For a while now, a series of questionable 1990s-era trauma therapies have regained credibility in mainstream culture. Promoted by celebrities in the wellness space and by social-media therapists who lean more influencer than mental-health professional, “The whole repressed and recovered memory stuff,” as the Harvard psychology professor Richard McNally puts it, is "a revenant that keeps popping out of the grave.” One such treatment is called Internal Family Systems, and it has been endorsed by Gwyneth Paltrow, Elizabeth Gilbert, and pop psychologists such as Bessel van der Kolk, the author of The Body Keeps the Score. IFS is premised on the notion that "each individual has multiple selves,” known as parts. This isn’t a metaphor. A part is a literal personality with its own identity, age, feelings, and even body.
The problem, as features writer Rachel Corbett reports, is that the last thing someone needs when they're dealing with complex PTSD, disordered eating, or psychosis — many of the very people IFS practitioners are taught to treat — is to be further separated from themselves. In the wrong hands, the potential of IFS for injury is higher, as Rachel learns from former patients at a clinic that applied the practice and has since been shut down. “In the span of a second, someone could switch ages, genders, even species,” Rachel writes. “Another ex-patient described how a transformation might come on: A person would ‘start totwist their body, like some weird exorcism thing, scrunch their face,' andsay in a girlish voice, ‘Hi, I'm willow tree.’”
—Erik Maza, editor-at-large, New York
