4 IFS Parts Examples: Understanding Depression, Anxiety, and Anxious Attachment Through the IFS Lens
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a powerful model of understanding ourselves. Instead of seeing the mind as one single voice, IFS teaches that we are made up of many inner “parts” – each with their own emotions, fears, beliefs, and protective roles. These parts are not flaws. They are not signs of weakness. They are simply inner subpersonalities trying to help us survive, stay safe, or avoid pain.
In this article, we’ll explore IFS parts examples using depression and anxiety as real-life illustrations. Then we’ll look at how anxious attachment develops, how anxious parts show up in relationships, and finally how exiles, managers, and firefighters work together inside our internal system.
IFS gives us a compassionate language for understanding our emotional world. And the more we understand our parts, the less overwhelmed we feel by them.
Let’s begin by grounding ourselves in the three main categories of IFS parts.
The Three Types of IFS Parts
IFS organizes our inner world into three broad types of parts:
Exiles
Managers
Firefighters
Your system developed these roles to protect you. Below, we’ll bring these roles to life with IFS parts examples using depression, anxiety, and attachment anxiety as illustrations. But first, here is a simple overview.
Exiles
These are young, vulnerable parts carrying emotional burdens from the past—fear, sadness, shame, grief, abandonment, trauma, loneliness. Exiles hold raw pain and often feel overwhelmed, helpless, or frozen in old experiences.
Managers
Managers work proactively to prevent you from ever feeling the pain of the exiles. They anticipate, plan, control, perfect, analyze, avoid, people-please, or overperform. Managers are future-oriented and try to keep the system “safe.”
Firefighters
Firefighters jump into action in the present moment when exiles get triggered. They aim to quickly numb, distract, or escape overwhelming emotions—sometimes through anger, shutdown, substances, food, scrolling, dissociation, or defensive reactions.
These categories will make even more sense as we walk through the upcoming IFS parts examples.
IFS Parts Examples Using Depression
Depression is often misunderstood as a singular feeling or diagnosis, but in the IFS model, depression is usually the result of multiple parts working together to protect the system. Below is an example of how depression can function inside an IFS system.
The Depressed Exile
Many people have a young exile part carrying:
Old sadness
Loneliness
Hopelessness
Emotional emptiness
Memories of emotional neglect or unmet needs
A sense of being invisible, unimportant, or unlovable
This exile may have formed early in childhood during moments when they felt dismissed, criticized, shamed, or unsupported. Because this pain was too overwhelming at the time, the system pushed the exile inward.
The exile often believes things like:
“No one cares about me.”
“I am too much.”
“It’s hopeless.”
“It’s safer to shut down.”
This exile’s pain may emerge later in life as depressive moods.
The Manager That Prevents Emotional Pain
To prevent the depressed exile from flooding the system, a manager part may work extremely hard to keep life under control.
This manager might:
Overfunction to appear strong
Push you to stay productive
Criticize you for not being “good enough”
Keep you emotionally numb
Suppress sadness
Avoid vulnerability
This is one of the clearest IFS parts examples for depression: the manager thinks, “If I keep everything together, you won’t have to feel what’s underneath.”
Managers don’t cause depression. They are trying to protect you from deeper pain.
The Firefighter That Shuts Down
When the depressed exile breaks through and its sadness feels overwhelming, firefighter parts step in to extinguish the pain immediately.
The depressive firefighter may:
Shut down
Disconnect emotionally
Make you feel numb or apathetic
Slow everything down
Make you feel like withdrawing
Create a sense of heaviness
This firefighter’s strategy is to shut down feelings so you don’t feel the pain of the exile.
This is another common pattern in IFS parts examples: depression is the firefighter’s way of “putting out the fire” of emotional overwhelm.
IFS Parts Examples Using Anxiety
Anxiety is another powerful internal experience that makes perfect sense through the IFS lens. Anxiety isn’t “who you are”, it’s a part of you trying hard to protect you.
Here is how anxiety often looks inside an IFS system.
The Anxious Exile
An anxious exile often carries early experiences of:
Inconsistency
Unpredictability
Emotional distance from caregivers
Being left alone
Feeling unsafe
Feeling unprepared
This exile may have learned early in life:
“I need to stay on alert.”
“I don’t know what will happen next.”
“Something bad could happen at any moment.”
“Being relaxed isn’t safe.”
This anxious exile isn’t “irrational”, it’s overwhelmed and carrying fears that were once completely valid.
The Manager Who Scans the Future
Managers related to anxiety work in overdrive to prevent bad things from happening. They are future-oriented and constantly scanning for potential danger.
A worry manager part may:
Overthink
Catastrophize
Plan excessively
Try to control outcomes
Look for signs of rejection
Double-check everything
Avoid anything unpredictable
This is one of the classic IFS parts examples for anxiety: the manager believes, “If I think hard enough or worry enough, I can prevent pain.”
Managers are not trying to make you anxious—they’re trying to stop the pain of the exile.
The Firefighter Who Reacts in Panic
When the anxiety becomes overwhelming or the exile’s panic breaks through, a firefighter may take over in the present moment.
This firefighter may:
Have an outburst
Shut down
Withdraw
Go into panic
Use numbing behaviors
Overeat, shop, scroll, drink, or binge
React impulsively
The firefighter doesn’t care about the long-term consequences—it just wants the anxiety to stop right now.
This relational triangle—exile fear, manager worry, firefighter panic—is a core pattern in IFS parts examples involving anxiety.
