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NEW-No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
Discover an empowering new way of understanding your multifaceted mind—and healing the many parts that make you who you are.
Is there just one “you”? We’ve been taught to believe we have a single identity, and to feel fear or shame when we can’t control the inner voices that don’t match the ideal of who we think we should be. Yet Dr. Richard Schwartz’s research now challenges this “mono-mind” theory. “All of us are born with many sub-minds—or parts,” says Dr. Schwartz. “These parts are not imaginary or symbolic. They are individuals who exist as an internal family within us—and the key to health and happiness is to honor, understand, and love every part.”
Dr. Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems (IFS) model has been transforming psychology for decades. With No Bad Parts, you’ll learn why IFS has been so effective in areas such as trauma recovery, addiction therapy, and depression treatment—and how this new understanding of consciousness has the potential to radically change our lives. Here you’ll explore:
• The IFS revolution—how honoring and communicating with our parts changes our approach to mental wellness• Overturning the cultural, scientific, and spiritual assumptions that reinforce an outdated mono-mind model
• The ego, the inner critic, the saboteur—making these often-maligned parts into powerful allies
• Burdens—why our parts become distorted and stuck in childhood traumas and cultural beliefs
• How IFS demonstrates human goodness by revealing that there are no bad parts
• The Self—discover your wise, compassionate essence of goodness that is the source of healing and harmony
• Exercises for mapping your parts, accessing the Self, working with a challenging protector, identifying each part’s triggers, and more
IFS is a paradigm-changing model because it gives us a powerful approach for healing ourselves, our culture, and our planet. As Dr. Schwartz teaches, “Our parts can sometimes be disruptive or harmful, but once they’re unburdened, they return to their essential goodness. When we learn to love all our parts, we can learn to love all people—and that will contribute to healing the world.”
216 pages, Paperback
First published July 6, 2021
16326 people are currently reading
85520 people want to read
About the author
Richard C. Schwartz
55 books730 followersRichard Schwartz began his career as a family therapist and an academic. Grounded in systems thinking, Dr. Schwartz developed Internal Family Systems (IFS) in response to clients’ descriptions of various parts within themselves. He focused on the relationships among these parts and noticed that there were systemic patterns to the way they were organized across clients. He also found that when the clients’ parts felt safe and were allowed to relax, the clients would experience spontaneously the qualities of confidence, openness, and compassion that Dr. Schwartz came to call the Self. He found that when in that state of Self, clients would know how to heal their parts.
A featured speaker for national professional organizations, Dr. Schwartz has published many books and over fifty articles about IFS.
A featured speaker for national professional organizations, Dr. Schwartz has published many books and over fifty articles about IFS.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,102 reviews
January 28, 2022
Decided to try this book after hearing it praised by therapists I know, but I found it very off-putting. The author is the person who has developed the Internal Family Systems model, which apparently is widely used and widely thought to be a helpful approach. I don’t doubt those things, but I found this presentation of it to be very odd. The author waxes spiritual and philosophical on almost every page, without really offering any reasons for the claims he is making. It would be one thing to say, hey, if you adopt this perspective and help your clients to adopt this perspective, you’ll and they’ll get positive results. But this book reads more like it was written by a cult leader who is trying to get people to be True Believers in a path to enlightenment that he has “stumbled upon” (a faux humble phrase he uses frequently). The transcripts of interviews that he includes are also quite bizarre, and read more like attempts at literal exorcism than like therapy sessions with real people. I confess also to being skeptical of claims being made about this model by someone who founded a whole institute based on the model.
That said, let me add that a de-mythologized version of this model does seem plausible to me, where the idea is just that we would all do well to see our inner world as involving different parts, like members of a family, who are trying their hardest to protect us from our pain but who sometimes misunderstood who we really are in the process. It wasn’t the basic idea of the model that turned me off, but instead the mystical packaging and the apparent commitment to the components of the model being the literal truth.
That said, let me add that a de-mythologized version of this model does seem plausible to me, where the idea is just that we would all do well to see our inner world as involving different parts, like members of a family, who are trying their hardest to protect us from our pain but who sometimes misunderstood who we really are in the process. It wasn’t the basic idea of the model that turned me off, but instead the mystical packaging and the apparent commitment to the components of the model being the literal truth.
November 28, 2025
!!!!!DAMN I LOVED THIS BOOK!!!!!
My favorite book of 2022 (even though it came out in 2021)
Conventional psychology assumes that normal people are unitary in mind and personality, and deems the presence of “sub personalities” as a pathological outcome of trauma/dissociation.
Author Richard C. Schwartz claims otherwise, asserting that normal healthy human psychology consists of many sub personalities, which he refers to as “parts”.
A phenomena that is readily apparent to anyone who has ever experienced a sense of inner conflict, where “part” of you wanted one thing, and another “part” of you wanted another.
Schwartz asserts that many of the issues contemporary psychology and psychiatry pathologize are in fact, simply the result of Intrapsychic (part v. part) dynamics.
Schwartz posits that we reject certain parts of ourselves, and that we employ other protector parts to keep the unwanted parts in “exile”.
Schwartz contends that this sort of intra-psychic conflict engenders suffering, ties up valuable creative energy, and can keep us trapped in repetitive self-destructive cycles.
Schwartz developed Internal Family Systems (IFS) as a therapeutic model to encounter these parts as distinct inner beings, and to resolve these types of inner conflict, much the same way therapists do in family therapy.
If this sounds whack as fuck.
I’m with you 100%
In fact.
I initially dismissed IFS due to similar misgivings.
However.
My skepticism gave way when I gave it a try.
IFS is experiential.
And you really need to experience it to understand how powerful and direct it is.
This book is minimal on theory and heavy on exercises. If you try them, in good faith, you may be astounded at what you learn about yourself.
After working through the exercises in No Bad Parts, I discovered things about myself that I simply had never known, let alone understood.
In fact, I’m reeling from how utterly profound and liberating my experiences in IFS have been.
This is great stuff.
I am completely uncertain about the quality of this review.
Words fail.
But I hope you do yourself a favor:
Get No Bad Parts and do IFS.
I honestly can’t recommend it enough.
My favorite book of 2022 (even though it came out in 2021)
Conventional psychology assumes that normal people are unitary in mind and personality, and deems the presence of “sub personalities” as a pathological outcome of trauma/dissociation.
Author Richard C. Schwartz claims otherwise, asserting that normal healthy human psychology consists of many sub personalities, which he refers to as “parts”.
A phenomena that is readily apparent to anyone who has ever experienced a sense of inner conflict, where “part” of you wanted one thing, and another “part” of you wanted another.
Schwartz asserts that many of the issues contemporary psychology and psychiatry pathologize are in fact, simply the result of Intrapsychic (part v. part) dynamics.
Schwartz posits that we reject certain parts of ourselves, and that we employ other protector parts to keep the unwanted parts in “exile”.
Schwartz contends that this sort of intra-psychic conflict engenders suffering, ties up valuable creative energy, and can keep us trapped in repetitive self-destructive cycles.
Schwartz developed Internal Family Systems (IFS) as a therapeutic model to encounter these parts as distinct inner beings, and to resolve these types of inner conflict, much the same way therapists do in family therapy.
If this sounds whack as fuck.
I’m with you 100%
In fact.
I initially dismissed IFS due to similar misgivings.
However.
My skepticism gave way when I gave it a try.
IFS is experiential.
And you really need to experience it to understand how powerful and direct it is.
This book is minimal on theory and heavy on exercises. If you try them, in good faith, you may be astounded at what you learn about yourself.
After working through the exercises in No Bad Parts, I discovered things about myself that I simply had never known, let alone understood.
In fact, I’m reeling from how utterly profound and liberating my experiences in IFS have been.
This is great stuff.
I am completely uncertain about the quality of this review.
Words fail.
But I hope you do yourself a favor:
Get No Bad Parts and do IFS.
I honestly can’t recommend it enough.
August 26, 2021
I liked this book’s compassionate approach to addressing our trauma and how we cope with it! In No Bad Parts, Richard Schwartz describes his psychotherapy Internal Family Systems, which centers on how we have different parts within ourselves that take on different roles in response to trauma we may have suffered in our childhoods. For example, we may have Exiles, which represent the psychological trauma itself and embody the pain and fear from our negative early experiences, as well as Firefighters, which symbolize coping mechanisms (e.g., binge eating, substance use) that try to mitigate the suffering elicited by Exiles. Schwartz writes about how we can view each part with kindness to work toward leading our lives with the Self, the wise and compassionate essence of ourselves.
Overall, I found Schwartz a personable and genuine writer and his approach to therapy a kind and affirming one. I appreciated the thoroughness in which he infused this book with self-kindness, like recognizing the importance of not stigmatizing how we cope with suffering so we can then cope in ways that feel even better for our psyches. He does a nice job too of touching on how social injustices (e.g., racism, patriarchy) contribute to psychological suffering, and he also gives credit to Buddhism for heavily influencing mindfulness. When he wrote about how bullying can manifest in leftist/social justice spaces because of people’s unresolved or unaddressed issues, I was just like, yep exactly glad someone named this dynamic!
I did want a bit more differentiation between internal family systems and other therapeutic approaches. In some ways I struggled to distinguish this approach from psychodynamic therapy generally – perhaps this approach is psychodynamic therapy with more specific names for certain phenomena (i.e., a clearer labeling of parts)? The notion of Firefighters reminded me a lot of emotion dysregulation concepts too. Finally, while I appreciated Schwartz naming the importance of addressing our own oppressive feelings and thoughts (e.g., racist beliefs we hold, sexist beliefs we hold, etc.) I do think a little more elaboration about the next step to address those feelings and thoughts would have elevated that section even more.
Overall, I found Schwartz a personable and genuine writer and his approach to therapy a kind and affirming one. I appreciated the thoroughness in which he infused this book with self-kindness, like recognizing the importance of not stigmatizing how we cope with suffering so we can then cope in ways that feel even better for our psyches. He does a nice job too of touching on how social injustices (e.g., racism, patriarchy) contribute to psychological suffering, and he also gives credit to Buddhism for heavily influencing mindfulness. When he wrote about how bullying can manifest in leftist/social justice spaces because of people’s unresolved or unaddressed issues, I was just like, yep exactly glad someone named this dynamic!
I did want a bit more differentiation between internal family systems and other therapeutic approaches. In some ways I struggled to distinguish this approach from psychodynamic therapy generally – perhaps this approach is psychodynamic therapy with more specific names for certain phenomena (i.e., a clearer labeling of parts)? The notion of Firefighters reminded me a lot of emotion dysregulation concepts too. Finally, while I appreciated Schwartz naming the importance of addressing our own oppressive feelings and thoughts (e.g., racist beliefs we hold, sexist beliefs we hold, etc.) I do think a little more elaboration about the next step to address those feelings and thoughts would have elevated that section even more.
August 28, 2021
As a patient, I've always felt something was missing in more traditional therapeutic modalities (i.e. CBT, DBT) and I picked up this book because IFS appeared to be an intriguing answer to my dilemma. While I doubt any of my past therapists would ever intend to shun, look down on, or demonize any part of me, even the most compassionate, open-minded, and accepting therapists have managed to ascribe to black and white or good vs. bad thinking in one way or another. I don't blame them for this - we live in a world centred in this mindset so it's only natural that it would show up in therapy as well. Under this dogma, I've always been conflicted as to how I can fully accept myself while also working to be better; self-acceptance and self-improvement have often felt paradoxical to me, so I've always erred on the side of looking down on my own flaws and mistakes thinking this was necessary to grow.
Schwartz offers an alternative perspective in which we exist as both an inherently-good, pure Self and a mosaic of "parts", each of which takes on a unique role in protecting us in response to our experiences. Under this model, individuals are encouraged to approach each part with curiosity rather than judgement. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but essentially IFS therapy is aimed at first recognizing and becoming familiar with these parts, then listening to the messages they're trying to send to our Self from a place of neutrality. Once this happens, parts begin to better trust the Self to rule us and can eventually be "unburdened" from the often destructive roles they've been forced to take on. The goal is never to eliminate these parts but to have them take on a less extreme, dominant role in our lives so we can put our Self back in the driver's seat. I was admittedly skeptical of this seemingly out-there concept at first but as Schwartz beautifully demonstrates, it is grounded in plenty of sound logic and clinical evidence. It's often said that working against our most intense thoughts, feelings, or beliefs only gives them more power, and IFS shows us how to put this principle into practice.
