Tami Simon: This program is brought to you by SoundsTrue.com. At SoundsTrue.com, you can find hundreds of downloadable audio learning programs plus books, music, videos, and online courses and events. At SoundsTrue.com, we think of ourselves as a trusted partner on the spiritual journey, offering diverse, in-depth, and life-changing wisdom. SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey.
You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Dr. Richard Schwartz. Richard Schwartz is the Founder of the Center for Self Leadership and his books include Internal Family Systems Therapy and You’re the One You’ve Been Waiting For. Richard Schwartz has developed Internal Family Systems in response to clients’ descriptions of experiencing various parts—many extreme—within themselves. He noticed that when these parts felt safe and had their concerns addressed, they were less disruptive and would accede to the wise leadership of what Richard Schwartz came to call “the Self.” With Sounds True, Richard Schwartz has created a new audio learning series called Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Discovering Your True Self Through Internal Family Systems Therapy, where he shows us how to engage even the most disturbing or unwanted parts of our psyche with openness and love so we may unlock the hidden gifts and wisdom each part contains.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Dick and I spoke about the multiplicity phenomenon—how we are all multiples—and how he stumbled upon the discovery that we are made of many parts. We talked about how our parts can take on emotional states as burdens and how the unburdening process works within IFS. We also talked about connections between IFS and shamanism, new discoveries about IFS through MDMA research, and how Dick is bringing IFS to the world of social activism, education, medicine, and mediation. And finally, we talked about what it means to be self-led and how this relates to spiritual liberation or enlightenment, how there are degrees of self leadership, and what a black belt, self-led day looks like and feels like for Dick Schwartz. Here’s my conversation with Dick Schwartz.
In preparing for this conversation, I had the chance to listen to your new audio series, Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts. And in that series, you really talk about Internal Family Systems as a spiritual path. I want to get there, Dick, and I want to talk to you about that. But to begin, I want your help in introducing the Internal Family Systems—IFS—model to our listeners. I think sometimes people—when they hear about something like IFS, they think it’s only for the initiated, the people who understand this private language that IFS therapists can tend to use. I notice that in preparing for this interview I developed an agenda, which is to make IFS as accessible as possible. So, help me here: in the most accessible way possible, introduce the IFS model.
Richard Schwartz: OK, well that is a challenge, and I share the goal. I just haven’t found the best elevator speech for it. But I’ll try.
So IFS is—as you said, it’s become a kind of life practice and it does have a spiritual aspect to it. So, you could call it a spiritual practice. And it’s also a way of understanding human beings and their complexity, and also how they can heal. I stumbled into this 30-some years ago and been exploring it ever since.
What I ran into back then was what I’m going to call “the multiplicity phenomenon”—the idea that we naturally have what I call “parts,” but other systems call things like “sub-personalities” or “ego states.” In other words, an angry part of you that sometimes takes over and makes you say things you regret isn’t just a bundle of anger, and that if you were to focus on it and ask some questions of it, you would learn that it’s a full-range inner personality that maybe is also afraid and also hurt, and that it protects other parts of you that are quite vulnerable.
So, I stumbled into this simply because clients began talking this language to me and I became intrigued, and just to then studying these inner systems of clients that most people can access quite easily. They just never take the time to shift their focus inside. Or if we do, we’re guided away from the phenomenon by some kinds of meditations and spiritual practices that don’t believe in the phenomenon. So, we don’t notice it.
But, yes the idea is that we’re all naturally multiple and that’s a good thing, because each of them contains qualities and resources that help us in our lives. There aren’t any bad parts. I’m sort of the Will Rogers of the phenomenon—I never met a part I didn’t like, ultimately.
And trauma and attachment injuries and other slings and arrows have the effect of shifting them out of their naturally valuable roles into extreme roles that can be damaging. They have become frozen in the past during these traumas and they still think you’re five years old, even though you’ve grown up and you don’t need their services in the way you did when you were five. They get frozen in these roles and they take on what I’m going to call “burdens,” which are extreme beliefs and emotions that entered your system from these bad experiences and attached to them almost like a virus and drive the way they operate.
So, while they all are valuable—just like a kid in a family who’s a dysfunctional family [can] become very acting out and endanger his family or himself, that isn’t the nature of the kid. That’s because he carries these extreme beliefs and emotions that he got either from an outside trauma or from the role he’s been forced into in the family.
So, the idea is the same with this inner kids—that they aren’t what they seem when you first meet them. If you can access what I’m going to call your Self with a capital “S” and have a conversation with them from a place of curiosity, calm, and confidence, they’ll share their secret history of how they were forced into these roles—how much they hate what they’ve been forced into and how much they’re afraid to leave their role because they’re afraid of what might happen to you. So, they’re actually trying to protect you usually.
Then there are a bunch of parts that, by dint of being hurt or scared or shamed, shift from being happy-go-lucky inner little children to now being kind of radioactive. We don’t want anything to do with them because they have the power to make us feel all the things we felt when we were traumatized because they carry those burdens. So, we try to lock them up inside and keep them away from us, and don’t look back and just move on.
