No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz: Summary and Notes
The full book, section by section.
Start hereThe short version
- 1Everyone is multiple. The mind holds parts, exiles that carry old pain and protectors, managers and firefighters, that keep it away, and behind them sits a Self that is never damaged, recognizable by the eight C's such as calm, curiosity and compassion. Part One maps this system in Chapters One to Five.The claim
- 2Healing means unblending from parts, getting to know protectors with curiosity, then retrieving and unburdening the exiles they guard, so parts return to their natural roles and the Self leads. Part Two, Chapters Six to Eight, shows it in action, with live sessions such as Sam's and Ethan and Sarah's.The method
- 3The same model reaches outward. Triggering people become tor-mentors that point to unhealed exiles, two laws of inner physics make any part safe to approach, the body carries what parts hold, and legacy burdens such as racism can be unloaded. That is Part Three, Chapters Nine to Eleven, and the Closing Thoughts.The reach
The summaryForeword and Introduction
The foreword is by the musician Alanis Morissette. She describes flying to Asheville, North Carolina, in a second bout of postpartum depression to work on the roots of her overwork, overgiving and chronic overextension with Brian Robinson, a voice in work addiction recovery. When she asked him what the approach was, he told her it was Internal Family Systems, IFS. She found it kind and all-embracing, and she describes coming to recognize in herself the qualities IFS calls the 8 C's.
In the introduction, Richard Schwartz writes about clients who come to him after a crash, a sudden heart attack, a divorce or the death of a child, when the goals that drove them have lost their meaning. They feel vulnerable and newly open, and he sees the moment as a chance to keep the striving, competitive parts that ran their lives from taking over again. He wrote the book during the COVID-19 pandemic and argues for a new model of the mind as inherently good, with implications that reach from individuals to families and nations. He writes that the pandemic could be a wake-up call if leaders use the painful pause to listen to the suffering of most people, and that what is needed is leadership that steers away from fear and fosters confidence in the inherent goodness and ingenuity of humanity. Leaders cannot do that, he argues, with the current understanding of the mind, because it highlights the darkness in people. He points to neoliberalism, the economic philosophy of Milton Friedman that has dominated many countries, including the U.S., since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, as built on a pessimistic belief about human nature. A paradigm that shows humanity as inherently good and thoroughly interconnected, he says, would let us move from being ego, family and ethnocentric to species, bio and planet-centric. The book is written to be practiced: it alternates chapters with guided exercises and transcripts of real sessions.
"As I write this, we are amid the COVID-19 pandemic."
Part OneInternal Family Systems
Part One lays out the model: the mind is made of parts, the parts take on roles, and behind them sits a Self that cannot be damaged. It pairs each idea with an exercise, starting with Getting to Know a Protector and Mapping Your Parts.
Chapter OneWe're All Multiple
Schwartz says we were all raised in the monomind belief system, the idea that one mind produces our thoughts, emotions and urges. He invites readers to try the paradigm of multiplicity instead: everyone is a multiple personality, and that is a good thing. People diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder have the same parts as everyone else; their systems were blown apart by horrible abuse.
He tells the story that started the method. A client had a part that made her cut her wrists, and Schwartz could not stand for it. He and the client badgered the part for a couple of hours until it agreed to stop, and he left drained but satisfied. Then she came back worse. Schwartz collapsed emotionally and said he gave up, that he could not beat the part. That moved him out of control and into curiosity. He asked the part why it did this to her, and it explained what it was protecting her from. Since then IFS has treated a part's impulse as a trailhead to whatever needs healing.
The chapter also takes aim at willpower and shame. Schwartz writes that the emphasis on willpower and self-control permeates American culture, with roots in the Victorian era's Christian emphasis on resisting evil impulses. If you fear giving a presentation, the willpower approach overrides the fear, argues with it and then criticizes you as a coward, and the fear tends to persist. He adds that politicians and pundits have used the same ethic to justify income disparity, teaching that people are poor because they lack self-control. Because the ethic is internalized early, people learn to shame and manhandle their unruly parts and wrestle them into submission, which only hardens them.
Two exercises follow, read by Schwartz himself. In Getting to Know a Protector, the reader scans body and mind, picks one thought, emotion, sensation or impulse, finds where it lives in or around the body, notices how they feel toward it and asks it what it wants them to know. In Mapping Your Parts, with a pad of paper and a pen, the reader follows one trailhead to a cluster of related parts and draws how they relate to one another.
