IFS, Psychedelics, and the Spirit World: Dick Schwartz Speaks to His Lived Experience

Dr. Richard (Dick) C. Schwartz is the Founder of the IFS (Internal Family Systems) Institute, which offers professional training in IFS therapy, an evidence-based psychotherapy that helps people access and heal their trauma through their multifaceted personalities. Dr. Schwartz began his career as a systemic family therapist and an academic and is a faculty member at Harvard Medical School. As a featured speaker for national professional organizations, he has published five books on IFS, including No Bad Parts and Introduction to the Internal Family Systems Model.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[4:04] An introduction to IFS (Internal Family Systems)
[14:09] How Dr. Dick Schwartz developed IFS and began working with psychedelics
[16:58] The spiritual qualities of the self
[22:29] What is the role of psychedelics in accessing a spiritual state?
[27:32] How to embark on a journey of self-discovery
[31:21] Dr. Schwartz talks about unattached burdens and guides
[40:50] Religious and scientific criticisms of IFS
[45:46] Criteria for identifying unattached burdens and how to differentiate guides from parts
[50:33] Dr. Schwartz’s perspective on using ketamine to advance the therapeutic process

In this episode…

The Internal Family Systems (IFS) model is a transformative framework for understanding and healing trauma, and many therapists look to integrate it with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. How can practitioners balance the introspective depth of IFS with the expansive, altered states induced by psychedelics to unlock profound therapeutic breakthroughs?

According to lifelong family systems researcher Dr. Dick Schwartz, the IFS therapeutic model identifies the mind’s multiplicity, where protective and exiled parts coexist with the innate qualities of the self. Drawing parallels with spiritual traditions, IFS bridges evidence-based therapy and practices, addressing phenomena such as unattached burdens and guides, which challenge conventional psychological frameworks. Psychedelics enhance the IFS process by temporarily silencing protective parts of the psyche, allowing greater access to the healing qualities of the self. While psychedelics can catalyze powerful emotional releases and self-awareness, Dr. Schwartz emphasizes the need for skilled facilitation to avoid overwhelming clients or triggering protector backlash. By combining IFS principles with psychedelics, therapists can create a safe, compassionate environment that supports deep healing and integration of past traumas.

In the latest episode of Living Medicine, Dr. Sandy Newes invites Dr. Richard (Dick) Schwartz to discuss how psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can enhance the IFS process. Dr. Schwartz talks about the spiritual qualities of the self, how to identify unattached burdens and differentiate guides from parts, and recent criticisms of IFS.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments:

“We’re all multiple personalities, not in a disorderly way, but in a naturally valuable, diverse way that can help us.”
“Parts carry burdens, extreme beliefs, and emotions, like a virus, affecting their roles and behaviors.”
“Self-energy is in everybody; it can’t be damaged and knows how to heal.”
“The importance of the facilitator’s presence can’t be overstated. It fills the room with self-energy, inviting safety and healing.”
“Psychedelics put your managers to sleep, releasing a huge amount of self-energy, inviting healing.”

Action Steps:

Embrace the concept of multiplicity: Understanding that everyone has multiple parts or subpersonalities can help you better navigate personal and interpersonal challenges. This approach normalizes internal conflicts and encourages a non-pathologizing view of oneself, which can lead to more compassionate self-awareness and healing.
Cultivate self-energy: Developing qualities like calmness, curiosity, and compassion enhances your ability to connect with your inner self and others. This practice can lead to better emotional regulation and create a safe space for addressing complex emotions or traumas.
Work with protectors before vulnerabilities: Before delving into deep-seated vulnerabilities, it’s important to gain permission from protective parts of your psyche. This approach reduces the risk of backlash and facilitates more effective healing when engaging in therapeutic work, especially in altered states induced by psychedelics.
Harness the healing power of psychedelics carefully: Understand that psychedelics, while powerful tools, are not a cure-all and must be approached with care and proper guidance. They can help bypass defenses to access deep self-energy but should be used in a controlled and supportive environment to maximize their therapeutic potential.
Maintain authenticity and self-presence in therapeutic settings: As a practitioner or participant, being present and authentic is crucial for creating a conducive healing environment. This presence helps maintain a container of safety, allowing for the exploration of deep emotional and spiritual experiences without fear of judgment or harm.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by the Living Medicine Institute.

LMI is a training, resource, and membership program educating providers about the legal and safe use of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

To learn more or participate, visit https://livingmedicineinstitute.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:00

Music. Welcome to the Living Medicine Podcast, where we talk about ethical medical use of psychedelic psychotherapy, teaching skills, examining the issues and interviewing interesting people. Now let’s start today’s show. Welcome to Living Medicines. Interview with Dick Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems, talking about unusual experiences in altered states.

