Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Richard Schwartz.
Dr. Richard Schwartz is the founder of Internal Family Systems Therapy, which is a unique form of therapy that's less centered on your relationship to other people, but instead focuses mainly on identifying the parts of yourself and your personality that tend to emerge in different situations, and that tend to create anxiety, resent, or depression. Another key feature of internal family systems therapy is that it's not just focused on fixing challenges within us, it also teaches you how to grow your confidence, openness, and compassion. Now, today's episode is different than any other episode of the podcast that we've done before, and that's for two reasons.
First, Dr. Schwartz takes me through a brief session of IFS Therapy, so you can see exactly what it looks like in practice, and then he takes you, the listener, through it as well. So as you'll soon observe and experience, internal family systems therapy allows you to work through challenging sticking points, basically the parts or feelings within you that you don't like to have, and then it shows you how to convert those feelings into more functional aspects of yourself. So as you'll soon see, internal family systems therapy is both super interesting and it's an incredibly empowering practice.
It's also a form of therapy that's now been studied, and for which there's a lot of peer-reviewed science to support its efficacy. By the end of today's episode, Dr. Dick Schwartz will have shown you that a lot of the negative reactions that we tend to have with different people and things tend to originate from a few basic patterns that once we understand, we can really transmute into more positive responses. It's a really interesting practice, it's one that you can apply today during the episode, and that you can return to in order to apply going forward in your life.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr.
Richard Schwartz. Dr. Dick Schwartz, welcome. Thank you, Andrew.
It's delightful to be with you. I've heard so much about you and your work and internal family systems models. I've had the opportunity to do a little bit of that work. To be honest, I don't know whether or not the person I did that work with was formally trained in it.
So I'd like to start off by just asking you what is internal family systems and what are the different components. And as we do that, I'm sure people are going to be thinking about these various components for their own life and the people in their lives. Well, originally, I developed it as a form of psychotherapy, which is probably the way it's used most now, but it's also become a kind of life practice and just a paradigm for understanding the human mind and as an alternative to the culture's paradigm. So that's saying a lot and it's been quite a journey.
I know Freudian psychoanalysis. I know of any number of different branches of psychology that have a clinical slant to them. There's cognitive behavioral therapy. What are the core components of internal family systems?
Yeah, so one basic assumption is that the mind isn't unitary that actually we're all multiple personalities, not in a diagnostic sense. But we all have these, what I call, parts, other systems called sub-personalities, ego states, things like that. And that it's the natural state of the mind to be that way, that we're born with them because they're all very valuable and have qualities and resources to help us survive and thrive. But trauma and what's called attachment injuries and the slings and arrows we suffer force these little naturally valuable parts into the roles that can be destructive.
Often they don't like it all, but because they're frozen often in time and during the trauma and they live as if it's still happening, they're in these protective roles that can be quite extreme and interfering in your life. And yeah, so I just stumbled on the phenomena of 40, now I think it's 41 years ago, and it's been, you know, amazing ride. So at the time were you already practicing as a clinical psychologist? Actually, I have a PhD in Maryland family therapy, so I was part of the movement in family therapy away from intra-psychic work.
There was a polarization and we thought we could reorganize families and heal all these symptoms just by doing that. We didn't have to muck around in the inner world. And I went to prove that, and this was about 1983, by getting a group of bulimic kids together and their families. And tried to reorganize the families just the book said too and failed.
The kids didn't realize they'd been cured and they kept binging and purging. So out of frustration, I began asking why? And they started talking this language of parts. And they would say some version of when something happens bad happens in my life, it triggers this critic who's calling me all kinds of names inside.
And that goes right to the heart of a part that feels empty and alone and worthless. And that's so distressing the feel that the binge part comes in and takes me out, takes me away from all that pain. But the critic comes in and attacks me for the binge. And then the criticism goes right to the heart of that worthless part.
So to me as a family therapist, this sounded like what I'd been studying in external families, these circular sequences of interaction. So I just got curious and just started to explore. Are these different parts that exist within each and all of us? Are they represented by a clear and distinctive voice from the other?
Or do people typically experience them as just the self, like my inner critic? You'll give us the other names and titles. Or is this happening typically below people's conscious awareness? Some of both.
So most people are aware of their critic. But other times you're not aware of these parts we call exiles that you've locked away because you didn't want to feel their feelings. They're stuck in these bad traumasines. And to survive in your life, you had to push them away.
And so with those parts, a lot of people aren't really consciously aware of them until these protected parts give space and open the door to the exiles. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. Now, I've personally been doing therapy weekly for well over 30 years.
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Before we do that, since you brought up the topic of trauma, this is a topic that I think many, many people are interested in. I'm just curious how do you define a trauma and why do you think it is that traumas tend to lock us into a state that was representative of an earlier time? Why is it that it's so linked to this thing of time perception? Yeah, the why question I can't totally answer, but it definitely is.
And for me traumas aren't necessarily traumatizing. So something bad happens to you. And if you can access what you and Martha Beck were calling with the self, capitalized, and you go to the part of you that got hurt by what happened instead of pushing it away and locking it up and you embrace it and you bring it closer to you, which means going to your suffering, which is counter to which most of us try to do. But if you were to do that and you could help it unload the feelings that got from the trauma, then you're not traumatized.
