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Feb. 3, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:36
1575 You Are Not Alone' - Freedomain Radio Interviews Dr Richard Schwartz - Freedomain Radio

A great MEcosystem theorist explains his approach. http://www.selfleadership.org

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Hello everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I have on the line Dr.
Richard Schwartz, who is the author of Internal Family Systems, which is a fascinating, fascinating approach to self-knowledge.
And rather than me badly paraphrase your, I think, very fascinating ideas, I was wondering if you could spend a little bit of time, Dr.
Schwartz, just talking about the degree to which You find multiplicity where most people, when they look inwards, are looking for a single personality element that you find more of an ecosystem of the personality.
Oh, well, okay.
I find that because most people, when I ask them to look inside, find that.
And that is a long time coming.
I've been doing this now About 30 years and got into it sort of serendipitously because I wound up working with clients who began describing what they called these parts of them inside themselves that seemed to have a lot of autonomy and they weren't multiple personality disordered clients so as I began to take seriously what they were saying And I'm trained as a family therapist,
so I began to kind of track the patterns inside in the way that I would if I was working with a family.
It became clear that a couple things became clear.
One, they weren't the only one that seemed to have these kinds of what I call parts, including myself.
As I looked inside myself, I found that I had them too, and that it wasn't necessarily a bad thing to have them.
They seemed to be very useful when they were out of their extreme role.
So most of this, unlike other kinds of philosophies of the mind, is derived empirically from experimentation with clients and trusting their reports.
And these observations now, as I say, have held up over 30 years.
And you have generally, if I remember right, you've generally categorized the inner personalities.
And by the way, I'm not a practitioner, but as a consumer of therapy, I found exactly the same phenomenon.
I didn't have a name for it before I read your work.
I called it the MECO system.
It's like the personality is sort of an ecosystem of balancing forces rather than a unity of sort of will and desire, which is what we're sort of trained in.
To believe and I had you know passionate debates during therapy with a variety of inner voices which was quite alarming to myself and Just just sort of hung in there and found that it was a very very productive process But you divide these personality aspects or parts into three categories the exiles the managers and the firefighters I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the roles that you see these different aspects performing Yeah,
well when I first encountered this I like an ecosystem, I'll say that.
I first encountered that kind of inner system in clients.
I really didn't know what I was doing and I managed to hurt a bunch of clients by mucking around sort of clumsily in that dark, murky land and became really committed to finding out how to help clients enter those worlds respectfully.
Without causing all that trouble.
And the process of doing that tried to identify what kinds of different roles parts were in and found that some of them were very protective of the person and then others were very, very vulnerable and were being protected by those protectors.
And the mistake that I and many other therapists have been making was to try to get to those vulnerable parts As soon as possible, because they're the ones that seem most obviously in need of healing, and to try and bypass the protectors, which we were considering to be the heart's resistance.
But over time learned that those protectors, if approached with respect and interest in them, will tell the story of how they got into their roles and How much they actually don't like having to do what they do but think there's no alternative to keep you safe.
And if convinced that going to the ones they protect, these very vulnerable parts that I call exiles because most of the time we try to lock them away inside of ourselves so that we don't have to experience their emotions because not only are they vulnerable but often They're the parts of us that carry the memories,
sensations, emotions, and beliefs from traumas that happened to us in the past, or from what in the field are called attachment injuries, sort of bad parenting experiences.
And since they carry all of that, they, in addition to seeming very vulnerable, can pull us back into scenes that In our history that we've vowed to never relive.
Because they actually, turns out, seem to be stuck in those places in the past.
So because of all of that, we try to lock them away.
I love the word ENCYST, E-N-C-Y-S-T. We kind of create a cyst inside of us to try and contain them.
And then these protective parts Go to work to try and keep us from ever touching them again and try to organize our lives and the world around us in such a way that they won't be touched.
So then it turns out there are two classes of protectors.
There are the ones who try to manage our appearance and our body and our performance and our relationships in such a way that Those exiles are never touched, never hurt, sort of have that never again philosophy like the Jews in the Holocaust.
And those parts tend to be the ones that might be hypervigilant, always looking for danger, also might be coaxing or criticizing us to perform better and work harder and lose weight and so on.
Throw up red flags when people get too close to us or too distant.
