On a chilly winter’s day in 2017, David Medeiros met Ross Calvert at his office in Newton, Massachusetts, and from there drove through 45 minutes of traffic to meet with Dick Schwartz in Boston. Ross was wary and quiet. Once in Schwartz’s office, he took off his thick jacket and lay back stiffly into the depths of the couch as if dropped there from a great height, his eyes blank and distant behind his thick-framed glasses. Seeing him in this new context brought home to Medeiros just how sick Ross was. Medeiros hoped that Schwartz would be able to get through to him, but it wasn’t looking good.
“It was taking Ross 10 seconds to answer simple questions,” Medeiros recalls.
Schwartz began by asking Ross to report what he was feeling, to notice where it came up in his body. For a time he helped Ross get to know an inner critic part that attacked him for small social mistakes. Finally Schwartz took the plunge into the heart of it all: the paranoid part responsible for the wild outbursts which had landed Ross in the hospital.
“I’m really interested in that part,” Schwartz said. “Are you ready for that? How do you feel towards it?”
There was a long pause.
“I feel a bit afraid of it,” Ross said in a faltering monotone.
Medeiros knew enough about IFS by now to recognize this as the telltale sign of another part of Ross coming in. Ross’s hospital stays had been traumatic battles between different parts of him, the paranoid part wrestling for control with other parts and wreaking havoc when it won out. No wonder Ross was afraid of it.
“Let’s see if those scared parts can go into a waiting room,” Schwartz said.
Medeiros recognized the common IFS “waiting room” technique that he had been learning about in training. It could be surprisingly effective.
Schwartz asked how Ross felt toward the paranoid part now.
“I sort of feel like it’s kind of… silly,” Ross said. “Or… pointless.”
It was a step in the right direction, but even these gentler judgments were a sign of another part interfering. Schwartz chuckled.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get that part to step back, too. We just want to be open and curious with it, if that’s possible.”
There was another pause as Ross asked the judgmental part who had just spoken to step aside and returned his attention to the paranoid part.
“I sort of feel bad for it,” Ross said.
“Yeah, so let it know that,” said Schwartz, obviously pleased.
It was the first glimmer of Self, the built-in mental healing mode that Ross would need to tap into to heal his paranoid part. But it turned out that the paranoid part was wary of being contacted, fearing the critical parts which had attacked it so often before. For the next 45 minutes, Schwartz helped Ross strengthen his connection to Self, extending enough sympathy and compassion to the paranoid part that it began to trust Ross to help. By the end, Ross was describing himself sitting side by side with his paranoid part in the dorm room where he’d experienced that nightmarish LSD trip just before graduation. The part talked about its intense fear of the end of college, about the way Ross’s best friend’s face had started looking increasingly scary, about how a number of little incidents over the past few days had seemed to add up to a plot among his friends to betray him.
It almost felt to Schwartz as if he had hacked into the mind’s built-in layer for psychological self-repair.
Schwartz asked if the part was ready to leave that place behind. Ross said that it was. He imagined driving the part around in the passenger seat of his old car.
“See if he’s interested in unloading any of the thoughts or beliefs or emotions he got back there,” Schwartz said.
Ross’s eyes closed behind his glasses. His shoulders slumped. Three whole minutes passed in silence on the clock before his eyes opened again.
“Um,” he said. “I think I was able to release a lot of what it was holding onto. Pretty much all of it.”
One by one, he explained, he and the paranoid part had walked through all the distorted beliefs from the psychotic break and given them up into a great beam of light.
“How do you feel?” Schwartz asked.
A tentative smile cracked Ross’s face.
“I feel unburdened in a literal sense,” he said. “I feel a lot lighter. I feel good. I feel hopeful.”
And with that, Medeiros couldn’t restrain himself from jumping out of his chair and giving a little cheer.
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