It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hello, everybody. How we doing? I have long been fascinated by the notion of demons, the hobgoblins that we all have knocking around in our heads, neurotic patterns that recur in often toxic and destructive ways. I actually went so far as to look into the history of this notion. It turns out it's quite ancient.

The idea that we have an interior cast of characters, a fractious intracranial committee.

It can be found in both ancient spirituality and also in modern psychology.

The Hindus referred to our mental dramatist persona as avatars. The Greeks called them daimans, so did the Christians,

although with a different spelling. Fast forward several centuries, and you have Sigmund Freud,

the father of modern psychology, who divided the psyche into the id, the ego, and the super ego.

Even more recently, contemporary psychologists often now embrace the so-called modular

model of mind, which holds that we have all of these various modes, anger, jealousy, generosity,

etc., that compete for salience in our consciousness, like tiles in a magic eight ball.

Okay, so this is clearly an idea that has stood the test of time, but what do you do about it?

How do you deal with your demons?

In recent years, I have become quite interested in something called internal family systems or IFS.

It's a kind of psychotherapy where you give your inner characters, which IFS people called parts.

So you give your parts names and then you create relationships with them.

For me, this concept has been massively helpful.

And so today on the show, we've got the guy who invented IFS, Richard Schwartz or Dick Schwartz.

He's got a new book out called the Internal Family

Systems Workbook, which is designed to help anybody do this therapy, even if you don't have

access to a trained IFS therapist. In this conversation, we talk about what exactly IFS is, the

relationship between Buddhism and IFS, how to make peace with your parts, even without a therapist in the room.

I then volunteer as a guinea pig to show what it's like to work with your parts, which is a little bit awkward, but I'm doing it for you because I love you.

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