What's most striking to me about IFS is how consistently and universally rooted it is in self-compassion - there is no space to view oneself as "bad" which makes it revolutionary in its potential to treat the most stigmatized, exiled individuals in society. Under this paradigm, every single person is seen as inherently good (yes, even Donald Trump or Adolph Hitler) - those who cause the most destruction can be thought of as being ruled by their most destructive parts. Schwartz manages to convey this without ever condoning acts of violence or destruction; reaching the most peaceful, harmonious world possible is one of the explicit goals of this model. He offers that this can only be possible if we acknowledge the positive potential of every human being with no exceptions. Because of this, IFS is fully compatible with abolitionist principles which can't be said for most therapeutic schools I've come across so far. I'm curious to learn more about IFS' potential to rehabilitate incarcerated individuals - I wouldn't be surprised if it's found to be one of the more effective treatments.
I was happy to see Schwartz address the potential of psychedelic therapies to heal trauma alongside IFS. From the beginning of the book, I noticed how several positive outcomes of IFS and re-connecting to the Self including acceptance, wholeness, connectedness, compassion, and a sense of spiritual clarity to name a few mirror the experiences of taking psychedelic substances. I hope both of these less pervasive models go on to be studied more extensively so their full potential to heal people can be unlocked.
As Schwartz clearly states, much of the work described in this book should only take place with the help of a professional trained in IFS (in fact it's very difficult to enact most aspects independently). That being said, the overarching principles outlined in this book alone have already transformed the way I view myself and others for the better. I feel better equipped to be kind to myself and others while protecting and living in alignment with my core self. It is incredibly freeing to realize it's not only possible to heal and evolve without viewing any part of ourselves negatively, but that this outlook may actually be the key to doing so effectively.
Schwartz offers an alternative perspective in which we exist as both an inherently-good, pure Self and a mosaic of "parts", each of which takes on a unique role in protecting us in response to our experiences. Under this model, individuals are encouraged to approach each part with curiosity rather than judgement. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but essentially IFS therapy is aimed at first recognizing and becoming familiar with these parts, then listening to the messages they're trying to send to our Self from a place of neutrality. Once this happens, parts begin to better trust the Self to rule us and can eventually be "unburdened" from the often destructive roles they've been forced to take on. The goal is never to eliminate these parts but to have them take on a less extreme, dominant role in our lives so we can put our Self back in the driver's seat. I was admittedly skeptical of this seemingly out-there concept at first but as Schwartz beautifully demonstrates, it is grounded in plenty of sound logic and clinical evidence. It's often said that working against our most intense thoughts, feelings, or beliefs only gives them more power, and IFS shows us how to put this principle into practice.
What's most striking to me about IFS is how consistently and universally rooted it is in self-compassion - there is no space to view oneself as "bad" which makes it revolutionary in its potential to treat the most stigmatized, exiled individuals in society. Under this paradigm, every single person is seen as inherently good (yes, even Donald Trump or Adolph Hitler) - those who cause the most destruction can be thought of as being ruled by their most destructive parts. Schwartz manages to convey this without ever condoning acts of violence or destruction; reaching the most peaceful, harmonious world possible is one of the explicit goals of this model. He offers that this can only be possible if we acknowledge the positive potential of every human being with no exceptions. Because of this, IFS is fully compatible with abolitionist principles which can't be said for most therapeutic schools I've come across so far. I'm curious to learn more about IFS' potential to rehabilitate incarcerated individuals - I wouldn't be surprised if it's found to be one of the more effective treatments.
I was happy to see Schwartz address the potential of psychedelic therapies to heal trauma alongside IFS. From the beginning of the book, I noticed how several positive outcomes of IFS and re-connecting to the Self including acceptance, wholeness, connectedness, compassion, and a sense of spiritual clarity to name a few mirror the experiences of taking psychedelic substances. I hope both of these less pervasive models go on to be studied more extensively so their full potential to heal people can be unlocked.
As Schwartz clearly states, much of the work described in this book should only take place with the help of a professional trained in IFS (in fact it's very difficult to enact most aspects independently). That being said, the overarching principles outlined in this book alone have already transformed the way I view myself and others for the better. I feel better equipped to be kind to myself and others while protecting and living in alignment with my core self. It is incredibly freeing to realize it's not only possible to heal and evolve without viewing any part of ourselves negatively, but that this outlook may actually be the key to doing so effectively.
February 11, 2024
The theory behind Richard Schwartz' therapy modality (though one could argue it's much more than that--philosophy, life practice?) is that none of us have a single mind, but that we are fragmented into what he simply calls 'parts'. He views those parts as individuals with their own needs and agendas, all of them well intentioned but, depending on their respective strategies, more or less destructive.
Part of me was like: No way, that's whack. Another part was quite intrigued by this idea.
I'm sure we all know the struggle of one part of us really wanting that piece of cake / episode of trash tv / person covered in red flags, while another part screams at us not to do the thing.
Seeing these conflicting wants and needs as belonging to different parts within us explains this phenomenon--it's like our heads are companies run by people doing their best but neither communicating nor coordinating their tasks.
This is where Self comes in. According to Schwartz, we all have a core that cannot be damaged and is a pro at helping the parts stuck in trauma and mediating conflicts.
I'm still not sure if I completely buy the multimind theory (Schwartz would say that's my sceptical part speaking, which makes it REALLY hard to argue with the guy), but I did the exercises and found them surprisingly powerful and profound.
Recommended for anyone who wants to work on themselves and isn't afraid to try something that would send Freud running, superego in tow.
Part of me was like: No way, that's whack. Another part was quite intrigued by this idea.
I'm sure we all know the struggle of one part of us really wanting that piece of cake / episode of trash tv / person covered in red flags, while another part screams at us not to do the thing.
Seeing these conflicting wants and needs as belonging to different parts within us explains this phenomenon--it's like our heads are companies run by people doing their best but neither communicating nor coordinating their tasks.
This is where Self comes in. According to Schwartz, we all have a core that cannot be damaged and is a pro at helping the parts stuck in trauma and mediating conflicts.
I'm still not sure if I completely buy the multimind theory (Schwartz would say that's my sceptical part speaking, which makes it REALLY hard to argue with the guy), but I did the exercises and found them surprisingly powerful and profound.
Recommended for anyone who wants to work on themselves and isn't afraid to try something that would send Freud running, superego in tow.
June 6, 2023
my therapist recommended that i read this and. it really fucking sucked.
disclaimer!! i know that this type of therapy can be really helpful to a lot of people. it's not helpful for me. i'm mostly writing this review to organize my thoughts so i can bring them to my therapist and explain why i need a different type of therapy so leave me alone ok
reasons it sucked for me personally:
1. i don't really agree with the basic tenants of the system. essentially IFS is like. there is a One True Self and then there are Parts and each part has emotions/personality/experiences that prevent you from just being your True Self all the time. basically its like if dissociative identity disorder was applied as a cognitive system to everyone, and each separate personality serves a different role and a lot of them are rooted in trauma and don't actually help you in the way they are trying to. i just don't know if i believe in a True Self, and i also can't really buy the idea of visualizing each part of me as a separate personality.
2. IF there is a true self, the author argues that each person's Self is essentially the same and names 8 C words (compassion, calm, clarity, i forget the rest) and 4 P words (patience, ???) that define everyone's unchanging self. that just makes no sense to me. like where is the room for personality? can't our true selves contain complex positive and negative emotions? the goal of this type of therapy is to try and connect with the true self as much as possible, but i don't want that? the notion of a true, calm and happy self sounds so BORING and passive and completely unappealing
3. the author makes a lot of assumptions about how the reader feels and about when trauma occurred. pretty much all trauma happened when we were young children and everything is about healing these multiple inner children. but it fails to account for the fact that maybe the trauma is ongoing? or happened 2 years ago? and isn't necessarily related to when we were young. a lot of the time he also tells us how we feel or how we will react in various exercises (i.e. you want to get angry and yell at a person who hurt you, when maybe actually i want to run away?) and it makes them hard to follow along with. he also makes it seem like all of this is really easy to do and that it comes naturally if we try hard enough because it is innate in humans, when hey it's hard for me and it makes me feel inadequate when i fail to follow his exercises. the transcripts are also wild like sorry but who can hear other voices in their heads besides their own?? and imagine all these things so easily? not me that's for sure
4. he doesn't even seem particularly good at his own methods. every transcript repeats the same formula even though the issues people are dealing with are wildly different. i could buy that, except that he describes how a patient became severely suicidal as a result of this method, and another committed major self harm after a session.
5. personally, this whole book was really distressing to me and i kept crying while reading it because a lot of the logic and concepts were essentially repackaged versions of my mother's spiritual beliefs and it really freaked me out to be exposed to that unknowingly. (i.e. "self energy" and "embodying a flow state with the Big Self" is just "positive vibrational frequencies" and "ascending to a higher dimension") a lot of this stuff isn't inherently harmful, but has been used to justify a lot of hurt against me in the past, so that's the perspective i'm coming from and it doesn't make IFS more appealing.
6. given that, the terms used throughout this book make things very confusing, to the extent that it seems gimicky, and honestly cult-ish. the author refers to himself as the "leader" with followers (more on that later), and this seems less like an holistic form of psychotherapy and more like a pseudospiritual set of beliefs that are quite rigid, based loosely on science, and require financial contribution to be fully part of the insular community (training in IFS costs $4000, and the author says that to fully heal you must work with someone who has been trained by him). he also mentions how you will change personalities as you go through this system and that you should cut off people who are resistant to that change (hello scientology?).
7. it also makes big claims without any backing in science. the author talks about how if you don't fully believe in the system, it won't work for you. which clearly shows how little it is based in objective fact and is way more of a belief system than anything else. like regardless of if i believe antibiotics will cure an infection, they will still work. i know the mind is less straightforward than that, but i still prefer methods that work regardless of belief in the process. he also mentions studies done that support his process, but they are done by people who he trained in the process, so bias makes these studies effectively null. the claims he makes are WILD like. he claims that through this process your thoughts can cure chronic pain and implies that if you practice enough, God will talk directly to you and give you guidance. hello????
8. there's a complete disregard of diagnoses and conventional psychotherapy. he says that getting diagnosed with a disorder makes people feel broken and isn't useful, which is not at all how i feel about it. he essentially argues that medication for mental health is necessary sometimes, but mostly blocks you from connecting to your Self and prevents you from fully healing. it's just so callous and it seems like every other type of therapy is cast aside because this is the Only Way to truly heal. sorry but antidepressants have helped me more than anything and to suggest that i should replace them with meditation is awfully limiting and unhelpful.
9. in the same breath, he also tells us that we should do ketamine and mdma because they bring us closer to our True Selves. he also says that this system is good for drug addicts. make it make sense!!!!!
10. there's this whole section about how if we can know all of our parts and the functions of them, we can develop greater empathy for people who are racist, sexist, homophobic, have murdered people, etc etc because we can see these things that they have done to harm others as harmful protective parts of themselves, and not actually their True Selves. he uses Trump as an example of this. i just think it's quite a privileged stance to take, as the author is a white straight man, to say that healing ourselves lends itself to forgiving the people and systems that have abused minorities. it's just insufficient and insulting. we do not owe racists any empathy or understanding!!!
11. even though the author seems relatively center or left politically, there are some parts that are huge red flags like. saying that the pandemic is a good thing because it will make us more aware of ourselves and such, plus the trump empathy thing. he also claims that being in Flow with your True Self will make you realize that the world is perfect as it is, which just encourages the new age conservative complacency that is sooooo fucking annoying. truly no one discusses the self-help/new age to alt right conspiracy theorist pipeline but it's sooooo real.
12. i really hate the parts of this system that take systemic issues and individualize them in a way that is so narcissistic. like okay. there's a whole section about confronting "racist parts" with a transcript from a session where, as always, the root of the part becomes about individual childhood trauma. like it's actually shocking to read about this white guy trying to uncover the reasons behind his racism and the author basically is like. it's because you made a mistake as a child and adults reacted poorly to you. i don't want to speak for people of colour; i just think that this was so out of pocket and actually, literally wrong. this happens with a lot of situations too like it's all about thinking only about yourself, literally trying to reach your True Self, and thinking that everything is a part of Self. as if we cannot have empathy for people if we don't see them as part of ourselves; as if there aren't cultural and generational traumas that don't necessarily relate back to one specific event in our childhoods. nope. in this system, everything relates back to me me me!
