What is IFS Therapy? | A Book Review of No Bad Parts From an IFS Therapist in San Francisco
What if every inner obstacle you face has a valuable gift to offer you? What if the shame you struggle with has an important story to tell you? What might happen if you engage in dialogue with your inner conflicts?
I’ve got a book rec for you that can answer these questions, and introduce you to a transformative method of understanding and relating to yourself and the world around you.
As an IFS-informed therapist in San Francisco, I support my clients struggling with issues like anxiety and chronic shame using Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, a therapeutic model developed by Richard Schwartz, PHD.
I’m here to give you the low-down on key concepts of IFS using Schwartz’s book No Bad Parts (Sounds True, 2021), a foundational guide to understanding IFS and exploring how to apply it in our lives. No Bad Parts presents IFS as a unique and powerful method to support your healing, build trust with yourself, and enhance your self-awareness. I recommend it to clients who express interest in learning more about the IFS theory, as it can be a great resource to complement your therapeutic journey and support the work we do together.
IFS overview
In No Bad Parts, Schwartz explains Internal Family Systems as the view that our minds are composed of different inner “parts”, all of which are fully realized members of our psyche with their own beliefs, emotions and memories, and who play different—and often extreme—roles in our lives. The fundamental premise of No Bad Parts is that each part of us is valuable and worthy of understanding and embracing, even the parts that manifest in difficult or damaging ways.
Schwartz uncovered the concept of Internal Family Systems through working with clients struggling with bulimia. As they described the relentless binge-purge cycle, they would refer to “parts” of themselves that would “take over”, as if the parts had full autonomy. These parts all interacted with each other, such as a merciless inner critic who victimized parts of them that felt sad and worthless, which then led to a binge in attempts to self–soothe. The inner critic would then attack them for the binge, and the vicious cycle continued.
At first, Schwartz encouraged his clients to argue with, ignore, or fight against their inner critic in attempts to stop this painful cycle, but that did nothing to alleviate his clients’ struggle.
Schwartz then became curious—what would happen if, instead of demonizing the inner critic, they became curious and actually listened to what it had to say?
Schwartz began to engage in dialogue with his clients’ parts and relate to them in a new way—with compassion, understanding, and appreciation. The more he listened, the more he realized that they formed an inner system—similar to that of a family. And the more he reflected, he realized that he, too, had parts—and that all of us have an Internal Family System that informs our emotional landscape and lived experience.
Schwartz discovered that our parts are often frozen in past traumas, most commonly developed in childhood when we are at our most vulnerable. Each part of us has a story to tell about how they came to play their extreme roles in efforts to keep us safe from painful memories and emotions. The extreme roles these “parts” play include our coping mechanisms for handling stress and trauma, and the ways we attempt to protect ourselves from the pain of negative core beliefs.
Schwartz goes on to explain the function and purpose of our types of parts and their roles: “Exiles” (the vulnerable parts of us that carry the burdens of our trauma and emotional wounds), “Managers” (the parts that try to keep us safe by controlling our emotions and behavior), and “Firefighters” (the parts that drive our coping mechanisms to escape painful emotions in response to triggers).
As Schwartz learned more about our inner parts, he began to understand what our parts need in order to heal, and what we can do to liberate them from the burdens they carry. At the seat of our Internal Family System is what Schwartz calls our “Self”—our innate inner wisdom untarnished by outward experiences that, when rediscovered and “unblended” from our parts, can heal and integrate our inner world.
Throughout No Bad Parts, Schwartz provides a variety of exercises you can do to engage in dialogue with your parts, establish a trusting relationship with them, and separate them from your core Self to become “Self-led”. These exercises range from “Getting to Know a Protector”, a “Daily IFS Meditation”, and “Accessing the Self through Unblending”. Using case studies and anecdotes from his clients, Schwartz shows us what the process of IFS can look like when practiced in real time.
Schwartz explains how IFS can not only guide us toward relating to our inner system, but can also inform how we relate to the world around us. IFS can become a spiritual practice to apply in our lives as we navigate our relationships with ourselves, with other people, and within the societies and cultures we belong to.
Parts and their roles
Schwartz breaks down our parts and the roles they play into categories: Exiles and Protectors, with types of Protectors as Managers and Firefighters.
Exiles are our “inner children”, the often young, vulnerable parts of us that are frozen in past traumas. Our Exiles were forced to carry extreme beliefs and emotions—which Schwartz calls “burdens”—that were passed onto us from our guardians, caregivers, teachers, and societal and cultural legacies. These burdens could be acquired through experiences such as shame, betrayal, neglect, or abandonment, instilling in us extreme beliefs such as not being good enough, that there is something inherently wrong with us, or that we deserve to be mistreated.
The pain of these burdens can be unbearable for our innocent and ill-equipped Exiles, which is where the Protectors come in. These are the parts of us that took on extreme roles in efforts to protect us from the pain of these burdens, which can manifest in our adulthood as a severe inner critic, anxiety and hypervigilance, and self-destructive habits.
Managers take preemptive measures to keep us safe, trying to avoid any trigger that might threaten the safety of our Exiles. These are the parts who may self-sabotage us and try to keep us “small”, feel the need to caretake the people around us at the expense of our own needs, or take the form of a harsh inner critic who berates us when we make a mistake and strives to be “perfect”.
Firefighters are all about damage control. When our pain is triggered, they resort to desperate measures to keep us away from unbearable feelings. These escape attempts could look like addiction or substance abuse, compulsive shopping, drowning ourselves in work, or numbing out with entertainment, among others. When these emergency tactics leave us feeling even more ashamed, disconnected and out of control, our Managers try desperately to control them, resulting in a painful feedback loop.
