My body was telling me to take a step back and reevaluate.

Five years ago I had pneumonia and I couldn’t really do anything other than prop myself up on the couch and breathe…

…breathe and think about how I ended up in this mess

I’d run myself into the ground. My schedule was full-to-overflowing. My life was packed and stretched to the edges. I had no margin for error, no space to breathe, no time to connect to who and what mattered to me.

What was I really chasing? Why had I packed my life so full? What was really driving me to try to be all the things to all the people?

The trauma of betrayal, abuse, shame, and the constant search to prove myself worthy–it was humbling and frustrating to see these recurring struggles and how they were hijacking my drive.

I needed to do more work to lift those burdens, so I could move forward in a way where my drive was aligned to what matters most to me instead of taking me further away.

In the last episode, Jonathan Merritt and I talked about how sometimes our bodies give us an SOS whether we like it or not. That SOS is an opportunity to take stock and make changes so we can get back to the work of leading.

Today, I am talking with an incredible thinker and one of the most generous leaders I have ever met about what to do when you get slammed into that wall and need to make changes.

Dr. Richard Schwartz created Internal Family Systems (IFS) after years as a systemic family therapist and academic. This framework has been instrumental in my own work as a therapist and coach for leaders.

We dig deep into the story of his own personal journey, what led him to course-correct on his early teaching on healing, and how unchecked drive can hijack other parts of you–your playfulness, your ability to rest, and your ability to handle what comes up when you finally take a break.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How we overcome overwhelm and why resistance always creeps in
• How a near-death experience in Hawaii helped Richard to reach a better understanding of Self-leadership
• How he was saved by his IFS practice and was inspired to bring the model to the world
• Why Richard feels like his methodology is a powerful support in an age of gas lighting culture
• How you can deal with all that comes up when you slow down, pause, or even have a hard stop like we all are currently experiencing now during this global pandemic

Learn more about Dr. Richard Schwartz:

• Internal Family Systems

Learn more about Rebecca:

• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the Weekly Rumble Email
• rebeccaching.com

Transcript:

Richard Schwartz: And now, forty-some years later and thousands of clients later and thousands of therapists like yourself using this all over the world, you can safely say that that Self (with a capital S) is in everybody, is a kind of essence that can’t be destroyed and knows how to heal and knows how to relate to your parts in a human way and knows how to relate to the people around you in a human way. That’s a big deal. That changes everything.

[Inspirational Intro Music]

Rebecca Ching: Five years ago I was sick, sicker than I’d ever been in my life. I had pneumonia, and I couldn’t really do anything other than prop myself on the couch and breathe (at least fight to breathe) and think about how I ended up in this mess. Sure, after priding myself on never getting sick, I had caught a bug, and I was dealing with the consequences. But I was also dealing with something else. I’d run myself to the ground. My schedule was full to overflowing. My life was packed and stretched to the edges. I had no margin for error, no space to breathe, no time to connect to who and what mattered to me. My body was trying to tell me something.

I’m Rebecca Ching, and you’re listening to The Unburdened Leader, the show that goes deep with leaders whose burdens have inspired their life’s work. Our goal is to learn how they’ve addressed these burdens, how they rise from them and become better and more impactful leaders of themselves and others.

Five years ago, my body was trying to tell me to take a step back and re-evaluate. What was I really chasing? Why had I packed my life so full? What was really driving  me to try to be all the things to all the people? Sick on the couch, I started to wrestle with how I ended up in this position. It wasn’t just my vision and mission driving me. They were still there but were buried, buried beneath a lot of hurt and wounds from the traumas of betrayal, abuse, shame that I was trying to run from. It was humbling and frustrating to see these recurring struggles and how they were hijacking my drive.

2:13

Ugh, this is so hard to say but the constant search to prove myself worthy, it just sucked seeing that there was more work to do on what I thought I’d resolved, and I knew sitting on that couch fighting to breathe that I needed to do more work to lift those burdens so I could move forward and move forward in a way where my drive was aligned to what matters most to me instead of taking me farther away from these anchors. That realization ushered me in a season of powerful life shifts. I worked on reprioritizing my family, my core values, my original vision for my business, and my passion for play and creativity. Finally, I found my footing to lead again.

In the last episode, Jonathan Merritt and I talked about how sometimes our bodies give us an SOS whether we like it or not. [Laughs] That SOS is an opportunity to take stock and make changes so we can get back to the work of leading. In today’s episode, I want to challenge the common narrative about our drive as leaders. I want to dig into how we change, how we overcome overwhelm, and why resistance, or what I call protection, always creeps in.

What often sets apart leaders is drive. I’m hard pressed to find a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur who is not driven. This drive goes deep. You get it. You live this every day. But what if your ceaseless drive to push through resistance is actually keeping you from realizing your true potential for leadership? I learned I needed to take a step back, check myself, and get clear on what the protectors (or the resistance) were trying to tell me. My own drive is fueled by many things: a cocktail of passion, pain, and possibility. And I see that same mix in the leaders I work with every day.

4:02

So how do we start to check ourselves? How do we get curious about what’s driving us and why our resistance is showing up in the first place? How do we know if we’re already succumbing to the consequences of unchecked drive? I could think of no one better to have this conversation with than Dr. Richard Schwartz.

Dick created Internal Family Systems as a systemic family therapist and academic. This framework has been instrumental in my own work as a therapist and coach for leaders but also as a wife, a mom, and just a human. It’s been instrumental for everything. But the story of his own personal journey showcases just as many insights as his body of work. Dick shares how his understanding of self-leadership saved his life in a near-death experience in Hawaii. He also shares what led him to course correct on his early teaching on healing and why he feels like his methodology is a powerful support in an age of gaslighting culture and, really, for any leader.

