June 14, 2022 • 55 mins
Richard Schwartz began his career as a systemic family therapist and an academic and has developed Internal Family Systems (IFS) in response to clients’ descriptions of various parts within themselves. He focused on the relationships among these parts and noticed that there were systemic patterns to the way they were organized across clients. Dr. Schwartz found that when the clients’ parts felt safe and were allowed to relax, they would spontaneously experience the qualities of confidence, openness, and compassion that he came to call the Self. He also found that when in that state of Self, clients would know how to heal their parts. Richard is a featured speaker for national professional organizations and has published many books and over fifty articles about IFS.
In this episode, Eric and Richard discuss his book, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
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Richard Schwartz and I Discuss Internal Family Systems and…
- His book, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
- Defining Internal Family Systems (IFS)
- Understanding that we all have multiple “parts” within us
- The parallels of family therapy work to internal family systems
- Identifying the “Self” among our different parts
- IFS work is trying to understand what burdens each of our parts is carrying
- How the Self can take an active leadership role over our parts
- The roles that our parts take on: exiles, managers, firefighters
- How our parts can transform into powerful allies to bring healing
- Four goals of IFS: Transforming, Restoring Trust, Bringing Harmony, Becoming more Self
- The 8 C’s – Creativity, Compassion, Confidence, Clarity, Connectedness, Curiosity, Calm, Courageous
- Trailheads refers to thought patterns or impulses that lead to the part from where it’s emanating
- How IFS is a type of spiritual practice in learning to access more of your Self
- The problems with positive thinking in working with your parts
Richard Schwartz links:
Richard’s Website (IFS Institute)
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If you enjoyed this conversation with Richard Schwartz, check out these other episodes:
The Energy of Emotions with Ralph De La Rosa (2021)
The Mind as Your Teacher with Ralph De La Rosa (2018)
Understanding Emotions with Susan David
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I hate the power of positive thinking. I hate positive psychology.
I had all the Dalai Lama. I don't hate him,
but I hate his philosophy. Welcome to the one you
feed Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of
(00:21):
the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
or you are what you think ring true. And yet
for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
see what we don't have instead of what we do.
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
(00:43):
But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on
(01:14):
this episode is Richard Schwartz. He began his career as
a systematic family therapist and academic. He developed internal family
systems or i f s in response to clients descriptions
of various parts within themselves. He focused on the relationships
among those parts and noticed that there were systematic patterns
to the way they were organized across his clients, and
(01:36):
then found that when the client's parts felt safe and
were allowed to relax, the clients would experience spontaneously the
qualities of confidence, openness, and compassion that he came to
call the self. Richard is a featured speaker for national
professional organizations and has published many books and over fifty
articles about I f S. Hi Richard, Welcome to the show.
(01:59):
I am a excited to have you on. We're gonna
be discussing your book No Bad Parts, healing trauma and
restoring wholeness with the internal Family Systems model. But before
we do that, we're going to get to the parable
that I know you're excited to answer. In the parable,
there's a grandparent talking with a grandchild and they say,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
(02:20):
are always at battle. One is a good wolf, represents
things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other
is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and
hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about
it for a second and looks up at their grandparents
as well, which one wins, and the grandparents says the
one you feed. So I'd like to start off by
asking you how that a parable applies to you in
(02:44):
your work and in your life. Well, it sort of
contradicts my work. My path and passion in the last
four years has been to try to reverse that kind
of thinking in our culture. So I'm not a big fan.
So I think that will be clear to people here
in a little while. Why so, I guess let's jump
(03:05):
into it, and I'm going to assume that listeners don't
know anything about internal family systems. Some uncertain do, but
many don't. So broadly speaking, what is I f S Well,
I developed it to be a form of psychotherapy, but
it's kind of evolved into being more like a life
practice and for some people of spiritual practice. Basically, what
(03:25):
I found four years ago when I started on this
journey is that things we think are bad, which would
be the qualities that you mentioned about the was it
a black wolf or something? No, no, no colors? Do
our wolves? Bad wolf, bad wolf, greed, hatred, fear, all
those things aren't what they see. They're not just negative emotions.
(03:48):
They're actually eminations from parts of us that, because of
traumas in our lives or bad parenting. We're forced out
of their naturally valuable stays and forced into roles that
they don't like, which would be the ones you just
mentioned and others, and carry a lot of the extreme
(04:10):
beliefs and emotions that came into your system during those
traumas and drive the way these parts operate. So what
I learned very early was, first of all, that we
all have but I call parts, that it's the nature
of the mind to be subdivided that way, and that
they're all valuable, but that they get forced out of
their naturally valuable states by traumas and attachment injuries, and
(04:36):
they pick up these what I call burdens, extreme beliefs
and emotions that drive them into actually being negative and
actually can be damaging to you or two people around you.
But that isn't who they are. And when you think
that's who they are and you starve them as in
the parable, they just get stronger and try harder to
(04:57):
get your attention or take over your life. So I
was working with eating disorders back in the day when
I developed this, and that's what I was trying to do.
I was trying to get my clients ignore the voice
that told her to starve herself or the one that
forced her the betage or fight with it, and they
(05:18):
just got stronger that way. Just at some point decided,
I've got to explore this and see what's going on.
And that's when I started to learn that they're not
what they see. So in essence, the idea is that
we're not a single mind. We have multiple parts within us.
And I've got some questions about how many parts and
what types of parts, But we've got these different parts
(05:40):
of us, and those parts I think you were describing
as naturally sort of beneficial, but that they then take
on I think the term you use in internal family
systems would be burdens. They take on burdens based on traumas, challenges,
injuries in the past, where a step into a role
(06:01):
where they think they need to protect and thus then
create behaviors and feelings and things that we might looking
at it externally go, well, that's not good. That's not
serving me, that's not helping me anymore. But it originates
from these parts deep desire to protect us, exactly right.
(06:23):
And in addition, they're frozen in time usually so they're
stuck in the time of the trauma, and they think
you're still five years old or whatever age you are,
and that you're as vulnerable now as you were back then,
and that you live in as dangerous a context as
you did back then. So there's a lot of reasons
why they do it, and you know, it's common sensical
(06:45):
to think of them as just bad and to try
and get rid of them. But yeah, that's a big mistake.
Our culture is made for centuries now. According to internal
family systems, we have parts, whether or not we've suffered injury, trauma,
neglect or not. It's just that if we have, those
parts have been forced into roles. They don't necessarily want
(07:07):
any idea like does everybody have a similar number of
parts to start with? Is it radically different? If so,
any idea why it's different? I mean, do you have
any underlying ideas there? I have no idea about any
of that. Okay. I know that with the client, we're
mainly working with the parts that are stuck to the problem,
helping them transform. And the range in terms of numbers
(07:29):
could be I would say from ten to okay, as
we go through corsotherapy, sometimes more, But in terms of
how many are there, I have no idea, and so
the question then comes up, if there are all these parts,
then who's me? When I talk about me? Who am
I talking about? Yeah? I had that question too when
(07:52):
I first ran into the phenomena by backgrounds of family therapists.
So as I was fearing about all these parts, I
started overlay my family therapy ideas onto them, and just
to make one parallel. So family therapy is big insight
was you can't take an acting out kid out of
his family and tell him to cut it out. You
(08:12):
have to understand the role he has been forced into
by the dynamics of that family and change those dynamics
and liberate him from that role so he doesn't have
to protect himself for the family anymore. He'll naturally transform
into who he really is. And that's what we're finding
with these parts. It's the same process. So as I
(08:34):
was getting that, which took quite a while, as a
family therapist, I was trying to help change these internal relationships,
and I was trying to get my client to actually
listen to the parts rather than ignore or hate them
or fight them. And so I was having these inner
dialogues and I might have you Eric talk to your critic,
(08:56):
your inner critic, and instead of yelling at it, or
ating with it, or ignoring it, I'd try to get
you to listen to it. And why it does this
critical thing inside of you all the time? What's it
afraid would happen if it didn't do that? And as
I'm having those dialogues, maybe you eric suddenly get angry
at the critic and the dialogue goes south. It reminded
(09:20):
me of family sessions where maybe I'm having two family
members talked to each other and trying to get them
to listen, and suddenly one of them is angry at
the other. And we were taught to look around the
room and see if somebody isn't covertly signaling one that
he disagrees with the other one too, And you've got
(09:40):
these alliances happening, and we were taught to get that
third person to step back and not interfere, and then
things settle down between the other two. And I thought,
maybe the same thing is happening in this inner system.
Maybe as I'm having these two parts, or my client
talked to the critic, a partner hates the critic has
jumped in, and so I asked my clients, could you
(10:03):
get that one to just relax an open space, step
back in there. And my clients would say yeah, okay,
and I'd say, okay, now, how do you feel towards
the critic, And out of the blue, it would be
this completely different answer, like, I'm just curious about why
it calls me names. Seconds earlier they hated or they
were terrified of it. You get that to separate, and
(10:25):
it's like this other person popped out and knew how
to relate to the critic in a healthy way. And
when I would do the same process with other clients,
it was like the same person popped out with the
same curiosity, calm, confidence, compassion, even I'm sorry, I feel
sorry for the critic clarity. Oh it suddenly it doesn't
look so scary. I'm naming what we call the eight
(10:47):
seas of what I call self leadership, because when I
would ask clients what part of you is that, they'd say,
that's not a part like these others. That's myself or
that's me. So I came to call that the self
and an answer to your original question, it turns out
that that self isn't everybody can't be damaged and knows
(11:07):
how to heal, and it's just beneath the surface of
these parts such that when they open, space pops out.
And that's who we really are. That essence is in everybody,
and these parts are also who we are, except they're
just part of us, and they add a lot of
spice to our lives and a lot of discernment, and
(11:29):
that could be very helpful. But who we really are
is that self. So we have this self then, and
you use a capital S for it. We've got this
self that has these qualities that you are able to notice.