And also, often can be the intellectual parts that got us through college and graduate school and so on.
So, those we call managers, because they're trying to manage us and the world around us.
And they are also trying to preempt anything that might trigger the exile.
Similar to our country after 9-11.
They're in this very preemptive mode all the time on hyper alert, but also trying to get us to behave in ways that won't get us hurt again or trying to organize people around us so that we can be in control of everything.
And I think, if it's fair to say, that much like America after 9-11, the preemptive behavior, in fact, often will generate more of the results that are trying to be avoided, if that makes sense?
Yeah, there's a kind of axiom in the work that protective parts generally generate exactly the opposite of what they want.
They bring on more of what they're afraid is going to happen just by their very actions.
So that applies to most all protectors in general.
The other class of protective parts we call firefighters because they go into action after an exile has been triggered and you begin to become flooded by the flames of emotion that are exploding out of those cysts.
And when an exile is triggered, it's terrifying.
You feel like you're being pulled back into those Horrific scenes of humiliation or terror in the past or hurt.
And to avoid staying in those places, there's another class of parts that immediately goes into action in a kind of frantic way to either douse the flames with some substance or to dissociate or distract us from all that emotion with some kind of distracting activity.
Which is why we call these firefighters.
And these, sorry, the firefighters act, I guess there's a kind of acting out in that you will pursue self-destructive, self-soothing behaviors such as drugs or alcohol or promiscuity and so on?
At least that's one way that it could go?
Yes, indeed. There are a lot of what have been called self-destructive behaviors that are the actions of firefighters.
But there are also a lot of socially sanctioned behaviors that are firefighters too.
So, for example, if I feel slighted by somebody, I can go and write an article and I'll feel a lot better.
And I'll be very distracted from the hurt.
So, there are workaholics that are very, very successful because their firefighter activity happened to be productive in society.
So the definition of a firefighter part, it's not defined by the kind of behavior as much as just its role.
Unlike the managers, which are preemptive, firefighters go into action after an exile has been triggered, so they're reactive, and they're often frantic and impulsive.
So it could be any behavior that's designed to get you away from Those emotions that you're trying to keep exiled.
Right, and in this way, a very grim cycle is set up, of course, because the exiles are exiled out of a feeling of attack and rejection, and then when they sort of break out, and then the firefighters sort of crush them back underneath sensation and acting out, they feel that same rejection again, and the cycle is set up for a sort of further breakout.
Is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah, exactly. I mean, the more they get triggered and then...
The more depressed again, or distracted from again, and the more desperate they feel, and the more rejected they feel.
So, the more often they try to break out, until at some point they often kind of give up and shrivel inside, but leave you with that kind of chronic ache and sense of worthlessness.
Right, right. Okay.
Now, you've written that, of course, the parts that we have can be, I guess, inflamed or exaggerated and also separated and dissociated as the result of trauma.
But if I understand you rightly, Dr. Schwartz, you also believe that these parts are innate to us, that even in the absence of trauma, we would experience ourselves as a sort of multiplicity of perspectives.
Yeah, that is my position, that it's the nature of the mind to be subdivided, that we come into the world with these parts either in potential or manifest.
And infant researchers will talk about six or seven discrete states they notice in infants.
So my take is that we come in with some of them operating substantially.
some of them dormant, and then over time more of them come online and become manifest.
If we were to be raised in a perfectly harmonious family, perfectly harmonious society, then Then our parts would come on, would pop out sort of on time.
But trauma and other kinds of things that children suffer make their parts come out too soon and also burden them with extreme emotions and beliefs that drive them into extreme roles.
So the other radical part of my position is Not only are we born with them and we all have them, but there aren't any bad ones.
They're all valuable.
It's, as I say, the nature of the mind to have many different minds, each of which has different talents and resources.
Again, if we were raised in a harmonious culture and family, they would stay in their naturally valuable roles and they would be great allies of ours.
But because of what happens in terms of trauma and attachment injury, they take on these extreme emotions and beliefs that come into us from these experiences and almost drive them thereafter like a virus might drive an organism and drive them into extremes which, as you mentioned earlier, can be very destructive to us.
