NO BAD PARTS

Pages, 1-39

Introduction

As a psychotherapist, I’ve worked with many people who came to me shortly after their lives had crashed. Everything was going great until the sudden heart attack, divorce, or death of a child. If not for that life-jarring event, they would never have thought to see a therapist, because they felt successful.

After the event they can’t find the same drive or determination. Their former goals of having big houses or reputations have lost their meaning. They feel at sea and vulnerable in a way that’s unfamiliar and scary. They are also newly opened. Some light can get through the cracks in their protective foundations.

Those can be wake-up call events if I can help them keep the striving, materialistic, competitive parts of them that had dominated their lives from regaining dominance so they can explore what else is inside them. In doing so, I can help them access what I call the Self—an essence of calm, clarity, compassion, and connectedness—and from that place begin to listen to the parts of them that had been exiled by more dominant ones. As they discover that they love the simple pleasures of enjoying nature, reading, creative activities, being playful with friends, finding more intimacy with their partners or children, and being of service to others, they decide to change their lives so as to make room for their Self and the newly; covered parts of them.

Those clients and the rest of us didn’t come to be dominated by those living, materialistic, and competitive parts by accident. Those are the same parts that dominate most of the countries on our planet and particularly my country, the United States. When my clients are in the grip of those participants, they have little regard for the damage they’re doing to their health d relationships. Similarly, countries obsessed with unlimited growth have le regard for their impact on the majority of their people, or the health of climate and the Earth.

Such mindless striving—of people or of countries—usually leads to a crash of some sort. As I write this, we are amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It has the potential to be the wake-up call we need so we don’t suffer worse ones down road, but it remains to be seen whether our leaders will use this painful pause to listen to the suffering of the majority of our people and also learn to laborite rather than compete with other countries. Can we change nationally and internationally in the ways my clients are often able to?

Inherent Goodness

We can’t make the necessary changes without a new model of the mind, biologist Daniel Christian Wahl states that “Humanity is coming of age l needs a ‘new story’ that is powerful and meaningful enough to galvanize □al collaboration and guide a collective response to the converging crises are facing. … In the fundamentally interconnected and interdependent planetary system we participate in, the best way to care for oneself and those closest to oneself is to start caring more for the benefit of the collective (all . Metaphorically speaking, we are all in the same boat, our planetary life port system, or in Buckminster Fuller’s words: ‘Spaceship Earth.’ The n-against-us’ thinking that for too long has defined politics between nations, companies and people is profoundly anachronistic. Jimmy Carter echoes that sentiment: “What is needed now, more than is leadership that steers us away from fear and fosters greater confidence

in the inherent goodness and ingenuity of humanity.”² Our leaders can’t do that, however, with the way we currently understand the mind because it highlights the darkness in humanity.

We need a new paradigm that convincingly shows that humanity is inherently good and thoroughly interconnected. With that understanding, we can finally move from being ego-, family-, and ethno-centric to species-, bio-, and planet-centric.

Such a change won’t be easy. Too many of our basic institutions are based on the dark view. Take, for example, neoliberalism, the economic philosophy of Milton Friedman that undergirds the kind of cutthroat capitalism that has dominated many countries, including the US, since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Neoliberalism is based on the belief that people are basically selfish and, therefore, it’s everyone for themselves in a survival-of-the-fittest world. The government needs to get out of the way so the fittest can not only help us survive but thrive. This economic philosophy has resulted in massive inequality as well as the disconnection and polarization among people that we experience so dramatically today. The time has come for a new view of human nature that releases the collaboration and caring that lives in our hearts.

The Promise of IFS

I know it sounds grandiose, but this book offers the kind of uplifting paradigm and set of practices that can achieve the changes we need. It’s full of exercises that will confirm the radically positive assertions I make about the nature of the mind so you can experience it for yourself (and not just take it from me).

I’ve been developing IFS (Internal Family Systems) for almost four decades. It’s taken me on a long, fascinating, and—as emphasized in this book—spiritual journey that I want to share with you. This journey has transformed my beliefs about myself, about what people are about, about the essence of human goodness, and about how much transformation is possible. IFS has morphed over time from being exclusively about psychotherapy to becoming a kind of spiritual practice, although you don’t have to define yourself as spiritual to practice it. At its core, IFS is a loving way of relating internally (to your parts) and externally (to the people in your life), so in that sense, IFS is a life practice, as well. It’s something you can do on a daily, moment-to-moment basis—at any time, by yourself or with others.

At this point, there might be a part of you that’s skeptical. After all, that’s a lot to promise in the opening paragraphs of a book. All I ask is that your skeptic give you enough space inside to try these ideas on for a little while, including trying some of the exercises so you can check it out for yourself. In my experience, it’s difficult to believe in the promise of IFS until you actually try it.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

We’re All Multiple

We were all raised in what I’ll call the mono-mind belief system—the idea that you have one mind, out of which different thoughts and emotions and impulses and urges emanate. That’s the paradigm 1 believed in, too, until I kept encountering clients who taught me otherwise. Because the mono-mind view is so ubiquitous and assumed in our culture, we never really question the truth of it. I want to help you take a look—a second look—at who you really are. I’m going to invite you to try on this different paradigm of multiplicity that 1FS espouses and consider the possibility that you and everybody else is a multiple personality. And that is a good thing.

I’m not suggesting that you have Multiple Personality Disorder (now called Dissociative Identity Disorder), but I do think that people with that diagnosis are not so different from everybody else. What are called alters in those people are the same as what I call parts in IFS, and they exist in all of us. The only difference is that people with Dissociative Identity Disorder suffered horrible abuse and their system of parts got blown apart more than most, so each part stands out in bolder relief and is more polarized and disconnected from the others. In other words, all of us are born with many sub-minds that are constantly interacting inside of us. This is in general what we call thinking, because the parts are talking to each other and to you constantly about things you have to do or debating the best course of action, and so on. Remembering a time when you faced a dilemma, it’s likely you heard one part saying, “Go for it!” and another saying, “Don’t you dare!” Because we just consider that to be a matter of having conflicted thoughts, we don’t pay attention to the inner players behind the debate. IFS helps you not only start to pay attention to them, but also become the active internal leader that your system of parts needs.

While it may sound creepy or crazy at first to think of yourself as a multiple personality, I hope to convince you that it’s actually quite empowering. It’s only disturbing because multiplicity has been pathologized in our culture. A person with separate autonomous personalities is viewed as sick or damaged, and the existence of their alters is considered simply the product of trauma—the fragmentation of their previously unitary mind. From the mono-mind point of view, our natural condition is a unitary mind. Unless, of course, trauma comes along and shatters it into pieces, like shards of a vase.

