I did not expect this book to affect me as much as it did, and now I can see why Internal Family Systems is such a powerful tool for treating trauma and other mental health conditions, and why they even made a couple of movies based on this approach.
So in this post, I’m going to summarize what I’ve learned about IFS with you and share some of the exercises that helped me see myself more clearly, detach a little from my very loud parts, and feel more compassionate and calm, toward myself and others. Let’s talk about No Bad Parts, by Richard Schwartz PhD.
Introducing No Bad Parts: A Guide to Internal Family Systems
IFS, or Internal Family systems, is a therapy approach developed by Richard Schwartz, and from what I hear, he goes by Dick. The main idea is that we are all made up of different parts. We might have a perfectionist part, an angry part, and a scared little kid part inside of us. And there are cultural approaches from Freudian psychology to religious philosophy to CBT that have taught that there are bad parts of us that need to be shamed and suppressed. What’s beautiful about Internal Family Systems is the concept that Schwartz put right in the title of his book: there are no bad parts.
Dick was trained as a Marriage and Family therapist (like me, woot woot family therapy!!) And in family therapy you’re trained to work with a bunch of family members all in the same room, and to look for their dynamics. There might be a problem child, a critical parent, and a rescuer parent. Each of them plays a role in the family’s system, and the more you pressure them, the more rigid they become. So for example, if the father is the critical parent, the more he criticizes the problem child, the more likely they are to act out. And the more critical the father is, the more the mother steps in to rescue the child.
Dick started to see this dynamic when he was working with Bulimic patients. And he tried to work with the families of Bulimic Patients, but when he found this wasn’t working, he got curious- here’s what he said:
They kept binging and purging, much to my frustration. And I began asking why, and they started talking this language of parts and would say some version of when something bad happens, this critic attacks me inside and it brings up a part who makes me feel worthless and empty and alone. And that feeling is so dreadful that the binge comes in to rescue me from it. But the act of the binge triggers the critic again. And it sounded as a family therapist familiar. because that’s what I’d been studying, these patterns in families. And at first I thought, well, that’s a nice metaphor for different emotions and thoughts and we can work with that. But they were talking about these things as if they had full personalities and a lot of autonomy and that they couldn’t control them. And then I got scared. I thought maybe these are people with multiple personality disorder and I started listening inside myself and my god I’ve got them too and mine are as full personalities and sometimes as extreme as theirs and then I just got curious and have spent the next 40 years studying these internal systems
In No Bad Parts, he writes:
“When we simply turn our attention inside, we find that what we thought were random thoughts and emotions comprise a bustling inner community that has been interacting behind the scenes throughout our lives.” – page 25
To be clear, IFS is different from Dissociative Identity Disorder. In fact, having parts is normal, natural and healthy. Internal Family Systems says we’re all born with these parts, and the goal is learning how to work with them with clarity and compassion.
What Richard Schwartz Teaches About Protectors and Exiles
Unlike the movie Inside Out these parts aren’t just emotions. They can be like little people you visualize, with their own thoughts, feelings and needs. They often have important roles like keeping you safe, or numbing you to pain, or motivating you to try hard. Sometimes these parts are just a bodily sensation you have, or a quiet little voice. Often we have parts that we aren’t aware of, and there are louder parts that are taking most of our attention.
In Internal Family Systems the various parts are categorized as either Protectors and Exiles.
Exile Parts in Internal Family Systems: The Hidden Carriers of Pain
Exiles are the wounded parts of us that carry the most pain, shame, fear, or feelings of worthlessness. They’re often younger, vulnerable parts that got “exiled” or pushed away from awareness because their emotions felt too overwhelming, or because other parts of us decided it wasn’t safe to let them show up in daily life. Some common Exiles are the Invisible Child who was neglected or the Rejected Teenager who was bullied.
Protector Parts in Internal Family Systems: Managers and Firefighters
Then there are the Protectors who are just trying to keep us safe. And there are two types of Protectors: Managers and Firefighters.
Managers are the planners and controllers trying to prevent pain. They are proactive. They can look like perfectionism, humor, worry, planning, and controlling behaviors. They show up as overachieving, people pleasing, or avoiding risks or rejection. They are usually very tired and stressed out because they’re working all the time. Some of them never sleep.
Firefighters are there for crises, they’re reactive. Their role is to rush in when Exiles are triggered and extinguish overwhelming pain. They can look like rage, self-harm, substance use, or dissociation. So this might show up as angrily defending yourself against criticism, or numbing yourself with alcohol to avoid disappointment.
