Pragmatic Humanism or IFS Part I: Sympathy and Righteous Anger are Not Bad Parts

In this piece, I try to describe the Internal Family Systems model of clinical trauma counseling, aka "IFS" - a model of the individual and process of healing that grants that every individual is a Self that has many parts, and no parts are bad. Even though the parts are all like individual persons, and it is important to focus on them one at a time, and, as the Self, try to get to know each part as an individual, the parts are not always eager to interact, because some of them have been chronically ignored or even shamed by the Self. Still, by practicing and remembering the point that no parts are bad, the Self can begin to help each part feel integrated into the whole system and begin to learn and grow without having to react in ways it might have learned in childhood. This is a helpful model for growing as individuals, but we can also use the model to think about the value in taking a compassionate approach to politics and to how we understand the different parts of our larger, global family system. This episode does not go into enough detail about IFS or the metaphor for my taste, so I am splitting it into parts, and will continue touching on the topic in future installments.