Dr. Richard Schwartz | The Parts Within - Understanding Anxiety Through IFS

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Mola and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness and life optimization. This is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change, helping you find alignment with the person you were always meant to be. Let's get started.

My name is Dr. Fleet Mahl, your co host for this session, and I'm thrilled to be here today with colleague and friend Dr. Richard Schwartz.

Thanks, Fleet. Always great to be with you.

Oh, I really enjoy our conversation. It's always illuminating. Your ifs model, as kind of described in the bio, a little bit was born from your deep listening and witnessing with your clients and your willingness to really follow their inner landscapes. So I wonder if you could share maybe a pivotal moment in your own life that kind of led you in the direction of not only being a psychologist, a clinician, psychotherapist, but kind of set you up to have that kind of willingness and courage to go with your client's experience and develop this model.

What drove me to try to do something big was I was the oldest of six boys to a very successful medical researcher and I was supposed to be that. And I think I had undiagnosed adhd and I just wasn't a good student. And so I came out of my family with a lot of worthlessness because I told my father crazy and a strong desire to prove him wrong about me and no idea of how to do that, particularly given my proclivities, which were not to work real hard at anything. And I've often said had I had a nicer father, ifs wouldn't exist. Probably because when I ran into the phenomena early on, when clients started talking about these parts, I had two advantages. One was systems thinking. So I didn't just I'd understand each part individually, but I tried to understand how they operated as a system from my family therapy background. And then the other was that I had seducely avoided studying psychodynamic work. So I didn't have a map to the territory. And relative to your question, I really had to be in beginner's mind basically to just be curious and was kind of dependent on my clients to teach me about what was happening inside and we would co construct experiments together. And so I think all of those ingredients were needed for it to come out like this.

So as you describe growing up and coming of age and having undiagnosed adhd, not particularly being a good student and juggling or not meeting your father's expectations or perhaps even demands and all the attendant shame and conflict around that, and then your desire to sort of prove him wrong and establish yourself with some kind of fuel for your career, which is often the case for us. But I'm wondering if throughout that whole.

Period, until you began to get your.

Own footing in your own career and your own identity, if fear and anxiety were part of that whole experience.

Yeah, they were constant companions, particularly anxiety. And, you know, I had anxiety for good reasons in the sense that I didn't have direction and I didn't have a good track record. And so, you know, I had a pretty good time in college, but I didn't get good grades, but was able to make some friends and so on. But when I left college, I really was sort of casting about, and then I ran into transcendental meditation. And through the mantra, I was able to get away from my anxiety and enter the basically access more self, what I call self, and was actually very helpful to me, even though I was doing what I call what John Welwood and others have called a spiritual bypass. I was using the mantra and the state I could achieve to get away from my anxiety and fear rather than trying to help them. And it really did help me. I mean, I could access a lot more courage and I started on. I got more direction. But, yeah, it wasn't healing well.

That brings up, I think, a good point. And I think, you know, we'll. We're going to explore the whole territory, fear and anxiety and the internal family system as opposed to working with that. And if we're really suffering with anxiety, you know, in a fairly pronounced way, there's some need to calm that down a little bit in some way, or maybe in ifs terms, get a little bit of a foothold in some aspect of what you call self with a capital S, in order to then be able to turn back towards the anxiety and do the deeper work, do the healing work. Would you agree with that?

That's right. Yeah. So if someone comes to me in a panic attack, I'm not going to try to ground them. I'm going to talk to that anxious part, the panicking part, about separating from them, what we call unblending from the person, so that they can help the part, because it's very hard to help it if it's totally taken over. And generally, if they actually believe what I'm saying, that it'd be easier to help them if they could pull their energy out a little bit, they will, and the client will. Whereas before, if I said fleet, how do you feel toward that anxious part? You would say some version of I am that part. I don't feel toward it, I just am it. If I convinced it to separate and I asked that same question, you'd say, I feel bad for it. I can see that it's really just scared. And so now you'd have a little distance from it and you would have access to more of what I call self. And then I could begin to help you work with that.