13. as such, i think that this system would be really attractive to narcissists (my mom follows so many similar belief systems and uh. no comment on her behaviour/personality). not to say that everyone who follows it is a narcissist, just that the obsessive categorization and investigation of the Self in a way that lowkey excuses/forgives poor behaviours towards others, explains all actions as done in the interest of the Self, and the lofty, unattainable promises of God and Life After Death (literally the author says that this system is good for clinically depressed people and people near the end of their lives), and the claim that IFS will Cure Every Problem In The Entire World, seems to jive with narcissism really well. and it doesn't help that the author admits he is narcissistic in the book.
14. the book is just also structured so poorly from a literary perspective like he asks us to connect to our true selves without first explaining what that is or how to identify feeling in your true self. and there are a ton of other examples of this that just make it a hard introduction to the topic and overall a weak, unsatisfying book.
ummmm yeah. just my thoughts ok bye
disclaimer!! i know that this type of therapy can be really helpful to a lot of people. it's not helpful for me. i'm mostly writing this review to organize my thoughts so i can bring them to my therapist and explain why i need a different type of therapy so leave me alone ok
reasons it sucked for me personally:
1. i don't really agree with the basic tenants of the system. essentially IFS is like. there is a One True Self and then there are Parts and each part has emotions/personality/experiences that prevent you from just being your True Self all the time. basically its like if dissociative identity disorder was applied as a cognitive system to everyone, and each separate personality serves a different role and a lot of them are rooted in trauma and don't actually help you in the way they are trying to. i just don't know if i believe in a True Self, and i also can't really buy the idea of visualizing each part of me as a separate personality.
2. IF there is a true self, the author argues that each person's Self is essentially the same and names 8 C words (compassion, calm, clarity, i forget the rest) and 4 P words (patience, ???) that define everyone's unchanging self. that just makes no sense to me. like where is the room for personality? can't our true selves contain complex positive and negative emotions? the goal of this type of therapy is to try and connect with the true self as much as possible, but i don't want that? the notion of a true, calm and happy self sounds so BORING and passive and completely unappealing
3. the author makes a lot of assumptions about how the reader feels and about when trauma occurred. pretty much all trauma happened when we were young children and everything is about healing these multiple inner children. but it fails to account for the fact that maybe the trauma is ongoing? or happened 2 years ago? and isn't necessarily related to when we were young. a lot of the time he also tells us how we feel or how we will react in various exercises (i.e. you want to get angry and yell at a person who hurt you, when maybe actually i want to run away?) and it makes them hard to follow along with. he also makes it seem like all of this is really easy to do and that it comes naturally if we try hard enough because it is innate in humans, when hey it's hard for me and it makes me feel inadequate when i fail to follow his exercises. the transcripts are also wild like sorry but who can hear other voices in their heads besides their own?? and imagine all these things so easily? not me that's for sure
4. he doesn't even seem particularly good at his own methods. every transcript repeats the same formula even though the issues people are dealing with are wildly different. i could buy that, except that he describes how a patient became severely suicidal as a result of this method, and another committed major self harm after a session.
5. personally, this whole book was really distressing to me and i kept crying while reading it because a lot of the logic and concepts were essentially repackaged versions of my mother's spiritual beliefs and it really freaked me out to be exposed to that unknowingly. (i.e. "self energy" and "embodying a flow state with the Big Self" is just "positive vibrational frequencies" and "ascending to a higher dimension") a lot of this stuff isn't inherently harmful, but has been used to justify a lot of hurt against me in the past, so that's the perspective i'm coming from and it doesn't make IFS more appealing.
6. given that, the terms used throughout this book make things very confusing, to the extent that it seems gimicky, and honestly cult-ish. the author refers to himself as the "leader" with followers (more on that later), and this seems less like an holistic form of psychotherapy and more like a pseudospiritual set of beliefs that are quite rigid, based loosely on science, and require financial contribution to be fully part of the insular community (training in IFS costs $4000, and the author says that to fully heal you must work with someone who has been trained by him). he also mentions how you will change personalities as you go through this system and that you should cut off people who are resistant to that change (hello scientology?).
7. it also makes big claims without any backing in science. the author talks about how if you don't fully believe in the system, it won't work for you. which clearly shows how little it is based in objective fact and is way more of a belief system than anything else. like regardless of if i believe antibiotics will cure an infection, they will still work. i know the mind is less straightforward than that, but i still prefer methods that work regardless of belief in the process. he also mentions studies done that support his process, but they are done by people who he trained in the process, so bias makes these studies effectively null. the claims he makes are WILD like. he claims that through this process your thoughts can cure chronic pain and implies that if you practice enough, God will talk directly to you and give you guidance. hello????
8. there's a complete disregard of diagnoses and conventional psychotherapy. he says that getting diagnosed with a disorder makes people feel broken and isn't useful, which is not at all how i feel about it. he essentially argues that medication for mental health is necessary sometimes, but mostly blocks you from connecting to your Self and prevents you from fully healing. it's just so callous and it seems like every other type of therapy is cast aside because this is the Only Way to truly heal. sorry but antidepressants have helped me more than anything and to suggest that i should replace them with meditation is awfully limiting and unhelpful.
9. in the same breath, he also tells us that we should do ketamine and mdma because they bring us closer to our True Selves. he also says that this system is good for drug addicts. make it make sense!!!!!
10. there's this whole section about how if we can know all of our parts and the functions of them, we can develop greater empathy for people who are racist, sexist, homophobic, have murdered people, etc etc because we can see these things that they have done to harm others as harmful protective parts of themselves, and not actually their True Selves. he uses Trump as an example of this. i just think it's quite a privileged stance to take, as the author is a white straight man, to say that healing ourselves lends itself to forgiving the people and systems that have abused minorities. it's just insufficient and insulting. we do not owe racists any empathy or understanding!!!
11. even though the author seems relatively center or left politically, there are some parts that are huge red flags like. saying that the pandemic is a good thing because it will make us more aware of ourselves and such, plus the trump empathy thing. he also claims that being in Flow with your True Self will make you realize that the world is perfect as it is, which just encourages the new age conservative complacency that is sooooo fucking annoying. truly no one discusses the self-help/new age to alt right conspiracy theorist pipeline but it's sooooo real.
12. i really hate the parts of this system that take systemic issues and individualize them in a way that is so narcissistic. like okay. there's a whole section about confronting "racist parts" with a transcript from a session where, as always, the root of the part becomes about individual childhood trauma. like it's actually shocking to read about this white guy trying to uncover the reasons behind his racism and the author basically is like. it's because you made a mistake as a child and adults reacted poorly to you. i don't want to speak for people of colour; i just think that this was so out of pocket and actually, literally wrong. this happens with a lot of situations too like it's all about thinking only about yourself, literally trying to reach your True Self, and thinking that everything is a part of Self. as if we cannot have empathy for people if we don't see them as part of ourselves; as if there aren't cultural and generational traumas that don't necessarily relate back to one specific event in our childhoods. nope. in this system, everything relates back to me me me!
13. as such, i think that this system would be really attractive to narcissists (my mom follows so many similar belief systems and uh. no comment on her behaviour/personality). not to say that everyone who follows it is a narcissist, just that the obsessive categorization and investigation of the Self in a way that lowkey excuses/forgives poor behaviours towards others, explains all actions as done in the interest of the Self, and the lofty, unattainable promises of God and Life After Death (literally the author says that this system is good for clinically depressed people and people near the end of their lives), and the claim that IFS will Cure Every Problem In The Entire World, seems to jive with narcissism really well. and it doesn't help that the author admits he is narcissistic in the book.
14. the book is just also structured so poorly from a literary perspective like he asks us to connect to our true selves without first explaining what that is or how to identify feeling in your true self. and there are a ton of other examples of this that just make it a hard introduction to the topic and overall a weak, unsatisfying book.
ummmm yeah. just my thoughts ok bye
December 24, 2021
This is a mess. I was excited to see something new from the founder of Internal Family Systems therapy, but I can't imagine that anyone unfamiliar with IFS would come away from this book with an understanding of it. Terminology is used prior to being defined. Exercises are given to the reader, and only later is the caveat made that certain things shouldn't be done solo, but only with a therapist. An editor was desperately needed to impose some kind of order, some structure, some coherence, onto the author's rambling flow of thoughts. That didn't happen, and the result is a book I can't recommend.
There's an Introduction to the Internal Family Systems Model, also by Schwartz, that may or may not be more useful; with a $35 price tag (for a 20-year old book), it's hardly appropriate as an "introduction" for the average reader, and I haven't read it myself. His first book, Internal Family Systems Therapy, was my introduction to IFS, but having read it 15 or more years ago, I can't vouch for its accessibility either. Surely somewhere in the world is an ideal intro text, but what it is I do not know.
Three stars is being unreasonably generous, more a nod to the value of the IFS model than a rating of the book itself.
There's an Introduction to the Internal Family Systems Model, also by Schwartz, that may or may not be more useful; with a $35 price tag (for a 20-year old book), it's hardly appropriate as an "introduction" for the average reader, and I haven't read it myself. His first book, Internal Family Systems Therapy, was my introduction to IFS, but having read it 15 or more years ago, I can't vouch for its accessibility either. Surely somewhere in the world is an ideal intro text, but what it is I do not know.
Three stars is being unreasonably generous, more a nod to the value of the IFS model than a rating of the book itself.
August 16, 2022
I like the concepts but hate this writer.
I’m coming to an increasing level of conviction that most psychologist are egomaniacs. This guy is for sure. Jung and Freud definitely. But I was holding out that like the midtier dudes would be all right. No. This book literally starts with Dr. Schwartz saying “I’ve helped a lot of people with this and you should adopt it to every point of your life like a religion.“
Sorry bud no can-do. I’ve decided that Adam Neuman is the only charismatic cult leader that I’m willing to follow. We’ve got another round of raising money from venture capitalists booked solid for the next 18 months. Schedule is full.
Seriously though what’s with all of these self-help gurus that try to cultivate this whole ecosystem around like three good ideas they have. Marie Kondo is trying to be a brand, her whole thing is just to throw out a bunch of your shit if it doesn’t make you happy. Brene Brown has a whole career around just convincing you that you’re OK no matter what’s going on. “just run over a small family in your mini van? That’s fine just have more compassion for yourself and be vulnerable about the pain you feel.”
This guy seems to think that his pet philosophy can apply to every worldly malady, from Covid to prison reform. I think the Delta between his ideas in the real world is just too large to have any sort of reasonable intermingling. Yet he throws out these claims like “if we just had more compassion in the criminal justice system we would have a lower recidivism rate“ Sure dude. And I can make unfounded claims and talk about how we should have a kinder softer system but that’s a far shake from any sort of actual reform. If you don’t realize the deep systematic reasons for these issues. Your pet philosophy isn’t going to be the answer. It’s reminiscent of the bozos who say “oh capitalism is the problem“ as if that’s some sort of a helpful contribution to any sort of conversation. Sure dude let’s just throw out all of the structures that bring us everything.
Realistically the dialogue in my head during the vast majority of this book was “okay interesting, interesting…. Really? God damn it. What the fuck?” The psychology of IFS is a really interesting template. I want good information about it but the claims this guy makes, beyond the narrow application of healing from trauma, I think is complete bullshit. That is to say that as a concept it’s helpful, but this guy shouldn’t be the one propelling it forward into the world. I don’t need to hear about how trauma healing is going to solve world hunger. Supply chains, agriculture, improve nutrition, better GMO‘s. Those are the things that are going to solve those problems. It’s like a child hearing about the Cold War and saying “I wish they would just get along“
I consistently had to check when this book was written because it does not seem like a book that was written in 2021, it seems like a book that was written in the 70s about how vague global consciousness can be elevated if only you clear out your chakras. Come to this guys commune and you will see the truth.
I say this with a level of sadness, IFS has been pretty helpful in my own trauma healing journey. I’ve had some really moving meditations around comforting my inner child. I felt a lot of healing around having compassion for personality traits that don’t serve me beyond the shitty situations they helped me get through. I should be an easy mark for Dr. Schwartzes parasitic mind viruses.
But this book really doesn’t do it for me. There’s a lot of hype. A lot of “I’ve helped so many people“ but then when it gets down into the weeds there’s like three good ideas. This book should’ve been a blog post or a laminated pamphlet.