The mono-mind paradigm has caused us to fear our parts and view them as pathological. In our attempts to control what we consider to be disturbing thoughts and emotions, we just end up fighting, ignoring, disciplining, hiding, or feeling ashamed of those impulses that keep us from doing what we want to do in our lives. And then we shame ourselves for not being able to control them. In other words, we hate what gets in our way.

This approach makes sense if you view these inner obstacles as merely irrational thoughts or extreme emotions that come from your unitary mind. If you fear giving a presentation, for example, you might try to use willpower to override the fear or correct it with rational thoughts. If the fear persists, you might escalate your attempts to control by criticizing yourself for being a coward, numbing yourself into oblivion, or meditating to climb above it. And when none of those approaches work, you wind up adapting your life to the fear—avoiding situations where you have to speak in public, feeling like a failure, and wondering what’s wrong with you. To make matters worse, you go to a therapist who gives you a diagnosis for your one, troubled mind.

The diagnosis makes you feel defective, your self-esteem drops, and your feelings of shame lead you to attempt to hide any flaws and present a perfect image to the world. Or maybe you just withdraw from relationships for fear that people will see behind your mask and will judge you for it. You identify with your weaknesses, assuming that who you really are is defective and that if other people saw the real you, they’d be repulsed.

“When people asked me if I was ready for my life to change, I don’t think I really understood what they meant. It wasn’t just that strangers would know who I was. It was this other thing that started to happen to me: when I looked in their eyes, sometimes, there was a little voice in my head wondering, would you still be so excited to meet me if you really knew who I was? If you know all the things I have done? If you could see all my parts?’ Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness’

A Brief History

The mono-mind perspective, in combination with scientific and religious theories about how primitive human impulses are, created this backdrop of inner polarizations. One telling example comes from the influential Christian theologian John Calvin: “For our nature is not only u utterly devoid of goodness, but so prolific in all kinds of evil, that it can never be idle … The whole man, from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, is so deluged, as it were, that no part remains exempt from sin, and, therefore, everything which proceeds from him is imputed as sin.”² This is known as the doctrine of total depravity, which insists that only through the grace of God can we escape our fate of eternal damnation. Mainstream Protestantism and Evangelicalism have carried some version of this doctrine for several hundred years, and the cultural impact has been widespread. With “Original Sin,” Catholicism has its own version.

We can’t blame this sort of thinking solely on religion, however. Generations of philosophers and politicians have asserted that primal impulses lurk just beneath the civilized veneer we present to the world. While Freud contributed important insights regarding the psyche, many of which are compatible with IFS, his drive theory was highly influential and pessimistic about human nature. It asserted that beneath the mind’s surface lies selfish, aggressive, and pleasure-seeking instinctual forces that unconsciously organize our lives. Dutch historian Rutger Bregman summarizes these underlying assumptions about human nature here: “The doctrine that humans are innately selfish has a hallowed tradition in the Western canon. Great thinkers like Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Luther, Calvin, Burke, Bentham, Nietzsche, Freud, and Americas Founding Fathers each had their own version of the veneer theory of civilization.”³

Willpower and Shame

The emphasis on willpower and self-control permeates American culture. We think we should be able to discipline our primitive, impulsive, sinful minds through willpower. Countless self-help books tell us it’s all a matter of boosting our ability to control ourselves and develop more discipline. The concept of willpower, too, has historical roots—namely in the Victorian Era with its Christian emphasis on resisting evil impulses. The idea of taking responsibility for oneself and not making excuses is as American as apple pie.

Sadly, our worship of willpower has been used by politicians and pundits to justify increasing levels of income disparity. We’re taught that people are poor because they lack self-control and that rich people are wealthy because they have it, despite research to the contrary. Studies show, for example, that lower-income people become empowered and productive once they are given enough money to cover their basic survival needs.⁴ However, the very real fact—especially considering the economic effects of the current pandemic—is that the rug could be pulled out from under most of us at any moment, and that threat keeps the survivalist parts of us humming.

Because this willpower ethic has become internalized, we learn at an early age to shame and manhandle our unruly parts. We simply wrestle them into submission. One part is recruited by this cultural imperative to become our inner drill sergeant and often becomes that nasty inner critic we love to hate. This is the voice that tries to shame us or attempts to out right get rid of parts of us that seem shame-worthy (the ones that give us nasty thoughts about people, for example, or keep us addicted to substances).

We often find that the harder we try to get rid of emotions and thoughts, the stronger they become. This is because parts, like people, fight back against being shamed or exiled. And if we do succeed in dominating them with punitive self-discipline, we then become tyrannized by the rigid, controlling inner drill sergeant. We might be disciplined, but we’re not much fun.

And because the exiled (bingeing, raging, hypersexual, etc.) parts will seize any momentary weakness to break out again and take over, we have to constantly be on guard against any people or situations that might trigger those parts.

We often find that the harder we try to get rid of emotions and thoughts, the stronger they become.

Jonathan Van Ness tried and failed at drug rehab several times. “Growing up around so much 12-Step and seeing so much abstinence preached in rehab and in church, I started to take on an idea that healing had to be all or nothing, which has really not been my truth. I was trying to untangle sexual abuse, drug abuse, and PTSD, and it was something that for me wasn’t conducive to a never-ever-smoking-weed-again approach. … I don’t believe that once an addict, always an addict. I don’t believe that addiction is a disease that warrants a life sentence. … If you ever mess up or can’t string a couple of months together without a slipup, you’re not ruined.”

There are 12-Step approaches that aren’t so locked into the rigid beliefs that Van Ness encountered, and the groups can be a wonderful context for people to be vulnerable and receive support. Also, the 12-Step admonition to give everything up to a higher power can often help inner drill instructors lighten up or even surrender. The larger point I want to make here is that any approach that increases your inner drill sergeant’s impulse to shame you into behaving (and make you feel like a failure if you can’t) will do no better in internal families than it does in external ones in which parents adopt shaming tactics to control their children.

Don’t think that this critique of willpower reveals that there’s no room for inner discipline in 1FS. Like children in external families, we each have parts that want things that aren’t good for them or for the rest of the system. The difference here is that the Self says no to impulsive parts firmly but from a place of love and patience, in just the same way an ideal parent would. Additionally, in IFS, when parts do take over, we don’t shame them. Instead, we get curious and use the part’s impulse as a trailhead to find what is driving it that needs to be healed.

