the IFS takedown: my unfiltered response to the psych industry’s victory lap

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Back from the borderline, it means back from the edge, from the abyss, from the illusion that you're too broken to heal. If that sounds like the kind of journey you're ready to take, follow the podcast on the player you're listening to right now. I drop new episodes every Tuesday. All right, let's get into it. On October 30th, 2025, New York Magazine published a feature titled "The Therapy That Can Break You" that scrutinized the rise of IFS or Internal Family Systems Therapy. The article was written by Rachel Corbett in The Cut, and it cast IFS in an incredibly harsh light to say the least. A widely popular trauma treatment that some patients say has destroyed their lives. It detailed incredibly disturbing accounts from the Castlewood Treatment Center, where IFS techniques allegedly coincided with clients recovering extreme false memories and exhibiting bizarre behaviors, and within hours of publication, many psychiatrists and psychologists on social media seized on the piece as some kind of vindication. The psychiatric establishments online reaction was almost celebratory. This sort of "we told you so" victory lap energy. In tweets and forums, clinicians described IFS as dangerous pseudoscience finally being exposed. One clinician remarked that IFS's focus on parts could drive "even more splitting" in vulnerable patients with unstable identities. Another voice likened scenes from IFS-based therapy to "a weird exorcism," pointing to reports of patients speaking in childlike voices and adopting alternate personas. The message from these commentators was pretty unmistakable, and that was that IFS had somehow overstepped into the sacred territory of treating the psyche, and now the guardians of clinical science were somehow reasserting their authority. But beneath the manufactured outrage lies what I see as a much deeper hypocrisy. The swift dogpiling on IFS by some in psychiatry, framing it as a cult-like "fad" run amok, invites us to examine an uncomfortable prospect and question. Who owns the psyche? Is it the sole domain of medically trained psychiatrists wielding DSM checklists and pharmacology? Or is there room for exploratory models that use metaphors and inner life, models like IFS? The answer to that question requires us to step back from the noise on platforms like X/Twitter and considering context. IFS definitely warrants critique, and we're going to go into that. But any such critique rings pretty hollow without acknowledging psychiatrists long record of harm and error in the name of science. So before we join the chorus condemning IFS's talk of inner parts as dangerous woo woo pseudoscience, we should recall how often mainstream psychiatry has indulged in its own excesses often with much less public self-reflection. All this outcry against IFS and professional circles has an error of theater to it. The article's scientific skeptics describe IFS as a simplistic allegory at best and at worst a dangerous pseudoscience. This framing really suggests that psychiatry by contrast is an unimpeachable hard science with purely evidence-based practices. But the reality, as long-term listeners of my podcast will know, is far more complicated. Psychiatry's history is absolutely littered with confidently promoted treatments and theories that later have been proven ineffective or even deeply harmful, rarely earning the field the kind of blanket pathologizing now that's being aimed at internal family systems. The outrage, in other words, is incredibly selective. Manu factured to de-legitimize a competing paradigm while at the same time downplaying psychiatry's own lapses. For instance, consider the cornerstone of modern psychiatric treatment, anti-depressant medication, meta-analyses by researcher Irving Kirsch and colleagues revealed something pretty startling to most people and that was that for mild to moderate depression, anti-depressant drugs perform no better than placebo's. Even for severely depressed patients, the drug placebo difference is relatively small and conventional criteria for clinical significance are met only in the most extreme cases. In 2008, Kirsch analyzed FDA trial data and found virtually no difference between SSRIs and sugar pills in moderate depression, an uncomfortable result that undercuts decades of psychiatric prescribing. The small benefit observed in very severe depression appeared to be due not to the med's "working" but to the placebo response dropping off among the most desperate patients. In plain language, anti-depressants were largely a triumph of marketing and hope instead of pharmacological wizardry. Yet how often was this dismal efficacy framed as a fundamental failing of psychiatric science? Certainly not with the volume of indignation now directed at IFS. Most psychiatrists continued prescribing SSRIs to millions of people buoyed by the cultural narrative that these pills fixed a "chemical imbalance" in the brain, a narrative that has now been thoroughly discredited by evidence. In fact, the entire chemical imbalance theory of depression once aggressively promoted by pharmaceutical companies and even the American Psychiatric Association has crumbled under scrutiny. Starting in the 1990s, the public was absolutely inundated with the message that depression is caused by a deficit of serotonin in the brain. This incredibly simplistic theory was used to justify the explosion of SSRI prescriptions, but a comprehensive 2022 review led by psychiatrist Joanna Monkrieve found "no clear evidence that serotonin levels or activity are responsible for depression." Decades of studies failed to confirm any consistent difference in serotonin between depressed and non-depressed people. As Monkrieve and her colleagues wrote, "Drug trials show anti-depressants are barely distinguishable from placebo and their effect on depression." In other words, an entire generation was sold a mythology of brain chemistry that drove up medication use. One in six adults in some countries are now on anti-depressants, and all of this mind you without any kind of solid scientific basis. Psychiatry as a field didn't launch a purge of this unscientific idea. There were no Twitter mobs branding the serotonin hypothesis as a dangerous pseudoscience, even though it was indeed false. Instead, the theory conveniently and quietly started to fade with minimal accountability for those who spent their entire careers pushing it. The contrast with this IFS situation is telling, "One domain's lack of evidence was glossed over for years, while another is pounced on immediately as proof of cultish fraudulence." Even more egregious are cases where psychiatric research actively harmed patients or misled the public. Events one would expect to trigger soul-searching in the profession. Let's take the infamous Paxel study 329. In the 1990s, GlaxoSmith Klein funded a clinical trial study 329 of the anti-depressant Paxel in adolescence. The results, once they were properly analyzed, showed no efficacy and elevated risks. More children on Paxel had suicidal thoughts and behaviors than those on the placebo, yet the studies published paper in 2001 claimed Paxel was, quote, "effective and well-tolerated" in adolescent depression. How? Well, I'll tell you how. The paper had been ghostwritten by a PR firm, cherry-picking data to make the drug look more positive. Internal documents later revealed the company knew the trial was negative for efficacy by 1998, and that suicidality was higher on the drug, but chose not to publish those findings. Instead, they published a completely distorted article that concluded that Paxel was generally well-tolerated and effective for teenagers. This deception contributed to widespread, off-label prescribing to minors, and was only unmasked years later after lawsuits and investigations started to pile up. In 2012, GSK paid a $3 billion fine in part for covering up study 329's results, one of the largest healthcare fraud settlements in history. And yet, despite the scandal of pseudoscience and harm, essentially a case of evidence being systematically warped, there was no broad denunciation of academic psychiatry as a dangerous enterprise. Unbelievably, the study 329 paper wasn't even retracted by the journal, lingering for years with only an expression of concern. The field's response was muted and defensive. No trending articles attacked the pseudoscience of psychopharmacology or the cult-like corruption of academic psychiatry, even