Quotes from Richard C. Schwartz

A part is not just a temporary emotional state or habitual thought pattern. Instead, it is a discrete and autonomous mental system that has an idiosyncratic range of emotion, style of expression, set of abilities, desires, and view of the world. In other words, it is as if we each contain a society of people, each of whom is at a different age and has different interests, talents, and temperaments. In

Imbalanced systems,whether internal or external, will tend to polarize.

Your protectors' goals for your life revolve around keeping you away from all that pain, shame, loneliness, and fear, and they use a wide array of tools to meet those goals—achievements, substances, food, entertainment, shopping, sex, obsession with your appearance, caretaking, meditation, money, and so on.

Jeff Brown explores the phenomenon in depth in his film Karmageddon: "After my childhood, I needed the kinds of spirituality that would keep me from allowing the pain to surface…. I was confusing self-avoidance with enlightenment."9