So it seems like that initial unblending phase is pretty critical. Do you run into situations where people just, you know, are. It's really difficult for them to unblend or.

Yeah. And that's generally because the anxious part, which in my system often is what we call an exile. You know, like with me, I was really trying to exile that anxiety. And most people try to do that so they can function. And so if it were just anxiety, it would be. Wouldn't be a problem. But it turns out you're locking up a part of you stuck in a scary scene and has anxiety because of that. And. Or it might carry what we call a legacy burden of anxiety that came into you from your parents or something like that. But point is, when you exile the anxiety, then it's desperate to get help. And so anytime there's an opening, it'll burst out of hiding or out of where it's locked up and try to totally take over because it believes if it doesn't totally take over, you're going to lock it up again.

So I want to explore further your understanding of anxiety from an IFS perspective, which you've already begun to explain. But maybe first we should just at least lightly touch on the overall landscape of ifs with these different categories of parts and the managers and itself and so forth. I wonder if you could just lay that out for us briefly.

Yeah. So the basic idea is that it's the natural state of the mind to be multiple, to have parts, to have these subpersonalities. And that given that it's the natural state of the mind, that there are no bad ones, they're all valuable and they contain resources and qualities that help us in life. But trauma and attachment, injuries and slings and arrows we face as we, especially as children, force them out of their naturally valuable states into roles that can be damaging and often are quite extreme. And again, from my systems background, as I was getting all that from my clients, I tried to create a map of that territory. And so I was looking for distinctions. And the big distinction that leaped out was between parts that before they were hurt, we would call them. These wonderful inner children provide so much lovely creativity and playfulness and openness and desire to connect and all that. But once they get hurt or terrified or made anxious or given what I call the burden of worthlessness, then they're not much fun to be around. And so because they have the ability to overwhelm us and to pull us back into the scenes they're stuck in and to make it hard to function. And so we try to, and are often told to by our parents or the culture, to lock them up and to just not go back there, not think about what happened, to make them anxious and to just move on. This is a just move on culture. We don't realize that in doing that, we're not just moving away from the fear and the memories, but we're also locking away our most precious qualities just because they got scared or hurt. And now we don't have access to that, those lovely qualities anymore. And once you have a lot of what I call exiles, so these are vulnerable parts, the gut, just by din of getting hurt or terrified or shamed, get locked away inside. And once you have a lot of exiles, you feel more delicate, the world seems more dangerous. So many things could trigger that anxiety. So other parts are forced to become protectors, so they have to leave their valuable states and take on these protective roles. Some of whom we call managers, because they're trying to manage your life so that you don't feel that anxiety and it doesn't get triggered. And so the anxious exile is contained. And we do that in a variety of ways. We try to make sure we look good and perform at a high level, so don't ever get criticized or rejected, or we don't let people close enough to hurt us again and take care of everybody so they don't leave us. So there's a variety of common managerial roles, some of them, because they're so determined to not let anything like that happen again, become these inner critics. And they're criticizing us to goad us to perform better or to look better. And so those we call managers, manager protectors, despite their best efforts, the world still has a way of triggering your anxiety or it pops out when you're low energy or something. And when that happens, it's a big emergency for some parts that are standing by to take you away from it right away. And so we call them firefighters. They're fighting those flames of anxiety by getting you higher than the flames or dousing them with some substance or distracting you till it burns themselves out. And most of us have a variety of firefighter activities, and most of those activities are not socially sanctioned. So they bring on more criticism from the outside world and from your critics. And all of that exacerbates the anxiety, which means they have to do more. So you're in that vicious cycle a lot of the time. But the good news, I mean, it's all good news that these are not what they seem. And they deserve to be listened to and healed. But the good news is there's somebody inside of all of us that can do that and is different from these parts. And I just stumbled onto that discovery 38 years ago by trying to help people separate unblend like I was talking about earlier, so they could listen to some of these parts. And once I was hip to the fact that these parts deserve to be listened to, even the ones that were really extreme, I was trying to get people to do that, but they were either afraid of the part or furious with the part. And so I began getting those other parts to open space so that they could open their minds to the target part. And as I did that, this other person would pop out who, you know, seconds earlier, the client was angry or afraid. And suddenly they're calm and they're confident relative to the part. They even have compassion for it. And in that state, the part would relax and would share its secret history of how it got forced into the role. It was that. And we could start a really a great healing journey with that part and the parts that protects and so on. And when I would ask clients, because I would do this with other clients, just this unblending seemed like whenever we got these parts done blend, it was like the same person would pop out in different clients with those same C word qualities and five others. So calm, confident, compassionate, curious, creative, courageous, clear and connected. And so I came to call that the self. And the big deal about ifs is that turns out 40 years later and thousands of people doing this all over the world, that self is in everybody, can't be damaged, no matter how much trauma you suffered in your life. And is just beneath the surface of these parks such that when they open space, it's available and knows how to heal them, knows how to heal inside, and knows how to heal your relationships.

