No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

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.

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 seem

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.

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 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.

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 of

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.

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.

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