You call them the eight sees curiosity, calm, confidence, compassion, creativity, clarity, courage,
and connectedness. So our parts take on roles based on
(11:53):
the things that happened to us. Right, they are conditioned, Right,
they are conditioned by the experiences that we have. Is
this self something that we would consider unconditioned? And so
it's beyond personality. So is myself in essence the same
as yourself? I think? So yeah, okay, I think that's right.
(12:14):
So for me self has taken on and this took
quite a long time too, more of a spiritual connotation,
you know. I like the metaphor from quantum physics of
photons being both a particle in a way, and like
there's a way of state of self that when you meditate,
you feel you kind of lose your separateness and you
become oceanic. And then there's a drop of that ocean
(12:37):
that's in each of us, and particleizes when it's in us,
so that we do feel separate from each other, but
it's really the same self. So in that way, yeah,
I would say it's all the same. I want that place, okay.
So that is uh, something closer to what in certain
schools of Buddhism we might call Buddha nature. Certain ways
(13:00):
of thinking of Christianity, they might call that the karmic Christ,
or the inner Christ, inner Christ, or the soul. Yea
call it coadtive book where we looked at it. Avirtually
every religion and every spiritual tradition, they've all got a
word for it, even though almost no psychotherapies know about it. Yep.
So you know that's what I'm talking about. And so
(13:22):
internal family systems then, as a approach, is where we're
working with trying to understand what is going on with
the parts, why they're the burdens that they are carrying,
trying to get them to perhaps set those burdens down
so that the self, this thing that has clarity and
(13:43):
connectedness and the rest of the seas naturally sort of
emerges and we spend more time living in the place
of the self versus living sort of through the perspective
of or in battle with the parts. That's part of it, okay,
But it's also what I found in contrast in some
ways to some of the spiritual traditions we mentioned, which
(14:07):
where self is a kind of state that's fairly passive,
witness state that you meditate to get to and and
maybe try to lead more of your life. From when
I would get my clients to access self in the
way I described earlier, self became a kind of active
inner leader that could not only interview the parts, but
also often see them and go and hold them and
(14:28):
comfort them, almost like a parent with a child, and
actually sort of would take over the session and do
what the part needed in a healing way, which just
amazed me because I was working with clients who had terrible,
terrible childhoods, and by most psychologies have no business having
any of those qualities, But here it was, and they
(14:50):
were actually healing themselves basically with me coming along for
the ride. And so this concept of self isn't just
a passive witness, but it's an active leader, both in
the inner world and in the outer world. One of
the goals is to help the parts trust that self
can do that. Because when you were little and you
(15:13):
were hurt and yourself couldn't protect you, your parts lost
trust in its leadership and they thought, like a child
in a family who becomes like a parent, they thought
they had to take over and run things. So it's
a big relief usually when they actually realized you're not
still five years old, and you are a person who
can handle them also handle the world. And you talk
(15:35):
about different types of parts. I'm just trying to sketch
the groundwork here for people before I start to go
into maybe some some deeper questions. You talk about different
types of parts. Maybe we could walk through those quickly.
The first is exiles. Yeah, so just to clarify, these
are not types of parts so much as the types
(15:59):
of goals. These parts are forced into by what happens
to them. Exiles. You know, we all are born with
these what other systems call inner children. These very young, vulnerable,
but also when they're not hurt, playful and creative and
loving and open and ah yeah, on and on, all
(16:24):
these wonderful qualities they have that we love to be with.
But when they're hurt or terrified or shamed and made
to feel worthless, they take on those burdens, They take
on those beliefs about themselves, they take on the emotions
from those experiences, and when they carry those burdens, they
(16:47):
have the power to make us feel all those feelings
that they still carry from those experiences, so they can
overwhelm us and make it so we can't function and
make us feel terrible. So we kind of naturally try
to lock them away in inner basements or abysses and
(17:08):
just move on from the trauma, thinking we're just moving
away from the memories and the emotions of the trauma,
not realizing we're locky way our most precious qualities simply
because they got hurt. And so those we call exiles,
we locked them away, and for them it's insult to injury.
The injury was the trauma, and the insult is we
(17:30):
abandoned them and left them in the past. And when
you get a lot of exiles, then you feel more
delicate and the world feels more dangerous because so many
things could trigger them, and if they get triggered, they
blast out of the basement and they overwhelm you and
make you stay in bed for a week or whatever
they do. And one other sorts of exiling is also
(17:51):
if there are emotions in your family when you were
getting raised that weren't acceptable and you had to luck
away the parts that felt those things too. I think
that was all of them. That's true for many of us. Yes,
So when you have exiles, you've got to have protectors
(18:11):
because so many things can trigger them, and so a
lot of other parts are recruited out of their naturally
valuable states to become these protectors, and they spend nervous
amounts of energy trying to manage your life so that
no one hurts you. Again, no one gets close enough
(18:33):
to hurt you. Maybe no one rejects you because you
don't look right, or everybody gives you accolades because you
perform at such a high level. So these we call managers,
they're just trying their best to manage your life, to
please people and control the world. And they'll also control
your body by making you a little bit dissociated from
(18:55):
your feelings and keeping you in your head. And it's
all an effort to contain these exiles and also keep
them from being triggered. And then the world still triggers
your exiles, so when that happens, it's a big emergency,
and these flames of exile emotion encompassing you, so you
need and other parts forced into this role of being
(19:17):
what we call a firefighter. They're trying to fight the
flames of exiled emotions, either by dousing it with some
substance or getting you higher than the flames, or distracting
you until they burn themselves out. So we all have
these firefighter activities that immediately happened in an impulsive and
(19:38):
I don't care about the consequences to your body, to
your relationships. I've just got to get you away from that.
That's another set of protectors. So the very simple Matt,
we've got protectors, one group of which is called managers.
The other is called firefighters, and they're both trying to
contain and protect these vulnerable eggs. Parts of those. Let
(20:01):
me relate some of this to my own life and
my own story and see if it helps apply this
in some ways. And I've I've got a couple of questions,
So a little bit about me, you know, recovering alcoholic
heroin addict. I've been in recovery fifteen years this time,
and it was about ten years before that, so most
of my adult life, and I certainly recognize the firefighter role. Right,
(20:22):
That's what my addiction was, right, it was I can't
handle how I feel, So let's douse the flames. Let's
let's get rid of these feelings that we don't like.
So lots of people are able to overcome their primary addiction,
this and again depending on how the person recovered and
the things that they did. But is it possible that
(20:44):
in one case, what's happened is that that person's managers
have gotten really skilled and the managers now have got
things under control to the point that the exiles don't
break loose. Thus we don't need the fire fire meeting
in the same way. Yeah, that's what most addiction treatment
(21:04):
is in this country, or I guess around the world.
Even it's showing up the managers so that they not
only contain the exiles, but they also lock up the firefighters.
And that takes a lot of work. You know, it
takes a lot of vigilance and a lot of you know,
go to the meetings constantly and reinforce it. And that's good.
(21:28):
I mean it's good in the sense that you're not
you're not addicted, but you become addicted to the meetings,
or you become addicted to whatever program is you're doing
to try and show up your managers, and you become
a kind of dry drunk in a way, and you're
not that much fun because you're dominated by these managers.
A better way, from my point of view, is to
(21:52):
actually honor the addictive part for its attempts to try
and save you from all that pain. It literally thinks
it's say in your life every time it does that.
And also go to the critic who's attacking you for
not being able to control yourself and thinks you should
have more willpower and so on, and get it to
(22:12):
back off, get it off your back, and then get
permission from those parts to go to the exiles that
are driving the whole thing. And we have a process,
it's like a five step process from which we can
actually heal those parts and get them out of where
they're stuck. In the past and help them unload what
we call unburdened the feelings and beliefs they got back there,
(22:35):
at which point it's like a curse has been lifted
and they'll transform into who they naturally are. And then
we can bring in the addictive part and the critic
and see they don't have to spend all this time
trying to deal with this pain. And then they shift
into totally different roles themselves and they start to get
along with each other. So it's a very different approach.
(22:57):
It's like almost the opposite approach, sort of like what
I was saying earlier about the two wolves. And it's
a tough sell because the addictions community is very attached
to the disease model and the sense that these addictive
parts are just what they are. I got sober at
(23:35):
twenty four from heroin addiction and very traditional twelve step approach,
you know, Central Ohio, and not a lot of you know,
not a lot of progressive thinking going on at that point,
you know, And the basic idea was, you don't need
to know why you're an alcoholic, you just are. Let's
not talk about your parents, let's not talk about your childhood,
(23:55):
Let's and and that approach worked. I got sober, but
a few years into being and sober, I had some
things happened. My marriage fell apart. I fell apart very
promptly after that, and that led me into a type
of therapy. At that time you already addressed one of
the words for it. You know, my therapist was very
influenced by a gentleman by the name of John Bradshaw,
(24:16):
and we did a lot of you know, inner child work,
which a lot of it feels similar to what I
see happening in parts work. We didn't necessarily talk about
the protectors in the same way. We kind of tried
to get right to the exile if I had to,
if I had to translate what I saw happening there
and your approach, although I think what happened with me
(24:37):
was indirectly. We were working with those protectors for a
long time in order to get there. But at that
point what it was is the work was really about
letting that exile basically have the the emotions that it
was unable to have when it was younger. Historically, I
(24:57):
did a lot of this similar type wor a long
time ago. And I have a question for you, though
about some of this type of work, and you and
I talked beforehand about, well, maybe we'll do some parts
work here on the show. You'll you'll do some with me.
