I am puzzled by the new direction the leadership of the IFS institute has taken. The great liberating and healing paradigms through the ages have been open source and shareable by all people. Today leading healers develop their work in the institutions of higher education. This makes their research a public resource that all can use and build on. Their concepts and methods become part of the open knowledge commons of humanity available in the US and globally.

The IFS Institute’s approach seems quite the inverse. It seeks to function as a for-profit private business, accountable only to generating monetary revenues for its owners and employees. Ironically, after years of Dick Schwartz challenging the “mono-mind” paradigm, the IFS Institute is now mandating that its students receive conventional mono-mind psychotherapy training. At the same time, it refuses to become part of the mainstream academic knowledge base.

Over the past years I’ve experienced the energy flowing from numerous IFS workshops and training events. I watched the so-called IFS “town hall” meeting which was held in name only on March 12, 2024. None of the participants were seen, there was no basic recognition elementary to the western tradition of mutual respect between those on the town hall lectern and those who became the invisible captive audience. The meeting was an iron-clad top-down corporate information dissemination session serving to let IFS practitioners and the IFS-informed realize that they are not seen, not respected, and not engaged.

From this meeting to judge, IFS now stands for an exclusive and elitist business that pedals diversity by having the right faces and CVs in the appropriate offices. Engaging the international community distills down to protecting the IFS trademark in all countries. Lacking the legitimacy of a peer-review process, the IFS Institute seeks to control who is permitted and recognized to use the methods developed by Dick Schwartz over the past four decades. Bottom line seems to have prevailed over connectedness, compassion, and healing.