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So, yeah, so that's the brief intro.

Yeah, that's very helpful. So when someone's experiencing anxiety, especially, you know, in a fairly pronounced way, or even a debilitating way, is the anxiety in your experience usually localized in a particular part, or is it pervasive across a number of parts? Or does it even, you know, even if the part hasn't completely taken over, often people still just kind of feel this baseline anxiety going on in their life. So are there more than one parts contributing to that or. So how does that work?

Yeah, usually there's like with ocd, for example, there's a manager who's trying to manage the anxiety by doing all these rituals. That manager itself carries a lot of anxiety, so it's doing these rituals in a very anxious way. But the goal is to calm down the parts, these exiles that it's protecting. Most of the people I've done this with who have a lot of anxiety have parts that protectors that are very scanning for danger and so on, on guard all the time. And then they have these parts that are stuck in these dreadful scenes when they feel like it's needed, you know, because something bad happened. If you don't have a protector on the lookout all the time, something bad's gonna happen again. Same thing could happen again. And so it's that kind of combination of managers and these terrifying parts the manager's desperately trying to contain that we call anxiety and often will go to that protector with a lot of appreciation for how hard it's working to try and keep the system safe and then negotiate permission to go to the exiles that it protects, that carry that terror from past experiences and get them out of those experiences and help them what we call unburdened, all the fear. And then we'll come back to the like the OCD part. And now it's a lot more flexible and open to unburdening itself.

So I know that in your model you don't see this parts as some kind of pathological fragmentation. In fact, your model is completely non pathologizing. You believe we're born with some kind of constellation of parts, or if you will, community or family of parts already. And so let's say someone is, you know, someone's blessed to have, you know, just really strong positive attachment and just a really benevolent loving childhood, about as stable as one could imagine. What does their parts landscape look like relative to others who may have a lot of traumas and a lot of wounded parts, and the firefighters and managers very active.

If you came out of such a family, and not many people do, it seems, but if you did, your parts would be far less what we call burdened than people with a lot of trauma in their background. Although there are such things we call legacy burdens that didn't get necessarily from your direct experience with your family, but came down through the generations, maybe from some trauma that happened centuries ago and now you're having to sit with and carry. You know, you're not immune, even if you have a great family, you're not immune from those kinds of burdens. But yeah, you're not going to necessarily have that three group system that I just described because your parts will be much more likely to trust yourself and yourself sort of intuitively knows to not exile and to actually embrace parts of you when they get scared. And so your parts won't be necessarily in these extreme roles that we find with people who have had bad experiences in their life.

So I know that when you identify these exiled parts and these wounded parts, they often turn out to be quite young in terms of when the wounding happened. A lot of that happens in our childhood and early childhood. And you referenced before that some of these parts are when they're unburdened, they're a source of joy and creativity, playfulness, that kind of. So they're. They have that young quality perhaps once unburdened, or is there a trajectory by which young parts move into adulthood or do some parts. Are some parts of that nature having that uninhibited young quality, innocent quality, and other parts have different kind of you.

