If You Beat Yourself, Who Wins? A Conversation on Trauma and Flow - Dr. Richard Schwartz | Flow Research Collective Radio

We all have these parts that before they got hurt bring us these wonderful qualities, but are the most sensitive parts of us because they are these sort of loving inner children that are very innocent and open. And so they're the ones that get hurt the most when someone betrays us or abandons us or yells at us and shames us. They take in the energy of those experiences. And now they've got the burden of worthlessness, for example. And once a part starts to carry that burden, it has the power to bring you back into that scene or that time if it gets triggered and make you feel as bad as you felt back then. And they're just sitting there in that that state, it's frozen in time, like I said. They make it so you can't function. I mean, not, not only can you not function in flow or in peak performance, but you might not even be able to get out of bed because one of those parts got triggered and brought you back into that trauma scene.

Hey there, if you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches, you'll go through our whole curriculum, you'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then Somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. What does it take to do the impossible?

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Breakthroughs. Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Ryan Dorris here with Flow Research Collective, and welcome to today's episode with Dr. Richard Schwartz, also known as Dick Schwartz. Dick began his career as a family therapist and an academic at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There he discovered that family therapy alone was not achieving full symptom relief. In asking patients why, he learned that they were plagued by what they called parts. These patients became his teachers as they described how their parts formed networks of interrelationships that resemble the families he had been working with. He also found that as they focused on and separated from their parts, his patients were able to shift into a state characterized by qualities like curiosity, calm, confidence, and compassion. And he called that inner essence the self and was amazed to find it even in severely diagnosed and traumatized patients. And from these early explorations at the University of Illinois Chicago, the Internal Family Systems model was born back in the early 1980s, about 40 years ago now. And since then, IFS, Internal Family Systems, has become an evidence-based model that is widely used as a form of psychotherapy, particularly with trauma. It provides a non-pathologizing, optimistic, and empowering perspective and a practical and effective set of techniques for working with individuals, couples, families, and more more recently, leaders and high performers. And in 2013, Schwartz left the Chicago area and moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where he is on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. And this episode was a really, really special one. We spoke in depth about the Internal Family Systems model and how various parts, which Dick calls exiles, can hold you back from achieving your potential and from doing and becoming all that you're capable of. I think you're going to really enjoy it. It was definitely a very special episode. Dick and I connected really well and we went deep on a number of these key topics, which are often underspoken about in the peak performance world. So with that, enjoy today's episode. Dick Schwartz, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio, and far more importantly, Happy birthday from myself, from Stephen, and the whole Flow Research Collective community. I had no idea it was going to be your birthday today.

Well, thank you, Rhiannon. It's an honor to be with you. I really enjoy your work and your podcast, and we share a lot of interests, so I'm really grateful to be invited.

I appreciate that. I wanted to start off with a quote of yours from Internal Family Systems Therapy, the book, I believe. And it goes, a part is not just a temporary emotional state or habitual thought pattern. Instead, it is a discrete and autonomous mental system that has an idiosyncratic range of emotion, style of expression, set of abilities, desires, and view of the world. In other words, it is as if we each contain a society of people each of whom is at a different age and has different interests, talents, and temperaments. So I would love, Dick, if you could break down what you mean by part in that quote.

Yeah, well, I'm glad you found that. I'm impressed that I wrote that. Yeah, so, you know, I stumbled onto this phenomena by working with clients. I was getting stuck as a family therapist and asking why these eating disorder clients weren't changing, they started talking about these parts of them that were getting in the way. And ultimately I got intrigued, and asking a lot of questions of these, these clients who were very articulate about their parts, became clear ultimately that these weren't just emotions or thought patterns, but that actually they had a lot of autonomy and they could take over the client and make them do things they didn't want to do. And they were often very polarized with each other. And so I ultimately came to conclude that we all have them because as I listened to my clients, I began listening inside myself and, oh my God, I've got them too. And some of mine are as extreme as my clients. And so just in staying curious and being taught By both my clients and myself and some other friends that were doing it, I learned the ultimate conclusion is that it's the nature of the mind to be multiple in this way, that people who are diagnosed what used to be called multiple personality disorder aren't so different from the rest of us, except that they're what they call alters, got blown apart by the horrible traumas they suffered over and over as kids. So that when one takes over, the others take off. But what they call alters are really the same as what I'm calling parts. They're full-range inner personalities and that they all are valuable. So it's a good thing to have parts because, you know, as you guys are talking about different states, there are different states that can be very useful in performance and then there are states that can get in the way. And when one of those states, or what I call parts, takes over, you are like a different person for a period of time, depending on how separate they are from other parts. So it's been a tough sell in our culture because we like to think of ourselves as unitary minds that have different thoughts and emotions. But movies like Inside Out, and there are ways that The culture is starting to warm to the phenomenon, and that's been very helpful to me.

I find it interesting that people object or resist the idea of parts because of the fact that our language, in very, very simple and basic ways, implies parts. Yes, we're saying, 'I couldn't stop myself from, you know, eating the donut,' or, 'I hate myself.' You know, that is by definition a reference to two selves at a minimum.

