Internal Family Systems (IFS) & Compassion
This class can be attended live or via the on-demand recordings. All class times are posted in Eastern Time / New York time zone.
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These Master Classes are offered exclusively for Embody Lab Members.
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ABOUT THIS MASTER CLASS
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a gentle, yet powerful, healing delivery system that releases the therapist from the need to be clever because it trusts and empowers the clients’ Compassionate Self. In addition to fostering a generalized sense of self compassion, IFS helps people have compassion for all parts of them—even the parts that screw up their lives or stand in the way of giving and receiving love fully. In that sense, IFS is radical self-compassion!
By learning about the Internal Family Systems model of psychotherapy, participants can gain skills that make self-exploration engaging and deeply satisfying. The qualities of SELF will be identified: curiosity, compassion, confidence, courage, clarity, creativity, connectedness, calmness. Participants will learn how to help clients notice from where in their body their inner critics seem to be broadcasting and understand the process that facilitates a compassionate relationship between their parts.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
Review the history and development of the Internal Family Systems model of therapy.
Explore and discuss the basic assumptions of IFS in regard to non-pathological multiplicity of mind and the concept of “SELF”.
Review and have a general knowledge of the 3 categories of sub-personalities that most often present in therapy: Manager parts, Firefighter parts, Exiled parts.
Discuss and identify the qualities of SELF: curiosity, compassion, confidence, courage, clarity, creativity, connectedness, calmness.
Learn how to help clients notice their inner critics and develop a Curious and Compassionate relationship with those parts.
ABOUT YOUR TEACHER
Richard C. Schwartz, Ph.D.
Developer of Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Dr. Richard Schwartz began his career as a family therapist and an academic at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There he discovered that family therapy alone did not achieve full symptom relief and in asking patients why, he learned that they were plagued by what they called “parts.” These patients became his teachers as they described how their parts formed networks of inner relationship that resembled the families he had been working with. He also found that as they focused on and, thereby, separated from their parts, they would shift into a state characterized by qualities like curiosity, calm, confidence and compassion. He called that inner essence the Self and was amazed to find it even in severely diagnosed and traumatized patients. From these explorations the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model was born in the early 1980s.
In 2013 Schwartz left the Chicago area and now lives in Brookline, MA where he is on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.