Beyond the Baseline of Wellbeing

Professional Ethics, Assessing Human Needs, and Internal Family Systems (IFS) Beyond Therapy.

Internal Family Systems can serve the restorative work of psychotherapy without being conceptually confined to it. It is not merely a clinical intervention, but a full-continuum framework for understanding and navigating change. 

TRANSCRIPT:

There’s a question I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about over the years, both as a psychotherapist and as someone whose work has increasingly expanded beyond psychotherapy.

And the question, in its simplest form, is this:

Where does therapy end, and where does something else begin?

This can be a surprisingly charged question in the helping professions.

Usually we talk about it in terms of coaching, scope of practice, ethics, or professional boundaries. And more recently, as Internal Family Systems has become increasingly well known outside psychotherapy, another version of the question has started showing up:

Can a framework like IFS, which has become so established and widely practiced within psychotherapy, also be used responsibly outside of it?

I think this question is particularly interesting when it comes to IFS because IFS does something much larger than simply treat psychological distress.

It gives us a framework for understanding human experience. It helps us understand why we can simultaneously want contradictory things. Why we behave in ways that don’t entirely make sense to us. Why certain parts of us become protective, reactive, controlling, afraid, or avoidant. And it gives us a way of developing an internal relationship that is fundamentally different from simply trying to get rid of whatever we don’t like about ourselves.

Those things are enormously useful in psychotherapy.

But they’re also enormously useful in being human.

And that distinction is really at the center of what I want to explore here.

I understand why conversations like this evoke strong reactions. In fact, I think they should. Whenever we’re invited into the inner lives of other human beings, the stakes are high. We should be deeply concerned with ethics and boundaries and competence and the possibility of doing harm.

I’m not interested in dismissing those concerns.

I’m also not interested in drawing some universal line and declaring that everyone else should agree with me about exactly where it belongs. Reasonable, ethical professionals can come to different conclusions about these boundaries.

What I am interested in is whether we’re asking the best questions.

Because for me, distinguishing psychotherapy from other forms of supportive work has become much less about permission and much more about discernment.

I became a psychotherapist because I genuinely love the work, and I remain deeply committed to the integrity of the profession.

Long before I opened a private practice, I worked in domestic violence, supporting victims and survivors through incredibly complex circumstances. After graduate school, I pursued advanced training in Internal Family Systems therapy, and I spent years in clinical supervision with two doctoral psychologists who had decades of experience in individual, family, and systems work.

And that supervision shaped much more than my clinical skills.

It shaped the way I think.

One thing that may surprise people is that neither of my supervisors ever suggested that psychological knowledge belonged exclusively inside a therapy office.

Quite the opposite.

We talked about all the places where psychological expertise matters outside clinical practice: education, writing, organizational work, leadership, research, public policy.

What they insisted upon was something both simpler and, I think, more demanding:

You need to be unmistakably clear about what kind of work you’re doing.

What is its purpose? What are its boundaries? What are you qualified to do? What is the person coming to you for? And what responsibilities belong to the professional container you’ve chosen?

That distinction has stayed with me.

Because before we can really talk about what belongs inside psychotherapy and what can responsibly happen outside it, I think we need to ask an even more basic question:

What is psychotherapy actually for?

There are obviously many legitimate definitions of psychotherapy. Different theoretical orientations emphasize different things, and laws and regulatory frameworks matter.

But the way I have come to understand psychotherapy is as a professional discipline devoted to assessing and treating human suffering when that suffering has meaningfully interrupted someone’s ability to live, relate, love, work, or function as they otherwise could.

Sometimes that interruption is acute and relatively short-lived.

Sometimes it has quietly organized someone’s entire life.

Sometimes it qualifies for a diagnosis and insurance reimbursement. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Those distinctions matter professionally, but I don’t think they’re the heart of psychotherapy.

For me, the heart of psychotherapy is restoration.

Psychotherapy helps restore freedom where suffering has diminished it.

And IFS is extraordinarily powerful in that restorative role. It allows people to compassionately meet the internal conflicts, burdens, protective adaptations, and trauma responses that have constrained their freedom.

That is beautiful work.

It’s sacred work.

It’s also deep work that carries real risk and responsibility, which is precisely why psychotherapy deserves the legal protections, educational requirements, ethical obligations, and standards of care that distinguish it as a regulated profession.

And there’s one place where I want to be especially clear: I am not arguing that trauma treatment should simply migrate outside psychotherapy.

Other forms of support may absolutely have a role in someone’s life after trauma treatment, or alongside clinical care when appropriate. But primary trauma treatment, in my view, belongs within psychotherapy.

