EP 181: Navigating Psychedelic Healing with IFS | Richard Schwartz, PhD

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 Fleet Moll, your host.

And today I'm having a conversation with.

My friend and colleague, the renowned Dick Swartz, Richard Swartz, and the developer of the Family Systems, Internal Family Systems Model, or ifs. An extraordinary psychologist and psychotherapist who has really revolutionized the world of psychotherapy. IFS Internal Family Systems is really one of the predominant models of psychotherapy practiced in the world today. And it does such a beautiful job of going into our inner landscape in an empowering and healing way. His most recent book is called no Bad Parts. Those of you familiar with the interning family system, it recognizes, like most modern therapies, psychotherapies, that the idea of a unitary I, a unitary self, is actually a myth that we're made up of many, many, many parts. And in his book no Bad Parts, he takes a completely shame free approach to to healing all those parts. And not only that, giving us access to what he calls self with a capital S, which is a greater space beyond all those parts which all the spiritual traditions have been pointing towards. So, Dr. Dick Swartz, I'm really thrilled.

To be here today with friend and colleague Dick Swartz. How are you?

Dr. Schwartz, as you know, you can call me Dick Fleet, and it's always great talking to you. I really enjoy our relationship.

Yeah, me too, me too, absolutely. And I actually really treasure it. And we've really been looking forward to this conversation and I'm gonna first share a bit of your bio for those who are not as familiar with your work and then we'll jump right into the conversation. So, Dr. Richard Schwartz, or Richard Swartz, PhD, is a systemic family therapist, academic and founder of the Internal Family Systems Model, or ifs. In response to clients descriptions of various parts within themselves, he developed ifs, which is an evidence based and widely used form of psychotherapy used particularly with trauma. It provides a non pathologizing, optimistic and empowering perspective and an effective set of techniques for working with individuals, couples, families, corporations and classrooms. Dr. Schwartz is on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is the founder of the center for Self Leadership, which offers professional and public training. Dr. Schwartz has published over 50 articles about IFS and is the author of bestselling books such as no Bad Parts. He is a highly sought after speaker for both public and national public events and national professional organizations. You know, you're best known for internal family systems, obviously. And I definitely want to explore that today and explore the potential it has for integrating with psychiatric psychotherapy. But I wonder if first you could just share a little bit about.

How your interest in this emerging field of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, or psychedelics in general emerged and you know, just how you feel about. I mean, it's taking place in the context of this overall kind of what's being called the psychedelic renaissance. So there's a lot going on and it's pretty fast moving. I'm just curious about your involvement with that and before we jump into the IFS in particular.

Yeah, so probably like you, I'm a child of the 60s and I, like everybody back then, did my share of psychedelics and had some amazing journeys and then had a really bad one bad trip that made me stop doing it at all.

And.

Also alerted me to the danger of doing it both without being really careful about the substance and also without careful attention to set and setting and who's with you? And then I didn't have anything to do with psychedelics until recently.

When actually a guy named Phil Wolfson got interested in IFS and proposed that we co lead a retreat on IFS and ketamine. And I felt like, you know, we do pretty well without psychedelics. So I'm not sure that this is something I'm going to really pursue in a big way. But I was happy to give it a try because we do get stuck and maybe this would jar people loose from when they get stuck. And.

So then went ahead and did that first retreat with him. I can't remember how long ago, but it's over a year. And was amazed at the accommodation, really.

Just, yeah, just amazed by the combination. So subsequently I think I've done two or three other ketamine and IFRS retreats and remain amazed and plan to keep doing one or two a year.

And I know there are other therapists and clinicians in the kind of IFS network that are also involved in the field, like the myth offers and many others. So imagine this is going to be an ongoing exploration. Well, let's talk specifically then about ifs. I wonder if you could give us a. I realize it's a complex, well, simple and complex, but it's a broad topic. But maybe if you could give us the thumbnail version of what ifs is actually and maybe something about the taxonomy of the parts and you know, the especially this emerging possibility of connecting with this emerging self with a capital S, becoming more self led and things like that one's life.

Yeah, I'll try to condense it.