Dr. Sandy Newes 0:33

I am Dr Sandra Newes, and I have the privilege of being here with Dr Dick Schwartz, and I want to just I’ll give you a little bit of a brief intro, but I doubt that it needs much like I think that, in my opinion, Dick, I this is in all sincerity. I think you’re one of the most influential people in the mental health field right now, and I am deeply appreciative of how much your influence has really changed the way not only practitioners work, but also the way people really think about themselves. And how do you know your model just really de pathologizes a lot of things that I think people have really struggled with. So I’ll do the more formal intro. So I have the privilege of being here with Dr Dick Schwartz, who’s the creator of Internal Family Systems, which, again, I think most of us know, is a highly effective therapeutic model that de pathologizes The multi part personality, really focusing on parts. Some people may not be aware that it’s actually evidence based. So, which is amazing, because that really gives us a very solid platform, both the confidence in the work, but also something to really withstand scrutiny and to really expand in doing that. So I’m really excited about that. The IFS Institute offers training for professionals and the general public. Dr Schwartz is currently on the faculty for Harvard Medical School and has published five books, including no bad parts, healing trauma and restoring wholeness with the Internal Family Systems model. I personally know multiple people who’ve worked with no bad parts and has have I recommend it to clients, and I think that’s been a really big influence. So Dick lived with his wife, Jean, near Chicago, close to his daughters and his daughters and his growing number of grandchildren, and he just told me that he just got back from a long, extended period on the road so doing training and spending time in the Caribbean and Hawaii. So thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Dick Schwartz 2:33

Well, it’s great to be with you, Sandy, and I’m honored by your interest and your words about me.

Dr. Sandy Newes 2:39

Okay, just to kind of fill in people. This meeting really came to be. We were introduced by Dr Ron Siegel, who I did an interview with, and I’ve had the pleasure to spend time with at conferences in also in Costa Rica, because we began speaking about what he referred to as, quote, somewhat atypical linguistic phenomena and different atypical phenomena, atypical meaning that it’s not kind of the phenomena that we necessarily see in regular therapy sessions, found within psychedelic work. I have experienced some of that myself. I’ve seen it in clients. We see it in trainees, in our training program, and I’m both fascinated by it and also I’m quite concerned that we need to understand more about this and have some tools to work with it. And Ron suggested that you are a person who shares that interest and also perhaps even that concern. So that brought us together.

Dr. Dick Schwartz 3:34

That’s right, yeah, and yeah, I’m happy to talk about that and other things.

Dr. Sandy Newes 3:39

Great, good. So you know, one of the places that I would love to start, I know lots of people, and there’s lots of information about IFS out there online and so, and you’ve done many talks on that, and I looked up the YouTube. And so if you would like to first, I wanted to say, if you’d like to kind of just give a brief introduction. It just so that people have the frame who might be less familiar.

Dr. Dick Schwartz 4:04

Yeah, happy to do that. So basic idea is that we’re all multiple personalities. And I don’t mean we all have multiple personality disorder, but the people get who get that diagnosis aren’t really different from the rest of us, except that, because of the horrific trauma they suffered as children, they’re what I call parts, but are called altars in the MPD world got blown apart more so they they don’t communicate much. They’re these amnesic blocks between them. But the phenomena of having multiple inner people really what other systems call sub personalities, from my point of view, and this is after 40 years of researching this whole inner world is normal. It’s the way. We were meant to be, were meant to have many different minds trying to help us in our lives with different talents and different resources for us and and if they never got traumatized or didn’t pick up what we call burdens from the culture or from our ancestors or from traumas that happened to us, they would always be in their naturally valuable states, and they would just be helping us in different ways as we go through our lives. And some of them are some of them haven’t been burdened that way, but, and there’s lots and lots of them, and and that trauma and what is called attachment injuries or bad parenting or or that some of these parts just didn’t fit into your family, all of that combines to take them out of their naturally valuable states into roles that can be quite extreme and sometimes damaging, and freezes them in time so that that often, if you were to ask one of these parts how old it thought you were, you’d get a single digit, because it’s living back when it took on this new role, when it shifted out of Its naturally valuable state into this protective role, or Zen, and it still thinks you’re nine years old and has to protect you the way it did when you were nine years old. And it carries what we’re going to call burdens, the definition, which are extreme beliefs and emotions that came into your system from those experiences, and attach to these parts, and then drive the way they operate, like a virus. And so that’s the way I see the mind. And as I come from family therapy and steeped in systems thinking. So as I was encountering this inner system and clients, I started to try and track those distinctions and sequences, to try and map out this world of parts, and the map that came then and has held up over these 40 years was between parts that, as I was saying, are before they were hurt, were these delightful inner children that were playful and loving and creative and joyful and so on. But once they do get hurt or terrified or shamed. Now they carry the burden of terror or worthlessness or emotional pain because they’re the most sensitive parts of us, and then once they get hurt like that, we don’t want to be around them, because they can overwhelm us and pull us back into those scenes and make us feel terrible. So we have a natural impulse to lock them away and enter basements or business. And everybody around us tells us to do that, because this is a rugged individual’s culture.