Managers and firefighters are usually fighting. So why won’t the parts back down? Because they LOVE YOU too much to do that. They are convinced that they are helping you, and that’s why they won’t give up. Not because they are stubborn, or bad, or mean.
How No Bad Parts Transforms the Way We See Ourselves in Trauma Therapy
The important thing to remember is there are NO BAD PARTS.
That every part has a good intention behind what it’s doing.
- A part that yells at your partner…really cares about the relationship and whether or not they show up for you.
- A part that criticizes you…wants you to get better and improve.
- A part that uses substances…wants you to feel better and have fun.
When a member of our family is trying to fight us, or seems to be undermining us, it’s natural to want to change them, argue with them, or avoid them. But what we find with Internal Family Systems is that fighting our parts usually leads to more dysfunction. Trying to suppress their voices leads to more internal struggle, or it allows protectors to run our life. Trying to defeat bulimia strengthens it. Trying to hate your perfectionistic part can lead to more self-hatred and fuel more perfectionism.
Internal Family Systems sees all of our parts, Exiles, Managers and Firefighters not as something bad to get rid of, but as hurt parts that need care. They are often innocent young children who took on the responsibility of life and shouldn’t have to carry that anymore.
So in IFS therapy, the goal is not to keep suppressing these parts but to build enough safety and self-leadership that these Exiles and Protectors can finally be witnessed, comforted, and unburdened. They need reassurance that you can be kept safe, and trust that you can handle life as it comes at you. When that happens, all the parts can transform—often becoming sources of vitality, creativity, and connection.
Instead of trying to kill the parts of us that we don’t like, IFS teaches us to listen to them and create a healthy internal family. This is where the Self comes in.
The Healing Power of the Self in Trauma Therapy
An amazing thing happens when you start to see your parts, to notice them, and name them, and listen to them. An incredible part of you starts to emerge. In Internal Family Systems it’s called the Self with a capital S.
The Self is the deepest part of you. It holds all of the parts, kind of like how an ocean holds all of its fishes. The Self is who leads, guides, listens to and comforts each of the parts. You guys, this is my favorite part of Internal Family Systems, because when you can let the Self do its work, both your internal and external relationships have more peace.
Let me share a personal example.
My Experience Using Internal Family Systems: The Planning Session
The other day my husband and I were trying to have a planning session. He hates to plan. I hate it when we have no plan. So we’re sitting, talking about our calendar, and I remind him for the second time about a task that needs to be done, that he agreed to do. He asks me to explain it to him again for the third time.
I started to feel somewhat angry and annoyed. “Why do I have to plan everything?!” “Does he even care?! This is so frustrating!” And then I started to feel bad for getting angry, so I just stopped talking. He paused for a minute, and I took a breath and closed my eyes. I could see this angry part inside me. It was the part of me that feels hurt and unloved when people don’t pay attention to me. This is a firefighter. And then perhaps I felt like the victim, because it seems like people don’t care about me. And then I could see the manager part jumping in and saying, “Don’t do anything stupid Emma. Don’t say anything! Don’t make Ryan hate planning even more because you’re going to be so sensitive about stuff like this.”
I had just finished reading No Bad Parts so as I noticed these parts coming forward, suddenly I could see them clearly and I felt my capital-S Self just stepping back from them. I could be curious and ask them what they needed. I felt more centered. I felt myself soften up a little.
I asked the little Victimy part, “What do you need?” She said, “I need to be shown that people care about me, that Ryan cares about me.”
Then I asked the Manager what she needed. “I need the angry one to not speak up because if she tells Ryan what she really needs, that will push him away.” (And by the way, if I had told Ryan it would have come out in an angry judgmental way.) I imagined my Self telling my little Victim “OK, I’m going to stand up for what you need” and then telling the Manager, “Don’t worry, I’m going to do it in a calm, firm, and kind way.” My parts reacted by calming down quite a bit, and I was able to feel more clear.
I opened my eyes. Ryan had been patiently sitting there while I had this little internal family conversation, and I said, “It really helps me feel like you care about me when you write down and follow up on the things we talk about. Could you please put this in your phone’s reminders?” And he said something along the lines of, “Sure honey. I’m sorry I forgot. I’ll do better next time.”
The Self is the gentle and wise leader who can guide your internal family to being harmonious and loving.