I'm trained as a family therapist, I have a PhD in that. And I thought family therapy was the bomb and did an outcome study in the early 80s and found it didn't work with the population I was working with. And out of frustration started asking these bulimic kids why. And they started talking this language of parts. And as I explore that, initially with fear because I thought maybe they're sicker than I thought, but ultimately got curious about the phenomena and was lucky in the sense that I didn't have any training in psychoanalysis or psychodynamic therapy. And so I really had to listen carefully to what my clients were saying. And as I did that, I learned that parts aren't the product of trauma, which is one of the ways they've been seen in the what's called the did world, the multiple personality disorder world where the unitary mind was blown apart by trauma. And these are all what are called alters or they're fragments of that. What I was learning was that the parts pre existed the trauma that actually.

Cards came into the world with them and that that they're all valuable.

One of my recent books was titled no Bad Parts. That there's nothing in there that in inherently is. Is negative or evil, but that trauma or attachment injuries and bad parenting or you know, being rejected over and over or abandoned and so on as a child forces these parts out of their naturally valuable states into roles that they don't actually like most of the time, but they think are necessary to keep you going. And traumas also sort of frees them in time during the trauma. So many of these parts think you're still quite young and think they have to protect you in the way they did back then. And the trauma also infuses them with what we call burdens, which are extreme beliefs and emotions that entered your system during the trauma and attached to the parts almost like a virus and drive the way the parts operate. So as I was getting that, it really shifted everything. It really shifted my whole paradigm for understanding people. But it also shifted the way I tried to get clients to relate to these parts from trying to fight with them or ignore them to.

Being compassionate for them and listening to them and getting to know why they do what they do. And in doing that, as a systems thinker, you mentioned a taxonomy and so I began to explore the distinctions among them. And how they operated as a system, patterns. And the big distinction that leaped out immediately and has held up as the big distinction all these years is between parts of us that before they were hurt, would in other systems be called these inner children that are not only young, but they're also playful and joyful and give us a lot of creativity and. And adventurous and so on. But when they do get hurt or terrified or shamed, they take on those burdens. They. They now carry all the shame or terror or pain, and now they have the power to overwhelm us with it. If they get triggered, they can make us feel all that again and take us back into those scenes where they're stuck. And we think they're just emotions and memories that came from our traumas. And we have been taught in our culture and everybody around us, and it's a kind of natural impulse to just leave that in the past and just move on and don't look back. And so we tend to lock all that up, not realizing that in what I call exiling, those parts of us were getting cut off from our juice, from our most valuable assets in some ways, simply because they got hurt. So for these, what I call exiles, it's insult to injury. The injury was the trauma, and the insult is they're abandoned by us, and so they're hurt even more by that. And so we've got this pool of pain and shame and terror most of us walk around with, trying our best to stay one step ahead of and to stay one step ahead and to really not to keep all that exile. Other parts are forced out of their naturally valuable states to become protectors, some of whom protect us by managing the outside world so that nothing happens that triggers those exiles. And so we call them managers, and they tend to either maybe keep us in our heads and we don't feel much in our bodies, or they're kind of scanning for danger all the time and giving us input, or taking over panic attacks, or they're trying to make us look perfect so we don't get rejected or get us to achieve a higher level, so we get accolades to counter the worthlessness or.

Take care of everybody, but don't take care of ourselves. So everybody depends on us. So there's a whole bunch of common manager roles, all of which have in common the desire to control the outside world and to please people and to, in doing that, keep these exiles from getting triggered, keep them contained and protected.

And that works a lot of the time, but when it doesn't, there's this Big explosion of flames, of exiled emotion that threaten to consume us. And so we also have a set of parts who are on guard for that, and whenever that happens, will impulsively take us away, either get us higher than the flames or douse them with some substance or distract us until they burn themselves out. And so we call those firefighter protectors.

So most of us walk around with that sort of assembly inside. And depending on circumstances and habits, one set of protectors or another is running our lives.

And that's how we get diagnosed if we have problems. It's really the diagnosis is just description of the cluster of protectors that are driving us.

That's the map to the territory. Very simple. Exiles and protectors.

One class of protector or managers. The other class is firefighter.

In addition, and this is the big discovery, for lack of a better word by ifs, is if all of those parts were to open space inside out, would pop a different person who has what we call the eight C's.

