Recommended Reading

Introduction to Internal Family Systems

  • Richard Schwartz began his career as a systemic family therapist and an academic, at the University of Illinois and at Northwestern University. Grounded in systems thinking, Dr. Schwartz developed the Internal Family Systems model (IFS) in response to clients’ descriptions of various parts within themselves. In 2000, he founded the Center for Self Leadership (www.selfleadership.org), which offers three levels of trainings and workshops in IFS for professionals and the general public, both in this country and abroad. A featured speaker for national professional organizations, Dr. Schwartz has published five books and over fifty articles about IFS.

Book Cover Greater than the Sum of Our Parts

Greater than the Sum of our Parts

  • Richard Schwartz began his career as a systemic family therapist and an academic, at the University of Illinois and at Northwestern University. Grounded in systems thinking, Dr. Schwartz developed the Internal Family Systems model (IFS) in response to clients’ descriptions of various parts within themselves. In 2000, he founded the Center for Self Leadership (www.selfleadership.org), which offers three levels of trainings and workshops in IFS for professionals and the general public, both in this country and abroad. A featured speaker for national professional organizations, Dr. Schwartz has published five books and over fifty articles about IFS.

Transcending Trauma

  • Frank Anderson, MD, completed his residency and was a clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is both a psychiatrist and psychotherapist who specializes in the treatment of trauma and dissociation. He is passionate about teaching brain-based psychotherapy and integrating current neuroscience knowledge with the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of therapy.

Book Cover Our Polyvagal World

Our Polyvagal World

  • Since Stephen Porges first proposed the Polyvagal Theory in 1994, its basic idea—that the level of safety we feel impacts our health and happiness—has radically shifted how researchers and clinicians approach trauma interventions and therapeutic interactions. Yet despite its wide acceptance, most of the writing on the topic has been obscured behind clinical texts and scientific jargon.


Book Cover Coping with Trauma Related Dissociation

Coping with Trauma Related Dissociation

  • This training manual for patients who have a trauma-related dissociative disorder includes short educational pieces, homework sheets, and exercises that address ways in which dissociation interferes with essential emotional and life skills, and support inner communication and collaboration with dissociative parts of the personality. Topics include understanding dissociation and PTSD, using inner reflection, emotion regulation, coping with dissociative problems related to triggers and traumatic memories, resolving sleep problems related to dissociation, coping with relational difficulties, and help with many other difficulties with daily life.

Book Cover A Shift to Love: Zen Stories and Lessons by Alex Mill

A Shift to Love: Zen Stories and Lessons

  • Alex Mill trained in a Zen monastery for 14 years and has been offering his extensive experience to transform people’s lives and businesses through mindfulness, meditation, and compassionate self-mentoring practices for over two decades.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

  • A celebrated speaker and bestselling author, DR. GABOR MATÉ is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics, such as addiction, stress, and childhood development.

Chasing the Scream

  • What if everything you think you know about addiction is wrong? Johann Hari’s journey into the heart of the war on drugs led him to ask this question - and to write the book that gave rise to his viral TED talk, viewed more than 62 million times, and inspired the feature film The United States vs. Billie Holiday and the documentary series The Fix.

    One of Johann Hari’s earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of his relatives and not being able to. As he grew older, he realized he had addiction in his family. Confused, not knowing what to do, he set out and traveled over 30,000 miles over three years to discover what really causes addiction - and what really solves it.

The Pastoral Clinic

  • The Pastoral Clinic takes us on a penetrating journey into an iconic Western landscape—northern New Mexico’s Española Valley, home to the highest rate of heroin addiction and fatal overdoses in the United States. In a luminous narrative, Angela Garcia chronicles the lives of several Hispanic addicts, introducing us to the intimate, physical, and institutional dependencies in which they are entangled. We discover how history pervades this region that has endured centuries of social inequality, drug and alcohol abuse, and material and cultural dispossession, and we come to see its experience of the opioid epidemic as a contemporary expression of these conditions, as well as a manifestation of the human desire to be released from them.

Links and Resources for EMDR Clinicians