A desire to understand is wisdom;
desiring a result is greed.

Sayadaw U Tejaniya

It’s June 20, 2022. As usual, I’d arrived at my therapist’s office in a rush. We talk about feelings. Feelings I’ve had for as long as I could remember. Feeling different. Disconnected. Feeling like a fraud. A deep, disorienting sadness.

These were sensitive topics for me, but I was trying too hard to do therapy correctly. Asking clever questions. Speaking carefully. Thinking a bit too much. That doesn’t get you very far. It’s not really talk therapy. It’s not even proper talking. The performance prevents anything real to percolate. You’d be literally better off talking to a tree.

My therapist changed tack. She asked the part of me that was blocking her questions to sit (imaginarily) on a (real) empty chair and tell her why it was acting like that. Why was it so defensive? And what in particular was it protecting?

When I spoke as that part, which we named The Controller, I repeated the same evasive, critical stance I had taken before. The crucial distinction was that it was now a separate part of me. Before the exercise, I was identified with it. I was it. By naming, placing and conversing with it, it was now a separate part. It had its own form. It had moved from subject, to object.

Unofficially, this was parts work, usually associated with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy. In No Bad Parts, Richard C. Schwartz rejects a “mono mind paradigm”, dividing up our interior world into many parts or “little inner beings who are trying their best to keep you safe.” There’s different types of parts, like Protectors, “the parts of us usually running our lives” and Exiles which “we have tried to bury”, burdened with difficult “emotions, beliefs and memories”. There’s also the Self, which is like our mature and ‘spontaneously compassionate’ side, that we all access once other less healthy parts move aside.

When we talk to, listen to, and gain the trust of these different parts, we can restore peace and order inside us. Exiled parts can emerge from the shadows when we no longer find them disgusting or dangerous. Harsh, defensive parts like an inner critic can relax. By talking to The Controller, I learned a little about what it cares about (identifying threats), but also that it’s tired of this job. This attitude, this protective stance started to sound like an extremely expensive insurance policy, written for imaginary risks.

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Outside a police academy, plainclothes officers whoop and horse around like new graduates. Two run straight at each other and collide, bouncing off unhurt like stuntmen. A policeman tells me they’re practicing to be criminals.
Dream – August 5, 2025

No Bad Parts, written by IFS founder Richard C. Schwartz, is a decent, slightly bland introduction to the theory. But like a book about basketball, it’s probably better to start practicing. Schwartz recommends finding an IFS trained therapist, which is a good start, although any mental health practitioner would be able to walk through a similar exercise to mine that I shared.

Since most people probably don’t have access to a therapist, or the concentration required to sit quietly and listen to themselves, it’s worth experimenting with other approaches. For example, if you have a practice of recording your dreams, you might consider thinking of dream characters as parts. Dreams have no need for conscious visualization or monk-like concentration. All you need is a bit of memory.

Dreams are naturally vivid and emotive, effortlessly delivery images and potent symbols for you to review each morning. A dream of a meeting with a confused, miserable teenager might be showing you an Exile that you banished years ago for being too embarrassing. A dream of policeman, horsing around in plain clothes might signal the relaxing of a habitually judgmental attitude.

Parts work uses different language than Jung, but the thought is the same. It doesn’t matter if you recognize a part in a dream or in an empty chair. What matters is getting free of the habitual identification, with the confidence and assurance that “you will never find anything in the unconscious that will not be useful and good when it is made conscious and brought to the right level.”¹

1. Johnson, Robert A. 1989. Inner Work ↩︎