Dr. Richard Schwartz on Internal Family Systems: Parts, Self and a Live IFS Session

High-Level Overview

Andrew Huberman welcomes Dr. Richard (Dick) Schwartz, the family therapist who founded Internal Family Systems (IFS). IFS treats the mind as a collection of "parts rather than a single unit, with a core Self" underneath that can heal them. Schwartz explains how trauma forces naturally valuable parts into extreme roles: exiles that carry pain, managers that try to keep life under control, and firefighters that react impulsively when pain breaks through. What makes this episode unusual is that Huberman volunteers for a live IFS session on a recent tense conversation with a family member, and later Schwartz guides listeners through their own short exercise in real time.

The tone is curious, gentle and surprisingly vulnerable. Huberman opens up about his need to protect his own truth, his old habit of working 80-plus hours a week and his fear of death, while Schwartz shares how his father's harshness drove him to build IFS. The conversation moves from theory to live demonstration, then to practical tools and bigger-picture applications such as psychedelic-assisted therapy, addiction, suicide, romantic patterns, racism and political conflict.

The Discussion Explores:

• The core IFS model: the mind is naturally made of parts, and trauma pushes them into extreme roles
• Exiles, managers and firefighters, and why "there are no bad parts"
• A live IFS session with Huberman exploring his "titanium teddy bear" protector
• The Self and its eight C's: curiosity, calm, confidence, compassion, courage, clarity, creativity and connectedness
• Legacy burdens, political polarization and leading conflicts from Self instead of protectors
• IFS combined with ketamine, and liminal states like early morning and breathwork
• Why we choose partners who resemble the parents who hurt us, and how to become your own attachment figure
• A guided self-exploration exercise for listeners and a daily practice for keeping it going

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

How IFS Was Born: The Mind as a Family of Parts

Schwartz explains that IFS began as psychotherapy but has become a life practice and "a paradigm for understanding the human mind." Its basic assumption is that the mind isn't unitary: "we're all multiple personalities," not in a diagnostic sense, but in the sense of having subpersonalities that we're born with and that are all valuable. Trauma, attachment injuries and "the slings and arrows we suffer" force these parts into roles that can be destructive, and because they are often frozen in time, they act as if the trauma is still happening.

He stumbled on this around 1983. Trained as a family therapist, he tried to cure a group of young people with bulimia by reorganizing their families "just the way the book said to," and it failed. Frustrated, he asked why, and his clients began speaking a language of parts: a critic attacks them when something bad happens, which hits a part that feels empty and worthless, which triggers a binge part to take them away from the pain, which the critic then attacks again. To a family therapist, this sounded exactly like the circular interactions he studied in real families, so he started exploring the internal family.

Exiles, Managers and Firefighters

Schwartz explains that trauma isn't necessarily traumatizing. If you go toward the part that got hurt, embrace it and help it unload its feelings, you aren't traumatized. What traumatizes us is locking those vulnerable parts away because we don't want to feel them, often because everyone tells us to move on. These become exiles. The more exiles you have, the more delicate you feel and the more dangerous the world seems, because anything could trigger them.

Other parts are then forced into protective roles. Managers try to keep you from being triggered: they keep people at a distance, make you look good or perform at a high level to counter worthlessness, and many become inner critics yelling at you to behave. Others become massive caretakers who look after everyone but you. Schwartz stresses that most of the field mistakes these roles for the parts themselves, for example treating the critic as an internalized parent's voice rather than hearing that "it's desperately trying to protect you." When an exile does break through, firefighters rush in; unlike managers, they're impulsive and reactive, willing to accept collateral damage to your body or relationships to get you "higher than those flames," numb you with a substance or distract you. Common firefighter roles include addictions, dissociation and rage.

A Live Session: The Titanium Teddy Bear

Huberman describes a recent high-friction conversation with a close family member that left both of them overwhelmed, even though it ended well. He coped by staying silent for five minutes and choosing to surrender, which he now sees not as giving up truth but as a way to get better perspective. Schwartz offers to explore it live. Huberman locates the frustration as pressure between his midsection and forehead, about the size of a teddy bear. At first he dislikes it, but when he gets curious it softens and "drops down a little bit."