Pay close attention to how Dick points out that unchecked drive can hijack other parts of you, your playfulness, your ability to rest, and your ability to handle what comes up when you finally take a break. And now, I am thrilled to share this conversation with an incredible leader and one of the most generous leaders I have ever met!

[Inspirational Music]

Rebecca Ching: Dick, it is such an honor and a pleasure to have you on the podcast today!

Richard Schwartz: It’s always great to talk to you, Rebecca.

Rebecca Ching: Well, thank you. I have to say that your work inspired this podcast. The title, the whole mission and vision behind The Unburdened Leader is based on your work and the founding of Internal Family Systems, so thank you for that inspiration.

Richard Schwartz: I’m very honored to hear that, and I’m really glad you’re in the community. I’m glad to have you spreading the word.

Rebecca Ching: Well, it’s a pure joy. So there’s so much that I want to address today but I want to bring you back to a time.

6:04

You shared a story when I was at a training with you that so impacted me, and I’ve continued to share that on your behalf with so many that I work with because it was so powerful. And I’m wondering if you can share with your listeners about the time that you almost drowned while you were swimming in Hawaii.

Richard Schwartz: Yeah, so this was, I think, three years ago, maybe two-and-a-half, three years ago. I was visiting my brother who has a place in Kauai on a bay there, and it was a day of very heavy surf, and I decided to go to the beach and thought it would be safe to just wade in the shallows. And then I took another step, and it was like a drop off or something, and all of a sudden I was being pulled out to sea by what they call a riptide. Not having spent a lot of time in oceans, I didn’t know what to do other than to try and swim back. And so, I did that for a while, punily, getting more and more tired. I’m not a great swimmer, and I’m pretty old. [Laughs] So I would try and roll over on my back to catch my breath, but the waves were so big the water would just come in my mouth.

So it got to a point where I really thought I was gonna die, and I had these parts screaming in my head, “We’re gonna die! We’re gonna die! I’m gonna die!” And I have a relationship with my parts to the point where I could say to them — I couldn’t say, “We’re not gonna die,” because I thought we probably would too. But I could say to them, “I’ll be with you, and I love you,” and they calmed down.

Not long after that my sister-in-law happened to come down to the beach and saw what was happening and frantically motioned me to swim parallel to the shore rather than trying to swim back. And I had just enough energy, and it was counterintuitive because there were such big waves, why would you swim that way? But I had enough energy to do that, and then the waves kind of carried me in.

8:20

So yeah, anyway, that’s the story. The reason I’m here able to talk to you today is my sister walking down just in the nick of time.

Rebecca Ching: But there’s this point in that story, I can even just feel the tenderness hearing you tell it again in me, where your system — you know, you were hearing, “We’re gonna die,” and that connection you had with those parts of you that were so scared, it wasn’t a false truth of, “We’re gonna be fine.” It was, “Well, no matter what happens, I’m with you.”

Richard Schwartz: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: And there was this sense of relaxing, so you even had your wherewithal to notice your sister-in-law. At least that’s what I make up, and that relaxing allowed you to kind of stay in your executive functioning stage and be able to get back into shore.

How does that experience illustrate your approach to Self-leadership?

Richard Schwartz: A part of why I tell that story is that there isn’t ever a time when you can’t access what I call the Self, even when you’re about to die, and that’s even — then not only do you feel better and calmer, but you can get a lot of points from your parts. So one of the big goals of this work is for your parts to trust you more as a leader inside, and if you can step up even in a time like that, then everybody says, “Oh, this guy, maybe we can trust him.”

Rebecca Ching: That’s powerful, and you talk about the Self, and you talk about the parts. Can you just briefly address this model, this Internal Family Systems model, this framework that you’ve developed?

Richard Schwartz: Yeah, so, you know, I’ll go back in time maybe almost 40 years now.

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]

10:04

Richard Schwartz: I was just a little kid, and I was trained as a family therapist. I have a PhD in that, and I thought with family therapy I’d found the holy grail. I held that belief until I tested it and actually did an outcome study with bulimia and found that I could reorganize the families just the way the book said to do it and still some of my clients kept binging and purging. So I, out of frustration, started asking why, and they started talking this language of parts, and they would say some version of, “Something bad happens, and this critic attacks me for it, and that brings up another part that makes me feel totally worthless and alone and empty. And that’s so distressing that to the rescue comes binge, which takes me out of my body, but then the critic attacks me for the binge, which brings back that worthless, empty, lonely one. But the binge has to come back.” And they’d be caught in that vicious cycle.

And family therapy is the field in psychology that’s steeped in systems thinking. And so, what I was hearing as a systems thinker was a natural sequence of interactions in a system. And so, I began trying to look at what my clients were saying through that lens and then actually trying to intervene using some family therapy technology. And longer story short, as I was doing that and trying as a family therapist to have these sort of internal family sessions where I would have my client talk to the critic and try and get it to change, and as I did that, I’d come to find that the critic wasn’t just a bundle of parental energy that a lot of the fieldists thought it was, and that it actually, when I really listened and got my client to listen, was really trying to keep my client safe by pushing her to look better or to perform better, perfectly, or it was trying to run down her confidence so she wouldn’t take any risk.

12:17

And as I had clients listen to and get to know other parts, it turned out that none of them were the way they seemed, that they were all, even these parts that were causing lots of symptoms, were screwing up their lives in various ways. When you really listened from a mindful place, with an open mind and an open heart, they would tell the secret history of how they were forced into these protective roles and how most of them were frozen in time in the past when that role was necessary often. But they’re still living as if you were still five years old. They still believe you’re five years old. They still have to yell at you in case the critics — they still have to make you feel better through the binge or so on and so on.

