A Surprisingly Effective Way to Deal With Your Inner Critic

We're bringing you some of our favorite gems from the archives, as chosen by our staff. This week, we're hearing from therapist Dick Schwartz, as chosen by Mani Chandy from our Substack team. Schwartz is the founder of Internal Family Systems, a way of looking at all of the various "parts" that we have inside ourselves, and how they can work together or make things harder for us. Full Episodes: How to Handle Your Demons | Richard Schwartz https://www.danharris.com/p/how-to-handle-your-demons-dick-richard?r=4o5o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=falseHow (and Why) To Hug Your Inner Dragons | Richard Schwartz https://www.danharris.com/p/how-and-why-to-hug-your-inner-dragons-ac1?r=4o5o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=falseGet ready for another Meditation Party at Omega Institute! This in-person workshop brings together Dan with his friends and meditation teachers, Sebene Selassie, Jeff Warren, and for the first time, Ofosu Jones-Quartey. The event runs October 24th-26th. Sign up and learn more here http://eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party-2025! Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hey, hey, happy Friday, everybody. Today, we're going to talk about one of my favorite and really most impactful for me personally, theories of the case when it comes to the human mind. I don't know if you ever saw that movie Inside Out or the sequel, Inside Out 2. The idea is that it takes you inside the mind of an American girl and shows how she's got these different parts to her. She's got her angry part, jealous part, calm part, happy part, joyous part. This is true of all of us. And learning to understand that we've got these different modes into which we go and then developing a sane relationship with the various parts of your personality, you might call them demons, although not

• 0:59Dan Harris?

  all of them are negative or problematic. But this view of the psyche and how to work with it has been incredibly helpful to me. And, you know, it's not entirely new. All the way back to the Buddha, the Buddha was working even after his enlightenment with one of his most problematic parts. He called this part Mara. It's kind of the god of desire and aversion and delusion, a kind of avatar of the most problematic aspects of the human repertoire. There's a lot to this. And like I said, I have found it incredibly helpful, and I'm not alone. All this month on Fridays, we're highlighting some of our favorite moments from past episodes, kind of golden nuggets from our vast archive, as selected by members

• 1:43Dan Harris?

  of the team here at 10% Happier. Today's episode is built around a selection from Mani Chandi, who works on our Substack operation. When we asked Mani, can you think of one of the most impactful things you've heard on the show? He mentioned a specific part of my conversation with Dick Schwartz, who's a family therapist and academic and a founder of a school of psychology called Internal Family Systems, which is where you kind of look at the various parts of your mind and figure out how they work together and how you can work with them more successfully. So coming up, you're going to hear Monty talk about why he found this so impactful. And then you'll hear the specific portion of the interview with Dick Schwartz that landed so powerfully with Monty.

• 2:26Dan Harris?

  Before we get to that, I just want to remind you that we're offering guided meditations that are customized to all of our episodes now, all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes. And for the month of August, our teacher of the month is Kyra Jewell-Lingo. These meditations are available to paid subscribers over at DanHarris.com. They're now the new normal here, so look out for them on the regular. As you've heard me say before, we really think about the podcast as the lecture and the guided meditations as the lab, where you really get to practice all the fascinating stuff you learn on the show. Today's a Friday episode, so there's no guided meditation that comes with this episode. But if you want to hear all of the past and future, Monday, Wednesday, customized guided meditation, sign up at DanHarris.com.

• 3:10Dan Harris?

  Okay, coming up, we'll hear from Monty and then Dick Schwartz.

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• 4:14Speaker 03

  Hey everyone, I'm Monty Chandy, one of the editors on the 10% Happier Substack. For my staff pick, I wanted to highlight a conversation Dan had recently with Dr. Richard Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems Therapy. This episode hit home for me. Like a lot of people, I can be incredibly hard on myself when I screw up, especially when I don't live up to my own standards. There's a part of me that tries to keep everything under control and get things just right. And when I fall short, another part shows up as an inner critic, saying harsh things to myself I never dreamed of saying to a friend. Or sometimes, it's distraction, scrolling TikTok, shopping online for things I don't need, whatever.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  What I love about Dr. Schwartz's take is that it doesn't label parts of us as bad or broken. Even my inner critic, or the part that numbs out with shopping or doom scrolling, is genuinely trying to help me get my needs met. Living with all these parts of myself, often with conflicting ideas of what's best for me and how to achieve this, reminds me of the Walt Whitman line, "I am large, I contain multitudes." This episode helped me to see those parts not as problems to fix, but as voices worth listening to. When I notice a part has taken over, I often ask myself, "What is this part trying to accomplish?" Or, "What does this part need right now?" Dr. Schwartz's approach helps me remember that we're all usually just trying to do

• 5:40Speaker 03

  the best we can with the imperfect tools we've developed. This way of thinking has made me a little kinder, both to myself and to others. I hope it does the same for you.