Dr. Sandy Newes 8:14

You must be strong, you must be productive, you must work hard,

Dr. Dick Schwartz 8:18

exactly, and you’re supposed to just move on from trauma and don’t look back and don’t carry those memories anymore, just move on. And that would be fine if, if you were just moving on from memories. But unbeknownst to you, you’re locking away the parts of you that were hurt the most or scared the most, or shame the most. And not only is that bad for those parts, but you no longer have access to those lovely qualities that they carry, so you become less of a person, and they are suffering constantly in this exile, exiles and when you have a lot of exiles, you feel more delicate. The world is more dangerous because so many things could trigger them. And if they get triggered, like a big explosion of flames of emotion are going to consume you and pull you down so other parts are forced out of their naturally valuable states to become protectors, one class of which we call managers, because they’re trying to manage your life so that your exiles don’t get triggered, so they stay contained. And some of them are managing your relationship so no one gets close enough to hurt you again, managing your appearance so that everybody likes you and doesn’t reject you, manage your performance so you get accolades to counter the worthlessness. Some of them are the inner critics that are yelling at you constantly with the goal of getting you to do these things. But they don’t. Know what to do with you, but to scream at you, or they’re trying to tear down your confidence so you don’t take any risks and protect you that way. Yeah, a whole series of what a manager roles. And again, that’s not who the parts are. That’s the role. Just like kids in a family, functional family, are forced out of their natural states to be in these roles in the family, it’s the same process, right? And so those would be otherwise known as the defenses. Events will break through those defenses and trigger your exiles, no matter how strong your managers are. That’s a big emergency, because other parts of you feel like you’re going to die. So there’s another set of protectors standing guard and go into action immediately to deal with this emergency. Douse the flames of emotion with some substance, or get you higher than the flames until they burn themselves out. Or will get you distracted until they burn themselves out. So these we call firefighter protectors. They’re in contrast to the managers who are in control, trying to stay in control and please people firefighters take you out of control and piss off everybody. A lot of them do not all yes, and they tend to be impulsive, and I don’t care about the consequences to your body, to your relationships. I just got to get get you out of here right before you burn up from these emotions. So that’s the map. It’s pretty simple, just big distinction between protectors and exiles. The two kinds of protectors, managers and firefighters. Just to complete, as I was mucking around with all this and tried to as a family therapist, I’m trying to get this inner system to get along as I got hip to the fact that these parts aren’t what they see when they actually deserve to be listened to. So I’d be trying to have maybe you listen to your critic rather than attack it, and it’s going okay, but suddenly you’re furious with the critic, and it reminded me of family sessions where working with two family members and suddenly a third one jumps in and is screwing everything up. Family Therapist, we learned to ask that person to just stay out of it and step out and go back to the dyad with better boundaries. And things work out when you do that. And so it reminded me, as I’m working with you and your critic, maybe some other part jumped in, who hates the critic who’s talking? So I might ask you to get that one to step out, get another one to step out. And as I did, that was like this other person would pop out, who had all these great, what we call C word qualities, knew how to relate to the critic in a way that was helpful. And was calm and was confident relative to the critic was even had compassion for it. Was curious about it. All these C word qualities. And what I would ask people, What part of you is that, because that’s great, let’s keep that around. They’d say, that’s not a part like these others. That’s me, that’s myself, like your authentic self. Yeah, so I came to call that the self of the capital S. Now, 40 years later, 1000s of people using this all over the world, we can safely say that that self is in everybody can’t be damaged and knows how to heal, and it’s just beneath the surface of these parts, such that when they open space, it pops out spontaneously. And relating all this to psychedelics, some reason, psychedelics have the effect of putting your managers to sleep or offline, which releases a huge amount of self. That’s a big invitation to all these exile parts to get attention. Yeah, feeling possible.

Dr. Sandy Newes 14:09

That’s so interesting, you know, because there’s so many different elements there. There’s psychodynamic elements. There’s, like you said, there’s family therapy elements, you know, as you mentioned, with psychedelics, one of the things that we see, and I think Michael Mithoeffer even maybe, did a study on this. I was talking to him about it, and just that they for whatever reason, even if you are not IFS trained, and I am informally, IFS trained, I’ve read the books, I’ve watched your videos, I’ve been to some workshops that just comes out, like the parts, language just emerges, and I don’t do it. And amongst our training program, we see that over and over again. And so I mean that to me, of all the things I’ve ever experienced, lends credence to this, like this wants to happen. This naturally just does happen.

Dr. Dick Schwartz 14:57

Yeah, I don’t know how many years ago it was, but when I first. Got interested in psychedelics and IFS he called me up because he’s a well trained IFS therapist, as is his wife, Annie. He said, as they were doing the maps research, especially with the high dose MDMA, they kept track of how often that would happen. Not only would people start talking the language, but they would start working with their parts, basically start doing IFS on their own, without any queuing from the facilitator. And it was 80% and

Dr. Sandy Newes 15:37

I mean, that’s what that’s really consistent with what I see. And I think if you prompt it, you get a little bit more. And you know, it’s given me a lot of both interest in learning more, but also confidence that this is a naturally emerging phenomena, and so this is part of human nature, which is one of the things I think, is so interesting. It

Dr. Dick Schwartz 15:58

was very validating to me, because it felt like I had just stumbled onto something that people know how to do spontaneously on their own. Yeah, yeah,

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