But once you get a bunch of these—what I call “exile parts”—life is much more delicate because the world can trigger them at any moment. You could be overwhelmed by all that, that they carry. So, all these other protectors have to take on roles to keep them contained and to keep the world from triggering them.
So, all of that is the way I understand parts from years of exploring all of this. But the big contribution is that in addition to them and actually just to beneath the surface of them lies what I call the Self with a capital “S,” which is very similar to what many different spiritual traditions have names for, like atman or buddha nature and so on. And once accessed, there’s a wisdom about how to heal all this [that] will take over sessions and begin to relate the parts in a human way when it’s accessed. And another thing I stumbled onto is a very quick way for most clients to access it simply by asking parts to open space until I can relax or step back, separate from the Self, unblend.
And as they do that, what I’m calling the Self emerges spontaneously, suddenly, and universally. And it turns out it can’t be damaged and as, I said, knows how to take over and heal all this.
So, how’d I do?
TS: I think you lost a lot of people somewhere in that process, but the good news is we’re going to break it down because I’m intensely interested in what you’re teaching, and have an intuitive resonance and have learned so much from your work. [I] am very, very passionate about people tracking with you here.
So, we’re going to start by the comment that you made—that we’re all multiples. What occurs to me is that I think most people know this. Most people know that this rage thing that I went on—that was some weird rage part of myself. It’s not really who I am, but it’s the rage thing. That part of me that wants to hide in the closet and suck my thumb—that’s some other part.
So, my question is: if we all kind of know this, why [do you think] this [is] a hard idea for people often to accept? Why pretend that I’m one person when I obviously have these strange parts that take over?
RS: Yes. Well, once I got hip to this, I started to explore that question of, “Why is this so countercultural?” And the answers that I’ve been able to come up with are in a book that I think you guys are going to be publishing—working with us on. I describe all this history. But it’s called Many Minds, One Self.
And what I find is that this idea that the mind is naturally multiple—and healthily multiple—has come up over and over through the course of not only psychotherapy but Western culture and some Eastern culture. Then it gets shut back down over and over. Most recently it was pathologized mainly by the people who talk about multiple personality disorder, starting probably with Pierre Janet, who was a trauma researcher who made a lot of important, valuable contributions. But one thing—he ran into parts. He ran into this phenomenon, but he thought it was the product of trauma so that the unitary minds had become fragmented by the intense pain. The goal was to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
So, he didn’t respect or really understand the independent and valuable nature of the parts and thought they were a sign of pathology. So, having multiple personalities has become a sign of mental illness.
So that’s the best I can do in terms of why it’s become so countercultural. There is something about the idea that you have one mind with different thoughts and emotions that seems appealing to human beings. I’m not sure exactly why. I mean, when I first encountered the phenomena, I had the same reaction everybody does: “Oh my God, these clients are much sicker than I thought,” until I started listening inside myself and found them. “Oh my God, I’ve got them too.”
And as you get to know them, it’s wonderful. It’s just a really good way to live—to keep an eye on them and interact with them. But in the beginning—and largely because it’s so countercultural—it’s quite jarring for some people.
TS: OK, so someone’s listening and they’re like, “But wait, maybe these are just emotional states. Why is Dick emphasizing so much that they’re independent?” And in the series Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts, you talk about the personhood of these parts and how important it is to understand and relate to their personhood. And I can imagine someone saying, “No, these are just sort of emotional states that take over.”
RS: Yes and that’s again the way that I thought of it initially. You can hold that position only so long if you actually interact with them because if you do, either inside yourself or if you’re a therapist, with your clients, you will learn what I learned—that they are much more than just unidimensional internal states and that they actually are little inner beings, for lack of a better word, who in many ways are parallel to external people—also in the way they relate to each other. There is literally this kind of internal family.
So, I’m more like what William James called “a radical empiricist.” I’m just kind of reporting the data, even though it took me way far away from my paradigm and my comfort zone. I’m not asking people to believe me because I’m saying it’s true. I’m just pointing towards something that is, from my point of view, a very real phenomenon that people can very easily explore themselves and find out if it’s true.
TS: So, what was it that you were seeing in your therapy practice 30-some odd years ago that showed you that these were independent beings with their own personhood—these parts of ourselves?
RS: Because that’s what they were telling me. At some point, I got very curious about the phenomenon after I got over the freak-out and everything. I started to talk to them directly at times or I’ve had my client talk to them. As I stayed curious and let go of my preconceptions, they talked like a little inner person—you know, the scared part that made the client shrink so often. We’d talk about why [they] did that and who it was, and how it also was angry and that it interacted with the anger part to try and cover it up and keep it at bay, and that it was protecting other parts that were very vulnerable. It could describe this whole network inside.
It was like I’d opened the door to an inner world that the client and I were just sort of mystified by. So again, it’s just—and now, thousands of therapists all over the world are finding the same thing because they actually tried it, and most of them came in quite skeptically about it.