Parts Are not Obstacles

The mono-mind paradigm can easily lead us to fear or hate ourselves because we believe we have only one mind (full of primitive or sinful aspects) that we can’t control. We get tied up in knots as we desperately try to, and we generate brutal inner critics who attack us for our failings. As Van Ness notes, “I spent so much time pushing little Jack aside. Instead of nurturing him I tore him to pieces. . . . Learning to parent yourself, with soothing compassionate love . . . that’s the key to being fulfilled.”⁶

Since most psychotherapies and spiritual practices subscribe to this monomind view, their solutions often reinforce this approach by suggesting we should correct irrational beliefs or meditate them away, because those beliefs are seen as obstacles emanating from our one mind. Many approaches to meditation, for example, view thoughts as pests and the ego as a hindrance or annoyance, and practitioners are given instructions to either ignore or transcend them.

In some Hindu traditions, the ego is viewed as working for the god Maya, whose goal is to keep us striving for material things or hedonistic pleasures. She is considered the enemy—a temptress much like the Christian Satan— who keeps us attached to the external world of illusion.

Buddhist teachings use the term monkey mind to describe how our thoughts jump around in our consciousness like an agitated monkey. As

Ralph De La Rosa notes in The Monkey Is the Messenger, “Is it any wonder that the monkey mind is the scourge of meditators across the globe? For those trying to find respite in contemplative practice, thoughts are often regarded as an irritating nuisance, a primitive agitator sneaking in through the side door. … In meditation circles, some unintended consequences of the monkey metaphor prevail: that the thinking mind is a dirty, primitive, lower life form of no real value to us; it’s just a bunch of garbage on repeat.”⁷

De La Rosa is one of a number of recent authors who challenge the common practice in spirituality of vilifying the ego. Another is psychotherapist Matt Licata, who writes,

‘The ego’ is often spoken about as if it is some sort of self-existing thing that at times takes us over—some nasty, super unspiritual, ignorant little person living inside—and causes us to act in really unevolved ways creating unending messes in our lives and getting in the way of our progress on the path. It is something to be horribly ashamed of and the more spiritual we are the more we will strive to ‘get rid of it,’ transcend it, or enter into imaginary spiritual wars with it. If we look carefully, we may see that if the ego is anything, it is likely those very voices that are yelling at us to get rid of it.⁸

The collection of parts that these traditions call the ego are protectors who are simply trying to keep us safe and are reacting to and containing other parts that carry emotions and memories from past traumas that we have locked away inside.

Later we’ll look more closely at some of the ways people practice spiritual bypassing—a phrase coined by John Welwood in the 1980s. 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.”⁹In fact, one central message in the canonical story of the Buddha’s awakening is that thoughts and desires are the primary obstacles to enlightenment. As he sat in meditation beneath the Bodhi Tree, the Buddha was assaulted by a series of impulses and urges—lust, desire, fulfillment, regret, fear, insecurity, and so on—and it was only by ignoring or resisting them that he was able to attain enlightenment.

That being said, the ubiquitous, Buddhist-derived practices of mindfulness are a step in the right direction. They enable the practitioner to observe thoughts and emotions from a distance and from a place of acceptance rather than fighting or ignoring them. For me, that’s a good first step. Mindfulness is not always pleasant, however. Researchers who interviewed experienced meditators found that substantial percentages of them had disturbing episodes that sometimes were long-lasting. The most common of those included emotions like fear, anxiety, paranoia, detachment, and reliving traumatic memories.¹⁰ From the IFS point of view, the quieting of the mind associated with mindfulness happens when the parts of us usually running our lives (our egos) relax, which then allows parts we have tried to bury (exiles) to ascend, bringing with them the emotions, beliefs, and memories they carry (burdens) that got them locked away in the first place. Most of the mindfulness approaches I’m familiar with subscribe to the mono-mind paradigm and, consequently, view such episodes as the temporary emergence of troubling thoughts and emotions rather than as hurting parts that need to be listened to and loved. Why would you want to converse with thoughts and emotions? They can’t talk back, can they? Well, it turns out that they can. In fact, they have a lot of important things to tell us.

How I Came to Learn About Parts

I started out like everybody else thinking the mind is unitary and I trained as a family therapist for years (in fact, I have a PhD in the field). As family therapists, we didn’t pay much attention to the mind at all. We thought the therapists who mucked around in that inner world were wasting their time, because we could change all that simply by changing external relationships.

The only problem was the approach didn’t work. I did an outcome study with bulimic clients and discovered with alarm that they kept binging and purging, not realizing they’d been cured. When I asked them why, they started talking about these different parts of them. And they talked about

these parts as if they had a lot of autonomy-—as if they could take over and make them do things they didn’t want to do. At first, I was scared that I was looking at an outbreak of Multiple Personality Disorder, but then I started listening inside myself and I was shocked to find that I had parts too. In fact, some of mine were fairly extreme.

So, I started getting curious. I asked the clients to describe their parts, which they were able to do in great detail. Not only that, but they depicted how these parts interacted with each other and had relationships. Some fought, some formed alliances, and some protected others. Over time, it dawned on me that I was learning about a kind of inner system, not unlike the “external” families I was working with. Hence the name: Internal Family Systems.

For example, clients would talk about an inner critic who, when they made a mistake, attacked them mercilessly. That attack would trigger a part that felt totally bereft, lonely, empty, and worthless. Experiencing that worthless part was so distressing that almost to the rescue would come the binge that would take clients out of their body and turn them into an unfeeling eating machine. Then the critic would attack them for the binge, which retriggered the worthlessness, and they found themselves caught in these terrible circles for days on end.

At first, I tried to get clients to relate to these parts in a way that would shut them out or get them to stop. For example, I suggested ignoring the critical part or arguing with it. This approach just made things worse, but I didn’t know what else to do than encourage them to fight harder to win their inner battles.

I had one client who had a part that made her cut her wrists. Well, I couldn’t stand for that. My client and I badgered the part in one session for a couple of hours until it agreed not to cut her wrists anymore. I left that session feeling drained but satisfied that we had won the battle.

I opened the door to our next session and my client had a big gash across her face. I collapsed emotionally at that point and spontaneously said, “I give up, I can’t beat you at this,” and the part shifted, too, and said, “I don’t really want to beat you.” That was a turning point in the history of this work, because I moved out of that controlling place and took on a more curious approach: “Why do you do this to her?” The part proceeded to talk about how it had needed to get my client out of her body when she was being abused and control the rage that would only result in more abuse. I shifted again and conveyed an appreciation for the heroic role it played in her life. The part broke into tears. Everyone had demonized it and tried to get rid of it. This was the first time it had the chance to tell its story.

I told the part that it made total sense that it had to do that to save the woman’s life in the past, but why did it still have to cut her now? It spoke of having to protect other highly vulnerable parts of her and it had to control the rage that was still there. As it talked about all of that, it became clear to me that the cutting part wasn’t living in the present. It seemed frozen in those abuse scenes and believed that my client was still a child and in grave danger, even though she wasn’t anymore.

