ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how using the Internal Family Systems model in consultation with clinicians treating clients with eating disorders helps the therapist develop a sense of competence in understanding and working with clients’ inner systems. Case vignettes describe the challenges in consulting with clinicians with varied professional backgrounds, experience with eating disorders, and knowledge of and proficiency with IFS. The author shows how consultation benefits clinicians whose grasp of IFS remains largely intellectual or whose fearful, caretaking, or frustrated parts interfere with treatment. The author illustrates working with parts of the clinician and herself that get activated by each other, the client, the family system, and/or larger culture. This models how IFS deepens the clinician’s learning about their own and their client’s systems. The chapter concludes with cases where clinicians experience deep satisfaction from observing the transformation that results when they successfully work with their own parts to avoid the power struggles common to typical approaches to eating disorder treatment.