TS: Now, you mentioned how these parts of us early in our life can take on burdens. And I’m wondering if you can explain that, and maybe give me an example of that lots of people could relate to.
RS: Yes. So, let’s say even accidentally in your family, one of your parents gave you the message that you weren’t valued somehow. I’m sure that it didn’t happen to you, Tami, but it sure happened to me several times. Many times. So, one part of you will take on this idea—this belief that you’re not valuable—because you got that from that caretaker. And with that belief will come a kind of terror—that you’re not going to survive because we’re born with the knowledge that if we aren’t valued by our caretakers, we don’t live.
So, that would be an example of a belief that then organizes the way this part is. So, this part now becomes very eager to please people—or some other protector of it does—to try and regain some kind of sense of being valuable so you won’t die.
But this pervading sense of being worthless also influences how much you show yourself and your life, and who you think you can have as a partner, and who you really believe you are—unless you actually get to that part and help it out of where it’s stuck in the past, where it got the belief from your mother, and help it unburden [and] release that extreme belief or emotion it carries. At which point, it will immediately transform into this happy-go-lucky, playful child it was originally.
So it’s almost like these beliefs are like curses that come onto our parts and attach to them. Once we unburden, the parts snap out of the trance they were in and they become valuable again.
TS: Can you help me understand how the unburdening process takes place in IFS?
RS: Yes. So, I stumbled onto this years ago because when I would ask—like I got hip to the fact that people have parts and I’m a structural family therapist, so I was trying to change all these inner relationships just the way I was changing external family relationships. And once I found Self, I would try to get Self to interact with the parts that had been exiled or had been locked away and bring them out. I would find that we could do that and I could even—the client would go and would actually hold and comfort this little child that felt worthless. And the child in the moment would feel a lot better, but in the next session would come back and was still feeling as bad.
So, as we explored that, the part itself would talk about how it carried this sort of tar on its skin. That’s the way it would describe it—r carried this fireball in its gut, or this pain, or this weight on its shoulders. That wasn’t it, but it carried it.
And this is literally what these parts would talk about that was making it continue to feel so bad. So, I came to call those “burdens” and explored them. They were extreme beliefs or extreme emotions that came from where they were stuck in the past, from those experiences.
I found that we would say, “OK, well what happens if you take that out of your body or off of your body?” And the part would take it off and—again—would feel a lot lighter and more playful. But then the next session it would be back in them the same way.
So again, through trial and error, [I] discovered that for a part to unburden and keep the burdens out, they need really two things in addition to being loved by the Self. They need you yourself—not necessarily the therapist—but they need you to get what happened when they got the burden in the past and also how bad that was for them. So, you need to become a compassionate witness to your own history.
And then they also need you—your Self—to enter that scene in this kind of inner world and be there for that [inaudible] child in the—in way your case—she needed at the time, and actually ask that little girl what she wants you to do back there for her that she couldn’t do back then. Clients will actually go and yell at the abuser for this little girl, or push their parent away or do whatever part wants, and then when it’s done—when all that’s done—bring that girl out of that time period to a safe, comfortable place.
At which point, I would have you ask if she’s ready to unload these emotions and beliefs she’s been carrying. Most parts, if those two steps are complete—the witnessing and the retrieval, taking you out of where she’s stuck—if those are complete, the answer will be yes. Then we’ll literally send this tar or this fireball or the weight—or whatever it is—out of the client’s system through one of the elements, usually. Light, water, fire, wind—or the part will decide what it wants to send that out.
And then once it’s gone, the part immediately feels much lighter or better. We can invite qualities into it. The part will invite qualities into it that fill up the spaces the burdens took that are always valuable. That’s a kind of consolidated piece of healing with that part. And then we bring in the parts that hated it or had been afraid of it to come and see they don’t have to continue to protect the system, and they shift into other roles too.
Now that will stick. The burdens won’t come back if during the next three weeks to a month you were to visit that girl and make sure she was still OK. So, there’s some kind of homework that takes place with clients too to keep it all going. One of the things I like best about access is that many people can do this on their own after they get the hang of it. That’s why I say it becomes a kind of life practice.
TS: Now in the audio series, you draw a parallel that I thought was very interesting between shamanic practice and the work of an IFS practitioner—or if I’m doing it myself, a shamanic path and the IFS path. Can you talk some to that?
RS: Yes. Pretty early on I heard about shamanism—back in the late ’80s, early ’90s. Then there was a book that came out by Sandra Ingerman—I believe—about it. I became very intrigued by the parallels because what they were describing seemed to be on very similar worlds—the one my clients would enter when they would do this process. We didn’t need any inductions or medicines to get there. All I would do would be have clients focus on a part and suddenly at least some of them was in this other world where they could see other parts and could see a kind of landscape in many cases, and so on.
So, I do think that it is basically the same world that the shamans for centuries have been exploring with their healing practices and that they talked about soul retrieval, for example—going and getting a part out of where it’s stuck. So, all that seemed very parallel, quite amazingly parallel, when I stumbled onto that.
