Jasmine St. John ’s Reviews > No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model > Status Update

One central tenet of IFS at work: going to war against inner beliefs or emotions of any kind will often backfire. Listening and healing them is the better way to go, all while relating to them with firm yet loving Self-led discipline until they unburden.

When you see through clear eyes of your Self that someone is doing something hurtful to your parts, you don’t have to turn them into a monster. That clarity empowers you to see that their actions arise out of their own hurt, and you also can better see without confusion the damage they do to your parts. This means you have the courage and confidence to set boundaries with them in an effective and very forceful way.

Exiles don’t trust our Self & they & protectors who try to get them to calm down are looking outside of us to get what they need. When we encounter a person who resembles the profile exiles have of the ideal protector, lover, they feel elated infatuated & relieved. Through positive transference parts put distorted images on people who can’t help but disappoint. Then comes negative transference from angry protectors.

When you realize that you’re not the insecure selfish parts that
you’ve identified with for so long, but instead that you’re this Self
that’s curious, calm, confident, compassionate, creative, clear,
courageous, joyful, generous, and playful—and that your essence is
connected to some kind of larger universal principle—you feel happy.

The Four Basic 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.

Protective parts blend because they believe they have to manage situations in your life. They don’t trust your Self to do it. If your father hit you as a child and you weren’t able to stop him your parts lost trust in Self’s ability to protect instead came to believe they have to do it. They carry the responsibility for protecting you despite the fact that they are not equipped to do so.

They can tell you the exact traumatic moment these emotions & beliefs attached to them & they can tell you where they carry what seem to them to be these foreign objects in/on their bodies. “It’s a fireball in my gut”/“a huge weight on my shoulders”. These foreign feelings are "burdens". It turns out that burdens are powerful organizers of a part’s experience/activity—in the same way a virus organizes a computer.

The harder we try to get rid of emotions/thoughts the stronger they become. This is because parts fight back against being shamed/exiled. When we dominate them w/ punitive self-discipline we become tyrannized by a rigid controlling inner drill sergeant. The exiled (bingeing, raging etc) parts will seize momentary weakness to break out & take over to be on guard against any situations that might trigger those parts.

Some parts seemed easier to dialogue with than others. Some felt riskier and downright threatening to embrace. That each part, however harrowing its acting-out, however hidden, confusing, or painful, had the best of intentions and held helpful messages for me. Each part, whether an exile, manager or protector, had profoundly kind and wise insights for me from my Self, if I but took the time to be there with them.