Parts that are freed from their burdens return to valuable roles, and underneath them every person has a Self, recognizable by qualities Schwartz lists as calm, confidence, clarity, compassion, courage, creativity, curiosity and connectedness: the eight C's.
Chapter One · From control to curiosity
"I give up. I can't beat you at this."
Chapter TwoWhy Parts Blend
A part is blended when it merges its perspective, emotions, beliefs and impulses with the Self, so that for a while you become the fearful young girl or pouting little boy you once were. Protective parts blend because they do not trust the Self to manage. If your father hit you as a child and you could not stop him, your parts lost trust in the Self and decided they had to protect the system themselves. They become parentified inner children carrying a job they are not equipped for. Unblending means asking parts to step back so the Self can be present, and the chapter's exercise, Unblending and Embodying, is one Schwartz says he does in some version most every day. The Self is never damaged, only obscured. Parts often become extreme in their protective efforts and take over by blending; some make you hypervigilant, and some people are blended with certain parts so much of the time that they no longer notice their beliefs are extreme. When parts separate, the Self comes through, and with it a deep sense of connectedness and a desire to connect with the Self of others, which Schwartz says has a spiritual element.
Chapter Two · Blending and unblending
"Why do parts blend? Protective parts blend because they believe they have to manage situations in your life."
Session OneSam
Schwartz teaches every year at Esalen, near Big Sur, California, and its podcast host, Sam Stern, agreed to a live demonstration in his first experience of IFS. Sam finds a tough part that wants a younger part to toughen up and lash out. Behind it is the boy he was when he was bullied in eighth grade, a 13-year-old afraid of being physically beaten. Schwartz guides Sam to ask the protector for space, approach the boy with curiosity and find out what he needs.
Session One · Sam
"I got bullied when I was in eighth grade, and the way I experienced was that it was bad."
Chapter ThreeThis Changes Everything
Schwartz draws a parallel with theology. In Christianity, he writes, sin is anything that disconnects you from God and takes you off your path. Burdens disconnect parts from the Self in the same way and give them extreme impulses. When parts are unburdened they transform and also trust the Self more, which he calls the second goal of IFS. He describes years of IFS trainings at the Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, where every student was an evangelical Christian and where he expected resistance to the claim that people are basically good. The students did argue that people are basically bad, and Schwartz answered by asking whether the Bible does not say that man is created in the image of God. The chapter includes the Dilemma Meditation, which separates the parts on each side of an inner conflict, and an exercise for working with a challenging protector such as an inner critic.
Chapter Three · Burdens disconnect
"In Christianity, the definition of sin is anything that disconnects you from God and takes you off your path."
- You're Already an Impact Business22 to 30
- You're Closer Than You Think14 to 21
- You Have the Foundation7 to 13
- The Starting Line0 to 6
Printable PDF"Schwartz says there are no bad parts, only good parts stuck in bad roles. Your business has parts too, right? Ten questions, a score on four of them and the part to fix first, so you know where to put your attention. It's free with your email. Go find out."
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- A score out of 30
- A four-part breakdown: Impact Clarity, Traction Proof, Model Strength, Founder Credibility
- The part to fix first
- Your tier's next steps
- A printable PDF
Free with your email. Your score and a printable PDF open right on the page.
Chapter FourMore on Systems
Schwartz was steeped in systems thinking when he met his clients' parts, and it let him see patterns instead of chaos. A bulimic client's critic attacked her, which triggered a young part that felt worthless, alone and empty; a binge came to the rescue; and the critic returned to attack her for binging, restarting the cycle. He contrasts IFS with the veneer theory, the view that civilization is a thin layer over primitive, dangerous instincts. He cites the historian Rutger Bregman, who argues that people are basically good and who re-examined famous studies of human cruelty and found enough distortion to discredit them. Schwartz also names four legacy burdens, racism, patriarchy, individualism and materialism, that he says have dominated the country's mindset since the Founders brought them from Europe, combining into a reinforcing feedback loop that leaves people feeling disconnected and on their own in a dog-eat-dog world. Schwartz notes that U.S. incarceration has grown over 500% since 1972, to the point where the U.S. jails almost a quarter of the world's prisoners, and argues that a control-and-contain approach fails inside and out. The chapter ends with a daily IFS meditation for checking in with parts.
Chapter Four · A system, not a symptom
"What if it was true that there are no bad parts, only burdened ones frozen in the past that needed to be unburdened rather than punished?"