The difference being they rely a lot more on what they call power animals or guides of various kinds to do a lot of the healing. Whereas my system—it’s the client’s Self who becomes the primary healer.
TS: Now, you mentioned that you stumbled on the Self. You stumbled on the fact that when parts can open space—and I think you used the word “un-blend”—that there’s this Self here. And first of all I want to say something, Dick. I don’t know if you’re just being humble or whatever, but this phrase that you’ve used a couple times—”stumbling on” what I think are very brilliant discoveries—it’s kind of interesting. I mean, have you really fumbled and stumbled your way here?
RS: Totally, yes. It was all a process of discovery. Yes:1 this didn’t come out of my brain’s brilliance. I was an average student in school. So, it’s not because I’m so smart. It’s because if I’m proud of anything, it’s that I stayed very curious and I discarded a lot of presumptions I had about the phenomenon. So I sort of had beginner’s mind—as I know you know what I mean—through the whole experience and was just intrigued and kind of fascinated. I was very lucky to have some clients who were really articulate about it initially and would tell me when I had it wrong, and would say, “No, this is the way it is.” If I’m proud of anything, it’s that I actually listened to them.
Because of my background as a family therapist, I was assiduously avoiding most intrapsychic kinds of concepts. So, I came with very few preconceptions. I really had to learn from my clients.
But yes, it was all a process of stumbling and being amazed. It’s like, “Whoa, if this pans out—if this is the way it is in other people too—this is amazing,” was my constant refrain in the early days. And it turns out it is amazing.
TS: And you discovered then something that you called the Self, which is different from our parts. How did you discover the Self?
RS: Just again, through trial and error. I mean I was—when I learned that parts weren’t what they seemed and actually were protective—[and] I learned that just from the parts—then I decided, “OK, I’m going to get my client to listen to them more rather than fight them or try and lock them away.” So, I would set up dialogues between my client initially in the gestalt empty chair technique. And as I would have them talk to these parts, other parts would interfere. It was clear. It would suddenly become angry at the part or be afraid of it.
So, it reminded me of family sessions where I was working with maybe a teenage daughter and her critical mother. As she was interacting, the teenage girl became angry at the mother. And you look around the room, and you see the father’s cuing her because he disagrees with the mother too. And we learned in family therapy to get him to cut it out, to move back out of her line of vision, and create a better boundary between the mother and the daughter. And then things settle down and they have a good conversation.
I thought maybe the same thing in this inner family would work. So, I began asking clients to find the part who had jumped in and was interfering in the relationship with the part they were trying to initially—the target part they were trying to talk to—and ask it to just give us some space, step back, let us continue without its interference. To my amazement, clients could do that. And when they did, when these parts would open space like that, this other person would emerge who knew how to relate in a human way to the target part and would be—we have what we call “The Eight Cs of Self-Leadership.”
So, it would be curious, like in a pure way, without an agenda, and would be calm, and at peace, and confident relative to the client—and also very often spontaneously compassionate. When they get there, I would say, “What part of you is that?” And they would say, “That’s not a part like these others. That’s really who I am. That’s myself.”
So, that’s why I call it “the Self.” And it turns out again, that’s just as parts open space, that comes out in everybody spontaneously and not only tend to this inner healing, but can relate to the outside world in a healing way too—in an effective way. So self-leadership has become a big part of the work, and knowing when you’re in your body with your Self. That was some of what I think the exercise in the course are about—and knowing when a part is there instead, and being able to ask that part to open space in the moment, becomes part of this life practice.
TS: Now I’m thinking that some listeners may not be clear when you say “open space”—that a part can open space. And I want to make this really clear—what that means when it’s happening. Let’s go back to that worthless part that I think many of us might feel. Some part of us that just feels, “Shoot, I’m basically not lovable.” Something like that. I think a lot of people have a person inside that feels, at the end of the day, “I’m probably not worth being loved.” Something like that.
RS: Right.
TS: In your work, if I understand that correctly, if that’s an extreme feeling, that could be an exiled sense at the end of the day. “I’m worth zero.”
RS: Yes. Often it is. Yes. And often we try to exile it, but it comes out whenever we’re not getting acclimated. So, whenever we’re not distracting ourself by being busy, it breaks out of exile.
Yes. But go ahead.
TS: OK, and then with this exiled part, there’s another part of me that might come forward that doesn’t want that to get discovered. So maybe that’s—in my case—the workaholic part or the part that’s going after those accolades.
So, what would it mean if I recognize that I have these two parts and they’re in relationship that the space could open for the Self to come forward?
RS: Right. So, let’s just hypothetically say you have those two parts.
TS: Hypothetically!
RS: And I would have you often—almost always we would start with the second one: with the part that is a workaholic and tries to bring accolades. That for sure would be a protector and we don’t start with exiles. The other one is likely to be an exile. Do you follow that?
TS: I do. So, is it fair to say that the exiles and protectors come in these pairs in IFS?