Qualities. So if I were working with you, Fleet, and I was having you work with your critic, maybe, and a part that didn't like the critic, and you had this big fight going on, and I asked them both to just relax for a second and open space inside, and now how do you feel toward them or how do you feel toward the critic? For example, you would say seconds earlier you hated it, but now you would say, I'm just kind of curious about why it calls me names. And you would say it from a place of calm, confidence, even compassion at that point. And again, it would be like a totally different person that emerged spontaneously simply by getting the other part to give us some space. And then if I had you talk to your critic, the conversation would go in a much different and better way, because the critic wouldn't feel so attacked and could reveal its secret history about why it got into this role and what. What it's trying to protect you inside of you. And. And you would open your heart even more as you listen to it. And you could even honor it for its service as it tried to protect even. Even if it was totally misguided and it screwed up your life.

And then it could reveal what it protects, and then we would get permission to go to that and get whatever parts are stuck in the past out of there and help them unburden. And then the critic could even totally transform. So. And when I would ask clients after this other person popped out, what part of you is that? They would say, that's not a part. Like these others that's me, that's myself. So I came to call that the self with a capital s. And now 40 years later, turns out that self is in everybody can't be damaged just beneath the surface of the part. So when they open space, it emerges spontaneously and knows how to heal, knows how to heal internally, knows how to heal external relationships. And that's the big deal about ifs. That we can access that place in people so quickly. You don't have to meditate 20 years to get to it.

So for people who maybe are less familiar with ifs, I mean, most of us were educated and cultured into the idea of a unitary self. I'm just this one personality. And we have a sense of our strengths and weaknesses and proclivities and so forth. But for the kind of uninitiated person, let's say what might be most, the parts they most might be readily aware of. Like, in fact, probably we've all at one point or another said, well, you know, part of me wants to do this and part of me wants that. We probably all said that at one time or another.

Yeah, I mean people. And I said that before I ran into the phenomena because it's a easy word, you know, it's the word I use for them, even though it doesn't do justice to their full range personalities. It sounds like some kind of machine part, but it's the most common parlance. And so people, you know, if I say tell me about your, the part of you that does this fleet, you're not going to say what do you mean part? But if I said tell me about the sub personality that does this, you'd say, what are you talking about? So I can engage people in the language easily if I use that word and.

Forget the rest of your question.

Well, I just want to give, you know, people.

Oh yeah. An example. Yeah.

Example of parts that we're kind of all aware of that are just under the service even when we're functional. You know, there's just.

Well, I haven't met many people who don't have a critic, for example. That was example I was giving you earlier.

And hate it. You know, or actually I once did a workshop for a bunch of CEOs and in the workshops I'll say, how many of you have a critic and can you go inside and get to know it and how do you feel toward it? And most people say, I don't like it, it drives me crazy or I'm afraid of it. These people, I depend on it, I need it, I don't want to get rid of it because it drives me. I have to keep working constantly. So anyway, most people can identify with a criticism. Most people, as you said, can think of a time when they're in a dilemma and there is a part arguing very openly one way and another part that's fighting with it inside. And they can notice there are these different voices in there because a lot of times.

You just don't notice them because they're just kind of doing it behind the scenes. And.

It'S only when they really stand out, like if there's some trigger that you can really identify them clearly.

So most of us, if we're relatively functional in life and that's a kind of broad categorization because some of what we have to do to function in modern society probably means we're being operated by, by self critics and all kinds of things. But if we're relatively functional, are we basically what, what's running our life mostly? Is it some. Maybe there's some of S self with a capital S. Maybe there's some there if we've done a little work. But it's mainly manager parts that are kind of managing our lives.

Exactly right. What's called the ego is generally a collection of little managers who often can do pretty well. You know, they're pretty smart even though they're often young and.

And they, they tend to be hard workers and. Yeah, so.

And they do their best. You know, they're in, in the family therapy world there was a concept of parentified children and that applies to this inner family too that these managers, if you get to know them, often are much younger than role they've been forced into and, and so they don't know a lot of the time that there is this other self in there that could do a much better job and is much older than them. And they think again often because they had to take over when you were young, that they need to keep doing that.

Well, let's explore.

Integrating this model with psycho consistent psychotherapy. So would seem that there, there are some similarities in the model in that they're, they're both somewhat insight based and that insights into this landscape can be liberating. People have insights under psychedelics that they find liberating and what you're describing, people would have insights and. Or the parts would have insights about each other and the cell paths. And then there also seem to be this. Both seem to have this possibility of what you're calling the self with a capital S emerging this kind of Wiser, more quantum U.S. sometimes more courageous, less stuck part.

Seems so. Or maybe it's not a part, but this part of our. It's hard not to say part.

That this seems to emerge out of both those models. And so I'm wondering how you see that working together.