Know, a lot some of these exiles grow up, but more often they just stay young kids. They're, they help us feel much more playful. And I also mentioned that, you know, when I talk about this, people say, but there are good reasons to be anxious now. It's not just my past. And that's more, more true now than ever from my point of view in this country. And so, yeah, that's right. And people of color have more reasons than we do and so on, and all that's true. And how you cope with these real external fears or real external triggers has a lot to do with how much burdens you carry within you. So it's still very valuable to work with your parts, even when it's true that there is need to be on guard for a lot of things. And I get that objection when I talk about this topic. So make it clear we're not minimizing the fact that things are pretty scary.

And not to minimize either the additional burden people carry around different fault lines of injustice, around wraith and ethnicity and, and gender and many other things. Although there are many challenges we wish people didn't have, and we would like to create a world where people experience less of that, at the same time, our challenges can be leveraged for healing and personal growth and even what's called post traumatic growth. And so a time of uncertainty like we're experiencing now, which is creating a lot of additional anxiety for a lot of people. Political and economic insecurity, climate insecurity, all kinds of things going on, as we know, polarization. And so perhaps some people who didn't feel all that challenged before because, you know, their parts, they probably have, you know, their share of some burdens, but not in a way that was really pronounced or was grabbing their attention. Not enough to be going to therapy or getting involved in this kind of work, but maybe now with these external circumstantial challenges, they may be experiencing more. And it may could actually be a portal into a doorway into embracing some inner work that they weren't aware of the need for before.

I totally agree with that. Many of us can go most of our life without being aware of what we've exiled. And it's experiences or times like these that produce what we call trailheads, that if you were to follow the trail of the fear, of the anxiety, and you stay focused on it, it'll take you to some part that's in desperate need of being healed. And so this is a really rich time for us to heal our anxiety. And then the other Critique you'll often get is what about changing the injustice? And it's a lot easier to do that if you're not sort of frozen and died all the time. And so as you heal the anxiety, then yourself is much more able to access courage and clarity and confidence that's needed to act in the outside world. And so that's some of my goal now is as we do the healing, to bring more self to all these, these issues we face. Yeah.

So the famous quote from Gandhi, B, the change you want to see in the world. And you know, we have to do that inner work. If we do that inner work, we'll be much, we'll be much more effective in bringing change to the world. And you know, that's not an excuse to just individualize it, not do collective work. And I think certainly we have to remember who said that. Gandhi, who was very much involved in collective work. Right. And widespread social change and social justice work. So I'm also curious. So this summit is rewiring fear and anxiety. Right. So we're rewiring. The idea is that we can rewire the brain, shift our neural architecture to heal the roots of anxiety, to better manage anxiety, to leverage anxiety for growth, to optimize our lives in different ways, to function better, be happier and so forth, to serve the world. And so when you think about these parts, you know, we can look at our experience from any different perspectives. Neurobiologically, neurophysiologically, neurochemically, we can look at it psychologically. And so when you think of the parts, and I don't know if any research has been done, you think of these parts are these constellations of memory that would have neurophysiological neurochemical correlates or a basis, or do you think of them more as structures of narrative? And I realize both could be true, but I'm just curious how you see that. And if you think doing the parts work, doing ifs in the long term is actually shifting our neural architecture such that there's a. We have a more optimal neural landscape from which to live our lives.

Yeah, well, I, I told you that story about my father and how he was this big shot medical researcher. And so I've always had a kind of allergy to neurology and that kind of medical science, so I haven't studied it intensely. But our experience, our anecdotal experiences, for sure, unburdening these parts has a big impact on your physiology and, and the burdens they carry also have a big impact. So, yeah, and we, you know, my big outcome study was with rheumatoid arthritis and we found that we could actually help people change their pain simply by working with their parts. So for me, there's a big connection between this work and what happens inside the brain, but also the body in general. So I'm not sure I'm answering your question, but.