And at some point I started to think, “Wow, maybe these parts aren’t what they seem.” Maybe they are like kids in a family. So family therapy’s big inside was you can’t take an acting-out kid out of their family and tell them to stop and expect that to work. You instead have to get to know what kind of sequences of interaction the kid is caught up in in his family that are maintaining his acting out or causing him to and then change that, and when you change that the kid reverts to his natural self and stops acting out. So I thought maybe the same thing’s true with these inner parts. Maybe they are good parts who are caught up in forces inside that are making them extreme this way, and it turns out that that’s true.

14:02

So a couple basic ideas of this model, one is that having parts isn’t a sign of pathology but it’s the nature of the mind to be subdivided that way, that we’re born with that is the idea. In addition, there aren’t any bad ones. They’re all valuable. They all carry resources and abilities that we need but that they get forced out of their naturally valuable states by the traumas we experience or the it’s called attachment entries in our childhood into roles that they’re stuck in, and they think are still necessary to keep you safe and can be quite destructive. But again, it’s not who they are.

So that was amazing to me and has contradicted so many things I’ve learned in psychology, and even more contradictory and even more amazing, as I was doing that work and I was having parts have these dialogues, and as a family therapist if you’re working in a family and you try to get two people to talk to each other and it doesn’t go well, it’s often because there’s a third person who’s interfering. So when I started working with clients and maybe had one of these bulimia kids trying to talk to her critical mother, and she’d get angry at the mother, and you’d look around and you’d see the father was cueing her that he disagreed with the mother too. So we learn as family therapists to get him to step out of her line of vision in the room, and she’d calm down and do okay.

So I brought that awareness when I was trying to have maybe that same kid talk to this critical voice inside of her, and as I’m trying to help her get to know it rather than fight it, suddenly she is furious with that critic. And so, I said, “Is there another part of you that hates the critic that’s interfering?” And the parts would say, “Yes. “But if we ask it to step back or relax or just give us some space so we can get to know this critic, and they’d say, “Okay, it did.” I’d say, “Now how do you feel towards the critic?” And they’d say, “I’m just kind of curious now why it’s calling me names.”

16:30

Seconds earlier they hated it, or they were terrified of it, but you get those parts to separate and suddenly there’s like this other person shows up who knew how to relate to the critic in a way that it would respond well to and would exhibit qualities like curiosity or calm or we have what we call the Eight C’s of Self-Leadership.

So, oddly enough, as I saw that person show up in other clients simply by getting these other parts to open space, it was like the same person would show up. As I started to catalog the qualities, oddly enough, they all began with the letter C. Compassion, courage, clarity, creativity, connectedness are all characteristics of what we call the Self, and now forty-some years later and thousands of clients later and thousands of therapists like yourself using this all over the world, we can safely say that that Self (with a capital S) is in everybody, is a kind of essence that can’t be destroyed and knows how to heal and knows how to relate to your parts in a human way and knows how to relate to the people around you in a human way. That’s a big deal. That changes everything.

That was the big discovery, ultimately, and like I said, it was a big challenge to believe at first. But I’d been taught, like probably you, that to have any of that you had to have a certain kind of parenting when you were a kid that had to come from some external relationship. But it turns out it doesn’t. It turns out it’s inherent in us. It becomes a more spiritual idea that way.

18:12

Rebecca Ching: You’re absolutely right, and the concept of the Self, it really is a game changer, and it shifts the agency we have. No matter what we’ve done or what’s been done to us, there’s still the agency and the capacity to heal. What that looks like and the process of that is its own unique journey for each individual. But I find even in my own work, whether I’m sitting in my clinical work or with my leadership clients or just as a citizen in the world right now, this practice of even what’s going on in myself or others, it really keeps me from dehumanizing. It helps me have compassion for those that are doing such harm or have had such harm done to them. And then I’m able to stay more aligned with who I want to be and my values and my integrity, and the domino effect of that is powerful that there’s such dignity in that even with folks that are doing a lot of harm and have done a lot of harm and in a culture that is so justice oriented —

Richard Schwartz: Right.

Rebecca Ching: — and all about efficiency too. This work is so countercultural. And so, I’m so grateful. Thank you for unpacking that. I want to follow up with what you said a little bit earlier because we both are trained Family Systems Therapists. Structural Family Therapy like you, was kind of my foundational, which has been a beautiful bridge to understanding this framework for me. But, you know, you talk about the traditional approach to change and healing. We talk about, “Let’s dig deep, find the pain, eliminate it.”

Richard Schwartz: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Ching: You know, and I see that both in clinical and in leadership work. “Let’s just exile this stuff.” Or on the other side you see this, “Just stay positive. Let go. Kill the resistance.”

Richard Schwartz: Right.

20:08

Rebecca Ching: I see this especially in the leadership/personal development world. Why do you believe that approach is harmful and problematic?

Richard Schwartz: This whole positive psychology, “Don’t look at the past. Just think about the future and think about all your qualities and resources,” has its place. You know, it can be valuable to a certain degree, but if you’re working with somebody who has a lot of trauma, they do have a lot of parts that, then you’ve lined up having to exile, in my language, because they don’t fit into that positive mindset. And in fact, some of them don’t want you to feel good about yourself for reasons we can get into. But, so in a sense, you wind up doing more violence to people because they come to you already having exiled a bunch of parts and then you’re teaching them that, yeah, those and even these others are getting you down and shouldn’t be around. And unfortunately, there are a lot of spiritualities that also subscribe to that belief system.

