This article is for people who already know IFS and are using it, either as an IFS therapist or coach, or in your own personal IFS work. The Self is central to everything that IFS does. Over the years, even as I had profound success healing myself and my clients and group members, I found that I didn’t fully understand the Self. Since I am drawn to theory, I set out to create a complete understanding of the IFS Self. In this article, I introduce the idea of there being two kinds of Self, which enriches our understanding of this concept that is central to IFS.

Two Kinds of Self

I believe there is some confusion about the nature of the Self, which I want to clarify. Here is an important question: Does Self ever have a goal or agenda? Many people would say that it doesn’t, that the Self doesn’t act, it just is. It is a place in consciousness.

However, according to IFS, the goal of therapy is to get to the point where you are living your life from Self, in conjunction with your healthy parts (Schwartz, 1995). When you need to make a decision, you want to be in Self and not taken over by any parts. If you have polarized parts, you can help to resolve the polarization by relating to each part from Self. These are all examples of Self taking action, having intentions. In addition, Self is active in healing exiles, especially during the Do-over step of the IFS process.

Example: Suppose you’re trying to decide whether to leave a secure job to pursue a creative career. A Fearful Manager part says, “You’ll go broke.” A Rebel part says, “Just quit already!” When you access Self, you don’t side with either part—you listen to both with curiosity, weigh what matters to you, and make a decision that takes all your parts’ concerns into account. That is Self taking action.

To clarify this dilemma, I want to propose that there are two kinds of Self, which I will call the pure Self and the active Self.

Pure Self just is. It is pure presence, pure experience, just being there. You often feel embodied and grounded. You are at ease. This experience isn’t always the same, but it is recognizable in your experience. You know when you are in Self. The pure Self has no agenda, not even a goal. It is not trying to accomplish anything, even healing or unburdening. It does not act.

Example: You’re sitting on your porch at dusk, watching the light change. You’re not thinking about your to-do list, not trying to solve a problem. There’s just a quiet openness, a sense of being fully present. You feel calm and whole. Nothing needs to happen. That is pure Self.

Another example: During meditation, you notice your breath without trying to change it. There’s a spacious awareness—no agenda, just presence. Thoughts float by and you don’t chase them. You feel a warmth in your chest and a gentle sense of connectedness. This is the pure Self arising without any effort.

Exercise: Take a minute to check in with your current experience right now. Notice if there is a part blended with you. If so, see if you can unblend from it. Now see if there is another part blended with you or if you are in Self. If there is another part, see if that part will unblend. Continue until you are in Self. From that place, notice your inner experience right now.

The Active Self is when Self makes decisions in your life, guides the inner IFS work in a therapeutic direction, takes healthy actions, and heals or unburdens your parts. When you are working your parts, a version of the Active Self often shows up which we can call the Healing Self. Unlike the pure Self, it does have an intention, though a helpful one. It wants to heal your parts, especially your exiles. It will develop a relationship with each of your exiles. It might tell an exile that it loves the exile. It could be the one who protects the exile from harm. It reparents exiles.

The Healing Self may have a role but it doesn’t have an agenda. It has an intention but not an agenda. It wants to heal your parts, but it doesn’t have a fixed idea of how to do this. It is open to where the flow of the work takes you.

Example: You’re doing an IFS session and have found a young exile who feels abandoned. The Healing Self moves toward this exile with care—perhaps telling it, “I’m here now, you’re not alone.” The Healing Self didn’t arrive with a script. It doesn’t know in advance whether the exile needs to be held, reassured, or taken to a safe place. It reads the moment and responds to whatever the exile needs. That responsiveness—having an intention (healing) without a fixed plan—is the hallmark of the Healing Self.

Intention vs. agenda is the main thing that distinguishes the active or healing Self from protectors. Protectors have fixed roles which they stick to even when they aren’t working (Schwartz & Sweezy, 2020). This is because they are stuck in the past and not relating to the present situation very much. On the other hand, the healing Self is aware in the moment of where the work is. If it needs to go in a different direction, the healing Self is open to that. It is aligned with whatever is needed for healing.

Example: In a session, a client’s Healing Self begins to reparent a five-year-old exile who was shamed by a parent. The Healing Self initially feels drawn to comfort the exile, but as the session unfolds, it becomes clear that the exile doesn’t need comfort—it needs someone to stand up for it. The Healing Self shifts naturally to a protective stance, telling the exile, “What happened to you was wrong. I won’t let anyone treat you that way again.” This flexibility—no rigid role, just attunement to what’s needed—distinguishes the Healing Self from a protector.

The active Self can, at any given moment, arise with various intentions. For example, healing an exile from within, making a friend through being open in sharing significant aspects of your life, strongly asserting your ideas at work, and so on.

Exercise: Repeating question: Tell me a form that your active Self takes.