Many psychotherapies and many theorists, theories of the mind, have mistaken what I'm calling these parts for the burdens that they carry and as a result they try to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Right, right. And you have, I think you borrowed the metaphor from somebody else in the book, but you have a wonderful metaphor in the book of a sailing ship where one sort of aspect of yourself is leaning really far over the railing, causing the boat to tip, which causes another aspect to lean off the other side.
And they both end up leaning further and further in an attempt to stabilize the boat while in fact making it more unstable.
And that is the role of the self or what we would generally perceive as the I or the ego.
It is the purpose of the self.
To effect a kind of collaboration and negotiation and cross-pollination of ideas and experiences in order to get everybody back on deck, so to speak, and not leaning into such far extremes?
Yeah, what you're describing with the sailors on the boat is what we call polarization, so that when one part becomes extreme in one direction, just like in any human system, like a family or a corporation or society, Another part will become extreme in the opposite direction.
Our country these days is full of polarization, as is our political system, like that.
And each sailor, as they lean out, can rightfully say, I can't step in because if I step in, the boat's going to capsize because this other guy is leaning out so much in the opposite direction.
So the only way that can change is if there's a third party who can reassure each sailor That if they step in, make sure the other one does as well.
Which is why leadership is called for in our country and also internally.
There has to be what you were calling an ego.
I call the self with a capital S.
And it turns out to be actually different from the way ego or ego strength has been classically thought of.
And that concept of the self has come to be the centerpiece of the theory, actually.
Now, it seems strange to me that this concept, and you, of course, are the expert, so correct me where I go astray, but it seems strange to me, Dr. Schroeder, Schwartz, that this concept of What I call the MECO system, what you call the IFS, is not more widespread among practitioners in mental health.
I mean, it seems to me anybody who takes a moment to sort of think about their own mental processes realizes that we're in a constant state of debate with ourselves, of weighing things and choosing and sometimes arguing, that we get struck by critical voices, which we kind of have to reason with.
And that we are a slightly different way, if not a very different way, with our boss versus our employee, with a grocery store clerk versus our wife versus our mother, that we all have different roles within us.
And certainly therapists who've worked with patients for any length of time and in any depth knows that patients can very powerfully and effectively do role plays of personalities other than themselves, which must mean that they've internalized or incorporated other personality structures to themselves.
I don't get the sense that this model of internal multiplicity is generally well accepted, let alone well understood.
Is that factual?
And if so, what do you think is the resistance to this becoming a more widespread model?
It seems strange to me too now at this point, but it didn't seem strange when I was first starting out and encountering this, because I didn't think of myself that way.
And through my training, I wasn't taught to think of people that way either, but it's a big question.
I like to start off with the easy ones, and then they give you the really challenging ones, just to make sure you stay awake.
Right, exactly. So, first, there's like four questions in which you ask.
So, first of all, is it widespread in mental health in the U.S.? And the answer, I think, is no, but increasingly.
I mean, it's a lot more than it was 10 years ago, for example.
Not just because of my efforts, but there are a number of people that are beginning to reach this conclusion about what people's minds are like.
And you're right. Anybody who does any kind of internal exploring will run into this phenomenon, just as you described so well.
And other theorists, actually most other intra-psychic theorists, have run into it and walked away with some kind of description of what I'm calling parts, whether Jung called them complexes and archetypes, and other theorists have called them ego-states, or...
The multiple personality disorder world, they're called alters.
So there's always, there's generally been the recognition that there are these things inside of people.
What the difference is in how much autonomy each different theorist attributes to them or listens, learns about them.
And then also what the theorist posits as their origin.
So, like a lot of people say that, you know, they run into them, but they're pathology.
So the internalization or the interjection of external voices in your family, for example, is one common explanation for them in the psychodynamic literature.
And if you think of them that way, you'll relate to them Entirely differently than if you think of them the way I described.
So if you think of them as merely these internalized energies and voices and emotions, then you're going to try to block them out or fight with them, argue with them, the critics.
Whereas if you think of them in the way I described as very valuable parts of us that have been distorted by virtue of And then as you learn the secret history of how the part got into that role,
you'll open your heart to it and show an appreciation for trying to protect you.
As I was reading your book, I was struck by, I think it's Heidegger who wrote about metaphysics.
He said, it is not a problem to be solved, but a disease to be cured.
And when I first encountered multiplicity within myself through the process of therapy, it first struck me as a disease to be cured, but I ended up braving the sort of gale 900 winds that were hitting me.