Again, I don’t think the question is which container is better.

The question is what each container was made to hold.

My own thinking about all of this began changing because, over time, another question became much more interesting to me.

What happens after restoration?

IFS was actually one of the things that made that question impossible for me to ignore.

Because the model doesn’t suddenly stop making sense when someone becomes well. Parts don’t disappear when we reach psychological stability. We don’t stop needing internal relationship, making complicated decisions, encountering protectors. We don’t stop needing clarity, integration, discernment, or Self-leadership.

What changes isn’t the basic human system. What changes is what we’re asking the work to do.

For years, I’ve described my non-clinical work as taking place beyond the baseline of well-being. And that idea has become increasingly important to the way I distinguish between the different kinds of work I do.

When I say baseline, I’m talking about the functional center of human experience: a place where life is reasonably stable, coherent, and intact.

That doesn’t mean you’re happy all the time.

It doesn’t mean you don’t struggle.

It doesn’t mean nothing hurts.

It means that what you’re experiencing isn’t substantially interrupting your ability to live your life.

One of the most important things I learned in supervision was that good therapy has a beginning and an ending, and ideally, we talk about the ending at the beginning.

We should have some understanding with a client about where the work is trying to take them and what happens when we get there.

But there was something else about psychological well-being that I wasn’t explicitly taught. I think I just came to understand it over time.

The baseline isn’t the finish line.

For many people, it’s actually a starting line for something else.

Whether someone begins there or arrives there through psychotherapy, there comes a point when clinically necessary treatment may no longer be what they need.

But that certainly doesn’t mean they’re finished growing.

People at the baseline still wrestle with questions that profoundly shape the quality and direction of their lives.

Who am I becoming? What do I actually want? What kind of leader do I want to be? What do I want my work to mean? Why do I keep getting in my own way here? What am I ready to let go of? What wants to emerge next?

Those aren’t necessarily questions of psychopathology. They’re human questions.

And this became particularly important to me as my own work expanded into professional development with female founders, spiritual cultivation, and other non-clinical applications of Internal Family Systems.

Because I started having conversations with other therapists about this.

And I encountered something I hadn’t really anticipated.

Some excellent, deeply qualified colleagues became visibly uncomfortable when we talked about work happening beyond psychotherapy.

It wasn’t necessarily because they thought other kinds of work had no value.

There was something about the boundary itself that felt dangerous.

And then I would take it one step further and suggest that the same underlying framework might have applications in both places.

That was generally where the shit really hit the fan.

I watched immense anxiety emerge in some very skilled therapists around the idea that one professional might do both clinical and non-clinical work.

The conversations could get tense.

And interestingly, I don’t remember feeling particularly angry about it.

Mostly I felt curious.

I felt compassionate.

And sometimes I felt sad.

Because what I saw wasn’t a lack of integrity. If anything, I saw people who cared enormously about integrity.

I saw tremendous professional conditioning and, in IFS language, the rapid mobilization of protective parts.

These were thoughtful professionals who were genuinely afraid of making an ethical mistake.

And I understand that.

But I also started noticing another consequence.

In trying so hard to prevent one kind of problem, we can create another.

Fear can become so dominant that it starts constraining our thinking.

And in IFS language, that’s when I might say the parts have hijacked the bus.

Every protective part has a positive intention. That doesn’t mean the outcome it creates is always the best outcome for the whole system.

And I’ve met many therapists who have enormous gifts, interests, experience, and capacities that could be expressed in a much broader range of ways.

They want to teach, write, work with organizations, they want to support leaders, facilitate spiritual or developmental work. They want to create things that don’t belong inside psychotherapy.

And sometimes they simply don’t. Not because they lack the ability. Because they have become afraid that stepping outside the therapy office means somehow abandoning professional integrity.

That observation stayed with me.

Not because I think every therapist should expand beyond therapy. I absolutely don’t.

But it changed the question I was asking.

I became less interested in asking: Does this person need therapy or not? And more interested in asking: Is this person’s life being interrupted by what they’re experiencing? Those sound like similar questions, but they’re actually organized very differently.

The first puts the intervention at the center. The second puts the human being at the center.

And I think that’s where a lot of our conventional thinking gets turned around.

We tend to begin with the helping profession or the intervention and then decide who belongs inside it.

I would rather begin with the person’s lived experience and ask what kind of support actually meets the need that’s present.

I’ve sometimes imagined the conventional helping professions as a kind of vertical tower.

Psychotherapy often gets placed somewhere near the top of that tower as the most serious, legitimate, powerful form of support.