No, no, I think so. You are? Yeah. I had a wonderful interview with Dr. Ron Siegel, who I know, you know, and you know, really a leader in integrating mindfulness and psychotherapy. And his perspective really was began with acceptance. There could be different therapeutic modalities. But to work with our generally our impulse towards any kind of discomfort is avoidance or self medication or pushing away or you know, or transcending or even what you call, you know, using meditation for spiritual bypass or something like that. So he said, you know, it really begins with acceptance. And it seems like that's a big part of the non pathologizing quality of ifs as well, that we're willing to turn towards the sources of what we're feeling that may be very uncomfortable and work with it from a place of acceptance very much.

And for me, mindfulness is a good first step. And not only is the act of noticing rather than being, you know, blended with the anxiety, helps you separate and helps you access more self. And self is naturally accepting. And so yeah, you know, I can support mindfulness practices if they include also times where you don't just witness the anxiety from an accepting place, you actually go to the part that carries it and you embrace it and you see where it's stuck in the past and you get it out of there. So mindfulness practices and lots of spiritual practices have ways of accessing self, as I learned in TM mantra. But because they see self as a passive witness or observer, they don't take the next step to having it actually actively heal the system. And that's what ifs does. And that's one of the differences.

Yeah, perhaps one of the places where that work begins to happen, not necessarily in a parts perspective, but the integration of mindfulness then with various self compassion practices, which may be direct it a little more globally, but often as maybe even a person isn't thinking in the landscape of parts, they may still be directing it unintentionally at parts of themselves. Because as you discovered, we all naturally thought, well, this part of me feels that way. Well, you know, this part of me wants we all talk in that language anyway. Right. Just in our ordinary everyday English.

I've had conversations with Krista Neff, and she's now supporter of IFAs. And so those sort of general self compassion practices are again a second step in the right direction. Yeah, but unless you really target certain parts, and particularly parts that ordinarily you don't like or that have done a lot of damage in your life or have hurt other people, unless you really believe that in their existence, which is challenging for people from the Buddhist world, then you're not going to come, you're not going to do the Full Monty with them. Might extend a little compassion to them, but you know, and that'll be helpful, but it's not going to heal them.

Yeah, that seems to be a bit of a leap there for someone with IFS that's really beginning to treat the parts as beings and relating to them like you would relate to your own children or another human being.

Now I get that that's a leap. And in the Buddhist world they hit me with the word you're reifying these things. Well, I'm not reifying them. They're real. It's not like I'm making them real.

You know, maybe including that, you know, I'm, I have a Buddhist background, but I teach a very secular form of meditation, which is, if I've intentionally tried to develop it as being trauma informed and neuroscience informed. And also it's really deep embodiment work. And so there's a trajectory of initially when we develop some kind of awareness practice, we're developing that witness capacity. Right. With the ability to witness our experience rather than just being lost in it or blended with it for that matter. And so that is a beginning of connecting with, I think, self and your understanding. But as you just got, it could just be that passive witnessing quality. But for me, a next deeper stage in the path of meditation is where we've stabilized enough. Whether you think of it neurobiologically, neurophysiologically, psychologically, we've stabilized enough our capacity to rest in awareness and attention that we can begin to let go of that separate sense of witness a bit and drop into a more kind of non dual practice. But I think one of the obstacles that comes up for people at that point is to the extent that they haven't done that inner work, as they begin to relax or let go of that witness, if they haven't done that inner work, rather than dropping into a deeper level of kind of non dual awareness and embodied non dual awareness, they're going to be back in the swamp, so to speak, of their unfinished business.

Exactly. Again, it's a kind of spiritual bypass in that sense. But you're going to the non dual which is real and is very, can be quite blissful. But you're not bringing everybody along or at least you're not reassuring them. You're going to come back and ask you their permission to let you go. And because you don't think of them that way, you think that's the monkey mind or it's, you know, these are obstacles to your enlightenment. So then you have to practice harder and get more and more addicted to the meditation to get those glimpses. And then your parts are constantly trying to pull you back because they feel abandoned by you. So that's the predicament that lots of spiritual practices are in.

