Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Van Ness and every week I sit down for a 40-minute conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Dr. Richard Schwartz, where I ask him how he created the Internal Family Systems model and how does IFS work.

Which, Internal Family Systems is a really incredible modality of therapy that I use and still use to help me and my therapist does it. But just a quick little content warning, this conversation does contain details about addiction, eating disorders and mental health disorders.

And also, your relationship with your mental health is yours and yours alone. And anything that you hear on this episode is not a direct endorsement, it's not you need to do this. We all have our own relationship with mental health. And this is Dr. Richard Schwartz's story of how he created Internal Family Systems.

It makes it a little bit of the story of how I used it to help me.

Welcome to Getting Curious. This is Jonathan Van Ness. I have such an exciting guest. I'm so excited. So first of all, if you've read my book, then you know that I talk about Internal Family Systems. And IFS has been a really important tool for me and my personal journey to healing.

So we have none other than Dr. Richard Schwartz.

Welcome.

Thank you. Please call me Dick.

I love being on such a first name basis.

Well, I loved your book. I can't tell you you read it. Of course.

And I think it's a fabulous book. I think it's going to help many, many people. Thank you.

And I agree with virtually all the critiques you have of, you know, 12 step and the sobriety model and just love town.

Discuss if you were about all your parts. Because as you say, people expect the positive part all the time. So I was really glad that you could be that discosive.

Thank you. Yeah, it was really nerve-wracking. But I was really excited to kind of have the opportunity to do that. I, full disclosure, did not know you read the book didn't mean for you to have read it. And that's so amazing that you did.

I'm very much fan personning out right now. Yeah, I have, I have had several family friends and like people in my life that like use IFS and had therapists that did IFS.

I think it's really such an incredible modality of healing. So can you just tell us like you're mining your own business one day and then you were like,

like, I think I have part like how did it happen? No, it didn't happen that way. So I, I have a PhD in Maryland family.

I love PhDs. I love doctors. I love titles. So so PhD in in in in Maryland and in what and what and family therapy. So I was a zealot family therapist who thought all this mucky around with the intersecting stuff was waste of time because we could change all that by just reorganizing.

Family relationships until I made the mistake of doing an outcome study and tested that theory and found that it didn't work.

I was working with a population of blue mckids at the time. And I could reorganize their family just the way the books said to do it.

And they kept bingeing and purging. So out of frustration, I began asking why.

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