Exactly.

I find that interesting. And could you give us a breakdown of the difference between, or the spectrum of mental health as regards to Parts? So I think what immediately comes up for some people, I'm sure you have to encounter this all the time when describing this, is, you know, our severe, severe psychiatric disorders, like potentially schizophrenia, or as you pointed out, some of the movies we see where people fall into completely distinct personalities of different ages that don't even know or remember each other. How do you think about parts on the spectrum of mental health from someone who is psychologically flourishing through to someone who is just challenged in a more normal way, through to someone potentially who is suffering more from trauma, all the way through to someone who is really, really undergoing a severe psychiatric condition?

Yeah, well, you kind of laid the spectrum out well. We're born with these parts either dormant or manifest. So infant researchers like Barry Brazelton will talk about 5 discrete states that infants rotate through, and they're all necessary for that infant. And as you progress in life, more parts come on board because they're all valuable. They all have ways of helping us. But trauma has the impact of forcing them out of their naturally valuable states into roles that can be very damaging. It also has the impact of freezing them in the time of the trauma so that most of us have parts that are living as if that bad thing that was happening then is still happening to us. And they see the world through those eyes, that this is a very dangerous place, for example. And they organize around a lot of those extreme beliefs and emotions. That I call burdens that came into them from the trauma and now attach to these parts and drive the way they operate, almost like a virus. So when you don't have a lot of trauma, or when you've had trauma but you actually went to the parts that were hurt by it and listened to them and helped them out of where they're stuck, then you have more harmony inside. The parts get along with each other. And they trust what I call yourself as a leader. And you don't even notice them because they're in their naturally valuable states. They don't stand out in bold relief like they do at the other end of the spectrum where you have a system of a person who was traumatized or had terrible, what are called attachment injuries from bad parenting and so on. And tried to lock away the parts that were hurt by those experiences. Because whereas before they got hurt, these parts are precious. They're these inner children that give us all kinds of creativity and liveliness and playfulness and so on. But after they get hurt or terrified or shamed, now they carry the burden of worthlessness or the burden of fear. Or the burden of emotional pain. And now we don't want anything to do with them, so we tend to lock them away in inner basements or abysses, caves, and just try to live our life avoiding anything that might trigger them. And then other parts are forced to become the ones who help you avoid things that might trigger them, what we call protectors. And so when people are traumatized and don't go to the hurt parts and don't do the healing, then they wind up in this very polarized place with these what I call exiles that are locked away, and then these protective parts that are in very extreme kind of rigid states trying to control the world, try to control your body, your mind, so you don't ever experience any of that again. I could go over the what's called the DSM which is the categories of psychiatric diagnosis, and describe a Parts view of each of those categories that is a lot less pathologizing and also describes the way people operate, even things like schizophrenia and bipolar and so on. And so for people that got traumatized and didn't heal their trauma, they wind up often with some kind of diagnosis like that at that end of the spectrum, and they still have the capacity to heal all that. And that's a lot of what I'm trying to bring to both psychotherapy and also to the culture in general.

You should give us a breakdown, Dick, of what you mean by exiles and protectors. And I know there, there are other labels like firefighters for commonly seen ways that parts show up. Could you give us a breakdown of those, what they refer to, and then maybe some examples as well?

Yeah. So as I said, we all have these parts that before they got hurt bring us these wonderful qualities, but are the most sensitive parts of us because they are these sort of loving inner children that are very innocent and open. And so they're the ones that get hurt the most when someone betrays us or abandons us or, or yells at us and shames us. And they take in the energy of those experiences. And now they've got the burden of worthlessness, for example. And once a part starts to carry that burden, it has the power to bring you back into that scene or that time if it gets triggered and make you feel as bad as you felt back then. And they're just sitting there in that, that state, frozen in time, like I said. They make it so you can't function. I mean, not only can you not function in flow or in peak performance, but you might not even be able to get out of bed because One of those parts got triggered and brought you back into that trauma scene. So it makes sense that we would try to move on from those feelings, especially if you just think of them as traumatized feelings. And our culture is a move-on culture. Our culture is rugged individualistic. So everybody around you says, just move on, just keep going, don't look back. And don't be a baby and just let it go. And that, all that combines to make most of us push away those hurt parts. And that's why we call them exiles. And as I said, when you get a lot of exiles, you feel a lot more delicate because so many things could trigger that. And the world seems a lot more dangerous because so many things could trigger it. And so then you have other parts who are forced out of their naturally valuable roles, who become either their job becomes to manage the outside world so that your exiles don't get triggered, so they can become very controlling of relationships or avoidant of all kinds of potential triggers, or they'll keep you in your head so you don't feel very much in your body. They might take care of everybody else so that nobody abandons you again. Often they're the critics who are criticizing you to try and get you to perform and to counter the worthlessness, to get a lot of accolades and achievements. There's a whole variety of common, what we call manager protectors. They're trying to manage both your external and your internal life to keep these exiles locked away so they don't get triggered. Despite their best efforts, your exiles will get triggered by different things, at which point it's a big emergency. And so another set of parts goes into instant action to try and get you away from those exiles, and will do it by getting you higher than the flames of emotion that are coming from the exiles. Or douse them with some substance or distract you until they burn themselves out and you calm down again. That's the kind of map to the territory. Managers and firefighters are the ones that react after the fact, after an exile has been triggered, to try and deal with the flames. And firefighters tend to be reactive and impulsive, and they don't care about the consequences to your body or to your relationships. They know they just got to get you away right now. So those two classes are both under the rubric of protectors— managers and firefighters— and they're trying to protect both, protect the exiles and also keep them contained so they don't overwhelm you again. So that's the map to the territory.

