What Is IFS Therapy and How Is It Different from Regular Therapy?
LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
Internal Family Systems therapy offers something most driven women have never had: a framework that explains why you contain what feels like contradictions. The relentless achiever. The crushing inner critic. The part that shuts down when someone gets too close. IFS doesn’t try to silence those parts; it tries to understand them. This post introduces IFS: what it is, how it compares to other therapies, and why it’s particularly powerful for healing relational trauma.
Last updated: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The Ten-Year-Old in the Boardroom
- What Is IFS Therapy?
- The Architecture of the Inner World: Parts and Self Energy
- How IFS Shows Up for Driven Women
- How IFS Differs from CBT, Psychodynamic Therapy, and EMDR
- Both/And: IFS Is Compassionate and Clinically Rigorous
- The Systemic Lens: Why Our Parts Developed in the First Place
- What Healing Looks Like: IFS in Practice
- Frequently Asked Questions
Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS) is an evidence-based model, listed by SAMHSA, that understands the mind as made up of multiple “parts,” each with its own beliefs and protective role, alongside a core “Self” that can lead healing. Parts like the harsh inner critic or the relentless achiever aren’t problems to eliminate; they’re protective responses to be understood. In my work with driven women, it’s often the first framework that makes their internal contradictions feel like information rather than character flaws.
In short: IFS therapy is an evidence-based model that maps the mind as a system of protective parts alongside a core Self, and teaches Self-led healing rather than trying to silence or eliminate difficult parts.
I’ve used IFS as a primary modality with driven women across more than 15,000 clinical hours, and I’ve consistently found it uniquely effective for people whose identities have been built on performance and self-sufficiency. Richard Schwartz, PhD’s foundational text lays out the clinical architecture of parts-work and the evidence base for Self-led healing (Schwartz 2021).
The Ten-Year-Old in the Boardroom
Beatrice is forty years old, a hospital administrator who runs a department of two hundred people with something close to surgical precision. She’s the person who stays calm in the code, the one who reads the room in a board meeting and adjusts before anyone else has noticed a problem. She has been told she’s unflappable, and for twenty years, she has believed it.
In her first IFS session, her therapist asks her to close her eyes and notice the part of her that needs to have everything under control. She expects to find something strong, an executive, maybe, or an internal general barking orders. What she finds instead is a ten-year-old girl standing in a kitchen, moving quietly between stove and table, managing a dinner party for her parents’ friends because her mother had had one too many glasses of wine. The girl’s face is focused. She’s checking the pasta, filling water glasses, making sure no one notices what’s wrong. She’s been doing this for hours, and she’s ten.
“That’s your manager part,” her therapist says. Beatrice starts crying. She’s been that ten-year-old in a boardroom for thirty years, and no one, including Beatrice herself, ever noticed the handoff.
This is what IFS does. It names what you already know somewhere in your body but have never had language for, and in that naming, something begins to shift, quietly, the way a held breath finally releases.
What Is IFS Therapy?
Internal Family Systems therapy is a model of psychotherapy developed in the 1980s by Richard Schwartz, PhD, a family therapist and psychologist who originally trained in structural family therapy. Working with clients who described hearing internal voices or feeling fragmented, Schwartz noticed those voices weren’t pathological. They were organized, with roles, histories, and protective intentions, and what emerged from mapping them was IFS: a framework for understanding the inner world as a system of distinct parts, governed by a core Self.
IFS has since become one of the most widely adopted trauma treatment modalities in the world, with more than 14,000 clinicians trained through the IFS Institute alone, and it’s listed as an evidence-based practice by SAMHSA. But numbers don’t capture why it resonates so deeply with clients. What makes IFS different is its premise: there are no bad parts. Every part of you, including the one you most despise, developed for a reason and was trying to protect you. The work isn’t to eliminate your difficult parts. It’s to understand them, and in understanding, to free them.
