A therapist worked with sex offenders and found something no one expected

For seven years, Richard Schwartz consulted at Onarga Academy, a treatment center in Illinois for sex offenders. He went there because he'd started to believe that healing someone who had abused others might prevent them from abusing again, and might spare future victims. It was not an easy assumption to test, and it produced one of the most unsettling and important discoveries in Internal Family Systems.

Working with these clients, Schwartz kept hearing the same story surface, again and again, once he stopped trying to shut the offending part down and instead got curious about it. While the person was being abused as a child, one of their inner protectors had become desperate to keep them safe, and it did that by taking on the very rage or sexual aggression of the person abusing them, turning the perpetrator's own weapon into a kind of armor. That protector then stayed frozen at that moment in time, still carrying the abuser's hunger to dominate someone weaker, long after the danger had passed. As adults, these clients' protector parts would sometimes act out that same dynamic on their own vulnerable, childlike parts, and tragically, on real children.

This is where Schwartz's central claim in the book gets tested hardest: there are no bad parts, only burdened ones. He isn't saying the abuse these clients caused wasn't real or didn't matter. He's making a narrower and stranger claim, that even the part driving the worst behavior has a history, and that history usually explains, without excusing, what the part is doing and why it believes it has no other option. When Schwartz and his clients worked with these parts respectfully instead of trying to defeat them, the parts would unload the violent energy they were carrying and transform, taking on entirely different roles.

Schwartz says he thought of the old line, I never met a man I didn't like, and realized he could say the same thing about parts. Even the ones that had done something he found horrifying, once he heard their history, he found he could still hold with compassion, while continuing to work to stop the harm they caused.

The distinction he's making is subtle but load-bearing for the whole book: a part is not the same thing as what it carries. The burden, the belief, the rage, the compulsion, came from somewhere. Strip it away, and Schwartz says what's left is not a monster but something young, scared, and, eventually, willing to change.

Start with something smaller than the extreme cases in this insight. Notice a behavior in yourself you've judged harshly, and instead of asking how to stop it, ask what belief or feeling it seems to be carrying. Get curious about when this part first had to act this way, rather than immediately trying to shut it down or shame it into stopping. Before asking it to change, let it know, honestly, that you understand why it took on this role in the first place. Then watch closely for any shift in how it responds once it feels understood rather than condemned, because that shift is usually where real change becomes possible.