EP 159: Listening to Our Trauma: A Path to Healing | Richard Schwartz

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Moll. In today's episode, I had a conversation with Dr. Richard Swartz, known to many as Dick Swartz, the founder of the internal Family Systems model, or ifs. We discussed self care and the dynamics of internal family systems in relationships and for healing trauma. We also talked about how the innate qualities of our true nature, our true being, can emerge spontaneously when we become aware of our exiled parts, what it means to practice self care for these exiled parts. In fact, we got into a whole discussion about really the multiplicity of parts that make up what we think of as a unitary self, but which in fact involves many, many different parts with different roles of being protectors and managers. And in the IFS model, they then talk about exiled parts and they talk about firefighters. It actually makes a lot of sense of all our behaviors and we really get into it in great depth. And especially talking about how our awareness, developing this awareness of the multiplicity of parts that make up this illusion of a unitary self, that that awareness itself gives us access to what Dr. Schwartz calls self with a capital S, and our capacity for self leadership, which is.

Really about being aware and being awake.

And having access to the depth of our being in a more expanded kind of consciousness. So I think you're really going to enjoy this episode.

So again, welcome and been looking forward to this conversation. So today on day two of the Self Care Summit, we are focused on the mental and emotional aspects of self care and well being. And for many of us, some form of therapy or counseling, even some form of self therapy, could be an important aspect of this dimension of self care. And so, as a longtime practicing psychotherapist, I'm curious about your take on the relationship between self care and psychotherapy and just in general.

Yeah, well, with ifs, it's increasingly become.

Harder to separate, to make a distinction between the two. So people come in and they'll do a session with me to get them going. But between those sessions, people are able, usually able to do a lot of work on their own. And so it's moving in the direction of becoming a kind of life practice as opposed to a psychotherapy. And there are many, many people who aren't in therapy who are practicing this on their own as well.

So.

One of the there are many well known features of internal family Systems. But the eight Cs is one one thing that's well known and it includes confidence, calmness, creativity, clarity, curiosity, courage, compassion and connectedness. And these appear to be a pretty good list of contributing factors to or descriptors of mental and emotional well being. So could you tell us a little bit more about internal family systems and how it might provide a vehicle or a path for healthy mental and emotional well being and self care?

Yeah. So that list of 8C words came to me as I was working with clients and you mentioned the word parts earlier. And these clients, and this goes back about 40 years, were telling me about these different parts of them that had all these.

Extreme beliefs and I and emotions and would make them do things they didn't want to do and would fight with each other inside. And I got intrigued. As you said, I have a PhD in family therapy. So I got very interested in all these inter relationships and how to change them. And in the process of trying to do that I stumbled on to the discovery that if I can get these parts to open a little space inside of people's bodies.

This other person would pop out who sort of knew how to relate to them in a healing way, in a self care way that actually this person would look at one of these parts that otherwise seemed very ugly or dangerous or had done had made the client do things like an addiction or something like that. And this person when it came out would say I just feel sorry for that part, would have compassion or clarity. It doesn't look so bad to me. And would have.

Was in a calm state as they observed the part and.

Then the other C words you mentioned so they would have confidence relative to it. Whereas before the client was very intimidated by.

They would have the courage to explore inside and ask a lot of important questions of it. And they would feel some kind of connection to it or desire to connect to it. Whereas earlier, before I asked these other parts to open space, they had felt nothing but hate for it or terror about it. And so as I tried that same process and other clients, it was like the same person popped out with those same 8C qualities and some others, but I like alliteration. So we stuck with the eight C's and those seem to be the ones most related to self care and to actual healing inside. And people when they access that, I'd say now what part of you is that? They'd say that's not a part like these others, that's more me or myself. So I came to call that the self. And now 40 years later, thousands of clients, later, thousands of people doing this around the world, you can safely say that that self is in everybody and actually knows how to provide self care, knows how to relate in a healing way to these inner parts that carry these extreme emotions and beliefs, knows how to relate in the outer world in ways to heal relationships, and is just beneath the surface of these parts such that when they open space, it's right there. And I know you come from a Buddhist background and I think in Buddhism it would be equivalent to Buddha nature or something like that.

That I just stumbled on a way to access pretty quickly.

So it would seem like the initial portal into that is just that capacity to witness our experience. Right. So to get some distance from and be able to name. Well, there's kind of this part shows up and I'm feeling this or acting that way and this other part. So just that witnessing capacity. But also here you're pointing that by kind of maybe stabilizing that witness, we also get access to some deeper innate quality part of ourselves that does have these eight Cs quite naturally. And that would be very naturally inclined towards self care.

That's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah. And I think you do access at least some of that when you, you practice mindfulness, for example, by separating from and observing what you think are emotions and thoughts, but are really, from my point of view, coming the emanations of these what I call parts. And as you get that separation, then you start to access some of these qualities.

So if there is this kind of innate, unconditional self with a capital S, I think as you reference it, or what's been called Buddha nature or divine nature and other traditions or so forth.