though lives were lost to undetected side effects and false claims. These examples illustrate a pattern that's really common here, and that is mainstream psychiatry's own excesses and errors are very rarely pathologized by its own practitioners. When evidence emerges that a standard treatment was far less effective than assumed, like antidepressants, or that a lauded study was essentially fraudulent, like this one, for Paxel intends, the news is met with a shrug and maybe a guarded admission, at most a call for more research or incremental reforms. The profession doesn't turn the analytical spotlight back on itself with the ferocity it reserves for outside challengers. It often takes outsiders like independent journalists, investigative journalists, patient advocates, all of the above to hold psychiatry accountable for its mistakes. Irving Kirsch had to fight to obtain unpublished FDA data. Joanna Monkreve had to brave, incredible amounts of criticism to publish her umbrella review. Study 329's truth came out through legal discovery and efforts by reform minded psychiatrists and journalists. The institutional response was slow and often aimed at preservation of reputation. No one in authority labeled the entire enterprise of SSRI prescribing as dangerous pseudoscience, even after the biomedical rationale completely evaporated. Trust me, I'm going somewhere with all of this context, and what I've said so far, I know doesn't prove that IFS is either effective or benign, but all of this does reveal this double standard in outrage. The rush I'm seeing to condemn IFS for being untested or having potential for harm feels really disingenuous when psychiatrists' closet is literally busting with skeletons. Where was the tweet storm from eminent psychiatrists when it became clear that millions of people may have been taking medications with marginal to no benefit? Or where was the collective introspection about the decades long over prescription of stimulants to children, or benzodiazepines to anybody with anxiety, or the polypharmacy cocktails that many patients end up on? All of these trends carry risk of harm from addiction to side effects to medicalizing normal human emotion, but they are discussed in these polite technical terms at conferences instead of derided as cult-like malpractice, which I would argue that a lot of it is. The manufactured outrage over IFS serves an agenda, in my opinion. I think it serves to reinforce psychiatry's jurisdiction over legitimate models of the mind, dramatizing the one case where an outsider model may have gone too far. It's a form of ideological boundary policing. The message is that exploring a metaphoric inner world is pseudoscientific quackery, where carving up the brain's chemistry, even based on shaky hypotheses, is science. This narrative just can't be accepted uncritically. So, before we turn to a detailed critique of the IFS takedown article, and that's coming, trust me, I just want to establish this, that psychiatry has often failed to police its very own excesses with the zeal it shows in policing others. The field that once embraced lobotomy and practiced and promoted shock therapy or ECT with scant to little to no evidence in its early days, that pathologized homosexuality for decades and still can't fully explain why its medicines work when they even do, that field should approach critiques of alternative models with a little bit more humility. I'm not here to engage in any kind of what aboutism to excuse the many flaws of IFS because it does have them, but I do expect, especially from professionals, a little bit of intellectual honesty. If we are going to hold IFS accountable for outcomes and evidence, we also need to hold mainstream psychiatry to that exact same standard. Only then can patients and the public trust that this isn't just some kind of weird turf war, manufactured outrage undermines genuine concern. So I really would love it if we could just see a little bit of a drop in the performative gasps and pearl clutching and do the much harder work of rational analysis for IFS and for psychiatry. The Castlewood saga lies at the heart of the New York magazine article's case against IFS. It provides this concrete horror story, a respected treatment center where IFS oriented therapy allegedly led to psychological devastation. The article paints a picture of Castlewood, a trauma focused eating disorder clinic in Missouri as a snake pit of therapeutic excess. Former patients recount sessions where women regress to infantile states, crawling on the floor, lying in fetal positions, even switching ages, genders, and even species, as they embodied different parts. Trauma's disclosed early in treatment supposedly escalated into implausible nightmares over time, tales of satanic cults, ritual child abuse, and other fantastical abuse scenarios that emerged during these IFS sessions. In the article's most damning sequence, multiple ex-patients described how under Castlewood's care, they came to believe false memories. One woman accused her father of raping her since she was four. Others became convinced that they had endured ritualistic abuse or had parents who pimped them out to entire neighborhoods of people. Four patients eventually sued Castlewood and its lead psychologist, Dr. Mark Schwartz, by the way who apparently has no relation to Richard Schwartz, the creator of IFS. So I want to make that clear throughout this episode because the author of the article made that clear too. But apparently, these lawsuits alleged that therapists at Castlewood, including Mark Schwartz, implanted false memories of sexual abuse and cult activity, which of course fostered dangerous estrangements from families. The state of Missouri's licensing board ensured Mark Schwartz and the facility after being sold to private equity and rebranded, shut down its St. Louis location amidst the scandal. This is the lurid backdrop that the article uses to indict IFS as a treatment modality by encouraging clients to talk to their parts. It implies IFS opened the door to dangerous levels of dissociation and confabulated trauma. And so essentially they're saying what this subtext is look at what believing in inner parts can do to vulnerable people. No wonder the critics call it dangerous. In my opinion, this deserves a really careful unpacking. There's no question that what happened at Castlewood was real and harmful. Vulnerable patients came away in worse shape than they came in with fractured identities and shattered families. But to attribute this entirely to IFS as if the model itself inherently produces these outcomes is a vast oversimplification. We need to examine Castlewood's unique context and the individuals running it. Mark Schwartz and his wife Laurie Galperin directed Castlewood and their professional history is telling. They emerged from the 1980s trauma therapy world with little to no boundaries. In fact, Mark and Laurie had earlier worked at the Masters and Johnson Institute and were proponents of really highly controversial practices. Masters and Johnson infamously promoted conversion therapy for homosexuality in that era. And by the 1990s, the couple had conveniently shifted focus to sexual abuse trauma. Vanity Fair dubbed them the sunny and share of trauma for their high profile workshops on abuse recovery. They held extreme beliefs about the prevalence of trauma. Mark and Laurie publicly claimed that an astounding one in three girls are sexually abused and that the vast majority of women with eating disorders have hidden histories of sexual trauma. With this lens, they reportedly saw abuse everywhere. A 1998 profile noted that under their care often clients end up accusing their relatives of sexual abuse. So Castlewood's leadership was already primed to overdiagnose trauma and pursue recovered memories even before IFS entered the picture. Their approach was much more open than many psychologists to unproven modalities. As Mark himself admitted, he relished being a rebel, embracing any method that could turbocharge therapy to get faster results. IFS was one such method that he adopted. Mark Schwartz was actually an early trainee of Richard Schwartz. In the early 2000s, he learned IFS and even became an assistant instructor in IFS trainings. He then invited Richard to consult a Castlewood. Richard ran workshops for staff and occasionally facilitated sessions with patients there. Richard Schwartz remembered he's the creator of IFS. At the time, he praised Castlewood's approach, emphasizing that "working with the eating disordered part of the self