Chapter FiveMapping Our Inner Systems
Parts fall into roles. Exiles are the younger parts often called inner children: playful, creative and trusting before they are hurt, and the most sensitive, so they absorb the extreme beliefs and emotions, the burdens, of trauma. They shift from feeling loved to feeling worthless and can pull us back into old scenes. Managers try to prevent that by keeping control. Schwartz calls them parentified inner children who are usually tired and stressed; some never sleep. Firefighters are another class of protectors entirely, and they react when an exile breaks through anyway, using whatever puts out the emotional fire fast, such as binging, drinking or dissociating. Managers and firefighters often fight each other.
Chapter 6 · Exiles, managers, firefighters
"Managers are parentified inner children. They are usually very tired and stressed out."
Session TwoMona
In a consult for another IFS therapist, Schwartz worked with Mona, who had had a psychotic break four years earlier, had been hospitalized, put on antipsychotics and diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and was afraid to explore the parts involved. After a session that went well, a protector backlashed: Mona reported a part that was furious with her and wanted to kill her. Schwartz approached it with curiosity, asked what it feared would happen if it did not hurt her, and found that it did not really want to kill her. It was trying to protect her.
Session Two · Mona
"There's a part that's furious with me and wants to kill me."
Part TwoSelf-Leadership
Part Two turns from mapping parts to what happens when the Self leads: healing, secure attachment inside, and a clearer sense of purpose.
Chapter SixHealing and Transformation
Psychotherapy, Schwartz argues, has made the mistake of assuming that parts are what they seem: a binge impulse, a panic attack, a disease. Like children in alcoholic families thrust into the lost child, hero or scapegoat roles, parts are pushed into roles that have nothing to do with their essence. IFS has four goals: liberate parts from their roles and return them to their natural states, restore trust in the Self, re-harmonize the inner system and become Self-led. His example is Cheryl, who felt terror when her boyfriend proposed even though she loved him. By getting other parts to give space, she got to know the fear and what it carried. The chapter's exercises, The Path and Accessing the Self Through Unblending, help readers feel what Self-energy is like. In The Path, the reader meets their parts at the base of a path, asks them to wait and walks on alone for a while to notice what it feels like to be with less of them. Schwartz is clear that pure Self is rare. Most of the time we are blended to some degree, and IFS talks about starting with a critical mass of Self, enough to get the ball rolling, with more of the eight C's arriving as parts learn they do not have to blend. As evidence that the Self is a real state, Schwartz cites an early MDMA study in which, he writes, the Mithoefers found that 70% of subjects spontaneously began working with their parts in a loving way without any prompting.
Chapter Six · The four goals of IFS
"When you understand that you are not sick or defective and instead see that you merely have a part playing an extreme role, you'll feel relieved and comforted."
The Founder Brain Kit
Chapter SevenThe Self in Action
Schwartz describes IFS as attachment theory taken inside: the client's Self becomes the good attachment figure for insecure or avoidant parts. He was amazed to find that once clients accessed the Self, they spontaneously related to their parts in the loving way attachment textbooks prescribe, even people who never had good parenting themselves. The chapter also warns against reducing a person to a diagnostic category.
Chapter Seven · Attachment taken inside
"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."
Session ThreeEthan and Sarah
Ethan and Sarah Hughes, named with permission, lead in the Living Off the Grid movement, living on a small homestead without electricity, with candles, a wood stove and a root cellar. Schwartz includes the session to show work with social activists and the spiritual side of the Self. Ethan has a part he calls the destroyer of injustice, which attacks anything it sees as supporting white supremacy or classism, including Sarah. The session follows the full sequence: getting to know the protector, retrieving the exile it guards and unburdening it.
Session Three · Ethan and Sarah
"So, Ethan, you've got this destroyer of injustice."
Chapter EightVision and Purpose
As people become more Self-led, their vision for life gets clearer and their priorities often change. While exiles carry heavy burdens, protectors have to be egotistic, hedonistic or dissociative, using achievement, substances, food, shopping, caretaking, money and even meditation to keep pain away. When exiles are unburdened, parts often sense their original purpose. Schwartz borrows Jean Houston's use of Aristotle's term entelechy, the seeded essence that holds the patterns and possibilities of a life, and discusses Maslow, whose early writing he finds too full of striving but whose later study of self-actualizing people found them working on causes that benefited others. The exercises are the Fire Drill and the Sad Person Meditation. In the Fire Drill, the reader pictures someone who triggers them, contained in a room and watched through a window, and notices each part that reacts. The Sad Person Meditation repeats the setup with someone who was deeply upset or crying, so the reader can see which parts close the heart.
