Therapy is Not a Science

Could it be that we’ve gone too far in stripping the spirit and soul out of therapy and have created a new altar of empirical science at which to worship?

Courtesy of EMDR Australia: This picture of Jamie from the 2024 Conference is what calls her “reluctant academic” posture.

Last week, several of my friends texted me to see if I’d read the “takedown” article of Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy on The Cut, via New York magazine: “The Truth About IFS, the Therapy That Can Break You.”

For context, I’ve historically been a critic of IFS and many of the things said by IFS founder Dr. Richard Schwartz and his senior teachers. In my own 2023 book on dissociation and parts, I point out some of these irresponsible statements and criticize IFS as being overly simplistic in working with dissociative disorders. I’ve also written a piece exploring whether or not cultish dynamics exist around the IFS community. Although Schwartz and I did an interview together in 2024 that was friendly, he later criticized me rather unfairly in another interview.

With all of that being said, I still found the recent piece in The Cut to be sloppy, unfair, and biased towards Western, academic definitions of science and inquiry.

Let’s get some of the obvious problems with the article out of the way, starting with the title. First, any approach to psychotherapy, even something as vanilla as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can “break you” if it is (a) not the appropriate fit of intervention at the appropriate time for a particular therapy participant, and (b) if the therapist delivering the intervention is not skillful with knowing how to use it or how to adapt it for the specific person they are serving. The treatment center written about in that piece seemed to lack that skill.

Secondly, the story kicked off with the testimony of a father who believes that he was falsely accused of perpetrating sexual harm against his daughter after she received IFS in a facility that treated eating disorders. Had the story led with the lived experience of a person who was willing to go public about their horrible experiences with IFS, then it may have had more credibility. The fact that the narrative centered on an alleged perpetrator made the whole piece reek of the “false memory” diatribes that trauma deniers have gone on and on about for years. My own friend Anna Holtzman writes expertly about this phenomenon in her piece Harvey Weinstein’s “False Memory” Defense and Its Shocking Origin Story if you want to read more of this history.

The point of greatest concern to me in this article, as well as in another expose-style piece of IFS that was published earlier this year in The Nation, was the pearl-clutching tone around scientific credibility and the opinion of the “scientific community” about IFS. As stated about IFS in The Cut:

The scientific community takes a much less enthusiastic view of the practice. A growing number of psychiatrists and psychologists — who, at the doctoral level, study the brain and mind, unlike counselors and family therapists — 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’s likely owing to the way it shifts responsibility for one’s actions onto another persona or the fact that it recycles aspects of traditional talk therapy that are, in fact, helpful. “I’m aware of how trendy it has become,” says Lynn Bufka, the head of practice at the American Psychological Association. There may be “elements of this intervention that are pretty standard and cut across what might be good psychotherapy, but the way it’s packaged or described? Those ideas don’t have a scientific basis.”

There are so many problems with this paragraph, yet the elitism is problematically bold. I am a licensed professional clinical counselor (LPCC) licensed to practice at the Masters level, and I went on to get a Ph.D. in human services. I train clinicians in another trauma modality who are counselors and family therapists (who get unnecessarily slammed in this piece) in addition to psychologists and psychiatrists. I’ve long believed that a good clinician is a good clinician regardless of their licensure and training. To suggest that psychologists and psychologists somehow have the market cornered on knowing and doing good therapy because their training is different, or perceived to be of higher quality, is dangerous. In my experience as a clinical educator, I am often more skeptical of psychologists and psychiatrists because they run a higher risk of being out of touch with the feedback and lived experience of the people that they serve due to their allegiances to the academic establishment and the precepts of the medical model.

Citing the American Psychological Association (APA) as a source of credibility here should also give us pause. This is the organization that put an interim stop on enforcing diversity, equity, and inclusion standards in the areas of recruiting, admitting, and selecting diverse students and faculty in their accredited programs as of March 13, 2025. I am a long-time continuing education provider (CESA) through the APA, having paid them thousands of dollars over the years in more fees than you can imagine to be able to offer continuing education for psychologists in my own programs. I was horrified, when earlier this year, I opened an email to providers cautioning us to take “illegal DEI” out of our programs. I’ve continued to battle them in recent years over their criticizing my programs for telling the full story about Indigenous origins of Western therapy practices, and their not considering lived experience voices to have the same power as often out-of-touch, peer-reviewed articles and academic practices.

