty inner critics. These inner critics can be demanding and relentless in how they go about their work. They can throw out sharp jabs, judgmental reflections, or set impossible to satisfy standards followed by scathing dressing-downs when we inevitably fall below these super-high expectations. Critics can express themselves through perfectionism, over-preparing, replaying conversations, assuming the worst, comparing ourselves to others, or never quite letting ourselves rest.

That inner pressure stirred up by these inner critics may even be the primary reason you’re seeking out support. In IFS therapy, many of us will discover that the parts of ourselves that criticize, push, or pressure aren’t actually harsh taskmasters, they’re often exhausted, overworked, helpers.

These critics have probably been working overtime for years (toiling away to prevent us from being rejected, feeling shamed, failing, getting too vulnerable, or collapsing). They may believe that if they let up, even for a moment, something will fall apart. The big bad will happen. And because they’ve been carrying so much for so long, they can feel intense, urgent, and deeply convincing. It could be a matter of survival!

When we take the time to listen in and understand these critics instead of just fighting them the inner pressure that comes with them often starts to shift. I’m not saying it’s instantaneous, like flipping on a light switch. It’s building a relationship, and as that develops those critics begin to soften. Their presence can feel less overwhelming. There can be more room to breathe, reflect, and respond with intention.

This change can be like having the blinders taken off. A lot of this work is about creating choice where there didn’t appear to be any room for before. And being able to make that choice in collaboration with your system, there is also the opportunity to cultivate and strengthen self-trust.

Mindfulness, Self-Compassion, and Parts Work

IFS is one of the core approaches I use in therapy, and it fits naturally with the mindfulness-and self-compassion-based work I also bring into your therapy.

Mindfulness can help you notice what is happening inside without immediately getting swept away by it. Self-compassion helps soften the harshness that so often surrounds pain, fear, or vulnerability. IFS gives us a way to understand the different inner responses that are showing up and relate to them with more care.

Together, these approaches can support a different relationship with anxiety, self-doubt, and inner conflict. I gravitate towards bringing in these approaches with clients because they encourage healing without being demanding, forcing positivity or rushing to meet some sort of therapeutic deadline. In my experience, these approaches help us to become more present, more curious, and more connected with ourselves (and others- despite some of our preconceptions about self-compassion, it actually has been shown to help us grow MORE compassionate toward others).

LGBTQ+ Affirming IFS Therapy in Portland

As a Queer and Queer-affirming therapist, I am wholly aware that inner conflict does not develop in a vacuum. Cultural messages, family systems, identity-based stress, and pressure to be more “acceptable” to the world around us can play significant roles in creating core deficiency beliefs. For those of us within the LGBTQ+ community, we may find we have parts shaped by hypervigilance, concealment, shame, fear of rejection, or the frustration of being misunderstood. We may have parts that are fiercely protective, skeptical, guarded, or exhausted from having to explain and translate our experience to a heteronormative world. Those parts of us deserve care too.

There is room to understand the impact of Queerphobia, family trauma, and other burdens in your therapy. These and other burdens can shape how we move through the world and how we relate to ourselves. As you already know, these are layered and complex experiences so all the more important that we find a way to explore them without assumptions and undue pressure.

That is part of what I appreciate so much about IFS. It allows us to approach your inner world with less agenda and more respect. Instead of forcing experience into a narrow definition of progress, we can create room for freedom, discovery, and relationship-building.

You do not have to become more polished, more productive, or easier to understand before you deserve support. You can begin where you are.

There Is No One Right Way to Do This Work

IFS is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Some of us relate to our inner world in images. Others will feel things in the body. Some think in words, memories, or emotional shifts. Some are imaginative. Some are skeptical. Some are unsure whether the language of “parts” fits them at all (totally cool by the way, we don’t have to use it if it doesn’t feel right).

