Shaming and Shamed: a Talk with Martha Sweezy

Martha Sweezy grew up in Cambridge, MA. Her mother, Nancy Sweezy, was instrumental at the legendary folk music venue Club 47, revived and managed Jugtown Pottery in North Carolina, founded Refugee Arts Group to work with refugees from Southeast Asia and was finally awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the NEA for her work in traditional arts.
Her father, Paul Sweezy, the founder of Monthly Review magazine and press and the author of numerous books, most famously Monopoly Capital written with Paul Baran, was known around the world as the “dean of American Marxists.”

Martha is an assistant professor, part time, in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a consultant at Cambridge Health Alliance and a psychotherapist in private practice in Northampton, MA.

After using psychodynamics, DBT and EMDR with severely traumatized individuals in community mental health for more than 18 years, she discovered internal family systems therapy (IFS) and became fascinated with the response of clients, not to mention with her own experience (IFS training is experiential). When she had gone through all the levels of training on offer she began to write about her clinical experiences and published two articles on IFS in peer reviewed journals. Then, with Ellen Ziskind, she invited some master IFS clinicians to articulate their applications of the model and published two co-edited volumes.

Martha also teamed up with Toni Herbine-Blank and Donna Kerpelman to write a book on IFS couple therapy entitled Intimacy from the Inside Out: Courage and Compassion in Couple Therapy. More recently she co-authored a manual on IFS with Frank Anderson and Richard Schwartz, and co-authored a 2nd edition of Dr. Schwartz’s first book on IFS, Internal Family Systems Therapy, 2nd edition, which includes over 70% new material. She remains as impressed and charmed by IFS today as she was when she first saw a video of Dr. Schwartz in session in 2006.

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