RS: Often in pairs. Pairs or triangles. So, you might have a workaholic that tries to bring the accolades to counter the worthlessness and make you feel good and keep that part down—the worthlessness down. But you also might have a part that tells you not to try and to try to make you feel bad about yourself so you don’t take any risks and is polarized with the one that wants you to get out there and work all the time. So, that is a common triangle if you follow this.
TS: OK, I’m with you.
RS: Two protectors trying to protect the same exile but in opposite ways. Almost like in a family you’ve got a vulnerable child and one parent’s going to be the hard-ass and the other one’s too soft to counter that. So, the same idea.
So, I would start with one of the protectors and I would have you focus on it and find it in your body, which you could do readily. Then I would ask you this magic question: “How do you feel towards that part—that workaholic part?” And you might say, “I kind of depend on it. I like it. It gets me a lot of things, but it really also makes me really tired and dominates too much,” or some version of that. So, I would say, “I get that, but let’s get the part that’s irritated with it or overwhelmed by it. Let’s get them all to give us a little space in there, just relax and step back.” And as you did that—and people just kind of have a knowledge of how to do that—you would say, “OK they did,” or not. If they don’t, then we work with them. But usually, [you would do it] and I’d say, “Now, how do you feel toward this workaholic part?” And it’s likely to be some version of, “I’m curious about it. I want to help it not have to work so hard,” and then I’d know I’ve got more Self.
So, the simple of having you ask other parts to step back, relax, open space, separate frees up more of your Self. I didn’t tell you to be curious, I didn’t tell you—it just automatically kind of happens. Then you can have a good conversation where the workaholic part will give you information about what it’s protecting, which will lead us to the worthless part—though we don’t go to those parts without permission. So, we would negotiate with the workaholic part permission to go to the one that carries the worthlessness.
I would have you focus on it, find it in your body. “How do you feel toward it?” and you might be really afraid of it. So, I would ask the parts that fear it to give us some space. And how do you feel now? “I feel sorry for it. I see now that it’s just a scared child.”
Is this helping? Am I making this come to life?
TS: It is helping. It is. It is.
So, you mentioned that when the parts unblend with the Self, the Self comes forward with these eight Cs. And I didn’t get them all, Dick. I got curious, calm, confident, and compassionate. But what are the last four Cs?
RS: Yes. So the other four include clarity. So, maybe as you started towards the workaholic part, it looked like this really important person that you need to listen to. Then as the others step back, including the ones who depend on it, the image shifted and now you saw a teenage kid trying desperately to please everybody and work hard. So, your image shifted because your Self sees clearly that it’s not this really important person. It’s just a kid trying her best.
And the same things happens in the outside world. I could have you focus on somebody that bothers you a lot and your image would be of some ugly person. And I’d get those parts to step back, and you’d see the person much more clearly. So, clarity is one.
Then courage—like suddenly you have the courage to go into these inner basements or abysses where the exiles live and be able to help them. Whereas before you were really afraid to do that.
And then creativity. So, whereas when your parts are there, you have very limited ways of relating to people or to parts inside. Self has wide range [and] has lots of creative ways of being with parts and people.
Then finally—and this relates to the spirituality of it—Self has this kind of knowledge that you’re connected. You’re connected to other people, you’re also connected to something bigger than us, and that you’re connected to the earth. So, there’s this kind of knowledge about our connectedness that’s very reassuring, but it also fuels our compassion because if we’re so connected, if somebody suffers over here, we’re going to want to help them because we know at some level they’re the same as us. Also there’s a desire to connect from Self—a desire to meet and feel and be present with the Self of another person or the Self of our parts, and connect those dots in a way.
That for me is just part of spirituality of it—that where there are myths and various spiritual traditions that, for whatever reason, God subdivided or exploded and we all carry these pieces inside of us. There’s a desire to bring it all back to together, and I do think there’s something to that.
TS: So, these eight C-words all describe what it’s like to be in a state of self-leadership. You make a pretty outrageous claim in this audio teaching series: that discovering self-leadership could be considered comparable to something like spiritual liberation or classical enlightenment. I thought, “Wow, that’s a bold claim.” Can you unpack that a bit?
RS: Yes. Well, again, in this book I mentioned earlier, I looked at every religious tradition and also at the esoteric branches of those traditions to see how they conceptualize what I’m calling “Self.” And indeed every one had a word for it. Virtually every one, in describing what they would call enlightenment, it was really that shift in your center of gravity, your identity, from what many traditions would call an ego in a pejorative way—which I’m a crusader against actually, because it’s very just your parts, what they call the ego. And yes, they do all the things people complain about. But if you love them rather than trying to ignore them or disparage them, you’ll have much better luck.
Anyway, that’s an aside. They were all in very similar language describing Self and describing enlightenment as this sort of knowledge that that’s who you really are—that when you get that in your bones, when you really shift your center of gravity to Self, then everything is different.
That’s what I find and that’s what I find happens with clients as they know, “I’m not this little piece of worthlessness I thought I was,” or, “I’m not this achieving part. I’m not this workaholic. That’s not who I am, really.” Beneath that is this center with not only the C words, but lots of other great qualities that I didn’t include partly because they don’t begin with the letter C—but that all the spiritual traditions also describe. I just didn’t really go into—you know the name, John Makransky?