And what typically happens for me and a lot of
these areas is that I have precious few memories of
(25:21):
being a child at all, Like it's a blank slate
back there. And despite doing lots of inner child work
and lots of different things, like I don't have memory
of like three days ago. So it's not it doesn't
appear to only be my childhood. It seems to be
a broader system. How do you do parts work if
(25:42):
you don't have memories? When we get to these exiles,
these inner children start the healing process by what we
call the witnessing stage, where I would have you ask
this vulnerable part what it wants you to know about
what happened in the past and where it's stuck in
(26:02):
the past, and you might get memories, you might get images,
but sometimes people don't. They just get the emotion or
they just feel the sensations and their body just starts
to move in strange ways. And many parts can feel
fully witnessed without having you to know exactly the details
(26:23):
of what happened. So it's really not a problem if
you can't get the details. There are some parts that
do want you to know the details, and the reason
you can't get them is because other parts are afraid
to let you know these things. So then we would
work with the parts who are afraid for those memories
to come, and just go over all their fears and
(26:44):
try to get permission for you to see what happened.
And because these parts, even though you consciously don't have
memories much of the time, and this has been true
for me, if you get permission, the memories will start
to come too. And so you know, the other lenge
that I found therapy wise in general inner child and
a variety of different kinds, is I get asked a question.
(27:07):
I looked at some of the exercises in your book,
and I know some people that, like you know, Ralph
Delarosa and I are are close, and I know he's
a big proponent of your work, and so you know,
I've been around this kind of work. Part of what
happens is if if we were to say, like, okay,
let's talk to this part in Eric, right, I have
a very difficult time differentiating is my brain generating something
(27:33):
that I know to be what I think that part
should be actually thinking, saying or feeling because I kind
of know the answers quote unquote in a way, right,
I mean? Or is it really organically happening? It's very
difficult to tell that apart. How do you help people
differentiate that is this an authentic part speaking or is
(27:55):
this a brain that knows what it thinks? The answer
should be. So there are ways that you get tipped off,
or I would get tipped off as your therapist that
it was a part just trying to please me or
trying to get through the session without getting dirty, you know,
something like that, And I would just say, Eric, could
you just see if there's some part of you that's
(28:17):
just trying to do this, and then we would talk
to you and see if we can get it to
step out. So that's not a huge problem in this system.
So you feel like over time by working with somebody
that it starts to emerge when something real is happening
versus something is not very much. Yeah, it's not hard
(28:37):
to time. And then I think you still do parts
work right, So this is an ongoing practice for you.
Would that be a safe way to say it, you
mean me personally? Yeah, totally, yes, Yeah, I mean I've
done a lot of work over the years, and still
my wife has an ability to tugger new parts that
(28:58):
I need to heal. So it never ends, it seems,
and you know, many many ways. I'm a lot better.
I feel my power and I ever have, but there's
still work to do. Yeah, you know. So a question
that comes up for me a lot that I've been
thinking about a lot recently is what is mental health
or what is when you're done? Or what does it
(29:20):
mean to be healed? Or what is good enough? Or
what is how healthy? Do I think I'm going to get?
You know, I think that's a question that comes up
a lot in my mind. How do you think about
that question? Yeah, I'm a big transformation guy, so you know,
maybe in contrast to some schools of Buddhism, where the
(29:41):
goal isn't too heal per se, it's really to become
very acceptable what's in there and kind of live with it.
But from a different place, this work actually helps you
unload pain, unload terror, unload all the emotions or or
the emotions you lead with. In terms of the second Wolf,
(30:03):
it helps you unburden all that and when you do,
not only do you not have to deal with those
feelings that came into you they aren't native to you,
that came into you from the experiences, but also these
parts will transform into being very valuable allies. And whereas
you didn't have access to much creativity before, you do
(30:26):
this unburdening with this part, and now you have all
kinds of creativity that helps you steer you in a
different place in your life. So and there are four
main goals of ifs. The first one is what we've
been talking about, the liberation and transformation of these parts
from the roles they've been stuck in so they can
be who they're designed to be. And then the second
(30:47):
we also talked about restoring trust of the parts in
self as a leader. And then the third is bringing
harmony to this inner system. So not only are the
parts different, but they're getting to know each other and
working together in new ways and feel more unitary because
they're not battling all the time. And then the fourth
(31:08):
goal is to be more self let in the outside
world and bring more self to the world in that way.
So that's for me what healing entails. When I look
(31:41):
at your list of seas for the self, I look
at them and I'm like, you know, I feel like
I spend a lot of time around many of those sees.
You know. I feel pretty calm, pretty confident, pretty curious.
I think, naturally compassionate. I'm not trying to toot my
own horn here excessively by any stretch. But what I
don't feel, I think there's a see in here that is.
(32:06):
The one that I would describe as doesn't feel as
present is connectedness. And I've described it this way before.
I've described it that I think I've done a lot
of work over thirty years, in a lot of different
ways and a lot of different schools, and I have
taken away what I would call the vast majority of
obvious suffering, right Like, I don't feel like I suffer
(32:29):
a whole lot. And yet if I were to describe
what I would say, it would be Okay, here's where
I want to continue to grow. It is in feeling
more connected or in not having what is from time
to time sort of a low mood, flat effect. There's
nothing going on there. It's like when I look at it,
(32:50):
I'm like, well, nothing is wrong that I can tell
a matter of fact, everything is actually pretty darn good
and you know. And so then you read lots of
different things that you hear or about happiness set points
like well, a certain amount of happiness is just going
to be, you know, genetic. And that's where I start
to get into when do you go, okay, like just
onwards with living and when do you continue deeper into
(33:13):
a healing journey? Well, you mentioned earlier the possibility of
working on that you want to spend some time, check
again on that. I am willing to try it for sure.
So I guess we would start with the part of
you that makes you feel so separate and flat. Does
that sound okay? M hum yep. So Eric, see if
you can find that feeling in your body or around
(33:36):
your body? Okay, got it? Where do you find it?
It's kind of in the pit of my stomach. And
as you notice that there, how do you feel toward it?
In other words, do you like it or you hate it?
Or you want you're afraid of it, you wish it
would change, you wish to go away? How do you
feel toward it? I certainly wouldn't say that there's a hate,
(33:59):
but sure, I'd love to see a change. Okay, So
we're gonna ask the part that wants it to change
to give us a little space now and step back
in there so we can just get to know it
and and maybe you know, get to know why it's
doing this better and just see if that one give
(34:23):
us a little space I think so, then go ahead
and focused in the pit of your stomach again and
tell me how you feel toward it. Now. Well, here's
the problem I described earlier. The answer that came to
mind was curious. But I don't know if that's because
I know that's what I'm aiming for. But let's just
(34:45):
let's just go with it and see what happens, all right. Again,
I haven't detected it, okay, Okay, ask the part who's
so skeptical about this to just give us a space
to give it a try, all right, and to not
constantly comment and how you're making it up, okay, And
then follow your curiosity and ask this one in the
(35:07):
pit of your stomach what it wants you to know,
and don't think of the answer, just wait and see
what comes. And if nothing comes, that's okay, just kind
of be patient. What does it want you to know
about why it does this to you. It makes you
(35:27):
feel this way. Three things are happening. One is the
feeling in the pit of my stomach is slightly more
intense good. Secondly is um an idea that it provides
me an excuse to hide, And third is the the
(35:53):
podcast host part of my brain going is this make
good audio to for it to be quiet this long?
But we're gonna ask that part to step aside hide,
and we're gonna you can always add it it's right, okay, okay,
So something about an excuse to hide? Did you say? Okay?
So ask this part what it's afraid would happen if
(36:16):
it didn't help you hide that way? I have to
do things I don't want to do. You have to
do things it doesn't want to do, or that it
thinks you thinks aren't good for you. Um okay. The
response I seem to get is I'm too tired. Okay,
So it's ask if it's keeping you tired or it
(36:40):
thinks you're too tired to do these things. I don't
seem to be getting a clear answer on that question. Okay,
try this one. Then, what are the things it's afraid
you would do if it didn't do this job? Can
you repeat the question over time? Yeah? Just again, I'm
directed right to the pretty stomach. What's afraid would happen
(37:01):
in terms of the things you would wind up having
to do if it didn't do this? Inside tell people
how I feel? Okay? So it's afraid that if you
felt more, then you'd have to tell people about those feelings.
Is that right? Yes? So it's keeping you flat so
(37:23):
you don't feel so you don't take the risk of
talking to people about your feelings. Just trying to get
this right, Just ask what that's right? Yeah? I think so.
It seems to be providing a little bit more information
about the type of feeling. Perhaps, can you share that
or you want to keep that private? That I'm angry
(37:44):
with them and I don't like them, Okay, I wasn't
afraid would happen if you did share that with somebody?
Either they or I would get hurt? Okay, So it's
really trying to protect you and other people from being hurt.
Are the angry part of you? Sounds sorry? I'm checking that.
(38:07):
Hang on, just check your Yeah, So how do you
feel toward it now? Eric? As you learn how it's
trying to protect you and keep you safe that way.
I feel like that part is starting to take up
more more bandwidth, the angry one or this one, I
think the protector part the flat car. Yeah, and how
(38:32):
do you feel toward him though? As you learn he
is trying to protect you from being hurt? I feel
compassionate towards him. And and now I might be using
a term I know from reading the book blended, but
because I also sort of feel like his arguments makes sense. Yeah,
(38:55):
Like like I'm like, well, okay, I get your point.
That's that's a good point. So I don't know if
I'm blended with that part or but that's sort of
what's coming up is like, hey, like we're waiting into
what feels like slightly dangerous ground here, I understand. So, um,
you're blended with a part that kind of agrees with
(39:18):
him and relies on him, and it's also afraid of
the anger. So uh, and that's fine. But for now,
just extend some compassion and appreciation to the flat part
and just see how it reacts to being understood and
(39:39):
appreciate it. I don't know what the part feels. I
just noticed my stomach sort of that that sensation sort
of fade away a little bit, Yeah, relaxed. Yeah, so
that's typical. And ask h and we you know, we
(40:00):
won't do it. We don't have time. But if at
another time you could go to that angry part and
help it so it wasn't so angry? Would this guy
have to work so hard to contain it? Just ask
that question? Maybe it's fair. Yeah, And if it didn't
(40:24):
have to work so hard at this job, let's suppose
we could do that and it was freed up. What
might it like to do instead inside of you play baseball? Cool?