If you’re reading this and curious about these concepts. Please feel free to let me know where I can read better information on this.
I’m coming to an increasing level of conviction that most psychologist are egomaniacs. This guy is for sure. Jung and Freud definitely. But I was holding out that like the midtier dudes would be all right. No. This book literally starts with Dr. Schwartz saying “I’ve helped a lot of people with this and you should adopt it to every point of your life like a religion.“
Sorry bud no can-do. I’ve decided that Adam Neuman is the only charismatic cult leader that I’m willing to follow. We’ve got another round of raising money from venture capitalists booked solid for the next 18 months. Schedule is full.
Seriously though what’s with all of these self-help gurus that try to cultivate this whole ecosystem around like three good ideas they have. Marie Kondo is trying to be a brand, her whole thing is just to throw out a bunch of your shit if it doesn’t make you happy. Brene Brown has a whole career around just convincing you that you’re OK no matter what’s going on. “just run over a small family in your mini van? That’s fine just have more compassion for yourself and be vulnerable about the pain you feel.”
This guy seems to think that his pet philosophy can apply to every worldly malady, from Covid to prison reform. I think the Delta between his ideas in the real world is just too large to have any sort of reasonable intermingling. Yet he throws out these claims like “if we just had more compassion in the criminal justice system we would have a lower recidivism rate“ Sure dude. And I can make unfounded claims and talk about how we should have a kinder softer system but that’s a far shake from any sort of actual reform. If you don’t realize the deep systematic reasons for these issues. Your pet philosophy isn’t going to be the answer. It’s reminiscent of the bozos who say “oh capitalism is the problem“ as if that’s some sort of a helpful contribution to any sort of conversation. Sure dude let’s just throw out all of the structures that bring us everything.
Realistically the dialogue in my head during the vast majority of this book was “okay interesting, interesting…. Really? God damn it. What the fuck?” The psychology of IFS is a really interesting template. I want good information about it but the claims this guy makes, beyond the narrow application of healing from trauma, I think is complete bullshit. That is to say that as a concept it’s helpful, but this guy shouldn’t be the one propelling it forward into the world. I don’t need to hear about how trauma healing is going to solve world hunger. Supply chains, agriculture, improve nutrition, better GMO‘s. Those are the things that are going to solve those problems. It’s like a child hearing about the Cold War and saying “I wish they would just get along“
I consistently had to check when this book was written because it does not seem like a book that was written in 2021, it seems like a book that was written in the 70s about how vague global consciousness can be elevated if only you clear out your chakras. Come to this guys commune and you will see the truth.
I say this with a level of sadness, IFS has been pretty helpful in my own trauma healing journey. I’ve had some really moving meditations around comforting my inner child. I felt a lot of healing around having compassion for personality traits that don’t serve me beyond the shitty situations they helped me get through. I should be an easy mark for Dr. Schwartzes parasitic mind viruses.
But this book really doesn’t do it for me. There’s a lot of hype. A lot of “I’ve helped so many people“ but then when it gets down into the weeds there’s like three good ideas. This book should’ve been a blog post or a laminated pamphlet.
If you’re reading this and curious about these concepts. Please feel free to let me know where I can read better information on this.
June 7, 2022
Definitely some bad parts.
August 13, 2021
I was super excited to read this book as I learned about IFS from my favorite teacher from grad school, who specializes in addiction and has actually done many trainings with Dick himself. I use it in practice often. Sadly I was not impressed with this book. I found myself having to force myself to finish it.
As a psychotherapist and science believer, the spiritual aspect of this book made things iffy for me. I commend Dick for even acknowledging this in his book. The IFS information and education I have been part of was not linked to spirituality like this book spoke about. To each there own on this, I just was hoping for way more psychoeducation and less spiritual insight.
IFS is about learning how the different parts interact within us and the roles they take on. Managers, firefighters, and exiles.
There are good exercises through the book that can be practiced, but I wish there was more information on how to get someone to talk to parts and what to do if they can’t conceptualize their parts, can’t get them to respond, can’t get them to move out the way, to unburden, you know the real work. Transcripts shown in book are of very extreme examples and I feel make the reader think it’s way simpler than it really is. Some of the content even seemed performative.
Needless to say I would recommend other books on IFS before this one.
As a psychotherapist and science believer, the spiritual aspect of this book made things iffy for me. I commend Dick for even acknowledging this in his book. The IFS information and education I have been part of was not linked to spirituality like this book spoke about. To each there own on this, I just was hoping for way more psychoeducation and less spiritual insight.
IFS is about learning how the different parts interact within us and the roles they take on. Managers, firefighters, and exiles.
There are good exercises through the book that can be practiced, but I wish there was more information on how to get someone to talk to parts and what to do if they can’t conceptualize their parts, can’t get them to respond, can’t get them to move out the way, to unburden, you know the real work. Transcripts shown in book are of very extreme examples and I feel make the reader think it’s way simpler than it really is. Some of the content even seemed performative.
Needless to say I would recommend other books on IFS before this one.
February 15, 2023
Really interesting approach that is gentle and compassionate. Not too long of a read or too scientific or even dry. There is a ton of information, examples, exercises packed in to this gem. Anyone who likes self help or healing trauma books has to read this. It will change so much for you in the best way possible.
August 3, 2022
TLDR: I wanted to like this book because the concept seemed really interesting, but it's basically Pixar's Inside Out in real life and is really mid.
Considering that the title of the book implies that this is for those suffering from trauma, that may be harsh to say, but I don't find it to be so because the way that information is presented in this book and the author's purpose in writing it is to bring his model of Internal Family Systems therapy into the mainstream. It is meant to be accessible to anyone and apply universally and I find it to not do that.
Dr. Richard (Dick) Schwartz is a trained family therapist who for the past few decades has been spearheading a new psychological model that he calls Internal Family Systems (IFS). Essentially, he takes his background in family therapy or in IFS terms, "External Family Systems" and applies it to the inside of the human mind. As opposed to the traditional mono-mind model of psychology, IFS states that every person has separate parts that drive their actions, bad or good. His conjecture is that these parts are not inherently bad, no matter what they do as their actions all serve to protect "the Self", a part that is unlike the rest in that it is the most diluted and clear part of a person that can be used to channel their innermost callings. However, when faced with trauma, the Self is blended to these parts which gives them control over a person's mind and body. While this is all deeply interesting, my first major problem with this book is that most of it can be summarized in an amount not much longer than this paragraph, in fact, the main goal of IFS can be summarized in one sentence: Listen to your parts.
Essentially, the first three chapters of this book are good. They give a detailed outline of IFS and and clearly show Schwartz's experience as well as his intent for IFS: to make the poly-mind paradigm less stigmatized. Schwartz does this in a simple yet descriptive manner that is elegant and gives the reader a holistic understanding of IFS and systems thinking. However, everything starts to fall apart after chapter four because Schwartz takes his thinking too far. Rather than keeping IFS as a tool for viewing the mind in a different way, allowing for people to use it at its best, to harmonize with and listen to their parts in order to be the most themselves, Schwartz (a self defined atheist) presents IFS almost as a religion, citing its spiritual nature and effectively ostracizing anyone who does not subscribe to his model of thinking.
Chapter four begins with the dismissal of the philosophy that humans are inherently bad, in fact it is made very clear that Schwartz believes heavily in the Lockean idea of humanity's innate goodness. While this in itself is not bad, he brings down Hobbesian thinking without any further consideration, saying that expecting humanity's natural negative tendencies serves as a way to manifest them. While this in itself is a fair point, the way that he goes off of this is by saying that punitive institutions and punishment as a whole are ineffective means of dealing with those who do wrong. For me at least, the idea that punishment as a whole should be abolished in favor of a purely reformatory system is hard to swallow. This is not because reformation is bad, but rather because of the case that there are people who do not deserve redemption, those who have committed such heinous crimes that they are truly evil. This is where I think the ultimate problem with Schwartz's presentation lies, in his idea that there are no absolutely bad parts. By thinking this way, he essentially claims that there is no evil in the world which is not true and while the gross majority of people may have parts that commit evil actions in service of protection, there are those that simply are evil. There are in fact, bad parts. Additionally, Schwartz attempts to demonize this way of thinking saying "If you believe that within you are dangerous, bestial, or sinful impulses that need to be constantly controlled and battled against, then it makes sense that you would see other people that way." While this does not directly say that thinking other people are evil makes you evil, it essentially says that "it takes one to know one", which rubbed me the wrong way.
However, it is not just his blatant dismissal of the belief in the naturally selfish human that breaks this chapter and the rest of the book for me, but also his dismissal of Tabula Rasa, or the blank slate theory which states that at birth, humans have no inherent anything, their minds are blank and impressionable. Schwartz instead buys into the idea of Humean (yeah it's David Hume) Nativism, which states that humans have inherent knowledge of certain things. Schwartz calls these things "legacy burdens", which constitutes beliefs such as racism, patriarchy, individualism, and materialism. The issue that I take with these legacy burdens is that Schwartz presents them as inherent when all of them apart from perhaps individualism, are entirely empirical. Prejudiced beliefs are not products of humanity's natural evolution, rather they are artifices of the development of human society in service to their inherent selfishness and individualism. Schwartz attempts to use the example of imperialism as a proof for naturally occurring racism, but this is wrong. The idea of conquest has been around since the natural evolution of humans from animals and can still be observed in animal kingdoms, it is not an issue of race or any social classification, it is a matter of ensuring ones own survival and improving quality of living. This occurred on a massive scale during European colonization and was driven by an animalistic need for more. It was driven by the greed of human's and their inherent selfishness, making Schwartz's point here hardly applicable and his dismissal of Hobbesian philosophy wrong.
After realizing all of this, I had a very hard time even bringing myself to finish this book as I felt these ideas to be out of place as I began reading to discover a new psychological model, not hear baseless claims about inherent racism permeating exclusively western society. But I digress, it is true that the way we perceive the internal world affects the way that we interact with the external world, but I wish Schwartz had kept this to a smaller scale, as it applies to day to day life rather than on a large existential plane. This is why I also did not like the latter thirds of this book, because of the way that Schwartz takes on a Guru like persona that makes IFS feel more like a religion than a psychological model. When he begins talking about harmonization of the parts, it feels like a natural goal to attain, however, he takes this too far when he begins talking about "self-energy", something that can be gained through harmonization and accessing ones "true self." This energy he claims, can be used to drive oneself, which makes sense. But he also claims that it can be transferred to others, which I find to be much too mystical and into the realm of insanity. I agree that this contact with the part of one's true self may be beneficial in bringing that person a deeper sense of calm and access to the eight C's that Schwartz discusses (creativity, compassion, curiosity, calmness, confidence, clarity, courage, and connectedness), I think that the way Schwartz puts it: "We are indeed communing with God, if you consider Self to be God within us." to be a little bit too much.
Overall, this book was fine. IFS seems to be a promising field of therapy and psychology and I enjoy that Schwartz is helping to make it more known as everything he says shows that he is indeed qualified to teach about it and he is well written. I am regretful that I could not glean as much as I hoped from this book, perhaps because my own parts are so good at masking themselves that I cannot feel them or perhaps because I am so in harmony with them that I feel as one mind, does not matter. I didn't feel much during any of the exercises but I still recognize them as well as the transcribed therapy sessions that he has as examples to be the best and most consistently good parts of this book. In fact, they are the most significant reason why this book is 3 stars and not 2. If I could read an entire book about IFS therapy sessions, I would because they were very interesting. Although this book didn't work entirely for me and even with the issues I have with Schwartz's overly grandiose presentation, I still think that this book was worth my time for the experience and ultimately I think is a valuable tool for those who do suffer from trauma and are in need of a new form of therapy. Sadly it is not the universal and all encompassing book that Schwartz sought it to be, allowing everyone to get in touch with their own parts, but I am privileged enough to know that I am not the target audience for this kind of book and that those who are suffering will gain a lot more from it than I did.
Considering that the title of the book implies that this is for those suffering from trauma, that may be harsh to say, but I don't find it to be so because the way that information is presented in this book and the author's purpose in writing it is to bring his model of Internal Family Systems therapy into the mainstream. It is meant to be accessible to anyone and apply universally and I find it to not do that.
