i have a psychological hot take that I'm not very serious about and it is that Internal Family Systems and the pop therapy framework of treating yourself as a second person in some sort of bicameral personality splitting is going to be looked back upon as shocking, funny, and regressive in 20 years. and I'll still be posting on this horrible website about it to say "I told you so" when it happens
“Dick Schwartz [founder of IFS] started calling them ‘critters’ a long time ago,” Falconer tells me. “They had a staff meeting at one point, and changed the name to Unattached Burdens, because it makes it sound a little more academically acceptable. This idea is like the third rail, and Dick’s terrified it’s going to destroy the reputation of IFS. But I thought it was so important that I wouldn’t shut up about it. It led to me being exiled from the IFS community for a while. Finally [Schwartz] came around and wrote the foreword to my book, and now they’re talking about it in Level 1 training.” [...] A core IFS dogma is “there are no bad parts.” But it turns out this is not entirely true. There are some parts that are not part of your Self. On the positive side, there are the “guides,” or angelic beings. And there are Unattached Burdens, UBs, or what are traditionally known as “djinns” or “demons.” As Falconer said, UBs have been a bit of an IFS secret, only taught in Level 3 training until recently. But a year ago, he published his book about UBs, with a foreword by Dick Schwartz and praise from other leading IFS therapists. This book has been pretty influential in IFS, underground psychedelic culture (where Falconer is active), and the wider New Age / spiritual culture. (He was interviewed on the Emerge podcast and the Stoa has launched a talk series dedicated to the topic.) Demonic entities are having a moment.
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reportedly, many IFS therapists are now routinely informing patients that they are possessed by demons lol
Here’s another client who emailed me: “I’ve been seeing my psychologist who specializes in trauma therapy for about 10 months now. I made it clear that I was not interested in anything spiritual because I had a lot of that pressed on me, and I wanted to set my boundaries…After our meeting on Tuesday, when I discussed a very frightening embodiment of what I would call the abyss, or death, which I felt had its sights set on me….she told me she thought I had an unattached burden. At first, I was interested, thinking it was some kind of trauma thing, and then my heart sank. And then I got really pissed off. I have suffered from delusions in the past, she knows that. I have experienced psychosis in the past. I have been expressing very suicidal thoughts, and I’m in one of the most vulnerable times of my life, certainly of my adult life. I feel disrespected, but more than anything, I feel, honestly, it’s kind of disgusted with the fact that she could say something so irresponsible to somebody in my situation.” IFS therapists can dismiss all these examples as “bad IFS,” but it seems there is clearly a risk of IFS therapists and coaches suggesting or imposing the idea of a UB, and clients finding it harmful — even more so if they’re working with clients taking psychedelics, which amplify suggestibility. In his book, one observer even tells Falconer it looks like he’s making hypnotic suggestions: “Participant 1: [Falconer], it seems like you implanted a lot of little suggestions, almost like a hypnotist. Falconer: Well, there is a general principle here. These things are often full of pride, and you can use their pride to manipulate them. “ In other words, Falconer thinks he is hypnotically manipulating the UB rather than the client… I emailed the IFS Institute to ask if they wanted to comment on these issues, but didn’t hear back.
this is basically scientology. i called it, btw. i intuited immediately there was something decidedly unchic going on here
There have been a few articles pointing out just how dubious a lot of his claims are since we chatted about this in 2024. The Nation had a good piece last April that pointed out just how dubious this shit is and how it's rapidly outgrowing the already scanty evidence base. They outright call it a scam in the url.
[...]“the current expansion of IFS across psychotherapy and social media has moved beyond its evidence base.” The authors note that the existing research on IFS excludes people with psychotic symptoms, even as they warn, based on their own observations in clinical settings, of the “overapplication” of IFS to people with such symptoms: “Our concern is that encouraging splitting of the self into parts for those who struggle with reality testing might be disorganizing.”
Yeah. No shit it might be "disorganizing".
Another cultural influence has been the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score, which attempts to make the case that trauma can fundamentally reshape the body and the brain. Published in 2014, it found a new wave of readers during the pandemic and has been on the New York Times bestseller list in the paperback nonfiction category for more than 334 weeks. Notably, van der Kolk effectively gives IFS his blessing in a chapter on the theory. “We all have parts,” he writes, adding, in words that could have been penned by Schwartz himself, that “a part is considered not just a passing emotional state or customary thought pattern, but a distinct mental system with its own history, abilities, needs, and worldview.” Several years later, van der Kolk went a step farther in a blurb he wrote for No Bad Parts: “IFS is one of the cornerstones of effective and lasting trauma therapy.”
I was wondering when that motherfucker was going to show up. Reminder that Van der Kolk is a satanic panic believing weirdo who harassed his colleagues to the point of losing his job and is wrong about pretty much everything.
As for IFS, it's like if Gestalt therapy was developed by an idiot American rather than a trio of Jewish anarchists interested in Dada and avant-garde theatre.