Yeah. So again with my limited experience, I have considerable experience now with ketamine, but less with other psychedelics. But my at this point generalization would be that for whatever reason the medicine puts the managers, we were just talking about that ego to sleep or offline for some reason. And when they're. When in the psychedelics where they call it ego death or ego dissolution, which terrifies these managers, they don't want to die. So it's a really. I'm trying to get the field to let go of that phrase.

But for whatever reason they go offline. And when they do spontaneously, a lot of self comes forward and that's a big invitation for a lot of other parts who haven't had access to come and get attention. And so people, it's more than insight because you can get a lot of insight from your thinking part. But you wind up going to these places that you've stayed away from most of your life and you wind up listening to the. What parts need to be witnessed. Those parts that, that you locked up need you to know about what happened to them and how bad it was. And that does help you understand your life more. But even more importantly for me, you wind up taking those parts out of where they're frozen in time and helping them transform. And you mentioned Michael and Annie Mithoff earlier and they are IFS therapists. And so they were running, especially the early days, the MAPS trainings with mdma. And they kept track of how often spontaneously people would start doing ifs without any guidance from them, without any coaching, simply by taking the MDMA. And they found with high dose MDMA was like 80% would just start doing it, start healing themselves that way. Which was very validating to me because it confirmed that I had just stumbled onto a phenomena that people know how to do when they access enough cell. And so, so that's my thinking about it, that we do have this healing ability inside of us and the medicine just opens that up because it's usually blocked by these parts that think they have to manage our lives so rigidly often and don't give us enough access.

It seems like in general the therapeutic landscape, there's so many different models, but they share in common some sense of trying to unfreeze that landscape. A lot of the Childhood experiences and childhood traumas allow those to resurface and ideally resurface or be re experienced in a way that's not re traumatizing. So the safety of a therapeutic relationship.

Or it seems like some of these processes, maybe in ifs the emergent of more access to self as well as what happens in the psychedelic experiences, there's.

You almost internally, have now created that therapeutic environment that allows you to re witness these things and learn from them or heal from them without being re traumatized. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. So.

With many other trauma therapies, there's a huge fear of what you're calling retraumatizing the client of what's called exceeding the window of tolerance, of whatever the emotions are that the trauma, the traumatized parts are feeling.

And so there's this tremendous fear of the overwhelm. And so there's a lot of activity.

In preparation of going to these places to help people feel very grounded and connected to the therapist.

And then as they do it, there's a careful monitoring of the amount of affect. And if it exceeds that window of tolerance, a shift away from it and into the grounding techniques. And what I found before psychedelics, but has been accentuated by psychedelics is the difference with ifs is we're not going. We're going to these places from what I call self. So you're bringing all these C word qualities. I mentioned four, and there's another four. So they're the eight Cs. So courage, creativity, clarity and connectedness, in addition to the calm, compassion, curiosity and.

Confidence. So you're already in that state before you start doing the work or before you take the medicine. And as you approach these exiles, if you open these doors to these basements that you've been staying away from your whole life.

You don't get overwhelmed even as you approach all this huge affect, you'll feel it. You look like you're in it maybe for a period of time. But if I were to ask you, fleet, is this okay or is this too much? You'd say, no, it's okay, I can handle it. So I don't really have to worry at that point about this window of tolerance issue. Mainly because we're bringing self to the. To the pain.

Well, self, in a sense is this. Self with capital S is almost also therapist with a capital T.

That therapeutic space.

Almost in a kind of self therapy, even if it's being aided by someone who's facilitating it?

Yes, the self is an inner therapist or an inner parent. Or inner healer or inner good leader. It can be all of those. And which doesn't minimize the need for the facilitator to be in self, because self is contagious. So if while you're with someone, you can get your parts to open a lot of space and you can be in this very spacious, kind of grounded place where you've got those eight Cs going for you, your client will sense the safety in that. So that's the set part of set and setting. Your client will feel this loving energy surrounding them and that also helps their protectors open more and more space.

So.

