Coaching practices for Ifs Maintenance

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Ifs Maintenance, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• We’ve drifted into roommates running on autopilot
• I’ve done one of these cycles and now I’m unsure how often I should actually be doing it — every month feels like a lot, but is once a year too little to matter?
• A brutal stretch of travel and deadlines is coming and I already know I won’t keep the full routine, and I dread coming back to find all those months of progress quietly drained away
• I’ve started treating every fight we have as proof that something’s broken between us, and because we never really circle back to mend them afterward, each unfinished one chips away at all the good we’ve built
• A part of me that used to be brutally harsh has genuinely softened lately, but I notice I’m still relating to it like the old enemy it used to be

Practices that may help

1. Relationship Maintenance Behaviors
   Relationship maintenance behaviors are the everyday actions partners use to sustain relationship satisfaction, commitment, and closeness over time. Laura Stafford’s research identified five evidence-linked categories — positivity, openness, assurances, social networks, and sharing tasks — with positivity and assurances showing the strongest and most consistent links to satisfaction.
2. IFS Parts Mapping, Made Practical
   Parts mapping is an Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz) practice of systematically identifying and visually or narratively charting the distinct inner parts — critics, worriers, peacekeepers, wounded exiles — and their relationships to each other. It is a diagnostic and orientation tool: it shows you the terrain of your inner system before you try to work with any single part. Evidence sits within the broader IFS and parts-work literature, which is growing but not yet on par with CBT or DBT.
3. IFS Self Energy, Made Practical
   Self energy — a core concept in Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems — refers to the innate calm, curious, compassionate core that exists in every person beneath their reactive parts. IFS holds that healing happens through parts experiencing the presence of Self, not through willpower or technique. The "8 Cs" (calm, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, courage, creativity, connectedness) describe its qualities. Evidence for IFS overall is growing but limited in controlled trials; Self energy overlaps with well-studied mindfulness and self-compassion constructs.
4. Pro-relationship maintenance behaviors
   Actively do things that maintain and strengthen the relationship, rather than expecting it to run itself.
   The Investment Model of Commitment: Why People Stay (and Why They Leave)
5. Internal Family Systems (IFS), Made Practical
   IFS, developed by Richard Schwartz, treats the mind as made of distinct "parts" — protectors and wounded exiles — orbiting a calm core "Self." The work is to lead from Self, understand each part’s protective intent, and help carried burdens release. The model is widely used and increasingly studied, but its controlled-evidence base is still emerging compared with CBT or DBT.
6. How often to run FMD cycles and when not to
   Monthly cycles are studied; quarterly may be appropriate for healthy individuals; some populations should not do it at all.
   Fasting-Mimicking Diet: Triggering Cellular Renewal Without Full Fasting
7. Protect VO2 max from detraining
   Maintain a minimum effective dose of cardio during busy or injured periods — VO2 max is hard to build and surprisingly fast to lose.
   VO2 Max and Longevity: The Peter Attia Framework
8. IFS Unburdening, Made Practical
   Unburdening is the healing step in Internal Family Systems (Richard Schwartz) in which a wounded part releases the extreme beliefs and emotions it has been carrying — usually after it has been fully witnessed and understood by the Self. The process is widely used in IFS clinical practice, and preliminary evidence is encouraging, but controlled trials are still limited. For significant trauma, unburdening is best done with a trained IFS clinician.
9. Treat conflict as maintenance, not maintenance failure
   Repair well and quickly — because how you end conflict matters more than how you conduct it.
   Relationship Maintenance Behaviors
10. Update the map as parts shift
    Revisit and revise the map after significant inner work — the system changes, and the map should too.
    IFS Parts Mapping, Made Practical

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