You don’t need to be calmer, more curious, or more courageous; there’s already a part of you that is calm, is curious, and is courageous. It’s already there. It’s not damaged. It’s not scared. It’s not wounded. This is something that you have to experience, and the way you do it is through little exercises that are kind of like meditations. I’m excited for you to learn these with me!
Get to Know Your Internal Family System by Mapping Your Parts
So the first exercise in the No Bad Parts book already started to change me. It’s called Mapping Your Parts. Taking time to get to know our parts can be a powerful way to reduce internal conflict and free ourselves from burdens.
To do it you sit down and quietly pay attention to your body, and then just notice the parts of yourself that come up. I’m making a much more detailed version of this exercise as a separate YouTube video, so check that out; I’ll put the link in the description. You can hear more of me talking to myself – haha.
Blending and Unblending in Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Another really essential aspect of Internal Family Systems is the idea of blending and unblending.
Examples of Blending from No Bad Parts
In Internal Family Systems (IFS), blending happens when you become fused with a part. You feel like the part is you. Let me give you some examples:
- You feel overwhelming shame and think, “I’m worthless. No one could ever love me.” The exile’s belief feels like the whole truth; you’re blended with an exile.
- You can’t make a decision, because the internal family members are arguing.
- You keep engaging in unhealthy habits, such as running away or binging, because the firefighters are desperately trying to control your triggered feelings.
- You believe that you just have to “try harder to be better” (you’re blended with a manager) but your willpower isn’t working because you’ve got another protector part trying to keep you safe by resisting change.
When one of our parts is running the show, we often get stuck in unhealthy or reactive behaviors.
So when I was angry at my husband, my little victim was telling me stories like “This is so UNFAIR! Why do I have to do everything! He NEVER cares about me! ” and it was fueling the angry desire to lash out and criticize him. In that moment, I was blended with my little angry firefighter.
But when I stepped back and noticed the victim part, and used my perspective as my Self, I could create some space. The manager wanted to suppress this victim part, but the Self was a thoughtful and curious place to step into.
Now, I’ve used ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, for years to do what they call “Defusion”, which creates some space between yourself and your thoughts. But honestly, I found the Internal Family Systems approach easier to practice. The metaphor just makes it much more simple to apply.
Here’s how Dick Schwartz describes it in his book, No Bad Parts (p. 25):
“When you simply focus on one of the parts, suddenly there was a you who was observing, and an it that was being observed.”
Unblending in IFS: How to Step Back and Let the Self Lead
This takes us to unblending. Unblending happens when you notice, “Oh, this is just a part of me,” and you shift back into Self-energy: calm, curious, compassionate awareness.
Let me walk you through how unblending works.
- Instead of believing “I am worthless.” – You notice, “A part of me feels worthless right now,” When your inner critic says, “You’re failing,” you pause and think, “Okay, that’s my Manager part speaking. I can listen without letting it take over.”
- You feel the urge to binge or numb out, but instead of acting, you say, “This firefighter part is trying to protect me. I can check in with it and see if it would be willing to do another behavior instead.”
- You can hold compassion: “I see this sad little part of me that feels alone, and I want to be with it.”
- Or when I was planning with my husband I could have said “you’re so unreliable!” and that would have probably invited more fighting- but if I’d said “A part of me feels hurt by you” that would have been more helpful.
Seriously, this is one of the most powerful, and most simple things you can do. When you start to notice your parts, you create the space to act with more calm and compassion.
Richard Schwartz on “Unburdening” a Part in Trauma Therapy
And the healing continues to deepen as the Self helps each part “unburden”. This process is best learned with a therapist trained in Internal Family Systems, but here’s an example where the author, Richard Schwartz, describes the process of unburdening the inner critic (from his interview with Tami Simon on Insights at the Edge:
“I would have you focus on that critical voice, find it in your body. Most people find that particular part in their head somewhere. I would ask you, ‘Tammy, how do you feel toward that critical part of you?’ It’s likely you’d say something like, ‘I hate it. It just makes me feel really bad and it keeps me from doing what I want to do in my life. It holds me back.’
We would ask the ones who hate it to give us the space to get curious. I wouldn’t have you talk to it until you were at least at some sort of open-mindedness toward it. At that point, I would have you ask what’s it afraid would happen if it didn’t do this to you all day? It’s likely you would…hear without thinking, you would just wait and see what comes back to you from that part, that it’s afraid if it didn’t do this to you, you’d get hurt maybe, or people would judge you, or you wouldn’t be perfect and then you’d be abandoned. There’s always some kind of protective reason.
