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\n Illustration: Joan Wong; Source Photo Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
Bobby Lerz put his 16-year-old daughter on a plane in New York so she could check into an eating-disorder clinic in Missouri. As a little girl, Elizabeth was \u201cvivacious, gregarious, everybody\u2019s best friend,\u201d he tells me. But she struggled as a teenager. She was cutting classes, and Bobby observed her engaging in what seemed to be restrictive behaviors around food, sometimes using meals as bargaining chips: I\u2019ll eat this if I get that.<\/p>\n
One day, Elizabeth brought home a brochure from the Castlewood Treatment Center. It looked like a luxury retreat: a modernist residential facility perched in the bluffs overlooking the Meramec River outside St. Louis. She begged to go, Bobby says, and, in 2011, he and her mother agreed. \u201cWhen your daughter tells you she might have an eating disorder, your heart stops and you say, \u2018Okay, anything it takes to get you fixed,\u2019\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Several weeks in, strange things started happening. Elizabeth called to tell him that she had enjoyed bartending at his tavern. Bobby, who once worked as a chef for Howard Stern and owned a bar upstate, told her that had never happened. He wouldn\u2019t let a teenager bartend, nor would his clientele. \u201cIt was a cop bar,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI could tell that I was on speakerphone, and I felt like I was in a therapeutic session,\u201d he says. \u201cI heard snickering and girls in the background.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not long after that, Bobby says, Elizabeth sent her stepsister \u2014 the daughter of Irene, whom Bobby had married in 2002\u00a0 \u2014 an unsettling text, asking if Bobby had ever touched her inappropriately. When Bobby heard about it, he confronted Elizabeth: Why was she asking these awful questions? She\u2019d just had a bad dream, he recalls her telling him. That, he adds, was \u201cthe last thing she ever said to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next time Bobby saw his daughter was at a New York State Child Protective Services office. Four months after she\u2019d gone into treatment in 2011, the agency, along with the Schenectady County Department of Social Services, launched an investigation into allegations Elizabeth had made against her father while at Castlewood. She claimed he had been raping her since she was 4 and alleged, in explicit detail, that numerous other men \u2014 including his friends, his bar\u2019s patrons, and local police officers \u2014 had joined in the abuse.<\/p>\n
At the hearing, Bobby had trouble recognizing her. Once an accomplished cross-country runner, she was now chain-smoking. And when she took the stand, Bobby watched in horror as she appeared to act out different characters. One was called \u201cmanager\u201d and another one \u201cfirefighter,\u201d he says. She\u2019d clench her fists and puff out her chest \u2014 that was \u201c\u2018protec-tor!\u2019\u201d Irene recalls, imitating the persona\u2019s low, booming voice. \u201cIt rings in my head how she would say that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter she testified \u2014 and it was the most glaringly sexual, disgusting, deviant testimony you ever heard \u2014 she gets up and she pirouettes like a ballerina out of the courtroom,\u201d Bobby says. \u201cIt was heartbreaking.\u201d Bobby denied the allegations then and still does. \u201cI was investigated by everybody \u2014 state troopers, Child Protective Services, my local police,\u201d he adds. They probed Irene, too, who was at risk of losing custody of her own daughter, who is about the same age as Elizabeth. In the end, Bobby says he was told by investigators, \u201c\u2018there is nothing here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2012, a judge ruled Elizabeth\u2019s account \u201cincredible.\u201d Bobby was told that her claims were inconsistent and her evidence contradicted itself. \u201cThe timelines weren\u2019t there. There was no corroboration. She had made up names,\u201d he says. After $45,000 in legal fees, there was at least a measure of vindication when the allegations were expunged from his record. But his relationship with his daughter was irreparably damaged. Despite the judge\u2019s finding, Elizabeth, which is not her real name, maintains her allegations against her father; her mother supports her version of events. Bobby, now a 61-year-old security guard, remains baffled at how his daughter, in just four months, turned into a stranger.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have spent 14 years just theorizing,\u201d Bobby says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy Choose Castlewood Treatment Center?\u201d read the brochure Elizabeth brought home. Beside its intimate ten-bed residential facility and the beautiful landscape, Castlewood, the pamphlet emphasized, had expertise in Internal Family Systems, a therapy centered on \u201cthe idea that each individual has multiple selves,\u201d known as parts. In IFS, a part isn\u2019t a metaphor. It\u2019s a literal personality with its own identity, age, feelings, even body. Traditionally, \u201ca person with separate autonomous personalities is viewed as sick or damaged\u201d and might be diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, according to Richard C. Schwartz, who conceived of the therapy in the 1980s and brought it to Castlewood in the early aughts. \u201cWhat are called alters in those people are the same as what I call parts in IFS, and they exist in all of us.\u201d To him, that\u2019s a good thing: By singling out parts, locating them in our bodies, and engaging them in conversation, IFS is said to relieve even the most severely traumatized people of their emotional burdens.<\/p>\n