Asked what it's afraid would happen if it didn't take over, the part answers, in Huberman's words, "That I wouldn't be able to discern the truth." He explains he is especially sensitive when someone tells him what his motives or feelings are. Going further, the part says, "because if you can't hold on to your truth, then nothing will make sense." Schwartz then asks whether it protects something more vulnerable, and it emerges that this "titanium teddy bear keeps at bay another part that would judge the family member harshly, which Huberman hates feeling because it would mean giving up a hopeful, perhaps unrealistic, picture of the relationship. He says his instinct is to look for the goodness in people and to take the appropriate amount of distance" to keep loving them rather than cut them off, though he admits he has sometimes put on blinders in destructive ways.

Schwartz summarizes: two polarized parts, both probably firefighters, one he admires and one he fears. With more sessions, he would get permission to meet the judgmental part too, and would likely find it's also a young protector. "There are no bad parts," he says. The goal is to help parts out of their roles and help them trust the Self to handle the relationship. Huberman notes that when he considered this, he realized he'd treated feeling disappointment and keeping the relationship as mutually exclusive. He contrasts it with his "pinch me" relationships with friends, family, coworkers and his dog, where no protector is needed.

The Self and the Eight C's

Schwartz explains that when his early clients got the parts that hated their critic to step back, they would spontaneously feel curious about it, or even sorry for it. When he asked what part that was, they'd say it wasn't a part: "That's me. He came to call this the Self with a capital S. After 40 years and thousands of practitioners, he says it turns out that self is in everybody," just beneath the parts, and it has what he calls the eight C's: curiosity, calm, confidence, compassion, courage, clarity, creativity and connectedness.

A hallmark of IFS, unlike many therapies, is that the therapist doesn't become the good attachment figure for your wounded inner children; you do. The parts learn to trust you as an internal leader. Schwartz describes doing this in arguments with his wife: noticing the protector and asking it to let him stay in the eight C's leads to a completely different conversation. Huberman likes this, comparing it to the idea of parenting yourself, and says running a lab taught him where his own nurturing instincts were weak or overdeveloped.

Role Confusion, Politics and Legacy Burdens

Huberman connects the teddy bear to his feelings about politics: he sees sensible and ludicrous ideas on both left and right, feels unaffiliated, and is tempted to be "a double hater, yet believes an adult citizen can't opt out. Fully feeling his judgment, he realizes, would create role confusion, since the teddy bear protects the simplicity of roles like son or partner. Schwartz says that in those moments he's hearing from conflicted parts rather than Self, which has clarity. In IFS, Self is not a passive witness as in many spiritual traditions but an active interleader" with an impulse to correct injustice.

Schwartz introduces legacy burdens: extreme beliefs and emotions inherited from ancestors that drive many of the world's conflicts. He says IFS runs trainings in the Middle East and he envisions large-scale legacy unburdenings for groups on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. In couples therapy and negotiations, IFS practitioners call time-outs and ask each person to find the parts that were speaking and come back able to "speak for them, but not from them." He adds that activists working from a righteous, judgmental part tend to be ignored, while those acting from Self have far more impact; inner work and outer activism should happen together.

Body, Mind and Psychedelics

Asked whether IFS suits people who feel things in the body better than intellectual types, Schwartz says it works for anyone, but very cognitive people first need their thinking part to trust that it's safe to step aside. Locating a feeling in the body and directing questions there short-circuits the thinking part, which often assumes it is supposed to do the therapy. The answers simply come when you ask the questions.

Schwartz says IFS has become one of the primary models used with psychedelics, and he had just finished an IFS and ketamine retreat with 32 leaders. Psychedelics often put manager parts "to sleep, releasing a lot of Self and inviting exiles forward, so after a ketamine experience he can do in 15 minutes what might take five sessions. Ketamine can also offer a taste of the big self," a non-dual state that helps people feel they are more than their small ego. So-called bad trips, he suggests, are often exiles demanding attention; instead of treating them as panic attacks, he asks how the person feels toward the scared part and helps them comfort it. Huberman adds strong caveats: young people should avoid psychedelics, psilocybin and MDMA remain illegal, unsupervised use can cause serious problems, and he mentions that the FDA did not approve MDMA for PTSD last year. He also notes that a widely cited study on MDMA neurotoxicity in primates was retracted after it turned out researchers had injected methamphetamine. Other ways to quiet managers include the liminal state after waking (Huberman keeps his eyes closed to explore what surfaces) and cyclic hyperventilation breathwork, done safely and never near water.

