Moulton Avery Discusses Facets of IFS and Dick Schwartz

"IFS is a theory of mind that was invented, developed, and promoted by one man: Richard Schwartz. It’s an idea, an allegorical construct that claims to represent the way that the mind actually works. However, there is no empirical evidence whatsoever to support that claim."

As psychedelic therapy becomes mainstream, we can anticipate a lot of companies and individuals jumping on the bandwagon to provide it. One reason is because it holds such great promise; another is because there’s a lot of money to be made. Although the 2023 Portland, Oregon street price for a “therapeutic dose” of psilocybin (the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”) is roughly $7-$9, the first facility officially approved by the State of Oregon to dispense psilocybin therapy is charging $3,500 for one therapeutic session. This price doesn’t even include the “cost of the medication”.

Although a well-defined protocol exists for formal psychedelic research in a university setting, the optimal structure for a psychedelic therapy session remains largely undefined. This leaves a lot of room for a system of therapy like IFS (Internal Family Systems) — or its practitioners — to promote its own particular brand for use in psychedelic therapy.

I think it’s prudent to be very wary of using a “system” like IFS as a framework for developing an individual’s “Set” both in advance of and following a psychedelic experience. This is particularly true for anyone taking psychedelics for therapeutic reasons.

If this is unfamiliar terrain to you, let’s begin by defining two terms which are commonly used to describe the foundation of a psychedelic experience or “trip”: Set and Setting.

“Set” is the mindset that one brings to the psychedelic experience.

“Settting” refers to the physical environment in which the trip takes place. In formal, university-based psychedelic research, setting includes ingesting a therapeutic dose of psilocybin, reclining on a couch while wearing eyeshades and listening to specific music played through headphones, as well as the provision of a safe environment in which two non-tripping guides watch over the person tripping. Guidelines that might influence the experience are minimal, and what you won’t find in any of these research settings is a concerted attempt to impose a therapeutic framework like IFS on the experience. The same holds true for trip guidance provided by “non-professional” guides, many of whom have decades of experience.

Deliberately seeking to influence Set by imposing a highly structured mental framework could also be considered unethical due to the psychological vulnerability to suggestion of the person tripping. IFS is far more than just a suggestion — it claims to provide a very detailed, highly-structured, insightful, safety-conscious, and helpful framework for both preparation and integration. In other words, it specifically seeks to influence and frame both the nature of the experience and any purported lessons learned from the experience.

To Be Clear: IFS is a theory of mind that was invented, developed, and promoted by one man: Richard Schwartz. It’s an idea, an allegorical construct that claims to represent the way that the mind actually works. However, there is no empirical evidence whatsoever to support that claim.

Particularly where psychedelic therapy is concerned, there is good reason to be very careful about embracing something like IFS and having it heavily influence both the mindset that you bring to a psychedelic experience as well as the way that you make sense of or “integrate” that very powerful experience after the fact. This is particularly true with respect to any “memories” that are supposedly unearthed as part of the psychedelic trip — a time during which a person is exceptionally vulnerable to prior suggestions that can dramatically influence the experience.

One non-psychedelic cautionary example of IFS in practice is related by a woman who sought treatment for an eating disorder at a facility called Castlewood (which changed its name to Alsana following some well-publicized lawsuits that accused the facility, among other things, of promoting the development of false memories — also know as repressed memories).

The charge of implanting false memories is an extremely serious one for anyone in the therapeutic community. For an excellent account of the discredited technique and the horrific damage that it’s caused, read the book Mistakes Were Made(but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. Also The Myth of Repressed Memory by Dr. Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham.

Recovered Memory Therapy was the technique that produced a flood of lurid (and entirely false) accounts of the satanic ritual abuse of children, incest, and related sexual abuse in the 1980s and 1990s. Research McMartin Preschool for more information — it was the “index case” that started a despicable nationwide trend of charging pre-school teachers with satanic sexual abuse.

Richard McNally, the director of clinical training in the Department of Psychology at Harvard and author of the book Remembering Trauma, put it bluntly in a friend-of-court brief: “The notion that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered is the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry.”

Although Richard Schwartz didn’t directly work at Castlewood, he reportedly spent a year and a half training their staff in the IFS method and was prominently listed as a clinical consultant on a 2010 brochure. In other words, it was his IFS therapeutic model that was used at Castlewood — where patients were strongly encouraged to recover memories of abuse. You can read that account and a lot more here and draw your own conclusions. I personally found the psychological parallels to cult indoctrination chilling.

It is, of course, an individual choice as to whether or not a person wants to embrace a particular framework that will influence their Set — both before and after a psychedelic journey.

What I’m arguing is that this isn’t a trivial decision, and that it should be approached cautiously and with eyes wide open. The fact that someone like Richard Schwartz has written a book, and has a bunch of YouTube videos and thousands of “Likes” or “Followers” is no reason to suspend critical thinking and blindly embrace his unproven ideas, particularly for their use in psychedelic therapy. My suggestion with respect to IFS or any similarly promoted therapeutic concept is that you do your homework before making such a monumental decision.

-Moulton Avery

See original article here:

https://medium.com/@MoultonAvery/ifs-for-self-inquiry-in-psychedelic-preparation-and-integration-c8cf58efde5c