Hey there, just gonna interrupt If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is an, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that, and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind scan through those. It allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. So to give some simple examples of how that dynamic might play out and some of the performance implications, I mean, it seems to me potentially one simple example Maybe that someone has an exiled part that is incredibly vulnerable and scared of rejection, which creates— let's just take a random example— you know, an immense paralyzing fear of public speaking, which results in someone never being able to pursue a career or opportunity that involves any kind of public speaking. And a result of that is that your whole life and possibility space has kind of got choked in and narrowed down. And then maybe a further example of how the exile might play out is that that person in some situation feels rejection, so the exile gets triggered, and then the firefighter comes in. And maybe I'm not using firefighter in the right way here, but the protector at least comes in and, you know, a cycle of binge eating or substance abuse.

That's a firefighter. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. And then the manager comes in and attacks you for having done the firefighter activity. And that inner critic, that attack, goes right to the heart of the exile, who now feels even worse, which makes the firefighter's job even more bigger because it has to get you away from that shame too. And so people are caught up in that kind of vicious cycle all the time, especially addicts.

And what's interesting is that that cycle is arguably much more pronounced in the addict, but may still fully be at play in, you know, a so-called peak performer who is using work, for example, as a way to, to numb and exile and producing great results as a result of it. But it's not coming out of choice, It's coming out of compulsion.

Totally agree. And I'm so glad you brought that up, Brian, because many of the people I work with are, you know, big performers of various sorts, sometimes CEOs, but other kinds. And when we work with the part that got them into that place, got them there, it's sort of dominated them to stay away from parts that do feel worthless or terrified. And you might have heard the term spiritual bypass from spirituality. Well, in thinking about this podcast, I came up with achievement bypass or performance bypass because it's the same phenomenon. It's using performance and achievement to stay away from your exiles. And it can actually help you achieve a lot. Like, that's my story pretty much. I was one of those guys that was terrified of public speaking. I made it through college avoiding any class that I might have to give an oral presentation. And then I stumbled into this stuff and I realized, well, this achieving part decided it was going to try and— this was my avenue to make me feel valuable. It overrode that terrified part, and I just got kind of used to it. But the achieving part didn't give a shit about what people thought. It just wanted me to get out there. And they were both protecting this exile that felt worthless from experiences, mainly with my father, because he was really hard on me because I wasn't a good student. He was a big medical researcher who was famous in his field. And I'm the oldest of 6 boys, so I was supposed to be like him. And so that achievement part was going to prove him wrong. And if it took getting me humiliated, it was willing to do that. And it could override the other part. But anyway, that's my fear about some peak performers that they're doing an achievement bypass and they'll pay for it down the road because when you exile all these other parts that don't necessarily want that for your life, they'll come back to take you out at some point, either some kind of medical symptom or addiction or divorce or something. So I'm really glad you brought that up.

And I think even regret is one of the ways that that shows up. There's the classic image of the workaholic at age 60 or 70 who's sort of left alone with all this money and is kind of in an existential crisis asking, you know, what was the point of all this? Why did I do all of this? And that is, I'm assuming, an example of sort of achievement bypassing where the protector is driving them for decades and then the other surface.

You know, so many people after they retire get very, very depressed. And it's because they don't have that constant feeding of their ego to counter the worthlessness or the other parts that they've locked away. And those parts catch up with them. If they can't constantly feed their ego, then these parts will make them feel like shit again.

What's really fascinating as well, and I love the term achievement bypassing, What's really interesting is there's been recent research coming out on a new concept that has been coined called dark flow. And Steven actually referred to the dark side of flow in his 2014 book, The Rise of Superman. But dark flow has been referred to as a sort of a flow state achieved in an activity that is unproductive or unhealthy for one's overall life and mental wellbeing. So you see dark flow showing up, for example, in gambling, and you see it showing up also in video game addiction. And what's interesting is that the more flow experienced in a dark flow context like video game addiction, the more you see a correlation to depression, anxiety, and other negative mental health outcomes. And normally we think of flow as an accelerator of, you know, optimal well-being and meaning and life satisfaction. But when it's applied in the wrong way, it actually accelerates us in the exact opposite direction. So I think it's important for I like people to think of flow as value-neutral and as an accelerator, but if not used properly, an accelerator in the wrong direction with the same level of speed as in the right direction. So it's an interesting conceptualization around achievement bypassing, I think.

