IFS Model: Trauma Healing and Self Strengthening | Richard Schwartz

[00:00:00]hey everyone welcome to being well I'm Forest Hanson if you're new to the podcast thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before welcome back I have been really looking forward to this episode which features just two of the most thoughtful people I've ever met when it comes to thinking about and working with our minds uh first I'm here as usual with Dr Rick Hansen so Dad how are you doing today I'm really touched Forest I mean you've literally never said that oh well there you go I totally beat it 100% authentically really honestly he kind of blew me away there I I know that our other that our guest Dr Richard schars genuinely is but thank you Forest you kind of really got me there well you are so welcome and as you said we're joined also by a very special guest today the creator of the internal family systems model of therapy Dr Richard Schwarz and if you're maybe not familiar with ifs we usually experience ourselves as one unified self one eye who is looking through our eyes but if you look a little closer you'll probably find that there are actually a lot of different characters or parts that are running around inside of you some help us stay focused and on track others help us relax or protect ourselves in response to stress then there might be some other softer more vulnerable parts that we've maybe pushed away over time and Dr Schwarz is the author of a number of books and over 50 60 articles something like that focused on ifs he is very prolific his newest book is no bad parts healing trauma and restoring whole with the internal family systems model and he can add to his list of accomplishments being one of the very very few people we've ever had on the podcast more than once so Dr Schwarz how are you doing today very honored to hear that and I was really glad to be present for that that moment between the two of you it's really lovely totally I I mean I felt the same way I thought it was so funny dad that that kind of like took you by surprise there it's very authentically how I feel no better Christmas present for this time of year we are recording at the end of 2023 we'll probably be posting this in early 2024 for so we're just a few days ahead of Christmas here to kind of bring people behind the curtain I would love to start with just a quick and general introduction to the ifs model for people who might not be familiar with it or maybe who didn't listen to our first conversation together okay well you get give us a good start on it but um basic idea is that like you said the mind isn't unitary it's not one it's actually multiple that we not so different from people carry that diagnosis used to be called multiple personality disorder what are called alters for those those people are what I call parts so full range personalities each with different talents and resources and uh if they're not hurt they're wonderful and they help us in our lives in various ways different ways but when we when they get her they take on what I call burdens which are extreme beliefs and emotions that come from the trauma or the attachment injury the bad parenting and those extreme beliefs and emotions then attach to them almost like a virus and then drive the way they operate thereafter and they also can get Frozen in time during the trauma and you know if you were to ask some of these parts how old they thought you are you get a single digit most of the time because they still are living back when when you were five and they think you're still that age and they have to protect you the way they did back then some of them like you said are very vulnerable that they're like the inner children you've heard of uh and before they get hurt they're delightful but they're also the most sensitive parts of us so they get hurt the most once they carry those burdens we want to get away from them because they have the power to overwhelm us and make us feel all that again and so we have a kind of natural impulse to lock them in their basements and everybody around us tells us to because this is a rugged individualist culture and you just move on from trauma you don't look back you don't wallow in the feelings you just move on and not realizing that you're not just moving on from the memories and maybe emotions you're actually locking away some of your most precious qualities simply because they got hurt so those we call Exiles and when you get a lot of Exiles other parts have to leave their uh naturally valuable States and become what we call protectors like you say and some of them protect by managing your life so that the Exiles don't get triggered again and they'll do that by trying to get everybody to like you or make you look good all the time or they're What's called the ego in the spirituality world and so in other systems that also be called the defenses probably and those don't always work and your Exiles get triggered and when that happens it's a big emergency because I say this raw motion comes blasting out from basement you got it locked in and can take you back into those scenes and make you feel everything you felt p in and so there's another set of Parts who will immediately go into action to deal with that emergency in some impulsive and often extreme way necessary whatever it takes and we call those firefighters because they're fighting these flames of raw emotion coming from the Exiles and they don't care about the collateral damage to your body or to your family or whatever they just know if they don't do this job that you're going to die and that's their belief often and so they might be the addictions or uh rage often or dissociation or there a lot common firefighter activities so that's the map to this territory that I created because when I entered it and C started telling me about these parts I didn't know what they were talking about but I got curious and because I came from a family therapy background I had systems thinking so I wasn't just trying to get to know one part I was much more interested in how they related to each other as a system the other big aspect of IFS uh and I you know very interested in Rick's take on this is that in addition to these parts and when they open space inside it releases what I call the self with a capital S I can't remember exactly what we did last time for us but if I was working with your critic and I asked you how you felt toward it and you said I hate it I would I might say makes sense but let's see if the one who it could give us a little space to get to know it and if that part was willing to separate a little bit and I ask you now how do you feel toward it you may well say some version of I'm kind of curious about why it calls me names all day and I actually feel sad that it has to do this so you would have just the act of getting that angry one to separate have gone from Rage toward it to compassion and curiosity and confidence relative to it and when I would ask clients now what part of you is that they'd say some version of that's not a part like these others that's myself so I came