Internal Family Systems is a psychotherapy model developed by Richard Schwartz, PhD, psychologist and author of No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. IFS posits that the mind is naturally multiple, comprised of distinct “parts,” each with its own emotions, memories, beliefs, and protective functions, and that at the core of every person exists a Self that’s inherently whole and capable of healing. The goal is to build a trusting relationship between Self and each part, facilitating “unburdening”: the release of painful beliefs and emotions parts carry from past wounds.
In plain terms: IFS is a therapy that treats your inner world like a family system. Instead of trying to get rid of the anxious part of you, or argue your inner critic into silence, it asks: what’s that part actually trying to do for you? When you understand the why, the part no longer has to work so hard. That’s when real change becomes possible.
What I see consistently in my work is that driven women arrive at parts work therapy having already done a great deal of intellectual work on themselves. They understand their attachment styles, they’ve read the books. What IFS offers is something different from more insight: a relationship with the parts running the show. Understanding a part intellectually and actually meeting it with curiosity are two entirely different experiences. The second is where healing lives.
The Architecture of the Inner World: Parts and Self Energy
To understand IFS, you need to understand its map. The model describes the inner world as two fundamental entities: parts and Self. Parts fall into three categories. Exiles are the youngest and most vulnerable, carrying the memories of experiences that were too much: the loneliness, the shame, the fear, the grief. They’re called exiles because the system typically locks them away, since feeling what they carry is too overwhelming.
Managers are the proactive protectors, often the parts we think of as our “personality”: the perfectionist, the over-functioner, the people-pleaser, the controller, the achiever, the inner critic, working in advance to keep you safe by maintaining control of your environment and image. Firefighters are the reactive protectors: when managers fail to contain the exiles’ pain and something breaks through, firefighters rush in to extinguish the emotional fire by any means necessary, dissociation, numbing, drinking, binge eating, compulsive scrolling, rage, disappearing into work. None of this is weakness. These are emergency responses that developed because they worked, at least temporarily.
Beatrice’s boardroom composure, the thing her colleagues call unflappable, is a manager in its most sophisticated form. It never had to become a firefighter, because it was that good at its job. The parts we most admire in ourselves professionally are often the same parts working hardest to keep an old wound from seeing daylight.
In the IFS model developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, parts organize into three functional categories. Exiles are wounded parts, often formed in childhood, carrying the emotional burden of past trauma, shame, grief, and fear. Managers are protective parts that work proactively to prevent exile pain from surfacing, through control, perfectionism, and self-criticism. Firefighters are reactive parts that activate when exile pain breaks through, using distraction, numbing, or impulsive behaviors to suppress the overwhelm. All three represent the psyche’s adaptive attempts to survive an environment that was, at some point, genuinely unsafe.
In plain terms: Think of exiles as the wounded children inside you. Managers are the responsible older siblings keeping things running. Firefighters are the ones who flip the table when things get to be too much. All three are trying to protect you. And all three deserve to be understood, not blamed.
And then there’s Self, which isn’t a part. It’s what you’re underneath all the parts. Richard Schwartz describes Self as having eight qualities, the eight C’s: curiosity, calm, clarity, compassion, confidence, creativity, courage, and connectedness. Self is never damaged by trauma. It can be obscured, buried under the noise of protective parts, but it can’t be destroyed. This is one of IFS’s most radical claims: no matter what happened to you, your core is intact.
In Internal Family Systems, Self Energy refers to the innate healing capacity at the core of every person, characterized by the eight C qualities: curiosity, calm, clarity, compassion, confidence, creativity, courage, and connectedness. Frank Anderson, MD, Harvard-trained psychiatrist, IFS lead trainer, and author of Transcending Trauma: Healing Complex PTSD with Internal Family Systems, describes trauma as “blocked energy, especially blocked love,” a disruption in the flow of Self Energy. Healing in IFS involves tracking how that energy is impeded by protective parts, and gradually freeing it.
In plain terms: Self Energy is the part of you that already knows how to heal. It’s the calm, curious, compassionate presence that can sit with a wounded part without being overwhelmed by it. It was there before the trauma. It’s there now. IFS therapy is, in large part, about helping your protective parts trust it enough to stand down.