What's traumatizing is something bad happens. These more vulnerable parts of us, the most sensitive parts of us get hurt or feel worthless because of what happened or get terrified. And then we lock them away because we don't want to feel that feeling anymore. And everybody around us tells us to just let it go, just move on, don't look back.
And so we wind up exiling our most sensitive parts simply because they got hurt. And then when you have a lot of exiles, you feel more delicate, the world seems more dangerous because anything could trigger that. And when they get triggered, they'll blow up, they'll take over. So it's like these flames of raw emotion come popping out.
So other parts are forced into these manager roles or these protective roles. And some of them are trying to manage your life so that you don't get triggered anymore, so that, for example, nobody gets close enough to you to trigger any of that. Or so you look really good, so you don't get rejected or perform at a really high level to counter the worthlessness. Many of those become the critics because in their effort to try to get you to look good, they'd be yelling at you to try and behave and do what they want, so you look better.
And then there are other what we call manager protectors that are, for some people, particularly women, have these massive care taking parts that don't let them take care of themselves and take care of everybody else. And so I can go on and on. There's a lot of common manager roles. And I want to make clear as I'm talking about this, that these are not the essence of the parts.
And that's a big mistake that most of the field is made is to assume the critic is just an internalized critical parent voice instead of listening to it and hearing this desperately trying to protect you. So none of these are what they seem. That's the role they've been forced into. And the analogy, again, is to an external family like kids and dysfunctional families are forced into these extreme roles that aren't who they are.
It's the role they got forced into by the dynamics of the family. So the same is true with this internal family. So most of us have a lot of what we call managers. They got us here.
They help us in our careers and the other systems would call them the defenses or the ego. And in spirituality, they get vilified too. But their whole MO is keep everything under control. Please everybody.
And you'll survive. The world has a way of breaking through those defenses triggering an exile. When that happens, it's a big emergency. Because again, these flames of raw emotion are going to overwhelm you and make you have trouble functioning or even getting out of bed.
So there are other parts that immediately go into action to deal with that emergency. And in contrast to these managers, they're impulsive, reactive, damn the torpedoes. I don't care about the collateral damage to your body, to your relationships. I just got to get you higher than those flames or doubts them with some substance or distract you till they burn themselves out.
So we call those firefighters. And again, these are just the roles. When released from these roles, they'll transform into being something very valuable. So the fire fighter, the inner firefighter role is one of the exiles that surfaces under conditions of a lot of emotion.
Maybe we could, this is a beautiful description and I'm completely on board this idea that we have multiple aspects of self or selves inside. Jung said that too, I think. Jung had all this a long time ago. What I like about this protectors slash managers versus, again, not versus because they're combated, but as a distinct category, the exiles is just feels very true to me.
And I like the, the directness of the language. So maybe we could just like create a mental grid for people. Like if, let's say I came to you as a patient and I said, listen, you know, I'll just be, I'll be honest. Why not?
Let's do it. Secretly I brought you here to get there. No. But okay.
So I'm somebody who for a very long time has been able to organize his life. I tend to have smooth interactions with my coworkers, great friendships. I now have a very good relationship with my immediate family. Very good.
In fact, I'm still working on a few things with a few people. I'm living in a mode of great joy and appreciation these days. However, I'm not going to get the details of this for sake of privacy. But you know, the other day I was in a discussion with a family member.
They had a grievance with me that I thought we had already addressed and it became a very high friction conversation very quickly to the point where we table as an idea that maybe we just take some like serious space, which was not reflective of how deeply I love this person or they love me. It was just a feeling of both of us just being in this like high tension place like and fortunately the conversation ended well with a path forward. That involved more contact, not less that both of us feel really good about. But in that moment where I'm feeling overwhelmed, and they're feeling overwhelmed.
What's going on there? We're both adults. So overwhelmed with anger at each other or frustration? Frustration.
Frustration. Like that previous conversations, I felt I hadn't. I was saying things. They were saying things, but I feel like there was so much underlying tension based on a history of poor communication nested on top of a of the kind of an intensity of emotion that we both tend to have.
And somehow we just like couldn't parse things from that state. And so I sat in my chair and I just told myself, okay, I'm going to not say anything for five minutes because I know myself. It's not that I thought I would say something really a barbed wire, but I just thought this is not going to work. Like I'm slamming my head against a wall.
They're not hearing me. I'm clearly not hearing them. And the thing that helped me through that was just because it was what was taught to me. I just decided to surrender.
And the word surrender used to mean to me letting go of truth. And I feel really scary because when you say surrender, it's almost like saying one context is surrender means you're right, no matter. And you're right. I'm just going to say that's right.
But I've come to realize that surrender to me is just surrender in the moment so that I can get better optics, internal and external optics. So to me, the thing of embracing surrender in those types of moments, very uncomfortable. But I now have learned it's a great way to get perspective. But even as I describe it, the whole situation was so heavy.
I came out of that call, even though it ended well and was like, ugh. Yeah. That was like, I'd never run a marathon, but I'd rather run a marathon than do two of those a week. Totally agree.
Yeah. I had one of those with my wife a few days ago. Okay. All right.
And yeah, very similar. Just caught that part and said, okay, let's just let it go for now and we'll talk later. So I could give you my take on what happened. But if you wanted to, we could just go in and do a little exploring.
Sure. Yeah. Sure. Okay.