And then I would have you say to it, if we could go to the part of you that it protects, that has been hurt in the past, and heal that so it wasn’t such a threat, ‘Would this part have to keep doing this?’ And most of the time they say, ‘No, they wouldn’t have to.’ And I might ask, ‘What would it like to do instead of being this critic?’ And often, oddly enough, the answer is the opposite role. So you might hear it say, ‘I’d like to be your cheerleader. I’d like to help you get out in the world, like to help you feel good about yourself.’
And so we would then negotiate permission from it to go to what it protected, that vulnerable hurt part. And we have a process for actually unburdening that part so that it feels much better and less vulnerable. And then bring the critic in to see that what it was protecting is no longer needed. And see now if we would like to shift into that other role. So that’s sort of in a nutshell the process we do.”
So the Self unburdens the critic from needing to protect the exile, and both the exile and the critic experience powerful healing.
Returning to the Self for Trauma Therapy
Let’s go back to the Self again. This is my favorite part of Internal Family Systems because healing happens when the Self leads, instead of the protectors. But if the Self is different from the parts, what actually is it? In No Bad Parts Dick describes the Self as a spiritual essence that is hard to describe but easy to experience. When you experience the Self, you’ll notice the 8 C’s of Self Energy.
The 8 C’s of Self Energy:
- Calm – steady, grounded, capable
- Curious – open to exploring inner experience without judgment
- Compassionate – caring toward your parts and others
- Clarity – sees situations and parts for what they are
Confidence – trusts in its own ability to lead, and it knows what’s right and wrong in any situation - Courage – willing to face pain and truth
- Creativity – resourceful and open to possibilities
- Connectedness – a sense of belonging to self, others, and the world
Doesn’t your capital-S Self sound amazing? The beautiful reality of the Self is that even if trauma has fragmented your system, the Self is never damaged. The Self is already and always whole. You don’t need to be more calm—a part of you already is calm. You don’t need to be more courageous—a part of you already is courageous. By its nature, the Self is a deep source of healing. Think of it like the sun. Even when storm clouds blacken the sky at mid-day, the sun is there, ready to break through with love and light.
Schwartz writes that “every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.” When you feel angry or afraid of one of your parts, you can know that’s not the Self. That’s how other parts react to each other. But when your Self steps in to listen to all your parts with kindness and curiosity, it creates space for healing the whole internal family system.
The Self listens to your protectors, building trust so they can soften their roles. It connects with exiles, witnesses their pain, and helps them release their burdens. When the Self brings compassion and curiosity to all the parts, it gains their trust so they can soften their roles. Now you might be thinking, “This sounds too good to be true.” But I don’t want you to take my word for it. Try some of the exercises and just experience it for yourself. Here’s what you’ll find:
“Within each of us is a wise, compassionate essence of goodness that knows how to relate harmoniously. In addition, we’re not one messed-up mind, but an internal system of parts. Sure, these parts can sometimes be disruptive or harmful, but once they’re unburdened, they return to their essential good-ness.
I know it sounds like a lot. But making this paradigm shift doesn’t actually require huge sacrifices or suffering. It can be painful to retrieve parts of yourself that you left in the dust, but the effort is more than worth it. Here’s just a taste of what you have to gain: more love for yourself and others, more access to your inner joy and delight (as well as to your rich sadness and grief), and more meaningful habits and activities with a sense of fulfilling vision.” (No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz, p. 68)
Daily IFS Practice from No Bad Parts
So how can we make this something we actually practice?
You can connect with your parts through daily practice. It’s like a meditation, or you can even do it on paper. You spend a few minutes each day checking in with your parts. You practice listening to them, and taking time to touch in with your Self. Be sure to stay curious, calm, compassionate, and courageous. As you practice this, your inner world becomes more harmonious.
It’s easy to see how on a global scale, countries and their leaders react to their inner exiles and protectors with violence, but as we heal our inner worlds, we can also make the world a better place.
When you can turn toward your own exiles with gentleness, you build the muscle to turn toward others with empathy—and that softens relationships, families, even communities. Every step toward Self-leadership sends out ripples of healing. In that sense, cultivating Self isn’t just personal growth—it’s an act of service to the whole world.
I personally found the process of Internal Family Systems to be really powerful in my own life, and I hope you try some of the exercises so that you can experience this inner shift yourself.
Make sure to watch my YouTube channel for the next couple of videos that I put out on the IFS exercises.
Thanks for reading and take care.
