How to Think About Overreactions Differently
Richard Schwartz used to treat extreme behaviors by suppressing them. Until he realized: what he’d been trying to fix… wasn’t broken. It was scared. That moment didn’t just change his method. It changed how we understand the mind.
Parts often become extreme in their protective efforts and take over your system by blending. Some make you hypervigilant, others get you to overreact angrily to perceived slights… The harder we try to get rid of emotions and thoughts, the stronger they become. In our attempts to control or exile parts, we just end up fighting—ignoring, disciplining, hiding, or shaming them.— Richard Schwartz
Richard C. Schwartz is the founder of Internal Family Systems (IFS), a therapeutic model that transformed trauma healing by treating the mind as a system of parts — not a pathology to be silenced, but a family to be led. After discovering that even the most self-destructive behaviors were protectors in disguise, he pioneered a radical method rooted in compassion instead of control. His work has…
Based on Richard Schwartz on Internal Family Systems, summarised and reframed by Insights.
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