And just trying to work within that system and found that it was, in fact, a problem to be solved, not a disease to be cured.
And that, I think, really changed my mind about this question of multiplicity.
Yeah, so what I guess I'm saying is that the multiplicity of the mind has been recognized by almost anybody who's done much intrapsychic exploration.
But the virtue of these parts of us and their malleability and Their functioning as an internal system of relationships, all that, and their autonomy, all that has just recently become more recognizable.
And the reason for that, you asked me why.
I think there's a number of reasons.
You know, if you look at Other cultures and some of the writings from other cultures, you run into the multiplicity phenomena, especially what have been called more primitive cultures,
quote-unquote, and it seems that, I mean, one reason, if we look at the long scheme of things, that when people thought of There being multiple gods, it was a lot easier to consider there being multiple parts of us inside.
Multiplicity was just a common part of life.
And with the advent of monotheism also came the advent of the one mind, the one God and the one mind.
And that's dominated our thinking for many, many years.
Yeah, that just struck me, of course, that the ancient Greeks were very interested in self-knowledge and had a sort of multiple pantheon.
And even within Christianity, you get that trinity in one, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, even within the single mind.
It's like you can't get away from it, even if you try with a monotheistic religion.
And then, of course, you have all the saints and the devils.
Mysticism multiplies itself, even if you try to keep it in one box.
But sorry, that's a bit of a digression.
Please go on. No, I think it's very relevant.
I agree with you entirely.
And Christianity has angels and so on.
And Plato talked a lot about these inner voices and what he called...
I forget what he calls them, but I think it was just common...
Now, he wanted to raise one of them to dominate the others, you know, the charioteer controlling the horses.
But he had...
The idea of multiplicity was, I think, pretty common knowledge back then.
Yeah, well Socrates always talked about his daemon, or conscience, which guided him to right or wrong actions.
Exactly. So that's one answer.
I think that because of the way that multiple personality disorder has been construed as being horribly pathological, There's been a tremendous fear of thinking of people this way too.
Some of the cultural bias that I actually run into with patients where I'll start to talk about this and they'll say, well, what do you think, I'm Sybil?
So that multiplicity has been pathologized by the mental health community as well.
I think that's a deterrent too.
And there's been In a lot of the psychodynamic writing, this kind of reverence of, quote-unquote, integration and fear of fragmenting, and the fragmented person is very sick.
So there's just a lot of, leading up to my work, just a lot of fear of multiplicity.
Right, so it's almost like they view the personality as a single vase that having been broken needs to be put back together without realizing that it's actually an entire avenue of beautiful jaris that can all work together to sort of mix metaphors quite a bit.
It's a nice metaphor, and that's totally my position.
Because for many years in the multiple personality disorder literature, there was this position that we should put Humpty Dumpty back together.
That he is a broken egg that needs to be reunited.
And that has shifted in the last four or five years in that world too, where they're starting to accept that multiplicity per se isn't necessarily evidence of sickness.
I think there's also a leap of faith that is required to accept this concept of multiplicity insofar as If you treat the multiples or what you call, if you treat the parts as broken, in other words, if you treat them with, in a sense, disrespect and hostility and suspicion and fear, I think that you're actually exacerbating the stimuli that produced them in the first place.
And therefore, they will become more extreme and more exaggerated.
But for me, it worked very much with the principle of opposites.
In other words, the aspects of myself that came out of humiliation could not be solved by rejection.
They had to be solved by the opposite of what created them.
So if they were created by humiliation, I needed to deal with them with respect.
And that kind of short-circuited the defense mechanism, so to speak, and allowed them to be more approachable.
And I think you talk about that in your book with your patient and her anger, that if you approach the anger without fear, the anger becomes much less aggressive, if that makes sense.
Yeah, you stumbled onto To the same kind of work that I do basically on your own, because that is exactly what we find, that because these parts are so misunderstood by most therapists, therapists encourage clients to approach them with fear or with anger and so on, because therapists feel that way about them themselves.
And if you do that with these kinds of protectors in particular, They will only get more extreme, which will only justify more coercive kind of measures on the part of the therapist and the client, which then wind up escalating things and making people wind up in hospitals and spiral down.
