📚 No Bad Parts Book Club - Weeks FIVE
- Jul 4
- 5 min read
The End 🎉
June 29–July 5 | Chapters 10–Conclusion (pp. 159–190)
Well…
We made it.
When all of this started, I genuinely thought 5–7 pages a day would feel like a relaxed, easy, enjoyable pace.
But that assumed an engaging read. 😅
Instead, this book felt like a bit of a battle for me to get through.
There are parts of IFS that I value.
I use parts work in a lot of my individual work with clients.
I absolutely believe that approaching our reactions with curiosity rather than shame IS the way through healing andd....
This book, for me, was often just too dry, too abstract, and at times carried a very particular old white man explaining big spiritual truths energy that I could not quite get past.
A Bigger Reflection Before We Wrap Up
A friend and fellow eating disorder therapist shared some thoughtful reflections on IFS that helped me put words to a lot of what was bothering me as I read this book.
So, a little shout-out to my therapist friend for helping me articulate this. 💛
Here are some of my bigger thoughts after finishing the book:
One concern with any therapy model is that the model can start to take up more space than the actual person.
A person brings in current stress, burnout, grief, relationship conflict, financial pressure, discrimination, illness, workplace issues, parenting, a genuinely terrible week…
…and the framework starts looking for the “deep” childhood wound or “exiled part” underneath it all.
Sometimes that is useful.
Sometimes it is not.
Sometimes a person is not responding from a buried childhood wound.
Sometimes they are overwhelmed because their life is overwhelming.
Sometimes the most helpful response is not “let’s find the part underneath this.”
Sometimes it is:
“That makes sense.”“This situation is really hard.”“What support would help right now?”“How can we make this week a little more manageable?”
I think parts work can offer something really meaningful: the idea that our reactions make sense, and that even the parts of us we dislike may be trying to protect us.
But I do not think that is exclusive to IFS.
Good therapy—including trauma-informed, client-centred, relational, emotion-focused, DBT, ACT, and other approaches—can help people feel less pathologized and more understood without insisting that everything needs to be understood through “exiles,” protectors, or early-life trauma.
I also remain a bit skeptical of the broader “everything is trauma” movement in therapy spaces.
Trauma matters.
Early experiences matter.
Our nervous systems matter.
And also: current stressors, social conditions, relationships, access to resources, discrimination, disability, poverty, illness, safety, and the actual circumstances of someone’s life matter too.
Anyway.
Onto the final chapters…
Chapter 10: The Laws of Inner Physics
Amazingly, Schwartz found a way to make a pop-culture example—A Beautiful Mind—feel inaccessible and boring to read about.
Sigh.
This book is just not written in a very conversational or accessible way.
I kept wishing it had more stories, more everyday examples, more concrete “here is what this could look like when you are spiralling after a hard conversation / stuck in people-pleasing / avoiding an email / feeling anxious before bed” material.
Instead, so much of it feels like:
“Here is an abstract internal concept.”“Now sit alone with it and figure out what your parts are doing.”
And then…
Another exercise. 😅
This one suddenly moves into internalized racism.
I appreciated that he went there at all.
But also: OOOF.
It felt like the exercise intensity jumped from a 3/10 to an 8/10 with very little preparation, education, or support around it.
Internalized racism is not a small or casual thing to unpack.
It is not something I think most people should be invited to explore in a few pages of a self-guided book exercise without more context, reflection, education, and relational support.
The suggestion that, with enough patience, most people can find their “inner racist” also made me pause.
I understand the broader intention: we all need to be willing to examine what we have internalized from racist systems.
Absolutely.
But the way it was framed felt overly simplistic for something that requires much more than internal reflection alone.
I wonder whether the book’s 2021 publication context, alongside the heightened public attention to anti-racism and Black Lives Matter, shaped the inclusion of this section.
The next case example, “Andy,” was more interesting.
The application of IFS to internalized racism was definitely more engaging than some of the earlier examples.
But I still struggled to see how a reader would realistically apply this to themselves without support.
At the end of the day, much of what Schwartz is encouraging is kind, gentle curiosity.
Which is lovely.
And important.
And also not especially unique to IFS.
Chapter 11: Embodiment
Well.
I was not bored with this chapter.
But not for good reasons. 😬
The way Schwartz writes about medication came across to me as quite anti-medication, and I really did not like it.
The implication that people cannot do meaningful inner work while taking medication is, in my view, both inaccurate and harmful.
For many people, appropriate medication support is what makes therapy, reflection, feeling, functioning, and participation in life more possible.
Medication should not be used to numb someone out or disconnect them from themselves. That is not the goal of good prescribing.
Sometimes medication helps someone feel less overwhelmed by anxiety, depression, ADHD symptoms, trauma symptoms, migraines, pain, insomnia, or other health concerns—so that they can actually access their thoughts, feelings, relationships, and therapy.
It is a bit like suggesting someone should only do “real” inner work while enduring a raging migraine.
No thank you.
Support is support.
Medication is often an essential part of that support.
And Then… Anti-Fat Bias. UGH.
I also really loathed the casual references to “unhealthy diets” and “lack of exercise” as explanations for disembodiment.
That framing felt deeply ableist, anti-fat, and wildly lacking in nuance.
People’s relationships with food, movement, health, energy, pain, functioning, and embodiment are shaped by so many things:
Disability
Chronic illness
Access to food• Poverty
Trauma
Caregiving responsibilities
Marginalization
Pain
Neurodivergence
Fatphobia
Medical trauma
And, you know… life
Dropping “unhealthy diets” and “lack of exercise” into a book like this without context is not neutral. It is not ok.
And it is especially frustrating given Schwartz’s history of working with people with eating disorders.
Health and embodiment are not moral achievements.
And “health concerns” are very often used as socially acceptable cover for anti-fat bias. I am having none of it.
Session Five: TJ
Content note: anti-fat bias / weight-centred language
This session example was difficult for me.
A lot of it felt problematic.
One of the biggest things I noticed was how weight gain was initially framed as inherently bad or alarming, and then repeatedly redirected into “back pain” and “health” concerns.
But reframing anti-fat bias as a concern about “health” does not make the bias disappear.
Often, that is exactly how anti-fat bias gets maintained.
It gets wrapped in wellness language.
It gets framed as concern.
It gets presented as medical common sense.
And then the underlying fear or stigma around weight gain is never actually challenged.
Sigh.
At this point, I was not bored anymore.
But my regard for the book definitely took a sharp turn downward.
Conclusion
The conclusion was… fine.
I am mostly glad the book is done. 😂
It was not the worst book I have ever read.
There were useful ideas throughout:
Approaching internal reactions with curiosity rather than shame
Understanding that protective responses often have a reason
Remembering that we do not need to eliminate parts of ourselves to heal
Making room for compassion, calm, courage, and connection
Those are all worthwhile things.
But overall, I would not personally reach for this book as a first recommendation for someone wanting to explore parts work.
For me, it felt too dry, too abstract, occasionally too preachy, and not especially accessible for many neurodivergent folks, people with trauma histories, people who struggle with interoception, or anyone trying to do this work independently.
Over and onwards. ✨
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