Should we start with the frustrated angry part? Sure. Yeah. Okay.
So remember that feeling and then focus on it and find it in your body or around your body. Okay. Where do you find it? It's between the middle of my midsection and like right behind my forehead.
Like there's pressure. It's greatly both places. It's great. You have such clarity about it.
So as you focus there, how do you feel toward this part of you? Oh, no. It's very unpleasant. So you don't like it?
No, I don't like it. Yeah, which makes sense because it does, you know, sometimes escalate things with your friend who doesn't leave you feeling good. So I understand why you don't like it. But we can ask the parts that don't like it to give us the space to just get curious about it and see if that's possible.
Okay. Okay. So how do you feel toward it now? A little bit of relaxation in the head part of it.
Yeah, it's funny how when you ask me to localize it, it's so clear. It's like this thing inside me. It's about the size of like a teddy bear. It's just like, oh, but it's not a good thing.
It's like pushed up there. But then when you said to get curious about it, it feels like it kind of drops down a little bit and kind of moves in a little bit. It maybe softens a little bit. So you do feel curious toward it?
Yeah. All right. So go ahead and ask it what it wants you to know about itself. Silently.
Up to you. Either way, whichever is more comfortable. Well, since this is a podcast and none of this is comfortable anyway for me to do in public, if I'm quite honest. Yeah, just asking.
Sure. No, I'll do it out loud. Okay. So what do you want me to know about you?
Yeah. And just wait for the answer. Don't think. I know you've got a big cognitive part.
So we're going to ask that one to relax and just whatever comes in terms of the answer. Just wait for it. My answer is based on the feeling that occurred immediately after asking it, which was the answer was I can dissipate and then I kind of felt it dissipate. So it feels like an energy that when condensed sucks.
But when I look at it, soften a little bit and then ask the question you asked, and then it feels like it just kind of went into the rest of my body, but not poisoning the rest of my body, just kind of mixing in with culture, speaking in to completely, you know, in mystical terms here. Right. So it relaxed. It may not have dissipated in the way.
We think about that. But just keep asking it. What's it afraid would happen if in that context, it didn't try to take over in the way that it did. Just ask that question.
If it didn't try to take over. Yeah. What's it afraid would happen if it hadn't tried to take over? Oh.
Just wait for the answer. Yeah. That's a good question. Okay.
So what would happen if you didn't take over my system that way, condensed from my stomach to my head when I'm feeling that way? Yeah. Don't think. Yeah.
The answers are coming really quick that I wouldn't be able to discern the truth. Okay. So the truth is really important to this part of you. Yeah.
Yeah. Because it tends to surface when I'm hearing something that I believe to be fundamentally untrue. Typically about my thoughts or feelings. Right.
I've come maybe with age. I've come to the conclusion that two people can look at the same interaction or same thing and have two very different versions of it. I'm okay with that. The part that I'm very, very sensitive to people in my life and others is when someone else tells me how I feel.
Right. What my motives are or how I feel. That to me is like cool. Like that's a kind of a hard fast way to engage this thing.
Okay. And let it know you get that. That having people misinterpret your motives is really, really hard for it. And ask it more about that.
Just again, don't think. But ask why that's so hard. Why does that bother it so much? And what's afraid would happen if it let that go?
Yeah. So why are you afraid to, why do you have to step in when that happens? Yeah. My answer is not going to be very satisfying for the listeners or for me.
But it's saying because if you can't hold on to your truth, then you can't hold on to yourself. Then nothing will make sense. So there's something about making sense or not, nothing making sense that it's really scared of. Is that right?
Yeah. I mean, I decide to become a biologist and to try and understand the meat inside our heads and body that is the nervous system because I felt, and I still feel that it can reveal some fundamental facts or truths. Understanding reality, as it were, is really important to me because I feel like humans, including myself, of course, are so prone to misinterpretation. Misinterpretation.
So like the truth, as a thing out there, I'm willing to let go of completely. Right. Like completely. The truth as it exists for knowing for certain what my motivations were or what did or didn't happen, but typically it's about motivation.
What did or didn't happen, you usually can parse with somebody. Yeah. That's something I feel I need to protect at all costs. Yeah.
So speaking of protect, and so this is a protector part, right? Ask it if it's protecting other parts of you that are vulnerable and get hurt when someone misses tunes to what your motive is. Just ask that question. Don't think.
That's a fast one. Not easy, but it's a fast one. Yeah. The part of me that feels injured by that is the fact that I believe that I, at least at the beginning and throughout most of a relationship, and even if a relationship ends for whatever reason, that I know it's my nature to try and imagine as much goodness in the intent of the other person as possible.
So if I were to let go of this response, keep going in my mind. I'm going like, it's like a titanium teddy bear shaped thing, but it doesn't feel like it's like a titanium block there. I would potentially move into a mode of judgment of them. It's interesting because I, there are many people from my past, and maybe even a few from my present that people close to me who are pretty well qualified, tell me that I should dislike them or cut them out of my life.
There are a few, maybe one or two instances of people I've cut out of my life, but it's my inclination always to just try and see what can, what can exist. So that, and that part feels important. I don't know why it's important that I come to think about it. Well, we can ask.
Yeah. So I'm, what I'm hearing is this guy, titanium guy is keeping a bag, another part that can be very judgmental of the other person. Yeah. I don't like feeling that.