My problems with the APA and the academic establishments it represents is my essential problem with the tone of The Cut’s article. How can you hold any therapy to purely “scientific” standards when therapy itself is not solely a hard, empirical science? The pervading knowledge in the field is that therapy is both an art and a science. For many of us, while science can be useful in informing some knowledge points, such as what’s happening in the brain when certain symptoms show up, therapy is a pure art form. And for those of us who see therapy as an art, the voice of the people and their experiences matters. Such direct voices shared in the public forum about a therapy like IFS can be pejoratively labeled as “trendy” by academics. Perhaps this criticism is simply resentment that university-sponsored research can never fully capture the entire picture with only empirical science as their frame of inquiry. The clinicians who come to me as students wouldn’t be seeking out training the more “trendy” forms of therapy if they believed and experienced that what they learned in graduate school was working in their real-world settings.

I am a qualitative thinker who is in touch with the parts and aspects of my experience. From a research perspective, I was trained as a phenomenologist, and one of the hallmarks of phenomenology is that the human experience cannot be quantified. I know that my field has tried to quantify it to make us more credible to the medical/scientific establishment. Yet when we do this, we take the soul and the art out of psychotherapy. We strip the voice of the people we serve out of therapy. Moreover, in my experience as a clinical trainer, people who lack the artistic capacity to modify and to respond to the unique needs of each therapy participant in favor of “this is what the protocol says,” or “this is what the research says” actually do more harm.

As I’ve stated in other pieces, I find it very important to disclose that in a MAHA-riddled country, I am not opposed to empirical science (e.g., the science that can be quantified and measured) and what it can teach us, especially in biological medicine. However, we do the mind, soul, and human consciousness a disservice when we try to fit into such a box. Also consider that if we trace the word origin of the English word science, it simply means “knowledge.” As a therapist, my therapy participants and lived experience have been my greatest sources of knowledge. I trust them, and people like Dr. Schwartz who (despite his faults) actually listened to his clients instead of the academic establishment, more than I do standard bearers and gatekeepers in organizations like the APA.

To regard psychology as an empirical science as defined by the Western academic establishment is not only elitist, it is racist. It fails to consider what Eastern psychological practices as captured in the spiritual traditions of India, and Indigenous practices from around the globe have taught us about the human condition. My long-time assessment of IFS is that it very much parallels what yoga philosophy teaches us about the Self and how connecting to the true nature of our Self helps us heal suffering. Admittedly, I’ve criticized Schwartz and IFS for co-opting Eastern spiritual philosophy as their own, and I do have some of the same concerns about the business empire around IFS as noted in The Cut article.

Yet I am writing this piece as a trauma educator in general support of the IFS movement, despite my criticisms of it. The popularity of IFS has normalized the notion in our therapy spaces that we all contain multitudes in terms of parts and aspects of our experience. As someone in long-term recovery from trauma-based dissociation who teaches that dissociation is not a dirty word and that we all have parts that are waiting to be seen, I thank IFS for amplifying this truth that the academic-scientific establishment has long ignored.

To hold Western science up as the paragon of wellness is a problem that I hope we, as a therapeutic community, will continue to discuss. I hope that the author of the piece in The Cut can see this folly. I know that calling therapy a “science” makes it feel more credible and comes with an illusory veil of safety. Calling it a science seems to remove it from the dangers of religions and its superstitions. Could it be that we’ve gone too far in stripping the spirit and soul out of therapy and have created a new altar of empirical science at which to worship? Remember that the true definition of science acknowledges multiple streams of knowledge and inquiry, and that empirical science reduces you to just being a body and a brain. A more artistic, globally-inclusive view of therapy appreciates that we are so much more than that.