No Bad Parts

A number of folks in my meditation group had mentioned Richard Schwartz's No Bad Parts, and since I've actually already done a little bit of IFS therapy, I figured an overview of the modality's methodology written by its inventor could be an interesting follow up on that experience.  Turns out, the book isn't aimed to give a full theoretical account of the IFS methodology, but instead to bring its basic ideas to a wider audience.  In other words, it falls into the pop-psychology, self-help genre.  As a result, I still feel like I don't completely understand IFS as a philosophy, and I still have lots of questions about how to apply it to my own psyche that I imagine only a professional therapist could answer.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it.  It outlines a simple and relatively easy to follow method for investigating your inner constitution, and it lays out an easily graspable world-view that is eminently compatible with the non-dual interpretation of Buddhism I've been interested in lately.

The basic trope of IFS is pretty simple.  You dramatize your inner life by treating your various thoughts and emotional reactions as if they belonged to other characters living in your head -- your parts.  Schwartz of course believes that this is much more than a mere metaphor, that we all suffer from something like multiple personality disorder.  But I don't see why one would need to opine about the ontological status of these parts to use the method, and indeed, I think that the parts he described really only exist as useful metaphors.  Of course, I believe that "useful metaphor" may in fact be the sole category of existence, so this may not mark any substantial disagreement.  The only important thing is to allow these parts to have enough reality that you perceive them as independent characters who are not identical to "you".  

The IFS methodology has you look for these parts in and around your body by examining various physical manifestations of the emotions associated with the part (eg. pain in your neck associated with a chronically tense inner critic).  Once you've identified a part, you enter into dialog with it.  What are its concerns and emotions?  How does it feel about your other parts? How does it feel about you?  This might at first sound pretty woo-woo, but like I say, I don't think it the methodology suffers from treating these "parts" as simple heuristic devices.  In fact, I find it easier to approach this work of identifying parts from the perspective of meditation.  For example, Shinzen Young encourages us to examine our mental images, our emotional bodily sensations, and our mental talk as a set of spaces with his See/Hear/Feel framework.  Practicing his techniques greatly improved my ability to notice all the various 'voices in my head' -- some of  which speak in images, some through emotion tied to a particular bodily region, and some of whom simply blah, blah, blah, end end quote.  Similarly, a number of traditions use the concept of spacious awareness to explore our ability to not identify with our thoughts.  You can instead imagine yourself as the space in which thoughts take place, just as the clouds 'take place' in the sky, or the waves in the ocean.  When you start paying attention to your inner life in these ways, you not only awaken to the fact that there's an awful lot going on in there, but you begin to be able to classify what's happening and locate it in a larger space as well.  The crucial thing is simply to create a separation between events in your inner space and 'you'.  With this distancing, it becomes much easier to see repeating patterns of thoughts, images, emotions, and voices when they occur.  I would submit that Schwartz's parts are none other than these repeating patterns.

Once you've found some parts, what do you with them?  On a practical level, you pull up a chair and invite them to talk.  But the initial goal of this conversation is to examine how the parts relate to form your inner system.  IFS has a pretty clear framework for classifying parts.  Basically, there are two possible roles for a part: exile or protector.  Exiles are parts you don't want to look at.  All the examples of these that Schwartz gives in the book are wounded or needy parts of you that resulted from some early childhood trauma.  Protectors are parts that keep your exiles hidden away so that you don't have to be re-traumatized by looking at them. Protectors come in two flavors.  Managers are, as it were, chronic protectors, that organize your world and your reactions so that you and your exiles never meet.  You might say that they scan the contents of experience looking for trigger warnings.  Firefighters, as the name implies, are acute protectors who show up to minimize the damage when some exile has already been triggered.  Most of our obvious problems result from the maladaptive behavior of our firefighters.  We get angry, we dissociate, we get drunk, etc ...  Firefighters cope with fires as best they can and don't worry about the consequences, because, well, they killed your fucking car!

Once you've gotten to know your parts and classified them, the ultimate goal of IFS therapy is to 1) separate yourself from your protectors, 2) get your protectors to relax enough to let you talk to your exiles, 3) get your exiles to trust you enough to tell you what trauma they suffered, 4) soothe these now unburdened exiles and credibly promise that your not going to let this sort of thing happen to them again, and finally, 5) live happily ever after, together with your parts as one big family -- naturally with 'you' as head of household.

