Our look at Internal Family Systems (IFS) reveals that this treatment method is considered particularly useful and effective vis-à-vis eating disorders. Today’s post provides some hints as to why, in the minds of many, that connection has been so strongly established.
After founder Richard C. Schwartz’s career had become established at Castlewood Treatment Center, at a later point, he was joined by Frank Anderson, co-author of the IFS Skills Training Manual. Anderson is credited with enhancing the basic IFS framework by integrating “neuroscience, psychopharmacology, and advanced trauma principles, especially for dissociation and developmental trauma,” thereby extending IFS into “a neurobiologically grounded trauma specialty.”
An insufficiently examined premise?
As previously mentioned, these pioneers found that most of the early-life traumas affecting the patients were sexual in nature, and they praised Castlewood for the institution’s policies that helped clients “heal the pain that underlies their eating disorders, rather than just manage the symptoms.” However, this approval was not universal.
As journalist Rachel Corbett recently mentioned, today’s medical community tends to believe that “eating disorders are no more linked to sexual abuse than they are other types of trauma”… or, for that matter, to unrelated genetic and/or environmental factors. Additionally, Corbett’s article, published last month, dropped these bombshells:
[T]he IFS Institute will have trained 15,000 therapists in the method by the end of this year, and another 5,000 are on a waiting list.
[…] and more than 45,000 mental-health practitioners in the Psychology Today database offer it as a treatment.
[T]he practice has exploded in social media. TikTok is flooded with millions of videos mentioning IFS, including those of people role-playing and analyzing their parts…
It comes as no surprise that some obesity experts suspect that there might be worrisome and potentially dangerous elements in a field over-saturated with IFA concepts. Some traditionalists are just not buying it and don’t care who knows.
A few random websites have been consulted to try and figure out what exactly the attraction is. Are the unorthodox ideas dangerous? What about the legal implications of accepting that each person embodies a whole crowd of amateur headshrinkers?
Poet Walt Whitman famously said, “I contain multitudes.” But is that true of everyone? What would he have thought of this possible over-identification with eating-disordered patients?
One of the general complaints mentioned by Corbett is that some therapists have far too enthusiastically embraced the whole multiple personality premise, and are inexplicably over-eager to encourage patients to discover multitudes of Parts inside themselves.
One technique recommended to patients is Guided Meditation, “which helps you invite Self-energy forward and engage with your Parts calmly.” These entities, of course, include the internal manifestations of the patient-as-victim at various ages, and also one or more of the patient’s self-rescuing guardian spirits.
In order to solve, for example, an attachment to overeating, some of the interior characters express their anxieties about life in general, while other “parts” or “alters” answer them, offering hope and reassurance, as well as tactical strategies to deal with specific situations.
Treatment or cult?
We will be looking at more of the reasons why many professionals feel uneasy about IFS. For one thing, there seems to be a near-universal opinion that “patients with eating disorders are among the most difficult to treat.” Meanwhile, here are additional words from Rachel Corbett’s research into what some researchers say:
[E]ven if high-functioning patients probably won’t develop multiple selves while exploring their “parts,” and plenty find it a helpful framework, it’s too untested a practice to be considered a safe form of psychotherapy… In the wrong hands, the potential for injury is higher.
Schwartz himself told the reporter that, even after more than three decades of research and thought, his own ideas about all of this are still evolving.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “ Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy,” iptrauma.org, 07/04/25
Source: “The Therapy That Can Break You,” thecut.com, 10/30/25
Image by AlisaDyson/Pixabay
FAQs and Media Requests: 