Yeah. And. And parts are contagious too. So if as a facilitator, I'm with somebody and they start to get very emotional and I get scared because I'm scared of my own exile and the protector comes in, my client's going to sense that immediately and that'll trigger their protectors and it'll shut it all down. So the state of the facilitator is really, really important too. And that's what I'm trying to bring also. The other thing I'll say about all that is what we found in these ketamine retreats is the importance of, in the prep sessions before the medicine going to the protector parts who aren't so sure about doing this or even have a lot of fear about doing it and listening to all the fears and addressing those fears. So it doesn't help to just listen to the fears. But we have to say, I get that, I understand why you're afraid of that, but this is how we can handle that and we can handle it. So that C word confidence, and would you give us permission now to do it? And so we don't go, we don't have people take the medicine until we get permission from their protectors. The veterans who've been doing this for a while have noticed the difference in the sort of volatility of the journeys people have. Simply because you get all this permission going into it.

Yeah. It would seem without that, there could still be a lot of different forms of manager. Parts controlling parts, protective parts, getting in there and. Yeah. Not. Not letting the thing unfold.

Yeah.

Well, let's talk a little bit more about the role of the therapist in psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. So I watched a lot of films from the clinical trials and so forth, and it seems, at least in that context, in fact, they're often called sitters. So it's a clinician, a researcher, sometimes physicians, sometimes psychotherapists, psychologists, and they're the sitters, and they're basically holding a safe space and, you know, they may rest a hand on someone or, you know, but they're basically trying to hold a reassuring, safe, nurturing space. But they're not really actively doing therapeutic interventions, at least what I've seen so far. And I know there's several camps within the movement. Some really err on the side of just trust the medicine, let the medicine do the work. It doesn't requ require any intervention.

But you were just mentioning there's what can be done before the session and of course there's integration work after the session. And I'd like you to address both of those. But I'm wondering also about what you what and whether you've had any experience with this on these ketamine retreats of any kind of facilitation during the session or any therapeutic intervention or guidance during a session or I know mostly music is used. So is it best just to let the person have their experience and have the therapy be pre and post, or do you see other possibilities of integrated further integration?

Yeah, well, in talking to Michael and Annie Methofer.

They were constrained by what the requirements of the government to give them approval to do the research in terms of what they would allow.

During the sessions. So they couldn't do ifs active. Ifs they could after the person started to access a part, and they did at times. But that's why you see such a passive kind of sitter. Yeah. So when we're doing it.

The ketamine is interesting and different in the sense from mdma, in the sense that if with, with moderate dose, medium dose, you actually leave your body and you're not available.

If I wanted to work with somebody, I couldn't for a period of time, and often it's maybe 20 minutes, but it's when they come back into their bodies that there's so much self available. And it's during that after period of maybe an hour, do an enormous amount of healing very quickly.

And yeah, other medicines don't make you leave, so you can actively work other medicines in effect, like with mdma.

And again, you just, you have a lot more access to exile parts and, and to self. And the healing happens much more quickly because the protectors, for whatever reason, often in regular ifs sessions, they're jumping in at times and you got to stop and get them to step out. But I think you access so much self that all these young protectors say, wow, there's an adult here. We can just get out of the way. And then they start to doing big too big, big a healing, which is part of why I'm excited about it.

Even talking about, you know.

Specific parts that become traumatized and, and then. And then further exile, they're adding insult to injury and so forth. And, you know, we could. I could. It could be an unending complexity to all these parts. And parts can have parts and it could be a complex system. I'm wondering how this addresses, you know, what people think of as a broader base generally. I think as a broader base, collection of symptomology like anxiety. They're experiencing anxiety. A lot of things make them anxious, they're physically anxious. It makes it difficult to leave home or engage socially or people that are experiencing depression. And they just, you know, they feel like they're trying to move through mud. Right. They're just, you know, in this. So these seems to be broader states and no doubt they have roots and underlying traumas and so forth. But I wonder how both ifs and possibly ifs and some kind of psychedelic assisted therapy address these kind of broader conditions.

Yeah. So having worked with people with both those diagnoses a lot, you do see common patterns. And.

We'Ll take anxiety first. So anxiety, there's usually a very, very scared exile part because.

Early on you saw in your life or your family told you that that anxious part that got scared in some trauma, maybe.

That you need to get away from it, you need to do things in spite of it. And to do that, you tend to have to exile it. And then once you do that, then you have a bunch of parts that are terrified of being triggered again, terrified of the anxiety attack and the disabling that comes with that. And so there are a bunch of protectors who either sort of shrink your life so that you don't. You're not in context that might trigger that one. Or.

Shame you constantly for being so scared and push you to try and overcome your anxiety and do things that or nearly you're afraid of. And there's these battles going inside about whether that's safe or not. And. And.