Then the work of working with the parts over time, maybe, you know, integrating them and making friends with them and you know, kind of untangling some of that landscape.

I guess that's, that's not really reinforcing what's already there, what's unconditional, but maybe it just gives us more direct access to that larger sense of self. That more unconditional thing you're talking about.

Yeah, it's a combination. You're actually in the process of relating to these parts in a healing way. You're actually helping them transform so they're not so dominant, they don't take up so much space inside of you and they now become valuable helpers instead of obstacles. And at the same time as that happens, as they what we call unburdened, which means you Send out these emotions and beliefs they carry that they got from traumas or other experiences in life. As that all happens and there's much more space, there's much more space for that. What I call self to embody, to be in your body and you can, it's very palpable. When I'm in self.

There are very clear markers that I'm there and when parts are blended with me, it's very clear that I'm not there and that these parts are dominating.

So if we're not engaging in appropriate healthy self care, reasonable self care, or if we're still engaged in even self destructive behaviors, or at least not so healthy behaviors, that probably some involvement of these parts and that blending you're talking about or I think you also talk about some of these parts become burdened by traumas or attached to something like shame. So I wonder if you could talk about that specifically how that might work in someone who's just not taking care of themselves or feels unworthy to take care of themselves or is still kind of getting hooked into unhealthy behaviors.

Yeah, I'm really glad you asked because I think too often.

Self care.

Comes from a sort of, what's the word? The idea that you should be able to do it and that if you have enough willpower you could do it. And for many people they might start to try to do it, but then these parts interfere and say what you said, like you know, you're not good enough for this or you don't deserve it or it's too much trouble and why bother? Because it's really not going to change anything or a variety of different thoughts, what you think are different thoughts are coming from these different parts. And so rather than try harder and push harder and use more willpower, we tend to just go to the part that's giving you those thoughts and ask more about what it's affecting happen if it really let you do this. And in answering those questions, and that's what I did back in the day, 40 years ago, just got curious about why these parts were interfering. And they'll typically share their secret history of how they were needed or they got these beliefs in some kind of traumatic experience in your background, in your past, often when you're a child and how actually they still live back there, they're still frozen in time, back in those terrible places and they still think you're five years old. And then if you actually did take care of yourself or started to shine in any way or feel better that something really bad would happen because you couldn't afford to back then. Because if you ever shown you'd be a tax somehow or if you ever started to feel good, somebody wouldn't like it. So until you can actually what we call retrieve those parts from where they're stuck in the past and help them unload those extreme beliefs and emotions, then self care is going to be a lot harder and they can actually sabotage too.

So for those in our audience who are not yet familiar with internal family systems or other models that include these kind of parts or subpersonalities or voices.

Maybe we could flesh that out a little bit. So these parts you're referencing, they're kind of like subpersonalities, they're almost voices. And you're suggesting with the help of the therapist, you could have a conversation, you could listen to them, listen to their needs, get a greater understanding of how they kind of separated out, constellated, or maybe you could even do this with yourself in some way. And, and some of these parts I guess are more unruly or more troublesome when we ignore them or repress them.

Yeah, yeah. So if you lock away, like I've done a lot of work, for example, with medical problems and one of our big outcome studies was with rheumatoid arthritis. And as we work with that population, which was typically, we did it here in Boston with Irish Catholic mothers and as we listened to the pain in the joints, the parts that wanted them to have a life.

Started to speak about how they hated the part that totally dominated them, took care of everybody else and never let them take care of themselves, speaking of self care. And that would be another obstacle to self care is the part that thinks you've got to take care of everybody else. Taking care of yourself is selfish. And so the parts that we're using, the arthritis, we're just trying to get the message to the client that this is really unhealthy. And.

They were furious with that caretaking part. And so as we worked out that polarization and again, it's just this inner focus.

Asking questions and then waiting for the answer. Don't think of the answer because too many therapies are all about trying to figure it out from up here. And this is focus in on where the part seems to be in your body and just ask it why it's doing what it's doing and wait for it to tell you. And as clients did that and work something out, a kind of time sharing arrangement, their arthritis got much better to the point where some went into complete remission so that's what we find in general with a lot of psychological problems is it's a battle among different parts and often it's parts that hate the one who dominates so much.

Well, the example you brought up I think is a very important one because in our culture and generally women are enculturated to be caretakers, mothers and caretakers of aging parents, caretakers of children, caretakers of spouses, sometimes caretakers of aging parents. And you know, they often end up doing this in an unhealthy, self sacrificing way and they don't feel permission to take care of themselves. And so, and you know, they're, and they may literally feel like they don't have time. So I wonder if you could talk about that on a more universal level of how that works out. I have a couple other examples I'd like to explore, but that one, there may be a literal real time conflict issue. Then there's the over identification perhaps with the role of the caretaker and underlying that there might be some unworthy who am I if I'm not the caretaker? And things like that.

There's all that. And also as I mentioned, a lot of these, these girls, little girls are stuck in dreadful traumatic places where they had to take care of people and they still are back there. So I recently did a session with somebody just as an example who had this massive caretaking part. And you know, it's like, okay. And she didn't even know it was a part, she thought it was her, it was up here in her chest. And as she got to think of it as a part.

