People are made of parts. Literally.
Parts are bundles of brainstuff with a degree of autonomy; they’re also called subpersonalities, ego states, subselves, facets, aspects, personas, Agents, and a variety of other terms.
Said more simply: parts are autonomous pieces of us. Each part is one aspect or side of the person they exist within, but parts can also be treated as their own entities. We are not any one of our parts; we are all of them and the thing watching them.
Parts can have internal appearances, ages, genders, etc. of their own. Parts can also have their own motivations, beliefs, feelings, thoughts, and so on. What we often think of as our thoughts, feelings, etc. come from our parts interacting with each other.
Parts have more than just the appearance of being their own entities. Parts have their own Selves:
Parts have parts. Parts have a structure like the structure of a person. They have a Self and parts, and their parts come in two varieties: protectors and exiles. This becomes very important clinically when dealing with dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder) because in these people, where the walls between parts are so strong, you’re always talking to one part or another — you can’t yet talk to an overarching Self. And then you work with the parts within that part, and sometimes the parts within the part within the part.
Robert Falconer, “The Others Within Us”
According to IFS, all people have parts. What differs between us is how well we can recognize the presence of our parts and how our parts relate to each other.
Burdens
When placed under stress or trauma, parts will step up and do whatever it takes to get through the situation. This might involve taking on maladaptive beliefs, stepping into extreme roles, or otherwise doing things they might not want to do. Burdens are beliefs, stuck emotions, and pain originating from past experiences.
A major focus of IFS is working with parts to release these burdens. Doing so allows parts to step into new roles that benefit the system. Burdens are typically released
Types of Parts
IFS typically divides parts into a few types. These aren’t absolute categories, and it’s not always useful to use them, but it can be good to know about these categories when trying to understand a part’s motives.
Exiles
Exiles are parts that have been pushed away from the rest of the system. They may hold painful memories or emotions, or they may act in ways that the system perceives as unsafe. In many cases, they’re stuck in the past or unaware that time has passed since their exile.
Protectors
Exiles tend to show up with big emotions, and other parts may react to their presence by trying to push them back down or distract from their pain. These parts are protectors.
Protectors fall into two main categories. Managers try to prevent the pain in the first place, often by attempting to control outer life. They might be people pleasers, critics, or otherwise attempt to make sure nothing brings up an exile’s pain.
Firefighters, on the other hand, respond to an exile’s pain by attempting to escape or avoid it. They might turn to an addiction to numb the pain, make impulsive decisions to try to feel better, or directly push back against the exile’s presence.
Some protectors are also exiles. Their methods of protecting you may seem dangerous enough to the rest of the system for them to be exiled. This doesn’t stop them from trying to protect you; any time they’re able, they’ll still step in and do their best to avoid or block an exile’s pain.
No Bad Parts
IFS believes that there are no bad parts. No matter how disruptive their behaviors are, parts are trying to help you. Yes, even that part. Somewhere, there’s a positive intention behind their actions. It may not be immediately obvious, but working with a part will eventually show that they mean well (and if it doesn’t, that may be an Unattached Burden- see Robert Falconer’s “The Others Within Us”).
We were all raised in what I’ll call the mono-mind belief system—the idea that you have one mind, out of which different thoughts and emotions and impulses and urges emanate. That’s the paradigm I believed in, too, until I kept encountering clients who taught me otherwise. Because the mono-mind view is so ubiquitous and assumed in our culture, we never really question the truth of it. I want to help you take a look—a second look—at who you really are. I’m going to invite you to try on this different paradigm of multiplicity that IFS espouses and consider the possibility that you and everybody else is a multiple personality. And that is a good thing.
I’m not suggesting that you have Multiple Personality Disorder (now called Dissociative Identity Disorder), but I do think that people with that diagnosis are not so different from everybody else. What are called alters in those people are the same as what I call parts in IFS, and they exist in all of us. The only difference is that people with Dissociative Identity Disorder suffered horrible abuse and their system of parts got blown apart more than most, so each part stands out in bolder relief and is more polarized and disconnected from the others.
In other words, all of us are born with many sub-minds that are constantly interacting inside of us. This is in general what we call thinking, because the parts are talking to each other and to you constantly about things you have to do or debating the best course of action, and so on. Remembering a time when you faced a dilemma, it’s likely you heard one part saying, “Go for it!” and another saying, “Don’t you dare!” Because we just consider that to be a matter of having conflicted thoughts, we don’t pay attention to the inner players behind the debate.
Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts, 2021
See also: Agents, Turtles All The Way Down