Yeah. It feels energetically wasteful and it feels more than that. It feels incredibly sad. Yeah.
It's sort of like, I think to, to accept that part of myself is to kind of give up on some fantasy, which is probably an unrealistic fantasy, which is why I'm calling it a fantasy. I realize. Yeah. Yeah.
Like this. Because I, I look at, and I always have since I was a kid, I look at people as we are among the animals where the curators of the earth, because we're good at technology development, but aside from that, and I were like, just like you wouldn't, I can't imagine that a raccoon, you know, looks at another raccoon and it's like, that's a bad raccoon. It's just a rac, rabid raccoon. Right.
You know, and they just, I, I sort of yearn for the same. Yeah. The same, the same sensitivity to our own species. You get that.
Yeah. Like, I don't hate anybody. Well, there might be parts of you that do, but. I hate behaviors.
Okay. I hate things that people have said or done, not certainly mostly to other people, not to me, but I, yeah, being like really being angry at someone in a pervasive way, not just in the moment, is something that's very difficult for me. But when I'm hearing what the, what we heard from this part, it's afraid if it doesn't do this, it, the part that judges the other probably, you know, you know, not so nice way, would be released. Does that sound right?
Yeah. It's just that you've been able to kind of exile it. Yes. Okay.
Yeah. I'm comfortable with the idea that you take the appropriate amount of distance could be zero or could be near infinite, but that I should take the appropriate amount of distance from things and people so that I can be in the most loving stance toward them or that. Yeah. I'm not sure I sound technical here with all the parallel constructions, but I've thought this through a lot.
Like, there's some people that I, um, that there's no limit to the extent to which I want to interact with them. You know, we have other things to do when I spend all our time together. And then there are other people that I love them, but I, I know that I have to keep a certain amount of distance in order to continue to love them. This is the same thing.
So in that moment, it's almost like, but it's coming up without my conscious thing. It's not like saying, listen, that's the kind of person I can, you know, talk to like once a month or something. And I'll just add, you know, in professional settings, not now, but in the distant past when I was in a very hierarchical structure of a, I'm still an academia, still teach, but not running research anymore. Um, formally, you know, like I had a couple, um, senior colleagues that I really loved and respected, but that they, um, they would say or do things that I thought were frankly unethical to other people.
I felt that it was kind of abrasive. So I might, like the physical manifestation of this is I would make it a point to like walk past their office door quickly so that they didn't say, Hey, cause I don't want to interact, but I, I don't, I'm not familiar with cutting people out of my life. Right. I'm just not familiar with doing that.
I don't, I sort of don't believe in it as a value. Let's pause for a second. I'll give you a little overview where we are. So we started with this guy who came up with your friend and is trying to protect that relationship because if you continue to be misunderstood in terms of your motives, it would have an impact.
Does that sound right? Yeah. Yeah. It's not that matters, but close family member.
Got it. And in exploring this part, asking what it's afraid would happen if it didn't do that. So there's this other part that might come out that would be very judgmental of that family member and really might have a bad influence on your relationship with that person. Is that sound right?
That's correct. Okay. So we have these two, well, we have you who's noticing all this, which we should talk more about. And then we have these two parts that are sort of polarized, but one, the judgmental one, you really don't like.
And so you really go to lengths to keep the bay and you're, you kind of admire this guy. And let you also know that he can get in the way at times too. Is all that sound right? Yeah.
That's right. Because I'm describing a recent situation where the presence of this like titanium teddy bear, sorry, I don't know why that's amusing to me to say that the shape of a teddy bear. I'm not seeing a teddy bear with it roughly that size and shape. It creates a protection, but a pressure internally super uncomfortable.
It's actually taking me a couple days to dissipate this. And I do think somewhat counter to the way I'm describing it, it doesn't prevent me from saying something. It actually, if it's too much, it's almost like that's when words start coming out and they're not kind. So it's not a real protector in the sense like it's preventing me from a course of action I don't want to take.
It's more like, it feels like it's kind of extruding all this stuff. And obviously I'm responsible for my words and actions. I know that, but it does feel like it creates kind of takes over. Yeah.
That's the way to put it. Let's go through that again. So I'm so grateful that you're willing to be this vulnerable and expose these parts. So this guy, actually they're both probably what we call firefighters.
Very reactive. There's maybe some other very vulnerable part that's involved here we haven't heard about. But if I were to be continued to work together, I would work to get permission to go to the judgmental guy too. And what you would find is he's a protector too, he's not just a bunch of negative thoughts about people.
And as I was hearing earlier, you've spent a lot of time in your life trying to be fair to people and to not judge them and to see them. What they do is just their behaviors and not who they are, which is great. But in the process of doing that sometimes, we wind up having to push away the parts that want to judge and want to hate and so on. And what I find is if we can go there and get to know them, they're just protectors too and they're young and they, when they are able to unload the hate they might carry, the judgment, they'll transform.
So this is a model of transformation in that sense and it's, there are no bad parts, you go to everybody in there, regardless of how you think, how bad they are, and you get curious about them and you learn how they're trying to protect. And then we help them out of their protective roles and help them trust, there's a you who you talked about with Martha who can run things, that they don't have to do it because most of them are young and get them to trust this you to handle your family member rather than they have to take over or try to take over in the way they did. Does that make any sense? Yeah, it makes total sense.