While I'm no psychologist, this therapeutic trajectory doesn't seem all that novel.  Basically it seems like a version of the oldest psychotherapeutic playbook out there -- treat your problems as symptoms of an underlying disease, as psychological coping mechanisms that seek to protect you from some trauma (presumed to have occurred in early childhood).  Cure the disease by reenacting it, or at least laying it bare to conscious inspection.  Methodologically speaking, perhaps treating these coping mechanisms as independent parts, as little people in their own right, is a fairly new idea.  Though again, it seems to me that Freud's emphasis on myth and dramatization would represent a precedent for this line of thinking.  This is not to argue that the repetition of an idea makes it any less important; all the great spiritual truths are clichés because they've been around for so long.  The important thing is simply to ask what kind of life you will lead if you follow this methodology.

Schwartz makes it clear that he himself has explicitly spiritual aims for IFS.  He would like to see us follow this methodology so as to become "self-led systems".  In other words, he identifies the 'you' that I have been putting in scare quotes this whole time with our "true self".  He conceives this self as distinct from, and bigger than, what we usually refer to as our ego.  With this self as our leader, we can learn to love and value and harmonize all our parts (hence the title).  In other words, the self, in Schwartz's terminology, is not merely a part, but some sort of integration of parts, some sort of space in which parts can interact in a healthy way.  It is curios, calm, confident, compassionate, creative, clear, courageous, and connected (to list Schwartz's eight C's).  In the end, it is a bigger, better, more open and more caring version of our everyday self.  

As I mentioned before, this conception of who we are (or can become) is very close to the Buddhist idea of non-self.  Strangely, while Schwartz is generally positively inclined towards meditation he either doesn't see or doesn't want to draw our attention to this very strong anti-parallel.  After reading David Loy though, we know enough not to be fooled by this self vs. not-self debate; he convincingly explains how these opposed terms represent different descriptions of one and the same non-dual experience.  Schwartz describes the self in almost exactly the same glowing terms that non-dualists like Michael Taft use to describe vast spacious awareness.  Or perhaps the better comparison would be to a contemporary advaitist like Maharshi who explicitly used the term Self.  

These comparisons also highlight the final spiritual aims that Schwartz has for IFS.  When non-dualists talk about Self or Non-Self, they are talking about a field of awareness larger than the individual.  Whatever they call it, they are talking about some absolute and unlimited fabric in which our individual selves are enfolded.  Which is to say that this individuality we cling to is ultimately illusory, and that the point of these meditations is to bring us to a sense of boundless connectedness.  While Schwartz may not go quite this far (he is a therapist, not a guru, after all) he does devote the end of the book to the ways in which the IFS methodology can help us to more compassionately connect with the world and open up to what he calls the SELF.  Once we have embraced the complexity of our microcosm, we become more aware of and compassionate towards our own parts, we can begin to recognize these parts in others.  We can even begin to look at society as a whole as a sort of self that we, in turn, are parts of.  

While there are are some good ideas here -- like compassionately exploring our own inner racists rather than exiling them -- I feel like Schwartz's writing begins to get a little mushy and nebulous at this point.  It's too tempting to just repeatedly apply the same logic of Self and Parts at higher and higher levels, as if the whole world were a neatly nesting series of Russian dolls.  The problem with this way of thinking is not its dalliance with the mystical interconnectedness of all things.  The problem is that, like Ken Wilber, it tends to picture this connectedness as a strictly hierarchical great chain of being.  But the unfolding of awareness is surely much more like a tangled web than a series of concentric circles.  There's little doubt that local hierarchies (or holarchies) are an important principle in nature's self-organization.  But as the example of racism illustrates, my parts do not belong to or impact me alone.  They are formed in the context of a larger society alongside the sense of self that they become parts of.  Various local hierarchies become entangled in a global rhizome.  I distrust any totalizing spiritual system that suggests there is a 'largest' or 'most important' level we should focus on to the exclusion of all else.  This shortcut to 'the highest' seems like a simulacrum of enlightenment designed to trap the unwary.  It's unfair to accuse Schwartz of taking this route, especially seeing as how he takes care to end the book with a chapter on embodiment.  However, are there points where he perhaps teeters?