And with the other one where you’re digging deep, you can dig deep too fast. Since we’re both systems thinkers, we both know that these internal worlds are delicate ecology. Two things about that. One is when you succeed and you get to a lot of this pain that’s in there or the terror and the shame, a lot of people will backlash. They’ll backlash because you didn’t go there with permission. You didn’t work with the parts that don’t want you to go there, what most systems call resistance, that you’re just supposed to plow through and overcome. And those parts, it turns out, have been working hard to keep you away from all that most of your life, and they really resent not being consulted about going there because they have a lot of fears about letting you go to those places.

22:20

So I learned that the hard way early on when I would have clients have those backlash reactions after sessions where we did succeed in going and digging deep. To my credit, I guess, I got curious. “What am I doing wrong?” And I had my clients teach me that, indeed, these are delicate qualities, and I’m barging in, throwing open the doors to our closets and pulling out all the dirty laundry without permission. And so, now we don’t do that. We always start with the protective parts of the system and honor them for their attempts to keep you safe, and then ask about what they protect and then start negotiating permission to go to them. And it turns out that when you come in in that respectful way that you don’t get so much resistance. You get permission, and then they don’t have the backlash.

Rebecca Ching: That’s powerful, and this permission approach, this lens of is it okay to have this conversation, to even go to that deep work, this trauma work in itself isn’t an efficient process, and I think that’s a mindset that’s important to change even in the leadership space. But this place of permission, it really is countercultural. It really shifts to more of a collaborative versus a power over approach that we’re seeing not only in our internal system but externally in our culture. But people aren’t very patient with this permission. It takes a lot. [Laughs]

24:00

Richard Schwartz: Yeah, I mean many people do have a part that’s determined to get in there and fix this right away. That part will always make things move slower, ironically, because it creates resistance from the parts that don’t want to go there. They dig their heels in. When I’m working with somebody, that’s the part I’m gonna get to step back first before any of the others, the one that’s really determined and driven to get healing to happen today.

Rebecca Ching: I get a lot of not maybe full-on backlash, but I get a lot of pushback in one of the aspects of Internal Family Systems where doing this work is to help people befriend the different parts of them.

Richard Schwartz: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: And whether it’s a protective part of an exiled part, and man, [Laughs] when I bring that up initially it’s like I just shook a snow globe with folks.

Richard Schwartz: [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: Like, “What are you talking about? Befriend this inner critic? Befriend the part of me that tells me I suck and I’m not worthy or who do I think I am?” And obviously we rumble with that and unpack it, but once people start to hook into that concept, this power of you’re here for a reason, that curiosity component of Self, like, “Help me understand what your job is. Help me understand what your fears or concerns are if you don’t do your job.” Again, I find that in the leadership space, especially, people love this. They’re like, “Holy cow!”

Richard Schwartz: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: It appeals to the other parts of their efficiency — like, this might be more efficient actually, and they relax a little bit.

Richard Schwartz: It actually does turn out to be a lot more efficient.

Rebecca Ching: It really does. It really does. It’s just the system takes a while to — has to get on board. [Laughs]

Richard Schwartz: Right. That’s right.

Rebecca Ching: And especially when, at least here in America, it’s such a justice-oriented culture. Permission and befriending and compassion, these words are often used to identify being weak or soft or you’re gonna get yourself too exposed. And so, it takes some trust building for sure.

Richard Schwartz: Yeah. Yeah, especially in the business world where “never let them see you sweat” is their motto. Now, my experience in the business world is that a lot of business leaders, while they have a kind of love-hate relationship with the critic, they hate that it makes them feel so bad, but they love how it motivates them. And so, some of them are very reluctant to get it to stop because they’re afraid they won’t drive as hard and won’t keep striving in their lives.

26:43

What’s interesting these days with the virus pause is that those parts of people can’t do what they ordinarily do. So a lot of people are forced to notice what else is inside of them, and that can be very disturbing if that driving critical voice is keeping you above your exiles, keeping you away from the sense of being worthless, and how hard you worked was the way you felt good about yourself. So you can wind up awash in parts because you don’t have the usual distractions, or you can find parts of you that you actually have neglected who want a simpler life and don’t want to spend all your life at work, that you actually find yourself enjoying things that you hardly ever would do in the past, like reading a novel. Yeah, it could go either way.

Rebecca Ching: I think you hit on something a lot of — even in myself, these internal polarizations around, as someone who can definitely protect with doing and work and keep things at bay, but then you feel this soul leading to the simpler, and that can be really disorienting to the internal homeostasis, the status quo. So it’s an opportunity for a lot of curiosity for sure.

28:12

I mean, can you keep going actually on this pause? Because we’re recording this in the middle of a global pandemic, which is unprecedented in our lifetime. Can you talk a little bit more about this pause, because what I saw, particularly with — I’m connected a lot with people. I have online businesses and entrepreneurs who are so innovative, so creative, and they jumped in right away, right? Some people were like, “Let’s pivot! Let’s change!” Everyone got their ten steps to do well at home, shelter-in in your business, and there were some beautiful resources out there. But there was also this energy that felt a bit frenetic too. So yeah, talk a bit more about what you’re seeing in this pause.

Richard Schwartz: Yeah, I mean, like I say, it can go either way. I’ve got big CEO-type clients who, because they can’t do the usual distractions, are really suffering, and it isn’t just because they’re scared of what’s gonna happen. It’s because, as I said, they’ve got parts that were so reliant on the accolades and the ability to be around a lot of people who are all working together for the same goal. And to work 60 hours a week, without that become lost, and up come these exiled parts that need their attention but they’re so afraid of.