It turns out, however, if I can help a client into a state of initially often curiosity, But then as they get to know the parts, they shift toward appreciation and actual love and respect,
like you said. The parts will dramatically shift as well and will show that they aren't what they seem initially.
They'll relax.
You know, if you just take All this and apply it to a family.
Say there's a family where siblings have been forced into a lot of different extreme roles because of the dynamics of the family.
Like in alcoholic families, they have labels for sibling roles like hero and last child and mascot and so on.
And if I, as a family therapist, When I enter that family, the kids initially will seem very extreme in these different roles.
And it's easy to start to label them as pathological.
But if instead I start to listen to them and create an atmosphere of safety in the family and help the parents restore more trust and safety, the kids will calm down and show that they aren't what they seem.
And we'll also be willing often to talk about what happened to them that forced them to behave in these ways.
So it's really the same with this internal system.
All these parts want, most of the time, is a chance to tell you what happened to them and who they really are.
And with the protectors, then, who they protect.
Because what we found is that these protective parts We'll calm down and they'll react well to respect and appreciation, but they can't leave their extreme positions usually until what they protect has been healed, that being the exiles.
Right. It's so common when we're sort of cowering before our inner critic.
That we see him as some sort of terrible god.
But the reality, of course, is that the inner critic is as trapped as we are, and that's in a sense what he's trying to communicate to us.
And to break out of those habits, it's sort of like if you're walking into a very strong wind and the wind is getting stronger and stronger, all you do is lean forward more and more.
But if the wind stops, in other words, if the resistance and opposition stops, You have to shift your stance or you're going to fall over, and that's what I found in these kinds of conversations.
To do the opposite of what was coming at me just really caused an immense shift in psychic forces.
Yeah, I'll give you an example that turned my head around about it.
Way back in the mid-1980s, I had learned about these parts from clients, and I was experimenting with them.
in how to work with these internal systems and I was assuming like so many psychotherapies that the critics you had to fight and the very impulsive parts that were self-destructive you had to fight and contain and or ignore and I was encouraging clients to do those things but finding that as we've been saying they just got stronger And my first survivor of sex abuse was also self-destructive in that she cut herself on her wrist.
And this was driving me crazy.
And by then, there was a way to actually talk to clients' parts directly.
So I would say, I'd like to talk to that part that tries to cut you all the time.
And I might have her shift into a different chair and be that part.
And I would say, okay, So you're the cutting part.
And she would say, yeah, I'm the cutting part.
And so I decided one session that I wouldn't let her out of my office until that part had agreed to not do it to her.
And after a couple, three hours of just badgering the part and I was having her badger it, it finally said, no, I wouldn't do it that week.
And of course, then I opened the door to the next session.
And now she has a big gash down the middle of her face.
Right. And I just gasped, you know, and collapsed and said, I give up.
This is a dangerous game and I can't beat you at it.
And the part shifted and said, you know, I don't really want to beat you.
And so I shifted again out of this kind of, well, first I was coercive and then I collapsed and now I'm just getting kind of curious.
So why do you do this to her?
And the part proceeded to tell the story of how when she was being abused, Right.
Right. Right.
Right. And with that, the part softened even more and talked about the reasons why it had to continue to do this, even though she was in her 20s.
Because the rage was still there, and there were also still reasons to get her out of her body.
But in telling me the story, it became clear that this part was stuck in the past.
It was living as if she was still as young as she was when she was being abused.
And that the world was as dangerous now as it was back then.
And that's what I find too with most of these parts.
They're frozen in time back during traumatic scenes.
And so they don't even know how old we are.
So with all of that, it just totally turned my head around about the whole phenomena.
And from that point on, my goal wasn't to fight these destructive parts.
But instead, to really get to know them, there's a line you might have heard from Longfellow, which I never get quite right, but it goes something like, if you knew the secret history of your worst enemy, it would be enough to dissolve all hostility.
And that applies not just to external enemies, but also to these internal enemies of ours.
So our goal really with these protectors is to get clients curious enough So they can learn the secret history of how these parts got forced into these roles.
Right, right.
Now, you've also written quite a bit about the toxic effects of, let's just say, modern American culture.
Because, of course, it's not all just about the family.
And it's sort of my opinion that you really can't try and change society or change the world.
You have to change yourself and then your interactions with others.
