The bro-ification of Internal Family Systems
Into the manosphere we go.
Hello Testers. Hope your AC units have been functioning well this summer.
Recently, I’ve noticed that my non-therapist friends are increasingly talking to me about Internal Family Systems. They are consulting with IFS therapists, seeing it on TikTok, reading about it, and then telling me about it in the bar. Today, I explore what may be contributing to the method’s moment in the spotlight.
A few months ago, Dr. Richard Schwartz went on the Huberman Lab for a podcast episode titled How to Achieve Inner Peace and Healing. For those lucky enough to live outside the manosphere, Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist with a singularly popular wellness podcast, a public friendship with Joe Rogan, and a series of likely now ex-girlfriends. He helped popularize habits like dopamine detoxes and cold plunges. (More on that in a future letter.)
The episode signals a burgeoning relationship between Internal Family Systems, a therapeutic model enjoying a moment of popularity, and bro-adjacent wellness culture, which seeks to optimize the self using methods both spiritual and structured.
Schwartz invented Internal Family Systems therapy in the 1980s. Schwartz, who has a Ph.D in marriage and family therapy, was inspired by family systems theory, which posits that family units operate as systems, with each family member playing an established role that keeps the family unit repeating patterns that may be harmful or enabling.
Dr. Schwartz posited that we can think of ourselves in terms of the subpersonalities, or “parts,” that comprise us. Per the IFS Institute, this theory “conceives of every human being as a system of protective and wounded inner parts led by a core Self.” Our parts are valuable and offer qualities and resources that help us survive, but our life experiences can force them into playing roles that can be destructive. An example: Schwartz developed this theory when he was working with patients struggling with bulimia. (ED discussion incoming.) He theorized that while traditional therapies focused on treating the bulimic symptoms, IFS seeks to treat the deeper, underlying reasons why the harmful behaviors were so important to his patients. He theorized that bulimic purging was an expression of his patients’ protective parts seeking to regain control and agency after binge-eating – essentially, trying to guard those deeper parts of themselves that may feel exposed or wounded – but those mechanisms of protection were ultimately causing those patients further harm. By understanding what wounded parts those protectors were seeking to guard, IFS claims, a deeper sense of healing can be reached.
IFS conceives of the Self using the “8 Cs”: confidence, calm, compassion, courage, creativity, clarity, curiosity, and connectedness. Being led by the Self is the goal, as well as cultivating healthier relationships with our parts.
Many of the core concepts of IFS – conceiving of the self as parts, identifying our self-protective defenses – are not new. The modality draws from psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, Jungian, Gestalt, and somatic therapies, among others. Some of its ideas look like repackaged versions of Buddhist concepts that are thousands of years old. But the packaging and the jargon are new. IFS is a structured and protocol-driven treatment that Schwartz also defines on Huberman Lab as a “life practice and [...] paradigm for understanding the human mind as an alternative to the culture’s paradigm.” It has one foot in traditional clinical approach and the other in counterculture. In other words, it’s an intervention that feels almost perfectly designed for our cultural moment.
Dick Schwartz is an exceptional brand ambassador. He has a tendency to transition the interviews he gives into IFS therapy sessions for his interviewers (Tim Ferriss, as another example). These interactions serve as bite-sized introductions to his methodology as well as ads for its effectiveness.
The marketing is working: Level 1 of IFS certification through the IFS Institute – a privately owned, for-profit company, and the only org that offers certification – boasts a waitlist of over 20,000 clinicians, as recently reported by The Nation. And in a field where postgraduate or specialized training is prohibitively expensive, IFS still stands out as one of the most costly. All told, it runs between $10-12,000 and about 2-4 years (excluding waitlist times) to become “fully certified” through the Institute. Unlike something like EMDR, in which a democratized network of providers are certified to offer training, IFS certification must happen within a cohort in the Institute.
The popularity of IFS, its core concepts and practices, and its presentation in the media offer some insight about where the therapy industry is at and where we’re headed.
IFS is commonly used in partnership with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. The idea is that psychedelics can help calm defenses (“protective parts,” in the jargon), providing access to some of the parts that hold pain or trauma (“exiles”) which are often hidden and protected. It’s also somatic – in IFS, clients are encouraged to take note of the sensations associated with certain parts. (My thoughts on the therapy-speakification of somatics here.)
Notably, IFS is not relational in the traditional therapeutic sense. The most important relationship in IFS therapy is not between therapist and client, but between the client’s Self and parts. In this way, it’s a good match for someone invested in a more individualistic (masculine?) approach to self work.
It’s a mirror of our cultural moment: The specialized jargon of IFS, its incorporation of somatic work, and its partnership with psychedelics (which have themselves been co-opted by the MAHA crowd and podcast bros – last year was MAPS founder Rick Doblin’s fifth appearance on Joe Rogan) feels aligned with wellness optimization culture. We expect “healing” to be spiritual, structured, self-led, and expensive.
I am by no means an IFS hater. In fact, I find several of its core concepts helpful and even intuitive. Research supporting its effectiveness to treat trauma is promising, though imperfect: A recent deep dive in The Nation found some flaws in the study design and interpretation of results (though, to be fair, therapeutic research is full of holes almost by definition – more of my thoughts on “evidence based therapy” here.) When I speak with my clients about the parts of themselves that are vulnerable, or protect them from pain, the shared language can help guide them to greater self-compassion and insight. And the method is grounded in curiosity, which can offer a refreshingly non-pathologizing model for talking about the parts of ourselves that cause us harm.
And despite the baggage, Huberman does offer some tools for men to connect with their emotions and destigmatize therapy – probably a net positive.
But my feelings are complicated. IFS is a brand-name therapy being advertised to the manosphere. Its cost and exclusivity benefit its brand and bottom line. In a moment when mental health treatment is less accessible than ever, the IFS Institute stands out as one of our profession’s most popular and expensive gatekeepers, a participant in the privatization of spiritual wellness.
–
Reading with intrigue
…Jules Evans’ articles on psychedelic tourism in his Substack, Ecstatic Integration. One of the most prominent documentors of the psychedelic healing industry, he recently reported on a participant’s tragic cardiac-related death during an ayahuasca ceremony at the American expat-run Ayahuasca Foundation in Peru. Come for the story, stay for the comments section, in which the org’s founder argues his case, and several former retreat attendees share their experiences, both positive and harmful. It’s a peek into some of the internal controversy in the psychedelic underground.
I’m interested in the efforts to make safety scalable as psychedelics continue to reach mainstream status. Orgs like the Psychedelic Safety Institute seem to be doing cool work here. (Loving and gentle reminder here that if you’re pursuing a psychedelic healing experience of any kind, know what you’re taking, know your health risks, and do your research.)
Thanks for reading! Are you an IFS client or clinician? What do you think? Is there something you want me to write about, or someone you think I should talk to? Comment here, or my DMs are open. <3
I loved that article in The Nation. I shared it far and wide.
The other thing that concerns me is that I'm increasingly seeing people advertising themselves as "IFS coaches," aka uneducated and unlicensed people offering potentially damaging pseudotherapy.
As someone who has done eating disorder work for the past twelve years, I don't find IFS helpful. DBT is more effective at helping clients overcome purging, in my experience. If done skillfully, DBT gets at all the underlying family dynamics that contribute to the eating disorder with tools like chain analysis and thought records. I also find IFS problematic as a trauma therapist, as I'm usually trying to help my clients integrate the dissociated parts of themselves and see themselves as a cohesive whole.
Thank you for holding my hand thru this tour of the manosphere— I was not aware of Swartz’s recent appearance and now this growing trend is making more sense!