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Richard Schwartz No Bad Parts
Does your inner critic keep you from enjoying your life?
Does your fear of looking weak or lazy drive you into the ground?
And why does there seem to be a battle between the part of us that wants to do great things and another part that just wants to play small?
Richard Schwartz introduced IFS or Internal Family Systems many years ago. Since then, the process has been used to heal, strengthen, and align the minds of many people — including myself.
I use IFS daily in meditation as well as in my coaching practice to help clients confront their fears and get out of their own way. When it comes to being productive, I’ve found that IFS works much, much better than forcing our way through resistance. And it’s amazingly effective at helping us cut through the noise so we can connect to what some may call our essential or spiritual Self.
Schwartz has a new book called No Bad Parts, and today we’re going to explore the inner critic, our addiction to achievement, and getting out of our own way.
In this interview:
- Are you crazy if you argue with yourself?
- The discomfort of being with yourself
- Why are we so harsh to ourselves?
- Why do we hold ourselves back?
- Should we force ourselves when we feel resistance?
Plus:
- Do we have an addiction to achievement?
- Why do so many high performers feel like sh*t?
- Are you afraid to slow down?
- Is our need to achieve healthy?
- Is it difficult to create balance between work and your life?
And:
- How would you live if we weren’t driven by fear?
- Are you scared of your spiritual side?
- How do we access our Self?
- What if spiritual realization isn’t something to strive for?
- What if you’re closer to the life you ultimately want?
About Richard Schwartz
Richard 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.
In 2013 Schwartz left the Chicago area and now lives in Brookline, MA where he is on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
