Josh TrentIdentity Transformation Architect and award winning Host of the Wellness + Wisdom Podcast—a decade-strong show with over 750 episodes and 15M downloads.

UNHEALED WOUNDS KEEP YOUR TRUE SELF TRAPPED

3 Sept 2025 · 1 min

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A short excerpt from a YouTube interview between Josh Trent and Richard Schwartz (creator of Internal Family Systems). The speakers describe how childhood wounds cause parts of the self to adopt protective roles that hide valuable qualities, and argue that accepting and loving those parts (rather than labeling them "bad") enables personal discovery and strengthens the Self. The dialogue connects individual self-work to greater capacity to love others who resemble those parts.

We're locking away our most precious qualities simply because they got hurt or scared. In family, a dysfunctional family, a kid has to take on a role that isn't who he is, but to protect himself or the family. He's in this role all the time. So other parts are forced out of their naturally valuable states to become protectors. Once they carry that burden of emotional pain or terror or worthlessness, they have the power to overwhelm us with those feelings, so make it hard to function. So we almost naturally try to lock them up.
To accept all of one's parts as not necessarily inherently being.
Evil or bad.
Is a jumping point for discovery of self, to strengthen the self. But it really starts by going within to our parts.
If you can love parts of you that you used to hate, then you can love people who resemble those parts, even though you used to hate them.