And that's, I think, how society ends up changing from, in a sense, the micro...
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the degree to which contemporary culture exacerbates and provokes some of these parts and breaks the lines of communication between them.
Well that's a big topic too, but the American culture in particular encourages certain parts to dominate and exiles others.
So we come from a kind of This pioneering culture of individualism, which, because there was such struggle to get where we are, doesn't have a lot of value in vulnerability in general, vulnerable emotions, and particularly for men.
And so we do wind up both locking away feelings of weakness and Anything that isn't bright and shiny, but also having a disdain for people that might show those kinds of feelings.
And I'm actually, these days, trying to bring some of these ideas into the business world, and it's just rife with that whole attitude.
So certain parts come to dominate us, very striving, individualistic, And even more so, I think, over the past 20, 30 years, because there used to be a kind of ethic of, you know, while we valued achievement, we also valued community and taking care of each other.
And that's going by the wayside, it seems, pretty quickly.
So, let's see.
So all that sets us up in a certain way.
So that by itself winds up creating exiles.
And then because of this very cutthroat culture, we also, our lives are filled often with various forms of humiliation and rejection.
And so that adds, those kinds of burdens come into To these parts of us that are very sensitive and vulnerable.
So those parts shift from often being pretty playful and spontaneous and fun-loving to being very hurt.
And once they become hurt like that, we don't want anything to do with them because we've been taught to just kind of get over it and just move on and don't look back.
That's what everybody around us tells us when we get hurt, which means we've got to leave these parts in the dust.
And we come to fear them now because no longer are they playful and happy-go-lucky and spontaneous.
Now they carry all the pain from those experiences.
Right. And it struck me very strongly while you were speaking, and based on the story that you said earlier, That it really was your vulnerability and, in a sense, feeling of weakness that provided this breakthrough in no longer being aggressive towards these parts of this female victim of sexual abuse who was self-mutilating.
That it really was accepting the helplessness that provides the opportunity to go to a different course of action.
And it sort of struck me particularly with the US culture.
There's so much in it, particularly in the political sphere, that just isn't working.
Like, the war on drugs doesn't work.
The war on terror doesn't work.
Public education doesn't work very well.
There's so much that doesn't work, and yet there seems to be a refusal to sort of tearfully stand up and say, this doesn't work.
We really need to try something different.
And whenever I see a culture, or for that matter, an individual, stuck in a resolutely repetitive, anti-empirical course of action, it seems to me you're just looking at a really hacked-up system Of split personality types that just don't communicate and don't have the cohesion and the strength to say, this doesn't work, let's get together, collaborate and figure out something better.
Like with the metaphor with the two sailboats, if every single aspect of the personality, they're all leaning perilously over the edge, nobody can steer, nobody can figure out what direction things should go in.
And I think that's something that's quite important for the culture to do.
I just don't see how the culture can do it until we as individuals can do it.
I totally agree with you.
As I mature with the model and I feel like I've been in the psychotherapy world long enough, I am trying to bring some of these ideas to larger systems.
I do believe that until we have a different paradigm for understanding human beings, it's very difficult not to continue to to wind up in these vicious cycles you just described and it is all parallel because just like the war on drugs and the war on terror in which there are some extreme elements of a culture or country and because they're in these extreme roles everyone attacks them and exiles them,
you know, throws them in jail. I just read that the United States It has one quarter of the world's prisoners in this country.
And then the more we try to contain and coerce and exile, then the more extreme that aspect of our culture becomes.
And the same, to some degree, we're finding with the war on terror.
I mean, if we only intervene at that level, I'm not saying that we shouldn't do things to protect ourselves.
But if we understand each of these terrorists or each of these criminals to be sociopaths or to be evil, then there's no options but to do the one thing we know to do, which is to either punish them or contain them.
So, yeah, so you see those kind of vicious cycles happening at all levels of our culture, and the same thing with polarizations in Congress.
And I had and I still have some hope for Obama because he seems to exhibit some of the qualities that I call self-leadership, which is what we try to release in internal systems which is what we try to release in internal systems and find that when we can,
when I can help a client access the state I call self, There's a kind of wisdom that comes with that about how to depolarize and harmonize and how to relate to these parts in ways that allow them to come out of their extremes so that what I'm calling self becomes the captain of the boat that allows both sailors to trust that it's safe to come in.