So again, this is a total, totally different paradigm for understanding anxiety. It's not just a ball of fear that you have to overcome. It's a hurting, inner, sacred being who needs your love, who you've abandoned. And so when I'm working with an actions person, I'm first working with all these protectors to get permission to actually go to the exile. It's so full of fear. And so we're going to the fear rather than finding ways to better cope with it or avoid it. And.

Most of psychiatry and psychology is designed to either medicate it to into oblivion or.

Find better strategies for managing it.

Instead of healing it, healing involves going to it. And I can say something very similar about depression.

With depression, there's usually an exile that carries a variety of feelings of pain or sadness or hopelessness or worthlessness. And then there are parts that to avoid it make you very flat and not. So you don't feel much and, and that's depressing to, to not feel much in life and to not care, to not try and to stay in bed and you know, and so again, we go to those parts first and get permission, honor them for trying to keep you safe and then get permission to go to the parts that are driving or that, that they're trying to keep you from being overwhelmed by and heal those parts.

So, you know, one, I think one could think of internal family systems, you know, as another conceptual model for describing all kinds of psychodynamics that happen within our personalities and so forth. And when I listen to you describe it, and I've read your book, you come closer to describing these almost as metaphysical realities. And you know, whether someone bought into that or not, it seems one of the important thing is that, that you, because you regard them that way, you regard them with a lot more respect and love and caring. And you seem to take on, you know, the role of a good, healthy parent, of really caring for, nurturing and respecting.

These, whatever you want to call them, entities, subparts, subpersonalities. But, but because you relate to them that way, it seems like you're bringing in a whole nother layer, a level of, of respect and care and love. Really?

Yeah. You know, I'm at a point now originally I thought, oh, this is a really good metaphor to help people relate inside differently. But over time the metaphor model didn't work. And I had to really acknowledge that these things are real. There is this real other world inside of us that we ignore most of the time, but deserves a lot of attention.

I don't impose that framework on students or people that are, especially people starting out, because it's so foreign to the ordinary paradigm. But my position is pretty pragmatic that if you relate to them as if they were real, it works. We have lots of outcome data that show that it works better than most anything else with things like PTSD and depression and so on.

So from that practical standpoint, why not buy into it, even if it's pretend for a while and start Relating to these things in this very different, much more compassionate and curious way. And then you find that it actually does make for a lot of transformation.

So in terms of the emerging self with a capital S that has these eight qualities, eight Cs, that you. You spoke of, and is able to do this naturally, do this capacity for healing and positive parenting and healing and so forth, and holding space.

I'm curious, does that self, that sense of self with a capital S, is it still tied to a separate sense of self, like being separate from others, being separate from the world? And is there another? Because the main spiritual traditions talk about going beyond, at least temporarily, or having experiences that are beyond any kind of separate self. And then you experience a profound sense of interconnectedness or, you know, a larger consciousness. So I'm wondering how that plays here in terms of one's relationship with the larger world.

And, you know, I'm glad you asked that, Fleet, because the other reason I'm so excited about psychedelics is that it does open a portal to this sense of we're so much more than what we're aware of in our bodies. And so my. And it isn't just through psychedelics I was getting. I'd gotten this before it. But my conception for self isn't that it's isolated in our bodies, separate from everybody else. In fact, as you do psychedelics or you meditate in a deep way, you really get a sense of what I call the particle physics.

In quantum physics, there's this concept of photons being both a particle and a wave.

Mm.

And that, for me, what we experience itself and what we can access and help to heal is the particleization of the big self, which people could call God or the. You know, the non dual or. And that when people take the medicine, particularly ketamine and I think psilocybin, also, to a lesser degree or maybe the same degree, I don't know, they have. In the higher doses, they go into that non dual, and they don't feel separate at all. They actually feel the connection to everything. And I've had that experience with ketamine, and it's a profound experience to feel. And it stuck with me in the sense that I now do believe that the self in me is. Is not only connected, but is part of that big self. And that from that place, I do feel much more connected to everybody and to the earth. And so connectedness is one of those C words. So the more you access self, the more you see that you're not an isolated individual, and the more you also have this sense of there being so much more that helps you navigate this world. And I think that's why psychedelics are being used now with end of life people who are at the end of their lives because they really get a sense of it's just a transition and it's not something to be feared.