And ask if it would be willing to let you
do that at some point or is it really still
(40:45):
very very frightened of the angry part, whether it let
me play baseball now, whether it would let you go
to the angry one and he would yes? Okay, okay.
And I don't know how long you've got, but does
(41:05):
this feel like complete peace for them? Yeah? It's reminded
me there's a batting cage right around the corner and
I ought to go visit it. Yeah. I think this
is like a like a good just thank the part,
thank the part for sharing so much. And when you're ready,
come on back. Okay, Yeah, so how do you feel now?
(41:28):
I mean, that's a slightly awkward thing to do in
front of, you know, thousands and thousands of people, but
but okay, I feel okay. I felt something happening there.
And I also sort of feel like, back to the
point earlier, like I've done enough thinking about my psyche
to kind of recognize that I think, I know that
(41:49):
this this makeup makes intellectual sense to me, So I'm
not sure that I wasn't kind of going where I
think it would go. But the same time, there were
shifts in internal experience that felt real, and that's part
of the way we can judge. Yeah, my sense was
that was quite real, and I would encourage you to
(42:13):
try and find somebody can help you go to that
anger so it's not such a threat and you don't
have to organize so much of your life around not
feeling yet. Yeah, it was interesting when we talked about managers,
Like I said, I feel like my firefighters have kind
of settled down. Although it's interesting that you talk about
firefighters being very interested these are not your exact words,
(42:34):
but very interested in finding enlightenment, right right, It's that
it's that like, get me out of here, so here.
I recognize that. But the thing about managers is they
are parentified in her children. They're usually very tired and
stressed out. And I'm not much stressed out most of
the time, but tiredness is more of a thing, you know.
(42:58):
And I bet if we had stayed in there and
asked that flat guy if he was tired of having
to contain all this, he would say, yeah, he's very tired. Yeah,
I believe that when he asked to expand that kind
of energy to contain it, then he'll make you tired.
So let me ask a few more questions if that's okay,
and then we'll chop up here in a minute. So
(43:20):
I want to turn a little bit towards trailheads. Tell
me what do you mean by the word trailhead. Trailhead
is any thought pattern or emotion, or impulse or sensation that,
if you were to focus on and stay with, would
(43:40):
lead you to the part from which it's emanating. So
it's like, if you're out hiking, then you find the
head of a trail, and if you follow the trail,
it leads you to something like a waterfall or something important.
So that's all I mean by so basically, what we're
saying is we're using our own experience of difficult thoughts, emotions, tension,
(44:03):
things along those lines as a thing to say, Hey,
something to look at here. Let's pause here, and let's
go in here a little further. Let's find the part
that that's coming from and get to know it and
help it. I have this program called Spiritual Habits and
talk about triggers, Like you know, we all have different
triggers that remind us to do something, and that the
most powerful kind of trigger is sort of an emotional
(44:25):
based trigger. It's when you recognize an emotional state and
that actually gets you to pause and do something versus
just being lost in it. Let's talk about spirituality and
and I f S. I'd like to explore this a
little bit more because you said, I f S is
morphed over time for being exclusively about psychotherapy to becoming
a kind of spiritual practice. And I would love to
(44:48):
know what that statement means to you, and what the
word spiritual means to you, because I just mentioned I've
got a program called Spiritual Habits, and I often am like,
what should I call it? Spiritual habits. Is it philosophical habits?
Is it psychological habits? Like these things all just there's
such a blending and overlapping of them. What do you
mean when you say that I f S is morphed
(45:10):
you know, from psychology to more of a spiritual practice. Well,
people do it as a daily practice often, and as
they do it, there are aspects of IFS that help
you work with your parts, but then there are others
that help your parts relax. And as your parts relax
and you feel more and more embodied in what I'm
(45:30):
calling South, you feel like you're meditating. You feel like
you're arriving at that place that people meditate to get to.
And as you stay in that, you feel a lot
of the things that people meditate for, which is you
feel like you're much more than this contained body and
that you're part of something much bigger, and there's a
(45:52):
sense of well being and everything's okaynus. And so it
becomes that kind of a spiritual practice where your sussing,
from my point of view, more and more of the
big Self what people call God, and you're bringing more
of that in and that is very soothing to your
(46:12):
parts to know that's who you are. You were talking
earlier about how you don't feel that connected. You feel
very separate even though you've done all this work, and
that process of embodying the spacious sense of self feeling
the bigger sound makes you feel very, very much more connected,
(46:33):
not only to that but also to other people, into animals,
and to the earth. So all of that becomes a
spiritual practice. Yeah. Yeah, there's a couple of lines that
you use that I thought I really liked, which is,
I f S helps people become bodhisatvas of their psyche.
So for listeners who aren't familiar with that term bodhisatva,
it is a primarily Mahayana Buddhist term. I believe it's
(46:58):
certainly emphasized heavily and zen practice the bodhisattva as someone
who is basically trying to lead all beings to enlightenment.
So I love that idea of you know, we're becoming
a Bodhisatva of our inner parts. And you said, or
through a Christian lens, I f S. People end up
doing what in the inner world what Jesus did in
(47:18):
the outer They go to the exiles and enemies, love
and heal them and bring them home. Yeah. Yeah, and uh,
just kind of getting those insights has been quite amazingly
on this journey. Is I got more and more how
it's all parallel. How what a lot of these spiritual
leaders were saying is true in the under world as
(47:40):
much as it is in the outer world. Yeah, well
you you say that in the book multiple times. You
say a theme of the book is, you know, exploring
how it's all parallel. How we relate in the inner
world will be how we relate in the outer world.
And that experience feels so true to me. You know,
I don't know which lead which what? Where is it?
Learning to love the external world more which led me
(48:01):
to love the internal world? Is that the internal world
leads the external Like, like you said, there's sort of parallel.
I think improvements in one for me anyway, has always
led to improvements in the other. But it's hard to
improve in the inner world if you think of these
things in the traditional way we do, which is the
other wolf? You know, I once I had an audience
(48:23):
with the Dali Lama, and my big line was because
he talks about similar he talks about their negative emotions,
and there are positive emotions and you need to build
these antidotes to the negative ones and focus on the
positive ones all the time, very much the same as
the wolf story. And I said, you know, it's ironic
(48:47):
to me that you teach us to go with compassion
to our outer enemies but not our inner enemies. And
he didn't really have a good answer to that. My
point of view, Yeah, well, I think it's an interesting
question because I think about this often and what I
see a lot of in spirituality, and I see it
in various forms of psychotherapy, although not so much I
(49:09):
f S. What I see is two basic approaches for
working with things of difficulty. One is, I would say,
you get in there and you mess with it and
you try and change. So cognitive behavioral therapy. I'm having
thoughts that are difficult, I go in, I examine those thoughts,
I look at them, I look for truth, you know,
I orient towards the positive. I get in there and
(49:30):
do something with it. And the other is, more broadly speaking,
what I'd say would be more of acceptance based therapies,
which are you allow things to be as they are,
and I f S is bringing a little of both
of that together. Right, You're you're certainly allowing the parts
to be there, the negative emotions to be there, and
(49:51):
you're encouraging them to change and transform. And so the
part of Buddhism that I've often heard that sounds very
similar to me that would allow line with I f
S is this idea of I'm not going to think
of the right quote right now, but it's basically the
jewels in the lotus, right, no mud no lotus right
to use tick not on. I think he's the originator
(50:13):
of that phrase. Yeah, of all the bodies leaders, Tikn
his philosophy because the closest time yeah, yeah, you know,
in terms of your anger used to take your anger
and create it like a little baby. Yeah. Yeah, he's
as close as you can come. So within all of this, though,
do you find a time or a place or a
point where it is useful and there are times where
(50:36):
it is useful to say orient your mind towards the positive? No, No,
And that would be that you feel like any time
there's any sort of negative thought or thinking going on,
that it's coming from burdened part. Yeah, it's a it's
a part that needs your attention. And if all you're
doing is thinking about the positive you're going to ignore it.
(50:59):
You know, there are times where say you're on a
date and you just wanna have fun, and some part
is reminding you that your dog died three years ago.
You might want to say, Okay, I'll talk to you later.
But I hate the power of positive thinking. I hate
positive psychology. I had all of that. The doll a Llama,
(51:21):
I don't hate him, but I hate his philosophy. That's
that's the I'm leading, And we're leading this episode off
with that quote. Chris makes you capture that, just morph it.
So we got Richard say he hates the doll a Llama. Right,
that'll help my career enormously. So, but just this whole
attitude about if you just think, look on the bright
(51:42):
side and think positively, your life's going to be good.
It leads towards exiling. And I'm a big crusader against
exiling anything. So yes, I mean, certainly there are times,
well I'll say to these parts, look, don't harass me now,
I'll talk to you later. But it's with a lot
of kindness, like you would if a kid comes running
(52:03):
in and you're trying to do something else, you know,
let me be, but I'm not going to forget about you.
Not bad for wanting attention, but now is not the time.
That's right. My personal beliefs are there are times that
we want to adjust where our attention is. You know,
you always want to do it with kindness, and you
(52:23):
don't want to do it in the extent that it
becomes denial. The example I often use is like, if
I walk into a hotel room, there's gonna be like
three things I really love about the hotel room and
a couple of things that aren't so good, and I
feel like there's a benefit and going, you know what,
I'm going to try and give the attention to the
parts of what I like and let the parts that
I don't like about it, you know, sort of go.
It's is not denying anything, it's just saying, you know,
(52:46):
where do I want to orient attention in this case?
But I think that's something that's relatively surface. I think
when we're talking about inner pain, at least to me,
has always made sense to pay attention to it, like
what's here? Why, what's going on? Yeah, to go with
it with initially curiosity but ultimately with love and Yeah,
(53:07):
but it isn't just the pain. I mean again, you've
got the wolves of I forgot the three you started with,
but agreed, I think and read hatred and anger or envy.