You know, she said she liked it. But it does make it so she can't take care of herself because she's so worried about everybody else, has her eyes out here all the time. How's everybody doing and what do they need? And so in just asking that part of her a few questions, it immediately took her to a scene in which her mother, her father had found her mother with her head in the stove and then brought in this little nine year old girl and said, you have to make sure she doesn't do this. You have to make everything good so she doesn't ever do this again.

That caretaking part was stuck back in that time and really thought that something really terrible would happen if it didn't always have its eyes out for whatever's going on. So it's a combination of the patriarchal culture we live in as well as those kinds of messages that people get. And as long as that little girl stuck back there and is frozen in that space. Telling her to stop caretaking and do better is not going to work. You actually have to go back and get that little girl out of there, which we did, and help her unload these beliefs and emotions.

So what would you say to someone who says self care? You know, you hear a lot about self care, but it's just basically more selfishness. Our narcissistic culture, you know, it's kind of just, it's that, well, what do you, what do you think's arising in that person?

Well, that, you know, that's a cultural burden too. In our cult, in our country, we're. It's a combination of where the rugged individualists in the US and you know, you should be able to, you have this high threshold for anything and you should be tough and not need. Need to care and you shouldn't ask for help. All that plus.

The Christian, I think, belief that that's selfish to think of yourself, to take care of yourself, to.

Shine. It's all.

You know, it's, you should be doing all this for God and doing it, doing something for yourself is actually selfish. And so those are legacy burdens in our culture that are quite prevalent. And that's also the kind of thing we help people unload.

Well, that's a really interesting point because certainly there is. I mean, we all deal with the kind of more egocentric aspects of our personality and what literally could be called selfishness or at least in, in many spiritual paths, what's considered ultimately an obstacle to move beyond, to get to some greater larger sense of self or connected to, you know, the larger world, interdependence, oneness, or an ecological self, as opposed to the me, me, me kind of self. Right. And yet self care is about kind of focusing on me and my needs, you know, in reasonable ways. So, you know, I mean, I think clearly there's reasonable self care and there's then egocentricity and they're not the same thing, but the language seems to conflate the two a bit. And so how do we tease that apart so we don't get them confused?

Yeah, in my world it's that. And it's also that these egocentric parts are really just trying to get things to take care of the parts we call exiles, the parts that feel worthless or feel neglected or feel.

Scared. And so these other protective parts have to constantly feed that emptiness in there and get accolades from everybody or get people to not leave and stay close and get a lot of material things to prove that you're not worthless, and so on and so on. And so it's actually the opposite by. By going to these parts that are hurting and caring for them, they. Then they see they can get something from you and they don't need it so much from other people in the outside world. And it's really the antidote to egotistic egotism is actually self care in that sense. Because as you take care of these parts of you, then all these other parts don't have to constantly try and do it in a manipulative way.

Wow, that's really, really important part of this whole conversation for this whole summit. I think it just reminds me.

I did a lot of hospice care in prison, and very often we'd hear staff talking about, oh, the patients are so manipulative. And, you know, in general, they say prisoners and convicts and inmates are all manipulative, and they're constantly trying to run games on you. And so we would start, you know, come in to get assigned to a particular patient, start working with that patient in a cancer ward or an AIDS ward, where maybe they were acting out, and they were acting out in some kind of manipulative ways. But as soon as we just started meeting some of their basic needs for human connection. Just have a friend, just have. Then all the manipulative behavior just subsided. Right. So it was really just they were in a situation where, you know, none of their reasonable needs were being met in any reasonable way. And when they just got a little tender loving care from another human being, all that manipulative behavior subsided. That seems to be a good example of what you're talking about.

Exactly what I'm talking about. And it happens in the inner world and in the outer world. And so, yeah, if. If somebody's acting extreme, we don't think they need behavioral therapy and they need to be punished for it or that they will be extinguished, which just drives these parts crazy. In general.

What they really need is to be given either internally or externally, what they crave. And then that all calms down, like you said.

So it seems from this perspective, self care, you know, all the different dimensions of self care, there are basic physical self care, and then what we can do to have social systems and support systems and all the. All the dimensions of our life. But in this kind of mental, emotional realm of our lives, self care really would have to do with caring for these parts, caring for all these disowned parts, neglected parts, parts that, you know, are burdened with shame or unworthiness, or these injured parts in A way these parts of us that are still hurting.

Yeah, they got hurt by the trauma and then it was insult to injury because they get hurt and then we abandon them because we don't want to feel their feelings anymore. And so we lock them away in inner basements or abysses and try to do our best to just move on in our life.

Realizing we're moving on from the parts of us that just got hurt. And before they were hurt, they were delightful. And so, yeah, it's insult. The insult was the trauma and the injury was the abandonment by you. And so anybody who's got a lot of exiles, and most of us do because of the way we're taught to handle our emotions.

