By Richard Schwartz
I did not care for this one. It makes a lot of claims about the magic of his Internal Family Systems approach but it was painfully light on both evidence and helpful instruction. The included patient dialogues read like a faith healer, novelty hypnotist, or medium who talks to ghosts. A few simple requests to some internal character and BOOM the patient’s problems were over. I think some participants in the book club felt that Untethered Soul was similarly lacking. I didn’t have a problem with that one, because it was aligned with many other sources that had provided the background, data, and detailed instructions. Perhaps if I was already familiar with the wider IFS literature, I wouldn’t have such problems with this book. Since IFS is his brand and he ends the book with a section about how it will save the world, this feels like a shady sales job. I don’t trust or like Schwartz at this point. Many of my self improvement books are full of sticky notes marking comments that I found to be profound or helpful. I made it through this one with no notes. The contents felt made up. Somewhere late in the book there was a comment about how Donald Trump’s behavior could be explained by hurt parts of his internal family. The reminder to recognize unfortunate behavior of other people as potentially unwanted reactions from their parts is nice enough. That hardly warrants a whole book.
Schwartz insists on the realness of many internal characters that make up a person. The book suggests they can be easily visualized, distinguished from one another, and spoken to as though they were a person in the room. That leap is neither real from my own experience, nor was it properly justified in the text. In The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate, Mate addressed prior injuries and how they manifest in current life. That made sense. Schwartz acknowledges Mate’s work and the greater space of spirituality and mindfulness while making unsubstantiated claims of superiority to all of them.
It was good and bad news that this book was very short. Bad in that I don’t think such a concept could be well captured in so little text. It needs data. It needs better instructions. However, the irritating experience of reading it was over quickly.
At the book club, a new member helped make it more approachable. She has had significant breakthroughs using IFS. She offered the following suggestion: “When you encounter a circumstance where you think ‘part of me wants to do this but part of me doesn’t’, be curious about the two parts. Hear them out. Act as though they were two friends having a disagreement and you are mediating.” I thought that was helpful and added some practical scaffolding that the book didn’t really provide. I’d like to read her version of an IFS book.