that encapsulates the trauma of the past," end quote. And even said, "I wish I could send them all my traumatized clients to Castlewood, presumably." In promotional materials, he was described as "integral to Castlewood." So this is a nuanced episode here, and so I'm going to say, this close association is frankly a serious mark against Richard Schwartz's judgment. It shows that his eagerness to see IFS applied to trauma meant that he lent his name to a program that was already skating on incredibly thin ice of recovered memory practices. It also explains why the New York magazine piece zeros in on Castlewood. Richard Schwartz can't easily distance himself from that debacle because he was a consultant and very public supporter of this particular facility. But here's where I'm not seeing any of the nuance in any of the reactions, which is what led me to create this almost emergency broadcast episode. I shifted back my entire content schedule to make sure that I could get this out, because I think it is very misleading to treat Castlewood as somehow representative of IFS therapy as a whole. Castlewood was an outlier, and it represented this perfect storm of factors that magnified all of the risks of IFS. The therapeutic culture at Castlewood verged on cultish and fanatic. Patients were encouraged to uncover ever deeper and deeper and deeper horrors, which often reminds me of how people are falling into AI-induced psychosis, going deeper and deeper into these recursion patterns. And so, as Castlewood was doing this, making them go deeper and deeper, arguably to fit the narrative that the therapists already believed that severe abuse was somehow ubiquitous across this population of people, mainly girls. IFS techniques like dialoguing with parts or visualizing exiles were in that setting very easily co-opted into a modern day witch hunt for hidden trauma. If you start with an assumption that a patient's symptoms must somehow mean some terrible abuse occurred to them, and you use an open-ended technique that legitimizes whatever image or voice arises internally, you have a perfect recipe for confirmation bias. And you have patients like these, the types of people and mainly girls who are eager to make progress, especially when you have symptoms of an eating disorder. These are young girls who often are wanting to people please or make progress because it's a way of them being able to have control over their situation. They're wanting to please authority figures. This concoction really generates increasingly extreme memories, especially in a group setting where there may be competition for the most dramatic story. As one Castlewood staff member observed, quote, "It was almost like people wanted to one up each other with horrific revelations." Now, again, none of this is inherent to IFS alone. It's a known risk in any therapy that uses imagination or hypnosis without proper safeguards. In the 80s and 90s, traditional hypnosis and guided imagery techniques that were not affiliated in any way to IFS because it was before then led also to a huge wave of false memory cases and satanic panic allegations. The common denominator was always therapists who imposed a narrative and inadvertently shaped patients' experiences. Castlewood repeated those mistakes just with a slightly different toolkit. The tragedy is that standard clinical wisdom already cautions against all of this stuff. By the late 1990s, the recovered memory frenzy had been widely discredited, but Mark Schwartz and his team charged right back into that very same minefield, really turbocharged, and this is a quote that Mark Schwartz used to use the word "turbocharged" by IFS and other trendy trauma methods. The article notes that Mark also integrated things like survivor retreats and took inspiration from people like Bessel Vanderkulk or Gabar Mate, who the article really cast as these fringe figures. And so it's fair to ask at this point, what kind of responsibility does Richard Schwartz and the IFS model itself bear here? It's too fold. First, Richard Schwartz failed to enforce quality control or speak out when things went wrong. He never publicly addressed the scandal at Castlewood points out the article. Even after lawsuits were settled and Mark Schwartz moved to a brand new clinic in California, Richard continued business as usual, even speaking at an Alsona conference, Alsona being the rebranded Castlewood about IFS and eating disorder treatment. So this silence really comes off as pretty evasive. A more ethically responsible leader would have probably issued guidelines or warnings about using IFS with memory recovery or at least distance the model from Castlewood. Schwartz didn't, likely on advice of lawyers, but the result is a really big missed opportunity to draw clear lines in boundaries. Next, the Castlewood case exposed that IFS can be really, really dangerous in the wrong hands. This is something Schwartz himself has acknowledged in more general terms. He told the cut that quote, "We can't police everything. It's dangerous to not have full training," end quote. And he noted mistakes that he made early on that harmed clients. The IFS institute belatedly tightened its training admission criteria, now requiring trainees to actually be licensed clinicians. But in the 2000s, as IFS was spreading, a lot of non-clinicians were certified. Castlewood's Mark Schwartz was a licensed psychologist and personally trained by Richard, so training alone doesn't fix things either, obviously. The deeper issue here is that IFS straddles a line between therapy and spiritual exploration, and not everyone is going to navigate this line safely. So when someone like Mark already predisposed to very fringe practices to put it as kindly and mildly as possible, when people like him use IFS, the model's permissiveness with it saying things like, quote, "Every part is welcome. Let's hear its story," end quote, right? These kinds of things become an unwitting cover for therapist-led suggestion. A part can say anything, after all, including things the client never consciously remembered. And without rigorous grounding, IFS facilitators might accept these utterances as truth and pursue them down really dangerous rabbit holes, and this is exactly what appears to have happened at Castlewood. So yes, the Castlewood story is a very valid cautionary tale about IFS. It's just not the whole story. And I think the article's failure is a failure of balance. It doesn't adequately distinguish how much of Castlewood's catastrophe was due to IFS itself versus due to therapist bias poor oversight and a really outdated recovered memory playbook. The author notes that Richard Schwartz never addressed the scandal and highlights Mark's embrace of unproven methods, but she stops short of analyzing whether a more careful evidence-based use of IFS might avoid this kind of harm. In a sense, the piece just assumes guilt by association. Castlewood did IFS, Castlewood was bad, so therefore IFS is bad. It's basically like saying hypnosis caused false memories in some cases, so therefore hypnosis is a technique that is inherently dangerous and pseudoscientific. But the truth, as it always is, is way more nuanced than that. Hypnosis in capable hands can be therapeutic for pain, habit change, and many different things. But in the 80s, it was misused by zealots chasing hidden abuse. The proper response wasn't to ban all hypnosis, but just to develop standards and safeguards. So I think in a similar way, IFS just needs stricter guidelines, like maybe clear warnings about not treating metaphor as literal fact, especially with dissociative or psychotic patients. These discussions are largely missing from these kind of knee-jerk condemnations that we're seeing on social media and with this article. So instead, what we get are these blanket statements that IFS quote destabilizes reality testing and should maybe be avoided entirely. And beyond Castlewood, the article also really harshly critiques IFS for its commercialization and its metaphysical underpinnings. IFS has definitely exploded in popularity, which brings along with it some valid concerns. It's not just fringe therapy anymore, it has become more so of this cultural phenomenon. As the cut notes, over 45,000 therapists on psychology today's directory now offer IFS, and the IFS Institute has trained 15,000 of those with thousands more on a waitlist. TikTok and Instagram are just filled with IFS content, and even celebrities from Guanath Paltrow to eat prey love author Elizabeth Gilbert sing its praises. This kind