Than just going back and opening that door and inviting them back in and not being afraid of their intense emotion and sitting with them, it's a huge, huge change.

Could you say more about this idea of exiles and maybe give a couple of examples?

Yeah. So as I was learning from my clients about all these different parts, it became clear that there were these parts that other systems might call inner children that before they're hurt.

Give you joy and.

Creativity and awe at the world and innocence and desire vulnerability, the desire to connect to people, all that. But after they get hurt, and they're often the ones that get hurt the most because they're the most sensitive parts of us after they get, they get the emotional wounding or they get terrified or they feel worthless, they feel ashamed.

Now they have the ability to pull us into those feelings and pull us back into those scenes. Trauma. And so we just naturally kind of want to get away from them. And in this culture, everybody around us tells us to do that. They say just move on, don't look back, you can't change what happened, just move on.

And so you're encouraged to move on from what you think are just memories or the emotions of the trauma or sensations. Not realizing you're locking away your juice, you're locking away these precious inner children who now, like I said, feel abandoned on top of hurt. And so those would be, you know, I could give more concrete examples, but in this, in the case I just mentioned.

That little nine year old became exiled because she was still carrying all those feelings from that time. And the client couldn't function if she stayed in that energy all the time. So her caretaking part had to do its job.

Yeah, I mean, that just seems to be almost generally true about what are known as aversive childhood experiences. Childhood traumas, they kind of force us to get into some kind of a survival context and often a more adult context and just kind of shove down that whole part of what's a natural part of being a child, the innocence, the awe, the playfulness, the vulnerability, the joy, the uninhibited quality is no longer safe for that child. Right. And its various aspects.

Yeah, that's right. That's the other reason. I mean, you exile because of trauma, but you also exile if you grew up in a family where it was dangerous to feel any of those things or where the family rules didn't allow for expressions of emotion of various kinds, and just to survive in the family, you tend to lock all that up too.

Yeah, I mean, but the good news is, if you can access this self thing we're talking about and from that place go back in time into that trauma and you can retrieve that exile so that it can transform, it can heal, and that's a lot of what we do.

So you've kind of been referencing this already, but I know one of the title of one of your more recent books is no bad Parts. So I think that what you're saying here, there are no bad parts. There are parts that we accept and that are a part of our richness and we have access to, to use in various ways or that can manifest. And then there are parts that are kind of traumatized or unhealed or burdened, but there are no bad parts.

Yeah. And you know, in the early days, as I would explore that, I would think, well, yeah, okay, I can buy that. These inner critics aren't bad, even though they're, they're nasty because they would always tell us how they were afraid if they didn't yell at you all day, you wouldn't perform at a high level or you wouldn't look good or, you know, they were always protective. And then I got a job. I was, I was a consultant to a treatment center for sex offenders for about seven years. And I thought, could it be possible that these parts weren't bad too? And we would get to the parts that did the offending and ask them about what happened and why they did it. And they would also go back into scenes where as a boy, he was being abused and the part was desperate to protect the boy from the abuser. And it wasn't always sex abuse, that's another story. But. And the part looked around the room and said, who has power in this room? It's this guy hurting me. I'm going to take in his energy to try and protect the boy from this guy. And then he Gets stuck with that abuser energy and the desire to hurt, vulnerability. And, and so as I did that with those guys, it really sealed that deal for me in terms of there aren't any bad ones, they're just good parts forced out of their naturally valuable states into roles that can be very, very heinous and destructive, but it's not who they are.

So we talked about.

Women and how that identification with the role, the cultural role of the caretaker is almost like women have to do that to prove their self worth or something. So absent that, you know, there's this ground of unworthiness. And of course now greatly, women have really taken their place in the workforce and in all the professions. And most, many of the glass ceilings are being broken, unfortunately. The most recent one with the, the nomination of the Supreme Court, the confirmation of the first black woman as a Supreme Court justice.

And yet so now kind of women are almost expected to get out and succeed in the world professionally and be caretakers.

I was just going to say that it hasn't helped with that issue because.

Yeah, I laugh, but it's not funny so much because it's putting tremendous burden on them.

It's like a double shift now. You know, it makes it even more taxing for them.

And yeah, and, and it isn't just.

The societal conditioning. It's also often they'll get in a relationship with someone for whom if they were to shift away from that part, that person would be really upset. And there's a fear of the conflict as well.

And for men in our culture, self care can be seen as soft, indulgent.

And you know, we, I mean our audience, we know our audience in this summit is going to be 60, 65% women or more. The whole kind of.

Not only the world of self care, but the world of personal evolution and self help and you know, is really skewed towards females because they feel more permission even despite all the things we've been talking about. But so, you know, men may, they may associate it with being soft or indulgent or they're also, you know, really wanting to perform and, and you know, I don't have time and you know, I gotta get out there and really compete. And so what's going on there culturally for men and how, what, what might be the work for men to make that shift to values? Reasonable self care?

Yeah, again, it's this legacy burden of patriarchy has that negative impact on women, but also on men because like you said, men are supposed to be strong and they are supposed to get out and compete and, and I don't know about you, but when I. My peership was really brutal when I was a kid. If I ever showed vulnerability, I would be just shamed no end, if not beaten.

