Season 2, Episode 30, Release Date: 5-4-2024

IFIO with guest Toni Herbine-Blank

Today I have the pleasure of sharing my conversation with Toni Herbine-Blank, MS. RN, C-SP. She is a Clinical Specialist, Psychotherapist, and Senior Trainer for the Center for Self-Leadership. Toni began training students in Internal Family Systems Therapy in 2004 and since then has been instumental in designing programs and writing curricula for Levels 1 and 2 IFS training programs.

Toni has been in private practice since 1996 specializing in the treatment of couples and individuals. In 2009, after designing a training for IFS therapists to apply the model to couples therapy, Toni offered the first Intimacy from the Inside Out (c) Training Program in Boston, MA. Since then the program has been received with great enthusiasm across the United States.

Whereas IFS focused on the internal aspects of an individual, IFIO focuses on the interdependance our internal system and external relationships. We turn inward (known as a "YOU-turn") to help us in our connections ("RE turn" to relationship). 

Toni shared how the heart of her model is "Courageous Communication." When we feel healed, we open up to conversations. In this way we can stay connected with our minds and hearts, and are able to tune into how we might be impacting other people in the conversations.

Within intimate relationships, there is mutuality, as well as exploration. Although skills and tools could be extremely helpful, we need to have a critical mass of self energy in order to access these skills. Self-energy helps us listen and speak from our hearts.

We spoke about how Shame is a verb. When we have difficulty connecting and commnuicating with one another, we can explore what is coming up within us, and there is always some path that connects us back to shame, shamfulness or shaming behaviors. Shame is a "rolling" energy, where we sometimes replicate within our systems what is done to us. Additionally, what we do to ourselves, we do to others.

In IFIO we are "helping people free themselves from the myth of Unloveability."

Through IFIO we earn the trust of our internal system, and in this way recognize who we can extend this trust to in our external world. As these people are welcomed into our internal universe, we co-constuct authentic and meaningful connection.