of hype inevitably outruns the evidence, and it also attracts people looking to make a quick buck in the wellness space. Schwartz's institute initially allowed even non-therapists, as I mentioned, like life coaches and massage therapists, to become licensed IFS practitioners, which while that democratized the modality, it also meant shaky standards. And there is this profit motive here too. Schwartz has built an incredibly lucrative enterprise with books, workshops, and annual conferences. And thousands of tickets are sold to these conferences, so you can only imagine the kind of revenue that's generating. IFS trainings aren't cheap either, and certification is a whole cottage industry now. And so IFS has basically just followed the same trajectory that other popular psychotherapies have followed, like EMDR, which has an institute and expensive trainings, or even psychoanalysis in its heyday. And so it's fair to critique the commercialization. I really do believe that turning inner child work into this branded product leads to an inevitable delusion of quality and this atmosphere of self-congratulation instead of real healing. And I find it interesting that even Richard Schwartz seems a little bit taken aback by how much fame he's found in his later life. And he said in the article, quote, "In some ways, it's a dream come true. And in some ways, it brings a lot more complications." And he said this, referring to IFS's surge in popularity. And so one of those complications is that in reaching for mass appeal, IFS sort of scaled back its metaphysical roots and even hid them a little bit. At its core, IFS is built on a quasi-spiritual worldview of the mind. Schwartz conceptualizes the psyche as composed of discrete parts that hold emotions, beliefs, and even ages. And at the center of everyone is the capital S self, described as an innately compassionate, wise core. These ideas echo spiritual and religious framework, so for example, the notion of a higher self or the idea of inner spirits. In the early days, Schwartz didn't hide this. He taught therapists to treat extreme symptomatic parts, not as pathologies to eliminate, but as, quote, "sacred spiritual beings" that actually serve a protective role. This language of sacred spiritual beings is remarkable coming from a clinical psychologist. It shows how IFS was born from an openness to the luminous aspects of the psyche, something which was foreign to the medical model at the time. And over time, as IFS tried to gain legitimacy, Richard Schwartz started to use much more secular phrasing. The article points out that what a traditional therapist might call feelings or behaviors, IFS calls them parts, but insists that those parts are literally entities within us, not metaphorical things. To avoid scaring off scientists, Schwartz leaned on psychology terminology. In other words, comparing IFS parts to Freud's inner constructs and presented IFS as an extension of family therapy theory. But IFS asks clients to engage imagination and personification in a way that standard CBT would consider unconventional, to say the least. So there is this whiff of the shamanic in IFS, which is something very ancient and story-driven. Schwartz's genius was partially in translating that spiritual sensibility into clinical practice. His compromise, though, is that by not openly owning the spiritual dimension, he left IFS vulnerable to misunderstanding. Skeptics take the model's claims like every part is welcome, even a suicidal urge or binge perj impulse has protective intention, and find them unscientific, which strictly speaking, they are, in the sense of not being empirically proven, but rather philosophically derived. Schwartz, however, might argue that those are working assumptions to guide therapy much like how a placebo can be a working tool to trigger self-healing. But because IFS uses scientific seeming language, like parts and systems, critics feel that it is masquerading as science when it is very far from it. And they're not entirely wrong. IFS lacks any kind of robust outcome research as of today. A pilot study here or there shows promise for PTSD or depression, but we don't have the kind of data one would want for a "evidence-based treatment" badge. In positioning IFS, as serious therapy, Schwartz invites the rightful demand for evidence in holding IFS out as this quasi-spiritual healing, though, he invites the ire of skeptics who smell mysticism on it, so he's created this really tricky double bind for himself, and one could easily argue that Schwartz was really trying to have it both ways. But Schwartz's ideas were never created in a vacuum. The concept of the mind consisting of parts or the idea of dialoguing with aspects of the self has long been a thing across various cultures and eras. Far from being this kooky 21st century fad, parts work is ancient. More than 2,300 years ago, Plato himself described the human soul as inherently multi-part, divided into the logical rational part, the spirited part, and the appetite-driven desiring part. He even illustrated this with the famous chariot allegory. A charioteer representing reason, struggling to guide two horses representing spirit and appetite. The implication was that inner conflict is a universal thing, different drives within us can act like independent agents. Later, the Freudian Revolution recapitulated this idea in modern form. Freud's structural model segmented the psyche into id, ego, and super-ego, primal desires, rational self, and moral conscience. These were essentially parts by another name, each with its own voice and agenda. And psychoanalysis for decades was in part about helping the ego mediate those inner figures. Freud's colleague turned rival Carl Jung went further into multiplicity. He described archetypes, universal figures in the collective unconscious, and acknowledged phenomena like the persona and the shadow, which meant an individual psyche contains subpersonalities, the shadow being the repressed side of oneself, often personified in dreams. Jungian therapy often involves dialoguing within our figures through act of imagination, for example. The early 20th century Melanie Klein, a pioneer of child psychology, observed that children internalized the good and bad versions of caregivers, which later gave rise to her object relations theory, and may split these into separate internal objects, which she posited reflected an inability to integrate love and hate. The term splitting that critics now use with borderline personality disorder, for instance, originally described psychological defense, where parts of the self or others are kept apart. So, when IFS says people have managers, exiles, and firefighters, it's not novel at all, but conceptually it sits on the same shelf as Jung's inner characters or Melanie Klein's internal objects. Even in religious or spiritual traditions, we see very strong similarities. One example being Tibetan Buddhism's Chod practice initiated by Machiglabdron in the 11th century. It explicitly involves encountering the personifications of one's fears and neuroses. Machiglabdron practitioners to tenderly surround yourself with the very demons and gods that terrify you, treating them with compassion rather than aversion. This is strikingly similar to IFS's dictum that no part is bad and that even the most destructive impulse should be met with curiosity and care. The idea is that by honoring these parts or inner demons, one dissolves their power. So these precedents, all these examples suggest to us that this idea of metaphorical personification of the inner experience is a tool that humanity has used for millennia as it relates to its search for healing, the suffering of the human experience. IFS didn't invent this at all, it just refined it into a systematic approach that took fire in pop psychotherapy. So you might be wondering by now why I would bring up all of these historical and cross-cultural points, and it's because they highlight a certain provincialism in the psychiatric establishments attacks. To sneer at the notion of parts and the idea of an inner self guiding them is basically to ignore that this language resonates with a deep thread of human understanding. When Lynn Boofka of the APA says that IFS's ideas quote don't have a scientific basis, she is technically correct but in a really narrow sense because controlled trials are scarce. But it's very easy to argue neither did Freud's ideas at one time, but they opened fruitful avenues for exploration. Neither do many common practices in therapy. For example, the use