Real Play: No Bad Parts and How to Do Internal Family Systems (IFS) With Dr. Richard Schwartz

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is an evidence-based therapy that helps you transform and heal your wounded and protective parts. In this “real play,” Dr. Richard Schwartz demonstrates IFS on Diana Hill’s “binger” and “restrictor” parts. He guides Diana in separating and dialoguing with her inner parts and helps her respond with compassionate and courageous self-leadership. They then unpack and debrief the exercise and connect IFS with Buddhist principles.

Listen and Learn:

What is Internal Family Systems
Why we avoid our inner parts
What are managers, firefighters, and exiles in IFS
How to hear and appreciate all your inner parts
How to dialogue between inner parts
The 8 Cs of Self-leadership
How to do IFS outside of the therapy room
The overlap between IFS and Buddhism
Where you can learn more about IFS

About Dr. Richard Schwartz

Dick Schwartz began his career as a family therapist and an academic at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There he discovered that family therapy alone did not achieve full symptom relief, and in asking patients why, he learned that they were plagued by what they called “parts.” These patients became his teachers as they described how their parts formed networks of inner relationship that resembled the families he had been working with. He also found that as they focused on and, thereby, separated from their parts, they would shift into a state characterized by qualities like curiosity, calm, confidence and compassion. He called that inner essence the Self and was amazed to find it even in severely diagnosed and traumatized patients. From these explorations, the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model was born in the early 1980s.

IFS is now evidence-based and has become a widely-used form of psychotherapy, particularly with trauma. It provides a non-pathologizing, optimistic, and empowering perspective and a practical and effective set of techniques for working with individuals, couples, families, and more recently, corporations and classrooms. Dick lives with his wife Jeanne near Chicago, close to his three daughters and his growing number of grandchildren.