Richard C. Schwartz > Quotes

“Compassion as a spontaneous aspect of Self blew my mind, because I’d always assumed and learned that compassion was something you had to develop. There’s this idea—especially in some spiritual circles—that you have to build up the muscle of compassion over time, because it’s not inherent. Again, that’s the negative view on human nature at play. To be clear, what I mean by compassion is the ability to be in Self with somebody when they’re really hurting and feel for them, but not be overwhelmed by their pain. You can only do that if you’ve done it within yourself. That is, if you can be with your own exiles without blending and being overwhelmed by them and instead show them compassion and help them, then you can do the same for someone in pain who’s sitting across from you.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“When you were young and experienced traumas or attachment injuries, you didn’t have enough body or mind to protect yourself. Your Self couldn’t protect your parts, so your parts lost trust in your Self as the inner leader. They may even have pushed your Self out of your body and took the hit themselves—they believed they had to take over and protect you and your other parts. But in trying to handle the emergency, they got stuck in that parentified place and carry intense burdens of responsibility and fear, like a parentified child in a family.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“Your protectors’ goals for your life revolve around keeping you away from all that pain, shame, loneliness, and fear, and they use a wide array of tools to meet those goals—achievements, substances, food, entertainment, shopping, sex, obsession with your appearance, caretaking, meditation, money, and so on.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“A part is not just a temporary emotional state or habitual thought pattern. Instead, it is a discrete and autonomous mental system that has an idiosyncratic range of emotion, style of expression, set of abilities, desires, and view of the world. In other words, it is as if we each contain a society of people, each of whom is at a different age and has different interests, talents, and temperaments. In”
― Richard C. Schwartz, Internal Family Systems Therapy

“IFS can be seen as attachment theory
taken inside, in the sense that the client’s Self becomes the good attachment figure to their insecure or avoidant parts. I was initially amazed to discover that when I was able to help clients access their Self, they would spontaneously begin to relate to their parts in the loving way that the textbooks on attachment theory prescribed. This was true even for people who had never had good parenting in the first place. Not only would they listen to their young exiles with loving attention and hold them patiently while they cried, they would firmly but lovingly discipline the parts in the roles of inner critics or distractors. Self just knows how to be a good inner leader.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“Imbalanced systems,whether internal or external, will tend to polarize.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, Internal Family Systems Therapy