I recently returned to Frank Anderson, MD’s work on the neuroscience of Self Energy, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how precisely it maps onto what I see across a caseload of driven women. Anderson, a Harvard clinical instructor and lead trainer at the IFS Institute, has written on how Self Energy corresponds to prefrontal cortex activation: when clients access Self, the thinking brain comes back online and the nervous system moves out of fight-or-flight. IFS changes the brain’s functional organization in measurable ways.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and author of The Body Keeps the Score and one of the world’s foremost trauma researchers, has called discovering IFS “a breakthrough,” an endorsement that carries weight given decades studying what does and doesn’t work for trauma survivors. IFS’s ability to access and heal the parts of the mind that hold traumatic material, without requiring clients to relive experiences in overwhelming detail, aligns with what the neuroscience of trauma demands. (PMID: 9384857)
How IFS Shows Up for Driven Women
In my work with clients, the parts work model resonates most powerfully with driven women, not because they’re more fragmented than anyone else, but because they’ve had more practice ignoring their fragmentation. When you’ve built an identity around competence and emotional management, your manager parts become extraordinarily sophisticated. They don’t just show up in one or two behaviors. They run everything.
The same woman who’s a visionary in her field can be completely paralyzed by conflict in her marriage, can lead a team through crisis and still spiral into anxiety over a mildly critical email, still hear the inner critic narrating her inadequacy at 2 a.m. That’s not failure. I’ve come to think of this as the competence-fragmentation split: the more sophisticated the outer performance, the more parts are working overtime backstage to keep it running.
The achiever part, so often mistaken for the whole identity, is almost always a manager: if you’re indispensable, you won’t be abandoned; if you’re the best, you won’t be criticized. It’s protecting the exile underneath who still believes she isn’t enough. If you’ve explored perfectionism and its roots in early trauma, this will feel familiar. The inner critic is typically another manager: it believes if it criticizes you first, the world’s criticism won’t land as hard. You can’t bully a part into silence, but you can thank it for its service and ask if it’s willing to try something different. If you’ve taken the nervous system self-assessment, you may already sense which parts are most activated in your system.
Beatrice’s story, the ten-year-old managing a dinner party, illustrates something I see constantly: the protector parts of driven women are often extraordinarily competent. They genuinely can run a hospital department, lead a team, manage the crisis. The tragedy isn’t that these parts exist. It’s that they’re doing this while carrying a terrified child on their backs, and that weight is what eventually breaks people. It’s what childhood emotional neglect does: it forces children to manage more than they should’ve to, and those strategies become the operating system for adulthood.
Parts work is a broad term for any therapeutic approach that treats the psyche as comprising multiple sub-personalities or “parts,” each with its own memories, emotions, and protective functions. Several models use this framework, including Janina Fisher, PhD’s Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment, but IFS is the most widely known and researched. Fisher, author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors, describes parts as carrying “fear, rage, shame, hopelessness, and despair.” Parts work in any form asks: what would it mean to meet every part of yourself with care instead of conflict? (PMID: 16530597)
In plain terms: Parts work is the umbrella. IFS is the most developed, most researched map within that umbrella. If you’ve ever felt like “a part of me wants this, but another part of me is terrified,” you already understand, intuitively, what parts work is describing.
How IFS Differs from CBT, Psychodynamic Therapy, and EMDR
One of the most common questions I hear from prospective clients is: how is this different from regular therapy? It’s a fair question, particularly if you’ve already done significant work. The honest answer is that IFS differs in mechanism, philosophy, and clinical experience, sometimes dramatically so.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the most commonly practiced modality in the world, has a strong evidence base for anxiety, depression, and phobias, working largely in the thinking mind: identifying distortions, building new cognitive patterns. It’s structured and often genuinely useful for presenting symptoms. But here’s what it can’t quite reach: the part of you that knows, intellectually, that you’re doing well, yet feels fraudulent every time you walk into a meeting, the part that agrees with every logical reframe and then hears the same critical voice at 3 a.m. anyway. CBT works with thoughts. IFS works with the parts that generate those thoughts and the exiles they’re protecting; its approach to the inner critic is to get curious about what it’s protecting, rather than challenge and restructure the thought. The former can bring symptom relief. The latter can bring genuine transformation. More on this in the piece on perfectionism and trauma.