In recent years, the practice has exploded in social media. TikTok is flooded with millions of videos mentioning IFS, including those of people role-playing and analyzing their parts, and more than 45,000 mental-health practitioners in the Psychology Today database offer it as a treatment. Schwartz\u2019s educational center, the IFS Institute, will have trained 15,000 therapists in the method by the end of this year, and another 5,000 are on a waiting list.<\/p>\n
Celebrities have helped spread the word: Gwyneth Paltrow has praised IFS on her Goop podcast, and the writer Elizabeth Gilbert credited it with healing a toxic friendship. IFS \u201coffers each of us nothing less than the cultivation of kindness, wisdom, and empowerment,\u201d writes Alanis Morissette in the introduction to Schwartz\u2019s 2021 book, No Bad Parts.<\/p>\n
The scientific community takes a much less enthusiastic view of the practice. A growing number of psychiatrists and psychologists \u2014 who, at the doctoral level, study the brain and mind, unlike counselors and family therapists \u2014 are emerging with urgent warnings about the therapy, casting IFS as a simplistic allegory at best and, at the worst, a dangerous pseudoscience. While some patients find relief through IFS, critics argue that\u2019s likely owing to the way it shifts responsibility for one\u2019s actions onto another persona or the fact that it recycles aspects of traditional talk therapy that are, in fact, helpful. \u201cI\u2019m aware of how trendy it has become,\u201d says Lynn Bufka, the head of practice at the American Psychological Association. There may be \u201celements of this intervention that are pretty standard and cut across what might be good psychotherapy, but the way it\u2019s packaged or described? Those ideas don\u2019t have a scientific basis.\u201d<\/p>\n
For patients with vulnerabilities like complex PTSD, disordered eating, or psychosis \u2014 many of the very people IFS practitioners are taught to treat \u2014 the therapy could destabilize already fragile mental states. An \u201cunstable sense of self,\u201d for example, is a defining feature of borderline personality disorder, a condition that commonly occurs alongside anorexia and bulimia. Last year, Lisa Brownstone, a University of Denver psychologist and eating-disorder specialist, co-wrote a report that raised questions about the risks of IFS. Brownstone had become alarmed after multiple patients appeared \u201cdisorganized and confused by treatments they had received from other providers that were IFS or IFS-informed,\u201d she says. \u201cThe process of splitting apart and having them speak from different perspectives within themselves can start to make it even less clear what their reality is.\u201d<\/p>\n
Former Castlewood patients told me they had witnessed women crawling around like babies or lying in fetal positions. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t uncommon to see people shaking on the floor,\u201d says Kimberly MacDonald. Another used to run in circles screaming. In the span of a second, someone could switch ages, genders, even species. Another ex-patient described how a transformation might come on: A person would \u201cstart to twist their body, like some weird exorcism thing, scrunch their face,\u201d and say in a girlish voice, \u201cHi, I\u2019m willow tree.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over time, traumas that patients would divulge early in their stays snowballed to gruesome extremes. Some say they gathered in group sessions to listen to stories of parents pimping out their daughters to entire neighborhoods, a grandmother molesting a child in a bathtub, a child forced into a meat locker with dead animals, someone who claimed to recover memories of sexual abuse as an infant. \u201cIt was almost like people wanted to one up each other,\u201d says Maria Frisch, who was the research director of the center in 2011. \u201cReally horrific things absolutely do happen. But do they only happen to people who went to Castlewood?\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2011, Lisa Nasseff was the first of four former Castlewood patients to sue the center and its co-founder and co-director, the psychologist Mark Schwartz. (No relation to Richard Schwartz.) She claimed that he took advantage of her malnourished, medicated, and emotionally distressed state to make her believe that she\u2019d been repeatedly raped and was once part of a satanic cult and that he convinced her \u201cto become increasingly isolated from her family and friends\u201d by implicating them in the crimes she alleged. Then came lawsuits from Leslie Thompson, who said she recovered false memories of rape and participating in a cult that ate babies; Colette Travers, who claimed that therapists conjured memories of sexual abuse at the hands of family members and classmates; and Brooke Taylor, who said that she, too, was led to falsely accuse relatives of sexual abuse.<\/p>\n
By then, Mark Schwartz had sold a stake in Castlewood to the private-equity firm Trinity Hunt Partners. In 2017, another private-equity firm, Riverside Co., took it over and renamed it Alsana. Last year, Alsana shut down its Missouri center for good but continues to operate four facilities in California and one in Alabama that have faced complaints similar to Castlewood\u2019s.
