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Welcome back book club pals! I had such a lovely time being live with you a couple of weeks ago for our little fireside chat, and we will definitely do one more while we are in this process together. There's something just so fun about getting to see each other's faces, hear each other's voices, and connect lives. So thank you for being there. If you couldn't be there, no worries at all. Thanks for watching the recording and sending me your thoughts. I always really value that.

Chapter four is a really important chapter because it's going to talk a little bit about systems theory, which is such an important thing to understand when we're understanding ourselves, our internal experiences, and how we react with the world around us. As always, just a reminder with any of this exploration or any of these exercises, it's normal that parts of you might feel challenged or activated. Some of your parts might not be ready to trust you, engage with you, or engage with this process. And that's okay. And that's why I always encourage us to take this one little drop at a time. So anything that we're learning here or any of the exercises, you don't have to feel any pressure to do them or to dive in. You can just be curious. And if you feel resistant to doing them or activated by them, it gives you an opportunity to be curious about which part of you or which parts of you are coming up.

It also doesn't mean that we have to avoid activation. If you try on some of the exercises in the book and you notice activation, that can be really scary to those of us who maybe didn't have anyone with us when we were scared or nervous or activated when we were younger. It's also cultivating to know that it's okay to feel a little bit of activation, and if you can access enough of the Self to be with the activation, even if it's just for a moment, you're also cultivating the understanding to the rest of your parts that you, the Self, the adult consciousness in NARM terms, can handle that activation. That's different than when we're children, when we're young and in events happened where things feel really scary and no one is with us; that feels like a threat to our lives, because we're totally relying on people around us to take care of ourselves and to make sure things are okay. If they're not doing that, our nervous system and brain are going to signal that we're unsafe. So we actually will feel terror when there's activation. But when we are adults, we know that we can handle a little bit of activation, and that can be part of the process too.

So I encourage you to be curious, track and notice what's happening. And if it's not the time for the activity, it's not the time. But maybe there's just a little experiment. Could I stay with this activation for five seconds more than I normally do? And what happens? What parts emerge? What do they have to say? How do I feel? There’s always an opportunity for more curiosity. So I say that specifically as the exercise around working with the challenging protector was there from the last chapter, to just be gentle, be neutral, be curious; and if you can't access any of those, that's okay. You can come back into the space, come back into connecting with the space around you, and come back into neutrality when you can.

In chapter four, Dr. Schwartz is exploring this idea of systems thinking, which is part of what helped him develop this model. And in systems thinking, it's really a framework to allow us to see the different patterns and relationships, the ways that our inner world engage both internally and with the world around us. So a lot of times I'll think of systems theory as gears, and gears are all together with each other. So when one gear turns, the other gear turns, and we don't know which way the gear is going to turn necessarily. So we don't know if we try working with a challenging protector, for example, if another part might get more scared or it might calm down, or it might trust us more, or it might trust us less; we don't know that if we engage with our parts and we start to shift, if people around us might shift, they will. Because when we change, we change the systems that we are in and we don't know if they will change for the better or for the worse. That's kind of part of being in a system that we don't know. We can't necessarily predict how things are going to change and same internally, but we can be curious and observe.

It's really a bigger picture way of noticing we don't exist in isolation. Our parts don't exist in isolation. We are all part of a bigger system. And that this perspective really came about when biologists were studying cells and they couldn't really figure out how they formed these living organisms, and they started to come into understanding that it was a system where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And such a big part of Dr. Schwartz's work that influenced the creation of internal family systems was this idea that we do not exist outside of the context of the systems that we are in, so slapping a diagnosis on someone often ignores the context of their systems, of their symptoms, and how these different ways that they behave-like maybe harming themselves- actually serves them within the systems that they exist in internally and externally. So we don't want to just reduce our experiences to a “symptom” or a behavior problem, but rather to start to understand how they fit into our internal systems and the systems around us, our relational patterns with our Self and our relational patterns with the world and our family and everyone around us. This really allowed him to start to understand that we have this internal system. And that always brings us back to the context that everything we do is in the context of our brain and our body and our nervous system.

If you've listened to me in other ways, you've heard me talk about predictive patterns in the brain and that those form based on past experiences to help us predict what's going to happen in the present and what's going to happen in the future. And that's really, really important to understand, because those predictive patterns are formed based on the systems in which we live. If we learn that every time we have an emotion, we're going to be punished or sent to our room or yelled at in the system that we are in, then we start to develop an internal system where when we'll shut down emotions; we'll just hold them down, we'll shut them down, we'll go up into the intellectualization/rationalization. Or if we feel an emotion, we'll start to criticize ourselves before anyone else can't. Those aren't just behavior problems or internal thought patterns; those are systemic ways of being within the context of the system that you're in. Those are developmental patterns to respond to the environment or system that you grew up in. So when we start to understand our experience as part of the greater system, both internally and externally, then we understand that our symptoms are behaviors- the things we don't like about ourselves- actually make a lot of sense in the context of our system to keep us safe and keep us in connection with those around us.

There are some examples that Schwartz shares in this chapter- if you haven't yet had a chance to read them- about a client who is suffering from bulimia, and this internal cycle where one of the critic parts would trigger some feelings of worthlessness, and then the bingeing would come in as a coping mechanism, which would then activate the critic further and perpetuate the loop. So that's part of the system, right? Where the inner critic part is triggering feelings of worthlessness, then the behavior comes out that we might say, like, oh, you need to stop the binging, right? You need to stop the purging. You need to stop doing these things. But in this example, we can understand that it's part of the bigger system. If we work with the critic, we work with that part that is activating some of these events. And we can understand the critic is there to keep us safe in some way based on our past experiences. Then when that slows down and it stops triggering feelings of worthlessness, the behavior of the bingeing and purging may be less available. We might want to do it less, or we might not feel the urge to do it. I always want to be really clear when talking about something like this, that everyone's experience is different and we have to treat people where they are. So we have to understand that not everybody who is struggling with an eating disorder or self-harm or anything like that can jump right into doing this work. There might need to be some stabilization work first, so please know that you can honor your own process. Work with your own therapist. These are just examples to help understand how these systems work.

Speaking of the systems that we're in, Dr. Schwartz was very curious about this idea that we as humans are bad. We are, at our core, bad. Civilization is bad, and that there's just this really thin layer, really thin veneer that protects us from our core primitive, selfish instincts. And we see a lot of that in society where we are so punitive toward other people, and we treat people as if they are bad, if they do things that we consider bad. For example, the war on drugs: that there's an idea that if you use drugs, you're bad and you must be punished by being put in prison or treated really horribly. And that really influences the way we see ourselves and the way we see people around us when we think that they are bad. Instead of understanding human behavior as a way that we try to protect ourselves, the way that we try to keep ourselves in connection with other people, and a way that we try to cope or survive an internal feeling that is really unsafe, or an external feeling that is really unsafe. And this is where we get the name of the book, No Bad Parts. What if we didn't have to see parts of ourselves as bad? Even as we take in information from the world that says, if you do this, you're bad. If you do this, you're not trying hard enough. You know, we have books like Atomic Habits that are like, well, you just need to learn how to access your discipline. And if you can't do this, there's something wrong with you. It's like everything in our society boils down to, well, if you can't do this good thing or the thing that everybody else is doing, there must be something wrong with you and you must be bad.