I mean for me there's a kind of cognitive non dual state that people can access. But I don't feel like it really becomes truly embodied without doing that inner work. You're just going to run into all that unfinished business. And so for a truly embodied non dual experience, I think it has to be done in this integrated way with some form of this inner healing work, however that's done. And of course the IFS work is one of the, obviously one of the most effective ways to do that. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about from the perspective of what we've been talking about, really further cultivating and developing this quality of self leadership maybe you know, even in an optimal way. Because certainly our world today needs a lot more healed people who've done their inner work, who can access a lot of self leadership to get out and lead and to be positive influences in the world rather what can happen because we're all, a lot of us are unhappy about this or that whatever side of the political spectrum we may be on. And we're feeling a lot of anxiety and fear. So instead we get out there in the streets with our parts. Right. Or you know, and that, you know, may be reasonable and I don't know how helpful it is in the long run. So I think you know, and I know you've begun to work with leaders to help influential leaders access more self leadership and self energy.

Yeah, last couple years I got the guidance that the institute could keep training psychotherapists. But my work needed to beyond what you're talking about, bringing this to larger systems, to the heads of organizations, to social activists, to influential people in general. And I've had success with that. I'm working with a number of people whose names you would know to help them do their work from Self rather than from their righteous protective parts. And they're finding that not only is it more effective, but they're enjoying what they do a lot more and healing the traumas that drove those protectors. They're actually able to be in self a lot more of the time. So ultimately, I'd like to bring that. I would love for ifs to be more of a cultural meme that, you know, kids start out knowing how to relate to their parts and how to access self, and that just kind of bubbles up and trickles down. So we do have now a number of projects. There are school projects, and there are. We have a training for coaches to bring it to leaders and so on. And we're trying to bring it more directly to the public as well. I put out a workbook this year for the public, so that's been my trajectory for a couple of years now.

So in a moment, if you'd be willing, I'd love it if you might lead us in some kind of reflective practice or something. And just before that, for people who are experiencing a lot of anxiety right now, whether they feel they've always kind of been an anxious person and now it's really exacerbated about what's going on, or they're just, you know, they're feeling like they are now an anxious person because there's so much going on and. And you can get trapped in these loops of doom, scrolling on your phone and watching too much news and focusing on. There's nothing but negativity out there, which is actually not the case. Even though there's a lot of. There is a lot going on. How would you encourage somebody other than going to find an IFS therapist? What else might someone do just to begin to work with themselves or to begin to shift their way of being with their anxiety to start with?

Yeah, I could lead a brief meditation around that if you'd like.

That would be great.

Yeah. I would just invite you to focus on that anxious part and see where you find it in your body or around your body, and then notice how you feel toward it. And it might be such that you. You're blended with it so you don't feel toward it. You just feel like you are it. Like you're just a very anxious person. But that, I promise, isn't true, and it is a part of you. And if you can again try and find it in your body, that helps to separate a little bit. And after you get a sense of that, then how do you feel toward this anxious part of you? In other words, there's a you who isn't that part and has a relationship with it. And maybe historically you've dreaded it, or you've been afraid of it, or you've been angry at it, which are all sort of natural, especially in this culture, reactions. So maybe as I asked that question, that was the answer, that you don't like it or you feel hopeless to change it. So if any of that's true, we're just for a second going to ask these other parts who have an attitude toward it or hear it, feel captive by it, to just relax back and give you a little more space in your body for what I call yourself. But just ask those parts to just for a few minutes, pull their energy out of you so you can try to help this anxiety rather than hate it. And some of you will find that those others aren't ready for that. They're not going to separate, which is fine. You can just get to know their fears of letting you any closer to the anxiety. But if they do separate and you can open your mind to it, then go ahead and ask what it wants you to know about its anxiety. And don't think of the answer. Just see what comes from that place in your body. And a related question is, what's it afraid would happen if it didn't make you so anxious all the time? If it answered that question, then it's likely a protector that's using the anxiety to try and keep you safe, keep other parts protected. That's true. Then you can extend some appreciation to it for trying its best to keep everybody safe and see how it reacts to the appreciation. If it didn't have an answer to that what's it afraid would happen Question, then it's more likely to be what I call an exile, just scared and stuck in a scary place. And just let it know you get that and you care about it. And in either case, a good question now is, how old does it think you are? A lot of these parts think you're the age they're stuck in in the past. They still have to protect you the way they did back then, or that you can't protect them because you're too young. If that's true, then go ahead and update them and see how they react. We're going to come back out in a second. But before you do, just let this part or these parts know that this is the beginning of a new relationship with them, that you're going to try and be there more for them rather than of them. Take Over. Then when you're ready, you'd shift your focus back out here. Take some deep breaths, if that helps.