It began to dawn on me that maybe these parts aren’t what they seem. Maybe, like children in dysfunctional families, they are forced out of their natural, valuable states into roles that sometimes can be destructive but are, they think, necessary to protect the person or the system they are in. So, I started trying to help my clients listen to their troublesome parts rather than fight them and was astounded to find that their parts all had similar stories to tell of how they had to take on protective roles at some point in the person’s past—often roles that they hated but felt were needed to save the client.

When I asked these protective parts what they’d rather do if they trusted they didn’t have to protect, they often wanted to do something opposite of the role they were in. Inner critics wanted to become cheerleaders or sage advisors, extreme caretakers wanted to help set boundaries, rageful parts wanted to help with discerning who was safe. It seemed that not only were parts not what they seemed, but also, they each had qualities and resources to bring to the client’s life that were not available while they were tied up in protective roles.

Now, several decades and thousands of clients later (and thousands of therapists doing IFS around the world), I can safely say that this is true of parts. They can become quite extreme and do a lot of damage in a person’s life, but there aren’t any that are inherently bad. Even the ones that make bulimics binge or anorexics starve or make people want to kill themselves or murder people, even those parts when approached from this mindful place—this respectful, open, curious place—will reveal the secret history of how they were forced into the role they’re in and how they’re stuck in that role, terrified that if they don’t do it something dreadful will happen. And, that they’re frozen in the past, during the traumatic times when they had to take on the role.

Let us pause here to explore the spiritual implications of this discovery. Basically, what I found is that love is the answer in the inner world, just as it is in the outer world. Listening to, embracing, and loving parts allows them to heal and transform as much as it does for people.

In Buddhist terms, IFS helps people become bodhisattvas of their psyches in the sense of helping each inner sentient being (part) become enlightened through compassion and love.

Or, through a Christian lens, through IFS people wind up doing in the inner world what Jesus did in the outer—they go to inner exiles and enemies with love, heal them, and bring them home, just as he did with the lepers, the poor, and the outcasts.

The big conclusion here is that parts are not what they have been commonly thought to be. They’re not cognitive adaptations or sinful impulses. Instead, parts are sacred, spiritual beings and they deserve to be treated as such.

Another theme we will be exploring in this book is how it’s all parallel— how we relate in the inner world will be how we relate in the outer. If we can appreciate and have compassion for our parts, even for the ones we’ve considered to be enemies, we can do the same for people who resemble them. On the other hand, if we hate or disdain our parts, we’ll do the same with anyone who reminds us of them.

IFS helps people become bodhisattvas of their psyches.

Some discoveries I made about parts:

Even the most destructive parts have protective intentions.
Parts are often frozen in past traumas when their extreme roles were needed.
When they trust it’s safe to step out of their roles, they are highly valuable to the system.

Burdens

Here’s another key discovery I stumbled on: parts carry extreme beliefs and emotions in or on their “bodies” that drive the way they feel and act.

The idea that parts have bodies that are separate and different from the person’s body they are connected to may seem strange or preposterous at first. Let me interject here that 1 am simply reporting what I’ve learned over years of exploring this inner territory without judgment regarding the ontological reality of that data. If you ask your parts about their own bodies, I predict you’ll get the same answers I’m covering here.

For a long time, I didn’t know what to make of this discovery. Regardless, this is how parts describe themselves—that they have bodies and that their bodies contain emotions and beliefs that came into them and don’t belong to them. Often, they can tell you the exact traumatic moment these emotions and beliefs came into or attached to them, and they can tell you where they carry what seem to them to be these foreign objects in or on their bodies. “It’s this tar on my arms” or “a fireball in my gut” or “a huge weight on my shoulders,” for example. These foreign feelings or beliefs (sometimes described as energies) are what I call burdens. It turns out that burdens are powerful organizers of a part’s experience and activity—almost in the same way that a virus organizes a computer.

It’s important to note here that these burdens are the product of a person’s direct experience—the sense of worthlessness that comes into a child when a parent abuses them; the terror that attaches to parts during a car accident; the belief that no one can be trusted that enters young parts when we are betrayed or abandoned as children. When we are young, we have little discernment regarding the validity of these emotions and beliefs and, consequently, they get lodged in the bodies of our young parts and become powerful (albeit unconscious) organizers of our lives thereafter. These we call personal burdens.

Some of the most powerful personal burdens are similar to what attachment theory pioneer John Bowlby called internal working models. He saw them as maps you developed as a child of what to expect from your caretaker and the world in general, and then from subsequent close relationships. They also tell you things about your own level of goodness and how much you deserve love and support.

There is another class of burdens that are called legacy burdens because they did not come from your direct life experience. Instead, you inherited them from your parents, who got them from their parents, and so on. Or you absorbed them from your ethnic group or from the culture you currently live in. Legacy burdens can be equally if not more potent organizers of our lives, and because we’ve had them so long, we marinate in them, so it’s often harder to notice them than the personal burdens we took on from traumas. In this way, legacy burdens can be as prominent and unnoticed as water to a fish.

Parts Are Not Their Burdens

This distinction between parts and the burdens they carry is crucial because many of the world’s problems are related to the error that most paradigms for understanding the mind make: to mistake the burden for the part that carries it.

It’s common to believe that a person who gets high all the time is an addict who has an irresistible urge to use drugs. That belief leads to combatting that person’s urge with opioid antagonists, with recovery programs that can have the effect of polarizing the addictive part, or with the willpower of the addict. If, on the other hand, you believe that the part that seeks drugs is protective and carries the burden of responsibility for keeping this person from severe emotional pain or even suicide, then you would treat the person very differently. You could instead help them get to know that part and honor it for its attempts to keep them going and negotiate permission to heal or change what it protects.

Then you would help the person heal by returning to the now liberated “addict” part and help it unburden all its fear and responsibility. Unburdening is another aspect of IFS that seems spiritual, because as soon as the burdens leave parts’ bodies, parts immediately transform into their original, valuable states. It’s as if a curse was lifted from an inner Sleeping Beauty, or ogre, or addict. The newly unburdened part almost universally says it feels much lighter and wants to play or rest, after which it finds a new role.

It is as if each part is like a person with a true purpose.

The former addict part now wants to help you connect with people. The hypervigilant part becomes an advisor on boundaries. The critic becomes an inner cheerleader, and so on. In other words, it’s as if each part is like a person with a true purpose.

No Bad Parts

If the title of the book didn’t trigger this question for you, I’ll ask it directly now: What are we to do with parts that have committed terrible violence? What about those that have murdered or sexually abused people? Or parts that are determined to kill their person? How in the world can these be good parts in bad roles?

