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Intimacy from the Inside Out: Courage and Compassion in Couple Therapy, published by Routledge in 2016, illustrates Toni Herbine-Blank’s IFS-informed approach to couple therapy.
Couples in distress enter therapy holding two goals that they now experience as mutually exclusive: to feel loved and to feel understood. Toni Herbine-Blank’s powerful new brand of couple therapy, Intimacy from the Inside Out (IFIO), offers a comprehensive conceptual map for achieving both goals. In a tour de force of elegant case illustrations wrapped around clear instruction, this book shows the IFIO therapist working with the natural subdivisions – or parts – of the human mind in a dyad, guiding and supporting couples to understand how they project childhood injury into current relationships and then, feeling threatened, frustrated and angry, lose track of their underlying needs to feel safe, connected and loved. With a focus on generating internal attachment stability to sustain each partner through the moments when the other is unavailable, couples in IFIO therapy reconnect with their essential needs, change their conversations and learn to make requests that invite rather than threaten in order to get those needs met.
Toni Herbine-Blank is a a master couple therapist who trains and supervises couple therapists in IFIO and offers workshops for couples. She is also a lead IFS trainer for the Center for Self-Leadership.
REVIEWS
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
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.
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.