Yeah, I agree with that. And that brings up a piece of IFS that I haven't talked about yet, which is actually the centerpiece. For me is the biggest discovery, which is that as I was working with people with these parts— I'm a background of family therapist, so I was trying to have my clients have dialogues with these parts and get along with them after I realized they weren't what they seemed and they actually were valuable, and get to know why they were stuck in these roles. And I would have these inner dialogues, like maybe at a have you talk to your critic and ask it questions like, what are you afraid would happen if you didn't criticize Rian so much? And so on. And answering that question, you would learn about how it's trying to protect you, and then you would have some appreciation for it, and you could show it that you cared about it and get permission to go to what it protects. We could heal that, and then it could not have to be so hard on you. But as I was doing some of those kinds of dialogues Other parts would come in that hated the critic, for example, and would start to make you hate it and say bad things to it, which would make it become more extreme and destructive. And as a family therapist, that seemed familiar because I, as I work with two people in a family, often the third person will influence the conversation. So we learned to get those, those other family members out of the the line of conversation and protect that boundary. But maybe the same was happening in this inner world. So I began asking clients if they could ask these other parts that hated the critic or were afraid of it to just open space in there and see what happened. And to my amazement, people would immediately shift into a state in which they would have a great conversation with the critic because they would manifest suddenly out of the blue, whereas seconds earlier they hated it or they were afraid of it, they would suddenly be calm, they would have curiosity about it, and they would have even compassion for it and be confident, and they would have the courage to ask questions and go to places they were afraid to before, and they would also have a lot of creativity in how they interacted And they could see it more clearly. It wasn't so intimidating anymore, often shrank inside. So clarity. And then they would feel a kind of desire to connect to it. And so that became to call the 8 Cs. They oddly enough all begin with the letter C, which are qualities of what I'm going to call self. Because when I asked people when they were in that state and was like the same person popped out in other clients as I was getting these parts to open space. When I asked people, what's that? They would say, that's not a part, that's me, that's myself. So I came to call that state the Self with a capital S. And there is a kind of flow that also comes with that state. But there are, as you were talking about, other parts that can also access flow. Flow. So it isn't whenever you're in flow, it doesn't necessarily mean you're in self. So the big discovery then is that that state of what I'm calling self is in everybody. I'm convinced of that. It's our birthright and is just beneath the surface of these parts such that when they do open space, it comes out spontaneously. Can't be damaged and knows how to interact internally and externally in ways that are healing, and also is a good leader, has all these great leadership qualities that can be brought to corporations or to nonprofits or to, you know, international relations. So that is the big deal about IFS, and I think is related to flow, and it is related to it in the way you're talking.

So self then, under that conceptualization, is like the unifying consciousness that sits as the backdrop to all of the different disparate parts. Is that right?

That's right. And they can take over. So If, for example, you were abused as a kid and you couldn't protect yourself, instead some of these parts had to step up and protect you. They lose trust in self-leadership, and they think from that point on they have to run your life. They don't allow self to come in and run your life. So a lot of what we're trying to restore in these parts is trust in this other person that's in there that they tend to blend with. That's the word we use. They'll merge with self and take over. So if I get into a fight with my wife, even now after all this work, there's an angry part that can take over and make her look very different to me, kind of far less attractive, and will feed me all these lines it wants me to tell tell her. And it just totally changes my perspective in a way that now I'm familiar with, so I don't get panicked by it. You know, I just said, "Oh, there's that angry part again." But if you're fully blended with it, you think, "Oh, what am I doing with this woman? I better go find somebody else." And then when it relaxes, when it steps out, when I can convince it to unblend, to separate, then I'm back back in self and she's attractive again. And I, you know, I can have a healing conversation with her.

Before I ask you about the obvious question, which is how to magnify and increase that sort of sense of self or the degree to which that is present versus these disparate parts, I actually wanted to ask you about Dan Siegel's concept of integration. So I actually used to work with Dan Siegel, and I was lucky enough to have him as the officiant at my wedding, funnily enough. And he's been an amazing mentor and whatnot to me personally over the years. And I know you both are within the same worlds and doing similar work. And Dan has a concept called integration that you may be familiar with. And I just wanted to read out a quote that gives a breakdown of his definition of integration and then just sort of see how it relates to your conceptualization of self here. So Dan says in his book, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, which I think is a great, great read for people. He says, state integration involves linkage in at least 3 different dimensions of our lives. The first level of integration is between our different states, the interdimension. We must accept our multiplicity, the fact that we can show up quite differently in our athletic, intellectual, sexual, spiritual, or many other states. A heterogeneous collection of states is completely normal in us humans. The key to well-being is collaboration across states, not some rigidly homogeneous unity. The notion that we can have a single, totally consistent way of being is both idealistic and unhealthy. So I'm curious what you think of his breakdown of integration and then just the different elements of that quote.

