Michael Quinn

“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

“You have to help your partner come through for you. Tell them how you'd like them to be. Help them win. Help your partner succeed, because it's in your interest to act like a team. In our individualistic culture, your partner either comes through for you or they don't. But when you begin thinking relationally, ecologically, you realize that you have something to say about how things go between you. "What can I do to help you come through for me?" is an entirely relational question. Thinking like a team is the clear antidote to thinking like two individuals. It's a shift from "I don't like how you're talking to me" to "Honey, I want to hear what you're saying. Could you please lower your voice so I can hear it?" A shift from "I need more sex" to "We both deserve a healthy sex life. What should we do about it?”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“If those emotions cannot yet be tolerated by the client, access to the underlying schema is also blocked. Therefore, making those emotions workable for the client to feel is necessary in order to then access the underlying schema, bring conscious awareness to it, and subject it to disconfirmation and unlearning. Facilitating direct experience of previously blocked emotion tends, in itself, to alleviate certain symptoms, and has been shown to correlate strongly with positive therapeutic outcome (e.g., Elliott et al., 2003; Missirlian et al., 2005), but will not by itself achieve transformational change unless, in addition, the underlying schema undergoes disconfirmation.”
― Bruce Ecker, Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Memory Reconsolidation and the Psychotherapy of Transformational Change

“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