You know what you said at the beginning, a permission to go to the judgmental part. I was just flits, when I hear that flits to, you know, two possibilities, one's a novel possibility, one's a familiar possibility. The familiar possibility is if I were to really feel the disappointment that I'm feeling when this pattern in the other person shows up again, because at least I'm very familiar with the pattern, then it would fundamentally change the way that I feel about them. That's right.
Like I'm trying to hold on to the goodness. That's right. Right. But of course I want to be very clear, not just for anyone listening but for myself too, that clearly that the protecting role of this titanium teddy bear has created something where what the times when things have broken through from my side, they're not kind and or they're spoken in a way that just is not constructive, right?
So yeah, and then the second possibility is that, and consider this possibility, but the second possibility is that were I to let myself feel that disappointment, that maybe the relationship could persist. Like I've been looking at those things as mutually exclusive exclusive. And as I say all this, I also realize that, well, the honest disclaimer is like I don't want to give the impression that I don't judge people, I'm human and I certainly do. I'm just saying that when there's a relationship that I wish to maintain, I'll go to great lengths to push aside knowledge of my own experience and or just judgment.
I've made this, I've engaged in this pattern in ways that were ended up being extremely destructive to me by completely putting the blinders on to things that were right in front of me. That's what I'm talking about. Consciously. That's what I'm talking about.
Because I adored the person so much in other dimensions like that, you know, and you know, it's not a lack of a better word, a holistic way to approach things. But I also will say that in contrast to the old types of relationships, the relationships where the titanium typewriter is not required feel to me, like by comparison, but also in the absolute scale feel to me, like the best possible relationships one could have. They're like pinch me type of relationships, like friendships, some of my relationships to family, like my co-workers and there are others too, certainly romantic relationships like that. Relationships, my relationship to my dog is trivial as people might think that seems that the contrast of that, like where there's no need for this protector pardon, it's like the best thing because it feels completely safe and uninhibited.
I never have to worry that I'm going to be taken over from the inside, nor do I ever worry that I'm going to like really screw up. And I hope that if I do screw up, they'll tell me, but it's the complete absence of fear. So let me check in and just see how this has been to discuss and focus and so on. What's it been like to do with this process?
It's a lot in the sense that I don't like feeling that titanium thing, teddy bear. It's been very informative, so it's balanced by that. And maybe that's why I went into a little riff about the pleasant relationships and how outsized positive they are for me. They're like a salve and an elixir for me that maybe I gave myself a little washover with that because it's pretty uncomfortable.
But it's really informative and it also tells me that the internal family systems work that I did with someone else was an attempt at this, but so very different, which makes sense because this is your art and science. So I'm grateful. Yeah, so what I was saying earlier is if we were to pursue it, we could get to the point where the teddy bear guy could unload the feelings he carries that makes it so uncomfortable and he would transform. How would I go about doing that?
You would focus on him again. We would explore more of what he's protecting. Either we would go to the guy he's trying to keep a bay that would ruin a relationship or often these parts are protecting something much vulnerable from your past. Some young part that's stuck somewhere in the past that has a big issue about being misunderstood in terms of motives or something.
Yeah, I'm not that I need clarity on this right now, but it's more that it protects the possibility of a relationship at all. Yeah, I think the fear is like if I were to look through my lens of truth or what's happened or is happening in the moment, if I were a quote unquote, better boundary person, it'd be done yesterday, but so it's sort of like a desire to live out a fantasy. Got it. I mean, if I'm honest.
So that would be the part that we would go to that it protects, that has the fantasy of what a relationship should be or could be. We might be stuck somewhere in the past and we would we would witness, you know, you talk in the mouth about compassionate witness, we would witness where he's stuck and what was happening back then. And then I would have you go in and get him out of that time period. Then we'd have him unload the desire for that fantasy that keeps you getting hurt.
And then I would have you have the teddy bear see, it doesn't have to protect him anymore. And then we would help the teddy bear unload the feelings he carries and then he could relax and they would all start to trust you, which we should talk about a little bit now. Who is you who was separate from these others? For the record, I never owned a teddy bear as a kid.
I had a teddy bear. I had a teddy bear. Well, I'm not embarrassed to eat. I had a stuffed frog I love isn't afraid of the frog.
Yeah. But so I don't know where the teddy bear thing came up. But it was the shape of so very clear. But let me let me just elaborate on what I was just saying.
Because when you separated from him and you found him here and I asked you how you felt toward him and you had an attitude about him at first, remember? We got that to relax and got curious about him. Then you started to access more of what I call yourself with the capital S. So it comes through curiosity.
Well, it often starts with curiosity and just to backtrack a little bit. So when I would have these clients in the early days starting to work with these parts, like the critic and so on, and once I got hit with the fact they weren't what they seemed or they deserved to be listened to rather than fought with, so I would help the parts that hated them step out and clients could do that pretty readily. And then I was like, now how do you feel toward this critic? It's spontaneously people saying, I'm just curious about why it calls me names on there.
Or even would say, I feel sorry for it that it has to do this. I'm going to help it. And when they were in that state and I would ask, what part of you is that? That's great.
Let's keep that around. They'd say, that's not a part like these others. That's me. That's my essence.
