Inner Peace: An Internal Family Systems Christian Devotional by Donna Glaser is sixty daily meditations pairing Scripture with the principles of a therapy model, aimed at readers carrying wounds from the past.
The old review misread the title, and it is worth explaining how
This page used to present the book as a devotional for Christian fathers on family leadership, complete with advice on communicating with your spouse and children.
That happened because of two words in the title. Internal Family Systems is a psychotherapy model, not a subject about families. Developed by Richard Schwartz, it describes the mind as containing distinct internal “parts,” and the word “family” refers to that internal system, not to a household. It is a term of art from clinical psychology.
So the previous review took a book about your own inner life and reviewed it as a book about parenting. Nothing in it is about being a father.
What it actually is
Donna Glaser is a licensed professional counselor and a trauma therapist, and that is the book she has written. Sixty daily meditations grounded in Scripture and in IFS principles, aimed at opening up old wounds carefully, finding a settled center, and living in the peace God promises.
The audience is someone carrying something. Childhood damage, a history he has buried, patterns he repeats and does not understand. It is a book about healing, not about leadership.
Which, to be fair, is a book a great many men need. Just not the one they were told this was.
An honest note on the method
Worth flagging plainly so you can decide for yourself.
Internal Family Systems is a mainstream, widely practiced therapy model, and many Christian counselors use it and find it compatible with a biblical view of the person. It is also genuinely contested among Christians. The debate centers on the model’s concept of the “Self” as an inherently good core within each person, which some argue sits awkwardly beside what Scripture says about the heart and about sin, and others argue is simply describing something real without making a theological claim.
CalledToBetter does not have a ruling on that, and we are not going to invent one. Both positions are held by people who take Scripture seriously. What we would say is this: read it with discernment, notice where the therapeutic framework and the biblical one are being fused, and test the fusion rather than swallowing it. That is good practice with any book that marries Scripture to a clinical model.
None of this is a reason to avoid dealing with your past. Scripture has no interest in a man pretending he is fine.
What we removed
A “Team Reflections” section describing a bedtime conversation one of our reviewers supposedly had after reading a meditation, and claims about new family rituals it inspired. Invented, and deleted. We also dropped the claim that each meditation carries reflection prompts and discussion questions for family discourse, which we could not verify and which makes little sense for a book of this kind.
The meta description on this page was also a stray fragment about burying trauma that read as though it had been pasted mid-sentence. Replaced.
Who it is for
A man who knows something in his past is still driving him and wants to work on it with Scripture in hand, ideally alongside actual counseling rather than instead of it. Sixty days is a serious commitment for a devotional and the subject warrants it.
Not the book for family devotions, not a parenting resource, and not light reading. If you came here looking for help leading your household, this is the wrong page and we are sorry it said otherwise for as long as it did.