of narratives and metaphors to help a patient make sense of their life. Humans aren't robots, and the process of therapy can't be approached as scientific engineering even though that seems like what people that are working for the APA are kind of advocating for. It's very logical to admit that there is a serious limit to what randomized controlled trials alone can tell us about meaning-making, which is a central part of psychological healing as many of us know. So using this dismissal of IFS's parts as allegory, critics are implying that only literal physical interventions count as real. But the mind itself operates in allegories and stories. If a war veteran imagines confronting his younger self who feels survivor's guilt and finds relief after forgiving that part of him was that pseudoscience or just an effective use of the inner world, an act of imagination? If a patient with addiction experiences their craving as a persona say a needy child part and learns to care for that part in a different way, is that dangerous or could it be therapeutic? These are the kinds of questions a fair minded evaluator would ask rather than just blankly squarning the concept of inner parts completely. And I want to make it clear if IFS wants to play with the big dogs and by big dogs I mean wants to be a certified evidence-based treatment modality, then it should be held to empirical testing just like any other. The critics are right that glowing anecdotes and celebrity endorsements are not proof of a model being effective. Rigorous studies are needed and if those find no benefit or specific harms, then that should be acknowledged. But it's this ideological dismissal of IFS. I think that it goes further than calls for evidence because it veers into asserting that IFS is very cosmology is inherently illegitimate and that any form of speaking to the self, the capital as self and exiles is inherently unscientific and therefore that means it's complete nonsense. And I think this is where it's very important for us to push back. Using imaginative or spiritual language in psychology isn't something we should try to get rid of. It is literally one of the ways human beings have always made sense of their mind. As long as it's used ethically and with the patients well being in focus, it's one way to access aspects of the experience that cold, clinical language can never really help out with. The excesses of castle wood and other treatment facilities like it basically just show the danger of taking the metaphors too literally and too far. But the remedy for the misuse of this stuff shouldn't be a zero tolerance policy for metaphor. I think it's just better training and much more wisdom in the therapists using these modalities. So in my opinion, a nuanced deconstruction of this article reveals three things. Number one, castle wood was an outlier case where IFS intersected with reckless therapy practices. It is evidence of what can go wrong, not what must go wrong in any case where IFS is used. The second point being the article very rightly flags IFS's unchecked expansion and commercialization because those things are real problems. A therapy movement can become a fad and fad's slash cults can do real harm. So I think this article is a chance for IFS practitioners and proponents of this modality. It's time to take this critique to heart and start to support much more research and quality control instead of just basking in vibes and hype. The third point though is that the metaphysical compromises of Richard Schwartz, the creator of IFS, oscillating conveniently between spiritual concepts and scientific aspirations have essentially left IFS as a modality, straddling two worlds, and drawing fire from both of those worlds. And I don't think this means that the idea is lack a merit completely, but it does mean IFS needs to really quickly clarify its identity. Is it a paradigmatic shift in understanding of the mind or is it just a toolkit that needs to be tested and validated? It could be both, but again, I think IFS needs to have a self-guided identity crisis and resolution right now. And I think finally, most importantly though, is that historically and across cultures, this idea of an inner multiplicity that you are made up of many different parts isn't crazy and it's also not new. And by recognizing this, we can remove some of the stigma that the word parts seems to provoke in all these hardened skeptics. If Freud, Jung, or Plato could speak across time, they would probably say, "Yeah, of course the psyche has parts. We give them different names, but we observed the same phenomenon." So I think this perspective really tempers this notion that IFS is some kind of alien pseudoscience and we can view it instead as just a modern iteration of the same old wisdom, one that should be evaluated on its therapeutic outcomes instead of just dismissed as meaningless mysticism. And now that we've covered all of these points, it's time for us now to zoom way out and look at the larger question behind all of this. What is this fight over IFS revealing about the way we understand the human mind? At its core, this clash over IFS as a modality is really a clash of cosmologies, these fundamental worldviews about what the mind is. The dominant view in modern psychiatry for the past 40 years might be called the machine model or the medical model. But either way, in this view, the mind is essentially the brain, an organ that can malfunction like any other organ. So through this view, mental illnesses are biological disorders characterized by chemical imbalances, faulty circuitry, or genetic errors. The role of the clinician in this view is like a technician or pharmacist, identify malfunction, diagnose based on symptoms, and apply a fix, medication or manualized therapy technique, or some direct modulation. It's a worldview that gained ascendancy in the 1980s with the rise of neuroscience and the publication of DSM-3, which intentionally stripped away psychoanalytic notions of meaning and replaced them with checklists, suffering in this new machine model is not to be interpreted in any way, just categorize it and eliminate it. As one analysis put it, after DSM-3, quote, "human suffering was sorted into categories, each with a matching pharmaceutical solution," end quote. And from here, psychiatry rebranded itself as the "high priests of neurochemistry," end quote in white lab coats. Messy human stories were replaced by tidy diagnoses and numbered scales. Therapy sessions shrank to 15-minute medication checks, listening was devalued as inefficient. So in this cosmology, because it is a religious cosmology, if you really unpack it philosophically, an approach like IFS, which invites imaginative dialogue with aspects of self, seems at best this quaint relic of the past, but at worst it's a dangerous distraction. Because if you truly believe the psyche is reducible to dopamine and serotonin tweaks, then talking to a firefighter part protecting an exile is basically delusional to you, a little like trying to converse with the puppets in your brain when you should be fixing the strings on the puppets. The machine model prizes objectivity, measurability, and standardization. It's responsible for advances like psychopharmacology and some efficient short-term therapies, but it has incredibly notable and glaring blind spots. It struggles deeply with problems of meaning, subjective inner life, and any phenomenon that can't be quantified in a brain scan or some kind of rating scale. So opposing this medicalized machine model of the human psyche and human suffering at large, opposing this is what we might call the inner world cosmology. This view doesn't reject biology outright, but it does see the mind as an experiential reality that can't ever be fully captured or pinned down by physical parameters. The inner world model treats thoughts, feelings, and even imaginative constructs as real forces in a person's life. It is the world view of depth psychology, humanistic theory, and many, many ancient spiritual traditions. Here the mind is more like a rich ecosystem or a story instead of a machine. Symptoms aren't glitches or signs that something is wrong with you or things to be completely eliminated. There are signs and signals that you need to listen to, messages from the psyche that are indicating some internal conflict unmet need or imbalance of some kind that you can address and bring your conscious awareness to. So healing in this view often will require exploration, insight, and integration of the personality instead of mere