to call that the self with the capital S and now we had we just had our 40-year anniversary celebration 40 years later we can safely say that that self is in everybody can't be damaged it is just beneath the surface of these parts such that when they open space it pops out for me that's the big discovery of ifs that uh in contrast to a lot of psychological theories like attachment Theory which says that to have any of that you had to have had a certain kind of parenting at a critical stage in your childhood uh it it just is there doesn't doesn't need to be develops and that blew my mind because I was into attachment Theory the time and I did I couldn't ground it until I started looking or was told to start looking at various spiritual Traditions so I think that's what I had stumbled on to was a way to access that place that many spiritual Traditions know about but pretty quickly and in most people and to use it in the Psychotherapy uh Endeavor uh a little bit about capital S self I find it's helpful uh as someone who's really looked at conventional psychological and Western philosophical views of the self so-called through the lens of the Eastern tradition especially Buddhist which deconstructed and so I find it's helpful to be careful about languaging not to be pedantic but I've actually read sentences in which the word self is used in two different ways in the single sentence the one usage is to the person process broadly you know a particular mind body process occurring over time in the Stream of reality okay so you're a person force is a person I'm a person all persons disperse eventually then there's self or selfing this presumption of some kind of unitary entity inside that is uh enduring and independent and unitary uh and the question then becomes is there actually such a such a one although such a one is continually presumed so that's a bit of a context for how I would come into the languaging of this and then it does seem completely true that I would use words like under but somehow under the parts struggling with each other under that is is a knowing an inherent wakefulness that's benevolent and absolutely as you say indestructible so I I guess I'm trying to say I really affirm and get value from you know what you're saying here and then the question question is what are the causes and conditions of that underlying capital S self is it as you know I'm perfectly comfortable with this view is it simply a a wonderful process that's innate in our own biology or in some ways does its existence require some kind of edging into mysterious transpersonal matters how about we just kind of ask right there do you extend it into the trans personal or do you just kind of leave it inside the natural frame of the big bang universe when I encountered it in again it was contrary to what I expected particularly in people who had horrible horrible childhoods and there was no way you could find somebody that they got it from in other words so then I started to think well maybe it is some kind of biological evolutionary uh aspect of people but the more I did it the less that could hold up as the possibility I'm not sure ah exactly why you know I come from a highly scientific uh family very skeptical or my father was really anti-religion actually it was a really hard cell I really had to be convinced that that this could be something spiritual but one of the things my father always told me was follow the data even if it takes you way outside your Paradigm and so it took me way outside it has taken me way outside my Paradigm to the point where now I believe that it is spiritual it isn't just something that's unique to us that it's the place in us that's connected to everybody else and every other uh living being and that there is a a big S sort of the like kind of I love the the particle and wave idea from quantum physics a photon can be both so for me there's a wave state of self that you get to when you meditate in certain ways or psychedelics get you into that where you don't feel like you're have boundaries you feel very yeah non-u and connected with everything which I've experienced now through psychedelics and then I as I remember coming back from that state thinking oh now I coming into this body and I have all these boundaries and I feel separate from everybody uh but it's really the same self it's just a piece of it's like a drop of that ocean that's in each ofas so that's how I've come to think about it and yeah I'm curious how that it's experientially and people listening can actually start to do this even but especially they probably know it as an experience in other words what's it like to be you you I'm using in the broadest sense as person process what's the like what's it like to be you when things get really quiet in your mind when the parts start dropping out right they get calmer it's not that you're suppressing them in any way you're moving more into just classic open awareness right you know shikantaza just sitting you know mbsr type uh states of being right and there's clearly an ongoingness of being even as there's very very little activity of any parts and um that in other words what remains when the when the parts settle out it just use a metaphor uh if the mind is a little bit like a pond uh the the surface can have a lot of waves in it a fair amount of turbulence but as the waves gradually quiet what's the what's the nature of the surface of the pond that's sure yeah in the Moment by moment awareness whatever may also be true in its STS under the water line of Consciousness yeah and that sense of ongoing being right would you describe that as what you mean by this capital S self yeah uhuh maybe one of the distinctions because as I've talked to other iist people and Buddhist teachers is that that capital S self that sort of serene Pond isn't just a passive Observer but actually can become yeah very active leader both in the inner world and the outer world yeah and I don't know if that's a distinction with you or not but that kind of amazed me when I was working with clients and they would access that place yeah you just described they didn't want to just look at their thoughts and emotions they wanted to go to them and actually embrace them and start to help them yeah from that place so uh I don't know if that works for you or not yeah and I hope the force is not itching too much to you know to help us get I I I do I do want to I do want to jump in really quick here I do want I want you to answer uh Dick's question dad because I think it's a phenomenal question but also I just to point something out I think it's so funny that we've kind of started with the end here uh and and what I mean by that is that dick a lot of the time when I've heard you talk about ifs and and the the pieces of ifs therapy that I've done myself one of the guiding goals of it is to help people get more in touch with this underlying sense of call it what you will you call it capital S self the ifs model it's the idea of what's there when the parts kind of drop away like you guys were saying and and that's the goal is is to find