Yeah, well, Dan's a good friend and we've done workshops together, at least one that think of. And as he watched my work, he would point out how it was achieving the levels of integration that he is talking about in that quote. And, you know, he can elaborate on other kinds of levels of integration, but that is one of the big goals. We don't necessarily call it integration, but I mentioned there are four goals in IFS, one of which is the restoring of Trust and self-leadership I mentioned, but another one is to restore harmony in this inner system, which would be equivalent to integration, so that the parts, rather than being polarized, start to get to know each other and work together and love each other. And when that happens, you feel integrated, you feel very unitary, because they don't stand out out in bold relief anymore, even though they don't disappear, which is the mistake that so many traditional Western psychotherapy has made. The goal being, if you see the parts as the product of trauma, then you pathologize them and you think healthy mind doesn't have any of this. And your goal is to make them sort of meld away into the unitary mind. If, as Dan said in his quote, quote, you think multiplicity is healthy, then your goal is harmony and integration, not the dissolving of these parts. So I love Dan's work.

And so how do we increase self and sort of heal these disparate parts that, you know, impede us in all the different ways that we touched on earlier?

You know, it is such a different paradigm to think of, like you were talking about, the fear of performance or the fear of speaking in public as a scared little kind of boy inside of you who needs your comfort and attention and love, rather than needs to be just pushed aside and shamed for being, you know, a wussy, something like that. So You know, a lot of— we're bringing it to education and schools, for example. So if kids get bullied, rather than shaming themselves for allowing it to happen and locking away the parts that got hurt, they go to the parts that got hurt and embrace them and love them. And that's done also by their peers and by their parents. That is in-the-moment healing. Then people aren't necessarily, the traumas they suffer don't become traumatizing. So that's a lot of what we're trying to bring, is that this is a different paradigm for understanding the mind and how to relate inside and to bring forth what I'm calling self on a not only individual scale, because self is contagious. So if I'm in those 8 C qualities, it'll resonate with yourself. It'll bring more of yourself to the surface. And that actually, to your listeners, will have an impact on their self. And, you know, as we're interacting, I'm noticing how much self I'm bringing. For example, I'm noticing how open my heart is right now to you, and my tone of voice, and I'm noticing, do I have a big agenda? Am I trying to impress him? All those things. So if I notice any of that, there's a part that I need to get to relax and step back a little bit and let me handle this. Let me stay. And when they do, I'll feel immediately much more in my body. My heart will be back open. My mind will be open. I'll be enjoying our conversation rather than sweating it. So that's some of what I want to bring, is that technology for actually noticing when you're in self and when you're not, and being able to very quickly get back into self. And I think that is very useful for leaders.

Yeah, the contagious piece is highly relevant to leaders, I think, and it's a good kind of contagious as well. Yeah, I think great leaders that I've experienced, to your point, have this contagious quality about them that sort of grounds others and makes them feel safe and in a high-trust, high-integrity environment through their presence alone, not even necessarily through stating words or telling people that it's safe, but just through their kind of way of being. And so I wanted to ask, you know, one of the first big skills or pieces here is noticing when and self and heightening awareness of parts. To increase that, is Vipassana or mindfulness or other forms of meditation, are they potentially tools to increase self in this way? And then, yeah, maybe you could give a breakdown of other practices or tools as well.

Well, let's start with mindfulness. So for me, mindfulness is a good first step because you're separating from your thoughts and emotions, which are your parts in my world, and you're noticing them rather than being blended with them. And that unblending allows you to very quickly access some qualities of self, which in the mindfulness world are acceptance and peace and so on. And that, as I say, is a great first step. But again, if you think of these as temporary or ephemeral thoughts and emotions, it makes sense to just observe them and not be in them. But if you think of them as suffering beings, then it's not compassionate to just passively watch them parade by because they're suffering. And if you actually have a lot of compassion, then you're going to want to go and try and help them. And that's where IFS comes in. That's the next step. Once you access, separate and access some self, then you can begin to let the suffering part know that you see it, you care about it, you want to help it, you want to get to know it, you want to learn about where it's stuck in the past, what happened to make it suffer. You want to witness all that from a place of compassion. And then you actually want to go into that scene, literally go into that scene in the inner world where the part's stuck and be with it in the way that that boy often, in our case, needed somebody at the time. And then you can literally take it out of that place to a safe place, at which point these parts are willing to unload the extreme beliefs and emotions. Emotions, what I call the burdens they carry, at which point they will immediately transform like a curse has been lifted into their naturally valuable state. And so a lot of the work is because we talked earlier about how parts can get in your way of performance. And many of these parts, like the one who's scared to public speak, but I work a lot with leaders. And they have, like, I work a lot with some of the top social activists, and they have these righteous parts that make them put off people all the time, or drive them too hard. Or they have parts that are afraid to take the next step, or afraid to be shamed by their followers, or so on and so on. And so we just have them focus on that part, find it in their body, body, start to get to know it, and then ultimately do a piece of healing like I just described. Because most of the time, these parts are stuck in these terrible things that happen to us.