Fear probably might have been in there. Anger. Yeah, all
those things that many Buddhist traditions see as negative emotions.
(53:27):
Those are just hurting parts, their parts that need your
attention to love as well as much as these eggsiles.
So the more you think of them as negative emotions,
the less you're going to feed them, and the stronger
they're gonna get. Yeah, well, I think that's a great
place for us to end. Thank you so much for
coming on the show. I really appreciate the chance to
talk with you, to share I f s with others.
(53:50):
Will have links in the show notes to your book,
to your website where people can find you. And thanks
for doing a little parts work with me. Yeah, and
thanks for being a good sport and allowing that and
for being so vulnerable with your audience. I'm sure that
part of the reason you have a big audience is
because you're very honest about your own experience. So it
was a pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much.
(54:29):
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I hate the power of positive thinking. I hate positive psychology.
I had all the Dalai Lama. I don't hate him,
but I hate his philosophy. Welcome to the one you
feed Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of
(00:21):
the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
or you are what you think ring true. And yet
for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
see what we don't have instead of what we do.
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
(00:43):
But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on
(01:14):
this episode is Richard Schwartz. He began his career as
a systematic family therapist and academic. He developed internal family
systems or i f s in response to clients descriptions
of various parts within themselves. He focused on the relationships
among those parts and noticed that there were systematic patterns
to the way they were organized across his clients, and
(01:36):
then found that when the client's parts felt safe and
were allowed to relax, the clients would experience spontaneously the
qualities of confidence, openness, and compassion that he came to
call the self. Richard is a featured speaker for national
professional organizations and has published many books and over fifty
articles about I f S. Hi Richard, Welcome to the show.
(01:59):
I am a excited to have you on. We're gonna
be discussing your book No Bad Parts, healing trauma and
restoring wholeness with the internal Family Systems model. But before
we do that, we're going to get to the parable
that I know you're excited to answer. In the parable,
there's a grandparent talking with a grandchild and they say,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
(02:20):
are always at battle. One is a good wolf, represents
things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other
is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and
hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about
it for a second and looks up at their grandparents
as well, which one wins, and the grandparents says the
one you feed. So I'd like to start off by
asking you how that a parable applies to you in
(02:44):
your work and in your life. Well, it sort of
contradicts my work. My path and passion in the last
four years has been to try to reverse that kind
of thinking in our culture. So I'm not a big fan.
So I think that will be clear to people here
in a little while. Why so, I guess let's jump
(03:05):
into it, and I'm going to assume that listeners don't
know anything about internal family systems. Some uncertain do, but
many don't. So broadly speaking, what is I f S Well,
I developed it to be a form of psychotherapy, but
it's kind of evolved into being more like a life
practice and for some people of spiritual practice. Basically, what
(03:25):
I found four years ago when I started on this
journey is that things we think are bad, which would
be the qualities that you mentioned about the was it
a black wolf or something? No, no, no colors? Do
our wolves? Bad wolf, bad wolf, greed, hatred, fear, all
those things aren't what they see. They're not just negative emotions.
(03:48):
They're actually eminations from parts of us that, because of
traumas in our lives or bad parenting. We're forced out
of their naturally valuable stays and forced into roles that
they don't like, which would be the ones you just
mentioned and others, and carry a lot of the extreme
(04:10):
beliefs and emotions that came into your system during those
traumas and drive the way these parts operate. So what
I learned very early was, first of all, that we
all have but I call parts, that it's the nature
of the mind to be subdivided that way, and that
they're all valuable, but that they get forced out of
their naturally valuable states by traumas and attachment injuries, and
(04:36):
they pick up these what I call burdens, extreme beliefs
and emotions that drive them into actually being negative and
actually can be damaging to you or two people around you.
But that isn't who they are. And when you think
that's who they are and you starve them as in
the parable, they just get stronger and try harder to
(04:57):
get your attention or take over your life. So I
was working with eating disorders back in the day when
I developed this, and that's what I was trying to do.
I was trying to get my clients ignore the voice
that told her to starve herself or the one that
forced her the betage or fight with it, and they
(05:18):
just got stronger that way. Just at some point decided,
I've got to explore this and see what's going on.
And that's when I started to learn that they're not
what they see. So in essence, the idea is that
we're not a single mind. We have multiple parts within us.
And I've got some questions about how many parts and
what types of parts, But we've got these different parts
(05:40):
of us, and those parts I think you were describing
as naturally sort of beneficial, but that they then take
on I think the term you use in internal family
systems would be burdens. They take on burdens based on traumas, challenges,
injuries in the past, where a step into a role
(06:01):
where they think they need to protect and thus then
create behaviors and feelings and things that we might looking
at it externally go, well, that's not good. That's not
serving me, that's not helping me anymore. But it originates
from these parts deep desire to protect us, exactly right.
(06:23):
And in addition, they're frozen in time usually so they're
stuck in the time of the trauma, and they think
you're still five years old or whatever age you are,
and that you're as vulnerable now as you were back then,
and that you live in as dangerous a context as
you did back then. So there's a lot of reasons
why they do it, and you know, it's common sensical
(06:45):
to think of them as just bad and to try
and get rid of them. But yeah, that's a big mistake.
Our culture is made for centuries now. According to internal
family systems, we have parts, whether or not we've suffered injury, trauma,
neglect or not. It's just that if we have, those
parts have been forced into roles. They don't necessarily want
(07:07):
any idea like does everybody have a similar number of
parts to start with? Is it radically different? If so,
any idea why it's different? I mean, do you have
any underlying ideas there? I have no idea about any
of that. Okay. I know that with the client, we're
mainly working with the parts that are stuck to the problem,
helping them transform. And the range in terms of numbers
(07:29):
could be I would say from ten to okay, as
we go through corsotherapy, sometimes more, But in terms of
how many are there, I have no idea, and so
the question then comes up, if there are all these parts,
then who's me? When I talk about me? Who am
I talking about? Yeah? I had that question too when
(07:52):
I first ran into the phenomena by backgrounds of family therapists.
So as I was fearing about all these parts, I
started overlay my family therapy ideas onto them, and just
to make one parallel. So family therapy is big insight
was you can't take an acting out kid out of
his family and tell him to cut it out. You
(08:12):
have to understand the role he has been forced into
by the dynamics of that family and change those dynamics
and liberate him from that role so he doesn't have
to protect himself for the family anymore. He'll naturally transform
into who he really is. And that's what we're finding
with these parts. It's the same process. So as I
(08:34):
was getting that, which took quite a while, as a
family therapist, I was trying to help change these internal relationships,
and I was trying to get my client to actually
listen to the parts rather than ignore or hate them
or fight them. And so I was having these inner
dialogues and I might have you Eric talk to your critic,
(08:56):
your inner critic, and instead of yelling at it, or
ating with it, or ignoring it, I'd try to get
you to listen to it. And why it does this
critical thing inside of you all the time? What's it
afraid would happen if it didn't do that? And as
I'm having those dialogues, maybe you eric suddenly get angry
at the critic and the dialogue goes south. It reminded
(09:20):
me of family sessions where maybe I'm having two family
members talked to each other and trying to get them
to listen, and suddenly one of them is angry at
the other. And we were taught to look around the
room and see if somebody isn't covertly signaling one that
he disagrees with the other one too, And you've got
(09:40):
these alliances happening, and we were taught to get that
third person to step back and not interfere, and then
things settle down between the other two. And I thought,
maybe the same thing is happening in this inner system.
Maybe as I'm having these two parts, or my client
talked to the critic, a partner hates the critic has
jumped in, and so I asked my clients, could you
(10:03):
get that one to just relax an open space, step
back in there. And my clients would say yeah, okay,
and I'd say, okay, now, how do you feel towards
the critic, And out of the blue, it would be
this completely different answer, like, I'm just curious about why
it calls me names. Seconds earlier they hated or they
were terrified of it. You get that to separate, and
(10:25):
it's like this other person popped out and knew how
to relate to the critic in a healthy way. And
when I would do the same process with other clients,
it was like the same person popped out with the
same curiosity, calm, confidence, compassion, even I'm sorry, I feel
sorry for the critic clarity. Oh it suddenly it doesn't
look so scary. I'm naming what we call the eight
(10:47):
seas of what I call self leadership, because when I
would ask clients what part of you is that, they'd say,
that's not a part like these others. That's myself or
that's me. So I came to call that the self
and an answer to your original question, it turns out
that that self isn't everybody can't be damaged and knows
(11:07):
how to heal, and it's just beneath the surface of
these parts such that when they open, space pops out.
And that's who we really are. That essence is in everybody,
and these parts are also who we are, except they're
just part of us, and they add a lot of
spice to our lives and a lot of discernment, and
(11:29):
that could be very helpful. But who we really are
is that self. So we have this self then, and
you use a capital S for it. We've got this
self that has these qualities that you are able to notice.
You call them the eight sees curiosity, calm, confidence, compassion, creativity, clarity, courage,
and connectedness. So our parts take on roles based on
(11:53):
the things that happened to us. Right, they are conditioned, Right,
they are conditioned by the experiences that we have. Is
this self something that we would consider unconditioned? And so
it's beyond personality. So is myself in essence the same
as yourself? I think? So yeah, okay, I think that's right.
(12:14):
So for me self has taken on and this took
quite a long time too, more of a spiritual connotation,
you know. I like the metaphor from quantum physics of
photons being both a particle in a way, and like
there's a way of state of self that when you meditate,
you feel you kind of lose your separateness and you
become oceanic. And then there's a drop of that ocean
(12:37):
that's in each of us, and particleizes when it's in us,
so that we do feel separate from each other, but
it's really the same self. So in that way, yeah,
I would say it's all the same. I want that place, okay.
