You Don’t Have Any “Bad” Parts
Written by Amanda Trimm, MFT
How many times have you experienced an emotion and said “this part of me is bad?” How many times have you done things during tense situations that you didn’t understand, or that caused yourself or somebody else harm, or that made you feel embarrassed, anxious, or sad?
Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems model of therapy tells us that we are all made up of sub-personalities, or the varying aspects of our personality. The sub-personalities include: exiles, the parts of us that take on and represent trauma and pain; and protectors, the parts of us that run our daily lives or try to protect us from exiles when they get loud. Difficult emotions feel not good, so they must be bad, right? And parts that cause us to feel these not good emotions must be bad, right?
Parts that use strategies resulting in hurt to ourselves or others are seen as bad. Parts that elicit difficult emotions within us are seen as bad. In reality, emotions are neither good nor bad. They just are. Calling them bad doesn’t serve us. Similarly, labeling these aspects of ourselves as bad doesn’t serve us either. We don’t want to dwell in difficult emotions forever, and we certainly don’t want to continue to do things that cause harm; however, labeling our parts as bad is adjacent to labeling ourselves as bad (if we haven’t already done so). If we see ourselves as bad, that makes all the good things we want seem that much further away.
When we come to understand why our parts do what they do, and when we start to accept that they are trying to help us in the way they believe is best, we can come to appreciate these parts of ourselves that we always feared, dismissed, or disliked. And when we start to change the way we relate to those parts, that’s when transformation happens.
Change “bad person” to “dysfunctional behaviors.” Change “bad parts” to “understandable survival strategies that saved me at one or more points in my life.” Through therapy, learn how these parts came to be, and why they do what they do. Learn how to invite those parts to the table. Learn how to lead them. These perspective shifts might just change your life.