Dr. Richard (Dick) Schwartz is a trained family therapist who for the past few decades has been spearheading a new psychological model that he calls Internal Family Systems (IFS). Essentially, he takes his background in family therapy or in IFS terms, "External Family Systems" and applies it to the inside of the human mind. As opposed to the traditional mono-mind model of psychology, IFS states that every person has separate parts that drive their actions, bad or good. His conjecture is that these parts are not inherently bad, no matter what they do as their actions all serve to protect "the Self", a part that is unlike the rest in that it is the most diluted and clear part of a person that can be used to channel their innermost callings. However, when faced with trauma, the Self is blended to these parts which gives them control over a person's mind and body. While this is all deeply interesting, my first major problem with this book is that most of it can be summarized in an amount not much longer than this paragraph, in fact, the main goal of IFS can be summarized in one sentence: Listen to your parts.
Essentially, the first three chapters of this book are good. They give a detailed outline of IFS and and clearly show Schwartz's experience as well as his intent for IFS: to make the poly-mind paradigm less stigmatized. Schwartz does this in a simple yet descriptive manner that is elegant and gives the reader a holistic understanding of IFS and systems thinking. However, everything starts to fall apart after chapter four because Schwartz takes his thinking too far. Rather than keeping IFS as a tool for viewing the mind in a different way, allowing for people to use it at its best, to harmonize with and listen to their parts in order to be the most themselves, Schwartz (a self defined atheist) presents IFS almost as a religion, citing its spiritual nature and effectively ostracizing anyone who does not subscribe to his model of thinking.
Chapter four begins with the dismissal of the philosophy that humans are inherently bad, in fact it is made very clear that Schwartz believes heavily in the Lockean idea of humanity's innate goodness. While this in itself is not bad, he brings down Hobbesian thinking without any further consideration, saying that expecting humanity's natural negative tendencies serves as a way to manifest them. While this in itself is a fair point, the way that he goes off of this is by saying that punitive institutions and punishment as a whole are ineffective means of dealing with those who do wrong. For me at least, the idea that punishment as a whole should be abolished in favor of a purely reformatory system is hard to swallow. This is not because reformation is bad, but rather because of the case that there are people who do not deserve redemption, those who have committed such heinous crimes that they are truly evil. This is where I think the ultimate problem with Schwartz's presentation lies, in his idea that there are no absolutely bad parts. By thinking this way, he essentially claims that there is no evil in the world which is not true and while the gross majority of people may have parts that commit evil actions in service of protection, there are those that simply are evil. There are in fact, bad parts. Additionally, Schwartz attempts to demonize this way of thinking saying "If you believe that within you are dangerous, bestial, or sinful impulses that need to be constantly controlled and battled against, then it makes sense that you would see other people that way." While this does not directly say that thinking other people are evil makes you evil, it essentially says that "it takes one to know one", which rubbed me the wrong way.
However, it is not just his blatant dismissal of the belief in the naturally selfish human that breaks this chapter and the rest of the book for me, but also his dismissal of Tabula Rasa, or the blank slate theory which states that at birth, humans have no inherent anything, their minds are blank and impressionable. Schwartz instead buys into the idea of Humean (yeah it's David Hume) Nativism, which states that humans have inherent knowledge of certain things. Schwartz calls these things "legacy burdens", which constitutes beliefs such as racism, patriarchy, individualism, and materialism. The issue that I take with these legacy burdens is that Schwartz presents them as inherent when all of them apart from perhaps individualism, are entirely empirical. Prejudiced beliefs are not products of humanity's natural evolution, rather they are artifices of the development of human society in service to their inherent selfishness and individualism. Schwartz attempts to use the example of imperialism as a proof for naturally occurring racism, but this is wrong. The idea of conquest has been around since the natural evolution of humans from animals and can still be observed in animal kingdoms, it is not an issue of race or any social classification, it is a matter of ensuring ones own survival and improving quality of living. This occurred on a massive scale during European colonization and was driven by an animalistic need for more. It was driven by the greed of human's and their inherent selfishness, making Schwartz's point here hardly applicable and his dismissal of Hobbesian philosophy wrong.
After realizing all of this, I had a very hard time even bringing myself to finish this book as I felt these ideas to be out of place as I began reading to discover a new psychological model, not hear baseless claims about inherent racism permeating exclusively western society. But I digress, it is true that the way we perceive the internal world affects the way that we interact with the external world, but I wish Schwartz had kept this to a smaller scale, as it applies to day to day life rather than on a large existential plane. This is why I also did not like the latter thirds of this book, because of the way that Schwartz takes on a Guru like persona that makes IFS feel more like a religion than a psychological model. When he begins talking about harmonization of the parts, it feels like a natural goal to attain, however, he takes this too far when he begins talking about "self-energy", something that can be gained through harmonization and accessing ones "true self." This energy he claims, can be used to drive oneself, which makes sense. But he also claims that it can be transferred to others, which I find to be much too mystical and into the realm of insanity. I agree that this contact with the part of one's true self may be beneficial in bringing that person a deeper sense of calm and access to the eight C's that Schwartz discusses (creativity, compassion, curiosity, calmness, confidence, clarity, courage, and connectedness), I think that the way Schwartz puts it: "We are indeed communing with God, if you consider Self to be God within us." to be a little bit too much.
Overall, this book was fine. IFS seems to be a promising field of therapy and psychology and I enjoy that Schwartz is helping to make it more known as everything he says shows that he is indeed qualified to teach about it and he is well written. I am regretful that I could not glean as much as I hoped from this book, perhaps because my own parts are so good at masking themselves that I cannot feel them or perhaps because I am so in harmony with them that I feel as one mind, does not matter. I didn't feel much during any of the exercises but I still recognize them as well as the transcribed therapy sessions that he has as examples to be the best and most consistently good parts of this book. In fact, they are the most significant reason why this book is 3 stars and not 2. If I could read an entire book about IFS therapy sessions, I would because they were very interesting. Although this book didn't work entirely for me and even with the issues I have with Schwartz's overly grandiose presentation, I still think that this book was worth my time for the experience and ultimately I think is a valuable tool for those who do suffer from trauma and are in need of a new form of therapy. Sadly it is not the universal and all encompassing book that Schwartz sought it to be, allowing everyone to get in touch with their own parts, but I am privileged enough to know that I am not the target audience for this kind of book and that those who are suffering will gain a lot more from it than I did.
February 15, 2022
IFS might be a great practice and has the potential to help a lot of people, but this book is not for me. The author and creator of the Internal Family Systems model has an off-putting writing style that disparages anything other than his therapy plan, but it is his misconception and incorrect description of Buddhist practice that I feel the need to correct.
His disparagement of 12 step programs, followed by a description of a "better" method that is similar to and complimentary to both Buddhist and 12 step programs really drove my dissatisfaction with this book. As someone who has pieced together their own recovery plan, adhering both to a traditional 12 step program and a Buddhist meditation practice to observe my mind, I know first hand that each individual in recovery has to figure out what works for them. No two programs of recovery are identical, and I've seen where creating space for flexibility is the saving grace.
Dr. Schwartz, instead of being open-minded, misconstrues and disparages 12 step programs. I can understand his perspective - my experience of 12 step programs has been to see them working for large numbers of grateful people in anonymous rooms. He only sees the proportion of people they don't work for, and those people need help too! He tries to be nice about it, but seems to be trying to prove that his treatment is the best, and he seems to want to cut down other tools in order to prove that's true.
I thought I was being pretty tolerant, maybe just being too harsh myself - he's a well intentioned, well trained, compassionate human being doing his best to share his knowledge, which had helped so many! But then he pretended to understand Buddhism. Which he does not. And I got annoyed again.
He specifically says this: "One central message in the canonical story of the Buddha's awakening is that thoughts and desires are the primary obstacles to enlightenment. As he sat in meditation beneath the Bodhi tree, the Buddha was assaulted by a series of impulses and urges - lust, desire, fulfillment, regret, fear, insecurity, and so on - and it was only by ignoring or resisting them that he was able to attain enlightenment." (Pp 13-14)
This is the opposite of the truth, it was only by accepting the feelings and thoughts, acknowledging the impulses and urges, and moving through them, that the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment.
This factual inaccuracy, and misunderstanding of Buddhism (which he accuses of being mono-minded, but the mono-mind is itself a Western construction) makes the entire read frustrating.
But the thing that takes the cake is how he ends chapter 3 by sharing a story of the brilliantly clever question he asked the Dalai Lama about compassion - what if we were compassionate to ourselves in the same way Buddhism preaches compassion to others? And then HE DOESN'T TELL US THE DALAI LAMA'S ANSWER. I mean I haven't finished the book yet so maybe eventually he'll reveal that in the Buddhist practice of compassion you actually start with self-compassion. But I doubt it. And why do you bring up a story about meeting the Dalai Lama if not to share what you've learned? Or where you agreed? Or taught the Dalai Lama something, which is what this story is implying? Or was it just name dropping?
IFS seems like a cool thing you should look into, if you think it sounds cool, but this introduction has some problems.
His disparagement of 12 step programs, followed by a description of a "better" method that is similar to and complimentary to both Buddhist and 12 step programs really drove my dissatisfaction with this book. As someone who has pieced together their own recovery plan, adhering both to a traditional 12 step program and a Buddhist meditation practice to observe my mind, I know first hand that each individual in recovery has to figure out what works for them. No two programs of recovery are identical, and I've seen where creating space for flexibility is the saving grace.
Dr. Schwartz, instead of being open-minded, misconstrues and disparages 12 step programs. I can understand his perspective - my experience of 12 step programs has been to see them working for large numbers of grateful people in anonymous rooms. He only sees the proportion of people they don't work for, and those people need help too! He tries to be nice about it, but seems to be trying to prove that his treatment is the best, and he seems to want to cut down other tools in order to prove that's true.
I thought I was being pretty tolerant, maybe just being too harsh myself - he's a well intentioned, well trained, compassionate human being doing his best to share his knowledge, which had helped so many! But then he pretended to understand Buddhism. Which he does not. And I got annoyed again.
He specifically says this: "One central message in the canonical story of the Buddha's awakening is that thoughts and desires are the primary obstacles to enlightenment. As he sat in meditation beneath the Bodhi tree, the Buddha was assaulted by a series of impulses and urges - lust, desire, fulfillment, regret, fear, insecurity, and so on - and it was only by ignoring or resisting them that he was able to attain enlightenment." (Pp 13-14)
This is the opposite of the truth, it was only by accepting the feelings and thoughts, acknowledging the impulses and urges, and moving through them, that the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment.
This factual inaccuracy, and misunderstanding of Buddhism (which he accuses of being mono-minded, but the mono-mind is itself a Western construction) makes the entire read frustrating.
But the thing that takes the cake is how he ends chapter 3 by sharing a story of the brilliantly clever question he asked the Dalai Lama about compassion - what if we were compassionate to ourselves in the same way Buddhism preaches compassion to others? And then HE DOESN'T TELL US THE DALAI LAMA'S ANSWER. I mean I haven't finished the book yet so maybe eventually he'll reveal that in the Buddhist practice of compassion you actually start with self-compassion. But I doubt it. And why do you bring up a story about meeting the Dalai Lama if not to share what you've learned? Or where you agreed? Or taught the Dalai Lama something, which is what this story is implying? Or was it just name dropping?
IFS seems like a cool thing you should look into, if you think it sounds cool, but this introduction has some problems.
April 29, 2022
This guy is real real kind- a tiny bit cheesy- but like really genuinely wants you to heal from your shit and live with more ease. He founded IFS, which is the idea that our traumatized younger selves get frozen as “parts” and can act out in bursts of big emotions as adults. If we can develop trust with these parts and help them heal their past, we can live more in our selves and not from reactions as adults. Took me a while to read because it’s full of exercises that are heavy but good. I think it maybe changed my life!
November 5, 2025
⭐️ ⭐️ 1/2
There were definitely some bad parts. Like the entire second half of this book…
It is repetitive, filled with mysticism and grandiose spiritual gobbledygook.
I love IFS as a healing and self-empowerment framework. It means a lot to me, and has helped me identify several wounded parts within, and the first half of this book does a great job explaining the parts of IFS I love. However, the entire second half is nonessential and turned me off a bit. Do yourself a favor and read Introduction to Internal Family Systems. It does a far better job explaining this concept, and it makes this book entirely unnecessary.
There were definitely some bad parts. Like the entire second half of this book…
It is repetitive, filled with mysticism and grandiose spiritual gobbledygook.