It was really helpful. It definitely threw me down in my gut. That's where the anxiety was localized. And I know. I've known for a long time that sometimes I can feel it in the chest or neck, but gut is. And it creates some digestive issues from time to time. But something just. Some things came up really clearly. There were a number of incidents in my life. One with my father and one with each of my grandfathers, where in each case, I did something that wasn't so smart. One case with my father, I ran out in the street after a ball. And he just was screaming at me. I know it was because he was freaked out and terrified. I almost got hit by a car, but it was very shocking. Another was one of my grandfather's farms, and I was out with one of the horses. I don't know why. I had a water hose and I sprayed it on the horse, and the horse freaked out. And it was kind of a dumb thing to do. And my grandfather yelled at me. And I felt really shamed and stupid and shamed. And the other time was my other grandfather, his farm. I was quite young, but I. I was standing up on something. He walked by, I jumped on his back, and it completely freaked him out. Cause he was older and again from this very. He was one of my most loving family members, that grandfather. And then suddenly he reacted with this fear and anger towards me. Right. So these are three incidents that have always stood out in my life, but where I felt both shamed and kind of stupid and small. And it was just right there, that whole thing that not related to those experiences of experiencing a complete fracture with people I had felt connected to and not only suddenly disconnected, but feeling shamed and feeling anger and shame directed at me.

Yeah. And so the parts come to think, you can't really rely on consistency, that people can change suddenly all the time. So, yeah, there's a lot of anxiety with that. So it's great that they could have you with this again, what that was like. And then the next steps would be actually go to those boys and get them out of those scenes and bring them home. Yeah.

As you were guiding us, I, you know, kind of providing some acceptance and some reassurance and some. And, you know, acknowledging what age I am now and what abilities I have to take care of them. And there was. I felt a definite relaxation in my gut as that was happening.

Yeah. So ideally, you and your listeners would do some version of that on a daily basis and build up trust in that anxious part that it didn't have to take over and that you're there for it. You haven't forgotten about it, and it can let you lead. And again, that's not going to totally heal it, but it's going to go to the second goal of ifs, which is to have these parts trust that they're not alone in there and that there's a you who can really take care of things and handle the outside world, too.

Yeah. Incredibly helpful. Yeah. And it was. It came up with such clarity. Yeah. I've been aware of those incidents for a long time, and I've had, you know, enough insight and understanding about them to realize that what I received from my father and my two grandfathers wasn't intentional. It was actually they were responding to something that shocked them. And, you know, so I think I have, on some level, a certain level of peace with it, but I could.

Feel there's still that inside. Doesn't necessarily help those boys because they still live back there.

Yeah, exactly.

They're still frozen in those scenes. So, yeah, until you get them out and help them unload, then you'll still have some of that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you for pointing me in that direction.

Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you so much for everything you've shared. Working people find out more about IFS and more about your work.

Our website is ifs-institute.com lots of resources on that. The book everybody loves is called no Bad Parts and that they can get online. And I'll mention we have a big conference coming up in September. First time we've been in person for a while, and that's in Chicago, so that'll be thinking on our way. Our mailing list to learn about that.

So is that conference primarily for therapists and practitioners, or will there be a largest lay public there as well?

Or there'll be a lot of therapists, but there'll be a lot of the public also. Wonderful.

Well, I really encourage people to explore that more. And if people are interested in working with an IFS therapist, it's pretty widespread, so it's not so difficult to find one in your local area.

Yeah. And there's a directory on our website.

Yeah. Wonderful. Dr. Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS Therapy, thank you so much.

Thank you, Flea. Always a pleasure.

Thank you for joining me on the radical responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present and stay true to you.

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