What this is
parts cowork is a free place to practise parts work: guided walks drawn from Internal Family Systems (IFS) for when one part of you has taken over, and a few places to keep what you find.
Use it on your own, between sessions, or alongside anything else that helps.
What is here
- 49 walks, from 3 to 17 minutes, and 19 tracks of 3 to 7 days for why you came. The Library has them all.
- 27 mad libs: give a few words blind, and they become a guided story with a part of you in it.
- Build a walk: say what you bring and how long you have, and swap any step.
- Your journal, parts and map: what each walk brought, the parts you have met, and how they sit together.
- Feelings: a wheel of feelings and needs, for when the word will not come.
- Party Line: screen names, profiles and messages for your parts, written by you, and a guide that reads a walk into the room a step at a time.
- For therapists: a practice desk that opens what a client chooses to seal for them, and keeps the therapist's own notes.
Parts, Self, and blending
IFS treats the everyday sense that "part of me wants to stay and part of me wants to go" as literal: the mind is made of parts, each with its own feelings and aims. Parts are not the problem. Many took on a job long ago, often a protective one, and kept doing it after it stopped being needed.
Underneath the parts, IFS describes a Self that is calm, curious and kind. You do not have to build it. When a part is blended with you, its feelings read as yours ("I am furious" rather than "a part of me is furious") and the Self is hard to find. Unblending is getting enough room from the part to meet it.
Six moves with one protector, and the turn in the middle
The core walk takes six moves with a protector, which IFS calls the six Fs: find the part, focus on it, flesh it out, notice how you feel toward it, befriend it, and ask what it fears would happen if it stopped.
The fourth step is the hinge. If what you feel toward the part is curiosity, warmth or calm, there is room, and you carry on. If it is irritation, fear, or wanting it gone, a second part has stepped in, and the walk turns to that one and asks it for some space. Then it asks again. That loop is most of the work.
Protectors and exiles
Most guided walks spend their time with protectors, the parts that plan, criticise, numb or fight. If a younger, hurting part shows up on the way, a walk lets you notice it and come back to it another time; two walks for meeting it, once its protectors agree, are offered from that part's page and the journal. Exiles are full parts everywhere else: name them, map them, give them a screen name on Party Line, write to them and as them.
Where each step comes from
Every step rests on passages from published IFS books, and each step lists them under "Where this step comes from". Before a walk is built, each passage it leans on is checked word for word against the text of its book, so a step cannot cite a sentence the book does not contain. The book text itself is not shown here; the citation tells you where to read it.
Two limits. That check proves the passage is real, not that our sentence says no more than the passage does; that second check is a separate review, and a walk marked draft has not had it. And page numbers are the page of the PDF, which can differ from the printed page.
Where your writing goes
Nowhere unless you send it. It is kept in this browser's own storage, on this device. There is no account, no server holding your entries, no analytics, and no AI reading what you write. The build fails if any page tries to load something from another site.
The cost is real: clear your browser data and the journal is gone, and nobody can recover it. Nothing syncs by itself either: to use it on another device, save a copy and open it there. Your data, in Settings, makes that copy, locked with a passphrase you choose before it leaves your browser. Forget the passphrase and the copy cannot be opened. The privacy page has the whole of it.
Check it yourself, with your browser's Network tab or airplane mode.
Why I built this
I wanted somewhere to practise parts work on an ordinary day: when a critic gets loud on the drive home, or worry takes the wheel at two in the morning, and the next session is days away. Most of what I found either wanted an account and my data, or wanted a chatbot to talk to my parts for me. I did not want either.
So I built the thing I wanted. Every step comes from the books, checked word for word. Nothing you write leaves your device. There is no AI in it, on purpose: the listening is yours to do.
The name is a small joke with a point. In parts work, who is doing the work? Not you alone, and not a part alone. It is done together, you and your parts, and sometimes someone who sits with you. Cowork.
This is the first thing I have made and put out on my own. It is free, and I mean to keep it that way.
Who made this
One person, on evenings and weekends. If you are a therapist with an idea for the tech side of your practice, you build tools in this space, or you just want something here to work differently, I would like to hear from you: send a note.
It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by Richard Schwartz or the IFS Institute. If this interests you, the books listed under sources are the place to go deeper.