Absolutely.

So, yeah, it's really scary to be vulnerable if you're a man and.

And shamed about being a sissy, too, about being a girl.

So there's a lot of those burdens in all of us. And then.

We get dominated by these macho parts that feel entitled and feel.

Ourselves, don't like weakness in other people.

And that creates bad relationships because women are different in general in that area. And.

Then we go into the business world, for example, where it isn't cool to be vulnerable and where all this is reinforced a lot of the time. Appearances are everything. So, yeah.

There'S a lot that needs to change in the culture to free people up to trust that it's safe to.

Take care of themselves. Because taking care of yourself, like you said in the beginning, has been seen as either egotistical or being soft, and you shouldn't need it.

I do a lot of work with first responders, and that's a subset of the mostly male dominated world, not all men, but where that macho thing is very strong and where there's been very little permission for people to seek mental health care and where there are very, very serious mental health risks, extreme mental health risks. And so there's a lot of work being done to try to. To try to shift that landscape. And I have one colleague, a retired Coast Guard commander and police lieutenant Richard Gerling, who's been on a number of our summits. And, you know, he talks about as a first responder, for him, it's just a matter of working smart. Like, I know that I'm being constantly exposed to high stress, both primary and secondary trauma, and that occupational injury is part of the job. It's more than likely going to happen in my life. And so I need to just work smart and take care of myself. So he said, just like I see my chiropractor on a regular basis. I see he calls it his mental health coach. That's what he calls his psychotherapy. I see my mental health coach on a regular basis. I do. For him, it's just a matter of working smart. And I think that's if we could shift the landscape, especially for men in the culture, that it's just really about, you know, working. If you want to perform at high level, okay, you got to take care of yourself. This is like your, your car, you know, you have a high performance race car, they have a huge team and pit crew taking care of it to keep it fine, you know, so if you don't take care of yourself, you're not going to be able to. And of course so many men, you know, in midlife or, or not so far beyond my midlife, start to have serious health consequences because they haven't taken care of themselves. They've been driving themselves relentlessly.

That's exactly right. You know, I mentioned earlier the polarization around the arthritis in women between the massive caretaking part and these parts that want them to have a life and how that really exacerbated their arthritis. And in many men I find that polarization, you're talking about this constant driven part that won't let them rest and is pushing constantly to achieve and to compete and to be the best. And then the other parts of them that want to have a life and that want to not do that forever and.

As you said, as they exile all those parts, they'll get back at you in some form or another. And it could be physical illness or mental illness or just a variety of possibilities. But I love your frame about getting that tune up and making sure that you can get all of your inner team, get everybody inside working in the same direction and feeling like part of the, you know, if you want, make it corporate, feel like they're valued members of the inner corporation. How do you want to frame it?

Well, you could bring all the, you know, the more enlightened aspects in the corporate world. There are some very enlightened companies that learned a lot about team building and leadership. And so if you start talking about self leadership and team building within ourselves, you know, that could be a really helpful frame probably.

Exactly. That's, that's playing with that. As we, we're training executive coaches now and we're playing with those kinds of metaphors.

Uh huh. That's great. Yeah. So one of the things that, I mean, first of all, I think for many of us just getting this perspective that we're not just this one solid I or me, that there's a multiplicity of parts in almost every modern model of psychology from Freud and Jung forward has talked about, you know, at least three parts, if not many more parts. And, and, and so just getting that realization and then, you know, being able to step back from it and have that, that witness self that can, oh, you know, I mean, that's huge. And then even then though, the part, you know, a lot of the parts that are most difficult to Access are the parts that are burdened, as you say, or have been traumatized. And it's so, you know, either connected in with guilt and shame and unworthiness. And, you know, I have a friend that does a lot of work in nonviolent communication, and it was a way of helping people go from a whole constellation of feelings and needs and a given conflict down to the core, and they go further, further, further, and almost always got to self worth as being the core need. And so what's more vulnerable to be to look at than that? So it can be really tough to. To go there. Right, because it's really going to the very heart of our vulnerability.

Yeah, that part that carries that worthlessness is one of the most prominent and as you say, the scariest exile. Because.

Because if you really were to feel that, it feels like you're going to die. It feels like your survival is at stake. Because as children, we know that if our caretakers don't value us, we're going to die. So with that burden of worthlessness comes this survival terror.

And that is a big motivator. I mean, it drives all these other protectors to make sure you don't feel worthless ever. And the pandemic's been really hard, I think, because so many people couldn't do what they were doing to try and counter that worthlessness all the time. And so that part started to bubble up more and more. So, yeah, and there's. As I work with people and try and convince these protective parts of them to let us go to that place, there's tremendous fear, and we have to do a lot of negotiating and assuring that we're not going there to feel the worthlessness again. We're going there to take that part out of where it's can unload the worthlessness, and then they won't have to feel that. They won't have to worry about that so much.

