Transformative Healing: An IFS Workshop on Addressing Legacy Trauma

Richard Schwartz, PhD, began his career as a family therapist and an academic, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There, he discovered that family therapy alone did not achieve full symptom relief and in asking patients why, he learned that they were plagued by what they called “parts.” These patients became his teachers as they described how their parts formed networks of inner relationship that resembled the families he had been working with. He also found that as they focused on and, thereby, separated from their parts, they would shift into a state characterized by qualities like curiosity, calm, confidence and compassion. He called that inner essence the Self and was amazed to find it even in severely diagnosed and traumatized patients. From these explorations the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model was born in the early 1980s. IFS is now evidence-based and has become a widely-used form of psychotherapy, particularly with trauma. It provides a non-pathologizing, optimistic, and empowering perspective and a practical and effective set of techniques for working with individuals, couples, families, and more recently, corporations and classrooms. The IFS Institute (ifs-institute.com) offers three levels of training and workshops in IFS for professionals, both nationally and abroad. Dr. Schwartz is a featured speaker for national professional organizations and a faculty member of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.