The State of Missouri censured Mark Schwartz\u2019s license, and he agreed not to seek its renewal. After the lawsuits were settled, he moved to California, where he continues to treat patients with IFS at a facility in Monterey called Harmony Place. Richard Schwartz has never publicly addressed the scandal at Castlewood. Earlier this year, he spoke at an Alsana-sponsored conference on \u201cthe power of Internal Family Systems in treating eating disorders.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat just breaks my heart that he\u2019s a celebrity,\u201d says one former patient, referring to Richard Schwartz. \u201cThere is no evidence IFS works. It\u2019s a sham, and it\u2019s dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n
When I meet Richard Schwartz over Zoom, he is sitting in front of an art print that reads \u201cIt\u2019s Never Too Late to Come Home to Your Self.\u201d It\u2019s September, and he is in the middle of a busy fall schedule planning his annual IFS conference, where 1,000 tickets are on sale for three days of workshops. A stiff 76-year-old with a white goatee and black-frame glasses, he explains his life\u2019s work with the dryness of a tax accountant itemizing deductions.<\/p>\n
The origins of IFS can be traced back to Schwartz\u2019s childhood. His father was a prominent endocrinologist in Chicago who expected Richard, the eldest of six boys, to follow suit. While three of his brothers went on to become physicians, Schwartz didn\u2019t have the grades for medical school. \u201cI\u2019m convinced that the model wouldn\u2019t exist if he had been a nicer father,\u201d Schwartz says of IFS. \u201cI was determined to prove that I was valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n
After earning a Ph.D. in marriage and family therapy from Purdue University in 1980, Schwartz got a job at the University of Illinois Chicago\u2019s training program in family systems, a popular model that advocated treating families as single emotional units. Unlike psychologists, family therapists \u201cdidn\u2019t pay much attention to the mind at all,\u201d Schwartz writes in No Bad Parts. \u201cWe thought the therapists who mucked around in that inner world were wasting their time, because we could change all that simply by changing external relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Schwartz listened to his patients, many of them juveniles struggling with eating disorders, PTSD, and multiple personalities, he noticed how often they spoke about themselves in terms of their parts. Some parts were self-critics, others were repressed inner children. Schwartz came to call our most painful parts \u201cexiles\u201d who are kept at bay by \u201cprotectors,\u201d another category that includes sub-personalities such as the perfectionist \u201cmanagers\u201d and impulsive \u201cfirefighters.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt sounded like parts had these alliances with each other against other parts,\u201d Schwartz tells me. \u201cIt sounded like an inner family.\u201d It occurred to him that he could simply apply family systems theory to treat an individual mind by helping the various parts listen and talk to one another. \u201cI was able to just overlay a lot of that way of working onto these inner systems, and it\u2019s held up really well,\u201d Schwartz says.<\/p>\n
He soon ran into problems. Some patients were getting worse. \u201cThese inner systems are quite delicate, especially in the kinds of people I was working with back then, and I made mistakes in the early days that really hurt my clients,\u201d he says. He recalled trying to browbeat one woman\u2019s self-harming part to stop cutting her wrists, only for her to show up the next day with a gash on her face. Schwartz shares this anecdote often to convey the profound lesson it taught him: A therapist must not try to dominate a patient\u2019s \u201cbad\u201d parts but instead welcome them into the room as the \u201csacred, spiritual beings\u201d they actually are.<\/p>\n
While a traditional therapist might describe these parts as feelings or behaviors, Schwartz\u2019s revelation \u2014 to treat parts with kindness and curiosity rather than judgment \u2014 has been a foundational therapeutic principle for over a century. In fact, many of IFS\u2019 central ideas aren\u2019t new. Freud identified the mind\u2019s parts as the id, ego, and superego in 1923; Jung had his archetypes and shadow selves. In the 1930s, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein developed object-relations theory to describe how infants turn caregivers into internal objects that shape their future relationships. Healthy early relationships create an integrated self, while unhealthy ones can lead a person into \u201csplitting\u201d\u2014a tendency to divide people into one-dimensional categories of either all good or all bad.<\/p>\n