So, in that sense, it’s a blessing for me as a therapist, because while they were “succeeding,” we can have trouble getting past those driven parts. And now everything’s cracked open, and so, there are a lot of trailheads we call it that we can follow to find the pot of gold, to find the parts that need their healing. And that’s also true with some people who the crisis itself is triggering a lot of parts that they didn’t have to experience when they weren’t in a crisis like this.

30:24

So I have clients, for example, who suddenly are feeling terrified and trapped, and that takes them back to when they were being abused and were powerless, and we’re able to go and get those little girls out of there. For a therapist, it’s a good time because people are accessing a lot more. And then there are people who don’t have big trauma histories who can do this naturally. Ideally, as I was saying in the second thing I was saying is you can help those driven parts see they don’t have to do that as much, and you can give access to people’s playful sides or their intimate parts that want to be intimate more, get to know their family better, or the parts that want to do things for their body rather than destroy their body the way they have been. So it can be a time when there’s an opportunity for more integration of all these parts that have been cut out by the dominant one. 

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, this is one giant trailhead right now that we’re leading to many more.

[Inspirational Music]

Rebecca Ching: Keeping up on the latest tools and practices is something that I know is innate to you. Your curiosity and work ethic set you apart, and you’re often ahead of the curve on new and innovative practices and techniques that support your leadership and the work you do. So when what has worked for you to navigate struggle, growth edges, recurring struggles has stopped working, it may be time to dig back into your curiosity and learn more how the burdens you’re carrying may be what is holding you back. It all starts with a conversation.

32:16

Set up a connection call with me to learn more about Unburdened Leadership Coaching experiences at www.rebeccaching.com, or send me an instant DM @rebeccachingmft and tell me you want to learn more about Self-leadership. Remember leaders are not meant to go it alone, and the tools that got you where you are today may need to be upgraded so you can go the distance with less burnout and burdens.

Share this episode with someone you think may really benefit from it and sign up for my Weekly Rumble email where you’ll have the resources at your fingertips to help you on your path to being an Unburdened Leader!

[Inspirational Music]

Rebecca Ching: I want to shift a little bit, and I want to hear more how IFS has impacted your own personal life and, let alone, as a healer and a leader at the IFS Institute, but I’d love for you to start with how IFS has impacted you personally.

Richard Schwartz: [Laughs] I feel very blessed to have stumbled into this because it’s given me a kind of purpose in my life since I was that age. I think I might have been 32 when I first started to get this, and I just turned 70 this year. So that’s a lot of years to have a really meaningful vision and to devote my life to it, and there were many, many lonely years where everybody was very skeptical. As you’re saying, it’s a countercultural kind of understanding of people that was a very tough sell in the early years, and I just had a few people who were into it and supporting me.

34:06

And now, as you know, it’s kind of taking off, and I think part of the reason, and this goes to your question too, is it took this long, and it’s been taking off for maybe the last five years or so. It’s taken this long in part because I wasn’t ready. I still had parts that I needed to work with to be a good leader when the time came.

And so, I have done a lot of work in the last 10, 15 years, I’d say particularly since my second marriage because my wife Jeanne has been a great, what we call, tor-mentor with a hyphen between the tor and the mentor. [Laughs] Such by tor-menting me, she mentors me (along the lines of what I was saying a minute ago) in terms of what parts I need to heal because every time I take the bait and I get really angry or hurt or something, rather than trying to change her, I focus on myself and find the part and see what’s stuck, and actually I can’t always do that by myself, but ultimately can unburden these parts so they don’t react in the same way.

And as I was stewing about why is it taking so long, I sort of got this inclination, this intuition that it’s because I wasn’t ready, and now I’m much more ready. Go ahead.

Rebecca Ching: No, I’m just thinking you weren’t ready. Yeah, can you unpack that a little bit more?

35:58

Richard Schwartz: You know, I think I was doing it for the wrong reasons. Not totally, but there were parts of me that needed the accolades, needed the sense that I was valuable. Along the lines of what I was saying earlier about clients this time. That if I had a period like this, for example, where I couldn’t get out and do a workshop and have everybody tell me how great IFS was and how great I was, then these worthless parts would start to creep up. And, you know, I had a father who was hard on me, and so, I came out of my family — and you know, he had some good reasons to be hard on me, but I came out of my family with a considerable sense of worthlessness. I’m actually looking at his picture right now.

Rebecca Ching: Wow.

Richard Schwartz: And so, the parts that were trying to counter that actually were necessary to get me — I’m a basically shy person, so to get me out in front of people saying these controversial things, I had to have parts that didn’t give a shit about what anybody thought and were sort of narcissistic that way and were just determined to prove my value. And so, none of this would have happened had all that not been the case.

But then, as I started to be the leader of a community, those parts started to get in the way and some other parts, and I was lucky to have people in the community who confronted me. As you know, there are some traitors who really, in the early days, wouldn’t put up with that. And, you know, what I’m proud of is that I listened to them rather than getting rid of them. And actually over time I did more and more work around these issues. So you got me going on a long disclosive story here.

38:12

Rebecca Ching: I appreciate it. You touch on the piece about not getting ready and that connecting that to this drive you had approving your worth, I’m hard pressed to find a leader, let alone anyone, that doesn’t have elements of those protectors in them.

Richard Schwartz: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: And they’re helpful, right? Because we’re not swimming in the shame of not enough, but it’s not sustainable, especially when you’re leading a big community. And so, I think that is a really important reflection that many people will be able to relate to.

Shifting gears too, how has your passion and commitment, then, to getting the IFS message out to the world led to you experiencing some burdens and maybe even them taking you out? Like you said, this was lonely in the beginning and people were skeptical. As I mentioned, this is countercultural. How did you navigate — now, this is a 40-year commitment, this is long-game work.

