11/02/2025
In recent years, Internal Family Systems has exploded in popularity. IFS, which was conceived by Richard C. Schwartz in the 1980s, is centered around the idea that each individual has multiple selves, known as parts. Patients will single out parts, locate them in their bodies, and engage them in conversation to help relieve their emotional burdens.
TikTok is flooded with numerous videos mentioning IFS, more than 45,000 mental-health practitioners in the Psychology Today database offer it as a treatment, and celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow and Elizabeth Gilbert have praised the practice.
The scientific community takes a much less enthusiastic view of the practice.
A growing number of psychiatrists and psychologists are emerging with urgent warnings about the therapy, casting IFS as a simplistic allegory and, at the worst, a dangerous pseudoscience. While some patients find relief through IFS, critics argue that it’s likely owing to the way it shifts responsibility for one’s actions onto another persona or the fact that it recycles aspects of traditional talk therapy that are, in fact, helpful.
For patients with vulnerabilities like complex PTSD, disordered eating, or psychosis — many of the very people IFS practitioners are taught to treat — the therapy could destabilize already fragile mental states.
Read Rachel Corbett’s full report on the widely popular treatment that some patients say have destroyed their lives: https://nymag.visitlink.me/l-u20g