IFS Parts Examples: Anxious Attachment and Clinginess in Relationships
Anxious attachment is one of the clearest IFS parts examples of how early wounds continue to show up in adult relationships. People with anxious attachment are not “needy”—they simply have parts that were burdened with fear of abandonment in childhood.
Let’s break this down through the IFS lens.
The Abandoned Exile
Exiles involved in anxious attachment often carry past experiences such as:
A caregiver who was inconsistent
Receiving mixed signals
Emotional unavailability
Being left alone frequently
Needing comfort but not receiving it
Feeling unwanted or dismissed
This exile learned:
“When someone pulls away, I’m in danger.”
“I might be abandoned at any moment.”
“I need to hold on tight.”
“Being alone is terrifying.”
This exile still feels like a child who is afraid of losing connection.
The Clingy or Controlling Manager
To prevent that sense of abandonment from being triggered, managers show up with strategies such as:
Clinginess
Needing reassurance
Reading into texts
Over-communicating
People-pleasing
Monitoring the relationship
Trying to control situations
Checking for signs of rejection
This manager believes:
“If I stay close enough, I won’t be abandoned.”
These patterns can be confusing for partners, but they make complete sense as IFS parts examples: the manager is desperately trying to protect a vulnerable exile.
The Firefighter Who Panics or Reacts Strongly
When the abandonment exile gets activated—like when someone doesn’t text back or seems distant—the firefighter responds immediately.
This firefighter may:
Have emotional outbursts
Accuse, blame, or react strongly
Shut down and pull away
Threaten to leave
Numb the pain through distractions
Feel engulfed by panic
The firefighter’s goal is not to manipulate—it’s to stop the overwhelming sense of “I’m being abandoned.”
This is one of the most accurate IFS parts examples for anxious attachment because it shows how internal dynamics play out externally in relationships.
IFS Parts Examples: Anxiety About the Future
Many people experience general, future-focused anxiety that is not tied to relationships specifically. This too maps beautifully onto IFS.
The Future-Focused Anxious Exile
This exile might hold fears like:
“Something bad will happen.”
“I’m not prepared enough.”
“I can’t handle uncertainty.”
“I need everything to be predictable.”
This exile often developed in childhood environments where:
Rules were unclear
Life was unpredictable
Parents were inconsistent
There was chaos or instability
Mistakes were punished harshly
The Overthinking Manager
To protect the exile, the manager steps in with:
Overthinking
Endless planning
Catastrophizing
Trying to predict every possible outcome
Researching excessively
Avoiding the unknown
This manager believes it can save you from future pain by never letting you relax.
The Firefighter Who Numbs Fear
When worry spirals out of control, the firefighter may try to escape by:
Numbing out
Scrolling for hours
Binge eating
Substances
Oversleeping
Distracting
Avoiding responsibilities
The goal is immediate relief from fear.
Again, this triad gives us clear IFS parts examples that help us understand why anxiety feels so overwhelming—it’s not one part, but a whole system reacting inside.
Exiles: Oriented to the Past
Exiles carry emotional burdens from earlier in life. They hold unresolved fear, shame, grief, or memories from childhood that never got comforted.
A simple way to understand exiles is:
An exile is a younger version of you still stuck in a painful moment.
That painful moment might involve emotional neglect, separation, harsh criticism, bullying, trauma, or simply a lack of soothing. When a child experiences fear or sadness without comfort, they internalize the pain.
In many IFS parts examples, the exile believes:
“It’s still happening.”
“I’m still alone.”
“No one is coming.”
Even when the adult logically knows they’re safe, the exile reacts as though the past is happening right now. This is why IFS is so useful—it helps you reach these younger parts with compassion and healing.
Managers: Oriented to the Future
Managers take on responsibility for protecting the system from ever feeling the exile’s pain again. They plan ahead, control outcomes, avoid risk, pursue achievement, manage relationships, or suppress emotions.
A manager’s worldview is:
“If I control everything well enough, we will never feel that pain again.”
In the examples above:
The worry manager
The clingy manager
The perfectionist manager
The controlling manager
The suppressing, numbing manager
All have one job: prevent painful feelings.
Managers are not the enemy. They are overworked protectors who need support, not criticism.
Firefighters: Oriented to the Present
Firefighters act in the moment when pain becomes overwhelming. They don’t think ahead or analyze—they react. They try to extinguish emotional fires immediately.
Firefighters may:
Explode
Shut down
Run away
Numb out
Self-soothe through compulsive or impulsive behaviors
Firefighters get a bad reputation, but in IFS, we recognize that they are doing their best to save the system from unbearable emotion.
These patterns become clear when reviewing IFS parts examples from real emotional experiences—depression, anxiety, attachment wounds, and future-focused worry.
Healing These Parts Through Self-Energy
At the core of IFS is the idea that you have a Self—a calm, compassionate, grounded inner leader. Self-energy is not a part. It is your natural state of presence, curiosity, and compassion.
When you lead from Self:
Managers relax.
Firefighters quiet down.
Exiles feel safe enough to heal.
This is the heart of the IFS model.
If You Want Support Befriending Your Parts
If these IFS parts examples resonate with you and you’re interested in exploring your emotional world with guidance or support, IFS therapy can help you:
Understand your patterns
Reduce anxiety
Heal attachment wounds
Soften depression
Release burdens from the past
Strengthen your adult Self
Build inner safety
If you’d like help connecting with your own parts, befriending them, and experiencing more internal calm, you’re welcome to reach out.