As I did IFS with clients it became increasingly clear that the burdens that drove their parts were rooted in early traumas, so in the late 1980s and early 1990s I came to specialize in the treatment of those who had suffered complex trauma and carried serious diagnoses like borderline personality disorder, chronic depression, and eating disorders. I also became interested in understanding and treating perpetrators of abuse because it became clear that healing one of them could potentially save many future victims in turn.

For seven years I consulted to Onarga Academy, a treatment center in Illinois for sex offenders. 1 had the opportunity to help those clients listen to the parts of them that had molested children, and over and over I heard the same story: While the offender was being abused as a child, one of their protector parts became desperate to protect them and took on the rageful or sexually violent energy of their perpetrator and used that energy to protect themself from that abuser. From that point on, however, this protector part continued to carry that burden of the perpetrator’s hatred and desire to dominate and punish vulnerability. The part also was frozen in time during the abuse.

Thus, the kick in molesting a child came from being able to hurt and have power over someone weak and innocent. These perpetrator parts would do the same thing in their psyches to their own vulnerable, childlike parts. This process—in which protectors in one generation take on the perpetrator burdens of their parents while they were being abused by those parents—is one way that legacy burdens are transferred.

As we healed their parts stuck in early abuse, their perpetrator parts unloaded their parents’ violent or sexual energies and, like other parts, quickly transformed and took on valuable roles. During this period, I had the opportunity to work with other kinds of perpetrators (including murderers) with similar findings. I remembered that famous Will Rodgers saying, “I never met a man I didn’t like,” and I realized that I could say that about parts. I ultimately liked all of them— even the ones that had done heinous things.

Now, decades later, I’ve worked with countless clients (as have other IFS therapists around the world) and I believe it is safe to say that there are no bad parts. Spiritual traditions encourage us to have compassion for everyone. This aspect of IFS actually helps make that possible. IFS operates from the radically different assumption that each part—no matter how demonic seeming—has a secret, painful history to share of how it was forced into its role and came to carry burdens it doesn’t like that continue to drive it. This also implies clear steps for helping these parts and the people they are in to heal and change. It brings hope to the hopeless.

The Self

In those early days of helping my clients listen to and form better relationships with their parts, I tried out a technique from Gestalt therapy involving multiple chairs. Basically, a client sits in one chair and talks to an empty chair across from them, and for IFS I had them imagine that the part they were talking to was in that empty chair. And because the parts got to speak, too, there was a lot of hopping back and forth, and to make it all work I ended up with an office full of chairs. I watched clients shift around the room, being their different parts, and it actually helped me learn a lot about the patterns among the parts. Then one insightful client suggested that moving from chair to chair might be unnecessary and that they could do the same work by just sitting in one seat. That method went fine for that particular client, and when I tried it out with others, they found they could do it that way too.

My main goal was to help my clients form better relationships with their parts. Some of the patterns I kept seeing with individuals were similar to what The Self is in everybody.

I witnessed it as a family therapist. For example, a bulimic kid would be speaking with their critical part and all of a sudden, they’d become angry at the critic and yell at it. In family therapy, let’s say this client is a girl talking to her critical mother and she gets mad and shouts at her mother. In such cases, we’re taught to look around the room and see if anyone is covertly siding with the girl against the mother—for example, the girl’s father is signaling to her that he disagrees with the mother too. This is when I’d ask the father to step back out of the girl’s line of vision, she’d slowly calm down, and things would go better with her conversation with her mother.

So, I started using this “step back” technique with individuals. I’d have them ask other parts to step aside so that pairs of parts could really dig in and listen to each other. For example, I might say, “Could you find the one who’s angry at the target part [in this case the critic] and just ask it to step back for a little while?” To my amazement, most clients said, “Okay, it did” without much hesitation, and when the part was off to the side like that, my clients would shift into an entirely different state. And then other parts would step in (a fearful part, for example) and the more of them that stepped back to allow the client to speak, the more mindful and curious the client would become. The simple act of getting these other parts to open more space inside seemed to release someone who had curiosity but who was also calm and confident relative to the critic.

When my clients were in that place, the dialogue would go well. The critic would drop its guard and tell its secret history and the client would have compassion for it and we would learn about what it protected, and so on. Client after client, the same mindfully curious, calm, confident, and often even compassionate part would pop up out of the blue and that part seemed to know how to relate internally in a healing way. And when they were in that state, I’d ask clients, “Now, what part of you is that?” and they’d say, “That’s not a part like these others, that’s more myself” or “That’s more my core” or “That’s who I really am.”

That’s the part that I call the Self. And after thousands of hours doing this work, I can say with certainty that the Self is in everybody. Furthermore, the Self cannot be damaged, the Self doesn’t have to

develop, and the Self possesses its own wisdom about how to heal internal as well as external relationships.

For me, this is the most significant discovery that I stumbled upon. This is what changes everything. The Self is just beneath the surface of our protective parts, such that when they open space for it, it comes forward spontaneously, often quite suddenly, and universally.

Your Turn

So that’s my introduction to IFS. It makes a certain amount of conceptual sense to many people initially, but until you’ve actually experienced it, it’s hard to fully get what I’m talking about. So now it’s your turn. I’m going to invite you to try an exercise designed to give you a start on getting to know yourself in this different way.

Exercise: Getting to Know a Protector

Take a second and get comfortable. Set up like you would if you were going to meditate. If it helps you to take deep breaths, then do that.

Now I invite you to do a scan of your body and your mind, noting in particular any thoughts, emotions, sensations, or impulses that stand out. So far, it’s not unlike mindfulness practice, where you’re just noticing what’s there and separating from it a little bit.

As you do that, see if one of those emotions, thoughts, sensations, or impulses is calling to you—seems to want your attention. If so, then try to focus on it exclusively for a minute and see if you can notice where it seems to be located in your body or around your body.

As you notice it, notice how you feel toward it. By that I mean, do you dislike it? Does it annoy you? Are you afraid of it? Do you want to get rid of it? Do you depend on it? So, we’re just noticing that you have a relationship with this thought, emotion, sensation, or impulse. If you feel anything besides a kind of openness or curiosity toward it, then ask the parts of you that might not like it or are afraid of it or have any other extreme feeling about it to just relax inside and give you a little space to get to know it without an attitude.

If you can’t get to that curious place, that’s okay. You could spend the time talking to the parts of you that don’t want to relax about their fears about letting you actually interact with the target emotion, thought, sensation, or impulse.

But if you can get into that mindfully curious place relative to the target, then it is safe to begin to interact with it. That might feel a bit odd to you at this point, but just give it a try. And by that, I mean as you focus on this emotion or impulse or thought or sensation and you notice it in this place in your body, ask it if there’s something it wants you to know and then wait for an answer. Don’t think of the answer, so any thinking parts can relax too. Just wait silently with your focus on that place in your body until an answer comes and if nothing comes, that’s okay too.

