Interesting article.

I've just read an interesting article about a therapist working with clients with borderline personality disorder.
I really enjoyed it so just putting it out there for anyone interested

Depathologizing The Borderline Client By Richard Schwartz ? Healing Trauma Center


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This is the article about IFS for BunYip. My T and I used to do IFS all the time but she didn't name the different kinds of parts. She also didn't talk to them but she often asked me to "ask that part what she wants", for example. I got a lot out of IFS and I liked the way we isolated the parts.

this seems similar to schema therapy

Thanks for sharing the article!

Here's another describing Internal Family Systems work
https://www.psychotherapynetworker.o...family-systems

IFS is the best success I have had in therapy so far. When I started doing this parts work, I thought it was kind of crazy-making. Didn't take long to see the results of parts becoming unburdened and so I was hooked. Good stuff. Thanks for posting the article!

I agree! My T seemed to think SE was better for me, but we still talk about my parts a lot. I used to think it was weird too!

My T and I talked about my child part an awful lot. At first I found it embarrassing, awkward and just plain weird. (Mainly because of what my young child needed & quite often demanded from T) but when I got used to it and realised my child self needed things it was great and where most of the hard work happened.

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I find the part below a bit disturbing. The language is quite paternalistic. Clients are described collectively like impulsive and nasty children.

"At times, they’ve formed a childlike dependence on me, wanting—and sometimes demanding—not only my continual personal reassurance, but also my help in making even small decisions, like whether to get a driver’s license. Some have had tantrums when I’ve left town. Others have wanted regular contact between sessions and asked to know in detail how I felt about them and what my personal life was like. They’ve continually tried to stretch my boundaries by demanding special treatment—such as free sessions and extra time on the phone to talk about every detail of their lives—or violating my privacy by finding out where I live and dropping by unannounced. When I’ve set limits on my availability by telling them when or if they could call me at home, some have responded by implying or stating outright that they might cut or kill themselves."

I'm sure it's not easy to interact, in this context, with people who have history of severe abuse or trauma. But I get the sense that many clinicians do not see that they are driving these behavioral extremes. I get the sense that they are so accustomed to the therapy dynamic that they can't discern its impact anymore. They truly believe that the client is acting out in largely in a vacuum or something.

Example: he says "they've formed" dependence, rather than saying dependence arose naturally from the structure of the therapy relationship, and due to innate attachment needs.

I wonder is there really strong evidence that subjecting people to this experience leads to benefit more often than not?

I also found that paragraph unpleasant but I think its early on in the article and reflects the way he thought of these interactions BEFORE coming to the understanding that he later reached. Therefore it is an illustration of how and why the therapist who does not properly understand the inner life of one of these patients is liable to react in a negative and exasperated way...

But this is not the IFS way. If you read on further into the article, Schwartz admits that his perspective on borderline clients back then was nothing short of wrong. My take on that disturbing paragraph (and a couple others) was to point out the error of his ways as an example to help other therapists that do think this disturbing way to get a clue.

AllHeart/thesnowqueen: I hear you, it's the before part of the before/after of the article. i couldn't help commenting because it seems to reflect prevailing attitudes among therapists, about clients in general not just BPD or some other subset, though admittedly this is a tangent. Also, even after he had his epiphany or change of heart, one wonders what vestiges of this tendency to objectify and pathologize remain and can the client ever escape it...