• 5:51Dan Harris?

  Thanks so much, Monty. All right, so now let's hear the part of the interview with Richard Schwartz where he explains the basics of IFS, or Internal Family Systems. I thought maybe it would make sense to start with a refresher on IFS, Internal Family Systems. Let me hand you the mic and you can just walk us through the basics of it.

• 6:11Speaker 04

  Okay, so there's a couple of big pieces to it. So, one, in contrast to the most common way of understanding the mind, which is to think of it as unitary.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  I believe it's the natural state of the mind to be multiple. And that people with that diagnosis of multiple personality are no different from anybody else, except that their system got blown apart more by the horrific trauma they suffered. But the idea that we all have these little inner beings, these little inner personalities, is for me, a natural state of the mind. And that they also, before they're hurt, or when they're not hurt, they're incredibly valuable. Each of them are there for a good reason. They have talents and resources to help us in our lives. But that trauma and what's called attachment injuries,

• 7:07Speaker 04

  which is basically bad parenting and, you know, all those things we suffer, especially when we're kids, force them out of their naturally valuable states into roles that can be quite destructive in our lives and frees them in time so that many of these parts, you know, if I were to have you ask a part of you, like a critic or something, how old a thought you are? Most people get a single digit. They still think you're five or six and they still have to protect you in the way they did back then. So they get frozen in time and they take in what I call burdens, which are the extreme beliefs and emotions that came into you during the trauma

• 7:51Speaker 04

  and then graft onto them and then drive the way they operate like a virus might. So that's the state of most of our parts. At least the ones that I tend to work with, because I'm a therapist. I'm trying to help people with the parts that are getting in their way. So the other couple of pieces of this, because I come from a family therapy background, I had two advantages. One is I didn't know anything about interpsychic work, psychoanalysis or any of that. So when clients started talking about this back in the early eighties, these parts, I really just had to listen and try to understand what they were saying rather than impose a theory on them.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  And the second advantage I had is from family therapy. I was a systems thinker. So in families, we would track the interactions of family members with each other and then try to make a map of who's allied to whom and who's polarized with whom. And you can do that. And with that map, then we would know where to go to try and integrate. So I began doing that with these parts. I wasn't interested in each one individually, but how do they relate to each other as a system? And a map I came up with ultimately, which is held up as this very useful map over these forty years, is that there are these, you know, other systems, we call them inner children,

• 9:16Speaker 04

  these young, vulnerable parts of us, who are very sensitive, but also when they're not hurt, are playful and joyful and creative and loving. And we love them because they're our most precious qualities a lot of the time. But they're the ones, because they're most sensitive, that get hurt the most. And so they take on the burden of terror from some trauma or the burden of worthlessness and shame or the burden of emotional pain. And then, once they carry that and they're stuck in those scenes, we don't want to be around them anymore because they have the power to overwhelm us with those feelings and pull us back into those scenes.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  And so we have almost natural instinct to lock those parts away. And our culture tells us to do that. This is a just move on, don't look back kind of culture. So we try to move on from the memories and the emotions of the trauma, but not realizing that we're also moving away from the parts of us that were hurt the most. So we call those exiles. When you do that, not only do those parts get hurt because you've abandoned them, but you lose contact with those wonderful qualities that carry. And so, most of us, growing up in this culture, have a bunch of exiles. And when you have a bunch of those kind of raw, vulnerable parts,

• 10:46Speaker 04

  you feel more delicate because so many things could trigger that. And the world seems more dangerous because so many things could trigger it. And so other parts are forced out of their naturally valuable states to become protectors. Some of them are trying to protect you by managing your life so that your exiles don't get triggered. So they'll manage your relationships so no one gets close enough to hurt you again. Or they'll try to make you look perfect so no one rejects you. Or they'll try to make you achieve at a high level to counter the worthlessness. Make you take care of everybody so that they depend on you, they don't leave you. Don't let you take care of yourself.