If you get an answer, then as a follow-up you can ask what it’s afraid would happen if it didn’t do this inside of you. What’s it afraid would happen if it didn’t do what it does? And if it answers that question, then you probably learned something about how it’s trying to protect you. If that’s true, then see if it’s possible to extend some appreciation to it for at least trying to keep you safe and see how it reacts to your appreciation. Then ask this part of you what it needs from you in the future.

When the time feels right, shift your focus back to the outside world and notice more of your surroundings, but also thank your parts for whatever they allowed you to do and let them know that this isn’t their last chance to have a conversation with you, because you plan to get to know them even more.

I hope you were able to follow me in that journey and that you got some information. Sometimes what you learn can be quite surprising. And for me, these emotions, sensations, thoughts, impulses, and other things are emanations from parts—they are what we call trailheads. This is because when you focus on one, it’s as if you are starting out on a trail that will lead you to the part from which that thought, emotion, impulse, or sensation emanates. And, as you get to know that part, you will learn that it isn’t just that thought, sensation, impulse, or emotion. Indeed, it will let you know that it has a whole range of feelings and thoughts, and it can tell you about the role it is in and why it does what it does. Then it will feel seen by you and you can honor it.

That’s what 1 started to do with my clients in the early 1980s and an entirely new world opened up in the process of doing that. It reminded me of high school biology class when we looked in the microscope at a drop of pond water and were shocked to see all kinds of little paramecia, protozoa, and amoebas scurrying around in it. When we simply turn our attention inside, we find that what we thought were random thoughts and emotions comprise a buzzing inner community that has been interacting behind the scenes throughout our lives.

In this exercise you may have noticed that by simply focusing on one of your parts, you were separating (unblending) from it. In other words, suddenly there was a you, who was observing and an it that was being observed. As I said in the introduction, you’ll find this type of separation in mindfulness practices, and it’s a great first step. Then you took the next step when you explored how you feel about it and noticed what other parts feel about it. When you feel angry or afraid of it, that wouldn’t be the Self, but other parts that are still blended with the Self.

If you were able to get those parts to step back and open space, it’s likely you felt a shift into more mindfulness. From my point of view, your Self was being accessed through that unblending. The simple act of getting other parts to open space brings the Self forward, and a lot of meditation works by simply getting you to that more spacious, emptier mind and enabling you to feel the sense of calm well-being that fills that space.

In this process you turn toward what you’re observing and begin a new relationship with it.

But instead of simply observing what most traditions think of as the ego or as mere ephemeral thoughts and emotions, in this process you turn toward what you’re observing and begin a new relationship with it, one that involves a lot of curiosity. Ideally, you can continue to deepen the relation- and parts really appreciate it when you do that. Usually, they’ve been operating by themselves in there without any adult supervision, and most of 1 are pretty young. When you finally turn around and give them some attention, it’s like you’re a parent who’s been somewhat neglectful, but who is finally becoming more nurturing and interested in your children.

Exercise: Mapping Your Parts

slow I’m going to invite you to get to know a cluster of parts that have relationships with each other. To do that you’ll need a pad of paper and a pencil or pen. Again, focus inside and think of another part—not the one you just worked with, but a different one that you’d like to start with this time. The trailhead could be any emotion, thought, belief, impulse, or sensation.

As you focus on this new part, find it in your body or on your body. And now, just stay focused on it until you get enough of a sense of it that you could represent it on the page in front of you. It doesn’t have to be high art—any kind of image is good. It could even be a scribble. Just find a way to represent that part of you on a blank page. Stay focused on the part until you know how to represent it and then draw it.

After you’ve put that first part on the page, focus again on that same one in the same place in your body and just stay focused on it until you notice some kind of a shift and another trailhead—another part— emerges. And when that happens, focus on that second one, find it in your body, and stay with it until you can represent it on the page also.

After you have drawn that second one, go back to it again and stay with it until you notice yet another shift and another trailhead emerges. And then shift your focus to this new one, find it in your body, and stay with it until you can represent it on the page. Then, once again we 11 go back to that third one, focus on it in that place in your body,

and just stay present to that until still another one comes forward. And then shift to that one, find it in your body, and stay with it until you can represent it.

You can repeat this process until you have a sense that you have mapped out one complete system inside you. When you feel you’ve done that, shift your focus back outside to your surroundings.

It’s likely that what you found is one clove of garlic, as we call it in IFS. You might be familiar with the onion analogy used in psychotherapy—you peel your layers off, and you get to this core and then you heal that and you’re done. Well, in IFS it’s more like a garlic bulb. You have all these different cloves, each of which has a handful of different parts inside that are related to each other, and maybe are all stuck in one place in the past. As you work with one clove, you’ll feel relief from the burdens it contained, but you may not have touched other cloves that revolved around other traumas. So, this mapping exercise is designed to bring forth one of your cloves—one subsystem within you. Feel free to continue and map out other cloves.

Now I’d like you to hold your page a little bit away from you, so extend your arms with your pad of paper all the way out and look at these four or five parts you’ve represented with a little perspective. How do the parts relate to each other? Do some protect others? Do some fight with each other? Is there some kind of alliance there? As you start to form some answers, make a note on your drawing to represent them.

Now I want you to look at the parts again and explore how you feel toward each of them. When you’re done with that, think about what this system needs from you. Finally, take a second to focus inside again and just thank these parts for revealing themselves to you and let them know again that this isn’t the last time you’ll be talking to them. Then shift your focus back outside again.

I recommend this exercise for many contexts. For example, if you have a pressing issue in your life, go inside and map it out and some of the answers come to you—either about what decision to make or about what parts making it so difficult. Mapping your parts is another way to separate n them, as well, because often were quite blended with more than one.

CHAPTER TWO

Why Parts Blend

In IFS, we use the term blended to describe the phenomenon in which a part merges its perspective, emotion, beliefs, and impulses with your Self. When that happens, the qualities of your Self are obscured and seem to be replaced by those of the part. You might feel overwhelmed with fear, anger, or apathy. You might dissociate or become confused or have cravings. In other words, at least temporarily you become the part that has blended with you. You are the fearful young girl or the pouting little boy you once were.

Why do parts blend? Protective parts blend because they believe they have to manage situations in your life. They don’t trust your Self to do it. For example, if your father hit you as a child and you weren’t able to stop him, your parts lost trust in your Self’s ability to protect the system and, instead, came to believe they have to do it. To make the parallel to external families, they become parentified inner children. That is, they carry the responsibility for protecting you despite the fact that, like external parentified children, they are not equipped to do so.

