Richard Schwartz Ifs Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

IFS is a loving way of relating internally (to your parts) and externally (to the people in your life), so in that sense, IFS is a life practice, as well. It’s something you can do on a daily, moment-to-moment basis—at any time, by yourself or with others.

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.

Like children in external families, we each have parts that want things that aren’t good for them or for the rest of the system. 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.

Well-known neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel has emphasized the importance of such integration in healing and has described IFS as a good way to achieve that. He writes, “Health comes from integration. It’s that simple, and that important. A system that is integrated is in a flow of harmony. Just as in a choir, with each singer’s voice both differentiated from the other singers’ voices but also linked, harmony emerges with integration. What is important to note is that this linkage does not remove the differences, as in the notion of blending: instead it maintains these unique contributions as it links them together. Integration is more like a fruit salad than a smoothie.”5 This, again, is one of the basic goals of IFS. Each part is honored for its unique qualities while also working in harmony with all the others.

Twenty years after working with Mary, I met Richard Schwartz, the developer of internal family systems therapy (IFS). It was through his work that Minsky’s “family” metaphor truly came to life for me and offered a systematic way to work with the split-off parts that result from trauma. At the core of IFS is the notion that the mind of each of us is like a family in which the members have different levels of maturity, excitability, wisdom, and pain. The parts form a network or system in which change in any one part will affect all the others.

IFS helps people become bodhisattvas of their psyches.

The basic principles of evolutionary biology would seem to dictate that any natural phenomenon as prominent in our lives as our experience of consciousness must necessarily have some discernible and quantifiable effect in order for it to exist, and to persist, in nature at all. It must, in other words, confer some selective advantage. And that raises an obvious question: What possible selective advantage could consciousness offer if it is only a functionless phantasm? How could consciousness ever have evolved in the first place if, in and of itself, it does nothing? Why, in short, did nature bother to produce beings capable of self-awareness and subjective inner experience? True, evolutionary biologists can trot out many examples of traits that have been carried along on the river of evolution although not specifically selected for (the evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called such traits spandrels, the architectural term for the elements between the exterior curve of an arch and the right angle of the walls around it, which were not intentionally built but were instead formed by two architectural traits that were "selected for"). But consciousness seems like an awfully prominent trait not to have been the target of some selection pressure. As James put it, "The conclusion that [consciousness] is useful is...quite justifiable. But if it is useful, it must be so through its causal efficaciousness.

Researchers who interviewed experienced meditators found that substantial percentages of them had disturbing episodes that sometimes were long-lasting. The most common of those included emotions like fear, anxiety, paranoia, detachment, and reliving traumatic memories.10 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.

I would recognize it when I would begin to feel the agendaless-ness of the IFS “eight Cs”: creativity, courage, curiosity, a sense of connection, compassion, clarity, calm, confidence.

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 ini- tially amazed to discover that when I was able to help clients ac- cess 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.

The Self is indeed more than the sum of your parts. It’s also in everyone, although it needs a certain amount of hardware (i.e., brain capacity) to operate fully. Young children can’t fully access Self, although they can embody enough Self to heal themselves emotionally—a process witnessed and described by many IFS child therapists. Children don’t have the brain power to fully protect themselves in the world, regardless of how much their parts might allow them to be Self-led. And this is partly why your parts lost trust in your Self’s leadership when you were hurt as a young child—you couldn’t protect them at the time, and they think they have to take over.

If, on the other hand, you recognize that your sudden absence of love is caused by the activation of protective parts of you that have blocked your love in the way that the moon obscures the sun during an eclipse, you can trust that there is no need to panic or do something rash. Instead, you use that numbing experience to signal the need to listen inside to discover why you’ve become so protective and what needs to change, both internally and externally, to help your protectors trust that it is safe to open your heart again.

Even when you can’t find any jewels in the trash heap—when it seems as if your partner is delusional—if you remain Self-led and respond to their pain rather than to their words, things improve because what they really want is for their exiles to be witnessed by you—to trust that you understand that you hurt them and regret having done that.

This is a brief meditation that I do a version of each day, as do many people who follow the IFS path. I encourage you to try it out as a daily practice. Get comfortable and, if it helps, take deep breaths. Then start by focusing on and checking in with whatever parts you are actively working with. To do that, see if you can find each of them in or around your body and get curious about how they’re doing. That is, ask each if there’s anything it wants you to know or if it needs anything—like you might with a child that’s in your care. As you’re getting to know it, at some point help it get to know you better—the you that’s with it now—since most of the time these parts don’t really know you. Instead, they’ve been interacting with other parts in there and they often believe that you are still a young child. Often this is their first encounter with you—the you who’s curious about them and cares about them. So let them know who you are, even how old you are, since they often think you’re much younger. Let them know that they’re not alone anymore and see how they react. You can ask, if you like, how old they thought you were. You can even ask them to turn around and look at you.