Client Resources
These are books, practices, courses, and other resources that I have found useful or have shared with clients over the years. I offer them as possibilities for exploration: take what feels useful, remain curious about what doesn’t, and trust your own experience as you go.
If You Need Immediate Support
If you or someone else is in immediate danger or needs emergency medical help, call 911.
For mental health or suicide crisis support, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Additional support is available through:
Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 for free, confidential 24/7 support.
The Trevor Project: Call 866-488-7386 or text START to 678678 for 24/7 support for LGBTQ+ young people.
Veterans Crisis Line: Call 988 and press 1, or text 838255.
211: Call 211 for help locating community resources such as housing, food, health care, and other local services.
NAMI Teen & Young Adult HelpLine: Call 800-950-6264 or text FRIEND to 62640 for peer support, Monday–Friday, 10 a.m.–10 p.m. Eastern.
The National Domestic Violence Hotline: Call 800-799-7233 or text BEGIN to 88788 anytime.
Books
Your Resonant Self: Guided Meditations and Exercises to Engage Your Brain’s Capacity for Healing and Your Resonant Self Workbook: From Self-Sabotage to Self Care. Sarah Peyton’s books are among my favorite resources for understanding what happens in our brains and nervous systems when we are distressed—and how compassionate attention can change our relationship with ourselves.
Her language is different from Internal Family Systems, but I find the approaches highly compatible. The books combine accessible neuroscience with exercises for bringing the ideas into lived experience. I return to them often and recommend them especially to people who enjoy understanding both the “why” and the “how” of inner work.
SoulCollage Evolving: An Intuitive Collage Process for Self-Discovery and Community. SoulCollage is a wonderfully creative way to get to know the different aspects of ourselves through image and intuition. The process involves creating cards that represent parts, qualities, figures, or energies that have meaning for us.
I especially like it alongside parts work because making something tangible can help us relate differently to an inner experience. A card can become a way of saying, “I see you. You belong here.” And sometimes an image can find us in a way words cannot.
Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships: Healing the Wound of the Heart. This is the book I’m tempted to give to everyone who is in relationship—which, admittedly, is a lot of people.
John Welwood writes with unusual compassion about what he calls the “wound of the heart”: the ways our longing for love and our experiences of disconnection shape how we protect ourselves in relationships. His perspective invites greater tenderness toward both ourselves and one another without asking us to pretend that relationships are simple.
I find his approach very compatible with IFS and with the kind of relational work I value: becoming more transparent, more responsible for our own experience, and more able to stay connected without abandoning ourselves.
Journey Through Trauma: A Trail Guide to the 5-Phase Cycle of Healing Repeated Trauma. I especially appreciate this book because it respects the complexity and nonlinearity of healing from repeated trauma.
Rather than offering a formula, Gretchen Schmelzer describes a five-phase cycle that can help readers orient themselves within a process that may otherwise feel confusing or discouraging. Her central metaphor is adventure travel—serious, demanding, sometimes disorienting travel—and I find it both compassionate and realistic.
This is less a “how-to” book than a companion: something that can help make sense of where you are, what the work may be asking of you, and why circling back does not necessarily mean you have gone backward.
Online Programs and Courses
Primal Trust is an online program focused on nervous-system regulation, somatic practices, and brain retraining. It includes educational material, guided practices, live classes, and opportunities for community support.
I sometimes recommend it to clients who would like a structured way to practice nervous-system regulation skills between therapy sessions.
The Nervous System Solution is an online program focused on understanding and regulating the nervous system through psychoeducation, body-based practices, and structured exercises. Its materials address experiences such as anxiety, overwhelm, fatigue, and stress-related symptoms.
I generally think of this as an alternative to Primal Trust rather than something to add alongside it, since the two programs overlap considerably in purpose and approach.
Guided Practices
Meeting Self Meditation
A guided meditation for slowing down, settling inward, and connecting with the qualities of calm, curiosity, compassion, and perspective that IFS associates with Self.
Connecting with a Part
A guided practice for becoming curious about one of your inner responses or “parts”—what it is experiencing, what it may be protecting, and what it would like you to understand.
Metta (Lovingkindness) Meditation
This meditation offers unconditional friendliness to self and others.
