No Bad Parts

No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model 2021

by Richard Schwartz Ph.D. (Author), Alanis Morissette (Introduction)

 

“Compassion as a spontaneous aspect of Self blew my mind, because I’d always assumed and learned that compassion was something you had to develop. There’s this idea—especially in some spiritual circles—that you have to build up the muscle of compassion over time, because it’s not inherent. Again, that’s the negative view on human nature at play. To be clear, what I mean by compassion is the ability to be in Self with somebody when they’re really hurting and feel for them, but not be overwhelmed by their pain. You can only do that if you’ve done it within yourself. That is, if you can be with your own exiles without blending and being overwhelmed by them and instead show them compassion and help them, then you can do the same for someone in pain who’s sitting across from you.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

 

“IFS can be seen as attachment theory taken inside, in the sense that the client’s Self becomes the good attachment figure to their insecure or avoidant parts. I was initially amazed to discover that when I was able to help clients access their Self, they would spontaneously begin to relate to their parts in the loving way that the textbooks on attachment theory prescribed. This was true even for people who had never had good parenting in the first place. Not only would they listen to their young exiles with loving attention and hold them patiently while they cried, they would firmly but lovingly discipline the parts in the roles of inner critics or distractors. Self just knows how to be a good inner leader.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“The big insight was that giving a troubled person a psychiatric diagnosis and seeing that as the sole or main cause of their symptoms was unnecessarily limiting, pathologizing, and could become self-reinforcing.”
― Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“Your protectors’ goals for your life revolve around keeping you away from all that pain, shame, loneliness, and fear, and they use a wide array of tools to meet those goals—achievements, substances, food, entertainment, shopping, sex, obsession with your appearance, caretaking, meditation, money, and so on.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“When you were young and experienced traumas or attachment injuries, you didn’t have enough body or mind to protect yourself. Your Self couldn’t protect your parts, so your parts lost trust in your Self as the inner leader. They may even have pushed your Self out of your body and took the hit themselves—they believed they had to take over and protect you and your other parts. But in trying to handle the emergency, they got stuck in that parentified place and carry intense burdens of responsibility and fear, like a parentified child in a family.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“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.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“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.” ― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“Well-known neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel has emphasized the importance of such integration in healing and has described IFS as a good way to achieve that. He writes, “Health comes from integration. It’s that simple, and that important. A system that is integrated is in a flow of harmony. Just as in a choir, with each singer’s voice both differentiated from the other singers’ voices but also linked, harmony emerges with integration. What is important to note is that this linkage does not remove the differences, as in the notion of blending: instead it maintains these unique contributions as it links them together. Integration is more like a fruit salad than a smoothie.” This, again, is one of the basic goals of IFS. Each part is honored for its unique qualities while also working in harmony with all the others.”
― Richard C. Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“Revisit each of these parts, inviting them to relax inside in open space just for a few minutes, and ask them to trust that it’s safe to let you more into your body. Their energy tends to make it harder for you to be embodied when they’re triggered. And if they’re willing to let you in more, you’ll notice a shift each time they relax—you’ll feel more space inside your mind and body. Remind them that it’s just for a few minutes, that it’s just an experiment to see what happens if they let you be there more. They don’t have to if they don’t want to, in which case you can just continue to get to know them. But if they are willing, notice the qualities of this increase in spaciousness and embodiment. Notice what it feels like to be more in your body with a lot of space.”
― Ph.D. Schwartz, Richard, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“Move from being ego-, family-, and ethno-centric to species-, bio-, and planet-centric.”
― Ph.D. Schwartz, Richard, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“We’re All Multiple”
― Ph.D. Schwartz, Richard, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“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.”
― Ph.D. Schwartz, Richard, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model