#492: Richard Schwartz — IFS, Psychedelic Experiences Without Drugs, and Finding Inner Peace for Our Many Parts

Tim Ferriss Show

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways We all have different parts within ourselves, and they can be valuableThey are not only the product of traumaBut traumas drive our parts into dysfunctional rolesFour Common “parts” in the Internal Family System (IFS) are Exiles, Protectors, Firefighters, and Self“I can safely say that that Self, with a capital S, is in everybody, can’t be damaged, knows how to heal and can be accessed simply by getting these parts to open space, because it seems it’s just beneath the surface” Richard SchwartzBehaviors that we see as self-destructive are not “maladaptive”, they just have outlived their usefulnessBehavior that we might view negatively today, might have been essential to survival in childhoodPeople with suicidal thoughts are relieved to realize that it is only one part of themselves that is suicidalIt’s just a part of you trying to take away your pain and sufferingIFS can be useful both to prepare in advance and to metabolize after a psychedelic experienceIFS goes beyond acceptance by making us actively help our “parts” to unburden

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Richard Schwartz — IFS, Psychedelic Experiences Without Drugs, and Finding Inner Peace for Our Many Parts | Brought to you by Helix Sleep premium mattresses, LinkedIn Jobs recruitment platform with 700M+ users, and Athletic Greens all-in-one nutritional supplement. More on all three below.

Richard Schwartz is on the faculty of the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

He began his career as a family therapist and an academic at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he discovered that family therapy alone did not achieve full symptom relief. 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 relationships 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.

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Disclaimer from Richard Schwartz: There is an on-going debate in the culture regarding the validity of recovered memories. While there is considerable evidence that recovered memories of abuse can be real, in some cases they are not. If such memories come to you, it is important to not act on them without corroborating evidence.