When the Old Systems Collapse, Who Will Build the New Ones?

In response to Jess McAllen’s article, “Trauma’s New Look” (The Nation, May 2025):

The Nation’s critique of Internal Family Systems (IFS) reflects a bigger problem: clinging to broken systems while the ground is shifting beneath us. This is my response—rooted in experience, and calling for a Left that isn’t afraid to imagine deeper forms of healing and solidarity.

I grew up in a house where The Nation was treated like a sacred text. My parents were classic good liberals — Enlightenment idealists who believed in reason, science, and critical inquiry above all. I’m grateful for the political and ethical grounding they gave me. But that worldview, for all its strengths, lacked a spiritual dimension. It taught me to reason through suffering, but not to hold it. It prized evidence, but often missed mystery. And in many ways, that worldview is failing to meet the moment we are living through.

Reading Jess McAllen’s piece, I recognize real concerns: the valid critiques of IFS’s commercialization, the pitfalls of New Age branding, the risk of therapies becoming fads rather than tools for real healing. But I also notice a familiar flattening — a tendency to conflate the griftiness of pop-psychology capitalism with the deeper human need that modalities like IFS are trying, however imperfectly, to address.

Yes, there’s plenty to criticize in how IFS has exploded on TikTok and been wrapped up in the trauma-industrial complex. But McAllen’s article seems to miss something essential: much of mainstream, “evidence-based” psychology — born from the same Enlightenment tradition my parents trusted — often fails to engage the full complexity of human experience. Systems that can chart brain waves and design double-blind studies still stumble when it comes to suffering that is relational, spiritual, and systemic.

Speaking personally, as someone who has been harmed by the psychiatric system, I have spent years fighting to build popular models of peer support — models that can be trained, shared, and practiced across communities without replicating the hierarchies and gatekeeping of the clinical world. Now, as the biomedical model collapses under the weight of its own failures, it’s disheartening to see liberal institutions like The Nation clinging to the wreckage, while right-wing populist movements rush to fill the void with their own distorted versions of “healing.”

I also write this as an Internal Family Systems practitioner who sees real, grounded value in its lineage — particularly its foundations in systemic family therapy. For those of us who’ve survived the violence of psychiatric labeling, the systemic lens that IFS offers — one that honors multiplicity, relational dynamics, and deep inner complexity — can be a lifeline. It’s not about selling a brand; it’s about recovering possibilities for connection, dignity, and collective repair.

I often think about the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s and ’70s — its imperfect but powerful attempts to bring Eastern spirituality and Western psychotherapies together in service of liberation, not just self-optimization. We urgently need that kind of humanistic, visionary spirit on the Left today. Otherwise, we’ll hand over the future of healing and meaning-making to forces that have no commitment to collective freedom — only to control, profit, and exclusion.

We absolutely need sharper critiques of how healing work is being marketed, branded, and sold back to us. But we also need the courage to talk seriously — and generously — about the real hunger for new frameworks of care, connection, and transformation. If we don’t, we’ll just keep circling the same broken systems that failed us in the first place.

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