Led by the Self

Book: Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts

Do you remember the scene in Inside Out where Fear, Disgust, and Sadness each take their turn at the console inside Riley’s mind, one of them suddenly leaping forward to take control? You didn’t think of Riley as strange, or as having multiple personalities. Even without a film to show us, all of us have felt the many moods, thoughts, and desires that move through us in a single day — the many figures inside one person. Among those inner figures, is there one you don’t understand, or don’t like?

If so, this book offers a chance to get to know that part a little better — and perhaps to meet the precious thing hidden behind it.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy grew out of the work of Richard Schwartz, a family therapist who began by treating clients through the lens of the family system, then turned his attention to the inner worlds of those it did not reach. There he found “subpersonalities” — the divided parts of the mind he came to call parts — and a systematic therapy took shape around them.

Approaches that work with the “inner child” already existed. What sets IFS apart is that it connects the client’s Self to their parts and builds a relationship between them. When we listen to each part with curiosity and compassion, honoring it as a being in its own right, we come to see its positive intention. Feeling received, the part can relax its defenses — and so we come to know the other parts too. Through this process the parts begin to cooperate under the Self’s leadership, like an orchestra finding harmony under its conductor, each instrument playing its optimal role, so that the person’s life becomes more peaceful and steady.

IFS distinguishes protective parts — managers and firefighters — from the wounded parts we often call the inner child, the exiles. They are called exiles because the pain they carry is so great that other parts strain to keep it from rising into awareness.

Addiction is a classic example of a firefighter. Alcohol, overwork, even absorbing spiritual or religious activity can play the firefighter’s role: when an exile threatens to surface, the firefighter rushes to put out the flare of anxiety, urgently, at speed — exactly like a firefighter answering an alarm. Such a part is not bad; it is simply so devoted to its single task that it cannot choose what would bring the whole system into harmony. It is working very hard to keep us away from the fear of meeting the exile’s pain. In a session, the client’s Self connects with that part without being overwhelmed, acknowledges how hard it has worked, clears away the blame and misunderstanding it has carried, and helps it set down its burden — so that the Self may reach the exile. No longer alone, the exile meets the Self, and real healing begins.

Led by a Self marked by the qualities Schwartz calls the eight C’s — compassion, curiosity, courage, confidence, clarity, calm, creativity, connectedness — a person can stop living bound by others and reclaim their own wholeness, moving toward a self-transformation guided from within. This reaches beyond the individual to families, and to the transcendent hope that our communities and world might recover their wholeness too. To heal oneself, in this sense, is to heal the world.

IFS is about thirty years old, has been evaluated for efficacy, and was listed with the U.S. National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices; thousands of mental-health professionals now use it around the world. It shows notable effects for depression, phobias, anxiety, somatization and bodily symptoms, resilience, and trauma, and is increasingly paired with other modalities and used as a collaborative, shared-decision model in medication care.

In my own experience, IFS is a remarkably delicate and gentle therapy. What struck me most about the Self, in training, was its quality of effortlessness. Sitting with that — effort and effortlessness — I found myself thinking of Laozi’s Tao Te Ching, and sensing the Self as something like the nature of the Tao; others in the training felt the Self as the love described in Corinthians. Across traditions and centuries, the resonance was moving. Whether we call it the true Self, the Self, love, or the Tao — is our task not to find the good nature in all of us, connect with every part of ourselves, and help make a better world?