No. When you start a conversation you can choose "I'm new to IFS", and Buddy will explain things in plain language as you go rather than assuming you already know the model. Plenty of people meet their first part without having read anything about IFS beforehand.
If you'd like a little background first, our short introduction covers the basic ideas: parts, protectors, exiles, and Self.
Yes. IFS rests on the idea that you have a Self – a calm, curious, compassionate core – that can get to know your parts and lead them. That capacity isn't something only a therapist can reach. It's already in you.
Self-guided IFS suits people working through everyday struggles such as anxiety, procrastination, self-criticism or low mood, people who want a feel for IFS before choosing a therapist, and people for whom therapy is out of reach because of cost, waitlists or location. It also works well alongside therapy – practising between sessions often makes the sessions themselves more productive.
Our article covers who self-guided IFS suits, what it offers, and how to practise it safely.
In broad strokes: settle in and let your attention turn inward. Pick something manageable to start from, such as a harsh thought you had today. Notice how the part shows up – as a sensation, an emotion, a voice or an image. Ask it for a little space so you can relate to it rather than from it. Check how you feel toward it; curiosity is the sign you're in Self. Then ask what its job is and what it's afraid would happen if it stopped, thank it for the work it's been doing, and close by letting it know you'll come back.
Twenty to forty minutes and a quiet spot is all you need. Our step-by-step guide walks through each stage with the questions to ask, a worked example, and what to do when you get stuck.
For many people, gentle self-guided IFS is safe and helpful. A little care goes a long way: begin with everyday things rather than your most painful memories, take "not yet" seriously when a part hesitates, and stop whenever you feel overwhelmed. Feeling calm and curious is a good sign; pushing for a breakthrough is not.
Some situations call for a qualified professional rather than self-guided work or an AI tool. Please don't use IFS Buddy as your support if you have a history of psychosis, including schizophrenia or bipolar disorder with psychotic features; if you're currently self-harming or having suicidal thoughts; if you carry severe or complex trauma such as childhood abuse or diagnosed PTSD; if you often lose time or feel disconnected from yourself or your surroundings; if you have an active eating disorder or substance addiction; or if you're in an acute crisis after a loss, an assault or another upheaval.
This isn't a judgement about your capacity to heal. It means your system deserves more support than self-guided work can safely offer. If you're unsure, talk to a mental health professional before starting. And if you're in immediate danger or at risk of harming yourself, contact your local emergency services or a crisis line – self-therapy and AI tools are not crisis support.
You can ask a general-purpose chatbot to run an IFS session, but you end up directing the process yourself: reminding it where you are, pulling it back when it starts analysing you or jumping to solutions, and remembering which question comes next – all while you're in the middle of a strong feeling. IFS Buddy is built for this one job and developed together with experienced IFS therapists, so the session follows the IFS process without you having to hold the map.
There's a deeper difference too. When you're struggling it's natural to pour your heart out to a chatbot, and it will listen and respond with sympathy. IFS asks something else of you: instead of speaking from the part that's upset, you step back and meet it, asking what it feels, what it's worried about and what it needs. The compassion then comes from your own Self rather than from an AI.
Being understood by a chatbot can feel good in the moment. Learning to understand and care for your own parts is what lets them settle.
You can use IFS Buddy without creating an account: an anonymous conversation runs up to 20 messages, which is enough to try the process and get to know a part. A free account gives you 100 messages a week and one saved chat.
A subscription adds the things that make the work continuous: unlimited chats saved with their summaries, a record of the parts you've met and the ability to focus a session on one of them, a memory of your previous sessions, voice mode so you can speak instead of type, custom instructions, and a review at the end of each session suggesting what to explore next.
We'd rather you try it first and decide for yourself afterwards whether the extras are worth it.
IFS Buddy uses "privacy by design" to avoid storing sensitive personal information. We purposefully don't use cookies to gather information about you and only store your email address that you use to sign up. The free version of the website is completely anonymous since you don't need to register to try it. We use secure data storage and encryption and are GDPR compliant which means that we follow the most comprehensive user data protection laws.
We are partnering with renowned IFS trainers to improve the quality of the chatbot. To do this, we randomly choose chats to look through in an anonymous way; they are not linked to your profile. This means all of your chats remain confidential.
If you're hesitant to trust us, keep in mind that much of IFS work can be done internally without disclosing personal details – so you can still benefit from the process while limiting what you share externally.
You're also in control of what we hold. You can view, edit or delete your chats, your saved parts and your whole account at any time, and our privacy policy sets out exactly what is stored and why.
This chatbot started as a personal project to help Martin, IFS Buddy's developer, go through IFS self therapy. Martin has a background as a physiotherapist, specializing in patients with chronic pain and trauma related issues. This led him to discover IFS therapy as a groundbreaking tool to treat trauma, chronic pain, and more. It was posted on an IFS forum and overnight gained hundreds of users, and from there has spread organically and been used by over 100,000 people all over the world.
During this rise in popularity, we have received a lot of help from various IFS therapists to ensure the chatbot works correctly and safely. We are also working with the University of Melbourne to potentially run a large clinical study and will be working together with IFS ANZ, the official IFS training organization in Australia and New Zealand.
No. Internal Family Systems is a psychotherapy model developed by Dr Richard Schwartz, and the IFS Institute is his organization. IFS Buddy is an independent product that applies the ideas of the model as a self-reflection tool. We are not the IFS Institute, and we don't offer IFS certification or training.
We are officially endorsed by the Mind-Beyond Institute, the official IFS training organization in Australia and New Zealand, and we work with experienced IFS therapists to keep the chatbot faithful to the model.
No we definitely don't want to replace human therapy with AI. IFS Buddy should be thought of as a tool to help you do personal inner work by yourself. It is also a powerful adjunct to in person therapy, with many of our users finding it incredibly helpful in between sessions with their therapist. Human connection is vital, but we also recognize that there's a global mental health crisis with limited resources. Therapy can be expensive or hard to access due to provider shortages.
Our aim is to make IFS more accessible and help people reconnect with themselves, and ultimately with others. Feeling better mentally often leads to healthier, more rewarding interactions in everyday life. That's our hope with IFS Buddy.
If you're a therapist wondering whether to recommend Buddy to your clients, we've written about how it's used between sessions and after therapy ends, and what to know before suggesting it.