Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts

Discovering Your True Self Through Internal Family Systems Therapy

De: Richard C. Schwartz

Narrado por: Richard C. Schwartz PhD

Explore your multifaceted mind - an invitation to personal healing and spiritual awakening

Inside each of us, there are many distinct selves. “Though we’ve been raised to believe that healthy people have a single ‘self’”, explains Dr. Richard C. Schwartz, “acknowledging our multiplicity gives a far deeper awareness of how our minds actually work.” Dr. Schwartz’s pioneering Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy has become renowned in psychotherapy for its power to help us connect with and heal the many distinct facets - or parts - of our psyche. With Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts, he brings you a practical training course for using this method for your growth, well-being, and especially your spiritual journey.

Embracing your inner diversity as a path to wholeness

One of the key lessons of IFS therapy is that there are no bad parts. “Trauma or life experience can cause our parts to take on burdens”, says Dr. Schwartz. “Yet when we bring the spiritual values of curiosity, gratitude, and kindness to these burdened parts, we discover incredible opportunities for healing and awakening.” Through instruction and guided meditations, Dr. Schwartz shows us how to engage even the most disturbing or unwanted parts of our psyche with openness and love - so we may unlock the hidden gifts and wisdom each part contains.

Many forms of therapy and even spiritual practice inadvertently put us in conflict with ourselves as we try to transcend or reject our parts. With Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts, Dr. Schwartz invites you to embrace each of your many parts with self-compassion - and discover the inclusive greater Self that is your true, divine nature.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2018 Richard C. Schwartz (P)2018 Sounds True

Great practical guide

The model developed by Dick Schwartz is incredibly powerful. And this audiobook provides an easy approach of this model. But what made this book incredibly useful for me is the multitude of guided meditations, which provided practical paths to parts discovery and dialogue. This helped me go from a theoretical understanding of the model to the beginning of its embodiment.

Helpful ways to gain a better relationship with self

Dr Schwartz practices what he preaches and it is evident in his work. These meditations and explanations will help form a foundation of how to engage with parts of yourself in helpful ways, creating healing and harmony within.

Excellent for integration work

Very illuminating and enlightening. What an awesome concept! I love the way the workbook is organized with the therapist as if I am in real sessions. I used it to do integration work for plant medicine.

Transformational

Love IFS! and Dick is a humble and inspiring discoverer and guide of the landscape of our internal world and has enabled life changing transformation in my own and my family's lives...

wonderful book

includes guided sessions I found to be very helpful. excited to continue my own personal evolution with IFS.

A Participatory Healing Journey

This book feels more like a conversation than a narration thanks to Dick Schwartz's warm, familiar tone, and lived experience with the material.

As he walks the listener through the internal family systems approach to psychotherapy, thoroughly grounded in his personal experience and clinical work, they are taken on their own healing journey with guided exercises. These exercises help the listener dialog with inner parts, to reclaim qualities of self identity, self trust, and self love that for many people are, too varying degrees, wounded by formative experiences. It is a wonderful, powerful journey that rewards repeated listenings.

The best guide for self knowledge and healing.

I have led a life of committed serious inquiry and I am in my 60’s. Dealing with trauma referred as CPTSD .
This course is the best modality to understand the ways the system dealt with the challenges.
It helped having experienced Somatic experience and Hakomi as well.
Check the somatic IFS texts as well.
After decades of struggling and learning, IFS is the way for me to a life of understanding and self compassion.
It is a long and difficult road, hence courage is required ,
but the map is there to guide me. Much gratitude to RS.
As RS expressed “ May the Self be with you”.

life changing

This audiobook, alongside my own therapy, has been a fascinating and profoundly healing journey.

Like therapy sessions, super helpful

I have read many of Dr. Schwartz' books, and this one is one of the best. In this book he actually walks you through sessions as if you were a therapy client. The delivery is excellent. Read this book if you want an IFS therapist or want to know how to do this type of therapy

Absolutely worth the credit

Having read the author's text books, I found it delightful to hear him speak. The IFS model is transformative and deep. The guided meditations he provided in this title were touching and meaningful, and there were tidbits of descriptions that I haven't heard anywhere else.

I wholeheartedly disagree with the negative review that referenced "victim valence" as a characteristic of this book. I personally was touched by Richard's openness about his indirect learning path to arrive at the model. His description of the ways in which previous theory didn't match with his experience with clients shows me his courage in avoiding the arrogance that many therapy traditions hold when they label people who don't respond to their approach as resistant or otherwise defective. I heard humility and a willingness to be human.

I do think this title will be more relevant and helpful if you already understand the basics of IFS. Richard isn't a narrator by profession, but I personally like hearing his personality come through in his speaking.

If I had to give back 400 of the 410 Audible titles I own, this one would be in the 10 to keep pile!