Talk with Martha Sweezy on Shame and Guilt as central for IFS Work

This podcast features an interview with Martha Sweezy, a Harvard Medical School assistant professor and IFS therapy author, focusing on her journey into psychotherapy and her work with Internal Family Systems (IFS). Sweezy details how IFS resonated with her after years in community mental health, providing a framework to integrate her client experiences. She emphasizes the importance of compassion in IFS as the opposite of shame, highlighting how IFS challenges global self-judgments by recognizing parts. Sweezy also shares her insights on shame versus guilt, defining shame as a global judgment about oneself and guilt as a judgment about behavior, and introduces the concept of "emotional cannibalism" to describe the self-attack that occurs when internalized shame leads to a belief of being defective.