symptom suppression. IFS squarely belongs in this camp. It posits an internal family of parts that relate to each other. It uses imagery and narrative and exile carrying the burden of trauma, a manager to keep order, etc. to make sense of psychological pain. This approach is also inherently ideographic, which means that it is about the individual's unique inner characters and story as opposed to more one-size-fits-all rules. It requires time and introspection and a certain suspension of disbelief to engage with one's own psyche in this way. From the inner world perspective, the machine models emphasis on quick fixes and uniform one-size-fits-all protocols appears dehumanizing and shallow. Critics from this side would point out that yes, you can numb someone's depression with medication, but if the cause of their despair was say a spiritual crisis or deeply buried grief, then you haven't really healed or helped them at all. You've just muted the signs from their body. And as we all can see, the limitations of this medical machine model of the human psyche have become increasingly evident. Despite more prescriptions and more quote evidence-based manual therapies than ever before, rates of mental illness and disability have not really improved much in decades. Thomas Insell, former NIMH director, famously admitted that the huge investment in neuroscience yielded, quote, "little impact on patients," and quote, "people weren't getting much better or dying by suicide any less." There is a sense of a paradigm stall in mainstream psychiatry. Biologically, the low-hanging fruit was already plucked, SSRIs, anti-psychotics and the like, and what remains the complex disorders, the chronic cases actually require grappling with mind-level complexities that pills alone haven't been able to solve. And so with this context, we can understand the rise and popularity of IFS and similar approaches like EMDR, somatic therapies, and others like it. We can really understand this more. They represent a very real grass roots pushback against the machine cosmology. A revival of the idea that to heal the mind, we must deal with the mind and not just the brain. The field of psychiatry completely reframed human suffering as a chemical imbalance to be corrected. Treatment was no longer focusing around the person's story, but simply a matter of adjusting their chemistry. So it's understandable that the reaction to this has been that many therapists and patients are deeply seeking to bring the story and the psyche and the inner world back into the therapy room. IFS brings story in the form of parts and narratives and roles. Each part has a perspective, the angry protector, the terrified child, the self-critical judge. This can resonate really deeply with people, and it's in a way that a DSM label never can and never will. A person will likely forget their exact list of DSM symptom criteria, but they probably won't soon forget meeting their inner eight-year-old exiled self and realizing that that part of them somehow still feels unloved. That is a really emotionally salient insight, and it's exactly this kind of insight that can catalyze change in how someone relates to themselves. And if you've had this kind of experience through any kind of inner work, you know what I mean. The fight over IFS's credibility is in a way a fight over whether this kind of metaphorical, narrative-based, messy exploration is considered valid therapy or is dismissed as nonsense. If psychiatry insists on owning the psyche, defining it only in its terms, then anything that smells of the metaphysical is going to be cast out by them. Historically, we've seen this many times before. As biological psychiatry rose, it discredited psychoanalysis as unscientific, sometimes fairly, because psychoanalysis does have its excesses, but I think it was also done pretty spitefully so that psychiatry could erase its biggest competitors. Psychiatry also marginalized talk therapy and exalted medication management, because the latter was much more profitable and totally fit with the medical identity. And so the result is what we see now, and that is meaning and context were completely drained from clinical practice. A development even many psychiatrists now openly regret. And so what we ended up with was 10-minute appointments and polypharmacy, but often no better understanding of why a person was suffering in the first place. So in this light, IFS's emergence can be seen as a part of this corrective force or movement trying to re-incorporate meaning, relationship, and the inner world back into healing. It's not the only movement. There is also the pure support movement, trauma-informed care, psychedelic assisted therapy, and many others, but all of them share this common thread of challenging this purely reductionist view. None of this means that we should just accept IFS uncritically. Imagination can heal, but it can also deceive us. We know that it can generate false memories if we don't handle it carefully. It can also lead to a really dangerously insular focus on our own inner theatre at the expense of dealing with our real external reality. There's also a risk of over-spiritualizing psychological issues, because not every problem is a profound soul drama. Sometimes panic attacks maybe can respond really well to a beta blocker and some CBT. So a more balanced stance is needed here. IFS should not become a cult of its own, where it starts to become impervious to criticism or evidence, so I think Richard Schwartz has a serious opportunity here. Some of the hype needs to be reigned in. Proponents of IFS would do very well to support and conduct very serious research, because it feels like Richard Schwartz spent the early decades of promoting this model mainly focused on teaching and spreading the word instead of research. So I think empirical humility is pretty important here if IFS wants to survive a long term. And also if it wants to survive, it's going to need to show results in controlled settings, and also more clearly define who it's for, and also more importantly when it might be not the best idea. But at the same time, mainstream psychiatry needs to confront its own ideological humility. They need to suck it up and admit the fact that not everything that matters can be measured in a fucking lab. There is a place for metaphysical inquiry in understanding the mind. It just is that way. And by metaphysical, I don't mean supernatural, but questions of essence, meaning and first person experience that don't reduce neatly to physical explanations. The psyche really lives at that intersection where the biological meets the experiential. And if we blanketly banish all language that isn't strictly material, we will lose sight of the very phenomenon we're trying to heal in the first place. In the 19th century, the term "soul" was commonly used in what we now call psychology. That term became unfashionable as science advanced, but it's starting to feel like we threw out the baby with the bathwater. There are aspects of human existence, yearnings, synchronicities, values, a sense of self that just can't be captured by discussing neurotransmitters. Those aspects often sound metaphysical because historically they were the province of religion or philosophy. And I think IFS's language of self and parts was an attempt to talk about them rationally. It might not be the final or best framework, but at least it was making an attempt to grapple with the full dimensionality of human mental life. It essentially says we have an observable strategic mind, our managers, an emotional wounded heart, our exiles, and then a reactive fighter flight set of behaviors, which are our firefighters. And then finally, we also have this underlying, deeper consciousness capable of healing. And that is the self, the big "s" self. Is this really more fanciful than saying depression is a serotonin dip, or OCD is excess chaudate nucleus activity? Those two are models, and arguably simplifications at that. In real truth, the brain and mind likely operate on multiple levels of organization. Mechanistic and narrative descriptions aren't mutually exclusive. They are actually complementary to one another. A future enlightened psychiatry could potentially actually try to integrate them. In other words, understanding that subjective experience of inner parts corresponds to certain neural network dynamics, or that engaging a patient's self has measurable calming effects on the limbic system. These bridges are actually beginning to be built. So that's the hope-pilled section of this