The Flavors of the Pure Self

If you pay close attention to the experience of pure Self in any given moment, you will notice that it is often arising as a certain quality or flavor of Self, often one of the 8 C’s (Curiosity, Compassion, Calm, Clarity, Courage, Confidence, Creativity, and Connectedness) or the 5 P’s (Presence, Patience, Perspective, Persistence, and Playfulness) elucidated by Dick Schwartz (Schwartz, 2021). For example, you might notice that Self is manifesting as calm, patience, or compassion.

Example: You’re listening to a friend describe a painful breakup. You notice that you aren’t trying to fix or advise. Instead, your heart feels open and warm. You’re experiencing the flavor of compassion—a quality of pure Self. It isn’t something you’re doing; it’s something that is simply present.

Another example: You’re hiking in the mountains and come to a vista. You stop, and everything gets quiet inside. Time seems to slow. There’s a sense of being held by something larger. This is pure Self manifesting as the flavor of presence, combined with a sense of connectedness.

Pure Self isn’t limited to the 8 C’s or the 5 P’s, as Schwartz has acknowledged. It includes many other qualities such as delight, love, appreciation, and depth. It can appear as strength, openness, flow, groundedness, or inner support. It can also appear as a combination of flavors because they are integrated with each other. Since all these flavors are Self, they naturally work together.

Exercise: Check to see if you are in Self right now. If you aren’t, see if you can unblend from any parts. Now, tune into your inner experience. Notice the quality or flavor of it.

Exercise: Repeating question: Tell me a flavor of the pure Self that you have experienced.

On the other hand, many of the 8 C’s and 5P’s can also show up as the active Self. For example, patience isn’t only a momentary experience (pure Self). It can also arise as the capacity for patient behavior.

Pure Self can be experienced by paying attention to your body sensations and noticing the quality of the sensations, not just the pure physical sensation but what it means emotionally or spiritually.

Example: After unburdening a part, you might notice your chest feels open and light. If you stay with that sensation, you might recognize it as a blend of joy and freedom—two flavors of pure Self arising together. Or you might feel your feet solidly on the ground and notice a quiet strength flowing upward through your body. This is the flavor of groundedness combined with inner support.

What makes it pure Self is that it doesn’t act, it doesn’t have intentions. The flavors of pure Self are similar to aspects of essence in the Diamond Approach formulated by A.H. Almaas (Almaas, 1986). The Diamond Approach has been my spiritual path for decades. Persephone Maywald, an IFS therapist who also works with the Diamond Approach, has written specifically about how IFS protector parts can spontaneously transform into aspects of Essence (Maywald, 2023). Almaas’s framework catalogs these aspects in great detail (strength, will, compassion, joy, peace, truth, etc.), and describes how each essential quality can be blocked by specific personality structures (Almaas, 1988).

Active and Pure Self Together

When you are in the active Self, the pure Self is also there, but it is in the background, as your inner experience. They arise together. If you choose, you can tune into that pure Self experience.

Example: You’re in an IFS session, working with an exile who carries deep loneliness from childhood. The active Self—in this case, the Healing Self—moves toward the exile with care, telling it, “I see you. You’re not alone anymore.” That’s the active Self doing its work. But if you pause and notice what else is happening, you’ll find the pure Self is also present, quietly suffusing the moment. There may be a warmth in your chest, a sense of deep compassion that isn’t directed at anyone—it just is. The Healing Self acts; the pure Self flavors that action with its quality. They arise together, inseparable.

In tuning into the experience of pure Self, it helps to notice what you are experiencing in your body. Susan McConnell’s work on Somatic IFS (McConnell, 2020) emphasizes that the body is a primary site through which Self-energy is experienced, and that practices such as somatic awareness, conscious breathing, and attuned touch can help you access the pure Self.

Example: After a session in which you helped an exile unburden, you sit quietly and bring your attention to your body. You notice a gentle expansion in your chest, a feeling of spaciousness. Your breathing has slowed and deepened without your trying. If you stay with these sensations, you might recognize them as the pure Self qualities of openness and peace—arising right alongside the active Self that just did the healing work. By tuning into your body in this way, you can experience the pure Self directly, not as an idea but as a felt, embodied reality.

Now we have demonstrated this key understanding that there are two kinds of Self, pure and active. There is much more to be explored about the nature of the active Self. You might want to read the next article, Capacities in IFS.

References

Almaas, A.H. (1986). Essence: The Diamond Approach to Inner Realization. Samuel Weiser.

Almaas, A.H. (1988). The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being, an Object Relations Approach. Shambhala.

Maywald, P. (2023). “The Essence of Self.” Retrieved from https://www.therapyviaskype.com/spirits-support/the-essence-of-self/

McConnell, S. (2020). Somatic Internal Family Systems Therapy: Awareness, Breath, Resonance, Movement, and Touch in Practice. North Atlantic Books.

Schwartz, R.C. (1995). Internal Family Systems Therapy. Guilford Press.

Schwartz, R.C. (2021). No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. Sounds True.

Schwartz, R.C. & Sweezy, M. (2020). Internal Family Systems Therapy, 2nd ed. Guilford Press.