Parts often become extreme in their protective efforts and take over your system by blending. Some make you hypervigilant, others get you to like the sun, the Self can temporarily obscured, but it never disappears.

overreact angrily to perceived slights, others make you somewhat dissociative all the time or cause you to fully dissociate in the face of perceived threats. Some become the inner critics as they try to motivate you to look or perform better or try to shame you into not taking risks. Others make you take care of everyone around you and neglect yourself.

The list of common protector roles in traumatized systems could go on and on. The point here is that these symptoms and patterns are the activities of young, stressed-out parts that are often frozen in time during earlier traumas and believe that you are still quite young and powerless. They often believe that they must blend the way they do or something dreadful will happen (often, that you will die). Given where they are stuck in the past, it makes sense that they would believe this.

Some of us are blended with some parts most of the time and we are so used to it that we don’t even think the beliefs we consequently hold are extreme. We just have a background sense that we are a fraud, that we shouldn’t fully trust anyone, or that we have to work constantly to avoid becoming impoverished. We may not even be consciously aware of such beliefs—yet those burdens govern our lives and are never examined or questioned.

Other parts only blend when they are triggered—someone rejects us, and suddenly we are awash in shame; a driver cuts us off, and we’re flooded with rage; we have to prepare for a presentation, and we have a panic attack.

We know that they’re overreactions, but we have no real idea as to why we get so upset. And because we never ask inside, we just go around thinking of ourselves as touchy, angry, or anxious people.

It’s important to remember that regardless of how blended we are, the Self is still in there—it never goes away. In ancient times, when there was a solar eclipse and it suddenly got dark because the moon blocked the sun, people would panic, believing the sun had disappeared. When the moon passes by or clouds dissipate, the sun shines as brightly as ever. Similarly, when parts unblend, the Self’s nourishing energy is readily available again and the parts are comforted to sense the presence of such a strong, loving inner leader.

Like the sun, the Self can be temporarily obscured, but it never disappears.

Blended parts give us the projections, transferences, and other twisted views that are the bread and butter of psychotherapy. The Self’s view is unfiltered by those distortions. When we’re in Self, we see the pain that drives our enemies rather than only seeing their protective parts.

Your protectors only see the protectors of others.

Your protectors only see the protectors of others. The clarity of Self gives you a kind of X-ray vision, so you see behind the other person’s protectors to their vulnerability, and in turn your heart opens to them.

Self also senses the Self in everyone and, consequently, has a deep sense of connectedness, as well as a strong desire to connect to the Self of others. This sense of connectedness has a spiritual element to it that we’ll explore later in this book—we feel connected to Spirit, the Tao, God, Brahman, to the Big

Self. We feel that because we are connected to it.

When we blend with burdened parts, we lose all sense of this connectedness and feel separate from one another and from spirit—alone and lonely. Here is another parallel between inner and outer systems. After they are burdened, our parts feel lonely and disconnected from one another and from our Self. They don’t realize they are all affected by what happens to each other and are loved by Self. Neither do we.

Thus, finding blended parts and helping them trust that it’s safe to unblend is a crucial part of IFS. As you might have discovered in the mapping exercise, the simple act of noticing parts and representing them on a page often creates enough separation from them (enough unblending) that you can have a different perspective on them. Like the view of a city from thirty thousand feet, you can see more clearly the roles they take on and how they operate as a system. Once you’re out of the trees, you can see the forest.

Not only can you see them better, but it is also easier to care about each of them when you are above, rather than in the middle of, their crossfires. When you unblend enough from the parts that hate your fear, for example, you suddenly see that it’s not a bundle of irrational neuroses but a frightened little child-like part who needs to be comforted. You have compassion for I’m inviting you to get a felt sense of what it’s like for you, your Self, to be more embodied. If you can become somatically familiar with this state, then you can notice when you’re there and when you’re not as you go through your day. Any departures from that state are usually due to the activity of parts that have blended to some degree and are giving you distracting thoughts, blocking the flow of energy, closing your heart, making you feel pressure in different places, et cetera. You can notice those activities and then reassure the parts doing them that they don’t have to—that it’s safe to unblend, at least for the duration of the meditation. Afterward they can jump back to attention if they really want to. I have found, however, that through this practice, parts gradually increase their trust that it is safe and beneficial to let the Self embody. They also trust that the Self is remembering and checking on them—that it’s being a good inner parent. All of this Self-leadership helps them step out of their parentified roles and consider unburdening.

In the next minute or so, I invite you to shift your focus back outside. Before you come back, though, thank your parts either for letting you embody more or, if they didn’t, for letting you know they were too afraid to do so just yet. Then come on back when it feels right.

The Four Basic Goals of IFS

Liberate parts from the roles they’ve been forced into, so they can be who they’re designed to be.
Restore trust in the Self and Self-leadership.
Reharmonize the inner system.
Become more Self-led in your interactions with the world.

This kind of unblending doesn’t have to be limited to twenty-minute sessions. It can become a life practice. As I go through my day, I notice how much I’m in my body—how much of my Self is present. I’ll check my heart to see how open it is, feel whether my mind is also open or if I have a strong agenda or pressured thoughts, gauge the resonance of my voice when I talk, feel whether or not that vibrating Self energy is flowing, examine whether there is the physical tension in my forehead or weight on my shoulders (which is where my managers hang out), et cetera. These are some of my markers, and I encourage you to find your own.

After practicing many years, I can check those markers quickly and then ask any activated parts to relax, separate, and trust me to embody. Because my parts trust me now, most of the time I’ll quickly notice changes in all those qualities and places in my body. There are a few circumstances where that is still a challenge, but that simply means that I still need to heal some parts that get triggered by those situations. When you can be present with your parts in the inner world this way, you can lead more of your life in the outer world from this place.

In this meditation, I had you tell your parts how old you really are. When I have people ask that question (i.e., “How old do you think I am?”), maybe 70 percent of the time the answer is in single digits. Often the number that comes back to you is the age you were when the part was forced out of its valuable state and into the role that it’s in now. It’s like once the part took on that role, it focused on the outside world and never looked back at you—it didn’t notice that you grew. So, many parts believe they are still protecting you as a young child. In many cases, how old you are now is a big revelation to these parts—many don’t believe it at first.

The goal of this updating process is for your parts to realize that they aren’t the Lone Rangers they thought they were in there. Instead, as they come to trust you-—your Self—as the inner leader, they are greatly relieved and can become who they are designed to be. They may grow a bit older or younger or stay the same age, but universally they transform into valuable roles. Those of you who have kids might remember that evening when you put a compliant little two-year-old to bed and the same child woke up saying no to virtually everything the next morning. That assertive part debuted overnight. So, it is the natural state of the mind to have parts.