So that is uh, something closer to what in certain
schools of Buddhism we might call Buddha nature. Certain ways
(13:00):
of thinking of Christianity, they might call that the karmic Christ,
or the inner Christ, inner Christ, or the soul. Yea
call it coadtive book where we looked at it. Avirtually
every religion and every spiritual tradition, they've all got a
word for it, even though almost no psychotherapies know about it. Yep.
So you know that's what I'm talking about. And so
(13:22):
internal family systems then, as a approach, is where we're
working with trying to understand what is going on with
the parts, why they're the burdens that they are carrying,
trying to get them to perhaps set those burdens down
so that the self, this thing that has clarity and
(13:43):
connectedness and the rest of the seas naturally sort of
emerges and we spend more time living in the place
of the self versus living sort of through the perspective
of or in battle with the parts. That's part of it, okay,
But it's also what I found in contrast in some
ways to some of the spiritual traditions we mentioned, which
(14:07):
where self is a kind of state that's fairly passive,
witness state that you meditate to get to and and
maybe try to lead more of your life. From when
I would get my clients to access self in the
way I described earlier, self became a kind of active
inner leader that could not only interview the parts, but
also often see them and go and hold them and
(14:28):
comfort them, almost like a parent with a child, and
actually sort of would take over the session and do
what the part needed in a healing way, which just
amazed me because I was working with clients who had terrible,
terrible childhoods, and by most psychologies have no business having
any of those qualities, But here it was, and they
(14:50):
were actually healing themselves basically with me coming along for
the ride. And so this concept of self isn't just
a passive witness, but it's an active leader, both in
the inner world and in the outer world. One of
the goals is to help the parts trust that self
can do that. Because when you were little and you
(15:13):
were hurt and yourself couldn't protect you, your parts lost
trust in its leadership and they thought, like a child
in a family who becomes like a parent, they thought
they had to take over and run things. So it's
a big relief usually when they actually realized you're not
still five years old, and you are a person who
can handle them also handle the world. And you talk
(15:35):
about different types of parts. I'm just trying to sketch
the groundwork here for people before I start to go
into maybe some some deeper questions. You talk about different
types of parts. Maybe we could walk through those quickly.
The first is exiles. Yeah, so just to clarify, these
are not types of parts so much as the types
(15:59):
of goals. These parts are forced into by what happens
to them. Exiles. You know, we all are born with
these what other systems call inner children. These very young, vulnerable,
but also when they're not hurt, playful and creative and
loving and open and ah yeah, on and on, all
(16:24):
these wonderful qualities they have that we love to be with.
But when they're hurt or terrified or shamed and made
to feel worthless, they take on those burdens, They take
on those beliefs about themselves, they take on the emotions
from those experiences, and when they carry those burdens, they
(16:47):
have the power to make us feel all those feelings
that they still carry from those experiences, so they can
overwhelm us and make it so we can't function and
make us feel terrible. So we kind of naturally try
to lock them away in inner basements or abysses and
(17:08):
just move on from the trauma, thinking we're just moving
away from the memories and the emotions of the trauma,
not realizing we're locky way our most precious qualities simply
because they got hurt. And so those we call exiles,
we locked them away, and for them it's insult to injury.
The injury was the trauma, and the insult is we
(17:30):
abandoned them and left them in the past. And when
you get a lot of exiles, then you feel more
delicate and the world feels more dangerous because so many
things could trigger them, and if they get triggered, they
blast out of the basement and they overwhelm you and
make you stay in bed for a week or whatever
they do. And one other sorts of exiling is also
(17:51):
if there are emotions in your family when you were
getting raised that weren't acceptable and you had to luck
away the parts that felt those things too. I think
that was all of them. That's true for many of us. Yes,
So when you have exiles, you've got to have protectors
(18:11):
because so many things can trigger them, and so a
lot of other parts are recruited out of their naturally
valuable states to become these protectors, and they spend nervous
amounts of energy trying to manage your life so that
no one hurts you. Again, no one gets close enough
(18:33):
to hurt you. Maybe no one rejects you because you
don't look right, or everybody gives you accolades because you
perform at such a high level. So these we call managers,
they're just trying their best to manage your life, to
please people and control the world. And they'll also control
your body by making you a little bit dissociated from
(18:55):
your feelings and keeping you in your head. And it's
all an effort to contain these exiles and also keep
them from being triggered. And then the world still triggers
your exiles, so when that happens, it's a big emergency,
and these flames of exile emotion encompassing you, so you
need and other parts forced into this role of being
(19:17):
what we call a firefighter. They're trying to fight the
flames of exiled emotions, either by dousing it with some
substance or getting you higher than the flames, or distracting
you until they burn themselves out. So we all have
these firefighter activities that immediately happened in an impulsive and
(19:38):
I don't care about the consequences to your body, to
your relationships. I've just got to get you away from that.
That's another set of protectors. So the very simple Matt,
we've got protectors, one group of which is called managers.
The other is called firefighters, and they're both trying to
contain and protect these vulnerable eggs. Parts of those. Let
(20:01):
me relate some of this to my own life and
my own story and see if it helps apply this
in some ways. And I've I've got a couple of questions,
So a little bit about me, you know, recovering alcoholic
heroin addict. I've been in recovery fifteen years this time,
and it was about ten years before that, so most
of my adult life, and I certainly recognize the firefighter role. Right,
(20:22):
That's what my addiction was, right, it was I can't
handle how I feel, So let's douse the flames. Let's
let's get rid of these feelings that we don't like.
So lots of people are able to overcome their primary addiction,
this and again depending on how the person recovered and
the things that they did. But is it possible that
(20:44):
in one case, what's happened is that that person's managers
have gotten really skilled and the managers now have got
things under control to the point that the exiles don't
break loose. Thus we don't need the fire fire meeting
in the same way. Yeah, that's what most addiction treatment
(21:04):
is in this country, or I guess around the world.
Even it's showing up the managers so that they not
only contain the exiles, but they also lock up the firefighters.
And that takes a lot of work. You know, it
takes a lot of vigilance and a lot of you know,
go to the meetings constantly and reinforce it. And that's good.
(21:28):
I mean it's good in the sense that you're not
you're not addicted, but you become addicted to the meetings,
or you become addicted to whatever program is you're doing
to try and show up your managers, and you become
a kind of dry drunk in a way, and you're
not that much fun because you're dominated by these managers.
A better way, from my point of view, is to
(21:52):
actually honor the addictive part for its attempts to try
and save you from all that pain. It literally thinks
it's say in your life every time it does that.
And also go to the critic who's attacking you for
not being able to control yourself and thinks you should
have more willpower and so on, and get it to
(22:12):
back off, get it off your back, and then get
permission from those parts to go to the exiles that
are driving the whole thing. And we have a process,
it's like a five step process from which we can
actually heal those parts and get them out of where
they're stuck. In the past and help them unload what
we call unburdened the feelings and beliefs they got back there,
(22:35):
at which point it's like a curse has been lifted
and they'll transform into who they naturally are. And then
we can bring in the addictive part and the critic
and see they don't have to spend all this time
trying to deal with this pain. And then they shift
into totally different roles themselves and they start to get
along with each other. So it's a very different approach.
(22:57):
It's like almost the opposite approach, sort of like what
I was saying earlier about the two wolves. And it's
a tough sell because the addictions community is very attached
to the disease model and the sense that these addictive
parts are just what they are. I got sober at
(23:35):
twenty four from heroin addiction and very traditional twelve step approach,
you know, Central Ohio, and not a lot of you know,
not a lot of progressive thinking going on at that point,
you know, And the basic idea was, you don't need
to know why you're an alcoholic, you just are. Let's
not talk about your parents, let's not talk about your childhood,
(23:55):
Let's and and that approach worked. I got sober, but
a few years into being and sober, I had some
things happened. My marriage fell apart. I fell apart very
promptly after that, and that led me into a type
of therapy. At that time you already addressed one of
the words for it. You know, my therapist was very
influenced by a gentleman by the name of John Bradshaw,
(24:16):
and we did a lot of you know, inner child work,
which a lot of it feels similar to what I
see happening in parts work. We didn't necessarily talk about
the protectors in the same way. We kind of tried
to get right to the exile if I had to,
if I had to translate what I saw happening there
and your approach, although I think what happened with me
(24:37):
was indirectly. We were working with those protectors for a
long time in order to get there. But at that
point what it was is the work was really about
letting that exile basically have the the emotions that it
was unable to have when it was younger. Historically, I
(24:57):
did a lot of this similar type wor a long
time ago. And I have a question for you, though
about some of this type of work, and you and
I talked beforehand about, well, maybe we'll do some parts
work here on the show. You'll you'll do some with me.
And what typically happens for me and a lot of
these areas is that I have precious few memories of
(25:21):
being a child at all, Like it's a blank slate
back there. And despite doing lots of inner child work
and lots of different things, like I don't have memory
of like three days ago. So it's not it doesn't
appear to only be my childhood. It seems to be
a broader system. How do you do parts work if
(25:42):
you don't have memories? When we get to these exiles,
these inner children start the healing process by what we
call the witnessing stage, where I would have you ask
this vulnerable part what it wants you to know about
what happened in the past and where it's stuck in
(26:02):
the past, and you might get memories, you might get images,
but sometimes people don't. They just get the emotion or
they just feel the sensations and their body just starts
to move in strange ways. And many parts can feel
fully witnessed without having you to know exactly the details
(26:23):
of what happened. So it's really not a problem if
you can't get the details. There are some parts that
do want you to know the details, and the reason
you can't get them is because other parts are afraid
to let you know these things. So then we would
work with the parts who are afraid for those memories
to come, and just go over all their fears and
(26:44):
try to get permission for you to see what happened.
And because these parts, even though you consciously don't have
memories much of the time, and this has been true
for me, if you get permission, the memories will start
to come too. And so you know, the other lenge
that I found therapy wise in general inner child and
a variety of different kinds, is I get asked a question.