So, as we do that kind of work, especially working with these more vulnerable parts of ourselves, are there kind of parts we can enlist as allies in a sense, to keep us safe while we venture into these very vulnerable, scary aspects of ourselves and our past?

You know what I find is, if I were working with you, Fleet, and you wanted to go to one of these exiles, I would ask, is there fear about going there? And we would work with all the fears, and I would speak to how we would handle those fears and get those parts to relax, and then yourself would pop out, and I would say, now, Fleet, how do you feel going to that part? He Would say, you know, I'd like to get to know him, I'd like to help him. And so it isn't so much we have to recruit other parts to help us do it as much as we just need to access you, your courage and your calm and your compassion.

And then people can generally do it. Yeah.

Right back to the eight Cs, which are qualities of this innate self, the self with a capital S. And. Yeah. So that, so it's. That's really the place from which we can do the work. So the more so part of the work is just getting more connected and more grounded in that part of our genuine self in that sense.

Exactly right. And meditation is a good practice for that. As long as you're not using the meditation to stay away from your exile. Right. Which some people do, especially spiritual bypass. But.

Right.

But.

Go ahead. Meditating and separating and getting mindful, that's the state we're looking for. So it's good practice for your parts to see that it's okay to separate and let you hold that place and then separate from your meditation. Do a different kind of meditation where you actually start to interact with each other parts from that same place.

Yeah. I personally find mindfulness to be incredibly helpful practice in that regard. And people can, you know, meditation can be used for avoidance and spiritual bypassing, but properly done with good instruction. I remember early in my kind of path as a meditator doing when I first started doing really extended retreats. And you know, in the first part of the retreat, it's physical stuff like I can't sit a minute longer, my knees are killing me, my back's killing me. And somehow after a few days, all that settles down. You have this moment where you feel like, oh, I could sit here forever. This must be it. Right. And then suddenly all the mental stuff starts coming up. And I guess what's happening is a lot of these parts and voices are starting to reveal themselves. Right. And so that's kind of driving you nuts for a while. And you hang in there with that and hang in there with that and allow yourself to be with it. And it starts to settle down. And then you're like, whoa, wow, now I'm really somewhere. And then the deep seated emotional stuff starts to surface. About weeks, three of a long retreat or something, you know. But if you allow all that stuff to come out and the practice is being with whatever's there, there is a natural kind of the work you're talking about can kind of happen in a natural, organic way.

Yeah. And I do believe that. I believe that just staying in what I call self in that mindful state and being accepting, which is what you're talking about. You're not fighting it, you're just observing. And I believe that that can be quite helpful to these parts. And then it's possible to take the next step and actually interact with them and not just observe them. And that is even more helpful.

So if I'm understanding it within internal family systems, the process of kind of.

Releasing the burden some of these parts carry and thus kind of healing and.

Returning from exile, in a sense. Right. Is one of acceptance, but it's an actual process of kind of showing genuine interest and being curious about kind of the pathway of those parts. Like how did it end up in exhale. Right. And how does it feel? And so you kind of have to have these sort of conversations with yourself. And I realize there's ways that this can be facilitated with a therapist.

How does this play out in self therapy? I mean, I could see how this could work organically in mindfulness practice, done correctly with a lot of self acceptance and self compassion. But other than that, is there a more active way we can kind of really focus in on these parts and do the work in a kind of form of self therapy with the internal family systems model?

Yeah.

So I'm not trying to put the therapist out of work here.

I would love to put the therapist out of work.

Yeah. You know, if I wake up in the morning and I have some kind of a, like, say I feel down for some reason and it's curious. Normally I don't. And so instead of meditating, I'll just focus on that. That sadness and I'll separate a little from it so I can get curious about it. I'll ask it to separate, actually, and then I'll feel a bit of a shift. And then I'll start to say, okay, I see that you're very sad. I don't say it out loud. I'm saying it in my mind, directing it toward the place of my body where I feel it, and what do you want me to know about that? And then I ask all my thinking parts to get out of the way because they'll come up with all kinds of theories about it and just wait to hear from that place in my body. And often it's quite surprising what it's about. It wouldn't have occurred to me from my thinking parts. And then I'll. So it's. It's one thing to get curious and hear what's going on with that part of you. And then in a literal sense, in a sense, I'll go and I'll just hold that part for a second and comfort it and let it know that I get it like you would a child. You know, it's really kind of internal parenting. Self becomes that good attachment figure for these inner children. And I.

I'm just reminded that it's not alone and that I. I love it and I'm with it even though my wife was mad at me or something, whatever the part's upset about.

And. And I feel the shift. I can feel a good shift in that. And then at another time or with a therapist, I'll ask it if it stuck somewhere in the past and I'll see how.

In my case.

Long story short, but I was very cut off from my mother from about the age of two. And she would have very extreme reactions to my being angry or being hurt. And so whenever my wife does anything resembling that brings up that little guy and. And he, you know, I've gotten him out of there. And so. But while he was living back there, my reactions would be very extreme and I would just shut down for days. Sometimes now it just feel a little sad. And so I go and I remind him that she's not my mother and I can take care of him and we'll. We'll be okay.

