Last Updated on December 9, 2024

No bad parts, no bad people

Imagine someone comes to a hypnotist to quit smoking.

The new client has a proposed solution:

“Can you just hypnotize me to never be able to use my right hand again?”

“You see, my right hand is bad. It’s the one that smokes.”

“I’ve been contemplating amputating it — after all, it’s threatening my life!”

Ridiculous, right?

You are your right arm, it’s not separate from you.

But we do something like this to ourselves all the time.

To exile or to love

We often believe that we have a “bad” part of ourselves.

That’s the part of us that creates an unwanted thought, feeling, or behavior.

Then we seek to get rid of that bad part.

Richard Schwartz, creator of Internal Family Systems Therapy and author of No Bad Parts, calls this “exiling” a part.

Like throwing a person out of the tribe, we try to get rid of the bad part.

This is an attempted solution to a problem.

But it’s also the main reason people end up in therapy or coaching in the first place!

You can’t really get rid of a part of yourself.

Wherever you go, there you are.

So in IFS — and in all other effective “parts work” — you begin by welcoming parts, and assuming they have positive intentions.

You cultivate compassion and curiosity for the “bad” parts.

And then inevitably you discover they weren’t actually bad at all.

One of the reasons IFS has become extremely popular lately is because it actually works.

Love works better than fear.

Loving each other

We know love works with healing parts of ourselves, helping us become more whole.

But does love work with other people? 🤔

In the wider world, it seems many people are convinced that the best way to resolve conflicts is with violence.

If we can just kill the “bad” people, then we will finally have peace.

History shows this works about as well as cutting off your arm to quit smoking.

We are all part of one larger “body” of humanity.

As the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius put it:

“…we have come into being to work together like feet, hands, eyelids, or the two rows of teeth in our upper and lower jaws. To work against one another is therefore contrary to nature; and to be angry with another person and turn away from him is surely to work against him.”

~Meditations 2.1, trans. Robin Hard

We can keep committing violence against The Other.

No one can stop us.

They did it to us first, after all!

So we are justified.

(And this is how everyone has justified all violence since the dawn of time.)

But luckily, there is a much better way, the way of Peace and Love.

This way actually leads to healing and connection.

We can start with ourselves, with our families, with our friends.

It’s OK if you’re not ready to love your “enemies” just yet.

We all have limits to our empathy, room to grow.

Me included.

But there’s a reason all the great wise teachers throughout history taught forgiveness and love.

Because it works!

How might you be unusually kind to yourself and others this week?

Take care,

 

 

 

~Duff
(they/them)

P.S. If you want to practice being unusually kind to yourself and others, I invite you to join my weekly coaching group The Joy of Doing. Participants report large increases in self-compassion!