Richard Schwartz is an American family therapist who developed Internal Family Systems (IFS), a psychotherapy that sees each of us as a family of parts, none of them bad, with a core Self that cannot be damaged. His best-known book is No Bad Parts (2021). Therapeutic Shamanism shares his respect for every part of us, and adds the shamanic map: parts that have left altogether, beings inside us that are not parts at all, and a Soul found in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer.
Who is Richard Schwartz? #
A psychotherapist trained in family therapy who turned the ideas of family systems inwards. He gained a PhD in marriage and family therapy at Purdue University, and taught at the Institute for Juvenile Research at the University of Illinois and later at the Family Institute at Northwestern University.1 He began working with his clients’ inner parts in the early 1980s, at first with people who had eating disorders.2 In 2000 he founded the Center for Self Leadership to train therapists in the model, and in 2019 it was renamed the IFS Institute.3
His books include Internal Family Systems Therapy (1995; second edition with Martha Sweezy, 2020), No Bad Parts (2021), written for a general readership, and Releasing Our Burdens (2025), with the teacher Thomas Hübl. He is often known as Dick Schwartz.
What is Internal Family Systems? #
A way of working with the mind as naturally multiple. Protective parts, which IFS calls managers and firefighters, try to keep young, hurt parts, the exiles, out of awareness, and the painful feelings and beliefs the exiles carry are called burdens. Underneath them all is what Schwartz calls the Self, which “cannot be damaged” and knows its own way to heal.4 The guiding principle is in the title of his best-known book: there are no bad parts, only good parts forced into roles they never chose. The fuller account, and what IFS offers shamanic practitioners, is in What can Internal Family Systems (IFS) offer shamanic work?
How does Schwartz see the spiritual side of IFS? #
As central to it. He describes the Self as if there were “a piece of God” in all of us, and tells how students studying spiritual traditions likened it to atman and to Buddha-nature, which set him searching for the Self in the contemplative sides of the world’s religions.5 He also writes of clients meeting what seem to be dead relatives, and figures people call guides, during the work. He does not explain them away. Whether such a figure is imagination, another part, or “actually the father’s spirit”, he writes, “I don’t pretend to know the answer”; as a pragmatist, if the visits help, he goes with them.6
He accepts, too, that not everything met inside a person is a part. People sometimes meet voices or images that feel flatter than parts, which IFS calls unattached burdens.7 And he ends No Bad Parts by insisting that parts are not metaphors but “inner beings”.8
How does his work relate to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
There is a lot of common ground. In Therapeutic Shamanism, too, there is no single self: each of us is a community, an inner tribeInner Tribe. The community of parts-of-self that a human being actually is. Health is not one part’s triumph but a well-run tribe: every member honoured, every member doing its proper job, the Adult in charge. Read the full answer, and a healthy tribe is one where every member feels welcome, respected and has a voice. The work is to get to know each part, listen to it and honour its needs, without bringing in the hierarchical thinking that ranks some parts of us as higher and others as lower.9 See What is the inner tribe?
Where Therapeutic Shamanism goes further, it does so in shamanic terms. Some parts are not simply pushed aside but have left altogether, which is soul loss, and a part that is no longer “in the room” cannot be talked with; it has to be found by journeying. Some of what is met inside a person is not a part at all, and needs the shamanic skills of extractionExtraction. Drawing a foreign body (an intrusion) out of a person and packing the hole with something healthy. The iron rule: only ever foreign bodies, never a part of the self: extracting a genuine part of self creates soul-loss. More about this, de-possession or psychopomping, not dialogue. And the Soul is found in the Lower-World, with the help of the Animal, Plant and Stone People, not only by looking inward; it is not the same as the IFS Self, which leans towards the qualities of Spirit and the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer. These points are set out in What can shamanism offer IFS work? and How does Therapeutic Shamanism relate to IFS, Voice Dialogue and Gestalt?
Is there evidence that IFS works? #
Some, and how much is disputed. An article for the Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy in 2024 pointed to “a strikingly small evidence-base” for a model developed some thirty years earlier, and a review published in 2025 found twenty-seven studies, seventeen of them case studies and only two randomised controlled trials, concluding that the research “remains limited in scope”.10 On the other side, IFS was listed in 2015 on the United States government’s National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices, and the same 2025 review called it a promising treatment, particularly for chronic pain, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and for developing self-compassion.11
