TT161 - No Bad Parts and the Self in Healing with Dr. Richard Schwartz, Internal Family Systems
Every voice is named by two or more agreeing sources.
“I think maybe that there is an alternative to the more traditional pathologizing approach to mental health, that there's a very different way to view the DSM and all those diagnoses and to work with what they represent. So I think that's where I'd start.”
IFS offers a different, non‑pathologizing way to view diagnoses like those in the DSM.
“And then there are the parts that are frozen in the scenes where they, anytime they did show what I call self-leadership, they were hurt more, that we call exiles.”
In IFS, “exiles” are parts that were hurt when they tried to act with self‑leadership.
“Because self can choose. It's, you're not sort of compelled to do things or not do things by your parts when you access more self-leadership.”
Richard argues that choice should be considered a ninth C of self‑leadership.
“I can't even name what I want. As soon as I do that, it feels scary.”
Emily shares a client’s experience of feeling fear when naming personal desires.
“We have 4 goals in IFS. The first is to help the parts out of the extreme roles they've been forced into, help them transform into their naturally valuable states.”
Richard outlines the first of four IFS goals: freeing parts from extreme roles.
“the only solution to that dilemma is for what I'm calling self to become that redeemer, to become that primary attachment figure.”
Self must act as the primary attachment figure for parts.
“the biggest mistake was going to exiles, what I call exiles, without permission from the protectors and creating this big backlash”
Skipping protector permission when accessing exiles causes strong backlash.
“we are getting reports from clients about damage they're encountering because these are poorly trained therapists calling themselves IFS therapists.”
Unqualified IFS practitioners are causing client harm.
“I got a bunch of backlash from my colleagues that I was in this training program with and in the field in general.”
Schwartz faced professional backlash when he introduced IFS.
“for 98% of human history, we were prey animals.”
He notes that for most of human history humans were prey, shaping our hyper‑vigilance.
“maybe there are no bad parts, which is the title of my last book.”
He proposes that all parts are ultimately not bad.
“And we would go to the part that did this, the offending, and get curious about it and get all the parts that were so ashamed or afraid of it to step out.”
He describes working with a part that committed abuse, uncovering its protective intent.
“every time we unburden somebody in our office, it has ripples.”
He observes that unburdening one person creates ripple effects.
“if we can bring more self to the planet, it will begin to heal itself.”
He predicts that increasing collective Self will help the planet heal.
“I'm feeling the feels. I just, I'm, yeah, my body's responding. I'm noticing my temperature is rising. I have some tears in my eyes. I'm really going there.”
Emily notices her temperature rise and tears as she visualizes the person.
“Yeah, there's just like a loosening. There's like a spaciousness, like my, like there's space between my bones and my muscle kind of feeling.”
She describes a feeling of loosened, spacious muscles after the exercise.
“All these parts, even the protectors, are pretty young and they're overpromoted. In family therapy, we would call them parentified children.”
Richard explains that internal parts act like parent‑ified inner children.
“if they trust that that's in it for them, they'll step back a lot of the time.”
He predicts that trusted parts will often step back.
“we put out a workbook recently. So we also trying to bring it now directly to the public, which took me a long time to get the courage up to do that because I'm worried about people overextending, but I think we I think we did a good job with the workbook”
Richard recommends listeners check out the new IFS workbook.