Chapter Eight · Keeping the ego afloat
"Your protectors work tirelessly and valiantly to keep pumping air into your ego so it doesn't deflate and sink in the abyss of exiled emotion."
Part ThreeSelf in the Body, Self in the World
Part Three applies the model to the people who trigger us, to the rules that make inner work safe, to the body and to social burdens such as racism.
Chapter NineLife Lessons and Tor-Mentors
We carry legacy burdens from families and cultures plus personal burdens of our own, and the lesson plan begins with unloading them so we can find out who we really are. Schwartz shares his own: for years he functioned well but felt he was fooling people and drove himself to achieve, because a little boy inside him was stuck at the moment his frustrated father yelled that he was good for nothing. The people who trigger us most are tor-mentors. The emotions they stir are trailheads to the exiles that most need healing. The exercises are Advanced Parts Mapping and Working with Triggers. Schwartz illustrates the first with a morning when, absorbed in a presentation, he forgot to join an important call with his five brothers and a lawyer; as the oldest of six, he used the sting as a trailhead. He prefers the image of a garlic bulb to the usual onion: a trigger lights up one clove of the system, which can be worked with directly.
Chapter Nine · One clove of the garlic
"By tormenting you, they mentor you about what you need to heal."
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Chapter TenThe Laws of Inner Physics
Schwartz uses A Beautiful Mind, in which the mathematician John Nash learns to separate from a paranoid part. Mindfulness lets Nash ignore it; IFS would go further and ask what it protects. Two laws make that safe. First, parts can control how much they overwhelm, so asking an exile not to flood you lets you get close without becoming it, which matters for highly traumatized or heavily diagnosed clients. Second, nothing inside has power over you if you are in Self and unafraid of it. The chapter's exercise is Advanced Protector Work. Its motto is that all parts are welcome, even the ones we fear or are ashamed of, and Schwartz writes that he believes no one can grow up in the U.S. or other countries with a long history of racism without carrying that legacy burden.
Chapter Ten · The laws of inner physics
"There's nothing inside of you that has any power if you are in self and not afraid of it."
Session FourAndy
Schwartz believes IFS can help unload inner racism along with the burdens of denial and apathy. On a podcast, the interviewer, Andy, who is white and very involved in anti-racism work, let Schwartz work with his racist parts. Schwartz asks him to find the part that carries racist beliefs in or around his body and to get to know it without shame, so it can let go of the burden it absorbed.
Session Four · Andy
"So Andy, if you're up for it, it'd be great to work with that part of you that's racist."
Chapter ElevenEmbodiment
When parts trust the Self, they make space to live in the body, and exiles no longer need to use the body to get attention. Schwartz has seen clients resolve chronic medical problems by listening to their bodies rather than killing the messenger. He played defense in football despite being small and suffered concussions, and he connects his rage to his father's undiagnosed PTSD from World War II: his father was a captain of a medical unit in Patton's army and rehydrated the survivors of Dachau. Schwartz also describes a study he took part in, published in the Journal of Rheumatology, in which about 36 rheumatoid arthritis patients did six months of IFS and were compared with a group of 40 who received educational classes. He reports a highly significant change in the arthritis as measured by third-party physicians, with some people going into complete remission.
Chapter Eleven · The arthritis study
"My father had undiagnosed PTSD from World War II."
Session FiveTJ
TJ, a medic in her 40s, had suffered debilitating low back pain for about 17 years, since a car wreck while she was pregnant with her second child, and wanted to know whether it was psychological. Schwartz uses the session to show how parts use the body when we do not listen to them. The book closes the chapter with a Body Meditation.
Session Five · TJ
"I don't know if the pain is trying to tell me something."
ClosingClosing Thoughts
Schwartz insists that the inner world is real. Parts are inner beings in inner families, and treating them as sacred makes a person an effective inner leader. Following up with exiles matters; healing is a relationship, more than a one-time release of repressed emotion. Changing society without changing yourself goes awry, as he says tended to happen in the late 1960s, and changing yourself contributes to the world. He quotes a saying that when water buffalo battle in the marsh, it is the frogs who suffer: when one person's protector attacks another, it hurts the other's exiles. Becoming Self-led, he concludes, expands the field of Self on the planet.
"You will expand the field of self on the planet, and that will contribute to healing it."