Healing the Inner Child: Unburdening Exiles
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
The Internal Family Systems (IFS) model was developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, Ph.D., over the past 30 years as he learned to set aside his trained assumptions and truly listen to his clients. It is a highly efficient and effective way of guiding clients to a state of inner clarity and compassion, the Self, from which they know how to heal themselves. From the Self, clients are able to calm and transform their troubling inner voices, the critical and anxious chatter, the compulsive distractions, their feelings of vulnerability, inadequacy, and overwhelm. These parts of the psyche are surprisingly responsive and resilient when addressed with respect and patience. They readily forsake their inner battles and take on valuable inner roles once they are accepted and witnessed.
This application of family systems principles and techniques to inner systems is now widely used internationally in the treatment of trauma and severe diagnoses, as well as in non-clinical applications such as business consulting and meditation practice.
Personal burdens are carried by exiles who usually want the Self to witness their traumatic experience and help them rescript it. The healing and reorienting of our “inner families” in an environment of genuine acceptance, translates into concrete behavioral change, plus improved ability to relate well to people. 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’ Self.
This workshop will introduce the basic principles and techniques of IFS and illustrate them with experiential exercises and video illustrations. The workshop will be very practical so that participants will walk away with new perspectives and methods for even their most difficult clients.
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.