There aren’t any bad ones. As you get to know them, you’ll learn about their full range of personalities. Most are young—even the ones that dominate your life and can be quite intellectual. After parts unburden, they will manifest their true nature in valuable qualities (like delight, joy, sensitivity, empathy, wonderment, sexuality) and resources (like the ability to focus, clear discernment, problem-solving, passion for serving others or the world) that you have new access to and enrich your life.
You often have to earn their trust. The fact that they are burdened suggests that you didn’t protect them in the past, and you may have locked them away or exploited them by depending on their extreme protective roles, so they usually have good reasons to not trust you. Like feral children, they need your love and nurturing, but they don’t trust it at first because of their history with you. Sometimes it takes you showing up in Self repeatedly and apologizing to them to regain their trust. Fortunately, they aren’t actually feral external children, so this trusting process often doesn’t take more than a few visits.
They can cause a lot of damage to your body and your life. Because they’re frozen in dreadful scenes in the past and carry burdens from those times, they will do whatever they need to do to get your attention when you won’t listen: punish you or others, convince others to take care of them, sabotage your plans, or eliminate people in your life they see as a threat. To do these things and more, they can exacerbate or give you physical symptoms or diseases, nightmares and strange dreams, emotional outbursts, and chronic emotional states. Indeed, most of the syndromes that make up the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual are simply descriptions of the different clusters of protectors that dominate people after they’ve been traumatized. When you think of those diagnoses that way, you feel a lot less defective and a lot more empowered to help those protectors out of those roles.

They are very important and deserve to be taken seriously.

If you can establish a new, loving relationship with them and help them transform, they become wonderful companions, advisors, and playmates. You find yourself wanting to spend time with them and hear what ideas they have for you. Their conflicts don’t bother you much anymore, because you know they are just parts, and you can help them get along—you become a good inner parent when necessary. And it becomes a lovely life practice just to spend time with them.

NO BAD PARTS

Introduction

Inherent Goodness

in the inherent goodness and ingenuity of humanity.”² Our leaders can’t do that, however, with the way we currently understand the mind because it highlights the darkness in humanity.

The Promise of IFS

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

We’re All Multiple

Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness’

A Brief History

Willpower and Shame

We often find that the harder we try to get rid of emotions and thoughts, the stronger they become.

Parts Aren’t Obstacles

Buddhist teachings use the term monkey mind to describe how our thoughts jump around in our consciousness like an agitated monkey. As

De La Rosa is one of a number of recent authors who challenge the common practice in spirituality of vilifying the ego. Another is psychotherapist Matt Licata, who writes,

How I Came to Learn About Parts

In Buddhist terms, IFS helps people become bodhisattvas of their psyches in the sense of helping each inner sentient being (part) become enlightened through compassion and love.

IFS helps people become bodhisattvas of their psyches.

Some discoveries I made about parts:

Even the most destructive parts have protective intentions.
Parts are often frozen in past traumas when their extreme roles were needed.
When they trust it’s safe to step out of their roles, they are highly valuable to the system.

Burdens

Here’s another key discovery I stumbled on: parts carry extreme beliefs and emotions in or on their “bodies” that drive the way they feel and act.

Parts Are Not Their Burdens

It is as if each part is like a person with a true purpose.

No Bad Parts

The Self

My main goal was to help my clients form better relationships with their parts. Some of the patterns I kept seeing with individuals were similar to what The Self is in everybody.

develop, and the Self possesses its own wisdom about how to heal internal as well as external relationships.

Your Turn

Exercise: Getting to Know a Protector

Take a second and get comfortable. Set up like you would if you were going to meditate. If it helps you to take deep breaths, then do that.

In this process you turn toward what you’re observing and begin a new relationship with it.

Exercise: Mapping Your Parts

and just stay present to that until still another one comes forward. And then shift to that one, find it in your body, and stay with it until you can represent it.

You can repeat this process until you have a sense that you have mapped out one complete system inside you. When you feel you’ve done that, shift your focus back outside to your surroundings.

CHAPTER TWO

Why Parts Blend

We know that they’re overreactions, but we have no real idea as to why we get so upset. And because we never ask inside, we just go around thinking of ourselves as touchy, angry, or anxious people.

Like the sun, the Self can be temporarily obscured, but it never disappears.

Your protectors only see the protectors of others.

Self. We feel that because we are connected to it.

The Four Basic Goals of IFS

Liberate parts from the roles they’ve been forced into, so they can be who they’re designed to be.
Restore trust in the Self and Self-leadership.
Reharmonize the inner system.
Become more Self-led in your interactions with the world.

There aren’t any bad ones. As you get to know them, you’ll learn about their full range of personalities. Most are young—even the ones that dominate your life and can be quite intellectual. After parts unburden, they will manifest their true nature in valuable qualities (like delight, joy, sensitivity, empathy, wonderment, sexuality) and resources (like the ability to focus, clear discernment, problem-solving, passion for serving others or the world) that you have new access to and enrich your life.
You often have to earn their trust. The fact that they are burdened suggests that you didn’t protect them in the past, and you may have locked them away or exploited them by depending on their extreme protective roles, so they usually have good reasons to not trust you. Like feral children, they need your love and nurturing, but they don’t trust it at first because of their history with you. Sometimes it takes you showing up in Self repeatedly and apologizing to them to regain their trust. Fortunately, they aren’t actually feral external children, so this trusting process often doesn’t take more than a few visits.
They can cause a lot of damage to your body and your life. Because they’re frozen in dreadful scenes in the past and carry burdens from those times, they will do whatever they need to do to get your attention when you won’t listen: punish you or others, convince others to take care of them, sabotage your plans, or eliminate people in your life they see as a threat.

To do these things and more, they can exacerbate or give you physical symptoms or diseases, nightmares and strange dreams, emotional outbursts, and chronic emotional states. Indeed, most of the syndromes that make up the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual are simply descriptions of the different clusters of protectors that dominate people after they’ve been traumatized. When you think of those diagnoses that way, you feel a lot less defective and a lot more empowered to help those protectors out of those roles.

They are very important and deserve to be taken seriously.

Session One: Sam

I’ve included several transcripts of IFS sessions with clients in this book so you can get a better feel of how the work I’m describing plays out in real time. If it isn’t clear, I’m the transcribed party referred to as Dick, or just D.

I teach every year at a beautiful retreat center near Big Sur, California, called Esalen. This past winter, Sam Stern (who was running their podcast at the time) asked me to do an interview with him, and he gamely agreed to let me demonstrate IFS on him. It was his first experience of IFS. If you’d like to listen to the interview, check out soundcloud.com/voices-of-esalen /dr-richard-schwartz-internal-family-systems.

Session One: Sam