So what would you say to people that say, you know.

You know, I. I struggle enough just getting through world as me, me, myself and I. And this sounds pretty complicated. It sounds like multiple personality disorder or something. And it may become. Might sound kind of scary to people.

Yeah. That fear I've been. I've run into all my career because this multiplicity has been pathologized by movies like Civil. You and I are old enough to remember that movie. And so there's been this connotation that if you hear voices or you, then that means you're crazy. And that a healthy person only has one mind, not a whole bunch of them.

And it turns out not to be accurate. And it turns out that if you can actually accept this.

Multiplicity paradigm, you actually, instead of being overwhelmed by.

Helps you navigate your inner world in a very practical way because you don't have to deal with all of your parts all the time. It's really like when somebody's having trouble, you go and you help them a little bit and. And they let you know. And when I wake in the morning, I'm just checking in. How's everybody doing? It takes five minutes. A lot of the time. So it's quite manageable. And it's. It certainly doesn't mean you're crazy. You're crazy when you don't take care of these parts. And they get more and more extreme. And then they be. They come. They become like somebody with multiple personality disorder because they're furious with each other and they. They don't trust you as a cell. So. So that is just one end of the spectrum of who we are as micro.

So in the case where people are diagnosed in a really severe way with multiple personality disorder, they probably have very little access to that self with a capital S you're talking about. They may have a dominant part, but they don't really have access to that innately whole, compassionate, you know, courageous and so forth. Eight sees selves.

That's exactly right. Which doesn't mean it's not in there, because it is right. This is a debate I've had with a lot of people in the therapy world, because most therapies are based on what's called attachment theory. And that says that to have any of those eight Cs inside, you had to have had good enough parenting during a critical period in your childhood. And if you didn't get it from your parent, then you got to get it from your therapist or you got to get it, but it's not in there inherently. And my position, and some of my position comes from working with people with that diagnosis where you're right, they had no access to it to begin with. But as I convinced their parts, their altars to open space, the same damn self popped up that pops up in everybody, despite the fact they had these horrific, horrific childhoods, not only did they not have good enough parenting, they'd been tortured on a daily basis. So there was no way to explain that phenomena based on attachment theory.

That's really fascinating for me in particular.

And it could be a kind of a bit of a relative and ultimate relative and absolute question. But I've worked with a number of people in my life who really suffer from pretty severe attachment wounds and attachment deficits. And yet through their engagement in a spiritual practice and they've been able to find that ground, that innate ground.

And they still struggle a bit. Their access to that ground is sometimes more of a struggle than it might be for somebody who doesn't have those attachment deficits. But there does seem to be something deeper in our being than that part of our wiring where the attachment will show up.

That's right. And that's what I'm talking about. And it just again, this 40 year history I have of it was, you know, I said earlier about the no bad parts could it possibly be. This person has. This part isn't bad. It was the same with the. Could it possibly, could self possibly be in this person with this history? Because I can buy it in somebody who had okay parenting, but not.

But not this. And yet there it was as soon as we opened the space. So it can't be damaged. That's the amazing thing.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. Yeah. In fact there's interesting some models they talk about. There's some of these parts that become exiles are the ones that kind of take the hits and take the slings and arrows. But that unconditional ground actually cannot be damaged.

Can't be damaged. Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. During, during my, during my prison years, I, you know, my first teacher, principal spiritual teacher, Chogam Chung Prabh, he described this as basic goodness, innate basic goodness. Called it primordial unconditional basic goodness or. And the Buddhist term would be Buddhist nature. But. And you know, during those years in prison there was, you know, and I'm from Missouri, the show me state, so I've always been a little skeptical, I guess. You know, I wanted to believe in basic good. I basically did believe in it. But, but you know, still I'm there and there were some pretty good candidates there among my fellow prisoners and among some of the prison correctional officers. Yeah, well, I wonder, right? So I had this kind of ongoing running experiment going, right? And I always had my kind of top five list going on among, you know, my fellow prisoners or the, or the correctional officers of. I really wonder if this maybe I finally found that person that doesn't have basic goodness and inevitably, inevitably they would somehow Rene. Reveal their humanity to me. It never, I remember there was one correctional officer who you just never got anything but hate and venom from, you know, it seems like he must have got beaten up on his way to work. He just got there and you just got nothing but like you just wanted to avoid him, right? In fact, sometimes I'd see he was on duty, I'd turn around and go back the other way, you know, and, but anyway, one day I'm had to get to this place, I'm crossing by and there he goes. Oh boy. You know, my holds systems on alert and everything. And it turns out he had been on duty in the visiting room when I had had a visit with my son like the week before or something. And so he just, he stopped me and my whole system go oh. And he goes, how's your son doing, Fleet?

Oh, it's so sweet.

And just the sweetest, kindest way, you know, And I just saw this whole other side of him, you know, and I finally gave up my research project and I, and I, you know, I realized I was convinced through this experiential, kind of participatory research that, you know, that everybody does have that unconditional goodness, no matter how repressed it may seem at times.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it, and it being just beneath the surface of these parts, such that you don't have to meditate 20 years to access it.