So I realized with this question going a little bit beyond the landscape or the language of what's currently considered evidence based, but if you don't mind venturing there. I know I've heard you speak about through having greater access to self, we get access to various forms of wisdom, inner wisdom, inner guidance. And it's not uncommon that in with plant medicine and other psychedelic experiences, people get in touch with what they regard as entities or beings or guides or allies and these kind of things. This is throughout the shamanic literature and the psychedelic literature and so forth. You know, in some ways, are these just more parts? Are these just more parts or is there a difference or.

Yeah, yeah. So I started running into the guide phenomena long before psychedelics with clients. I would be working with somebody and they might have done some big piece of work and they're feeling good about it and all of a sudden they would get this voice of support and how great it was they could do that and that voice would start to point toward other things and might even come in and help in some ways. And as I, at first I thought, oh, that's great, there's a kind of cheerleader part that's come in. But as I had clients get curious about it, these things would say they're not parts like the others, they're there to help, and that they have been waiting for access to the client to give them this wisdom and support. But they're not parts. There's something else. And you know, I, at that time, I wasn't a particularly spiritual person. I didn't have a framework for any of that. But then I did hear about shamanic kinds of traditions. And, and you do see that centuries or thousands of years people have been working with this phenomenon. And so I got more and more curious about it. And Now.

I'd say 50% of my clients have access, ongoing relationships with these guides, we call them guides, and they're very, very helpful. And in the ketamine IFS workshops, it's not uncommon that they just show up spontaneously. And that's the other thing I'm excited about. It's again, it opens a portal to that kind of wisdom that we haven't had access to because our parts and their burdens keep us from accessing those guides. And the guides will say that they're dying to help us. They just can't get through. And so when we unburden to the point where they do have access, they're thrilled. And it's not like you got to pray to them and thank them. And, you know, they're just very eager to be here and to help us, not only individually, but they really want to help heal the planet. And so that's part of what excites me about the whole psychedelics revolution also.

So in terms of.

As you know, these psychotic therapies are coming online right now. Ketamine is the only one that's legal nationally, I guess. I'm not sure what's going on in Oregon with psilocybin, but we may see MDMA or psilocybin be rescheduled this year or next year. And in terms of the possibilities of further integrating that with internal family systems, is there any research going on or do you see the possibility of some research or what's kind of happening there?

I am aware of a couple projects both with psilocybin and end of life.

A couple people have gotten grants to study that with ifs. And I'm not sure where things stand in terms of the research, but I'm very excited that this is happening.

There's been quite a lot of research done on ifs. It has been established in SAMHSA as a evidence based therapeutic model.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know how many studies we have now, but yeah, we're called evidence based and I'm very proud of that.

Yeah, so, yeah, so it seemed like it would be a natural continuation for that kind of research to continue, hopefully for that to get funded.

Do you have, do you have any concerns about, about this field of, of psychedelic medicine and where it's going and you know, in terms of safety, ethics, accessibility, different things, I have concerns about all of that.

And you know, in general, I'm not a big proponent of a huge amount of regulation, but I do think there's the potential that it's all going to backlash and.

We'Re going to be, you know, there was this kind of heyday back in those, I guess it was the 60s mainly. There was research on psychedelics all over the place. And then Nixon and the war on drugs and all of that just shut it all down. But partly it was shut down because so many people were having bad drugs. And so there is that danger. If, you know, I don't think it's a good idea for people to do it as a party thing. And I do think it needs to be and that, you know, there are people who have questionable ethics who are using it and.

Have been busted for that for exploiting people when they were on the medicines. And the basic thing I'm trying to say is if we don't have some degree of regulation.

It'S going to be this big opportunity is going to be lost.

I really am supporting people who are pushing for that thing.

Yeah, it's pretty hard to control what's going on in a larger underground psychedelic movement. Although there's a lot of wonderful nonprofits trying to support people today. There were, I don't think there were any non profits around when, when you and I were doing it back in the 60s that were out there to help you with your psychedelic experience. But there's a lot of that going on now, so perhaps that'll help with that movement. Seems to be a lot of thoughtful people involved in that. But it would seem like the training of the therapist is really in terms of that part of it that the psychedelic assisted therapy, the training of the therapist is really critical. And you know, I think that's an age old issue in, in the world of psychology and therapy and clinical practice. How much therapy does a therapist or a clinician psychologist need to have done? And you know, you can be a licensed clinical psychologist and never have done any inner work on yourself at all. And so, and it seems like how you're describing the potential of the work with internal family system for oneself.

