Intimacy from the Inside Out: Courage and Compassion in Couple Therapy

Take a journey with Toni Herbine-Blank and her co-authors into couple therapy from the perspective of Internal Family Systems therapy. Follow the detailed illustrations of a master IFS clinician as she helps couples move from content to process and discover new ways to be incisive and positive in your response to interlocking defenses. Make your therapy more revealing, compassionate and collaborative with her way of doing intrapsychic work in the presence of the partner. And, especially important, learn to accept the inevitable countertransference challenges that arise when you work with your toughest couples. Ellyn Bader, PhD, founder/director of The Couples Institute.

Toni Herbine-Blank brilliantly expands the IFS model by adapting it to couples therapy. With detailed, moving case illustrations she and her co-authors lead the reader step by step through the actual process of parts work done inside a relationship. Protectors relax, exiles unburden. The relationship itself unburdens. Both a practical guide and a comprehensive conceptual map, readable, clear, and compelling, Intimacy From The Inside Out will be a classic. Terrence Real, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marriage

From the foreword:

This book takes a topic of immense complexity-how the two internal systems of a couple collide with each other to produce the rigid patterns that drive them toward dissolution-and in simple, clear language makes it understandable. Along the way, it offers time-tested techniques for helping each partner drop their weapons, focus inside and speak to each other from a different place-the Self. When couples are able to do this, each partner invariably develops new insight and also discovers that speaking from the Self on behalf of (rather than from) both protective and vulnerable parts produces an entirely different response from the partner. Richard C. Schwartz, PhD, LMFT, is a lecturer on psychology at Harvard Medical School, a licensed marriage and family therapist, fellow of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, and creator of the Internal Family Systems model.