Schwartz\u2019s colleagues in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois Chicago predicted many of the issues his critics are observing today. When he first presented his model to a group of residents, physicians, and medical students in the 1980s, \u201cpeople stood up and said I was dangerous. I was fragmenting people. They tried to get me fired,\u201d he tells me. \u201cIt was quite humiliating, and I gave up on trying to break into that field and decided to go grassroots.\u201d<\/p>\n
Schwartz saw himself as a disrupter of the academic Establishment that shunned him. He started writing books and training clinicians independently and, in 2000, he founded the Center for Self-Leadership (later renamed the IFS Institute) in Oak Park, Illinois. \u201cInitially, we would take people who weren\u2019t licensed therapists, so we would take coaches in the trainings or teachers or massage people,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
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\n Richard Schwartz in a video introduction to Internal Family Systems.
\n Photo: Internal Family Systems\/YouTube\n <\/p>\n
Then, in 2015, \u201csomething happened; there was a shift,\u201d Schwartz says. IFS took off in part because the animated movie Inside Out \u201chelped with the popularity of the model. It normalized the multiplicity phenomenon for the culture,\u201d he says. At the time, other 1990s-era trauma therapies were also regaining favor, including EMDR, somatic experiencing, and \u201cthe whole repressed and recovered memory stuff,\u201d says Richard McNally, the clinical training director at Harvard\u2019s psychology department who has debunked those theories. \u201cIt\u2019s a revenant that keeps popping out of the grave.\u201d<\/p>\n
Schwartz\u2019s friend Bessel van der Kolk, once a leading proponent of recovered-memory therapy who was pushed out of Harvard in the 1990s, made a comeback in 2014 with his mega best seller The Body Keeps the Score, which suggests that we physically store memories of trauma we can\u2019t consciously access; it includes a chapter on IFS. Van der Kolk and a host of other influencer-therapists \u2014 including Gabor Mat\u00e9, a family physician who has been criticized for styling himself as an expert on psychiatric disorders, and Thomas H\u00fcbl, whose Ph.D. is from Ubiquity, a California university that\u2019s unaccredited in the U.S. \u2014 legitimized Schwartz\u2019s budding practice with flattering endorsements. Celebrity acolytes joined the chorus, too. \u201cThe whole parts thing is really ferosh,\u201d Queer Eye\u2019s Jonathan Van Ness wrote in his memoir.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis popularity thing is really hard for me to get used to because I spent probably 30 years in relative obscurity feeling like, Why don\u2019t people get this?\u201d Schwartz tells me. \u201cIt\u2019s in some ways a dream come true, and in some ways it brings a lot more complications, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of Richard Schwartz\u2019s early trainees was Castlewood\u2019s Mark Schwartz, who learned the method and then became an assistant instructor. In the early aughts, Mark hired Richard as a consultant to treat Castlewood patients and train staff. Over the next decade at Castlewood, Richard and Mark emphasized \u201cthe importance of working with the eating disordered part of self that encapsulates the trauma of the past.\u201d In promotional materials, Richard was described as \u201cintegral to Castlewood,\u201d and Richard in turn praised the facility: \u201cUnlike so many treatment centers, Castlewood helps clients heal the pain that underlies their eating disorders rather than just manage the symptoms,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI wish I could send them all my traumatized clients, not just those with eating disorders.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mark and his wife, Lori Galperin, came up as therapists through the Masters and Johnson Institute, a proponent in the 1970s of conversion therapy. By the early 1990s, the couple with matching blond bobs were dubbed \u201cthe Sonny and Cher of trauma<\/a>\u201d by Vanity Fair for shifting their attention from marital woes to sexual abuse, \u201ca growing, controversial, potentially profitable field.\u201d Mark led yearly workshops at van der Kolk\u2019s trauma conference at Harvard and, in 1999, he and Lori founded the Castlewood Treatment Center in Ballwin, Missouri.