Why I Use IFS to Help My Coaching Clients

I met with my first coaching client in 2011 before I had any formal life coach training. I believed (accurately) that I could help others by showing them how to use the same tools and methods I had employed in my own life. I had been clean and sober for 28 years when I first started coaching and had been sponsoring others in 12-step programs most of that time. I enjoyed working with others but struggled with seeing how the 12 steps alone could help me with my own emotional sobriety.

Don’t get me wrong. Life improved in so many ways after I got sober, both internally and externally. But, no matter how many years of abstinence I accumulated, I always had the sense that something was missing, especially when I felt overwhelmed by fear and self-doubt. I struggled when strong emotions rose up inside, doing all I could to manage my them and to control my behaviors.

The 12 steps gave me values and ideals to strive for but, despite multiple personal inventories, transparent disclosures, and attempts to clean up the harm I’d done others, I continued to suffer when uncomfortable emotions were triggered. 

More than sobriety

Even after I had been sober for twenty years, I was still suffering terribly. No matter how many meetings I attended, how many times I worked through the steps, or how many people I sponsored, I still struggled with fear and anxiety, anger and depression. I didn’t trust myself to make good relationship or career decisions and lacked clarity and a sense of purpose or meaning in my life.

My first wife, Lori died of a brain tumor when I had been sober 7 years. We were together for fifteen years and she had seen me through early recovery, several geographical escapes, and numerous job changes. I knew I loved her and that she loved me, but my emotional immaturity robbed us of true connection.

My Grief

When she died, my son was 8 years old and my daughter was 9. I was too scared and proud to drink over her death but discovered that new relationships were a sufficient substitute for alcohol. For the next ten years, I kept my grief at bay by distracting myself with dysfunctional relationships and major life decisions including a failed marriage and several career changes. Despite supplementing my 12-step recovery with years of therapy, I continued to feel overwhelmed by my life.

When I left the marriage, I struggled financially in my new career as a home loan officer. I felt emotionally overwhelmed, coping with drunken calls from my alcoholic and drug addicted ex-wife. When I left, I had assumed she would remain sober as she had done for the previous nine years. But the day I left, she began drinking and using drugs again. I became fearful that she would hurt our 7 year old daughter. But by leaving the family home, my attorney informed me, I’d compromised my ability to protect my daughter. Until something bad happened, he said, there was nothing I could do while my daughter was in my ex-wife’s custody.

Fear and Guilt

I felt guilty for ending the marriage and ashamed of feeling victimized by my angry and critical wife. Men, I thought, shouldn’t be afraid of women. Yet even the thought of a confrontation with her activated deep fear and dread. I loathed myself for the failed marriage and for the impact all my bad choices had on my kids. And I felt ashamed of what all my 12 step program friends must think of me with all my sobriety as they watched me flounder.

I fought off anxiety and depression by going to AA meetings and keeping myself busy at work. At the same time, I was desperate to find some answers, terrified that if I didn’t find a way to heal my past, I would repeat it.

Hope

I broadened my net and began talking with others who, like me, insisted there had to be more to recovery than abstinence. In 2002, thanks to the suggestion of a 12 step friend, I was introduced to The Work of Byron Katie. A business associate introduced me to Landmark Education at about the same time and I attended a weekend intensive called the Landmark Forum. 

Inspired by these two new influences, my internal landscape began to shift. For the first time in my life, I could see a correlation between my suffering, my beliefs, and my thinking. By getting interested in my own thoughts and beliefs and by challenging them, I realized I could influence how much I suffered. When I questioned my thoughts instead of automatically believing them, I stopped suffering.

Rewiring my beliefs and thoughts became the primary focus of my life for the next 15 years. I met new people who were on a similar path and together, we formed an advanced recovery community. From one day to the next, I wasn’t able to recognize the changes that were taking place from the work I was doing. But others noticed the difference and when I looked back after a year I was surprised at how much had changed already. I was no longer depressed. My ex-wife continued to spiral out of control but I had learned to stay centered and grounded despite her frightening behavior.

Coaching

In 2011, I met my first ontological coach. That one hour conversation inspired me. I knew that I wanted to be a life coach.

The same year, I met my wife Kathy. The driving motivation for my personal development work since 1999 had been to become the man who would attract someone like Kathy or who would be happy alone. I knew I had my work cut out for me and I did that work using the tools I discovered over that 12 year span. It worked. Kathy and I have a wonderful marriage.

I was still working full time as a loan officer and began my coaching career as a side gig. By 2015, I was doing well enough as a coach to pay for a one year coach training program and quit my home loan job. 

But when I graduated from the coach training program in the spring of 2016, I hit another wall. Rather than graduating from the program with confidence, I left the training full of self doubt. I had been unable to let go of the methods that I’d used with my coaching clients prior to the training and couldn’t adopt the ones the training school tried to teach me. When I told the trainer about my crisis of confidence, she suggested that I go back to therapy. 

More Therapy

Discouraged and resentful, I prepared for another career change. But what would I do now? I was still licensed as a loan officer, but had left the industry for a reason. I wanted to be a coach but couldn’t seem to find the confidence I needed to provide guidance to my clients. How could I expect to help anyone if I was struggling so much myself?

Finally, I surrendered. As much as I resented the trainer for saying so, and despite all the years I’d been in therapy, maybe she was right. If therapy could help me regain my confidence so I could continue to build my coaching business, then it was certainly worth a try. What did I have to lose? I contacted Brenda, a therapist in the office I was using for my coaching groups and scheduled four sessions.

Internal Family Systems

Brenda introduced me to the Internal Family Systems therapy model. During those first four sessions I got far more than I’d hoped for. The performance-based confidence was eclipsed by a new experience of confidence which seemed to be rooted in something far deeper than the approval of others. I was under new internal management and had begun to develop Self-leadership. I continued to build my coaching business and have never looked back.

In 2019, I completed Level 1 training in the IFS model through the IFS Institute. I completed Level 2 in 2020, and by 2021 I became a Certified IFS practitioner. Little by little, I have integrated the IFS model into my coaching and the results for my clients have been profound and lasting. 

IFS is a therapy model. I am not a therapist - I’m a coach. That means that I use IFS to help my coaching clients get results through compassionate coaching. Thanks to the lessons I’ve learned from my IFS training as well as from my coaching clients, compassion and curiosity trumps any coaching method that guilts, scares, shames, or pressures people to take actions they don’t want to take. 

What Makes Sense

I’ve learned that we all do what makes the most sense to us to do under the influence of the most dominant parts of ourselves. Using the IFS model, I help my clients shift by helping them understand the internal dynamics that automatically produce the results they’ve always gotten. IFS is the most powerful tool in my coaching toolbox because it breaks up old patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior through compassion and curiosity.

Once our parts become Self-led, they become far more interested in the present and future than the past.