Inside the Revolutionary Treatment That Could Change Psychotherapy Forever, IFS therapy is upending the thinking around schizophrenia, depression, OCD, and more
“Eventually, Schwartz did come up with names for the most common roles he saw parts taking on in their relationships with each other. Parts that he called protectors used a vast array of coping strategies, sometimes very extreme ones, to manage the emotional pain of deeply buried parts that Schwartz called exiles. Exiles were often very young and lived in a nightmarish limbo, interpreting even minor adult pain through the lens of the childhood memories they were trapped in. Because they were so vulnerable, exiles were hard to access. You had to go through protectors to get to them, and protectors could be tough customers…”
Read the full article at the link here, an overview of Internal Family Systems written for the general reader.