<\/p>\n Their background made sense for Castlewood if you believed, as they did, that an astounding one-in-three young girls are sexually abused and that the substantial majority of women with eating disorders are among them. The consensus in the medical community today is that eating disorders are no more linked to sexual abuse than they are other types of trauma or to unrelated genetic and environmental factors, according to Jennifer Thomas, co-director of the Eating Disorders Clinical and Research Program at Mass General. But Mark and Lori argued that nearly every patient they saw at Masters and Johnson could be treated for sexual trauma. \u201cOften,\u201d St. Louis magazine reported in 1998, their \u201cclients end up accusing their relatives of sexual abuse.\u201d<\/p>\n Mark, who describes himself as a rebel and admits his approach to therapy is provocative, is more open than many psychologists to unproven modalities. When he first attended one of Richard\u2019s IFS workshops in Chicago in the early aughts, \u201cI immediately realized that what he was doing was very different than anything I\u2019d seen before,\u201d he tells me. IFS \u201cturbocharges your process,\u201d and that\u2019s significant at a time when \u201cinsurance companies have forced us to find ways to get to this deeper work faster.\u201d<\/p>\n IFS has also allowed him to be more creative. \u201cAs a psychologist, you emphasize that you\u2019re a scientist and what you do is empirically determined. If a person says they\u2019re suicidal, there\u2019s four or five ways you handle that, so you become kind of a technician,\u201d he says. With IFS, \u201cyou can allow yourself to be a healer and really join with the client.\u201d<\/p>\n Former patients describe Richard as a quiet, low-key presence at Castlewood whose IFS sessions often felt forced and uncomfortable but were sometimes insightful. Mark, on the other hand, was impossible to miss. He decorated his office with phallic African sculptures and, according to several former patients, constantly inserted sexual innuendos into conversation. One says Mark often asked leading questions, pressed for details, and \u201cseemed to very much enjoy hearing the sexual-abuse stories.\u201d Frisch, the former research director, recalls how \u201cMark would sit with me and talk about the type of research that he was into and he would say things like, \u2018This research is just multi-orgasmic, isn\u2019t it? I just want to fuck it.\u2019\u201d One former patient testified in her lawsuit against Castlewood that Mark Schwartz instructed the members of her group therapy to masturbate, journal about their fantasies, and bring them back to the group to share. (Mark denied the allegation in court papers.)<\/p>\n One of the first tasks for new patients at Castlewood was to write long narratives about their lives, including any instances of trauma or abuse, and read it aloud to their peers during group sessions. Many found the exercise excruciating. \u201cNot only do you have to share and expose all of these things about yourself, but you\u2019re also hearing everyone else\u2019s very significant trauma, which is derailing in a lot of ways. It\u2019s very triggering,\u201d says MacDonald, the former patient. She was also troubled by the degree to which she says therapists defined experiences for her, as in \u201cthat was abusive, or you\u2019re being codependent,\u201d in ways that felt inaccurate. \u201cPeople who are in a vulnerable and fragile place are not necessarily going to question that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe talked a lot about repressed sexual-abuse memories, which I hadn\u2019t personally raised,\u201d says another patient, Julia Williams, referring to Mark. Patients were encouraged \u201cto do deep dives into these distinct inner identities and have them write letters to your abuser or your boss.\u201d Another former client at Castlewood says she observed the effects of IFS in real time during group sessions. A therapist might ask, \u201c\u2018If you have a part named Jane, does this part Jane have a favorite food? Does this part have a favorite color? Does this part talk differently?\u2019 They would almost suggest things, and all someone would have to do is be like, \u2018Oh yeah, maybe she talks like this,\u2019 and in creating this person in their head, they believed it themselves, too,\u201d the former patient recalls.<\/p>\n The therapists were so convinced that everyone had multiple personalities, the former patient claims, \u201cthat they were just finding them. But there were people who eventually, even while they were there, said, \u2018You know, I can\u2019t keep track of the names of my parts anymore \u2026 This is too hard to pretend.\u2019\u201d Cristy McMahon, whom Mark and Lori treated at another facility, says she created a PowerPoint documenting all her parts.<\/p>\n \u201cThe healthier I got, I started to feel like, Did I lie? Am I a liar?\u201d McMahon says. \u201cThat\u2019s the part that makes people trapped. It feels shameful to think you lied. So I just kept it quiet.