(27:07):
I looked at some of the exercises in your book,
and I know some people that, like you know, Ralph
Delarosa and I are are close, and I know he's
a big proponent of your work, and so you know,
I've been around this kind of work. Part of what
happens is if if we were to say, like, okay,
let's talk to this part in Eric, right, I have
a very difficult time differentiating is my brain generating something
(27:33):
that I know to be what I think that part
should be actually thinking, saying or feeling because I kind
of know the answers quote unquote in a way, right,
I mean? Or is it really organically happening? It's very
difficult to tell that apart. How do you help people
differentiate that is this an authentic part speaking or is
(27:55):
this a brain that knows what it thinks? The answer
should be. So there are ways that you get tipped off,
or I would get tipped off as your therapist that
it was a part just trying to please me or
trying to get through the session without getting dirty, you know,
something like that, And I would just say, Eric, could
you just see if there's some part of you that's
(28:17):
just trying to do this, and then we would talk
to you and see if we can get it to
step out. So that's not a huge problem in this system.
So you feel like over time by working with somebody
that it starts to emerge when something real is happening
versus something is not very much. Yeah, it's not hard
(28:37):
to time. And then I think you still do parts
work right, So this is an ongoing practice for you.
Would that be a safe way to say it, you
mean me personally? Yeah, totally, yes, Yeah, I mean I've
done a lot of work over the years, and still
my wife has an ability to tugger new parts that
(28:58):
I need to heal. So it never ends, it seems,
and you know, many many ways. I'm a lot better.
I feel my power and I ever have, but there's
still work to do. Yeah, you know. So a question
that comes up for me a lot that I've been
thinking about a lot recently is what is mental health
or what is when you're done? Or what does it
(29:20):
mean to be healed? Or what is good enough? Or
what is how healthy? Do I think I'm going to get?
You know, I think that's a question that comes up
a lot in my mind. How do you think about
that question? Yeah, I'm a big transformation guy, so you know,
maybe in contrast to some schools of Buddhism, where the
(29:41):
goal isn't too heal per se, it's really to become
very acceptable what's in there and kind of live with it.
But from a different place, this work actually helps you
unload pain, unload terror, unload all the emotions or or
the emotions you lead with. In terms of the second Wolf,
(30:03):
it helps you unburden all that and when you do,
not only do you not have to deal with those
feelings that came into you they aren't native to you,
that came into you from the experiences, but also these
parts will transform into being very valuable allies. And whereas
you didn't have access to much creativity before, you do
(30:26):
this unburdening with this part, and now you have all
kinds of creativity that helps you steer you in a
different place in your life. So and there are four
main goals of ifs. The first one is what we've
been talking about, the liberation and transformation of these parts
from the roles they've been stuck in so they can
be who they're designed to be. And then the second
(30:47):
we also talked about restoring trust of the parts in
self as a leader. And then the third is bringing
harmony to this inner system. So not only are the
parts different, but they're getting to know each other and
working together in new ways and feel more unitary because
they're not battling all the time. And then the fourth
(31:08):
goal is to be more self let in the outside
world and bring more self to the world in that way.
So that's for me what healing entails. When I look
(31:41):
at your list of seas for the self, I look
at them and I'm like, you know, I feel like
I spend a lot of time around many of those sees.
You know. I feel pretty calm, pretty confident, pretty curious.
I think, naturally compassionate. I'm not trying to toot my
own horn here excessively by any stretch. But what I
don't feel, I think there's a see in here that is.
(32:06):
The one that I would describe as doesn't feel as
present is connectedness. And I've described it this way before.
I've described it that I think I've done a lot
of work over thirty years, in a lot of different
ways and a lot of different schools, and I have
taken away what I would call the vast majority of
obvious suffering, right Like, I don't feel like I suffer
(32:29):
a whole lot. And yet if I were to describe
what I would say, it would be Okay, here's where
I want to continue to grow. It is in feeling
more connected or in not having what is from time
to time sort of a low mood, flat effect. There's
nothing going on there. It's like when I look at it,
(32:50):
I'm like, well, nothing is wrong that I can tell
a matter of fact, everything is actually pretty darn good
and you know. And so then you read lots of
different things that you hear or about happiness set points
like well, a certain amount of happiness is just going
to be, you know, genetic. And that's where I start
to get into when do you go, okay, like just
onwards with living and when do you continue deeper into
(33:13):
a healing journey? Well, you mentioned earlier the possibility of
working on that you want to spend some time, check
again on that. I am willing to try it for sure.
So I guess we would start with the part of
you that makes you feel so separate and flat. Does
that sound okay? M hum yep. So Eric, see if
you can find that feeling in your body or around
(33:36):
your body? Okay, got it? Where do you find it?
It's kind of in the pit of my stomach. And
as you notice that there, how do you feel toward it?
In other words, do you like it or you hate it?
Or you want you're afraid of it, you wish it
would change, you wish to go away? How do you
feel toward it? I certainly wouldn't say that there's a hate,
(33:59):
but sure, I'd love to see a change. Okay, So
we're gonna ask the part that wants it to change
to give us a little space now and step back
in there so we can just get to know it
and and maybe you know, get to know why it's
doing this better and just see if that one give
(34:23):
us a little space I think so, then go ahead
and focused in the pit of your stomach again and
tell me how you feel toward it. Now. Well, here's
the problem I described earlier. The answer that came to
mind was curious. But I don't know if that's because
I know that's what I'm aiming for. But let's just
(34:45):
let's just go with it and see what happens, all right. Again,
I haven't detected it, okay, Okay, ask the part who's
so skeptical about this to just give us a space
to give it a try, all right, and to not
constantly comment and how you're making it up, okay, And
then follow your curiosity and ask this one in the
(35:07):
pit of your stomach what it wants you to know,
and don't think of the answer, just wait and see
what comes. And if nothing comes, that's okay, just kind
of be patient. What does it want you to know
about why it does this to you. It makes you
(35:27):
feel this way. Three things are happening. One is the
feeling in the pit of my stomach is slightly more
intense good. Secondly is um an idea that it provides
me an excuse to hide, And third is the the
(35:53):
podcast host part of my brain going is this make
good audio to for it to be quiet this long?
But we're gonna ask that part to step aside hide,
and we're gonna you can always add it it's right, okay, okay,
So something about an excuse to hide? Did you say? Okay?
So ask this part what it's afraid would happen if
(36:16):
it didn't help you hide that way? I have to
do things I don't want to do. You have to
do things it doesn't want to do, or that it
thinks you thinks aren't good for you. Um okay. The
response I seem to get is I'm too tired. Okay,
So it's ask if it's keeping you tired or it
(36:40):
thinks you're too tired to do these things. I don't
seem to be getting a clear answer on that question. Okay,
try this one. Then, what are the things it's afraid
you would do if it didn't do this job? Can
you repeat the question over time? Yeah? Just again, I'm
directed right to the pretty stomach. What's afraid would happen
(37:01):
in terms of the things you would wind up having
to do if it didn't do this? Inside tell people
how I feel? Okay? So it's afraid that if you
felt more, then you'd have to tell people about those feelings.
Is that right? Yes? So it's keeping you flat so
(37:23):
you don't feel so you don't take the risk of
talking to people about your feelings. Just trying to get
this right, Just ask what that's right? Yeah? I think so.
It seems to be providing a little bit more information
about the type of feeling. Perhaps, can you share that
or you want to keep that private? That I'm angry
(37:44):
with them and I don't like them, Okay, I wasn't
afraid would happen if you did share that with somebody?
Either they or I would get hurt? Okay, So it's
really trying to protect you and other people from being hurt.
Are the angry part of you? Sounds sorry? I'm checking that.
(38:07):
Hang on, just check your Yeah, So how do you
feel toward it now? Eric? As you learn how it's
trying to protect you and keep you safe that way.
I feel like that part is starting to take up
more more bandwidth, the angry one or this one, I
think the protector part the flat car. Yeah, and how
(38:32):
do you feel toward him though? As you learn he
is trying to protect you from being hurt? I feel
compassionate towards him. And and now I might be using
a term I know from reading the book blended, but
because I also sort of feel like his arguments makes sense. Yeah,
(38:55):
Like like I'm like, well, okay, I get your point.
That's that's a good point. So I don't know if
I'm blended with that part or but that's sort of
what's coming up is like, hey, like we're waiting into
what feels like slightly dangerous ground here, I understand. So, um,
you're blended with a part that kind of agrees with
(39:18):
him and relies on him, and it's also afraid of
the anger. So uh, and that's fine. But for now,
just extend some compassion and appreciation to the flat part
and just see how it reacts to being understood and
(39:39):
appreciate it. I don't know what the part feels. I
just noticed my stomach sort of that that sensation sort
of fade away a little bit, Yeah, relaxed. Yeah, so
that's typical. And ask h and we you know, we
(40:00):
won't do it. We don't have time. But if at
another time you could go to that angry part and
help it so it wasn't so angry? Would this guy
have to work so hard to contain it? Just ask
that question? Maybe it's fair. Yeah, And if it didn't
(40:24):
have to work so hard at this job, let's suppose
we could do that and it was freed up. What
might it like to do instead inside of you play baseball? Cool?
And ask if it would be willing to let you
do that at some point or is it really still
(40:45):
very very frightened of the angry part, whether it let
me play baseball now, whether it would let you go
to the angry one and he would yes? Okay, okay.
And I don't know how long you've got, but does
(41:05):
this feel like complete peace for them? Yeah? It's reminded
me there's a batting cage right around the corner and
I ought to go visit it. Yeah. I think this
is like a like a good just thank the part,
thank the part for sharing so much. And when you're ready,
come on back. Okay, Yeah, so how do you feel now?
(41:28):
I mean, that's a slightly awkward thing to do in
front of, you know, thousands and thousands of people, but
but okay, I feel okay. I felt something happening there.