All of that is welcome here. Part of what makes this work meaningful is that it adapts to the way you naturally process and make sense of experience. Your creativity, directness, uncertainty, and doubt are all a part of this process and there is room for hesitancy and skepticism. Really, the hope and intention is to help you build a more honest, compassionate relationship with yourself and for you to gain confidence in how you make choices moving forward.

Building Self-Trust Can Begin Here

As an IFS therapist in Portland I offer one-on-one telehealth sessions for people in Portland and across the state of Oregon. I specialize in therapy for anxiety, LGBTQ+ affirming therapy and mindfulness and self-compassion.

If what you’ve read here sounds like what you’ve been searching for, I welcome you to reach out for a free 15-minute phone consultation and I’d love to see how I can help. Call (971) 533-5590 or contact me here to schedule your consultation.

FAQs for IFS Therapist in Portland

What is IFS Therapy?

IFS stands for Internal Family Systems, a therapy model that helps people understand the different inner responses or “parts” that shape how they think, feel, and react. Rather than viewing these parts as problems to eliminate, IFS helps you build a more compassionate and trusting relationship with them.

What does “parts work” mean in therapy?

Parts work is a way of understanding the inner conflicts many people experience. You may notice that one part of you wants closeness while another pulls away, or one part wants rest while another pushes harder. In therapy, we explore these different inner responses with curiosity rather than judgment.

Do I need to know anything about IFS before starting?

Not at all. You do not need to understand the model ahead of time or feel comfortable with the language right away. We can begin simply by exploring what you are noticing inside and using language that feels natural to you.

What if talking about “parts” feels strange to me?

That is a very common reaction. You do not have to fully buy into the idea of parts for this work to be helpful. Many people begin with skepticism, and that is welcome. We can move at a pace that feels grounded and make the work fit how you naturally think and relate. And in the meantime there are many other approaches we can explore.

Can IFS therapy help with anxiety?

Yes. IFS can be especially helpful for anxiety because it helps you understand the inner responses driving worry, pressure, avoidance, and overwhelm. Rather than only managing symptoms, we begin to understand the protective patterns beneath them and build a steadier relationship with them.

How does IFS help with self-criticism?

IFS often helps people see that the inner critic is not just harsh—it is also trying very hard to protect them in the only way it knows. When that part begins to feel understood, it can become less extreme and more open to change. That often creates more room for self-trust and self-compassion.

Is IFS only for people with trauma?

No. IFS can be helpful for a wide range of concerns, including anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, identity exploration, harsh self-judgment, and feeling torn inside. You do not need a specific diagnosis or trauma history to benefit from this work.

Do you offer LGBTQ+ affirming IFS therapy?

Yes. I provide LGBTQ+ affirming therapy online in Portland and throughout Oregon. My work honors the ways identity, safety, belonging, and cultural messaging can shape inner experience, and I strive to create therapy that feels respectful, affirming, and genuinely welcoming.

Do you offer online therapy throughout Oregon?

Yes. I provide virtual therapy for adults throughout Oregon. Whether you are in Portland or elsewhere in the state, we can meet online.

I’ve tried therapy before and it didn’t help. Why might this be different?

There are many reasons therapy may not have felt helpful in the past. Sometimes the approach was not the right fit. Sometimes therapy moved too fast, felt too structured, or did not leave enough room for complexity. My approach is collaborative, non-shaming, and paced with care. We will work to understand what has and has not felt helpful for you.

How long does IFS therapy usually take?

That depends on your goals, history, and what kind of support you are looking for. Some clients notice meaningful shifts fairly early, while others benefit from longer-term therapy. We will check in regularly about your experience and adjust as needed.

Do you accept insurance?

I’m an out-of-network provider, which means I do not bill insurance directly. I can provide superbills for potential reimbursement, depending on your plan.

How do I know if IFS therapy is a good fit for me?

IFS therapy may be a good fit if you often feel pulled in different directions inside, struggle with anxiety or harsh self-judgment, or want a therapy approach that is compassionate, non-pathologizing, and deeper than symptom management alone. You do not have to be sure before reaching out. A consultation can help us determine whether it feels like a good fit.