the IFS takedown: my unfiltered response to the psych industry’s victory lap
back from the borderline
mollie adler
4.8 • 602 Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2025
⏱️ 87 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When New York Magazine dropped its viral feature “The Therapy That Can Break You,” in The Cut on October 30th, 2025, the internet exploded with hot takes. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts flooded X (Twitter) with posts claiming they’d been “right about IFS all along.” In this episode, we’re going to completely dissect this article, as well as all the backlash and scandal surrounding it. The question hiding underneath it all is this:
Who gets to own and define the human psyche?
Together, we’ll break down:
- The media’s framing of Internal Family Systems (IFS) as a “cultic fad”
- Psychiatry’s very own record of harm (from the serotonin-imbalance myth to ghost-written SSRI trials)
- How “Castlewood’s” scandals became a morality play for the mental-health establishment
- Why metaphysical and imaginative models of the mind still matter
- The line between healing frameworks and corporate therapy empires
You won’t hear me outright defend IFS or the biomedical model of mental health in this episode. My goal was to expose the hypocrisy that fuels both.
If this episode opened your mind, felt validating, or even challenged your perspective and you’d like to hear more, follow Back from the Borderline on the podcast player you’re on right now. Rate, review and share it to help more people find nuanced conversations about psychology, spirituality, and the culture of healing.
Link to the full article by Rachel Corbett can be found here: https://www.thecut.com/article/truth-about-ifs-therapy-internal-family-systems-trauma-treatment.html
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Long-term listeners of this podcast know that I've spent the last five years talking about the dark. |
| 0:06.5 | Now I've built a flashlight, and it's called Moods. |
| 0:10.4 | It's an instrument for serious, private inner work designed to dismantle your excuses and never |
| 0:15.7 | inflate your ego or assume the role of a sycophantic companion. |
| 0:19.6 | And the wait list is finally live. |
| 0:21.7 | Access is granted in the exact order you sign up. |
| 0:24.9 | Lock in your spot now at moods.world. |
| 0:28.8 | Welcome to the new era of inner work. |
| 0:35.6 | Welcome to Back from the Borderline. |
| 0:37.9 | I'm your host, Molly, and I don't want to talk to your personality. |
| 0:42.1 | I want to talk to your soul. |
| 0:44.0 | This podcast is where we unravel toxic programming from dysfunctional family systems, societal scripts, and the mental health labels that have kept you small. |
| 0:53.1 | We talk about sovereignty, shadow work, |
| 0:56.0 | emotional alchemy, culture, AI, and everything that lives at the intersection of the soul and the |
| 1:01.8 | system. Back from the borderline means back from the edge, from the abyss, from the illusion that |
| 1:08.1 | you're too broken to heal. If that sounds like the kind of journey you're ready to take, |
| 1:13.0 | follow the podcast on the player you're listening to right now. |
| 1:16.3 | I drop new episodes every Tuesday. |
| 1:18.4 | All right. Let's get into it. |
| 1:24.9 | On October 30th, 2025, New York Magazine published a feature titled The Therapy That Can Break You, that scrutinized the rise of IFS or Internal Family Systems Therapy. |
| 1:42.5 | The article was written by Rachel Corbett in The Cut, and it cast |
| 1:48.7 | IFS in an incredibly harsh light to say the least, a widely popular trauma treatment that some patients say |
... |
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