• 11:26Speaker 04

  So these are just some of the common, what I call manager protector roles. That otherwise people call the ego, basically. But they have in common the desire to keep you safe and in control and to please people. And mainly so that you can not get triggered. These exiles don't burst out with their flames of raw emotion. Now, doesn't always work. And the world has a way of breaking through those defenses and triggering your exiles. And when that happens, that's a big emergency. Because it feels like these raw flames of emotion are gonna take you out. And for many of the people I work with, they do.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  You know, when you get really triggered, you can't function. And some people are in bed for a week and so on. So it's all very real. So there are other parts who are kind of on standby. Waiting to deal with this explosion of flames of emotion. By either getting you higher than those flames or dousing them with some substance or distracting you until they burn themselves out. So we call those firefighters. So that's the map, it's pretty simple. Exiles and then two different kinds of protectors. One, the managers who are trying to preempt anything that might Trigger the exiles and then the firefighters who react after the fact,

• 12:53Speaker 04

  after an exile has been triggered. And in contrast to the managers who are careful and try to keep you in control and please people, these firefighters don't care about the consequences to your body, to your relationships. They just got to get you away from those feelings right now, no matter what it takes. And so there's built in polarizations inside of us also between the part that when you feel that wants to get you drunk and then the part that attacks you for being a drunk and so on. That's the map of the parts, but actually the big deal about IFS, and I, I think this is very related to your work, is that in addition to these parts, there's a kind of essence

• 13:38Speaker 04

  in people that I call the self with a capital S. And I just stumbled onto that discovery back in the day, you know, way a long time ago. Because as a family therapist, once I got hip to the fact these parts weren't what they seemed and they needed to be listened to rather than fought with, I would try to get clients to do that. So maybe I'm having you try to get to know your critic and to get curious about it rather than hate it. And you're doing that and you're listening to the critic and it's telling you about how it's trying to protect you by running down your confidence so you don't take risks or by pushing you to achieve more or so.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  There's always a positive intention, even though often it backfires. So I'm trying to get you to listen and even extend some appreciation to this part that you hated. And then suddenly the part that hates it has jumped in and is doing the talking. And so things go south. And it reminded me of family sessions where I'm trying to have two family members talk to each other and a third member comes in and sides with one against the other and it goes south. And I began asking clients, could you find the part that hates the critic or is afraid of it or whatever part you're working with has got an attitude about? And could you ask that one to give us the space to just get to know this one we're trying to work with?

• 15:04Speaker 04

  And to my amazement, when these other parts would separate, it was like some other person popped out and would do the talking and had these qualities that were really useful, like was calm, where seconds earlier they were really agitated, or had confidence relative to the part, or were just purely curious about it. And also often would suddenly become compassionate toward it. And in that state, whatever part, the critic would say, would drop his guard and would really respond well. And then the client would basically take over the session and would know how to relate in a healing way to this part.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  And when I would do that with other clients, it was like the same person would pop out with those same C-word qualities: calm, confident, compassionate, curiosity, but also would be clear, the image would change, or would be courageous and could go to places they couldn't before, or would be creative in how they related to the part, or feel connected to it. And when I would ask people, "What part of you is that? That's great, let's keep that around." They'd say some version of "That's not a part like these others, that's myself." So that's why I came to call that the Self with a capital S. And now, forty years later, we can safely say that that Self is in everybody, can't

• 16:29Speaker 04

  be damaged, knows how to heal, and is just beneath the surface of these parts, such that when they open space, it pops out spontaneously. And so that's the big deal about IFS. That's what I'm trying to bring to the culture, is this kind of different understanding of human beings and the mind that is much more uplifting, actually.

• 16:52Dan Harris?

  You said a lot there, so I'm gonna try to sum it up, although it's a lot to sum up. But essentially, the IFS model says, I think it's intuitive, really, we all have these different modes, these different aspects of our personality, angry, jealous, happy, creative, ashamed, whatever. And you refer to these as parts. Sometimes these parts get inflamed, exacerbated through the trauma of our lives. And we try to compartmentalize or shut them out because it's too painful to handle. At that point, the part becomes an exile.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 17:29Dan Harris?

  At which point, we see the emergence of two, you might call protector parts. The manager, often an inner critic, who's kind of like a sheepdog, trying to keep everybody in line, to manage things so that the exiles don't grab the mic. And alternatively, the firefighter, who's much less regulated and will try to douse the flames with alcohol, or shopping, or gambling, or whatever it is. Both are trying to manage the exile in different ways.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 18:01Dan Harris?

