Richard Schwartz – Healing Self: Going Beyond Acceptance To Self-Compassion

Mindfulness has become a popular and useful tool in psychotherapy, but therapists too often encourage clients to adopt a passive-observer stance in therapy, as if it’s enough to just observe thoughts and emotions from a place of separation. This workshop will provide a comprehensive overview of how to guide your client move beyond detachment into a more engaged and relational form of self-compassion and self-healing.

What You’ll Learn In Healing Self: Going Beyond Acceptance To Self-Compassion

Objectives

1. Integrate the IFS model into your clinical practice and accelerate healing for PTSD, anxiety, depression, substance abuse and eating disorders.
2. Develop a deep understanding of how neuroscience informs therapeutic decisions in IFS therapy.
3. Explore methods for honestly and transparently handling situations in which clients are emotionally triggered

Outline

Attachment Injuries

• Internalized Parts of the Self
• Parts Can Be Useful
• Extreme Beliefs and Emotions
• Injuries Like a Virus

Goal of Therapy

• Harmony and Integration
• Use the One Mind of Integration

Mindfulness Approaches Allow the Noticing and Awareness of What Happens in Emotional Pain

• Can be used to move away from pain without resolving it
• Parts Work Results in Healing Legacy Burdens

Map of the Parts Territory

• Vulnerable Parts that are hurt by Trauma
• Protectors
• Exiles: connect, witness, and retrieval: interact with adult part, and move to present time
• Managers
• Firefighters
• Bring Protectors into Realization That They do not Have to Change Now
• Can Ask How the Self Feels Toward Different Parts = Parts Detector

Parts Protect the System

• Recognizing These Parts
• Parts Triggered in Relationship
• Curiosity, Confidence, Compassion, Creativity, Courage, Calm
• Connectedness and Clarity
• Self Heals and Becomes the Absence of Parts with the Ability to Love Parts Under Stress

About Richard Schwartz

Richard Schwartz began his career as a family therapist and an academic at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There he discovered that family therapy alone did not achieve full symptom relief, and in asking patients why, he learned that they were plagued by what they called “parts.” These patients became his teachers as they described how their parts formed networks of inner relationship that resembled the families he had been working with.

He also found that as they focused on and, thereby, separated from their parts, they would shift into a state characterized by qualities like curiosity, calm, confidence and compassion. He called that inner essence the Self and was amazed to find it even in severely diagnosed and traumatized patients. From these explorations, the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model was born in the early 1980s.

IFS is now evidence-based and has become a widely-used form of psychotherapy, particularly with trauma. It provides a non-pathologizing, optimistic, and empowering perspective and a practical and effective set of techniques for working with individuals, couples, families, and more recently, corporations and classrooms.

In 2013, Schwartz left the Chicago area and now lives in Brookline, MA where he is on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Speaker Disclosures:

Financial: Dr. Richard Schwartz is the Founder and President of the IFS Institute. He maintains a private practice and has an employment relationship with Harvard Medical School. He receives royalties as a published author. Dr. Schwartz receives a speaking honorarium, recording, and book royalties from Psychotherapy Networker and PESI, Inc. He has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.

Non-financial: Dr. Richard Schwartz is a fellow of Meadows Behavioral Healthcare and is a member of the American Family Therapy Academy and the American Association for Marital and Family Therapy. He is a contributing editor for Family Therapy Networker. Dr. Schwartz serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, the Contemporary Family Therapy, the Journal of Family Psychotherapy, and the Family Therapy Collections.

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