TS: No.
RS: OK. He’s a Tibetan Buddhist leader and lama, and wrote a very nice book about this phenomenon and describes in a much better way that I can the same thing that he calls “buddha nature” or Dzogchen and that’s who we really are. In his book and many, many books that I’ve read, that’s what they’re saying—that once you get, that you’re enlightened.
So, I know it sounds outrageous but—and it’s hard to hold onto that because our parts can blend again and take over again and so on. And there are degrees of that enlightenment—degrees of knowing yourself as who you are and leading from that place in life. So, we have probably black belt [and] brown belt levels of enlightenment. But the more you unburden, the more—see, the burdens that our parts carry keep us away from that knowledge and create disconnects.
Burdens in general make it so our parts feel isolated from us and don’t know us, and that our Self is not embodied as much because of the burdens. We don’t have as much access to whatever you want to call the big Self. So, the process of unburdening itself brings you closer and closer to enlightenment.
TS: Can you describe to me a day lived as a black belt, Self-led human? What’s that like? This is a black belt day.
RS: Yes. I wish I could describe my personal life that way, but unfortunately I can’t. I can describe that day when I’m with clients.
TS: I just chose one day, Dick. I wasn’t like—you know what I mean. I was just like one day. Yes.
RS: Yes, OK.
So, on a really good day, I feel a sense of inner well-being. I feel all those C-words in my body. Maybe I’m teaching or I’m working with clients, and I literally feel a vibrating energy running through my body that makes my fingers tingle [and] that we call self-energy that comes with this and that other systems call qi or prana. That just seems to come automatically when parts open a lot of space.
So, all that’s happening in me. Then as I’m interacting with people, I’m doing it very spontaneously, without a lot of thought. Words are [just] coming very easily and smoothly and the words seem very wise to people. And I’m really enjoying because I feel so connected. I really—if I’m working with a client, it feels like a sacred experience to go on these adventures inside them.
So, it’s like I’m meditating. I feel uplifted by the experience. I don’t feel drained as a therapist. I feel very privileged to be with people in that state.
Then it’s the same when I’m teaching. I just love helping people come to this. So, I feel like I’m doing what I’m here to do. That’s the kind of sense I have. That is what I believe—that we are helping people unburden and become more enlightened and embodied in Self. Not so that they leave and go to these other realms and spend their time in unity or nondual states, but so they bring Self to this plane and start to become Self-led activists in the world. I believe that’s part of my job—is to help people do that. And I actually do work with social activists to do this.
So, I’m kind of rambling, I think. But yes, that’s a good day for me.
TS: And describe to me what it’s like when you’re not having such a good day, but you’re somehow returning—at least at moments—to Self-leadership.
RS: Well, I can describe an interaction I had with my wife about 10 minutes ago.
TS: That works.
RC: Or 10 minutes before we started. I won’t give you the content of our argument, but it’s a chronic one. She got very angry at me, and so I got very angry at her. So, we had these two angry parts doing the interaction with each other for a period of time. When that happens, I’m very, very far away from the person I was describing earlier because I share all this voice saying negative things about her, and she looks less attractive to me and so on.
But now, after a lot of work on myself and experience with this, at the same time I know that that’s just a part that’s taken over temporarily. And I know that it’s just a part of her, and that we have this little unpleasant interaction between these two parts. But, both of us still have a Self, and I know that my Self loves her very much and thinks she’s very attractive, and that all this is going to recede before too long.
So, that makes a huge difference. Because we’ve both been healing the exiles that get triggered by these angry parts of each other, that doesn’t last very long. Whereas in the beginning of our relationship it would last for days. And now it lasts for usually at most maybe half an hour. Then we’re back and we’re connected and we’re thinking the other is attractive.
TS: Now, I want to circle back to something that you said as an aside—something like, “I’m a fierce crusader against pejoratively talking about the ego and that the ego is made up of our parts and their interactions together.” I wanted to understand more how you see the ego in IFS.
RS: What’s traditionally called the ego is what I would say is a collection of protectors who are—in your case and my case—one would be the workaholic. Another would be a part that’s worried about pleasing everybody. Another would be a part that’s very intellectual and is trying to figure things out and make sense of the world, and [helped get] us through graduate school.
So, it’s a collection of several—what we call “manager parts.” They’re trying to manage our lives so we don’t get hurt. They’re trying their best, and sometimes they do all the things they get a bad name for. They keep us attached and they make us kind of shallow, and they don’t want us to spend time meditating. So on and so on.
And when we try to meditate, they’re the ones that are yapping all the time—the monkey minds. They have such a bad name.
If instead of trying to shoo them away and feeling irritated by them, you go to them—often in the beginning of a mediation—and you just love them up and thank them for trying so hard and remind them that it’ll be good for everybody if they give you a little space, then they all relax and you have this great meditation. You don’t have to battle with them and they don’t feel just abused by you for just trying to do their jobs.