  The route to sanity is to, first of all, to recognize that we have all of these parts, and then, to the best of your ability, to relate to them from what you're calling the capital S self. And so, I know we talked about this last time, but I think it's worth bringing up again. What is the link for you between what you're calling the capital S self, and what in Buddhism we would call not self? Like, our core is that we have no core. That the self, the idea that there's some core Dan behind my eyes, between my ears, that's an illusion, in fact, a really harmful illusion. Whereas you're pointing to this capital S self as being the point of origination for healing.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I've had many, many of these conversations with Buddhists. And what we can usually come to is, it's linguistic. So, what they're calling self is really what I'm calling parts. So, no self in Buddhism is really the absence of these, sometimes, extreme voices and parts that are cluttering your mind. And as you get them to open space inside, you find this kind of calm essence that people call no self in Buddhism. But for me, it's really the self, the capital S. So, that's where I've come to reconcile it.

• 19:26Dan Harris?

  And for somebody who's having, I can imagine at this point, listeners being a little confused. And I'm probably part of the problem because I brought in this hard to understand concept of no self. But just again, very simply, your concept of the self is the best part of us? The sanest, calmest, clearest, most compassionate aspect of the human mind?

• 19:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's our essence, actually. It's who we are when all these parts separate. And it has these great C-word qualities that I just mentioned and some other kinds of qualities. And for me, and this is related to your work too, I think, when I encountered it in people, I couldn't reconcile its existence because I'd been trained in what's called attachment theory to believe that to have any of that inside, you had to have gotten it from a relationship. So as a child, you needed to have gotten it from good enough parenting. If you didn't get it there, you had to get it from a therapist. If you didn't get it there, you had to get it from a spouse or someplace. For it to be native inside of us.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  And I was working with people who had been horribly abused on a daily basis as children. And so there was no way I could reconcile encountering this in them with that theory. So it wasn't until I started, and I was sort of directed to look into spirituality, that I could ground that observation. Because like you were saying about Buddhism, virtually every spiritual tradition has a word for this, and almost no other psychologists do. So in Buddhism, it's not only no self, but it's also Buddha nature. And in Christianity would be Christ consciousness, and Hinduism, it's Atma. And in Judaism, it's Nafesh, and so on.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  Actually, co-authored a book where we went through each tradition and identified that essence that we were finding in us and how they describe in very similar ways. But I was finding that we could access that very quickly in people, even people who've been horribly traumatized. In contrast to a lot of those traditions where you have to meditate 20 years to get to it. But for me, it is the same, and it is a kind of drop of a bigger ocean. So the model and my own thinking has much more evolved in a spiritual direction that way. That there is this big self that others have other names for, that you can access through meditation,

• 21:58Speaker 04

  you can access through psychedelics, and that, you know, this is a particle of that big wave or a drop of that big ocean.

• 22:07Dan Harris?

  Yeah, there's a whole debate here that I don't think we should have about big self, because I think there are some in the Buddhist world, including many of my own teachers, who would say, as long as you're identifying with anything, you're suffering. But let me set that aside and go to this notion of, in the later schools of Buddhism, of a Buddha nature, which, as you said, there are names for this in many spiritual traditions. My understanding is this kind of gets us into the debate of like, what is fundamental about human nature? Are we red in tooth and claw? Are we rotten root and branch? Or are we essentially good? And I'm not an expert in this, but my understanding is there are some data coming out of the sciences

• 22:50Dan Harris?

  indicating that actually, like in our rawest state, you know, if you look at a baby, for example, and put in front of a baby like a mean character or a nice character, they'll very naturally gravitate toward the nice character. Or if you have a baby or a toddler in the room and somebody participating in the experiment pantomimes being in pain, they will naturally express concern and try to help. So there are some indications that this idea of a Buddha nature or essential goodness, it doesn't require exogenous factors like good parenting, it's just in us.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I'm just finishing reading for the second time a book by a guy named Rücker Bregman called Humankind, where he goes through all the data there is to show that we've been laboring under this misconception about what people are really like. And we do have this really good essence, so I'd recommend that.

• 23:49Dan Harris?

  I wrote it down.

• 23:49Speaker 04

  Includes the research you're talking about.

• 23:51Dan Harris?

