I met Robert when he reached out for an in-person IFS session. At the time, he was on sick leave from employment in corporate IT. He was burned out. Stuck. The income was steady enough that leaving felt irresponsible, but staying felt like it was costing him something he couldn’t yet name.

Robert describes his situation:

I first discovered IFS through an online community focused on nondual teachings, where several members happened to be practitioners. While on medical leave, I realized I needed deep internal work before returning to my career. I started by working through Jay Earley’s Self-Therapy on my own, but while I identified a few protector parts, I couldn’t create true relief alone.

I decided to find professional support. My initial attempts with two in-network insurance providers fell flat—they seemed to talk about IFS without actually practicing it. Refusing to give up, I searched the IFS Institute directory and found Joshua. Even though he was out-of-network, I booked a consultation. Right then and there, Joshua demonstrated what genuine IFS looked like, guiding me to identify parts on the fly. Knowing my leave was ending soon, I immediately committed to three sessions a week, and we got straight to work.

We started working together in October 2025. Over the next seven months—about 20 hours of sessions in total—we got to know the parts of him that had been carrying the weight of “provide, perform, don’t stop” for years. We also worked to make room for parts of him that insisted there was another way to live.

Somewhere in that process, the question evolved from “how do I tolerate this job” to “what do I actually want to do.” Robert answered that question by becoming an IFS practitioner himself. He’s now running his own practice, Innate Wellbeing Coaching, helping people do the same kind of inner work that changed things for him.

There’s a particular kind of satisfaction in watching someone go from needing this work to offering it. 🌱 Robert built the kind of trust in himself that lets him now sit across from someone else’s exhausted, driven, self-critical parts and say, credibly, You’re not broken. Let’s listen. 🎉👏

Robert’s journey echoes my own: both of us ex-software people who received IFS as clients long before we trained to offer it.