episode. For instance, some neuroscience of dissociative identity disorder finds different brain states corresponding to different selves. So we should remain open-minded that imagination and science can inform each other and return to playing with one another again. So I think we should address the elephant that's sitting in the room with us right now, and that is outcomes. Does IFS actually work? The honest answer is that we don't know yet in a definitive way, really. anecdotally, many therapists report that it helps get clients in touch with emotions and resolve their inner conflicts. A few small studies have shown reductions in PTSD symptoms, but without larger trials, it's possible that IFS is no more effective than any decent therapy that provides a framework for self-reflection. Critics argue that any benefits from IFS are due to very common factors like empathy, feeling understood, etc., or borrowing techniques from standard therapy. They also worry that IFS could be harmful to people who are already more prone to psychosis or really severe dissociation by encouraging them to treat voices or identities as real. Those concerns are very legitimate, and they should absolutely be tested empirically. My stance, though, is that imaginative techniques are very powerful, and power, as we all know, can heal or it can harm. Guided imagery helped many, many people to quit smoking or manage pain, and that is positive use of imagination. But the same suggestibility can also create false beliefs and negative use, right? Kof Kof, our own government doing these things, Kof Kof MK Ultra, or the case of the satanic panic. So the answer isn't to discard imagination as a tool, but we need to use it in the right way with ethical safeguards. If a client starts believing their IFS visualizations are literal, external entities, then a skilled therapist needs to reality check and ground them. And if a patient is really fragile, IFS probably is not the best approach to use first, or it needs to be used in a very modified way, maybe focusing on stabilization and not diving into deep exile work until they are passed kind of the crisis phase of their recovery path. One would really think and hope that these would be nuances that any mature therapeutic modality would address over time. CBT, for example, had to evolve to acknowledge that it's not right for everyone and to include mindfulness for those who don't respond to purely cognitive techniques. And so I think in a similar way, IFS can evolve, and even these harsh criticisms could and should be a catalyst for that evolution if it's taken up in good faith. So like I said, I think it would be really cool to see Richard Schwartz take this feedback and do something with it. But overall, I hope that you can see by now that what this is actually about is that we have two competing cosmologies about the psyche clashing in the discourse. The machine model insists that metaphors like IFS's parts are inherently unscientific and so therefore don't have any value. And the inner world model insists that those metaphors are keys to deeper healing that the machine model has overlooked. So I think the truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle, in an integration of both of these views. We are not going to solve mental suffering by swinging to either extreme. We need the precision of science and the wisdom of the numinous and metaphysical language. The ideological hypocrisy I'm trying to call out here in this episode is that one side, the establishment or psychiatry or the medical model, seems to claim sole ownership of what counts as truth, even as its own track record is so far from pristine. It labels the other side, IFS and similar approaches as ignorant, dangerous or regressive without recognizing that it is basically projecting its own blind spots. So this controversy around IFS is so much more than a controversy about therapy. This is truly this flashpoint in a much larger conversation about how we are going to understand the mind in the 21st century. We're really out of threshold. Will we continue to see it as a computer in need of little software tweaks and patches? Or are we going to remember that it is also a storyteller and a meaning maker and maybe even something transcendent that requires a richer and more numinous vocabulary to approach it? In the quiet after the storm of all the tweets or posts on X, I still can't get used to that, the many think pieces that will surely flow after this initial article in the cut. I think it's essential that we ground ourselves back in that fundamental question. Who owns the psyche? The answer is one we all know. No one. The psyche, our inner life, is not the proprietary territory of psychiatrists or psychologists or any single school of thought. It is an ever evolving and mysterious frontier. It is as much poetry as it is biology. And so to approach the psyche means you need to have both rigor and openness. In this recent take down of IFS in this article and the gleeful chorus that followed attempted to draw this hard boundary to declare that the only legitimate way to speak about the mind is in the language that they define or in the language of science as they define science. But this incident has shown why this stance is completely untenable. Metaphysical language is not a regression to pre-scientific superstition even though that's the argument that's being made. It's actually an acknowledgement of those aspects of mind that science has not been able to illuminate. So far from being the enemy of progress, it could actually be the inspiration for progress. Today's metaphors could become tomorrow's research questions. And what matters now is how responsibly we use them and if we even use them at all. And I hope you can see by now that we've made the case clear. The critics of IFS had a point. But a lot of them also veered into dogma. I wanted to hold a mirror up to the establishment in this episode. A house with cracked beams and a deeply rotting foundation should probably think twice before mocking the architecture of a neighbor. We should not replace one dogma with another. IFS isn't a panesia. It is one lens among many, many other lenses. But the freedom to explore multiple lenses is essential for the growth of human understanding. If the language of parts and self helps some people heal, it deserves to be examined with genuine curiosity and not just dismissed. But if conversely it somehow fails or causes real harm in certain contexts, that needs to be faced very honestly by practitioners and proponents of IFS. No treatment modality is infallible and I don't think that should be the expectation. But we should expect integrity on both sides. But we can walk away knowing one thing for sure. And that is that the human psyche just can't be fully captured by the metaphors of machines alone. But it also can't be fully healed by the metrics of efficacy alone. There is a space in between those things where subjective experience lives. And that is a space that speaks in images, narratives, and yeah, sometimes in the language of inner parts or spirits. And so rather as calling this some kind of backward step, we could also choose to see it as the next boundary that we need to cross or the next threshold we need to cross. And that's the threshold between what's measurable and what is felt. And I think the next breakthroughs in mental health will likely be found there. By those willing to embrace complexity and ambiguity and blend the empirical with the luminous and experiential. And all of this controversy over IFS can be instructive for us. It could be a reminder that ownership of the psyche is ultimately a shared thing. The psychiatrist, the shaman, the neuroscientist, the patient on their healing journey. They are all stakeholders in that ownership of the psyche. No single perspective has a monopoly on truth. Science absolutely remains our greatest tool for weeding out error. But imagination is an equally important tool for discovering possibilities science needs to test out. If we completely shut down or shut out the luminous, imaginative, metaphysical inquiry into the mind, we will end up with a technically advanced but completely soul-starved practice that helps neither the practitioner or the patient in the long run. And frankly, that I believe is what is causing this awakening that's happening right now. And the flood of people that want to approach and learn about things like IFS. Because they believe that this mechanistic model of the mind has gone too far. So it is a pendulum