And the other very radical aspect of this philosophy, this model, is that Everybody has that state inside of them that it can't be damaged no matter how traumatized the client is.
That it's our birthright.
Just like our body is born with the knowledge of how to heal itself if you get cut, we're born with the knowledge of how to heal ourselves emotionally.
And it's an inherent state.
But it gets covered over By these parts and their burdens.
So most people who have been forced into extreme roles don't manifest any of these qualities because it's beneath the surface.
But what I've found is that as we get clients to talk these parts into opening space inside, these qualities manifest spontaneously.
It isn't like I have to teach people How to meditate to do it or how to become more mindful or have more ego strength.
It just is there.
And once there's space for it, it arises spontaneously.
So that was a very startling discovery early on in this work.
And that is basically a radical position, I think, both in psychotherapy and in philosophy.
Well, my listeners know my perspective on Obama, which I don't need to share here.
And I was wondering if I could just...
I don't want to press too much on your time, Dr.
Schwartz, but I was wondering if there are listeners out there, and I have obviously many, many listeners who are very interested in self-knowledge, which is really the core of the philosophical journey, because you can't know the truth until you know the truth about yourself.
If listeners to this show are interested in pursuing this kind of internal family systems approach to therapy, which...
I would, you know, as a complete amateur outsider, I would recommend to explore.
What are the resources available for people in the US or other countries, I guess, focusing in the US to find a therapist who might be good at this kind of technique?
Is there any kind of central place where therapists who are good with this technique are available or any kind of questions that people could ask therapists about this kind of work?
Because I think that you can get very amazing results relatively quickly compared to other kinds of therapy by using this approach.
Is there a place where people can go that they can try and find therapists who are practicing this approach?
Yeah, we have a directory of therapists who've completed our training on our website, which is selfleadership.org.
So there's a lot of other resources on it as well.
And there are therapists, there are IFS therapists all over this country and Europe and Israel.
Okay, I will definitely put a link to that, selfleadership.org.
And your book is Internal Family Systems Therapy, which I guess is 15 years old since the first edition.
Have you written much that would be of interest to the layperson since then?
Yeah, actually that book is written mainly for therapists, but I've written a book called Introduction to Internal Family Systems And also, more recently, a book on how it applies to couples and relationships, which is called You're the One You've Been Waiting For.
That's a good title. Very good.
Thank you. And both of those are available on the website.
And there's also a book that applies more to clients who've been sexually abused and have severe diagnoses called Mosaic Mind, which is also on the website.
Okay, I will definitely put a link to that in the show.
It's selfleadership.org.
Is that right? Yeah.
Well thank you so much and I really do want to thank you for I know that anybody who's innovative in any field faces a long slog and it seems to be particularly true of the therapeutic field.
There's a lot of entrenched models and of course people have the challenge of self-examination when coming across any new model of the human mind or approach to therapy but I really do appreciate as a layperson the degree of commitment and endurance that you have exhibited In your 30-year quest to bring this more to the forefront of the therapeutic model.
And so thank you so much for that, because it certainly gave me a lot of relief and validation for what I went through and experienced during therapy.
And I think it has given some fantastic tools for people to work on their own issues.
Well, thank you, Steve.
It's a treat for me to talk to someone who really gets this.
You can embrace it this way.
And I also feel very witnessed by what you said about the journey, because it hasn't always been easy, as you can imagine.
Oh, listen, I know.
I mean, I'm doing a philosophical show that is very challenging to people, and so I haven't tasted 30 years yet, but I know that it is a real slog.
I guess someone not quite as far up the mountain I just wanted to say that's some damn fine climbing you got in there and I know that it may have cost you some toes but I'm really glad that you got up there because I think the vision that you bring is very powerful and very helpful and has certainly been the case for myself and for other people that I've talked to and I think anybody who looks inward with honesty and humility will see these operations at work and can find the compassion for themselves that is necessary For Compassion in Society to extend and expand.
And I really do appreciate the work that you've done.
And I really do salute you for the slog that it's been and for the efforts that you're putting in to continue it.
And I'm glad to help promote the idea in any way that I can.
I'm grateful for the support and happy to talk again anytime.
Thank you very much, Dr. Schwartz.
And I will talk to you soon.
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