On one whiteboard there are three circles labeled manager, firefighter, and exile, and a fourth figure drawn above them with no label because it needs none. On another there is a stack of ten words, Relationships at the top and Reactions at the bottom, a person's presentations to the world laid out one above the next. A client who has seen both boards is standing between them, holding a marker.
Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems describes the mind as a system of parts, protectors who manage and react and exiles who carry the burdens the protectors guard, with a core Self that is not damaged and can relate to the parts with compassion. Treatment helps the Self to lead and the burdened parts to be relieved of what they carry. The path describes something adjacent. It speaks of the layers a person built around herself to meet the world, the masks, the rules they obey, and the contracts she has kept, and it holds that a self remains recognizable beneath them.
The maps overlap in two places. Both describe protective organization that once served the person, and both hold that something intact remains underneath. They differ in their units. A part is an internal subpersonality with its own voice and feeling. A mask is an adopted way of presenting to a room, taken on to stay safe, accepted, or useful. The one is defined from inside and the other from outside, and they are not matched one to one. A protective part might operate a mask, a mask might involve several parts, and some masks may have no clear counterpart in the part language at all.
The Self of IFS is specified, with defined qualities and a role in the treatment. The path leaves the self beneath the masks unspecified, recognized by the person alone, which is a real difference in ambition. The path makes no attempt to lead a person to a Self in the IFS sense, and an IFS clinician should not assume that a client's language of recognition refers to the same thing.
The practical counsel is to keep the vocabularies separate. Clients can use your terms in your office and the path's terms on the path, and neither vocabulary needs to be translated into the other. Unburdening is clinical work and stays with you. The path does not ask a client to address parts, dialogue with them, or witness their burdens.
Language gained in one frame sometimes helps a client notice a pattern in the other, and you are the one who decides how much crossing is useful. A companion essay, Eight Cs and Six, sets the IFS list of Cs beside the Commission's Six C's. The one page brief sets the frames side by side.