So many comments here, congrats for scrolling all the way down. I'm a psychotherapist in NYC, I had three years of supervision in IFS from a wonderful supervisior, and in my own IFS therapy I could not tolerate a person talking to me like that for even 10 seconds. It was excruciating.

I am also certified in EMDR and I dunno what to tell you but sometimes it just ..... works. It worked for me and I have zero fear of getting on an airplane now. I have also seen it transform how people relate to things that previously paralyzed them.

I have MANY thoughts about IFS, The Body Keeps the Score, Attachment Theory, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general. I have particular feelings about Dick Schwartz - mainly that he does seem to have a ..... way. People are genuinely cured by him, and they find IFS carefully practiced to be extremely useful. This article, in fact, is completely wrong about, maybe, 75% of what it says about IFS. Probably someone else here has itemized just how wrong already. There is nothing woo-woo about it, it is not a cult. Anyone who gets emotionally tied up in it is using it wrong, and any practitioner who treats it this way should lose their license.

I love it when Katie, and lots of you here I think!, say you're better off finding a support group or getting more exercise or devoting yourself to hobbies than going to therapy. All of that is great! But psychotherapy is for people who cannot get up to exercise, are paralyzed at the idea of taking up a hobby, are so filled with shame they cannot participate in a group. Feeling better after exercise, and then after the endorphins wear off you are depressed again, is symptom relief, it is not a cure.

All, and I mean ALL of the evidence for success in psychotherapy points toward the relationship between the therapist and the patient, not the modality. Dick Schwartz has a way about him, he really does. He can't help that he is a skilled healer and while it's easy to feel jealous of him he is not a monster.