I love IFS as a healing and self-empowerment framework. It means a lot to me, and has helped me identify several wounded parts within, and the first half of this book does a great job explaining the parts of IFS I love. However, the entire second half is nonessential and turned me off a bit. Do yourself a favor and read Introduction to Internal Family Systems. It does a far better job explaining this concept, and it makes this book entirely unnecessary.
May 25, 2023
I want to preface this by saying the basic theory of parts work is very helpful and beneficial and I have gotten a lot out of it in my own therapy sessions. The idea of protectors who need to be loved and listened to, instead of berated or silenced, is a great new way to look at healing trauma and dealing with anxiety. The guided meditations (although Schwartz would say they are NOT meditation which he hates so much) are helpful, but hard to listen to on audio if you were doing other things while listening.
Okay, all that said, Richard Schwartz is a total charlatan and I think he says some things that are actually quite dangerous.
Schwartz opens the book by ragging on almost every religion under the sun and saying how they all are harmful and outdated and will never compare to the wonders of IFS. He says we need to break away from all the old ways of living and believing and create a new society based entirely on IFS. Weird right out of the gate. At one point he says the Dalai Lama has said things that are “a good start” but IFS finishes the job for him. He then goes on to say that there is no evil in the world, just unhealed parts, and that what Christians think of as Satan and sin, or what others would think of as evil, are just parts that needs to be loved and accepted and then evil will go away from society. Throughout the book he essentially props up IFS as a new alternative to religion and his own special newly revealed path to true enlightenment which is PRETTY WEIRD for a psychology book, but okay.
Schwartz doesn’t just say that his theory is better than any religion. He also says it is better than AA and other 12 step programs, and than traditional approaches to treating mental illness. Schwartz says we should treat addiction, anxiety and depression with mushrooms and also FENTANYL instead of psychotropic medication. He also says mental health diagnoses are false and that these are just unhealed parts that, once healed, will no longer need medication. He suggests that taking medication will hinder your ability to be “healed” through IFS and thus, you should stop taking them. BIG YIKES.
Throughout the book Schwartz claims IFS can heal every social and political ill we have, from city planning, to prison reform for rapists and murderers, to capitalism, to Donald Trump.
The best part is he continuously talks about how humble he is and how others just don’t understand how he can be so humble when he’s “stumbled” onto such an amazing thing. LOL.
I spoke with a friend who is a therapist and she basically shared my feelings about Richard Schwartz. She also said that IFS has turned into a huge business empire for him and that to be officially “certified” through his organization, you have to do really expensive trainings that also include staying at his expensive “getaways” and ultimately shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars just to say you can treat patients using IFS. She agreed that IFS is helpful but Schwartz is not a good source to learn about it. Without any of the other wacky stuff he says in the book, this alone would make me very skeptical of him.
Finally, Schwartz offers exactly zero science, research, or evidence to back up his theory and claims. It’s all based totally anecdotally on his experience with his own clients, and he also doesn’t provide information on which demographics he treated.
Again, helpful theory, terrible book. I’d look to other sources to learn about IFS.
Okay, all that said, Richard Schwartz is a total charlatan and I think he says some things that are actually quite dangerous.
Schwartz opens the book by ragging on almost every religion under the sun and saying how they all are harmful and outdated and will never compare to the wonders of IFS. He says we need to break away from all the old ways of living and believing and create a new society based entirely on IFS. Weird right out of the gate. At one point he says the Dalai Lama has said things that are “a good start” but IFS finishes the job for him. He then goes on to say that there is no evil in the world, just unhealed parts, and that what Christians think of as Satan and sin, or what others would think of as evil, are just parts that needs to be loved and accepted and then evil will go away from society. Throughout the book he essentially props up IFS as a new alternative to religion and his own special newly revealed path to true enlightenment which is PRETTY WEIRD for a psychology book, but okay.
Schwartz doesn’t just say that his theory is better than any religion. He also says it is better than AA and other 12 step programs, and than traditional approaches to treating mental illness. Schwartz says we should treat addiction, anxiety and depression with mushrooms and also FENTANYL instead of psychotropic medication. He also says mental health diagnoses are false and that these are just unhealed parts that, once healed, will no longer need medication. He suggests that taking medication will hinder your ability to be “healed” through IFS and thus, you should stop taking them. BIG YIKES.
Throughout the book Schwartz claims IFS can heal every social and political ill we have, from city planning, to prison reform for rapists and murderers, to capitalism, to Donald Trump.
The best part is he continuously talks about how humble he is and how others just don’t understand how he can be so humble when he’s “stumbled” onto such an amazing thing. LOL.
I spoke with a friend who is a therapist and she basically shared my feelings about Richard Schwartz. She also said that IFS has turned into a huge business empire for him and that to be officially “certified” through his organization, you have to do really expensive trainings that also include staying at his expensive “getaways” and ultimately shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars just to say you can treat patients using IFS. She agreed that IFS is helpful but Schwartz is not a good source to learn about it. Without any of the other wacky stuff he says in the book, this alone would make me very skeptical of him.
Finally, Schwartz offers exactly zero science, research, or evidence to back up his theory and claims. It’s all based totally anecdotally on his experience with his own clients, and he also doesn’t provide information on which demographics he treated.
Again, helpful theory, terrible book. I’d look to other sources to learn about IFS.
December 31, 2022
IFS work is certainly a valid and helpful form of trauma therapy; however, this book is muddled, disjointed, extremely repetitive, grandiose, and at times reads as dogmatic pseudoscience. I find the author’s distaste and hesitancy for diagnoses and medication extremely problematic and dangerous. This book suggests that IFS is the best and most effective type of therapy for all, which is simply untrue. IFS should be looked at as a helpful tool to incorporate into your therapy but by no means do I agree it is the only or best method of healing for all people. This is reductive. We are all different and require different forms of healing, and usually multiple kinds of trauma therapy are necessary. Diagnoses are important for getting people the correct care, and for some medication is essential for survival. The warning and discouragement the author gives for medications, as in “try not to be disappointed if you can’t do much inner work when you’re on them” is harmful and ridiculous. While it can take time to find the correct medications and dosages, many people like myself require them in order to be able to access the depths of the inner world in the first place. Additionally, at the end of the day, IFS is very similar to other types of trauma therapy like inner child work, inner critic work, and theatrical role play, just dressed in different language. This book criticizes the ego while being full of it. Suggesting IFS is the pathway towards healing racism and paedophilia and the world’s issues at large is also reductive. Of course IFS can be helpful to look at the origins of harmful beliefs within us, but I found this to be a very far reach and incredibly self aggrandizing. I would suggest many other books on trauma therapy over this one; even if you want to practice IFS I would suggest just doing research online or working with a trained IFS therapist directly as the information in this book could have been reduced to half its size.
September 1, 2022
Absolutely the worst mental health book I've ever read. it's basically Scientology OT-III body thetans, without the scifi. do not read this book.
December 16, 2022
The forward by Alanis Morissette should have been a warning, jfc
November 15, 2021
More like a 3.75 the issues I had are personal to me. I don't want to hear about my author's political or spiritual practice unless that is the book I specifically picked up. This is a good book, I just don't like reading through parts where he talks about politics and religion. Otherwise, really good IFS material and I would recommend the book with the caveat above to others.
--
"When your parts start to trust your Self, they open more space for you to be in your body. When that’s the case, you feel sensations and emotions more and, consequently, you become increasingly interested in keeping your body grounded and healthy. With this enhanced sensitivity to your body’s feedback comes increased knowledge about what foods or activities are beneficial and which can be damaging. This leads to corresponding changes in your behavior. In addition, your exiles no longer have to use your body to try to get your attention or punish you for ignoring them, because they can get through to you directly."
--
"When your parts start to trust your Self, they open more space for you to be in your body. When that’s the case, you feel sensations and emotions more and, consequently, you become increasingly interested in keeping your body grounded and healthy. With this enhanced sensitivity to your body’s feedback comes increased knowledge about what foods or activities are beneficial and which can be damaging. This leads to corresponding changes in your behavior. In addition, your exiles no longer have to use your body to try to get your attention or punish you for ignoring them, because they can get through to you directly."
July 30, 2021
I was very intrigued as I started this book. The concept makes sense to me. However, perhaps it’s just that I’m neurodivergent, but I really struggled with the exercises. I really could not get a grasp on what the instructions were trying to get my mind to do. I also felt a bit alienated by how much religious talk there is in the book, particularly Christianity.
I appreciate the concept of having a system of personalities in one’s head, but this book just didn’t do it for me.
I appreciate the concept of having a system of personalities in one’s head, but this book just didn’t do it for me.
April 25, 2021
I was introduced to IFS many years ago in my therapy sessions as I was healing from a difficult year of cancer surgeries and treatments. Learning about and exploring my own “internal family” made a huge difference in my healing process moving forward with my life. This new book by the founder of IFS is written in a style that is friendly, warm, and informative for someone who is new to the process as well as someone who has already learned the basics. I found the exercises and recommended suggestions to be powerful and transformative for me in the current life situation I am in. Richard shares many examples from the lives and experiences of his own clients and the included dialogs of some of his clients with their own inner parts I found extraordinarily helpful.
I am a SoulCollage®️facilitator and will be sharing this book with my workshop participants when we are exploring our inner parts via the Committee Suit
Thanks to NetGalley, the author and publisher for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
I am a SoulCollage®️facilitator and will be sharing this book with my workshop participants when we are exploring our inner parts via the Committee Suit
Thanks to NetGalley, the author and publisher for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
November 24, 2022
Read it. Read it slowly. Read it again.
⠀
Feels as significant and paradigm-shifting as The Body Keeps the Score.
⠀
Clicks with so much of what I’ve been learning lately about systems theory, and kinship networks, and embodiment, and ecology, and all these seemingly disconnected things. And what’s been coming up in therapy.
⠀
Makes intuitive sense to me that it’s alllll connected. Every last part.
⠀
Feels as significant and paradigm-shifting as The Body Keeps the Score.
⠀
Clicks with so much of what I’ve been learning lately about systems theory, and kinship networks, and embodiment, and ecology, and all these seemingly disconnected things. And what’s been coming up in therapy.
⠀
Makes intuitive sense to me that it’s alllll connected. Every last part.
April 17, 2025
I'm in the minority here, not feeling the love for the hot new therapy trend, IFS. It really does not resonate with me. I'm glad it helps some people. Not every therapy method works for every person. I was actually surprised at how irritated this book made me feel.
A huge chunk of the book are transcripts of various therapy sessions Schwartz has led over the years. Oddly, every single patient sounds the same. They all are immediately 100% on board and acting out their different parts. I guess it helps that a lot of people have seen that Disney blockbuster Inside Out. That is basically what this therapy is, people reenacting that movie.
My reactions to some direct quotes from the book:
(IFS) helps people access what I call the Self (an essence of calm, clarity, compassion, and connectedness) and from that place begin to listen to the parts of them that had been exiled by more dominant ones. OK, sure, I can get behind people needing to not let one emotion dominant their lives and to instead be well rounded.
Neo-liberalism, the economic philosophy of Milton Friedman that undergirds the kind of cutthroat capitalism that has dominated the US since the days of Ronald Reagan, is based on the belief that people are basically selfish and, therefore, it's everyone for themselves in a survival-of-the-fittest world. The government needs to get out of the way so the fittest can not only help us survive, but thrive. This economic philosophy has resulted in massive inequality as well as the disconnection and polarization among people that we experience so dramatically today. Hmmm, this is getting political very quickly. Wait, am I not reading a psychology book?
IFS has morphed over time from being exclusively about psychotherapy to becoming a kind of spiritual practice More hmmmm. A spiritual practice?!
We often find that the harder we try to get rid of emotions and thoughts, the stronger they be-come. Sure. This isn't new information. It's the whole "Don't think of a white bear" and immediately you think of a white bear.
The parts that make people want to kill themselves or murder people when approached from a respectful, open, curious place will reveal the secret history of how they were forced into the role they're in and how they're stuck in that role, terrified that if they don't do it something dreadful will happen. Uhhhh - no. He says for example that child abusers were themselves abused in childhood so thus couldn't help but abuse kids when they grow up. Wow. Ok, then what about all the abused kids who grow up and don't become rapists? What about the rapists who were never abused and still rape? I found the author disturbingly off base with this theory of his.
