Intimacy from the Inside Out: Courage and Compassion in 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.

About the Author

Toni Herbine-Blank, MS, RN, Cs-P , is a senior trainer for the Center for Self-Leadership and the sole developer of Intimacy from the Inside Out (IFIO). She runs trainings, retreats and workshops on both methods nationally and internationally and has a private psychotherapy practice in Durango, Colorado. For more information: toniherbineblank.com.

Donna M. Kerpelman, JD, MS , has been immersed in IFS for more than ten years as a student, teacher and therapist. She has organized and facilitated several IFIO retreats for couples in addition to assisting in IFIO trainings for couple therapists. She also brings her knowledge of IFS and relationships to the legal world where she represents children with lead poisoning.

Martha Sweezy, PhD, has a therapy and consultation practice in Northampton, Massachusetts. She is a clinical supervisor at Cambridge Health Alliance, a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, an occasional helper at IFS trainings, and co-leads workshops on the topic of shame. She is author of several articles on IFS and co-editor, with Ellen Ziskind, of two volumes on IFS: Innovations and Elaborations on Internal Family Systems Therap y and Internal Family Systems Therapy: New Dimensions . For more information: http://marthasweezy.com