Psychodynamic therapy has much more in common with IFS than CBT does. Both value insight, take the unconscious seriously, and understand the past shapes the present. The difference is speed of access: traditional psychodynamic work approaches wounded material gradually through transference and interpretation, often taking years to reach the most vulnerable parts, while IFS is more direct, often accessing an exile part in a single session because the framework gives client and therapist a shared map. For women healing relational trauma, that directness matters.
EMDR is perhaps IFS’s closest relative in the trauma therapy world, and they’re frequently used together. Both work with the parts of the psyche that carry traumatic material and aim to reduce its emotional charge, though the mechanisms differ: EMDR uses bilateral stimulation to reprocess specific memories, while IFS uses internal dialogue and the relationship with Self to help burdened parts release what they’ve been carrying. Many clinicians who offer somatic and trauma-informed approaches integrate both, using IFS to build internal safety before EMDR for memory processing. They’re complementary, not competing. IFS doesn’t ask you to fight your inner world. Nothing inside you is the problem; every part has a story, a role, a reason, and the path to healing is through befriending your difficult parts, not defeating them.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver, Poet, “The Summer Day”
Oliver’s question is what eventually surfaces in IFS work. Once your manager parts trust Self enough to relax and your exiles have been heard and unburdened, you’re left with a remarkable amount of energy that was previously occupied by internal conflict. What do you want to do with it? Who do you want to be when you’re not managing everything? Those aren’t small questions, and as clients sometimes describe it, they’re what make IFS feel less like therapy and more like coming home to yourself.
Both/And: IFS Is Compassionate and Clinically Rigorous
There’s a misperception I want to address directly. IFS’s language, parts, Self Energy, the idea that there are no bad parts, can sound, to the uninitiated, like spiritual self-help rather than clinical treatment. The vocabulary is different from DSM diagnostic categories or CBT protocols, but IFS is both warmly humanistic and empirically supported, and treating these as mutually exclusive is a false choice.
The research base is growing rapidly. A 2021 randomized controlled trial published in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, co-authored by IFS founder Richard Schwartz himself, found statistically significant reductions in PTSD symptoms among IFS clients compared to a waitlist control, and many no longer met diagnostic criteria for PTSD by the end of treatment. In 2026, the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School affiliate, published results from PARTS, a 16-week group-based IFS treatment for PTSD, showing reductions comparable to EMDR and cognitive processing therapy. IFS is now on the SAMHSA National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices, used in medical settings, veteran treatment programs, and addiction recovery.
Arti is a filmmaker, thirty-seven years old, four months into IFS. She came to therapy carrying a question she’d never been able to answer: why, when she was genuinely good at what she did, could she not enjoy it? Every finished project felt immediately insufficient, followed by near-despair. In today’s session, she’s working with her inner critic, the voice that says nothing she makes is good enough, and her therapist asks her to approach it with genuine curiosity instead of exhausted resignation: what does this part actually look like, where does it live in her body, what is it trying to do?
When Arti approaches with curiosity instead of anger, the critic reveals something she didn’t expect. It’s not cruel by nature. It’s terrified, and it describes what it’s been doing for twenty years: criticizing her work before her mother can. “If I tear it apart before she can,” the part says, “it hurts less.”
Arti feels something shift. Not resolution, but something like compassion for a part of herself she’s hated for two decades. The inner critic, it turns out, has been protecting a very young, very exposed part of her from a specific kind of devastation. You can explore how this kind of wound, parental criticism that never felt safe enough to receive directly, relates to what I write about in betrayal trauma and childhood emotional neglect.