\u201d In treatment, she came to falsely believe that her mother wanted to kill her, and she exaggerated stories of legitimate abuse by her father. \u201cIt was really hard to tell the truth anyway about a horrible circumstance, so to then realize you\u2019ve spoken words of untruth \u2014 you\u2019d rather just go silent and never talk to anyone than to say, \u2018Oh, I made a mistake,\u2019 and I think that that\u2019s where people get stuck. They can\u2019t undo the damage.\u201d<\/p>\n Like McMahon, some patients concluded that the memories of abuse were false and recanted their accusations. For others, the parts, and the memories stored within them, became all too real. \u201cIt\u2019s not hard to get you to close your eyes and be who they want you to be and say what they want you to say,\u201d once said Amy Fedor, another former patient who realized years later that she had falsely accused her father of abuse and didn\u2019t realize her mistake until after he died. \u201cThey made me sicker. That whole place destroyed my life.\u201d<\/p>\n Frisch, who worked at Castlewood in 2011 and is now a behavioral scientist in Minnesota, says she was let go when she started challenging the treatment protocol. (Mark denies this.) \u201cIt was not at all empirically based, they were keeping people based on the length of their insurance, and they were really stuck on this idea that at least half of their clients had multiple personalities,\u201d Frisch says. Her title was research director, but, she says, \u201cthere wasn\u2019t a desire for research so much as there was letting people know how great the program was.\u201d<\/p>\n In the years since, Frisch has concluded that the issues at Castlewood weren\u2019t just the result of possible bad actors but of IFS itself. \u201cIt is highly unethical and should not be practiced in the treatment of any recognized mental-health disorder \u2014 it\u2019s not appropriate for eating disorders and not appropriate as a primary mode of treatment,\u201d she says. \u201cPart of the process of recovering from an eating disorder is to separate yourself from the disorder, but not like that. I imagine that the kids who were in treatment when I was there just have this loss as adults. They lived through their eating disorders, but at what cost?\u201d<\/p>\n Of Richard Schwartz, Frisch claims, \u201cDick really wanted some recognition for his approach, and he knew fully what was going on. But he never said anything.\u201d In court documents, Mark Schwartz testified that he and Richard never disagreed on any aspects of the care at Castlewood. After leaving the center, Richard sent an email instructing IFS trainers that memories of abuse can be fallible, but he denies that his method played a part in the breakdown of patients there. \u201cThere is a risk of clients coming up with false memories with any trauma therapy that focuses on healing past wounds. The key is to not assume any memories are necessarily accurate without corroboration. That is what I taught then and teach now,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Most of Castlewood\u2019s methods, starting with its use of IFS and the focus on trauma, contradict the prevailing playbook for treating eating disorders. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of all psychiatric disorders, and the standard treatment focuses on stabilizing patients via family-based therapy, nutritional interventions, and diet-focused sessions, according to the American Psychiatric Association. Dredging up harrowing memories can overwhelm already fragile psyches and may lead to self-harm, substance abuse, or other unhealthy coping behaviors.<\/p>\n To meet the standard of the evidence-based therapies guide from the Academy for Eating Disorders, a treatment would need to have more than one randomized controlled trial showing it was more effective than an alternative treatment. \u201cAnother reason for doing randomized control trials is that there\u2019s an obligation to systematically track any harms that might happen,\u201d says Thomas, the Harvard psychologist and eating-disorder specialist. To date, no such trials have been done on IFS as a treatment for any psychiatric disorder. (The strongest evidence supporting its usefulness, according to Richard Schwartz, is a 2013 study he co-wrote showing that a group of rheumatoid-arthritis patients reported improved joint pain, self-compassion, and depressive symptoms.)<\/p>\n \u201cIf someone needs to learn how to eat, this is not the time for them to talk to their child self,\u201d says Brownstone. \u201cThere are some providers out there who just love treating trauma. They find it fascinating. But your interest in trauma should not be the driving force of your therapy right now. Your client needs stabilization.\u201d<\/p>\n