Exploring Inner Landscapes:
Broadening IFS by working directly with the environments and spaces where our parts live
Max Littman and Peter Silvien
August 16, 2026
This article is co-written with fellow psychotherapist Peter Silvien, who first brought this territory into our biweekly conversations for the past two years and has been more deeply immersed in it through his personal and clinical work. What follows comes from Peter’s deeper sensing and exploration of inner worlds, my translating and shaping of the frame through writing, and the shared conversations that have helped us begin to name something we believe is clinically useful, personally meaningful, and underdeveloped in the way IFS is often taught and practiced.
We are naming and bringing attention to:
- Parts exist in inner environments.
- These inner environments may be as clinically relevant as the parts themselves.
Internal Family Systems has given many of us an elegant and simple way to understand our inner experiences. Its primary focus is the WHO of inner experience. We listen for parts. We notice protectors, exiles, managers, firefighters, young parts, critical parts, caretaking parts, collapsed parts, angry parts, anxious parts, preverbal parts, dissociating parts, and many others.
We also listen for WHAT inner experience consists of: burdens, beliefs, fears, roles, polarizations, memories, emotions, and the relationships parts have with Self and with one another.
This has changed the way many of us understand the mind, symptoms, wounds, and healing. IFS gives us a way to recognize and approach inner multiplicity with less shame and pathologizing, and more openness, curiosity, compassion, connectedness, and clarity. It helps us understand that mental health symptoms, whether externally observable or felt only on the inside, are often part of an internal system organized to protect, adapt, survive, and heal in response to threats of physical harm or interpersonal disconnection.
What feels less developed is the question of WHERE this inner experience occurs and what implications it has for parts in these inner places and for our system as a whole.
This is not a foreign idea in therapy.
We already know that environments shape people. A person may make real gains in therapy, but if they keep returning to a family system, workplace, relationship, community, or culture that remains threatening, shaming, chaotic, or misattuned, those gains may be difficult to sustain.
We also know that physical environments affect the body, mind, and psyche, for better or worse: light, sound, air, space, temperature, safety, crowding, beauty, pollution, access to nature, and the many visible and invisible conditions that shape what our body’s systems have to manage.
Peter and I believe the same may be true internally. A part may not be fully understood apart from the inner world it inhabits.
The importance of inner place is also not entirely new to IFS practitioners and adjacent clinicians, especially those with more experience. Many already recognize them implicitly or attend to them explicitly in their work, including authors and educators.
Deb Dana, for example, describes inviting clients to visit the landscape of an active autonomic state, attending to its particular bodily experience, actions, story, and environmental qualities while allowing the nervous system to determine whether to observe it from the entrance or move more fully through it.
Joanne Twombly likewise references inner habitats in her work with dissociation, including the realities in which parts may still be living and the importance of meeting them there when they are not yet ready for retrieval or orientation to the present. She also uses inner places creatively through what she calls “safe space imagery”, offering possibilities for healing and transformation when parts are cut off from Self and a sense of safety.
Place is also implicitly present in standard IFS practices including redos and retrievals. Sometimes an unburdening involves attending to where a part is or where an experience is taking place, while practices such as waiting rooms and rooms with windows for scary or intense parts make explicit use of inner spaces.
What may be more novel than simply being aware of a part’s location is treating inner environments as a distinct area of clinical attention and highlighting them as therapeutic resources in their own right. The knowledge already present in the field also points to the need for clearer guidance about when attention to an inner place may be useful and how to engage it without becoming overly interpretive or prescriptive.
The core idea is not simply that parts exist in inner environments.
It is that inner environments shape what is possible. And that when we attend to and “flesh out” these inner environments, more therapeutic possibilities can emerge.
Inner environments may shape what a part can feel, know, remember, tolerate, receive, or release. An inner habitat has influence on the roles, burdens, beliefs, emotions, memories, and relationships of those parts that live there. And they may have the effect of filtering what a part can perceive and how it can respond.
Whenever a part is encountered, it is encountered somewhere. That somewhere may be somatic, vivid, vague, visual, sensory, spatial, atmospheric, relational, or difficult to describe. It may be explicitly named or explored in a session, or it may remain in the background.
A part may be in darkness, behind a wall, underwater, in a closet, in a childhood home, in a field, behind glass, in a cave, floating in space, inside a house with no doors, or in a place that does not resemble ordinary physical reality but still has distance, pressure, temperature, atmosphere, light, texture, or boundary.
These places are easy to overlook or treat as unimportant background imagery. They may seem like metaphor, decoration, visualization, or the mind’s creative way of making something more vivid. Sometimes that may be true. But Peter and I are interested in what becomes possible when these environments are understood as clinically vital rather than incidental.
Where a part exists may matter just as much as who the part is, what it carries, and how it came to carry it.
The point is not to assign fixed meanings or interpretations to these inner realms. A dark room, wall, locked door, glass barrier, or great distance does not always mean one thing.
The more important question is what’s the relationship between such environments and the wider system. It may be a larger form of protection, an energetic structure if you like, not itself a part or simply something a part created.
We do not see the exploration of inner environments as a replacement for the usual focus in IFS. Roles, fears, burdens, emotions, and relationships still matter. Self-energy still matters. The relationship between Self and parts remains central.
But the environment may be just as rich a part of the clinical picture.
We believe IFS rightly emphasizes relationship. We ask how the client feels toward a part. We help parts come into relationship with Self. Sometimes we help parts form better relationships with each other. We listen for what parts need us to know, what they fear, and what burdens they carry.
But relationships happen somewhere. It is always contextual.
A part in an open field may have a different relationship with Self than a part in an airless space. A part near warmth may experience contact differently than a part behind glass. A protector standing at a locked door may need that threshold respected before it can trust anyone coming closer. A part in a version of the past may not have the same relationship to present-day Self as a part that already knows time has moved forward.
In other words, when we ignore the environment, we may miss why a familiar intervention lands well with one part and feels intrusive, impossible, or irrelevant to another.
This focus on inner environments may be especially important in dissociative systems, where different parts may not only have different roles, memories, and ages, but may inhabit different internal worlds with different rules, timelines, boundaries, and degrees of access to the present. In these systems, the question of place may not be secondary. It may become central to understanding how experience has been organized and compartmentalised.
For now, we are simply naming this territory. We are not offering a complete model or a step-by-step process. We are calling attention to this dimension of inner experience without immediately turning it into a technique that can be extracted and applied too rigidly. We are excited by this territory, and we do not want our excitement to move faster than it can be metabolized. We want the idea to unfold at a pace that feels clinically grounded and digestible for the IFS community.
There is much more to explore here than we can or want to say in one article. We are still listening, learning, experiencing, testing, and clarifying.
We are beginning with a claim that feels increasingly important:
Parts exist in inner environments.
And these environments may be as clinically relevant as the parts themselves.
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Over the next six months, we’ll be exploring inner landscape as a significant area of clinical inquiry with a small cohort that’s already formed. From there, we expect to develop more formalized and structured offerings for those interested in this work. Along the way, we’ll continue sharing articles about what becomes clearer, more complex, or newly apparent to us about inner landscapes.
If you’d like to join us in exploring this territory, you’re invited to sign up for updates on future articles and experiential opportunities for the Inner Landscapes Project here: https://forms.gle/q3ZzqG2kRn3Xvy6V8