And I also sort of feel like, back to the
point earlier, like I've done enough thinking about my psyche
to kind of recognize that I think, I know that
(41:49):
this this makeup makes intellectual sense to me, So I'm
not sure that I wasn't kind of going where I
think it would go. But the same time, there were
shifts in internal experience that felt real, and that's part
of the way we can judge. Yeah, my sense was
that was quite real, and I would encourage you to
(42:13):
try and find somebody can help you go to that
anger so it's not such a threat and you don't
have to organize so much of your life around not
feeling yet. Yeah, it was interesting when we talked about managers,
Like I said, I feel like my firefighters have kind
of settled down. Although it's interesting that you talk about
firefighters being very interested these are not your exact words,
(42:34):
but very interested in finding enlightenment, right right, It's that
it's that like, get me out of here, so here.
I recognize that. But the thing about managers is they
are parentified in her children. They're usually very tired and
stressed out. And I'm not much stressed out most of
the time, but tiredness is more of a thing, you know.
(42:58):
And I bet if we had stayed in there and
asked that flat guy if he was tired of having
to contain all this, he would say, yeah, he's very tired. Yeah,
I believe that when he asked to expand that kind
of energy to contain it, then he'll make you tired.
So let me ask a few more questions if that's okay,
and then we'll chop up here in a minute. So
(43:20):
I want to turn a little bit towards trailheads. Tell
me what do you mean by the word trailhead. Trailhead
is any thought pattern or emotion, or impulse or sensation that,
if you were to focus on and stay with, would
(43:40):
lead you to the part from which it's emanating. So
it's like, if you're out hiking, then you find the
head of a trail, and if you follow the trail,
it leads you to something like a waterfall or something important.
So that's all I mean by so basically, what we're
saying is we're using our own experience of difficult thoughts, emotions, tension,
(44:03):
things along those lines as a thing to say, Hey,
something to look at here. Let's pause here, and let's
go in here a little further. Let's find the part
that that's coming from and get to know it and
help it. I have this program called Spiritual Habits and
talk about triggers, Like you know, we all have different
triggers that remind us to do something, and that the
most powerful kind of trigger is sort of an emotional
(44:25):
based trigger. It's when you recognize an emotional state and
that actually gets you to pause and do something versus
just being lost in it. Let's talk about spirituality and
and I f S. I'd like to explore this a
little bit more because you said, I f S is
morphed over time for being exclusively about psychotherapy to becoming
a kind of spiritual practice. And I would love to
(44:48):
know what that statement means to you, and what the
word spiritual means to you, because I just mentioned I've
got a program called Spiritual Habits, and I often am like,
what should I call it? Spiritual habits. Is it philosophical habits?
Is it psychological habits? Like these things all just there's
such a blending and overlapping of them. What do you
mean when you say that I f S is morphed
(45:10):
you know, from psychology to more of a spiritual practice. Well,
people do it as a daily practice often, and as
they do it, there are aspects of IFS that help
you work with your parts, but then there are others
that help your parts relax. And as your parts relax
and you feel more and more embodied in what I'm
(45:30):
calling South, you feel like you're meditating. You feel like
you're arriving at that place that people meditate to get to.
And as you stay in that, you feel a lot
of the things that people meditate for, which is you
feel like you're much more than this contained body and
that you're part of something much bigger, and there's a
(45:52):
sense of well being and everything's okaynus. And so it
becomes that kind of a spiritual practice where your sussing,
from my point of view, more and more of the
big Self what people call God, and you're bringing more
of that in and that is very soothing to your
(46:12):
parts to know that's who you are. You were talking
earlier about how you don't feel that connected. You feel
very separate even though you've done all this work, and
that process of embodying the spacious sense of self feeling
the bigger sound makes you feel very, very much more connected,
(46:33):
not only to that but also to other people, into animals,
and to the earth. So all of that becomes a
spiritual practice. Yeah. Yeah, there's a couple of lines that
you use that I thought I really liked, which is,
I f S helps people become bodhisatvas of their psyche.
So for listeners who aren't familiar with that term bodhisatva,
it is a primarily Mahayana Buddhist term. I believe it's
(46:58):
certainly emphasized heavily and zen practice the bodhisattva as someone
who is basically trying to lead all beings to enlightenment.
So I love that idea of you know, we're becoming
a Bodhisatva of our inner parts. And you said, or
through a Christian lens, I f S. People end up
doing what in the inner world what Jesus did in
(47:18):
the outer They go to the exiles and enemies, love
and heal them and bring them home. Yeah. Yeah, and uh,
just kind of getting those insights has been quite amazingly
on this journey. Is I got more and more how
it's all parallel. How what a lot of these spiritual
leaders were saying is true in the under world as
(47:40):
much as it is in the outer world. Yeah, well
you you say that in the book multiple times. You
say a theme of the book is, you know, exploring
how it's all parallel. How we relate in the inner
world will be how we relate in the outer world.
And that experience feels so true to me. You know,
I don't know which lead which what? Where is it?
Learning to love the external world more which led me
(48:01):
to love the internal world? Is that the internal world
leads the external Like, like you said, there's sort of parallel.
I think improvements in one for me anyway, has always
led to improvements in the other. But it's hard to
improve in the inner world if you think of these
things in the traditional way we do, which is the
other wolf? You know, I once I had an audience
(48:23):
with the Dali Lama, and my big line was because
he talks about similar he talks about their negative emotions,
and there are positive emotions and you need to build
these antidotes to the negative ones and focus on the
positive ones all the time, very much the same as
the wolf story. And I said, you know, it's ironic
(48:47):
to me that you teach us to go with compassion
to our outer enemies but not our inner enemies. And
he didn't really have a good answer to that. My
point of view, Yeah, well, I think it's an interesting
question because I think about this often and what I
see a lot of in spirituality, and I see it
in various forms of psychotherapy, although not so much I
(49:09):
f S. What I see is two basic approaches for
working with things of difficulty. One is, I would say,
you get in there and you mess with it and
you try and change. So cognitive behavioral therapy. I'm having
thoughts that are difficult, I go in, I examine those thoughts,
I look at them, I look for truth, you know,
I orient towards the positive. I get in there and
(49:30):
do something with it. And the other is, more broadly speaking,
what I'd say would be more of acceptance based therapies,
which are you allow things to be as they are,
and I f S is bringing a little of both
of that together. Right, You're you're certainly allowing the parts
to be there, the negative emotions to be there, and
(49:51):
you're encouraging them to change and transform. And so the
part of Buddhism that I've often heard that sounds very
similar to me that would allow line with I f
S is this idea of I'm not going to think
of the right quote right now, but it's basically the
jewels in the lotus, right, no mud no lotus right
to use tick not on. I think he's the originator
(50:13):
of that phrase. Yeah, of all the bodies leaders, Tikn
his philosophy because the closest time yeah, yeah, you know,
in terms of your anger used to take your anger
and create it like a little baby. Yeah. Yeah, he's
as close as you can come. So within all of this, though,
do you find a time or a place or a
point where it is useful and there are times where
(50:36):
it is useful to say orient your mind towards the positive? No, No,
And that would be that you feel like any time
there's any sort of negative thought or thinking going on,
that it's coming from burdened part. Yeah, it's a it's
a part that needs your attention. And if all you're
doing is thinking about the positive you're going to ignore it.
(50:59):
You know, there are times where say you're on a
date and you just wanna have fun, and some part
is reminding you that your dog died three years ago.
You might want to say, Okay, I'll talk to you later.
But I hate the power of positive thinking. I hate
positive psychology. I had all of that. The doll a Llama,
(51:21):
I don't hate him, but I hate his philosophy. That's
that's the I'm leading, And we're leading this episode off
with that quote. Chris makes you capture that, just morph it.
So we got Richard say he hates the doll a Llama. Right,
that'll help my career enormously. So, but just this whole
attitude about if you just think, look on the bright
(51:42):
side and think positively, your life's going to be good.
It leads towards exiling. And I'm a big crusader against
exiling anything. So yes, I mean, certainly there are times,
well I'll say to these parts, look, don't harass me now,
I'll talk to you later. But it's with a lot
of kindness, like you would if a kid comes running
(52:03):
in and you're trying to do something else, you know,
let me be, but I'm not going to forget about you.
Not bad for wanting attention, but now is not the time.
That's right. My personal beliefs are there are times that
we want to adjust where our attention is. You know,
you always want to do it with kindness, and you
(52:23):
don't want to do it in the extent that it
becomes denial. The example I often use is like, if
I walk into a hotel room, there's gonna be like
three things I really love about the hotel room and
a couple of things that aren't so good, and I
feel like there's a benefit and going, you know what,
I'm going to try and give the attention to the
parts of what I like and let the parts that
I don't like about it, you know, sort of go.
It's is not denying anything, it's just saying, you know,
(52:46):
where do I want to orient attention in this case?
But I think that's something that's relatively surface. I think
when we're talking about inner pain, at least to me,
has always made sense to pay attention to it, like
what's here? Why, what's going on? Yeah, to go with
it with initially curiosity but ultimately with love and Yeah,
(53:07):
but it isn't just the pain. I mean again, you've
got the wolves of I forgot the three you started with,
but agreed, I think and read hatred and anger or envy.
Fear probably might have been in there. Anger. Yeah, all
those things that many Buddhist traditions see as negative emotions.
(53:27):
Those are just hurting parts, their parts that need your
attention to love as well as much as these eggsiles.
So the more you think of them as negative emotions,
the less you're going to feed them, and the stronger
they're gonna get. Yeah, well, I think that's a great
place for us to end. Thank you so much for
coming on the show. I really appreciate the chance to
talk with you, to share I f s with others.
(53:50):
Will have links in the show notes to your book,
to your website where people can find you. And thanks
for doing a little parts work with me. Yeah, and
thanks for being a good sport and allowing that and
for being so vulnerable with your audience. I'm sure that
part of the reason you have a big audience is
because you're very honest about your own experience. So it
was a pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much.
(54:29):
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Eric Zimmer
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