Both/And: IFS holds space for the profound compassion healing requires, and it’s grounded in a rigorous, clinically tested methodology. You don’t have to choose between feeling seen and doing real work. In IFS, the seeing is the work.
The Systemic Lens: Why Our Parts Developed in the First Place
IFS doesn’t treat parts as malfunctions. It treats them as adaptations, and this distinction has enormous implications for how we understand individual psychology and the systems that shape it.
Manager and firefighter parts develop in response to environments where the full range of human emotion wasn’t safe to experience. A child who grows up in a home where a parent’s mood determines the emotional weather of the household will develop exquisitely attuned manager parts that read the room, anticipate needs, keep the peace, not because there’s something wrong with that child, but because those adaptations were genuinely functional in that environment.
What we don’t always reckon with is that these adaptations don’t automatically update when the environment changes. The manager part that kept Beatrice safe at ten is still running the boardroom at forty, often in environments where the original threat no longer exists and the strategy causes more problems than it solves. The woman who learned to over-function to prevent family chaos will over-function in her marriage until it fractures under the weight of it. This is why recovery from complex PTSD requires attending to these adaptive patterns, not just symptoms.
There’s also a broader systemic reality IFS practitioners are increasingly naming: some parts in women’s internal systems are internalized cultural messages, not purely individual adaptations. The part that says your worth is contingent on your productivity, the part that says you should be smaller and quieter: these are residue of systems that have told women, for centuries, that the full expression of their selfhood is dangerous. Therapy for driven women that doesn’t account for this is incomplete; it can help a woman understand her inner critic, but without naming the cultural substrate that critic absorbed, the work remains partial. If you’ve wondered whether your nervous system has been quietly running your career, this self-assessment can help clarify what’s happening beneath the surface.
What Healing Looks Like: IFS in Practice
People sometimes expect IFS sessions to be dramatic: cathartic breakthroughs, tears, revelations. More often, they have a quality of quiet recognition. You go inward, find a part, approach it with curiosity, and learn something you didn’t know about yourself, then bring that understanding back to your daily life. Over time the internal landscape becomes more spacious, less at war with itself.
A typical session might begin with your therapist asking you to notice a feeling or sensation present today, then inviting you to turn your attention inward, not to analyze it but to find it: where does it live in your body, how old does it feel. Before doing meaningful work with a part, you need to know how much Self is present. Approach with frustration and the work stalls; arrive with curiosity, and you can ask the part what it’s afraid would happen if it stopped. Parts respond to being genuinely asked. They’ve been waiting, often for decades, for someone, even just the inner someone, to actually listen.
When a part feels truly seen, it may soften or show you what it’s protecting, often revealing an exile underneath. Working with exiles is the deeper, slower work: witnessing their pain and gradually facilitating the unburdening of what they’ve carried. This is the work that rebuilds the foundations, not through intellectual understanding alone but through an embodied, relational experience of being fully met.
IFS is particularly effective for relational trauma, the kind that comes from the chronic experience of an environment where it wasn’t safe to fully be yourself, which fragments the self into parts that learned to hide, perform, manage, survive. Janina Fisher, PhD, psychologist, trauma specialist, and author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors, describes this as helping parts in survival mode discover they no longer need to fight alone.
Healing in IFS isn’t linear. New parts emerge as others settle, and the inner critic that softened in one session may return in full force six weeks later under pressure. That’s not regression; it’s a part that still doesn’t fully trust it’s safe to stand down. Your job is to keep showing up with curiosity and keep telling your parts: I see you, I’m not going anywhere, we can figure this out together.
Beatrice is eighteen months into her own IFS work now. The ten-year-old in the boardroom still shows up, especially in high-stakes weeks, but Beatrice recognizes her faster these days. Last month, in the middle of a budget crisis that would once have sent her into overdrive for a week straight, she noticed the familiar tightening in her chest, the old urge to manage everyone’s feelings before her own. She paused. She asked the part what it needed. It needed to know the department wouldn’t fall apart if Beatrice, for once, let someone else handle the wine at the dinner party. She let someone else handle it. The department didn’t fall apart.
