An Ecological Psychology: Internal Family Systems for a Turbulent World with Richard Schwartz & Steffi Bednarek

**Steffi Bednarek** (0:00)
Climate psychologists get asked to work with groups who actually feel distress. And the implicit invitation is often, can you make this go away? And it has something similar to how we manage the land, how we manage monocultures. Certain emotions are wanted, others are not. Nobody wants discomfort and distress.
But that's the appropriate response to the external conditions. That's why I think IFS has a very powerful lens to say there's an ecology of parts and that can be hopeful and hopeless. And these contradicting things can be there at the same time.

**Nate Hagens** (0:45)
You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagens. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together, and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification.
I'm very pleased to be joined today by therapist and founder of Internal Family Systems, Richard Schwartz, along with psychotherapist and psychologist, Steffi Bednarek, to discuss how the Internal Family Systems model can help us work through crises at every level, from individual trauma all the way up to our shared, more than human global predicament. Dr. Richard C. Schwartz is the creator of Internal Family Systems, or IFS, a therapeutic model that depathologizes the multi-part personality. Dick is also the founder of the IFS Institute, which offers training for professionals, and is also currently a teaching associate in Psychiatry at Cambridge Health Alliance. Steffi Bednarek is a climate psychologist, Gestalt psychotherapist, systems thinker, and IFS therapist, as well as the founder and director of the Center for Climate Psychology. With over 25 years of experience in systemic change and trauma therapy, Steffi invites us to reimagine our place in the broader web of life, and advocates for restoring soul to our collective culture. Her work has supported national governments, the corporate sector, global financial institutions, the sustainability sector, and large NGOs. In this conversation, Dick walks us through the basics of IFS, a framework for naming and recognizing the parts of ourselves that often come into conflict with one another, which he variously categorizes as the exiles, the managers, the firefighters, and the self with a capital S.
From there, Dick, Steffi, and I explore how the expression of these parts and our relationship to them has shifted over time, and how that shift has contributed to many of the unhealthy behaviors so many of us grapple with today. Most importantly, and most interestingly to me, we apply the IFS framework to the level of the global economic superorganism, examining how these aggregate behaviors have built in to the dysfunctional system we see today, and identifying the parts at play within that system itself. Though perhaps slower and more introspective than some TGS episodes, I find conversations like this one to be some of the most valuable for understanding myself and how I reflect the larger system that I'm a part of, creating potential space for system-level change that starts with the individual. I hope you are able to take the time to reflect in the same way you listen and watch these conversations. With that, please give a warm welcome to Richard Schwartz and Steffi Bednarek.
Dick Schwartz, Steffi Bednarek, welcome to the program.

**Steffi Bednarek** (4:19)
Nice to see you, Nate, and thanks for having us.

**Richard C. Schwartz** (4:22)
Thanks for having me as well, Nate. I'm honored.

**Nate Hagens** (4:25)
Dick, you have spent your career developing the evidence-based internal family systems model that has changed how hundreds of thousands of people relate to their own minds and behaviors.
But probably many of our listeners will be hearing the term internal family systems, IFS, for the first time. So maybe before we go any further, could you give us an internal family systems 101?

**Richard C. Schwartz** (4:55)
So basic premise is we all have these, what I call, parts, other systems called subpersonalities, that it's the nature of the mind to be subdivided that way, that's actually healthy because they're all valuable. They all have qualities and resources to help us in our lives.
But trauma and bad parenting, attachment injuries, things like that, force them out of their naturally valuable states into roles that can be destructive and freeze them in time during the trauma and inject them with what we call burdens, which are extreme beliefs and emotions that came from the trauma and then get injected into these parts and then drive the way they operate like a virus. So good parts in challenging difficult roles, not unlike families, where in dysfunctional families, kids are forced into roles that aren't who they are, but they're necessary to protect them, protect the family.