Shame, Racism and Why We Choose Painful Partners

Building on Martha Beck's idea of owning shameful things as "in us and not of us," Schwartz describes workshops where people who insist they aren't racist discover a small part that spouts racist beliefs. Rather than exiling it in shame, he helps them get curious about where it learned those beliefs, and it can unload them. "These parts are not the burdens that carry," he says. Even seemingly evil people are dominated by protectors terrified of their exiles, and people who hate parts of themselves tend to hate people who resemble those parts. Compassion for your own protectors doesn't make you vulnerable; it makes you less so, because protectors "will generate often what they fear" in others, while Self can still be fierce.

On why people choose partners who are bad for them, Schwartz points to his book You're the One You've Been Waiting For. An exiled part that absorbed worthlessness from a rejecting parent is desperate for redemption and looks for someone who resembles that parent, who then hurts you the same way. Protectors respond by trying to change the partner, change yourself, or leave to find the "real" Redeemer. "And it's always inside," he says. When each person becomes their own good attachment figure, the partner is freed from the impossible job of caring for a young exiled part.

A Guided Exercise and a Daily Practice

Schwartz leads listeners through a short session, noting that people with fear about doing it shouldn't. Pick a protective part, such as an inner critic, a part that makes you overwork, or one that takes care of too many people. Notice where it is in or around your body and how you feel toward it; if you feel anything besides openness or curiosity, ask those other parts to relax back. Then ask it what it wants you to know, what it's afraid would happen if it stopped, and offer appreciation for its effort to protect you. Ask what it would like to do if it were freed from its role, and "How old does this part think you are?" If it has your age wrong, update it. Finally, ask what it needs from you going forward, and thank your parts. Schwartz says many protectors still think you are a young child, and simply updating them brings a lot of relief.

For people without an IFS therapist, he says his team released a workbook focused on safely getting to know protectors, since going straight to exiles can be destabilizing for people with a lot of trauma; healing exiles is where a therapist is still needed. Schwartz treats IFS as a daily practice: each morning he checks in with parts he's working with, and during the day he watches for departures from the eight C's (a closed heart, lack of curiosity, a big agenda) as signs of a protector. Before this podcast, he says, he worked with nervous parts he could feel in his hands, asked them to step back, and felt a literal shift.

Firefighters, Workaholism and the Fear of Death

Schwartz describes a hierarchy of firefighter behaviors, with suicide at the top for many people. Rather than fearing a suicidal part, IFS asks what it's afraid would happen if it didn't act. Typically it's that the pain would be unbearable, and if the pain can be unloaded, the part often transforms into one that wants to help you live. The same applies to addictive parts: "Would you give us a chance to prove" the pain can be healed?

Huberman shares that in graduate school and as a junior professor he worked 80 to 85 hours a week and sometimes slept under his desk. When he examined it, he found a fear of annihilation, which he eventually recognized as a fear of death. His bulldog taught him that slowing down isn't depressive, and he now picks fewer, more meaningful projects and savors them. He has come to believe most people, addicted or not, are terrified of death. Schwartz says Huberman was essentially doing IFS without knowing it. Schwartz shares his own story: the oldest of six boys, with undiagnosed ADD, he was called lazy and worthless by a demanding physician-researcher father, and a part driven to prove him wrong fueled IFS through years of attacks, including being humiliated at psychiatry grand rounds. Students eventually confronted those protectors, and after healing his worthlessness he no longer feels driven. He adds that constant phones and distractions feed protectors and leave exiles further behind. Huberman recommends Oliver Sacks' memoir On the Move as a portrait of how medical fields resist new ideas.

Conclusion

This episode is both an explanation and a demonstration of Internal Family Systems. Dr. Richard Schwartz's central message is that the parts of us we most dislike, from the inner critic to the rager, the binger or even the suicidal part, are protectors stuck in roles they didn't choose, guarding exiled pain from the past. Approached with curiosity instead of hostility, they reveal their fears, can be updated and unburdened, and come to trust a calm, compassionate Self to lead. Huberman's live session shows how quickly this can turn abstract ideas into felt experience, and the guided exercise lets listeners try it themselves. From couples and addiction to racism and geopolitical conflict, Schwartz argues the same principle applies: when people act from Self rather than protectors, conflicts become solvable. For anyone curious about therapy, trauma or simply understanding their own reactions, the episode is a rare, practical and moving introduction.

This is a summary of "How to Achieve Inner Peace & Healing | Dr. Richard Schwartz" from Huberman Lab, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.