Queering Internal Family Systems (IFS) Podcast

A conversation between two queer, neurodivergent IFS therapists who wanted to talk about the things that don't always make it into the training room.

Hosted by Jude Carn and Alessio Rizzo, Queering IFS explores what happens when you bring a queer and neurodivergent lens to Internal Family Systems therapy. Each episode is a genuine conversation: about identity, parts, self-energy, shame, joy, nature, and the places where the model needs to stretch a little further.

Whether you're an IFS therapist, in IFS therapy yourself, or just curious about what it means to do this work in a body and a life like yours, you're welcome here.

New episodes drop fortnightly. Find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.

Jude Carn Jude Carn

Episode 20 - Queering Internal Family Systems (IFS) - Queering Menstrual Cycle Awareness in Therapy

What happens when you bring the cyclical body into the therapy room, without the binaries, the "divine feminine", or the blue liquid?

In this episode, Jude and Alessio are joined by clinical psychologists and IFS therapists Dr Charlie Ingham (she/they) and Dr Nancy Bancroft (she/her), who are about to run a training on menstrual cycle awareness for therapists. Together they explore how knowing your cycle can bring more Self-energy, more clarity and more compassion to your inner system, and how to talk about it in a way that includes everyone for whom it's relevant: women, trans and non-binary people with periods, intersex people, and anyone curious about the cycles moving through their body.

Read More
Jude Carn Jude Carn

Episode 19 - Queering Internal Family Systems (IFS) - Transitional Justice and Global Voices

IFS and Transitional Justice in Syria

This episode is unlike any other in the Queering IFS series. Jude and Alessio are joined by Hane Alrustm, a Syrian-Lebanese psychoanalyst, theatre practitioner, and founder of Healing on the Move, currently living in Belgium as a refugee. Hane speaks from profound personal experience: the kidnapping of his father by the Syrian government in 2010, the disappearance and death of 10 to 15 family members over the years that followed, and his own exile through Lebanon to Belgium, a country chosen for him by the United Nations.

The conversation centres on transitional justice: what it means for a society emerging from large-scale human rights violations to acknowledge what happened, hold perpetrators accountable, and find a path forward. Hane draws direct parallels with IFS, asking what the model can offer at a collective level when individual therapy is simply not available to 25 million people. The language of IFS, exiles, managers, firefighters, parts and self, maps with striking clarity onto the dynamics of a nation trying to transition without first doing the witnessing.

Read More
Jude Carn Jude Carn

Episode 18 - Queering Internal Family Systems (IFS) - Adapting IFS for NeuroQueer Clients

Adapting IFS for Neuroqueer Clients

In this episode, Jude and Alessio open up a conversation they've been circling for a while: what does it actually mean to adapt IFS for neurodivergent and queer clients? Not as a checklist of tweaks, but as something more fundamental.

They talk about the difference between changing a slide background colour and genuinely redesigning how the model is taught and held. Alessio shares his experience collaborating on the first neurodivergent-friendly Level 1 IFS training, and reflects on how access fatigue can creep in when a model built for neurotypical brains is simply handed over unchanged.

Read More
Jude Carn Jude Carn

Episode 17 - Queering Internal Family Systems (IFS) - Queer Joy!

Queer Joy is an Act of Resistance

In this episode, Jude and Alessio explore queer joy - what it is, where it lives, and why it matters. Starting from a poster on a friend's kitchen wall ("queer joy is an act of resistance"), they follow the thread through personal reflection, IFS parts work, and the politics of marginalised identity.

Read More
Jude Carn Jude Carn

Episode 15 - Queering Internal Family Systems (IFS) - Ecotherapy meets IFS

IFS has a lot to say about the internal landscape. This episode asks what happens when you bring the external one in too.

Jude and Alessio explore the relationship between IFS, ecotherapy, and ecopsychology: why mainstream psychotherapy has been slow to look outward toward nature, and what gets missed as a result. They talk about how the natural world can offer something distinct to parts work, not as a backdrop but as an active presence, and why nature connection might be one of the less obvious routes into self-energy.

Read More
Jude Carn Jude Carn

Episode 14 - Queering Internal Family Systems (IFS) - Decolonising Internal Family Systems (IFS)

In this episode, Jude and Alessio explore what it might mean to decolonise therapy, with a particular focus on Internal Family Systems (IFS). They reflect on how Western psychotherapy has been shaped by white, Eurocentric frameworks that influence what is considered knowledge, health and healing.

Positioning themselves as white European therapists working within these systems, they discuss how therapy models often locate distress within the individual while overlooking the wider social, political and economic systems that shape people’s lives.

Read More
Jude Carn Jude Carn

Episode 12 - Queering Internal Family Systems (IFS) - Bringing Compassion to the Complexity around Pronouns for Everybody with Phil de la Haye

In the first episode of 2026, Jude and Alessio are joined by Phil for a thoughtful conversation about pronouns, privilege, and complexity.

Rather than treating pronouns as a simple checkbox, this episode explores how they operate across different layers: inside our systems, in relationship, and within wider cultural and organisational contexts. The conversation stays with the reality that pronouns can be affirming, exposing, political, tender, and sometimes activating, often all at once.

Read More
Jude Carn Jude Carn

Episode 8 - Queering IFS- Queering Shame in IFS - Are We Missing Anything Out?

In this podcast, Alessio Rizzo and Jude Carn discuss the complex process of shame, which we all have experienced. Queering how we might understand and see this through and IFS lens.

Many books have been written about shame, but, perhaps, there is something that we have missed out about the various layers of shame. Listen up to find out what it is!

Read More
Jude Carn Jude Carn

Episode 6 - Queering IFS - Queering the Self in IFS (Part 2) - is the Self Queer?

In this episode Jude (She/They) and Alessio (He/They) continue their conversation on the Self, which is such a central concept in IFS Therapy.

Jude and Alessio dive further into questions of Self or Self-Energy in IFS through a queering lens. They ask, is the Self queer? Where is queerness in the system? And where does the question of the qualities of Self even come from?

Read More