NO BAD PARTS

Intro, Goodness & Promise, 1-4

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.