Richard Schwartz: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: And it’s just taking off. But how did you navigate those times when the burdens of this work not connecting to queue out?

Richard Schwartz: When I first stumbled into this, I was sort of like a rising star in the family therapy world. I had co-authored a textbook. I was in the middle of — maybe you had it in graduate school.

Rebecca Ching: My first MFT course was your book, absolutely!

Richard Schwartz: Okay. [Laughs] And, you know, I thought I was a hotshot, and I, again, had these parts that were very eager to have everybody think I was great.

39:57

And then I came into this and very early on when I started to see that Self was in everybody and that these parts weren’t what they thought, I got a big vision for this. I got a sense that this could change everything if everybody got this. But I was [Laughs] a little kid. I think I was 33 or 34 maybe when I really started to get it. But I was a really young 34. I was immature, people would say, in a lot of ways. And so, I thought, “This is amazing. I sure hope the person who can take it where it’s supposed to go comes along, because I’m just a little kid.” But that person never showed up, so I felt like myself maybe, or parts of me felt like this is so important that I have to get it out even if it hurts so many parts of me, and it did.

I had experiences — I was in a department of psychiatry at The University of Illinois at Chicago, and I was asked to do grand rounds about it to this sea of white lab coats, again, as a 33-year-old kid, and the analysts in the room just butchered me, just got up and tore into me. One guy tried to get me fired and said I was dangerous. This was in Chicago where what’s called Self Psychology was a big model and cohort, and the idea, they had this big fear of fragmenting in that world. And so, they would say I was fragmenting people to having to focus on these parts. And I would say, “No, they come in pretty fragmented. I’m having focus so they could go and get them and bring them back home, so they’re less fragmented.” But they were so scared of the whole phenomenon that just by focusing on them they thought — so anyway, I can’t remember how I got into that.

42:18

And parts of me would be really, really, really hurt and want to go crawl in a hole and hide, and I wasn’t getting a lot of support from my family therapy colleagues that I worked with because family therapy had avoided thinking about the intrapsychic world. Family therapy was kind of born as a reaction against what they saw as the excesses of psychoanalysis. So I was a traitor to the cause there too. So I was like a man with no home or what’s the right phrase.

Anyway, yeah, I just felt alone, and luckily I had some students who got excited about it and kept me going. So it wasn’t just me. I had my wife at the time and a number of students where we could compare notes on our discoveries, some of the early ones. Michi Rose is one who’s still around. And so, there was this little kind of enclave where we were all excited and all supporting each other, and that was really helpful. I had to have that.

Rebecca Ching: I think you bring to the surface the absolute essential need to have community to reflect back to us whether it’s personal on our own worthiness and value or the professional, especially when we’re innovating and shifting culture because, man, homeostasis, we know this in our training, it fights to the death to keep status quo, and it is a beast to hold space for.

44:17

I am so glad you had that community at the time, and you persevered. It’s thinking about 40 years though. It’s this making significant change is long-game work.

Richard Schwartz: Yeah. Yeah, there was a point where I kind of got that, and systems thinking really helps this.

Rebecca Ching: Totally.

Richard Schwartz: You do get that there is an established paradigm that you’re hitting up against and that every time a systems thinker does that, they expect the homeostatic reactions you’re alluding to. And so, there was a point where I didn’t take it nearly as personal.

Rebecca Ching: That shift of where it’s this work and everyone’s acceptance of it isn’t connected to your worthiness, to this work is deeply personal and deeply important but your worthiness isn’t on the table for others to have a say.

Richard Schwartz: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: That’s a big shift, and it’s an essential shift to sustain trying to pivot culture, especially, but making change in general.

Richard Schwartz: And there was also a point where I had begun trading sessions with a woman who had come up to me at a workshop and said, “I’m getting these messages for you from somewhere, and they’re interesting if you want to know.” And so, you know, I have people come up and say crazy things to me all the time, but in her case, she seemed quite non-manipulative and sincere. And so, I did start trading sessions with her, and the messages she was getting really helped me too because she was getting messages about how I was sort of given this to bring, it isn’t about me, and how much I needed to get my personality out of the way so that I could bring it in a clean way. And so, that not only helped me not take things personally but also helped me with the commitment to keep working on myself.

46:31

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, I mean, that’s differentiation at its finest right there. It’s a tough one. It is a tough one in a world that loves to reward the doing and not just who we are and our essence. We have to rely internally on it. I love how Self-leadership in the capacity of what I often talk to people about is the YOU-turn, to bring that back.

This makes me shift to my next question on what you were just saying because what do you see is the biggest benefit for IFS in the leader and leadership spaces and business and entrepreneur spaces, because often the message is, “You do you, and no one else is you,” and that is so true, yet there’s this double-edged message of, “Do you, and then we’ll decide if we’re gonna choose you.” [Laughs] And so, talk about what you see are some of the benefits for IFS in more of the business leadership space from your perspective.

Richard Schwartz: Yeah, that’s a big topic. So, of course, there’s Self, and Self-led leaders, Self-led organizations will have a certain culture that resembles the inner worlds of the people in leadership. So what I’m calling Self is contagious. So if I can be in Self in my community, it’s gonna pull Self from everybody else.

48:02

Whereas if I’m in parts as a leader, then that’s also contagious, then everybody’s protectors start to come forward. And if I am not afraid of my own vulnerability because I know my exiles, and I can be with them without being overwhelmed and without being afraid, then when people are vulnerable around me, I’ll be very accepting of them, and I’ll be able to be present with them. But if I’m afraid of my exiles, then I’m dominated by these protectors that never want to see me sweat, at least be seen as sweating, then when other people are vulnerable, I’m gonna try and get them to cut it out.