I find your point about mindfulness very, very interesting. One of the things that I've enjoyed contrasting conceptually for myself over the years of reading is the two paths of what you could call Western psychotherapy or a developmental view and Eastern spirituality or more of a contemplative view. Another way I sometimes think about those is as healing versus accepting. Mindfulness, I think, is incredibly, incredibly powerful in increasing your ability to accept. But to your point, it's also good to actually heal these things. I think it actually might've been in your, conversation with Tim Ferriss where he used the really nice analogy for this of a pebble in your shoe. If you've got a pebble in your shoe, you want to take the pebble out of your shoe, which is the healing side, but you also want to be able to be okay with there being a pebble in your shoe because at some point there's going to be a pebble in your shoe. So it's sort of like these two skills which fall into those two lineages and paths partly, I think.

I totally agree. I think you said that you first saw me in Brussels, is that right?

In Belfast. Yeah, in Belfast.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Go somewhere else with that.

But yeah, yeah, I remember you did, um, on that note, when I first saw you there, you did, I believe it wasn't a live demonstration, but it, it was a rec— I think it was a recording of, of work that you had done with a client which just really stuck in my mind because it was, it was amazing, amazing to watch. And I believe it was a woman who had suffered from sexual assault. And maybe you could give a breakdown for folks of, you know, what happened in that instance, because I think it illustrates the nature of the healing work that comes with Parts Work very nicely as well.

Well, I'm not pulling up that exact demo, but I could talk generally about how I would do that.

Yeah, yeah. Or even just kind of what happened in a demo like that, or what can happen in those sorts of situations.

Yeah, so I'm just thinking of a client recently. So I was working with a woman who had a whole series of failed relationships and came in because whenever she would get close enough to a guy that the guy wanted more and wanted a commitment, and then she would bail. And she saw this as a pattern in her life. And so she knew she'd had a hard life as a kid but hadn't really put the two together. And so I had her focus on that feeling she got when she felt like this guy was getting too close. And there's a process by which I would just say, find it in your body. And she found it in her chest. And the next question, which is a sort of self-detection question, is how did— I asked her, how do you feel toward that part that panics when somebody really wants more from you, when a guy wants more from you? You? And she said, I hate it because it's screwing my life up. And I said, that makes sense that you would hate it, but let's just see if the parts who hate it would give us a little space to just get to know it a little bit, to get curious about it. And so she focused inside for a few minutes and said, okay, they did. They— and I said, how do you feel toward it now? She says, well, I'm kind of interested in why it does why it does this. And so that's the shift I'm talking about. When you're starting to get what we call a critical mass of self, people will shift from, I hate it, to just curious about why it does this, which then allows the part to start to tell you why it does it. So I would say, just ask it. Ask it why it does this all the time. And don't think of the answer. Wait and see what comes as you just, you know, are patient. And the part said, because you'll get hurt. And so that sort of surprised her, and she said, okay, tell me more about how I might get hurt. And it turned out to be a part that believed that all men were evil and dangerous and not to be trusted. And that was kind of shocking to her too, because she wasn't aware that she had that part. And then as she warmed up to it by letting it know, I get you're just trying to keep me safe, you're just trying to protect me. And the part felt appreciated for that rather than vilified. And softened with that. Then I had her ask if it was protecting other parts in particular, and she very quickly saw a little girl. And I had her ask the part if we could get permission from it to actually heal that little girl, and there was a lot of resistance to that. There was a lot of fear about going there because she'd be overwhelmed by the little girl's feelings. And this part had spent a lifetime keeping her away from that. So there were a lot of negotiations around that. But ultimately, it did give permission. Because when I get to that point, I'm what I call a hope merchant. I'm just saying, if you let us, we're not going to go to that girl to kind of grovel in her feelings. We're going to get her out of where she's stuck in the past. We're going to help her unload whatever pain she's carrying so that she now becomes a happy little girl, and you don't have to be so protective. And most protectors will bite on that. I'm a good salesman that way. And so we got permission. We went, had her go to the little girl. Little girl turned her back, didn't trust what I call the self. So we had to go through, because self didn't protect her from the sexual abuse she suffered. So we had to repair, and she was able to apologize to the little girl, and to the point where the little girl then did start to trust her. At which point I had her ask the girl to show where she was stuck in the past and what had happened happened there. And she saw these scenes of being abused by a neighbor, an adult, and had kind of blamed herself, which is very common. So then I had her go into the scene and be with that girl and actually push the neighbor away and protect her in the way she couldn't before and take the girl to a safe place. At that point, The girl is willing now to unload these feelings and beliefs. So we have a kind of ritualized process for doing that. And she does, she unloads the shame and the terror. And now she's a kind of happy little girl. And I bring in the protector to see it doesn't have to protect this little girl anymore. And it's willing to unburden some of its experiences. Extreme beliefs about men. So that would be—

that might even be what I showed, but I think that was actually the same thing you showed. So that's— that's— but, but I think it's a great and, um, powerful example of, of how the actual process itself works in a practical sense. And what I'd love to transition to is some of the underlying mechanism at play neurobiologically. There's a quote by the neuropsychologist from the mid-20th century, Donald Hebb, that goes, "Neurons that fire together wire together." And a riff on that quote that Dan Siegel often, often mentions is, "Where attention goes, neural firing flows, and neural connection grows." And obviously there's been a lot of research and work on neuroplasticity over the last few decades with Norman Deutsch's book, The Brain That Changed Itself, being one great resource for people to check out. So I'm curious, what is, what is happening, or what do we believe is happening neurobiologically during those kinds of processes?

