If a patient got all their parts to step aside, protectors and exiles alike, something curious happened. They entered a state of mind far clearer and more joyful than any they seemed able to maintain in day-to-day life: calm, confident, curious, compassionate.
“What part is this?” Schwartz asked, amazed, the first few times it happened. He always got the same answer: “This doesn’t feel like a part. It just feels like myself.”
So Schwartz decided to call it Self: a unified mode of consciousness that seemed to lie just beneath all the sound and fury of parts, surprisingly reminiscent of the clear mental waters that Buddhists sought with mindfulness meditation. When a patient went into Self and visualized approaching an exile with total openness and compassion, something extraordinary happened: They began spontaneously to do the kind of work with their exiles that Schwartz himself would have done, far more effectively than Schwartz had been able to do from outside. With relief and gratitude, exiles opened up to Self about pain that they had held inside for decades. Patients sobbed, shook, screamed. Some reported seeing images of the exile opening its arms out for a hug or crawling into their laps, its long wait for rescue finally over. It almost felt to Schwartz as if he had hacked into the mind’s built-in system for psychological self-repair.
Schwartz decided to call the process “unburdening,” since his patients found it natural to visualize the exile’s pain as a physical burden that was being burned away, dissolved into the ocean, or released into a great beam of light. Once an exile was unburdened, Schwartz found, the protectors that had been managing its pain — for instance, by eating mass quantities of ice cream every time the exile got triggered — tended to be more than happy to abandon their stressful old roles and find more fulfilling new ones. The transformations were powerful and lasting. Schwartz’s bulimic patients finally stopped bingeing and purging.
Was it possible that parts were just a normal part of conscious experience — that everyone had parts?
Schwartz began giving talks at conferences about what he was doing. But his colleagues were far from convinced. Family systems therapists balked at the internalization of problems they were still convinced were located in families rather than individuals. Cognitive behavioral therapists thought distorted beliefs and attitudes had to be corrected, not coddled. Psychiatrists favored biochemical explanations that could be addressed with psychiatric medications, not nebulous internal dramas surrounding a mystical-sounding “Self.” Even Schwartz’s family wasn’t convinced. According to Schwartz, his first wife and kids suffered from his obsessive early efforts to evangelize what he had decided to call internal family systems therapy. To this day his adult daughters rib him for all his strange talk of “parts.”
Though Schwartz would end up consigned to the margins of psychotherapy for the better part of two decades, he never gave up on IFS. He felt sure that he was onto something.
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