So, that’s some of what I’m trying to bring to many different spiritual traditions that have this attitude. I was part of the Mind and Life Conference a year and a half ago, I guess it was. I tried to bring this to the Dalai Lama because he says that you have these destructive emotions and you have these constructive emotions. For me, that’s just a big, big problem.
TS: Say more about that—it’s a big problem. But you don’t believe that anger and all that hot rage is a destructive emotion?
RS: No, they’re not. They’re parts that carry those burdens, but they’re just trying to protect. If you go to them with compassion—what I’m trying to get people to do is become inner bodhisattvas. Not just bodhisattvas in the outside world, but to do that in the inside world.
Or when I talk to Christians, I’m saying, “What Jesus did in the outside world, do in the inside. Go to the exiles. Jesus loved the poor people and loved the lepers—and you’ve got a bunch of lepers in there. So, just be a good Christian inside.”
So, if you think of your anger—or the Buddhists have theirs that they don’t like the most, which I forget what they are. But if you see them as those are just destructive emotions, then you are going to have an attitude about them, and you’re going to try to have antidotes to combat them. But if you see them as parts trying their best—little kids who are stuck in these terrible roles and are trying their best to keep you safe (which is what they are)—then you’ll go to them with compassion.
And that’s what I said to him. You tell us to go with compassion to your external enemies. Why not do that to our internal enemies?
TS: And what happened in that dialogue?
RS: You know, I don’t think he really understood what I was saying, or I couldn’t really follow how he was responding. So, it didn’t really seem to go anywhere. But it made headlines in the Buddhist newspapers.
TS: And when you talk about this angry part as being like a little kid, is that because it came online when we were young?
RS: Yes—although at best they’re usually teenage. Most parts are quite young and they stay that way. But yes, most of our parts came online—and they were without [inaudible]—they were forced into this angry role when they were quite young. They’re frozen back there too. They still think you’re five years old and that the world is as dangerous as it was then, and that they’ve got to keep the anger going because you never know when you’re going to get blindsided like it was when you were at the mercy of an abusive parent maybe—something like that.
Here’s a really easy experiment for people to try: If they were to just focus on a protector and maybe the anchor but maybe some other protector and get curious about it, and then ask it how old it thought they were, most people will get a single digit. And just updating these parts is a big relief to them often.
TS: Now, one of the things that I learned in listening to your new audio series is that one of the ways that we can become aware of what parts are living inside of us that are heavily burdened is by seeing what triggers us in other people. I thought that was just very useful. But also I’m curious, Dick: what triggers you in other people and how can you share with us the IFS model to understand how that might be something inside you that’s still burdensome?
RS: OK well about the only person who still triggers me is my wife, and so . . .
TS: What am important job she has.
RS: Indeed. And that’s the way we come to see the people who trigger us—as our what we call “tor-mentors” with a hyphen between the “tor” and the “mentor.” So, by triggering me, she’s mentoring me about what I need to heal, and there’s—she done a good job with a bunch of things that I’ve healed because of her. There’s still a couple, so actually the content of our most recent interaction—I’m embarrassed to admit—is around household chores and how I don’t do enough, which is true. I’m trying hard to be better, and from this part or this point of view, it’s very hard for her to see the progress sometimes.
So, that was the content. Because my mother tried very, very hard to get me to do a lot of stuff around the house and would spend a lot of her life frustrated with me because she didn’t succeed very well, then there’s a part that is very allergic to criticism about this [and] that I really have to work with, and can be very defensive, which just makes her crazy—Jean, my wife.
So, that was the content. What I’ve hoped to still work on is [to] go to that boy who’s stuck back with my mother and help him see that she isn’t her and I don’t have to be defensive about it, and then also go to the lazy part of me that doesn’t want to have to. Well, not only is it lazy, but it still has some patriarchal attitudes about house work, I’m also embarrassed to admit. You’ve got me—
TS: This is getting good.
RS:—spilling my guts there.
TS: This is getting good, yes.
RS: [Laughs.] And so I have yet to totally unburden that one, but still plan to. And yes, she’s still tormenting me that I need to heal that stuff. I also need to work with that part that reacts so angrily to her angry part, which at this point has become such a chronic issue that there are parts of her kind of set up. How’s that?
TS: That’s good. Now I’m curious: both of you knowing what you know about Self-leadership and your comment that it can take about half an hour at most to reset back into this being centered in the Self—how does that work in a situation like this?
RS: Yes. So, we’ll have those exchanges and then get a little distance from each other, and we both begin to talk to our parts. Sometimes it’s hard for me because she likes to talk to them out loud. So I’m hearing this angry part go on about me in the other room. But, we’ll have a talk and remind them—because she’s got stuff with her family of course and so on—and get them to step back, and then we’ll come back. The process is what I call “speak for your part rather than from it.”