You know, I'm not a neuroscientist, so I don't pretend to know absolutely, but, you know, I have sort of debates with Bessel van der Kolk all the time, and other other people like that about— because he can't fully believe in what I'm calling self. He says that people who have been severely abused are too damaged. They have to learn, relearn all these skills. And I'm saying, no, they just have to get these protectors to open space and self will be right there. And he'll hold up slides of a trauma survivor where the whole prefrontal cortex is offline. You just see kind of a blank there. He says, this is what we're dealing with. And I'll say, you know, if you get that protector to step back, you'll see that prefrontal cortex light up, I promise. And he said, well, prove it. And we've been trying to get money to do some of that research to prove it. But I do believe that if we can get the money together to do it, we would show that when people access self, their brain is really lit up because all these parts are there and feel welcome and they're very embodied and you have the full capacity that is your birthright. And that parts can black out certain places in your brain for their own purposes. Is, you know, dissociative parts can totally take you out and make that prefrontal cortex sort of go blank and so on. But, you know, I'm just riffing. I don't really know enough to—

well, just on that dissociation point, I think that's another good example also where trauma can very, very negatively impact performance. You know, when, when someone is, is traumatized, that experience of at least it feeling like your prefrontal cortex has gone offline and you're just sort of blurred out and dissociated and not able to form a coherent sentence, that can happen under stress and cause people to, again, do things like mess up a speech or kind of communicate to someone in a way that really heavily damages a relationship or not be able to articulate a point in the way that they know they would be able to if they didn't have that traumatic reaction. So I think it's a good example from that perspective. And then in my research for this interview as well, I was looking through the empirical research on IFS. And I know there's a number of studies that have been done on— there was one study in 2016 on depression among female college students and another interesting one on the impact of IFS, internal Family Systems, which is this process, on pain and depression and physical function, which I thought was really interesting. So I don't know if there's anything you'd like to mention around some of the empirical research that's been done on IFS or some of those findings.

Yeah. And we, we are just publishing one on PTSD that was very, very successful where after I think it was 16 sessions of IFS, only 1 of the 14 subjects— it was a pilot study— qualified for PTSD anymore. So it's comparable or even better than the psychedelic research with PTSD. So yeah, we've had really good results. I'm very grateful to the people because I'm not a researcher that way. We've collaborated with, and the study you're talking talking about with rheumatoid arthritis was, you know, an RCT, random controlled study, uh, at Brigham and Women's Hospital here in Boston. And it was quite remarkable, just by having people who were naive to therapy— these were, speaking of Irish, these were mainly Irish Catholic mothers who'd never been in therapy and had these massive caretaking parts. They took care of everybody and never took care of themselves. And by having them focus on their pain and getting curious about it, they would learn how much the parts giving them the pain hated the caretaking part. And we're gonna cripple them, or we're going to, you know, punish them for not listening and taking care of these other parts of them, which is very similar to what we were talking about earlier with the achievement bypass. So by simply working out a kind of timesharing arrangement, people got much, much better in their arthritis, to the point where some went into complete remission. And we subsequently— I've done it, done this kind of work a lot with various medical symptoms with similar results. So when your parts can't get through to you in any direct way, they'll use what they've got. And what they've got is your body. You know, medicine is designed to kill the messenger rather than listen to the message. And so what I'm trying to bring to medicine is if you listen to the message, a lot of times the symptom will get better without all the interventions.

Yeah, that field of psychosomatic conditions is really, really fascinating. So, Dick, I know it's your birthday. I want to be conscious of time, and I know you got a nice dinner coming up soon. So I just have 3 more questions for you. The first one is that I know one of your missions in the coming years is to bring IFS and Parts Work to other realms like performance and leadership. And I'm curious why you have that mission and what application you think is going to be most impactful within leadership and some of these.

Yeah.

Rounds?

Thanks for asking. This is my 72nd birthday. So as I get older, I just feel drawn more and more to take this as far as I can in terms of affecting the culture. And we've had opportunities now to bring it to your field of executive coaching and other kinds of of coaching. We're starting training programs on that with some of the big-name firms. But I'm also, as I say, working a lot with the top activists who run organizations you've heard of to try and lead their nonprofits from self-social activists. And I'm working in collaboration with people that do international kinds of consulting or consults to governments to try and bring more self-leadership to the leaders in those governments. And also, like I said, to medicine. We're trying to bring it all to meditation, to spirituality. So there's just, you know, at the same time, I'm trying to separate from the part of me that has made me a workaholic all this time. You know, as I'm trying to repair my relationships with my kids and, and I'm trying to get more balance in my life while simultaneously, because the model has become so popular now, I'm bombarded by these wonderful opportunities. So I'm still trying to sort all that out. And luckily there are a number of other people who are much more talented than me in these areas. That are picking it up and carrying the ball for me or for the model. So anyway, thanks for asking.

