Innovations and Elaborations in Internal Family Systems Therapy

Book excerpt: Martha Sweezy and Ellen L. Ziskind’s Internal Family Systems Therapy: New Dimensions quickly established itself as essential reading for clinicians who are interested in IFS by illustrating how the model can be applied to a variety of therapy modalities and patient populations. Sweezy and Ziskind’s newest volume, Innovations and Elaborations in Internal Family Systems Therapy, is the natural follow-up to that text. Here Richard Schwartz and other master IFS clinicians illustrate how they work with a wide variety of problems: racism, perpetrator parts, trauma, addiction, eating disorders, parenting, and grief. The authors also show creative ways of putting into practice basic IFS techniques that help parts to unblend and to unburden both personal and legacy burdens.