Why IFS
Not a healer and a patient.
The Unconscious leads the way.
IFS does not polarise with an "us versus them" mentality — "I'm a healer and you're a victim," or "I'm the trauma expert and you have a trauma history." Essentially, we have all been traumatised in some form at some point, each carrying wounds deep within ourselves, each working hard to keep the pain of those experiences at bay. We are each susceptible to being triggered, to overreacting when old wounds resurface — and we each have what IFS calls the Self: our core, our essence, an internal compass with its own wisdom and capacity to heal.
Complex PTSD is a relational violation. It disrupts our sense of safety and trust in the world, and limits our access to that Self-energy. The goal of IFS is Self-leadership — and, in time, individuation.
Trauma Informed
Trauma became a particular focus early on. I first studied trauma constellations with Franz Ruppert, then trained extensively in Internal Family Systems across multiple levels and with several of the model's leading teachers, including Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS.
More recently I've been training with Thomas Hübl, learning to work as a collective trauma facilitator — extending the same inquiry from the individual psyche to the wounds we carry together, through his Timeless Wisdom Training.
A message from Camilo on trauma-informed practice
A Synthesis
Today my work sits at the intersection of these threads. Jungian analysis offers the symbolic and archetypal container; IFS offers a practical map of parts and Self; and predictive processing — the emerging neuroscience of how the brain constructs experience through prediction and error — offers a third lens, showing how trauma reshapes the very models the mind uses to anticipate the world. As a Collective Trauma Facilitator, I bring this same synthesis beyond the individual session, working with the trauma that moves through families, communities, and generations.
“The psyche is not an indivisible unity but a divisible and more or less divided whole. Although the separate parts are connected with one another, they are relatively independent.”
— C.G. Jung, CW 8, para. 582
About Camilo
IAAP · GAP · UKCP
I worked first as an actor and filmmaker in Los Angeles, and it was there, while working as an actor, that I moved into the Dharma Zen Centre and began a daily Zen practice under Master Seung Sahn.
In 1994 and 1996 I travelled to Peru to learn from the shaman Agustín Rivas and work with plant medicine. Something opened in that work — an inquiry into the unconscious that went deeper than anything acting had asked of me. I wrote and directed Inscape, a short that played the festival circuit, and later 47 Years in Tibet, narrated by John Cleese with music by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
To follow that inquiry properly, I moved back to London and began training as a Jungian analyst in 1998. That was over 25 years ago now. I've since worked more than 20,000 clinical hours, and today I also work as a training analyst and supervisor for analysts in training.
Trauma and Internal Family Systems
Trauma became a particular focus early on. I first studied trauma constellations with Franz Ruppert, then trained extensively in Internal Family Systems across multiple levels and with several of the model's leading teachers, including Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS.
More recently I've been training with Thomas Hübl, learning to work as a collective trauma facilitator — extending the same inquiry from the individual psyche to the wounds we carry together, through his Timeless Wisdom Training.
Film and Production
These days I also work as a creative consultant and producer on projects sitting at the intersection of psychology, healing, and storytelling — bringing the same clinical grounding into film.
How It Works
If I take a moment to "go inside," as I'd be invited to do at the start of an IFS session, what would I find? The same stream of thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, anxieties, and preoccupations I'd meet in any mindfulness practice. Within the IFS model, though, I approach a thought or feeling as a communication from some part of myself asking for attention — not simply a momentary event that arises and passes.
From Clients
"There's Camilo Gallardo, who is a rock and a magician. Who sat with me, hour after hour, year after year, through the highs and the lows, through the confusion, the nightmares, and the eventual clarity — who was especially there for me when I dove head first into the inferno. He is my Virgil, my fearless companion, who told me these words by C.G. Jung: 'I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.' Thank you, my friend. I wouldn't be here without you."
Wolf Marloh — Portrait/Headshot Photographer and Writer
"I did want to share that my therapeutic experience of IFS — your presence, holding, and creativity — was massively positive. The process bypassed the mind and cut to the core of authentic unconscious processes. It did not leave me 'high and dry' to make an intellectual evaluation of it all. Quite the opposite — your unconditional holding, trust, and wise guidance navigated the reconnection process, which was, and continues to be, hugely healing."
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"You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection." — Buddha