So, rather than my sensibly saying, “Why do you always . . . ?”—you know that kind of stuff—I’m saying, “You know, when you pointed out that I left the mustard on the counter and the way that you said it, it triggered this little part of me that used to feel so criticized by my mother. And that triggered this defensive guy. So, I’m sorry I let him take over that way. And I’m going to keep working on him. It’d be helpful if when you saw that mustard on the counter, you didn’t lead with that part—but I can’t tell you what to do.”
Some version of that, but we’re both saying it from an openhearted place and reconnecting in the process. So, that’s how we try to do it.
TS: Well, that seems like a very important teaching—speak for your parts, not from them. That seems very important.
RS: Yes, it’s totally valuable.
TS: There’s one final thing I want to make sure we talk about, and it’s something that you and I spoke about when we were together recently. You also brought it forward in this new audio teaching series—that someone that you’ve trained, an IFS practitioner, has been doing some interesting MDMA research. One of the things that is being discovered is that when people are in their MDMA journey, they have ready access to these parts. These parts are coming forward and having conversations and having healing experiences. I wanted to hear more about this.
RS: Yes. That’s been very moving for me. Yes. The man is named Michael Mithoefer—and his wife Annie. [They] have spearheaded this big movement. It’s become a kind of movement because they’re in what they call phase three trials now with the FDA because they’ve shown that MDMA is so effective on PTSD. Michael and Annie both are IFS therapists. In the protocol, they spent eight hours in the session with somebody while they’re doing the medicine.
The protocol is they’ll just do a kind of Rogerian, client-directed approach with the person, unless spontaneously they begin to work with their parts, and then they’ll shift some into IFS. They found almost 80 percent of these people spontaneously, without any cuing from the therapist, start doing a very IFS-like process because it turns out that the MDMA seems to access a huge amount of Self for some reason and helps all these protectors relax.
Then, as I keep saying, when people access a lot of Self, they know how to do this. They know how to heal their parts and they start to do it and tell the therapist about it.
So, he’s got a lot of videos of people saying things like—like a guy who was a combat vet in Iraq sees his anger who earlier had [been] described as this little demon with red eyes that he was trying to choke and who was stabbing him. He’s sees it, but he’s locked it in a jail and it was a mistake. He’s opening the door now and he’s letting it out and he’s getting to know it, and they’re becoming friends. And he did it totally without any cuing from the therapist. So, for me, it was very validating because it just says that I stumbled onto the process that we know how to do—something that we do naturally when we access enough of this Self.
TS: OK, just one final question, Dick. This new audio series has more than a dozen guided exercises and practices where you lead people in guided journeys to work with their parts. One of the questions came up for me is: how effective is it really—do you know in your experience—for people to do this kind of work on their own with an audio series versus working with a therapist? I mean, can you really do this kind of deep work on your own?
RS: Many people can do an amazing amount on their own, again, because of what I’ve been saying. It is a kind of natural process we know how to do.
Then there will be people—particularly people with really, really bad trauma histories—who will have protective parts that won’t let them do it, or if they do succeed to some degree might shut it down suddenly, or even find ways to punish them. But most people—if you don’t have those kinds of parts—can do an awful lot on their own.
TS: All right. Very good. And just to end our conversation, what do you see as the next frontier for IFS? I notice you caught my ears when you said you were working with social activists, and of course that’s something we need in our time. What’s the new frontier?
RS: Well then, funny you should ask, because our next conference—our theme is “new horizons.” There’s a bunch, so we’re moving it fairly rapidly out of the psychotherapy. I mean, it’s still in the psychotherapy world, but moving it into other areas.
So, for example, I co-lead trainings with a guy named David Hoffman for mediators and conflict resolution people where I have a plenary at our conference on bringing it into education and helping kids learn to do this from an early age, and [teach] teachers how to stay in Self when they’re with the kids. I’m also going to present a conference on bringing this to schizophrenia because it turns out the voices are parts, and our psychiatry profession has terrified people about their voices. If you just help them not be so scared and listen to them, they’ll shift.
And what else? So, medicine—there’s some initiatives and it’s all quite overwhelming for me to stay on top of, but it’s also quite thrilling.
Spirituality: as I’ve been saying, I’ve been collaborating with Loch Kelly—who I think you know—and some other people in that realm. So, yes, it’s a lot.
TS: And in conclusion, I think you and I should both do more housework! Very good.
RS: You too, Tami? OK. I’m glad I’ve got company.
TS: Yes, my house is not a hotel, I’ve been told. Yes, very good.
I’ve been speaking with Dick Schwartz. He’s created with Sounds True a new six-session audio learning series. It includes more than a dozen guided practices. It’s powerful medicine. It’s called Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Discovering Your True Self Through Internal Family Systems Therapy. He’s also the author of several books on IFS, including Internal Family Systems Therapy and You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For. Dick, it’s great to talk to you, and I hope to be able to have many more conversations with you as we work together to introduce IFS to as many people as possible. It’s such a powerful approach. Thanks for all your good stumbling.
RS: Thank you for all your support, Tami. It means . . . I can’t tell you how much it means to me to have you helping me with this, and so into it. So, it really is wonderful.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world. Thanks for listening.