The parts you’ve been trying to manage or escape, your perfectionism, your people-pleasing, your inner critic, weren’t mistakes. They were solutions: creative, often exhausting solutions to circumstances that required you to split yourself in order to survive. IFS isn’t about undoing who you are. It’s about meeting who you’ve always been, and discovering that she was never as broken as you feared.
Mary Oliver asked what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life. IFS therapy is the process of becoming free enough to actually answer that question, from Self, not from a part that’s been trying to keep you safe for thirty years. That’s worth pursuing, whenever you’re ready.
Warmly, Annie.
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Q: Is IFS therapy evidence-based? I’ve heard it called “spiritual” and I want to know if it actually works.
A: IFS is listed as an evidence-based practice by SAMHSA. A 2021 randomized controlled trial found many participants no longer met PTSD diagnostic criteria after treatment, and a more recent Harvard-affiliated study showed reductions comparable to EMDR and CBT. The language, parts, Self Energy, is unusual, but the underlying clinical mechanisms are rigorous and increasingly well-researched. No single therapy works for everyone, and the best approach depends on your history and goals.
Q: How is IFS different from just talking about your childhood in therapy?
A: Talking about your childhood in traditional talk therapy is valuable; it builds narrative and understanding. IFS does something different: instead of narrating your history, you access it directly through the parts formed by it. You might meet the eight-year-old part that’s still living it. That’s experiential rather than narrative, and many clients who’ve “understood” their history through years of talk therapy find IFS gives them access to emotional material insight alone couldn’t reach.
Q: What does “no bad parts” actually mean? Some of my behaviors have genuinely caused harm.
A: “No bad parts” means every part, including those whose behaviors have caused harm, developed with protective intention: the firefighter that drinks too much, the manager that controls relationships, the part that explodes in rage. That doesn’t mean the behaviors aren’t harmful or don’t need to change. It means shaming yourself for having those parts doesn’t work. When you understand the protective logic behind a behavior, you can work with it rather than against it, which is where real change becomes possible.
Q: I’ve been doing CBT for years. Can I switch to IFS, or do I have to start from scratch?
A: You don’t start from scratch. The self-awareness you’ve developed in CBT is genuinely useful in IFS work, which adds a relational, experiential dimension rather than replacing that insight. The two approaches operate on different levels of the same system, and some therapists integrate both. It’s worth consulting an IFS-trained therapist about what that could look like given your history and goals.
Q: Is IFS appropriate for complex PTSD or relational trauma, or is it better for simpler presentations?
A: IFS is particularly well-suited for complex and relational trauma, arguably more so than for single-incident trauma, because that kind of trauma creates a fragmented inner world developed across years of an environment that wasn’t consistently safe. Frank Anderson, MD, whose work focuses on complex PTSD and dissociation, has found IFS approaches produce high rates of PTSD symptom remission in complex trauma populations. For dissociative presentations, IFS needs careful, appropriately paced application, but remains one of the most effective frameworks for this complexity.
Q: How long does IFS therapy typically take before I see results?
A: Many clients notice a shift within the first several sessions, not because the deep work is done but because the framework itself is orienting. Naming a part and approaching it with curiosity rather than shame can bring quick relief. Deeper unburdening work with exiles takes longer, depending on the severity of the trauma history and how much trust protective parts need before allowing access. For complex relational trauma, a realistic frame is one to three years, though progress often comes well before that.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
- Brenner EG, Schwartz RC, Becker C. Development of the internal family systems model: Honoring contributions from family systems therapies. Fam Process. 2023;62(4):1290-1306. doi:10.1111/famp.12943. PMID: 37924221.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Fisher, Janina. Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors. Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
- Anderson, Frank G.. Transcending Trauma. PESI Publishing, Inc., 2021.
- Oliver, Mary. Devotions. Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 2017.
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She’s currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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