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Hello and welcome to our No Bad Parts Book Club and read along together. I'm so excited that you all are here to join me. We have a lot of new people joining me this time, and so I just briefly wanted to discuss the format our book club has taken in the past.

The first thing that's really important to know is it's okay if you don't have the time to read along with us right now. Those of us who are not reading along will still find a lot of rich value in the discussion, and in each post I'll be breaking down the chapter and discussing it. So even if you haven't read it, you'll be able to listen and take in the material. Of course, you are more than welcome to read along, but I know that everyone reads at a different pace and we all have different levels of capacity in our lives, so you are welcome here, even if you will not be reading along, but just listening along. Each week I will discuss a chapter of the book and break it down a little bit of my viewpoint as a therapist, and how we might apply this in our personal lives. That will be the bulk of our book club.

You are welcome to leave questions or comments on each post, and I will respond to your questions, either in the comments or on our next session. I will record a response to your question. We'll also have a private chat on Substack that's for paid subscribers only, which is where we can discuss as we're reading or ask questions or share curiosities that pop up…or share interesting TikToks we saw- we can share anything we want to there.

Once or twice during this period, we will have what I call like a pop up fireside chat, where I'll give you about a week's notice that we're going to have a live meeting, and then we'll all pop on zoom together, discuss. I'll answer questions, share curiosities, whatever we might be drawn to in that hour. We will have live meetings that usually take place at 6 p.m. eastern time, which I know will not work for everyone in all time zones, so they will be recorded and then shared on Substack.

This book has 11 chapters and we'll see how we go with the chapters. Usually I do one chapter a week just because there's a lot of rich material to talk about. But sometimes we might do two chapters just depending on how I'm feeling with the content. And this book club is for my paid subscribers, so if you're a free subscriber and you'd like to join, you can upgrade to the paid membership. It is $5 a month, and that helps support the time that I use to put together these book club posts and other parts of my work.

For those of you who are new here, we just completed our book club on the book about NARM- Neuro Affective Relational Model called The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma. Because I am a therapist who practices NARM and uses an IFS lens, you will hear me make references to NARM and how NARM works in relationship to IFS. If you would like to learn more about NARM and how that might work with IFS as a paid subscriber, you have access to the entire archive so you can go back and listen to all the chapters that I've recorded about the NARM book called The Practical Guide for healing Developmental Trauma.

So right off the bat, that mono mind paradigm is that idea that we have just one mind or just one consciousness inside of our mind. And Richard Schwarz suggests that we actually all have these different parts inside of us or these sub minds. And this can be really confusing, especially if we have heard of things like multiple personality disorder, which is now called dissociative identity disorder. A lot of times people will think, well, does this mean that I have dissociative identity disorder? Of course, I'm not here to diagnose anyone, but for most of us, the answer to that question is no.

Thinking of these different sub minds or parts of us is a way to understand the different experiences we all have inside of us. So as he uses the example of kind of like that classic angel and devil on the shoulder, one part of us saying go for it and another part of us saying, don't you dare, you can kind of think of that as two separate parts or two separate voices inside of your mind. And so IFS relies mainly on this idea of parts that develop at different times in our lives. If you've seen the Inside Out movies, then you're familiar. They use IFS, Internal Family Systems, as a model for those movies to really help differentiate those parts. In Inside Out, the parts have emotion names in IFS. We don't necessarily assign emotions the names, because we know each part of us can experience a wide range of emotions, but I think Inside Out gives you a great idea of what it's like to have those different parts in our mind that are trying to run the show.

He does a really important and big thing here in the first chapter of laying out this idea of willpower and shame that is so pervasive in the American culture. And if you joined us for the NARM Book Club, you know how much we talked about this idea of shame, and it has this idea that we should be able to manage everything through willpower: pull yourself up by your bootstraps all the time, and anything else is part of your kind of like your…evil impulse. And so you need to keep that evil impulse under control with your drill sergeant or inner critic selves. But most of us find that the harder we try to get rid of these parts of us that are not “willpower,” the more they fight back. And this is why the self-help industry is $1 billion industry. If you've watched any of my content and you know that, I kind of have ongoing criticism of the Atomic Habits book, and if the Atomic Habits book works for you, that is wonderful… But books like that take this idea that you can change your habits and make it really, really simple, as if we all should be able to do it.

What happens is I get a lot of people coming into therapy saying, well, I did all of these things in the book and I still couldn't stick to my habits. And that comes back to this idea of willpower and shame. We should be able to stick to what the Atomic Habits book says or whatever other self-help book says. And if we can't, it's because there's something wrong with us. And so we criticize ourselves more. And I don't know about you, but if someone's criticizing me, do you think I’m more or less likely to do the habit change? Less likely. Right. So we get stuck in these endless internal battles of trying to willpower and pressure our way into change, and IFS offers a different viewpoint of things. It's really important to know that it doesn't mean there's not room for wanting to set habits or make change in our lives, but that we all have parts that want different things. And some of those things might be things that are not in pursuit of what is good for us or what we really want. We might have parts who want things that are really bad for us, and that's not because they are bad parts, but because there's something they're trying to accomplish with that desire.

Many traditions, whether religious or philosophical or cultural, teach us that we have this single mind, and to control this single mind, we have to overcome our thoughts and overcome our emotions. And what that does is it sets us up to constantly attack ourselves when we can't control our thoughts and can control our emotions. And it really strengthens that inner critic part. Certain types of therapies and spiritual practices can reinforce this with this idea that to be successful in life or to achieve enlightenment or whatever it may be, that we have to control more tightly; grip more tightly onto our thoughts. But in IFS, we're challenging this, and we're suggesting that the thoughts and emotions and body sensations (I'm going to throw that in there) that we experience come from different parts of us. So rather than having one mind that is just throwing these thoughts at us that we need to try to control, we have these different parts that have developed in different parts of our lives to try to keep us safe. Rather than viewing them as obstacles that need to be controlled through habit change and planners and spreadsheets, instead we view them as parts of us that need to be heard and loved and taken care of.

Now, mindfulness or observing is a really big part of IFS- not to try to shut down our emotions and thoughts or to stop our thoughts, which oftentimes mindfulness has gotten to be this idea that we need to stop our thoughts- but rather to observe and be curious and notice. So if you go back and listen to any of my posts about the NARM model, for those of you who weren't there with us, you'll hear me talk nonstop about observing and noticing. Because if we can observe and notice with curiosity and neutrality, then we have the opportunity to intervene, do something different, or show up for these parts in a way that they have never been shown up for before. So our goal in observing isn't to push these parts away, but to connect with and support the healing of these different parts of us. So we're not trying to quiet the mind, but rather to bring them in, listen to them, and nurture them. And that as we do that, they can express what they've been holding all along. Then, they will lessen or shift into strengths.

Doctor Schwartz really shares his curiosity and learning here as a therapist, where he used to subscribe to the sort of mono mind idea of just trying to control and change our behaviors by changing our thoughts. But then he started to notice that a lot of his patients were sharing these different parts of them. Some of them were helpful, some of them may have been enacting harm to the patient, but all of them were protective and shaped by that person's past experiences. And when he was able to be with the clients and allow these parts to share their stories and how they might have been frozen in time from a younger part that experienced trauma or difficult experiences, then things started to shift a little bit. Then the part started to be less destructive and less harmful and start to take on different roles. And so even a behavior as they share in this book, like self-harm, could be part of one of those internal parts of us that is trying to protect us.

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