hmm...

Quoted from page 1 of "No Bad Parts" by Richard Schwarts in his book on "Internal Family Systems".

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 questioned 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 (internal family systems) espouses and consider the possibility that you and everyone 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 the 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 players behind those debates. IFS helps you not only start to pay attention to them, but also become the active internal leader that your system of parts needs.