So that's my self. So I came to call that the self with the capital S. 40 years later, thousands of people doing this all over the world turns out that that self is in everybody just beneath the surface of these parts. So when they open space, you can access it quickly and has all these great qualities.
What I call the eight C's. So curious, but also calm, confident, compassionate, courageous, clear, creative, and connected. And that person knows how to heal these parts. So once I get somebody in a lot of self, I'll just say, okay, what do you want to say to this part?
And how does it react? And now what do you want to do with the part? I can kind of get out of the way. And one of the hallmarks of IFS, as opposed to a lot of other therapies, is that it's not so much about me becoming that good attachment figure to these hurting parts of you, these inner children, you become that.
You become the good attachment figure yourself, or the good inner parent, or the good internal leader for these parts. And they come to trust you as a leader. And then you get into it with your family member, and you just remind the part, now I can handle this, just let me, let me stay. And now when that happens with my wife, sometimes not on a good day, I can stay in the C word qualities and have a totally different conversation with her than if that protector took over.
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Wealthfront brokerage isn't a bank. The APY is subject to change. For more information, see the episode description. I'm struck by a couple of things that I think people will be, if I may, wise to think about.
One is in the classic psychodynamic or CBT model of therapy, it's clear that the client or patient sometimes it's called a patient-therapist relationship is one where it takes on certain components that exist in the outside world with other people. It's always slightly bothered me, slash concerned me that that's the structure. And as you said, in IFS, internal family systems, you become your own therapist if you know for lack of a better way to put it. I like that because there's so much discussion nowadays about parenting yourself and this kind of thing and learning to mother yourself and father yourself.
I actually think there's great value in that. I learned by living alone how to cook for myself and clean for myself. These are mapping to stereotypes here, but also to protect myself and to organize myself and be very disciplined. And actually running a laboratory was a great teaching there because you're basically a single academic parent to all these people.
You quickly realize where you lack maternal instincts and where you may lack or overemphasize or have hypertrophy paternal instincts. So that was a good forum to see my weaknesses and hopefully some strengths too. So I like this idea that one can play those roles for oneself. How is IFS typically done if somebody doesn't have access to a therapist who's expert in it?
Or is that really the only proper gateway into it? No. So because I'm sitting here with the master, the founder, and I'm very grateful, by the way, for the work we just did. So thank you.
It feels good. I was a privilege. Yeah, thank you. Likewise.
But most people won't have direct one-on-one access to you. So it's very experiential. I imagine in books and courses, people can learn how to do this. And by the way, this was not a preconceived as a pitch for books and courses.
But I'm wondering, can somebody do this on their own the very first time? Yeah. That's what I wanted to know. Yeah, yeah.
So for a long time, I resisted trying to take this directly to the public because I learned the hard way that some systems, particularly people with huge amounts of trauma, are quite delicate. And if you start going to the part we talked about that's vulnerable inside that has this view of relationships, this kind of idealized view of relationships of yours, would be what I call an exile that if we were to go to it, and we won't today because it requires a lot of vulnerability. But if we were to, a lot of extreme protectors might come out and then people start to get scared. So it took a long time to figure out how we might bring it to the public in a safer way.
And so we just put out a workbook for people and it doesn't involve necessarily going to those places. But there's a huge amount you can do just by working the way we started to with these protectors and getting to know them and know that they're not you. They're just a part trying to know it's not anything negative. That judgmental part you've got such an attitude about or fear of.
If you were just, again, getting curious about it and getting to know it about it, you'd find out that it's a very valuable part that has a lot of discernment, like you said. You know, and Bonin wants desperately to keep you from getting in these relationships where you get hurt and get so judgmental because you don't listen to it. Do you follow what I'm saying? I do.
In fact, something pops in mind. Maybe I could just ask you about it. My mind's right on what you're saying, but something occurred to me as you said it, which is if I were to, for instance, really feel the feeling of like, hey, that's really screwed up or like that's not like actually feel the disappointment or judgment that this titanium teddy bear is trying to protect against, I realize it leads to a lot of role confusion and identity confusion. That's right.
And I'll just be very blunt. It's probably not the best thing to do on a podcast when I do it anyway, which is, you know, that this is how I feel about modern politics. I see things on the left that make sense to me and things that are, to me, just absolutely ludicrous and inappropriate and offensive and like just badly wrong. I see things on the right that make a ton of sense to me and also things that are inappropriate, offensive and wrong.
And as a consequence, I'm trying to see the best, the goodness in both sides and just kind of create this kind of Swiss cheese model of the world. I'm talking about politics because it's just simpler to do when people at least know what the groups we're talking about. And, but then it leads me in a place of no affiliation. And I'm then between one of two stances, one of just kind of standing there being like, yeah, well, there's no real position in the middle that is an official position in the middle, but it also makes me just want to put up the middle finger to both and say, I'm a double hater, but of course I'm an adult and a citizen who cares about people in the country and so on.
I feel like to be an adult, I can't opt out, but there's like, I feel unaffiliated. I feel like there's no option for me. And this maps pretty well to, I think, the identity and role confusion that I feel when I place my, again, understanding the truth is a complicated thing. But my judgment on things and people is like, well, then what is my role as a son?
What is my role as a partner? What is my role if this thing is true? Right. And so it's a way I'm realizing of protecting the simplicity of a role.