So the message there is that the way you relate to your parts will be parallel to the way you relate to people when they resemble your parts.

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] The way that you relate to your parts is the way that you relate to people when they remind you of your parts.

Richard Schwartz: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: I just had to repeat that there. And so, what you said here reminds me of what Brené Brown often says, how courage is contagious (and courage is one of the C’s of Self, no surprise) and so are our parts, right, so is anxiety, so is judgment, so is shame. Those things are contagious, and we know all the neuroscience studies about that too.

I love what you just said. If I’m not afraid of my vulnerability and I’m aware of my exiles, this is really I think what sets leaders apart in being able to handle change and rejection and falls and failures without losing themself and taking others down in the process.

50:00

Richard Schwartz: Yeah, back when I had all these exiles that were assuming I was worthless and somebody was critical of me, that would just explode with the shame inside of me, and to avoid that, it would have to be a part (and we see this in our current president) who would immediately have to argue and correct the person and restore my sense of self-esteem that I am not a bad person even with the slightest kind of criticism. And once you can be with that exile, then you don’t fear the way people might trigger you otherwise. You’re not so brittle, and you could actually unburden that shame so that you’re not even so vulnerable to that.

So yeah, for me, I’m just fascinated by the parallels between inner systems and outer systems.

Rebecca Ching: I’m with you. It is fascinating, and they’re inextricably connected.

Richard Schwartz: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Ching: It’s almost these ecosystems within systems within systems.

Richard Schwartz: Yeah, at family therapy we had a concept of isostructural minuton. We’d talk about isomorphic system, and that’s what it is. It’s just the same system inside and outside.

Rebecca Ching: And that involves perspective taking. That involves being able to step back and see our inner system versus being led by parts of our inner system. And that requires work and personal and professional development work. It’s powerful. I love this, and this is where I’m gonna geek out. I’m like, “Oh, minution. Oh, minution”.

So I want to just wrap up because you touched on what’s going on politically right now, and I’ve been writing and talking a lot about cultural gaslighting, you know, this sense. And I’m hearing so many of my clients — even the last few days, I’m getting texts and messages from my leadership clients going, “This is really hard to hold space for.” To keep speaking truth and literally having people in power say, “No, the sky isn’t blue. It’s purple.” And I’m feeling my system start to overwhelm and shut down.

52:17

Can you talk about ways we can lead ourselves while in an age of such intense even external polarizations without burning out or feeling overwhelmed by the anger or just wanting to tap out altogether these days? Can you comment a little bit about that?

Richard Schwartz: Yeah. You know, I have all those reactions. As this goes on and you watch the news and you watch his press conferences, and yeah, there are parts of me that have that reaction.

Rebecca Ching: I’m rolling my eyes right now.

Richard Schwartz: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: Dick just saw me roll my eyes. [Laughs]

Richard Schwartz: But there are these young parts that think, “Oh, maybe he’s right,” you know? And you can sort of see how he could induce people into that place.

Rebecca Ching: Yes. Exactly.

Richard Schwartz: Because even me who has done a lot of work on myself and — [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: Yes, I know! I know, I’m like, “Maybe the sky is purple?”

Richard Schwartz: Yeah!

Rebecca Ching: And then my husband looks at me, and he’s like, “What are you talking about?” I’m like, “Ah! I’m in the trance!”

Richard Schwartz: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: But then that causes my inner system, then, to kind of get anxious, and I start to feel a little flooded like, “Wait! What day is it? Who am I?”

Richard Schwartz: Exactly.

Rebecca Ching: It’s disorienting.

Richard Schwartz: Yeah, I know now to go to those young parts and say, “I get you. You wish that there was this strong guy who could take care of everything and knew all the answers. But I’m here. You don’t need him, and I know that I can actually help you.” So, you know, it’s walking the talk of becoming the primary caretaker of your own exiles, which then frees up everybody around you to become the secondary caretaker, and then that allows you to stay in Self.

54:08

When I listen to him in Self, it’s a totally different experience. I can see through all the bullshit and actually see his exiles. You can kind of see beyond his protectors and see what an insecure, hurting guy he is that he needs to do this all the time and have compassion for him. And again, I’ve trained a lot of social activists. Have compassion while you’re acting to stop things, stop the injustice. And doing it from Self, you don’t polarize, you know? Whereas if you do it from these righteous, angry parts, then you do polarize.

Rebecca Ching: That’s a powerful differentiation, and I really appreciate you touching on that, that place, because I know when I can have compassion for what I’m seeing in our leadership right now, it is a radically selfish act for my own wellbeing because I’m not getting hooked, and yet, it’s not remiss of accountability and that we can still move forward. It’s compassion isn’t rolling over saying, “Oh, it’s just someone wounded in their childhood.”

Richard Schwartz: Right.

Rebecca Ching: There’s still a sense of accountability.

Richard Schwartz: Right. Yeah. One of the three C words that Self has that people forget are courage and clarity and confidence, and so, Self can be very forceful in standing up to injustice. And also there’s a drive, or drive is the wrong word, but a desire in Self to bring healing and to bring justice and a lot of times healing involves bringing justice.

56:09

So the more Self-led you become, the less afraid you are to act in a way that’s gonna actually bring more harmony, and to bring more harmony, often you do have to stand up to the protectors in the external world.

Rebecca Ching: That’s awesome, and if we had more leaders like that, whether in our home, in our communities, our elected officials, our businesses, that would —

Richard Schwartz: You know, and that’s the big vision is to create more leaders like that through this work. And so, I’m really glad to hear how much you’re doing with leaders because I think you can do a lot of that.