  Yeah, maybe a guest on this show. I do want to get to the practical, because that's the subject of your new book. But just to stay on the, with the sort of esoterica for a second. You know, when you talk about managers and firefighters, again, just to refresh people's memories, these are the parts that we develop to keep our shit together. In the case of the manager, often the manager manifests as a kind of inner critic, keeping you in line. And then the firefighter is kind of a wanton reckless pain relief often. You know, just, let's just get us out of this. Let's save us from the exiled unwanted parts of ourselves by drowning it in some sort of, you know, dopamine ocean.

• 24:36Dan Harris?

  It reminds me a little bit, especially the managers. And here's where I could probably get myself in trouble with Buddhist scholars. But to the very small extent to which I understand, protect your deities within Tibetan Buddhism. I'm wondering whether there's some overlap there.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  I think so, yeah. I've been collaborating a little bit with just Sutra Malione. Do you know that name? She wrote a book called Feeding Your Demons. And she's a Tibetan Lama. Yeah, that's where we've come to some agreement, that those demons, they call them, are really just these protective parts. And that rather than fight with them, feed them and help them calm down and relax and transform. So, yeah, I agree with that.

• 25:25Dan Harris?

  It's so interesting, she has this term feeding your demons. I kind of independently arrived, well, independently, nothing's independent, in a codependent universe or an interdependent universe. But I've started using the term high-fiving your demons.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  It's great, yeah.

• 25:41Dan Harris?

  You know, and I've learned this from you. And I've also learned it through the work of Kristin Neff and others involved in self-compassion. And of course, in my Buddhist practice and studies.

• 25:51Dan Harris?

  You know, I think my traditional approach and the approach of many people is to use the managers or the firefighters to keep the exiles at bay, and it's pretty hostile. Whereas if you blow them a kiss, or give them a high five, or feed them, not in the sense of indulgence.

• 26:08Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 26:09Dan Harris?

  But in a sense of like, thank you, I recognize that these exile parts, or even the managers I may not like, are essentially, as you said before, the organism trying to protect itself.

• 26:18Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 26:19Dan Harris?

  We develop these habits and patterns, often for very good reasons, but they're not skillful. If you welcome them to the party, and give them a party hat, and let them sit at the table, they often get quite compliant.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  Very much, yeah. That is part of what I'm trying to bring. I actually could reference a book, because we're talking so much about Buddhism, that just came out, called Outshining Trauma, by a guy named Ralph De La Rosa. And it's all about IFS and Buddhism. And one of the big pieces of it is that there's been such an attitude about the ego, quote unquote, in so many Buddhist traditions, and that we're really trying to get Buddhists to do what you're talking about, which is to love them up. And if you do that, instead of trying to shoo them away, these parts, that you get much more cooperation in your meditation.

• 27:14Dan Harris?

  Yes. What I realized, doing high dose loving kindness meditation, where you flood the mind with warmth, it can feel quite forced, or treacly, or saccharine, this practice. But what I realized, after I got over myself and allowed myself to do it at a high dosage, was as my demons, let's call them that, or my parts, whatever you want to say, were emerging in my practice, I was meeting them with more warmth. And I was realizing that my mindfulness practice here to fore was shot through with aversion.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 27:45Dan Harris?

  And aversion is, in Buddhist speak, a hindrance.

• 27:49Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 27:49Dan Harris?

  If you're actually feeling aversion towards something, you're not truly being mindful of it. So mindfulness, properly understood, self-awareness properly understood, contains in it a kind of mixture of warmth and non-judgmentalism. And I was practicing mindfulness improperly, up until that point, really.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  Maybe. I mean, I've just run into many Buddhist teachings that actually encourage you to do it that way. So, yeah, so this is revolutionary in the Buddhist world, and another woman named Lama Willa Baker has really transformed her teaching around that. And it's hard to be loving and compassionate to this ego that gets vilified in Buddhism. It's a lot easier if you think of them as these little inner beings who are trying their best to keep you safe. And sometimes they're misguided. So how you think of this makes a big difference in how you can relate to them.

• 28:47Dan Harris?

  Thank you to Dick Schwartz and also to Mani Chandi for suggesting that excerpt. We'll put a link to the full episode in the show notes. Dr. Schwartz has also published a number of books, including the Internal Family Systems Workbook, which has some great tools for learning about your own parts and how to deal with them. And don't forget, head on over to danharris.com to become a paid subscriber, and you can access our growing library of meditations that are customized to our Monday, Wednesday episodes. DanHarris.com, join the party. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show.

• 29:29Dan Harris?

  Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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