That's right. And I did grow up in a home where like the roles were like, you know, your son, you do certain things like, you know, you do, you know, and so, but I also have a rebellious side to me. So the role confusion is something that I imagine a lot of people are familiar with. And when one, and I also believe that when you just really say, well, they did something bad, therefore all bad, therefore, I'm part of the opposite team.
That to me is an unlived life. But I see a lot of people do it. And actually sometimes I'm envious of people that have that ability because they seem so unconflicted. So it's a tough thing to be a thinking feeling person at the level of nuance.
It kind of sucks sometimes. Yeah. I'd rather do that than then be a double hater or just cleanly opt in. Yeah.
Does that make sense? Don't totally make sense. Okay. And what I'm hearing is that when you're looking at a person or a political party or issue in the world, you'll hear from these conflicted parts.
And they each have perspective, just like our country now. Here's from these conflicted parts. And but you don't have a lot of access to what I'm calling self in those contexts. Because one of the seabirds is clarity.
So again, as I was listening to you and Martha, you were talking about how there are times where you just have the sense in your body of what's right or what's true. That's what I'm calling self. Self has that clarity and self-season justice and self. Some of those seabirds are courage, confidence, and clarity.
So there's an impulse also to act to correct imbalance, to correct injustice too. So self isn't a kind of passive witness as it is in a lot of spiritual traditions in IFS. It's an active inter-leader. It's an active external leader.
And too often our actions are driven by these protective parts. And that's true in our politics now too. So one of my goals is to try to bring more self-leadership to the world, to these conflicts. But to do that, people have to unburden.
They have to release these extreme beliefs and emotions they got from their traumas in the past. We have a concept we call legacy burdens. So many people have inherited these extreme beliefs and emotions that came down through their ancestors and drive their parts, drive their extremes. And many conflicts in the world are driven by these legacy burdens.
And we've gotten good at helping people unload these things. And we've seen this in the Middle East recently. Totally. And we're doing a lot of work in the Middle East.
So we have training programs there. And one of my visions is to have large-scale legacy unburdening. We're large groups of people come together and we help them unload the Holocaust legacy burdens on the one side and the 1941 legacy burdens on the Palestinian side. And have more self-accessible to each side.
And when we do couples therapy and we do other kinds of negotiated conflict, if people's parts start getting into it, we'll just say, time out. You sort of did this on your own with your family member. Just say, time out, on both of you to go inside, find the parts that have been doing the speaking. Don't come back until you can speak for them, but not from them.
And come back in these keyword qualities in that state of self. We can hold people in that. It's really easy to get out of the conflict. If their protectors are going at it all the time, conflicts never change.
Do you think that people who have the reflex or the ability to kind of somatize a bit? Like I obviously, I don't think of myself as somebody who's like a somatic. I don't stomach aches and headaches and stuff unless I'm caught a virus. But I can feel where certain things are in my body pretty quickly.
I always have. Do you think that IFS lends itself better to people who feel things somatically versus people that are really cognitive and in their head? Because I have that component too. I can actually feel the switch.
I'll go into a narrative and then I start to see the structure up here. That happened several times when we were working together. Like I would have you stay with something and then the narrative part would kick you in. And then I would try to refocus you.
But I lived in Boston for 10 years. So I worked with lots of cognitive people who didn't know their bodies, who just were in that rat race to try and get tenure and it's on. In there. Yes, me too.
Tenures nice, but one should tend to their emotional selves while they're pursuing it. But just to answer your question, they can do it. But we first have to start with that thinking part and get it on board and get it to step out and just to stay out long enough that they can feel their bodies. So it lends itself to anybody.
But with people like that, it takes a while for that thinking part to trust that it's safe to let them in their bodies. So we were to just step back for a moment and do sort of a top contour, summary of the process. Someone brings forward a memory, a recent or just a memory of something that made them feel not good. And you try and localize some sensation in the body in a sense of its location.
Let me pause there. I'll tell you why. Yeah. Because if they find it in their body and they direct the question there and they wait for the answer to come from there, they're less likely to be in their head.
So it sort of short circuits that thinking part and so many people come to therapy and that thinking part thinks it's supposed to do the therapy. It's CBT or whatever. Even a lot of the more experienced, not experiential, but a lot of the more psychodynamic therapies, the thinking part is really trying to explain why they feel stuff. Right.
So this is getting them out of that and getting them to actually listen inside into what they think is their body. But it's really these parts that live down there that they haven't had access to because the thinking part is running through so much. Got it. And then one places some attention from the stance of curiosity.
They're like, what's there? What's it? What's it trying to say? Exactly.
And then you start to reveal that underlying layers of what's presenting, what are those things that are protective trying to say? Yeah, it's not even you're trying to reveal. It's just that you're asking these questions and the answers start coming. I see.
Oh, I love this because I'm a big believer in seating the unconscious mind and then letting things surface either in sleep or in meditative states or has internal family systems been combined with some of the therapies that are now getting tested still in clinical trial stage around psychedelics. Yeah, in fact, two days ago, we just completed a higher fast and ketamine retreat. Oh, wow. So we had and we're doing it more and more.
Like I said, I'm trying to bring this more out of the psychotherapy world. So we invited 32 leaders to come of various kinds and had three days where they do ketamine and then do I have the nice thing about psychedelics is it puts those manager parts to sleep somehow a lot of the time. Yeah, I've been open about the fact and I always have to provide the disclaimer. I don't just say this to protect me.