There is another class of burdens that are called legacy burdens because they did not come from your direct life experience. Instead, you inherited them from your parents, who got them from their parents, and so on. Or you absorbed them from your ethnic group or from the culture you currently live in. Oh my, what a broad swath of life he is indicting! Even if you can't blame your troubles on specific past events(usually caused by parents, according to Schwartz) you can blame them on the general vibe of life.
let them know who you are, even how old you are, since they often think you're much younger. Let them know that they're not alone anymore and see how they react. You can ask, if you like, how old they thought you were. You can even ask them to turn around and look at you. FFS all this talking to yourself as if you were multiple different people, no, I am not feeling it. It is SO hokey and dumb. All that inner child crap, huge eyeroll. Reading these parts I felt like I was in that old SNL skit Stuart Smalley. I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!
The 4 Goals of IFS.
1. Liberate parts from the roles they've been forced into so they can be who they're designed to be.
2.Restore trust in the Self and Self-leadership.
3. Reharmonize the inner system.
4. Become more Self-led in your interactions with the world.
OMG the sheer woo-woo of this! Reharmonize my inner system? What the fuck are you talking about. Capitalizing the word self in the middle of the sentence is like the visual equivalent of nails on a blackboard.
Parts aren't afflictions and they aren't the ego. They're little inner beings who are trying their best to keep you safe and to keep each other safe and to keep it together in there.They have full-range personalities: each of them have different desires, different ages, different opinions, different talents, and different resources. They're like little inner people, and because most are quite young, they're more like inner children. At this point, the book has completely lost me and I am hate reading.
Maybe (the six states of infants described by Berry Brazelton) these are the parts that are online when you're born and the others are dormant until the proper time in your development when they're needed and they kind of pop out. Of course, Schwartz does not name these states so I looked them up. They are sleep(deep and REM), drowsy, awake/alert, awake/fussy and crying. Hmmmm. How on earth is this related to IFS. When we are born we are either asleep or awake? Sometimes drowsy? It's like he was hoping his readers wouldn't look up what he was referencing and instead just be impressed that Brazelton is being linked to this therapy model.
I teach every year at a beautiful retreat center near Big Sur, California, called Esalen. Esalen?! Oh, this is all starting to make sense, haha. I've been there and it is NOT my scene.
meditations do this by emptying the mind, but in IFS, instead of wrestling with parts that don't want to be emptied, we lovingly ask them to open space inside for a few minutes and then find that Self emerges - immediately and spontaneously. WTF is he talking about? What a strawman argument. That is not what meditation does/asks you to do. That is what people who don't know anything about meditation think it's about. Grrr
The epiphany that led me to become a family therapist and later to develop IFS was the insight that giving a troubled person a psychiatric diagnosis and seeing that as the sole/main cause of their symptoms was unnecessarily limiting, pathologizing, and could become self-reinforcing. Ok, I can agree with this. It's never good to be limiting and only see yourself one way, whether it's a psychiatric label like depressed or a career label like doctor or a relationship label like wife. We are all multi-faceted human beings. Does this warrant an entirely new therapeutic method? Ehhhhh
negative expectations become self-fulfilling prophesies that further reinforce negative views Sure, that can totally be true. Again, do we need to reenact a children's movie in order to not do this? Aren't there other ways of combating this issue that aren't so inane?
The first question I have the client ask each part is whether they have anything in common. Each part is often shocked to learn that they share the desire to keep the person safe, but their ideas about how to do that are totally different.Shocked? Lol, stop it.
firefighters are desperate to find someone to make the exiles feel better, and often become recruiters who search for that special person or practice. They turn us into seekers who move from one meditation or spiritual leader to another, looking for the one that can permanently make those exiles feel better. I'm so confused. I feel like I did in Algebra class, there are too many formulas to memorize.
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 goodness. No, this is swinging the pendulum back too far. I don't think humans are innately good or innately bad. We are the dialectic. We are both, we are everything all at once. Sometimes the good is stronger and sometimes the bad. The idea of purging all the bad and leaving 100% good rings false to me.
Language like "A part of me got very triggered by what you just said and beneath that part of me was a part that felt hurt" conveys a much different message than "I really don't like what you just said." It also leads to predictably different results.HAHAHA. Yes, I agree. I prefer the second sentence. The first sentence sounds like you have a stick up your ass.
I have many more quotes to argue against but I am sick of thinking about this book.
A huge chunk of the book are transcripts of various therapy sessions Schwartz has led over the years. Oddly, every single patient sounds the same. They all are immediately 100% on board and acting out their different parts. I guess it helps that a lot of people have seen that Disney blockbuster Inside Out. That is basically what this therapy is, people reenacting that movie.
My reactions to some direct quotes from the book:
(IFS) helps people access what I call the Self (an essence of calm, clarity, compassion, and connectedness) and from that place begin to listen to the parts of them that had been exiled by more dominant ones. OK, sure, I can get behind people needing to not let one emotion dominant their lives and to instead be well rounded.
Neo-liberalism, the economic philosophy of Milton Friedman that undergirds the kind of cutthroat capitalism that has dominated the US since the days of Ronald Reagan, is based on the belief that people are basically selfish and, therefore, it's everyone for themselves in a survival-of-the-fittest world. The government needs to get out of the way so the fittest can not only help us survive, but thrive. This economic philosophy has resulted in massive inequality as well as the disconnection and polarization among people that we experience so dramatically today. Hmmm, this is getting political very quickly. Wait, am I not reading a psychology book?
IFS has morphed over time from being exclusively about psychotherapy to becoming a kind of spiritual practice More hmmmm. A spiritual practice?!
We often find that the harder we try to get rid of emotions and thoughts, the stronger they be-come. Sure. This isn't new information. It's the whole "Don't think of a white bear" and immediately you think of a white bear.
The parts that make people want to kill themselves or murder people when approached from a respectful, open, curious place will reveal the secret history of how they were forced into the role they're in and how they're stuck in that role, terrified that if they don't do it something dreadful will happen. Uhhhh - no. He says for example that child abusers were themselves abused in childhood so thus couldn't help but abuse kids when they grow up. Wow. Ok, then what about all the abused kids who grow up and don't become rapists? What about the rapists who were never abused and still rape? I found the author disturbingly off base with this theory of his.
There is another class of burdens that are called legacy burdens because they did not come from your direct life experience. Instead, you inherited them from your parents, who got them from their parents, and so on. Or you absorbed them from your ethnic group or from the culture you currently live in. Oh my, what a broad swath of life he is indicting! Even if you can't blame your troubles on specific past events(usually caused by parents, according to Schwartz) you can blame them on the general vibe of life.
let them know who you are, even how old you are, since they often think you're much younger. Let them know that they're not alone anymore and see how they react. You can ask, if you like, how old they thought you were. You can even ask them to turn around and look at you. FFS all this talking to yourself as if you were multiple different people, no, I am not feeling it. It is SO hokey and dumb. All that inner child crap, huge eyeroll. Reading these parts I felt like I was in that old SNL skit Stuart Smalley. I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!
The 4 Goals of IFS.
1. Liberate parts from the roles they've been forced into so they can be who they're designed to be.
2.Restore trust in the Self and Self-leadership.
3. Reharmonize the inner system.
4. Become more Self-led in your interactions with the world.
OMG the sheer woo-woo of this! Reharmonize my inner system? What the fuck are you talking about. Capitalizing the word self in the middle of the sentence is like the visual equivalent of nails on a blackboard.
Parts aren't afflictions and they aren't the ego. They're little inner beings who are trying their best to keep you safe and to keep each other safe and to keep it together in there.They have full-range personalities: each of them have different desires, different ages, different opinions, different talents, and different resources. They're like little inner people, and because most are quite young, they're more like inner children. At this point, the book has completely lost me and I am hate reading.
Maybe (the six states of infants described by Berry Brazelton) these are the parts that are online when you're born and the others are dormant until the proper time in your development when they're needed and they kind of pop out. Of course, Schwartz does not name these states so I looked them up. They are sleep(deep and REM), drowsy, awake/alert, awake/fussy and crying. Hmmmm. How on earth is this related to IFS. When we are born we are either asleep or awake? Sometimes drowsy? It's like he was hoping his readers wouldn't look up what he was referencing and instead just be impressed that Brazelton is being linked to this therapy model.
I teach every year at a beautiful retreat center near Big Sur, California, called Esalen. Esalen?! Oh, this is all starting to make sense, haha. I've been there and it is NOT my scene.
meditations do this by emptying the mind, but in IFS, instead of wrestling with parts that don't want to be emptied, we lovingly ask them to open space inside for a few minutes and then find that Self emerges - immediately and spontaneously. WTF is he talking about? What a strawman argument. That is not what meditation does/asks you to do. That is what people who don't know anything about meditation think it's about. Grrr
The epiphany that led me to become a family therapist and later to develop IFS was the insight that giving a troubled person a psychiatric diagnosis and seeing that as the sole/main cause of their symptoms was unnecessarily limiting, pathologizing, and could become self-reinforcing. Ok, I can agree with this. It's never good to be limiting and only see yourself one way, whether it's a psychiatric label like depressed or a career label like doctor or a relationship label like wife. We are all multi-faceted human beings. Does this warrant an entirely new therapeutic method? Ehhhhh
negative expectations become self-fulfilling prophesies that further reinforce negative views Sure, that can totally be true. Again, do we need to reenact a children's movie in order to not do this? Aren't there other ways of combating this issue that aren't so inane?
The first question I have the client ask each part is whether they have anything in common. Each part is often shocked to learn that they share the desire to keep the person safe, but their ideas about how to do that are totally different.Shocked? Lol, stop it.
firefighters are desperate to find someone to make the exiles feel better, and often become recruiters who search for that special person or practice. They turn us into seekers who move from one meditation or spiritual leader to another, looking for the one that can permanently make those exiles feel better. I'm so confused. I feel like I did in Algebra class, there are too many formulas to memorize.
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 goodness. No, this is swinging the pendulum back too far. I don't think humans are innately good or innately bad. We are the dialectic. We are both, we are everything all at once. Sometimes the good is stronger and sometimes the bad. The idea of purging all the bad and leaving 100% good rings false to me.
Language like "A part of me got very triggered by what you just said and beneath that part of me was a part that felt hurt" conveys a much different message than "I really don't like what you just said." It also leads to predictably different results.HAHAHA. Yes, I agree. I prefer the second sentence. The first sentence sounds like you have a stick up your ass.
I have many more quotes to argue against but I am sick of thinking about this book.
June 16, 2025
I first read about Internal Family Systems in a chapter of The Body Keeps the Score and it deeply resonated with me immediately. I think I even tried to find an IFS therapist locally, but couldn't at the time. It clicked so well that I remembered times in my life when I intuited it as a method (for instance, wayyyy before I knew this was a thing, I would journal about having a lot of curly women in my brain and how they'd move one by one to the microphone, and I even identified more rudimentary 'parts' they represented - it's sort of like that). So I don't know why it took me so long to read this.
Firstly, I really recomment the audiobook, because a good chunk of the book contains exercises you can do with your own 'parts' and they're guided by the author himself (it seems like it would be annoying to read them out yourself while trying to focus on your inner life).
Secondly, I loved how right out the gate Schwartz calls out the selfishness and greed of the capitalist world we live in, in the introduction, describing the world as a system, just like our inner world ends up being a system of parts that exist as sort of coping mechanisms / adaptations that are trying to protect you.
And I love the concept of IFS because it's the most compassionate model of the human psyche that I've come across. The process is meant to help you look at these parts with curiosity and compassion and courage (there's an 8C thing with 8 c-starting words that I won't get into). The transcripts from therapy sessions are highly moving and beautiful in their catharsis. For instance, there's an activist couple where the guy has anger issues kind of connected to injustice - to witness the peeling back of layers or discovering all of the parts involved in that conflict was very emotional for me, as someone who gets really angry at injustice. So the idea is to get to know these parts, figure out their purpose and then gain their trust so that they don't 'take over' in a damaging way, as they usually might do. Sounds woo woo, but delving into my psyche, I felt it as a very real thing.
Also, as someone who was gaslit using Buddhist concepts by an ex, I really loved reading a critique of meditation and many other spirituality practices (like the 'crunchy' spirituality we see now, that feels very eugenics-y, gender essentialist and antivaxxy). And, if before this you would hear me scoff at the ego of people and how much damage ego has done to the world, after reading this, thanks to Schwartz's thoughtfulness on the topic, I am ready not to hate on it anymore with the same intensity, so I definitely came out more compassionate.