Rebecca Ching: Thank you. It has been transformative, personally. I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for this work. Yeah. It’s hard to put to words the feeling. I know you hear these stories all the time when you have the burdens lifted and experience what joy is, and you get to see, then, other people experience that too. And we’ve still got a lot of work to do. There’s a lot of work we’ve got to do, Dick. There’s still a lot of work to be done.

Richard Schwartz: Yep.

Rebecca Ching: And I know we’re here for it. [Laughs] We’re not going anywhere.

Richard Schwartz: I am, yeah.

Rebecca Ching: Can you talk briefly about what you’re working on right now?

Richard Schwartz: I am working on several things. One is a book on the spirituality of IFS that is — originally I did, what do you call it, an audiobook called Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts, and so, now they’ve translated that and want me to do a regular book for them. That’s been really fun because I’ve been putting a lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about into that. So we’re hoping to start to scale IFS from being just a kind of one-model of psychotherapy to bringing it to —

58:24

Rebecca Ching: Badass!

Richard Schwartz: — what feels like education and consulting and coaching and medicine. There are projects in medicine and spirituality and collaborating with some Tibetan Lamaist to try and help them stop doing the spiritual bypass stuff.

Rebecca Ching: Oh, that’s a whole other conversation I’ll have you back for. [Laughs]

Richard Schwartz: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: That’s right because you spoke in front of the Dalai Lama. I don’t know, how long ago was that, four or five years ago?

Richard Schwartz: I think it was a little less than that but yeah, mm-hmm.

Rebecca Ching: Okay.

Richard Schwartz: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: And where can people find you and connect with the work that you’re doing?

Richard Schwartz: They can find the work at our website which is www.ifs-institute.com, and I do some of these kinds of things, and I also do workshops. I’m doing a workshop Saturday for the first time online. So everything’s been moved to online, and so, if people go to the website and get on our mailing list, then there are notifications that go out all the time about things that I’m doing, and that’s the best way to find me. 

Rebecca Ching: Wonderful. And I recommend your books Intro to Internal Family Systems and You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For to anyone that I know. I have order copies and given them away.

Richard Schwartz: I totally appreciate it!

Rebecca Ching: I’m married to an educator, and it’s been fun to see him bring some of these principles into his work.

Richard Schwartz: Oh, that’s great to hear.

1:00:10

Rebecca Ching: Right after my first level one training, I came back and I said, “Oh, so a part of you is really upset right now,” and my husband’s like, “What do you mean a part of me? This is all of me!”

Richard Schwartz: Right.

Rebecca Ching: And I’m like, “Oh, you’re blended.” He’s like, “What?”

Richard Schwartz: [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: And I’m like, “Okay, I need to stop talking.” I did it all wrong. I did it all wrong.

Richard Schwartz: Well, you can apologize to your husband for me inflicting that on you.

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] I think between you and Brené Brown there’s been a lot of apologizing. [Laughs] Like, “If you’re gonna talk about IFS or Shame Resilience Theory, I need to tap out right now.” [Laughs]

Also, too, there’s a six-month program that you guys offer. Anyone can join and learn about the model, right?

Richard Schwartz: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: I think did you just close that most recent one at the time of this recording?

Richard Schwartz: I think yeah, uh-huh, yeah.

Rebecca Ching: Okay. But if you’re on the mailing list, you can hear about the next one?

Richard Schwartz: Mm-hmm, yeah.

Rebecca Ching: Okay.

Richard Schwartz: It’s called the IFS Circle Program. So yeah, people tend to love that.

Rebecca Ching: I benefited a lot from that. So it’s a wonderful program. Thank you, again, for your time, for your wisdom, for doing your own work in unburdening so that your system can be ready to scale this to the globe. I’m very grateful for your example and for your leadership in my life and in so many spaces that I’m in. So thank you for your time today!

Richard Schwartz: Thank you, Rebecca! I always enjoy talking to you, and you’re a really good interviewer. You pulled a lot of stuff out of me that I don’t usually talk about. [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: Thank you for your trust. I appreciate it.

Richard Schwartz: Okay. [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: There are no overnight successes, and our drive can work against us if we let it lead us based on our wounds and fears. Instead, we want to lead our drive in a way that is aligned with our values and from a place of what IFS calls Self-leadership. This conversation was a deep dive into the importance of leading your inner system and the important connection and parallels between your inner system and what is happening externally.

1:02:11

Dick Schwartz left us with a powerful reminder on the importance of doing the work to be ready to hold the capacity to tolerate success and lead ourselves and others with integrity, no matter what is happening around us. Dick’s work in his own unburdening practices saved his own life and helped him get out of his own way so he could lead from a place of generosity, compassion, and clarity, instead of being led by the childhood shame that fueled his initial drive for success, notoriety, and being right.

Dick’s explanation of the IFS or Internal Family Systems model unpacked for us how this perspective shifts so much of what we’ve been taught about drive, resistance, and struggle, so much, gosh. Our discussion around leading in gaslight culture, which can be disorienting and fuel feelings of helplessness and hopelessness in the best of us, gave us practical insights to how your leadership can run the marathon when you’re not hijacked by those who trigger you. Instead, you’re driven by a deep curiosity rather than fear and shame.

Thank you so much for joining this episode of The Unburdened Leader. Make sure to check out the IFS Institute at www.ifs-institute.com, which is the homebase for the IFS community, resources, and more. You can find this episode, show notes, and free Unburdened Leader resources along with ways to work with me at www.rebeccaching.com!

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