Makes it a more practical.

Way to bring it to the world, I think.

Yeah. Would you say all the, all these various parts.

It'S not so much that they're completely separate from that ground of the capital S self or basic goodness or ground of being, but they're more like expressions of it. And by relating with them, we can also find our way into that kind of innate goodness.

Yeah, I mean, if you stay with this too long, your head will explode. But as I going back to multiple personality disorder, there were times when I'd be working with one part for maybe five sessions in a row and the part would start talking about its parts. I could have it itself, its parts. And I won't even go further than that because.

Yeah, Caitlyn, pretty endless.

But it's like fractals, you know.

It'S turtles all the way down, but it.

Is all some kind of basic expression of our whole human vulnerability and that we all have the same universal needs for belonging and love and connection and so forth.

Exactly right, that's right.

Yeah. So you kind of mentioned, you mentioned it just a moment ago and giving the example of how a situation with your wife could trigger an exiled part of yours and how you learn to work with that. So it's not quite as. Doesn't shut you down the way it used to. So the relational field of our relationships, especially our primary relationships, is certainly a place where all this stuff can get triggered in ways that we suddenly find ourselves shutting down or acting out or, you know, and all these kinds of things. And yet our relational field is a really important part of our resilience, our well being, our social support systems, a big so, you know, and we have a day focused on social self care. So it seems kind of like the, the relational feel of our primary relationship. Spouses and parents, children, siblings and close friends, and all of that is both maybe one of the ultimate sources for resilience, well being. But it also can be a minefield of re traumatization. And so can you talk about how to, how to go from this understanding of internal family systems into being able to convert our relational field is something that really does support us.

Yeah, I was just reading.

Gabor Mate has a book coming out For Too Long, and I got an advanced copy of it. And he cited a study that said that married couples in general live longer than single people. But if you break it down a little more, people in healthy marriages are the ones who live longer. People in dysfunctional marriages live less long than single people. And so, yeah, the quality of your relationship can really enhance your life, but it can also pull you down. And so part of the reason for that is.

And this is related to what I was saying earlier, related to self care, because most of us as we're talking about, come out of our families with parts that didn't feel valued, that feel worthless and like I was saying with my mother, and then go looking for a partner who's going to change that. And these exiled parts, these parts that carry the terror, the survival terror, worthlessness will look often for somebody who resembles the one who was supposed to give it to you, supposed to be your redeemer. And when they give it to you, you get infatuated with that person because finally they've taken away this worthless feeling and so you hook up with them. But it turns out they are kind of like your caretaker and they hurt you in the same way at some point. And then your protectors go crazy and they, they try to change that person back into who they're supposed to be, or they try to change you to get them to go back to who they're supposed to be. Or you start looking around, this wasn't the real redeemer that's still out there. So on. So as long as these exiled parts of you are looking to get what they need primarily from your partner, it's going to create a lot of trouble.

And what we found out instead is that if you do what we call the U, turn in your focus and you, you as self began a relationship with the part that was so hurt by your caretaker, and that part can come to trust you as the primary caretaker, that frees up your partner so that they don't have to be, have all that pressure of never hurting you.

And that makes a big, big difference in these relationships where your partner can then be the secondary caretaker of these exiles.

Yeah, I think that's really interesting because I think we often end up, you know, kind of holding our relationships hostage around these unmet needs. Right. Of various kinds. And, and that's a setup for all kinds of relational difficulties. Right. Because nobody else wants to be held hostage. And then that's triggering their parts and their unmet needs. And so it's not that we're islands, but learning to meet our needs, do our inner work at some level to get more access to that self with a capital S we're talking about and the ability to meet our own needs on some level and maybe seeing others in our lives as the secondary sources of getting our needs met. Right. Taking a little more responsibility for our own work. And then. So then we can still be in our social systems, be helping each other get our needs met, meeting each other's needs, because we're social animals, but maybe from a slightly less desperate place, a place where there's a more even flow of exchange and so forth.

Very well said. Because that's. It's another ironic thing where if you take care of yourself in that way, it doesn't mean that you're going to become like that island that you said. It actually frees you up to be less afraid to be connected to somebody and more and self desires connection. So if you're in self, you're going to want to connect more with your partner and your partner isn't as dangerous. They can't hurt you in the same way. And so you're more able to do that. So it's really the opposite.

Well, this has been incredibly. It's been fascinating and incredibly helpful.

Each time I've talked to you, there's all these dots that are getting connected up in my own life experience and the different types of work I've done with myself and with others. And it's just really.

It just reinforces a sense of okayness. I think that with more understanding comes the fundamental sense of okayness. And so. So I really appreciate it.

I always love talking to you, Fleet. So anytime.

Great. Well, this is going to be an incredible contribution to our summit. And people can find out more about your work@ifs-institute.com Dr. Richard Swartz, the developer of the internal family systems model, thank you very much.

Thank you, Fleet.

Be well.

You too.

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