“any approach that increases your inner drill sergeant’s impulse to shame you into behaving (and make you feel like a failure if you can’t) will do no better in internal families than it does in external ones in which parents adopt shaming tactics to control their children”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“Parts are little inner beings who are trying their best to keep you safe.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“We need a new paradigm that convincingly shows that humanity is inherently good and thoroughly interconnected. With that understanding, we can finally move from being ego-, family-, and ethno-centric to species-, bio-, and planet-centric.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“The Four Basic Goals of IFS 1.​Liberate parts from the roles they’ve been forced into, so they can be who they’re designed to be. 2.​Restore trust in the Self and Self-leadership. 3.​Reharmonize the inner system. 4.​Become more Self-led in your interactions with the world.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“The difference here is that the Self says no to impulsive parts firmly but from a place of love and patience, in just the same way an ideal parent would. Additionally, in IFS, when parts do take over, we don’t shame them. Instead, we get curious and use the part’s impulse as a trailhead to find what is driving it that needs to be healed.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“We often find that the harder we try to get rid of emotions and thoughts, the stronger they become. This is because parts, like people, fight back against being shamed or exiled.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“In the same vein, if you don’t fear your own anger, you’ll be able to stay Self-led when someone’s angry at you. The person’s judgment of you won’t trigger your own inner critics, because you know who you are, and because those critical parts of you have retired or taken on new roles. So many of the obstacles in our relationships are because we fear the mayhem that someone else’s behavior will create in our inner systems. When Self leads, the mayhem is gone. The”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“The mono-mind paradigm has caused us to fear our parts and view them as pathological. In our attempts to control what we consider to be disturbing thoughts and emotions, we just end up fighting, ignoring, disciplining, hiding, or feeling ashamed of those impulses that keep us from doing what we want to do in our lives. And then we shame ourselves for not being able to control them. In other words, we hate what gets in our way.”
― Ph.D. Schwartz, Richard, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“how we relate in the inner world will be how we relate in the outer. If we can appreciate and have compassion for our parts, even for the ones we’ve considered to be enemies, we can do the same for people who resemble them. On the other hand, if we hate or disdain our parts, we’ll do the same with anyone who reminds us of them.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“Some discoveries I made about parts: •​Even the most destructive parts have protective intentions. •​Parts are often frozen in past traumas when their extreme roles were needed. •​When they trust it’s safe to step out of their roles, they are highly valuable to the system.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“3.​You often have to earn their trust. The fact that they are burdened suggests that you didn’t protect them in the past, and you may have locked them away or exploited them by depending on their extreme protective roles, so they usually have good reasons to not trust you. Like feral children, they need your love and nurturing, but they don’t trust it at first because of their history with you. Sometimes it takes you showing up in Self repeatedly and apologizing to them to regain their trust. Fortunately, they aren’t actually feral external children, so this trusting process often doesn’t take more than a few visits.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“From the IFS point of view, the quieting of the mind associated with mindfulness happens when the parts of us usually running our lives (our egos) relax, which then allows parts we have tried to bury (exiles) to ascend, bringing with them the emotions, beliefs, and memories they carry (burdens) that got them locked away in the first place.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“4.​They can cause a lot of damage to your body and your life. Because they’re frozen in dreadful scenes in the past and carry burdens from those times, they will do whatever they need to do to get your attention when you won’t listen: punish you or others, convince others to take care of them, sabotage your plans, or eliminate people in your life they see as a threat. To do these things and more, they can exacerbate or give you physical symptoms or diseases, nightmares and strange dreams, emotional outbursts, and chronic emotional states. Indeed, most of the syndromes that make up the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual are simply descriptions of the different clusters of protectors that dominate people after they’ve been traumatized. When you think of those diagnoses that way, you feel a lot less defective and a lot more empowered to help those protectors out of those roles.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“Parts often become extreme in their protective efforts and take over your system by blending. Some make you hypervigilant, others get you to overreact angrily to perceived slights, others make you somewhat dissociative all the time or cause you to fully dissociate in the face of perceived threats. Some become the inner critics as they try to motivate you to look or perform better or try to shame you into not taking risks. Others make you take care of everyone around you and neglect yourself.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“finding blended parts and helping them trust that it’s safe to unblend is a crucial part of IFS. As you might have discovered in the mapping exercise, the simple act of noticing parts and representing them on a page often creates enough separation from them (enough unblending) that you can have a different perspective on them. Like the view of a city from thirty thousand feet, you can see more clearly the roles they take on and how they operate as a system. Once you’re out of the trees, you can see the forest.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“As the urges of these protectors consume most of your attention, they drown out and keep exiled the more sensitive and loving parts of you. As you unburden your exiles, it allows your protectors to transform, and you begin hearing more from those parts of you that aren’t so obsessed and driven—the ones who love being truly intimate with others, the ones who want to create art and move your body, the ones who want to play with family and friends, and the ones who just love being in nature. When you’re more Self-led, you become a more complete, integrated, and whole person.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“Jimmy Carter echoes that sentiment: “What is needed now, more than ever, is leadership that steers us away from fear and fosters greater confidence in the inherent goodness and ingenuity of humanity.”2 Our leaders can’t do that, however, with the way we currently understand the mind because it highlights the darkness in humanity.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“Another kind of happiness exists that you can feel steadily whether you are in a relationship or not. It comes from the sense of connectedness that happens when all your parts love one another and trust and feel accepted by your Self.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, You Are the One You've Been Waiting For: Applying Internal Family Systems to Intimate Relationships

“5.​They are very important and deserve to be taken seriously. If you can establish a new, loving relationship with them and help them transform, they become wonderful companions, advisors, and playmates. You find yourself wanting to spend time with them and hear what ideas they have for you. Their conflicts don’t bother you much anymore, because you know they are just parts and you can help them get along—you become a good inner parent when necessary. And it becomes a lovely life practice just to spend time with them.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“You can become your own healer—the special person your vulnerable parts have been waiting for. When that happens, your partner will be released from the redeemer trap and its accompanying projects, and true intimacy will be possible.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, You Are the One You've Been Waiting For: Applying Internal Family Systems to Intimate Relationships

“move from being ego-, family-, and ethno-centric to species-, bio-, and planet-centric.”
― Ph.D. Schwartz, Richard, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“The clarity of Self gives you a kind of X-ray vision, so you see behind the other person’s protectors to their vulnerability, and in turn your heart opens to them.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“through a Christian lens, through IFS people wind up doing in the inner world what Jesus did in the outer—they go to inner exiles and enemies with love, heal them, and bring them home, just as he did with the lepers, the poor, and the outcasts.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“They’re all good parts forced into roles they don’t like, they don’t deserve, and they’re eager to leave, but they just don’t think it’s safe enough to do that.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model