That would almost be at least one ideal training for people to be able to be therapists and support others from their, you know, having a lot of access to their help with a capital S with those HC qualities and so forth that that could do a lot to avoid a lot of harm.

That's exactly right. And that's been our focus in training therapists in general. Not just psychedelic therapists. But the effectiveness and also the lack of doing harm is so related to how much personal work people who have done with this. And I think part of the danger with the psychedelics is that I don't want to be too over generalizing, but a lot of people attracted to being in the psychedelics world and also being facilitators have looser boundaries and, and less training to shore up those boundaries than in general than. And so I do feel like there's a big need for very intense and well designed training programs. And we run a training for ifs psychedelics. We run a couple version of those level 2 trainings and.

Trying to, you know, support other programs that are doing similar things. I think MAPS has done overall a good job with it, although they even had a scandal of some kind.

So, yeah, it's. It's very touchy right now. This is a point at which things could go either way.

Yeah. And.

One of the things about psychedelics is that both on the therapist side and the client side, or you say you get this very quick access, you take a substance and you get quick access to realms that might take quite a lot of individual effort to get there through meditation or breath work or therapy or other things. More dedication, more effort. But with a psychedelic, it takes a substance and boom, you're there. And so it makes it seem very easy and it could create, you know, a different context than when we actually, you know, kind of work our way into something. And as well as for the therapist, I can just, you know, instead of have really become skillful, I can just have this person take this substance and they're wide open and I can work with them.

And yeah, and that is a big danger of psychedelics that because it puts these managers to sleep something.

Then you wind up going to places that they ordinarily are terrifying to have you go. And.

When you come back, they could punish you for doing that in ways that can be quite serious. You know, I learned the hard way about that with non psychedelic ifs. And so we. That's why I was stressing earlier the importance of, in the prep sessions, getting permission from all these protectors and even helping them become aware that we might go to these very scary places. And I just want to be sure that, you know, I'll be with you the whole time and won't be judging you and all the things they're afraid of, but not going without permission. And that seems to the people like Sunny Strasberg and the people I collaborate with now have seen a big difference in the amount of what we call backlash that people suffer from because of that.

And, you know, all this, we haven't even mentioned how many clinics there are out there where people give.

Patients the medicine without even staying with them and staying in the room and just kind of believe the medicine will do its magic. So for me.

There'S way too much focus on the medicine as the healer rather than the medicine as a portal to healing that needs.

A presence of a good therapist and somebody who knows the territory well.

Yeah, well, you brought up that, that risk of backlash from, you know, parts that you brought into a situation they Maybe they weren't prepared for you, they didn't give you permission for. To me that one of the most obvious kind of evidence of my own experience of parts is like in oneself and others, when you see this kind of self sabotage dynamic happen where you're somebody's obviously doing something that completely.

Counterproductive to everything about their life. I mean literally, you know, burning their own life down on some one level or another, at least undermining a relationship or really, you know, and who would, who would do that to who? I mean it's really points that there's something going on here. There's some complexity of relationships going on there.

Yeah. But if you, you know, if that was happening and I had you focus on that part that's trying to sabotage and got you curious about it, they generally have pretty good reasons. You know, they, they're afraid if they don't pull you back down that you're going to take a lot of risks and get hurt again. And they're stuck in the past when that happened. And so, you know, again, in contrast to other models that don't understand why someone would sabotage themselves. They're, you know, we always find there are good reasons, not, not good reasons necessarily in the present, but there were good reasons in the past.

Right, right. Yeah.

Wow. Well, thank you very much. This has been incredibly rich journey and every time I talk to you about this, I think I understand internal family systems better and I think I understand myself a little better and, and it really does just seem to be great promise here. If we can sort of guide it with self wisdom, this emergence of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy and its potential integration with internal family systems. So thank you very much for the work you're doing.

Thank you, Fleet. As I said earlier, I always love talking to you. I always get a lot out of it too. And I'm so glad you're doing this because you're bringing a lot of wisdom to this community at this time, which is so important.

And people can find out more about your work at the IFS Institute. Is that. What is it?

Ifs-institute.com yeah, right, right.

Ifs-institute.com, the IFS Institute. I encourage people to check that out. So thank you very much. Dr. Richard Schwartz, Dick Swartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems. Thank you.

Thank you, Fleet. Great to see you.

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