Even the Worst of Us Are Inherently Good

Source: Richard Schwartz

This post is part two of a three-part series.

Richard Schwartz, Ph.D., is the founder of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy. A featured speaker for national professional organizations, Dr. Schwartz is the author of many books, including No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model, You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For: Bringing Courageous Love To Intimate Relationships and Many Minds, One Self: Evidence For a Radical Shift in Paradigm.

Mark Matousek: Underlying all of your work is this belief in humanity as being inherently good, which is a Buddhist tenet. It’s so different from the notion of total depravity that we’re given in certain religions, like with original sin. Can you tell me how a belief in our goodness impacts our ability to heal?

Richard Schwartz: I didn’t start out that way, but over these 40 years, over and over, I've seen that when we access our larger Self, it’s pure goodness. It is just beneath the surface of these parts, and it can’t be damaged. All of that is quite amazing. If that’s the essence of humanity, then, yes, all these other ideas about people are wrong and this is who we really are. Again, it’s just an empirical observation. Then the other big shocking discovery is that there aren’t any bad parts. That’s the title of my book you’re quoting some from, No Bad Parts. As you get to know each of the parts, they have a Self. When they’re released from their extreme roles, they become pure goodness, too. It’s a radical position about human nature. At our annual conference, there are a couple of people that are working in the prisons with murderers, and people who are into restorative justice, things like that. It makes such a difference when you’re working with those people to know that there’s goodness in them and to not just write them off the way psychiatry does as pathological sociopaths and so on.

MM: It’s unhealed trauma that prevents us from knowing our goodness?

RS: Exactly right.

MM: So some of our parts get frozen, and in order to thaw them out, we need to listen to our troublesome parts rather than fight them. You also teach that it’s necessary to get parts out of protective roles for them to be able to speak. Could you just give me an example of a part that might want to protect us from trauma and yet keeps us stuck?

RS: Most people come in with a big critic, for example, and they hate it. It makes them feel stuck and worthless and young and alone. It constantly tells them that they’re bad even when they succeed. It’ll find some reason to say you’re still bad. Most spiritualities as well as most psychotherapies go to war against that or try to isolate it or ignore it or distract from it. When you do that with that part, it just gets stronger and more determined to make you feel bad. Instead, you go with curiosity, with someone like myself, a therapist, because I can talk to these parts directly, and say, “Mark, how do you feel toward this critic?”

You learn that even though it’s gotten you really stuck, it’s really just trying to keep you safe. I would say, “Okay, Mark, how do you feel toward it now?” You could say, “Well, I feel sad for it. I feel compassion for it. I actually feel like it’s desperately been trying to help me and I’ve been so hard on it.”

“Can you extend that compassion to it and see how it reacts to your compassion?” I might add. These parts will start to melt because no one’s ever listened to them and realized they’re just trying to help. Then there’s a whole set of practices to actually help relieve that critic of its role and help it transform into its naturally valuable state.

MM: The ego is so often vilified, in spiritual life particularly. You don’t see the ego that way. You write, “The ego is a cluster of managers who are trying to run your life and keep you safe.” The idea is to befriend and listen to what we call ego instead of trying to just constantly override it or diminish it?

RS: Yes. Very similarly, this critic is often one of those managers. There are a lot of other common manager roles that comprise the ego. Some of these include a part that strives to achieve things and to be responsible and take care of people and sometimes takes care of everybody but doesn’t let you take care of yourself, for example. There are parts that just keep you in your head. They don’t let you feel much of your body. They keep you thinking in an intellectual way all the time. Those parts are particularly annoying to spiritual types.

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Yes, it’s all true. The ego is getting in the way of your accessing these higher levels. It’s true. It makes sense that a lot of spiritualities are trying to fight that or trying to ignore it. But what we find is that if you go with love to these parts and learn about how they’re trying to operate and work and ask them to give you space to go to these higher places, you go with permission. Then you don’t have to meditate nearly as much because you don’t have to fight them off all the time. They just allow it. They bask in it. They can join you in that bath of spiritual energy, what we call Self-energy. It’s a very different approach to meditation and to lots of other things.

MM: You’ve written that many people come to spiritual traditions with lots of “exiles” — meaning those parts of ourselves that we avoid, sometimes due to trauma in our background — hoping for relief. How can we recognize when we’re avoiding our exiles and engaged in spiritual bypassing?

RS: I’ll tell you my own personal story. I came out of my family with a lot of worthlessness and the assumption that I didn’t have much to contribute to the world and a lot of anxiety about my future because of that. I went through college and got out of college and had no clue about what I wanted to do and was pretty anxious. Then I ran into TM [Transcendental Meditation] and became a very ardent meditator and found that it really helped with that anxiety. The mantra would just take me away and I could feel some of the bliss. I thought I’d found the answer.

It actually did help. I actually could function better and could concentrate better. I didn’t have so much ADD as I had before. I felt better in general, but I was also abandoning all these parts of me that carried the anxiety that way. The anxiety and the worthlessness, they weren’t being touched by it. I became addicted to the meditation because it could keep me above all that, keep me away from all that. Because I didn’t know this model at that point. I just thought, I’m feeling better. What’s wrong with that?

Now, having worked with many people that come to me with similar attachment to some spiritual practice and say, “What’s wrong with doing it?” I’ll say nothing’s wrong with it, but you do have these symptoms. If you could stop meditating for a while and get that spiritual part to step back a little bit, we could go to the parts that aren’t being served by it and actually get them out of where they’re stuck in the past and heal them. Then the spiritual practice will be good for everybody in there. It won't be just getting you away from the other parts.

Stay tuned for part three of our conversation.