The author also discusses racism as a 'legacy burden' in the world and talks about his own struggles with his 'racist part' (tough to access and work with because he was feeling shame about it and tried to 'bury' it). In the last chapter of the book, Schwartz advocates for a world in which we take care of the planet and each other and we build communities of support, through this compassion.
The one thing that really bugged me was his saying that he works with consultancy firms like McKinsey, but I guess I can see how he would perhaps rationalize that, as trying to make the world that he wants happen. Shocking, if true (but probably won't happen one overpaid consultant at a time).
I could gush some more, but already a friend I've gushed to in person said this sounds like a cult, so... Lol, it's not a cult. Insert rant about how CBT feels very capitalistic so of course it would be the most mainstream way of doing therapy, etc etc.
If it wasn't clear until now, I veru much recommend this book!
Firstly, I really recomment the audiobook, because a good chunk of the book contains exercises you can do with your own 'parts' and they're guided by the author himself (it seems like it would be annoying to read them out yourself while trying to focus on your inner life).
Secondly, I loved how right out the gate Schwartz calls out the selfishness and greed of the capitalist world we live in, in the introduction, describing the world as a system, just like our inner world ends up being a system of parts that exist as sort of coping mechanisms / adaptations that are trying to protect you.
And I love the concept of IFS because it's the most compassionate model of the human psyche that I've come across. The process is meant to help you look at these parts with curiosity and compassion and courage (there's an 8C thing with 8 c-starting words that I won't get into). The transcripts from therapy sessions are highly moving and beautiful in their catharsis. For instance, there's an activist couple where the guy has anger issues kind of connected to injustice - to witness the peeling back of layers or discovering all of the parts involved in that conflict was very emotional for me, as someone who gets really angry at injustice. So the idea is to get to know these parts, figure out their purpose and then gain their trust so that they don't 'take over' in a damaging way, as they usually might do. Sounds woo woo, but delving into my psyche, I felt it as a very real thing.
Also, as someone who was gaslit using Buddhist concepts by an ex, I really loved reading a critique of meditation and many other spirituality practices (like the 'crunchy' spirituality we see now, that feels very eugenics-y, gender essentialist and antivaxxy). And, if before this you would hear me scoff at the ego of people and how much damage ego has done to the world, after reading this, thanks to Schwartz's thoughtfulness on the topic, I am ready not to hate on it anymore with the same intensity, so I definitely came out more compassionate.
The author also discusses racism as a 'legacy burden' in the world and talks about his own struggles with his 'racist part' (tough to access and work with because he was feeling shame about it and tried to 'bury' it). In the last chapter of the book, Schwartz advocates for a world in which we take care of the planet and each other and we build communities of support, through this compassion.
The one thing that really bugged me was his saying that he works with consultancy firms like McKinsey, but I guess I can see how he would perhaps rationalize that, as trying to make the world that he wants happen. Shocking, if true (but probably won't happen one overpaid consultant at a time).
I could gush some more, but already a friend I've gushed to in person said this sounds like a cult, so... Lol, it's not a cult. Insert rant about how CBT feels very capitalistic so of course it would be the most mainstream way of doing therapy, etc etc.
If it wasn't clear until now, I veru much recommend this book!
February 5, 2023
I had a lot of thoughts about this book….I was intrigued at first and then it slowly got weirder and weirder. Lots of psychobabble and ideas not rooted in science. I think my biggest qualm with this book was Dick Schwartz’ absolutely unnecessary and misplaced inclusion of his own political beliefs. As a therapist, I picked up this book to try and learn more about a therapeutic approach/theory, not have a rich white dude get on a soap box about how progressive he is. Seemed performative because caring about the environment, racism, and patriarchy is super hot right now and I just can’t gauge if he’s a genuine person or simply trying to sell books. He presented things in an incredibly biased way and honestly I think he just seems like someone I would be super annoyed by lol. He goes on a whole bit about how so many people “ask how he’s sooo humble in life” and it was the least humble thing ever. Sometimes you just gotta laugh. Schwartz is a bit cuckoo for sure and I did not vibe with him one bit. I consider myself left wing and do NOT like Trump, but Schwartz legitimately tried to argue that if someone likes Trump, then that is just a bad “part” of them that is rooted in trauma - LOL. Wtf?
March 6, 2023
I went into this book very intrigued by the IFS model, and I remain thrilled by the compassionate and dignity-serving approach that it takes. However, I found myself disappointed by the grandiose, strangely political, and often reductive approach Schwartz took in the writing of this book. I went into “No Bad Parts” hoping to find some discussion of the foundational philosophy behind the model, but found instead a primary concern of the practical implications of the model, often involving the “macro” rather than the “micro.” That said, I did enjoy the experiential approach which allowed me to process my resistance and “burdens” in real time. I think the model is a beautiful way to view human suffering and growth, but this book did not convince me that IFS is worth hitching my wagon to, as a psychotherapist. Perhaps I went into the work with the wrong attitude, but I found it to be a preachy effort far too concerned with satisfying a utopian fantasy.
January 19, 2023
I loved some of the messages in the book - that we have parts inside of us that protect us, criticize us, and put out emotional fires, but none of those parts are inherently bad, and that doesn’t mean that we are made up of only one “part”. However, I felt that the exercises in the book (which there were tons of) were written in a way that were unattainable to a layperson - it was very difficult and abstract to access parts of yourself with no training (and little meditation experience generally). Also, I found parts of his ideas abstract - particularly about big picture impact of IFS on the world and politics.
October 28, 2025
I truly think the Internal Family Systems model is what we need more than ever in mental health care and therapy. It is groundbreaking, healing, and wise for its brave acknowledgment of what we all know, deep down: our past does not stay in the past; the echoes of our life's traumas are nonlinear; and we won't grasp or be able to heal from the depth of that impact on ourselves and on how we engage others until we turn inward, thoroughly, lovingly, curiously exploring the interiority of ourselves.
"There’s this idea [...] 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."
"There’s this idea [...] 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."
February 22, 2023
2023 reads, #14. This introductory guide to the psychotherapy process known as "Internal Family Systems" was recommended to me by Gabor Mate, in his own book on the psychotherapy process, The Myth of Normal, in that the two have a lot of overlap and Mate is actually friends with IFS creator Richard Schwartz. His main premise gels with a lot of what we're learning right this moment about the human brain through the latest generations of monitoring equipment, that what we call "ourself" or our "personality" is actually an amalgamation of a bunch of different parts in our mind, and that there's essentially an orchestra conductor we alternatively call "consciousness" or "the soul" that keeps them all in harmony, allowing some pieces to work together and forcing some to stay far apart. Schwartz contends (if I'm reading this correctly) that we have a core being largely determined by our particular DNA that he simply calls Self, inherently sweet and kind and generous because humans are born inherently sweet and kind and generous; but that as parts of that core Self perhaps get hurt or abused or otherwise mistreated in childhood and beyond (in either a small way or deeply, accidentally or on purpose), other parts step up to push that hurt part far away so they can't get hurt anymore (becoming what Schwartz calls an "exile"), with some parts that may for example become combative or engage in destructive behavior in their attempts to shield that exile (becoming "protectors"), and others that might work overtime to maintain a kind of homeostasis that allows the entire system to function (thus becoming "managers").
IFS therapy, then, is the process of examining our outward negative behavior as adults, then doing deep probing to identify what parts they're coming from and why that part thinks it's protecting us by engaging in that negative behavior, discover the exile it's trying to protect by doing so (some pushed so deeply into our unconscious, we forgot they even existed), and see if we maybe can't get these parts to talk to each other so they can understand that the threat is now over, that the protector can stop being a security guard for the exile, and that the exile can come back and be a normal, happy part of our kind and generous Self again. So for one example, like Mate, Schwartz believes that there is no such thing as being "born" with an addiction, or that people are born with "addictive personalities;" this is simply your mind engaging in numbing behavior to try to quiet the pain of a hurt exile, and once you talk with this exile and understand how to overcome the pain, the addictive behavior quickly disappears (which, indeed, we're starting to see happen in big numbers rapidly now that the medical community is starting to take psychedelic-aided therapy seriously, which for many PTSD people apparently is a powerful way to "reboot a defragmentized hard drive" and essentially reset the relationships between these parts back to their healthy defaults).
If this all sounds a bit dodgy, like Schwartz is trying to compare normally functioning brains to those that suffer from multiple personality disorder, you'd be correct, one of the reasons I'm giving this book 4 stars instead of 5. I especially didn't like his chummy relationship with those fucking nutjobs at Esalen and the whole "human potential movement" (where the notoriously intense and now debunked '70s psychodrama weekend workshops known as "EST" came from), and the way he conducts IFS therapy by literally having patients speak in the voice and personality of each of these parts, having them assign each part a specific age, specific gender and specific history, then having the various parts "talk to each other" like a high-school senior doing an awkward monologue from Sybill for their college AP Drama tryout. But that said, it works, and I'm living proof of it, as I participated in all the exercises described in the book and indeed walked away understanding myself and my "bad habits" in much greater detail and with a lot more self-compassion and forgiveness. Like has been the case for me over the years with gratitude journaling and lovingkindness meditation as well, once I was able to just accept that this thing I'm being asked to do is cheesy as fuck, and simply engage with it in the way it was asking me to, I found a lot of very useful things to be learned and incorporated by looking at my complex, multifaceted personality in this way, and a lot of wisdom in the idea of all of us trying to continually work backwards to get back in touch with that goofy, trusting, joke-loving, deeply loving little ten-year-old we used to be, before puberty and sudden new Big Brain Activity turned us into the dysfunctional, neurotic shits we now are. It comes recommended in this spirit, that no matter how practical and common-sense it is, there are still parts here that will make most people roll their eyes, and that it's up to you to make peace with that if you want to get the 100% most out of this book that you can.
IFS therapy, then, is the process of examining our outward negative behavior as adults, then doing deep probing to identify what parts they're coming from and why that part thinks it's protecting us by engaging in that negative behavior, discover the exile it's trying to protect by doing so (some pushed so deeply into our unconscious, we forgot they even existed), and see if we maybe can't get these parts to talk to each other so they can understand that the threat is now over, that the protector can stop being a security guard for the exile, and that the exile can come back and be a normal, happy part of our kind and generous Self again. So for one example, like Mate, Schwartz believes that there is no such thing as being "born" with an addiction, or that people are born with "addictive personalities;" this is simply your mind engaging in numbing behavior to try to quiet the pain of a hurt exile, and once you talk with this exile and understand how to overcome the pain, the addictive behavior quickly disappears (which, indeed, we're starting to see happen in big numbers rapidly now that the medical community is starting to take psychedelic-aided therapy seriously, which for many PTSD people apparently is a powerful way to "reboot a defragmentized hard drive" and essentially reset the relationships between these parts back to their healthy defaults).
If this all sounds a bit dodgy, like Schwartz is trying to compare normally functioning brains to those that suffer from multiple personality disorder, you'd be correct, one of the reasons I'm giving this book 4 stars instead of 5. I especially didn't like his chummy relationship with those fucking nutjobs at Esalen and the whole "human potential movement" (where the notoriously intense and now debunked '70s psychodrama weekend workshops known as "EST" came from), and the way he conducts IFS therapy by literally having patients speak in the voice and personality of each of these parts, having them assign each part a specific age, specific gender and specific history, then having the various parts "talk to each other" like a high-school senior doing an awkward monologue from Sybill for their college AP Drama tryout. But that said, it works, and I'm living proof of it, as I participated in all the exercises described in the book and indeed walked away understanding myself and my "bad habits" in much greater detail and with a lot more self-compassion and forgiveness. Like has been the case for me over the years with gratitude journaling and lovingkindness meditation as well, once I was able to just accept that this thing I'm being asked to do is cheesy as fuck, and simply engage with it in the way it was asking me to, I found a lot of very useful things to be learned and incorporated by looking at my complex, multifaceted personality in this way, and a lot of wisdom in the idea of all of us trying to continually work backwards to get back in touch with that goofy, trusting, joke-loving, deeply loving little ten-year-old we used to be, before puberty and sudden new Big Brain Activity turned us into the dysfunctional, neurotic shits we now are. It comes recommended in this spirit, that no matter how practical and common-sense it is, there are still parts here that will make most people roll their eyes, and that it's up to you to make peace with that if you want to get the 100% most out of this book that you can.
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