swing. And pendulums can always swing too far in one direction and become dogmatic when unexamined. So maybe ultimately the psyche owns itself. And our job is to learn its language in all of its amazingly diverse dialects, instead of just forcing it exclusively into our language. And so in the wake of all of these gleeful takedowns of IFS and all of the outrage and all of the sub-articles subside, what I hope can stay with all of us is a perennial truth, this quiet certainty. Speaking about the mind and rich, metaphorical terms is not a betrayal of science. It's a continuation of the human project to understand ourselves. I think that there is room for both neurons and the nomeness. Evidence can coexist with the ineffable. And it should. So with this more expansive and nuanced view, I'm hoping that one day the champions of parts and the champions of precision will find that they were exploring the same truth from just opposite polarities. And maybe they will meet finally in the messy middle where hopefully for all of us a fuller understanding of the psyche awaits. All right, my lovely listener, that is it for today. Thank you for staying with me. When this article dropped, I watched the reactions flood in in real time. There were hot takes everywhere, so much dunking, so many victory laps from people who in my opinion should know better. And all I could see was missing nuance and an inability or refusal to ask harder questions and instead just swathing away anything that sounds imaginal or inconvenient. And those of you who are long-term listeners, you know my lane. I have questioned IFS before in multiple episodes. I've also covered it more positively before earlier in my journey in multiple multi-part episodes. So one can't make an argument that I'm doing this as some kind of way to try to protect IFS from critique. And you also know that I have questioned the biomedical model of mental health for years now. I'm really, really interested in the contours of where those worlds meet, cross and clash. It is a niche interest of mine. People often try to pin me to one side or the other, but I don't live on either side. I just try to see the field as it actually behaves instead of how any particular camp wants it to look. But I can't tell you one thing. Watching licensed professionals, especially psychoanalysts and psychiatrists pile on this piece really raised eyebrows for me. Because the tone is just smug. It's not just critical. Lots of confirmation bias. A lot of we told you so with very little amounts of self auditing. All of these people are experts in the mind supposedly, but missing their own shadow work. So it's sort of the irony, writes itself kind of thing. There's a lot to learn there about power, identity, and professional pride. I know many people who have benefited from IFS, and some of you listening might count yourselves among them, or even might be a practitioner of this modality yourself. For me, the model has always felt a little bit sanitized a lot, sanitized. I'm wired much more Jungian myself. I speak fluently in archetypes, and I definitely prefer a metaphysical bent to my healing pathway. And I like to hold room for the presence of the numinus. That's just my taste. And it has helped me a lot more than talk therapy or medication ever did. And I did try those paths. And sometimes the relief did happen, but it was brief and not integrative. And I experienced a lot of side effects. Not to mention the debilitating process of weaning off the various drugs I was put on. So that being said, some people really resonate with IFS and get real traction. And I respect that. Different keys open different doors. That's a phrase for a reason. But I can imagine IFS being way too intense for somebody in a fragile spiritual or psychological state, especially in residential programs for teenagers with eating disorders. Those kids need food, sleep, and grounding, and inner safety. And they need nervous systems that can actually settle and stable daily rhythms before diving into any kind of deep inner work. This kind of really intense inner excavation of the psyche usually is something that happens only later in life for most people. That's why people that want to be Jungian analysts, it's recommended that you don't even do that until you're in your mid 30s. You need a certain amount of ego strength and life context and grounding to be able to engage in this kind of stuff. I'm not saying you need to wait until you're in your 30s to do inner work, but I think we can all agree that children, this is just too much for children, period, much less a child in a severe crisis to the point where they're showing up at an eating disorder recovery clinic. Words like essence and parts and spirits can terrify a teenager whose inner world is already developing and really wobbly. Kids need grounding and so if you bring in the imaginal like this with people that are too young, it needs to be very gentle and grounding. Part of me hopes that Richard Schwartz could hear this episode and also maybe has read many of the critiques I have no doubt that his inbox is bursting today. But I hope he can treat this moment as a hinge point and choose better partners and start to really identify what crosses the line for him and draw that line in public. And Dick, if your work is truly metaphysical and spirit, own that and protect it. If you want to wear a lab coat, meet that bar without walking around it. This double life confuses clinicians and leaves patients exposed to harm. For listeners who read Richard Schwartz's books or got help from this parts framework, I don't think you should let a headline tell you what you experienced. Helpful concepts don't just go away because one journalist wrote one take down piece. But I'm not discounting harm stories either, right? Patterns at certain clinics like the ones exposed in this article are a big deal and that's why journalists are so important. That information belongs in the room in the public square. But at the same time, we shouldn't erase the centuries old insight that humans feel and act in parts. It's in Plato and Jung and folk and indigenous practices across culture and millennia. Adults with solid footing can work with those ideas responsibly and find real interchange. But minors in crisis and in-patients fighting for medical stability need a different approach. I don't think this should be that complicated. But I hope that for you, my lovely listener, that this episode could give you the tools to look at moments like this without getting swept up into team sports type behavior. I want better questions to travel through the algorithm of our feeds and less smug dunks from professionals who should be modeling intellectual honesty. I hope that more people will feel permitted to say, hey, medication got me through a really tough season. But also, parts work really helped me meet the eight-year-old version of myself and somehow through that inner exploration, I'm no longer addicted to porn anymore, for example, or I no longer find myself pushing people away and finally found connection and intimacy in my life. And they will say, but before any of that, I needed food and rest. All three of those things can be true. And so if you found this episode useful or helpful or validating, I would love it if you are a new listener, if you could follow the show on your podcast app that you are listening to right now so that you will never miss a new episode each time I drop one. And speaking of dropping, if you could drop a quick rating or short review on whatever platform you're listening on, it would really help me a lot more than you think. And if someone came to mind while you were listening to this, please share it with them. Word of mouth is exactly how my podcast grows. There's a lot of content out there and so the fact that you chose to sit here with me for an hour and a half listening to my creation means a lot. And so that's it for now. But until then, remember, anyone, even you, can come back from the borderline. I'll see you next time. If you're still here listening, you still have time to support what I'm doing. This is a one-woman show and things like ads, pay walled episodes, and Patreon are how I keep it going. So if this episode meant anything to you, please consider doing one small thing. Follow the podcast on whatever app you're listening to, rate or review it, or visit backfromtheborderline.com to join my Patreon and unlock hundreds of hours of bonus content. Even a few seconds of support like this helps independent creators like me keep going.