I say this to protect listeners that I do think young people should avoid psychedelics. The brain is already in a psychedelic state. It's the amount of plasticity and this is really tremendous. And this is coming from somebody who regrets it.
But I did psychedelics recreationally as a kid. And I regret it. I returned to them later in a clinical setting and dropped a lot of benefit, I think, from them, namely high-dose psilocybin and MDMA. But both of those are still very much illegal.
You can get into a lot of trouble for taking them and or certainly for selling them. So that's the cautionary note there. And the clinical trials are really impressive, in my opinion, spectacularly impressive, especially for MDMA and for the treatment of PTSD. But the FDA this last year did not approve MDMA as a treatment for PTSD.
I think going forward in the new administration, it's likely that it will get approved. But who knows? Anyway, that's a bunch of pseudo-legally used jargon. But it's sincere if I were an 18 or 19-year-old person or 30-year-old person listening to a conversation about psychedelics and how they can be helpful, I would want to also know that there are instances where people take them and they don't have the appropriate guidance in and through it and out of it, and at least serious problems.
So that is a real thing that we're talking about. That's why these kind of me in clinics where they just handle the drugs in your medicine and just leave them on their own, it's scary to me. I'm proud to say that IFS has been adopted as one of the primary models for psychedelics now. Great.
Because it's a really nice feeling. And as I was saying earlier, what I see happening often, not always, is these manager parts go offline. And that releases a lot of self. So you start to just feel those seaward qualities emerging.
And that's a big invitation to all these exile parts to come and get attention. And so as people come out of the ketamine experience, I can work with them for 15 minutes and do something that would take maybe five sessions because they can get access to parts that they couldn't get, or it would take a long time to convince their protectors to let us go to. And we can unburden those exiles and then bring back their protectors. And so I love it.
And ketamine is the legal one, so that's why we do it. And the other nice thing, and I don't know as a scientist how much you would go with this, but ketamine, again, because it opens the door with these protectors, you can also taste what I call the big self. You taste this what they call non-dual state that can be quite blissful. And some people got and then as you come back, you have this sense of, I'm much more than this little body and this little ego that there is something much bigger.
And that's why they're using it with end of life. And why so often has such a big impact on depression and because it sort of lifts you out of this little box your protectors have you to know that there's something much more. So interesting. I've never tried ketamine a few years ago.
And I've talked about this publicly as well. I started developing a pretty deep relationship to spirituality and God, mostly through the path of giving up control. I mean, they're just breaking news folks. You can't control everything, you know, and you can control certain things, but most things know.
And the way you describe ketamine is very interesting because as a dissociative anesthetic, it works in such a fundamentally different way than say MDMA, which is an empathogen, which makes people feel so much more. I sort of have joke that the aside from the safety legality stuff that the concern I have about MDMA is that if one is not in the eye mask, if you don't have somebody guiding you through it and taking some notes, you know, if you listen to a piece of jazz or classical music or your favorite rock and roll album or you're there with your dog or cat or plants, I mean, you can spend the entire four hours bonding with the plant. You're not going to run off and get married to a plant. You're not going to try and fornicate with a plant, but oh, but it's a very precious, but very labile situation because it's such a strong empathogen that whatever you direct your attention to internal or external is going to hypertrophy.
So you have to be really careful, you know, and given that the neurotoxicity issues seem worked out in that if it's actually MDMA and isn't other things, by the way, that the big study that showed neurotoxicity of MDMA and non-human primates turned out they were injecting methamphetamine. Yeah, that paper was retracted. It was published in science. We'll provide a link to the paper and the retraction.
That the retraction was not as publicized. Methylenedoxy, methamphetamine, MDMA has not been shown to be neurotoxic provided. That's what people are taking and not taking some combination of other things. Yeah, it's a real tragedy, the way that retractions don't get nearly the kind of popular press coverage that that initial studies do regardless of whether or not the initial study was positive or negative.
In any case, I do believe there are other routes to calming down the forebrain in the context of doing this kind of work that just like your thoughts on. When I first wake up in the morning, I'm in kind of a liminal state. But the thing that I don't want to think about comes to my brain. I can't avoid it.
It's just like the protectors are not available. They're still asleep. So that seems valuable. I've tried recently to keep my eyes closed.
Sometimes I'll get up and use the bathroom but keep my eyes closed. Stay in that still state and explore the contours of that thing. Provided it's done safely and not anywhere near water, cyclic hyperventilation, breath work done for a few minutes or cycles. You know, but we think can change the brain activities so the forebrain kind of comes off a line a bit.
All these things just put managers to sleep. Put managers to sleep. Like when you go to sleep, your managers go to sleep and then you have these weird dreams and that's because your hags outs have access to your mind now. They're trying to give you signals about what they want.
The other thing I'll say about psychedelics and the breathing too is that as your managers go to sleep and your hags outs start coming in, it can seem really terrifying because these parts are stuck in horrible places often. With a lot of terror. And so what's called bad trips is them trying to get attention. So they'll come in and they'll totally take over and you'll look like you're having a panic attack.
But what we've learned and this happened a few times last week is instead of thinking it was a panic attack or a bad trip to welcome it. Here's a part that needs a lot of attention. It's taken over entirely. But if I were to say, okay, Andrew, I see you're really scared.