Internal Family Systems: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with Dr. Richard Schwartz
28% of the talking has a confirmed speaker.
“And when you get a lot of exiles, other parts have to leave their naturally valuable states and become what we call protectors, like you said.”
Exiles cause other parts to become protectors in the IFS system.
“I find it's helpful as someone who's really looked at conventional psychological and Western philosophical views of the self, so-called, through the lens of the Eastern tradition, especially Buddhist, which deconstruct it.”
Rick sees value in comparing Western self concepts to Eastern Buddhist deconstruction.
“When I encountered it, and again, it was contrary to what I expected, particularly in people that had horrible, horrible childhoods, and there was no way you could find somebody that they got it from.”
Richard was surprised to find the Self present even in those with severe trauma.
“I love the particle and wave idea from quantum physics.”
He references the quantum physics concept of particles behaving as waves.
“Yeah. Maybe one of the distinctions, because as I've talked to other mindfulness people and Buddhists, teachers is that that capital S Self, that sort of serene pond, isn't just a passive observer, but actually can become a very active leader, both in the inner world and the outer world.”
Claims the capital‑S Self can act as an active leader, not merely a passive witness.
“And so this process of training in which you just take even a few minutes a day and let your mind get kind of quiet.”
Suggests a daily short meditation practice to quiet the mind.
“We have what we call the 8 Cs of self‑leadership: calm and curiosity and confidence and compassion, but also creativity, clarity, courage, and connectedness.”
Recommends cultivating eight C qualities for effective self‑leadership.
“In my own experience of doing parts work, It's paradoxically true, just like you say, that the more you listen to parts, the quieter they get, or something like that.”
Observes that listening to internal parts tends to make them less noisy.
“I spent some time working with DID clients, people with really extreme parts that didn't know or didn't like each other.”
Shares a clinical experience with dissociative identity disorder clients.
“as they depolarize, as self becomes the leader and can go to each polarized part, And then bring them together”
In IFS, the Self leads and integrates polarized parts of the psyche.
“It's called You're the One You've Been Waiting For.”
He points listeners to his book that summarizes IFS concepts.
“through all that complexity though, is this kind of radical commitment to kindness”
He highlights kindness as a central, radical commitment within IFS work.
“self is kind of contagious.”
He believes a therapist's Self can spread to the client, facilitating healing.
“For me, these are real inner entities. They're not physical in the sense that you can't reach out and touch them physically, but everything else about them is quite real.”
He asserts that the parts in IFS are actual inner entities, not just metaphors.
“the notion of working with aspects of myself and attempting to move them to a position in the system with their consent that is more kind of appropriate for that tendency, as opposed to kind of going into conflict with it.”
He believes compassionate collaboration with inner parts is essential for personal work.
“I just did a training at a treatment center called HeartWatch. We're training the whole staff in IFS and they're 12-steppers. You know, it was total 12-step. And so they had an attitude about the addictive part and they—”
He describes a recent HeartWatch training where staff initially tried to ignore the addictive part before learning a more compassionate approach.
“The greed part is a part that got stuck in the role of trying to acquire a lot of things to protect you.”
He explains the greed part as a protective role rather than pure greed.
“Many of them are not functional while they're in these roles. They actually are causing lots of damage.”
Parts can be harmful in their current roles, contrary to the idea they are always functional.
“We did an outcome study with rheumatoid arthritis and that was very successful because we would have people focus on the pain, get curious about it, ask what it wanted them to know.”
An IFS‑based study showed that focusing on pain and its meaning led many arthritis patients into remission.
“I would have you focus on it, find it in your body. How do you feel toward it? I would work to get you curious about it.”
Suggests paying attention to the internal critic physically and cultivating curiosity toward it.
“The problem starts when we add the second darts that we throw ourselves of our defensive maneuvers, our exiling, our firefighting.”
S2 says suffering is amplified by our own secondary reactions, the “second dart.”
“I have this condition of aphantasia, where in contrast to most people who see images, I don't see anything when I work inside.”
S3 describes having aphantasia, an inability to visualize mental images.
“what enables what you're doing, what we're talking about, to work, it seems to me, is accessing the capital S Self.”
Accessing the capital S Self is essential for IFS work to be effective.
“In the US, in the US, that's, it's really decreased enormously.”
Self‑access has dropped dramatically in the United States.