This doesn’t mean the inner critic—or any other part that negatively impacts our lives—is bad. True to the book’s title, there really are no bad parts. Schwartz argues that even the most destructive parts that cause damage in our lives are simply doing so to protect us in the best way they know how. Ironically, once a destructive part that causes us harm is liberated from their extreme roles in efforts to keep us safe, it can end up being one of our greatest strengths.
The Self
Enter what Schwartz calls our “Self”. Our core Self is the place from which we observe our parts and the outside world. As Schwartz continued to guide his clients in getting to know their Exiles and Protectors, he began to notice a new voice coming through—one that was separate from their hurt and traumatized parts. This calm and compassionate voice approached their parts from a place of wisdom and healing, and Schwartz began to recognize it as the pure, undamaged essence that exists within all of us.
In No Bad Parts, Schwartz states: “The Self is in everybody…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 (Schwartz, 22-23)”.
Our Self is comprised of qualities Schwartz refers to as the “8 C’s”: compassion, curiosity, clarity, creativity, calm, confidence, courage, and connectedness. This Self energy is innate to all of us, and we all have the capacity to tap into these qualities.
Sometimes it can feel like we’re entirely disconnected from our Self, resulting in feeling lost and alone. When this happens, it means our parts feel the need to play such extreme roles in our lives that they blend with the Self.
Blending and Unblending
Blended is an IFS term that describes “the phenomenon in which a part merges its perspective, emotion, beliefs, and impulses with your Self (Schwartz, 29)”. Blending is what happens when your Self is eclipsed or seemingly replaced by those of a part, such as anger, fear, or dissociation. Essentially, it’s when a part “takes over” our inner system.
Our Protectors “blend” when they don’t trust our Self to manage situations in our lives, so they believe that they have to step in and manage it for us. For instance, in a situation of powerlessness as a child such as a parent inflicting harm and there was nothing you could do to stop it, your parts would lose trust in your Self’s ability to save or protect them.
Basically, blending is when your parts believe you are still as young and powerless as you were when you were a child, and they feel the need to protect you in that state.
There are countless ways our parts can take over our system in extreme efforts to protect us, such as dissociating when feeling threatened, angrily overreacting to a perceived insult, or neglecting ourselves for the sake of taking care of others. When we’re in this place, it can feel like our core Self is a million miles away—but our Self never disappears. It’s always there, no matter how blended we are, ready to step forward and comfort and guide our parts through “unblending”.
“Unblending” is a crucial element of IFS therapy. It’s the process of identifying our blended parts and building trust with them. As our Self consistently proves to our parts that they don’t need to blend to keep us safe, our parts can feel safe enough to let the Self guide our inner system. The more we distinguish our Self from our Exiles and Protectors, the more we can allow our Self to embody its true purpose of creating and facilitating healing and harmony—what Schwartz calls being “Self-led”.
Becoming “Self-led”
Schwartz defines the four basic goals of IFS as follows:
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. (Schwartz, 34)
Schwartz defines “Self-led” as a state of being where “the different parts maintain their separateness while communicating and collaborating with each other, while the Self conducts this inner orchestra (Schwartz, 131)”.
The Self uses patience, persistence, presence, perspective, and playfulness to maintain harmony within our system. When our parts are activated by stressful or triggering experiences and feel the need to “take over”, we know that the Self is there to help–like a healthy “inner parent” to our inner family.
IFS in practice
We’ve discussed the ways IFS can help us transform the state of our inner world–but what about relating to the world around us?
When we are connected to the Self and its innate qualities, we are better able to handle conflict and situations and it can become easier to repair relationships. The Self is more connected to humanity in general, and when we come from that calm, compassionate place we can be more curious about others, able to identify their parts, and communicate more effectively.
IFS doesn’t promise that we will be “Self-led” all the time–but the development of our Self-leadership can help us notice when we are “in Self” versus when our parts are running the show, and be able to come back to center with more ease as we navigate our relationships and the world around us. IFS in practice can help us tap into more love for ourselves and others, connect to our deepest emotions, and develop more meaningful habits.
As an IFS-informed therapist, I believe it’s important to acknowledge the struggle to survive in a societal system that isn’t designed to meet human needs. Schwartz touches on this in No Bad Parts when he identifies what he calls “legacy burdens”, such as racism, patriarchy, individualism, and materialism, and acknowledges the way these burdens reinforce a sense of disconnection and fear for survival.
As we work with our inner system, we cannot ignore the outer systems that inform our lived experience. IFS therapy can help us understand our individual experiences in the context of larger societal structures, so that we don’t only view our challenges personally, thinking they’re our fault. Bad things happen that have nothing to do with our behavior, but the ability to pay attention to and take care of our parts can help us handle these experiences.
A free therapy consultation in San Francisco
I hope this helps you understand some key elements of Internal Family Systems so you can have a broad idea of what you can expect from IFS therapy in San Francisco. I have found No Bad Parts to be a useful gateway to IFS, and can be a great resource to deepen your relationship with yourself.
I’ve seen IFS in practice deeply benefit my clients, transforming their relationship to anxiety and shame and guiding them through struggles in their relationships. I’m passionate about supporting you on your healing journey, and I hope to share this resource with you so you can gain a fuller understanding of how IFS can positively impact your life.
If you’re looking for IFS therapy in San Francisco, feel welcome to call me at (415) 851-5125 for a free 15-minute phone consultation. My specialties include anxiety, self-esteem, and relationship issues.