no bad parts:

The Magic of Meeting Your Inner Child

Have you ever had an experience where you reacted to a conflict or were triggered by a situation and it made you feel like a little kid again? In that moment you feel overwhelmed and small, and vulnerable to whatever is happening. Certain people in your life can take you into this state, and you wonder ‘Who was that acting that way? I don’t recognize myself sometimes,’ when you reflect back on your behaviour later on.

Many people have now come across the work of Richard Schwartz, who wrote ‘No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model’. Schwartz built on the work of psychodynamic wayse of understanding the self, and described an experience of turning inside to get to know the parts of us that are still ‘living’ inside us, deeply affected by what we went through as children or at other times in life. These parts tend to take over under stress, and in those moments it’s as if we literally become our child parts and act as if we were them again.

The reason Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) has become so popular is that many people have found it to be an extremely effective way to get to know the parts of ourselves that are usually a bit elusive, hidden under the surface of our awareness most of the time, but ready to pop up and act when we feel threatened.

In sessions with folks I support in therapy, they have described the experience of meeting inner parts as ‘magic’. I think this might be because when they are guided to look inwards, the parts they encounter have clear voices, clear beliefs and clear unmet needs that are asking to be witnessed and responded to. People experience it as a very real practice in self-love, as we create room for unhealed parts to be acknowledged and offered care and compassion.