I'm excited to see how that unfolds and excited to see if we can help as well in any way at all. The second last question, Dick, was just with respect to your either daily or weekly or monthly practices and habits. What are the things that you personally find most useful as far as, again, habits or supports or resources to increase self?

Yeah, well, I alluded to this earlier, but throughout the day, it's become a kind of daily practice for many people, more than a psychotherapy. And so throughout the day, I'm just noticing these shifts that you guys play with, the shifts in states. And I'm Noticing, as I said earlier, how much I'm in self or not. And when I'm not, I'll ask the part to give me some space. And if I have the time, I'll go to it and I'll ask why it took over and what it needs from me. And these days, because I've been doing this a long time, it's a pretty brief conversation often. And if it needs more time, I'll say, Well, just wait till my session, because I trade sessions with somebody, and they trust me now. They know I'll remember and I'll bring it there. So the goal then being to lead most of my life from self, but with my parts nearby and advising me and helping in different ways and giving me a lot of the joy that's there if you connect with your young parts. And when I go to play tennis, I call on the jock part of me that's still around. I played college football. And so I know that flow state. That was definitely not in self when I was in that flow state. It had all the qualities of flow because time would slow down and, you know, everybody's going in slow motion. I was going fast and I could have hyperfocus and all that. But it was definitely from a part that— there's this jock part. So anyway, there are times where I'll call on parts to help me out, and other times where they're just hovering around giving me information. Some are very sensitive to relationships and can clue me in when they think I'm out of line or something like that. So we all get along pretty well. I don't really have critics anymore, which sometimes can be a problem. But yeah, and so it's like I said, it's a daily practice like that. There are times where I'll do just a regular meditation and I'll do a version of mindfulness, but then I'll also add a kind of check-in because that's one of the things I'm trying to bring to spirituality. There's been this kind of demonizing of the ego as, as a, you know, at best a pest and at worst the enemy. And the ego is just a bunch of these little manager parts trying to get you through life. And if you go to them before your meditation and just ask for some space in a respectful way and reassure them that you're not going to forget about them and you're not going to forget all the things they want you to remember remember, but just give me a little break. You don't have to fight with them for the whole meditation. So anyway, there's a lot of applications, as you can see. But yeah, that's— it just becomes a kind of life practice.

Yeah, no, the emphasis on the constant check-ins is nice. And it's very interesting. I still find it very interesting, even though I'm familiar with this work, the reference to they and we as parts of oneself. I imagine when you speak about this work to people who are less familiar, people get a little bit jarred by that language or thrown off by it?

Yeah, you know, even my kids now say, get out of here with that part shit, Daddy. You know, they OD on it, you know, they're into it, but they don't want it, you know, jammed down their throat.

Right, right. And then the final question, Dick, which is one we always ask at the end of Flow Research Collective Radio, is a question about a question we call our Research Genie question. So if you could click your fingers and instantly have all of the research be complete to answer any question that you have, what would that question be?

Hmm, boy. All the research will be complete to answer. Yeah, I mean, my strong belief and conviction now, and when I entered this work, I wasn't a spiritual person at all, but my strong belief now is that what I'm calling self is a drop of that ocean of the big self. That we all carry. So quantum physics talks about photons being both a particle and a wave. And for me, there is this wave of big self that's non-dual that you can enter through meditation or through psychedelics, where you feel the unity and you feel kind of blissful about that, total sense of connectedness. And then we come back from the meditation or the psychedelic thing into our bodies, and it's the same self, but it's in particle form with boundaries. And so the question I would have is, if there was a way to actually prove that that's the case, it would make such a difference to humanity to know that that's in us, and that's who should be running things.

That's a great one. Yeah, I've seen that being referred to in the psychedelic literature as oceanic boundlessness.

Yes, that's right.

I think it's a great, a great way to describe it. Well, thank you so much. This has been amazing, and I would love to ask you just to feel free to share where people can learn more and where maybe people should go if they are interested in doing this work directly themselves. As a way to close out?

Okay, yeah, we have a website, of course, which is ifs-institute.com, and there's a directory of IFS-trained therapists on it and a lot of other resources in the store. And we have an annual conference coming up that laypeople are very welcome to be a part of, coming up mid-October. I think, which is on virtual online. So, and also I recently wrote a book for the public called No Bad Parts through Sounds True, and that's a good place to start. A lot of people like that.

No Bad Parts. Okay, great. We'll link that as well below. And again, thank you so much. If what you've heard on Flow Research Collective Radio has been helpful, please consider doing us a solid and leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you are listening to this. Reviews help us connect to a wider audience so we can get these peak performance principles out to more people.