Then somewhere beneath it we place coaching, advising, spiritual development, mentoring, education, and various other forms of human support, almost as though we’re ranking them according to seriousness.

I’ve never had much appetite for that hierarchy.

For reasons that go well beyond my professional life, sovereignty, autonomy, and empowerment have always been important navigational values for me. And I think that tower carries some significant power dynamics with it, including, frankly, some institutionalized patriarchy.

But if you take the tower and tip it onto its side, something much more useful appears.

Instead of a hierarchy of interventions, you get a continuum of human experience.

At one end are periods of significant psychological suffering and life interruption. At the other are thriving, development, exploration, creativity, expansion. And somewhere in the middle is what I call the baseline of well-being.

Now the question isn’t, “Which profession is highest?” The question becomes, “Where is this person right now?”

And only after we understand that do we ask what kind of support makes sense.

At one end of that continuum, someone may be dealing with depression, trauma, severe anxiety, addiction, complicated grief, relational instability, or another form of suffering that is meaningfully compromising their ability to function and feel well.

These are the experiences psychotherapy was designed to hold.

And there’s another reason this matters.

When we’re in those periods of significant suffering, we’re often more vulnerable. We may be less clear. Our decision-making may be affected. We may need the safeguards, assessment, clinical skill, accountability, and structure that psychotherapy provides.

But if the work does what it’s meant to do, something eventually changes. The suffering stops being the central organizing force in the person’s life. And now we’re somewhere else on the continuum.

The questions begin to change. Instead of questions that chase us, we begin encountering questions we actually want to chase.

That, to me, is the significance of the baseline.

It’s the point at which our orientation can begin shifting from restoration toward integration and development.

Psychotherapy can help us return to that baseline. Developmental work can help us explore what becomes possible beyond it. This is exactly where I think Internal Family Systems becomes so interesting.

Psychotherapists can use IFS in those interrupted seasons when trauma, anxiety, internal conflict, or protective patterns require clinical treatment. 

And trained professionals in other disciplines - as well as therapists - can also use the IFS framework beyond that baseline, where the work isn’t about treating trauma or restoring impaired functioning.

It’s about identity, Self-leadership and the art of inner relationship as a supportive life practice.

IFS is what I call a full-continuum framework, meaning it can be applied and powerfully transformative across the full range of human experience. When we understand this, and understand the continuum itself, I think the question of what a person truly needs becomes so much clearer. 

At its core, Internal Family Systems gives us a way of understanding how human beings are organized internally. It helps us understand protective adaptations. It helps us work with internal conflict rather than simply trying to overpower it.

And it gives us a way to cultivate Self-leadership - the capacity to orient and lead from something deeper and more enduring than whichever protective part happens to be loudest in a given moment.

None of those things belong exclusively to a professional category. They’re features of being human. And this brings me to what may be the most important distinction in this whole conversation.

Internal Family Systems is a framework. Psychotherapy is a container. Those are not the same thing. A framework is a way of understanding human experience. A professional container determines how that understanding is applied.

Psychotherapy is one container, with a particular purpose, legal responsibilities, ethical obligations, and standards of care.

Leadership advising is another.

Education is another.

Organizational consultation is another.

Spiritual direction is another.

Coaching is another.

Each of those containers carries different responsibilities, limitations, expectations, and ethical commitments. The mistake, in my view, is assuming that because a framework is profoundly useful inside one container, it therefore belongs exclusively to that container. Frameworks illuminate. Containers determine how that illumination is responsibly applied.

Psychotherapy is where I first learned Internal Family Systems, and I remain profoundly grateful for that foundation.

But the longer I’ve practiced, the less interested I’ve become in defending professional territory.

I know how to distinguish one professional container from another. What interests me much more is cultivating the discernment necessary to choose responsibly between them.

Psychotherapy deserves enormous respect. So do education, leadership development, organizational consultation, spiritual direction, mentoring, coaching, and the many other disciplines devoted to human development. And I believe many of those disciplines can benefit tremendously from the skilled and ethical application of Internal Family Systems.

We should keep talking about the boundaries. We should keep questioning ourselves. We should keep examining ethics and competence and scope.

Those conversations should stay alive because our professions evolve, our understanding evolves, and hopefully our collective wisdom evolves with them.

But for me, the principle I keep returning to isn’t fear, territory or absolute certainty. It’s discernment.

Because ultimately, I don’t believe our responsibility is to defend frameworks or polarize professions. Our responsibility is to understand the human being in front of us, understand what they need, understand what we are qualified to provide, and then meet them as safely, wisely, and ethically as we can.