The Hope Merchant Podcast is on a mission to find the world’s Hope Merchants and give their voices and offerings a platform to be heard. 

What is a hope merchant?

Internal Family Systems uses this term “hope merchant” to, as founder Dr. Richard Schwartz explains, “sell hope to hopeless systems.” We are all living with parts that help us navigate the world and sometimes those parts hold extreme beliefs, patterns and agendas that can make the world feel overwhelming and at times, unmanageable. So the Hope Merchant comes in to offer hope to the parts of us that at times feel hopeless in an uncertain, and sometimes painful, world. There are parts that hold limiting beliefs, fears, and traumas and believe that they’re doomed to be stuck in their ways forever: exiles forever trapped in the pain of their memories and exhausted protectors working overtime to keep the system safe. Offering these parts hope that there is another way, a better way, can change the entire inner world.

The goal of this podcast is to explore the world in search of the Hope Merchants out there offering hope to all the hopeless parts struggling to navigate the world safely. Every guest has a special gift or an offering that can bring hope to our hopeless parts. 

My vision is that if even one person is reached by a guest on this podcast and their parts can feel a sense of peace that there is hope for them, then this podcast is a wild success. These guests offer tools and tips to help our parts find their way back to Self and relieve them of their hopelessness.