that thing and so from the very beginning of this conversation yall in your inquiry found found the target um because it's a place of great interest and it's particularly a place of great interest I think for people who have done a lot of work in this area including a lot of personal work so they're kind of a little further down the road but um my experence as somebody who's walked into the therapy office is that there's a lot more of a preoccupation with defenses difficulties in a person's life that are getting in the way of that natural self-expression there's kind of a focus on that as opposed to more of a focus on the Target that they're searching for which might be that like pure expression of self if that makes sense so I think it's funny that we're going to kind of like spend time at the end then loop back to the beginning and kind of go from there I think part of what's useful is to recognize the frame of intent or aim in which we're exploring something part of what we're talking about is the capacity to uh rest in awareness of rather than be identified with and that which helps disidentification in general is certainly very very foregrounded in ifs and in many other places including in Buddhism and that is I think of General value for people who may never do an ifs therapy just learning how to step back from and witness and disidentify from whatever is going on in your mind including react especially reactive patterns so that's really helpful totally agree yeah and so this process of training in which you just take even a few minutes a day and let your mind get kind of quiet what's it like to be you when things settle down right and uh to get to know that place and to especially the somatic embodied feeling of it it and then you develop you move from the states of that to the trait of being able to rest in that calm abiding where you're present with and you might be actually really upset about stuff but there's a core in you that's not upset and I think maybe that's part of what we're saying that is what per say we're talking about the same thing there exactly exactly and then you're exactly right you zeroed in on sometimes it's really useful to open to the wisdom you know the the Insight the encouragement of that inherently benevolent and wakeful and wise core applied to himself like you're saying I think at other times it's really helpful to to be to to make no efforts at all in the mind and to Simply other than the minimal efforts necessary to remain awake present essentially partly as a training and then the last thing I'll just drop in to be be able to relate to Consciousness as a whole because the structure of suffering and also the structure of good many good things but certainly the structure of suffering always is Parts struggling with other parts and so being able to train in the capacity to rest as yourself as a whole including awareness awareness and as object's Consciousness as a whole is really useful and that's really interesting for people where you're rest you're you're abiding as you're being as a whole in the moment um that's really helpful okay I'll pause right there what do you think of all that well it depends on what you mean by as a whole yeah you are a whole system but you still have these parts so that's right they're all included in the whole of your Consciousness in the moment yeah so you're resting for my language would be mhm you're getting your parts to open a lot of space inside you're separating from them you can notice them but you're also asking them to really let you just embody really let you just be in this place you just describe so beautifully yeah and and to trust that to kind of uh as a practice know that it it helps to to be in the world from this place and that they don't have to always take over and run everything and so so I I'm very supportive of that kind of a practice and at other times like you said particularly when you're want to do some healing to access that place and then come to these parts with all those great qualities I mentioned three I think earlier but we have what we call the eight se's of self- leadership calm and curiosity and uh confidence and compassion but also creativity Clarity courage and connectedness so yeah those those are the qualities I mean you mentioned others and there are a bunch of others those are the ones I've um kind of attached to partly because they begin with the letter c and it's nice for literal purposes but also those for me seem to be the most valuable qualities for the healing process which is you know this is a Psychotherapy so that's what I'm focused on so so we get people in that place and then ask them how they feel toward these different parts that they're observing and then we have them from a place of compassion say that they care about them and and see how the parts react and then and so on and so self shifts in that context from just being a passive witness to becoming a very active healer basically of the inner system and it become it becomes a positive cycle the more the parts unburden which is basically equivalent to healing in this world but the easier becomes meditated the more you can be in that place of Stillness for longer and longer period is and the more you can lead your life from that place from my own experience of doing Parts work it's paradoxically true just like you say that the more you listen to Parts the quieter they get or something like that they feel included they kind of settle down and I imagine you know like King Arthur's Round Table this big committee space in which there are different parts and when you actually start listening to them they become less strident and more reasonable it's kind of counterintuitive do you point people to a whole that includes capital S self plus all the parts and how do you do that so there are four goals of ifs we didn't talk about this first one that much which is is the uh helping these parts leave their extreme roles and states and become who they're designed to be so the liberation of parts and transformation of them is the first goal the second goal we have talked about which is to help all of them come to trust to trust self as a leader and then the third goal which you're hinting at here is for the parts to begin to get to know each other and depolarize and start to work together and like each other and so to bring more Harmony to this inner system not such that they disappear but so you don't notice them because they're not standing out in the way they were you know I'm careful with the word holess because I I'm so allergic to the idea that there's just one mind but people feel much more whole they feel much more integrated as these outlying parts are brought back home and just to get a little further into the metaphysics of this it turns out that each of these parts have what I call Self too you spent some time working with did clients people with really extreme parts that didn't know or didn't like each other and dissociative identity disorder multiple personality disorder so-called yeah so I would have to spend a lot of time getting to know one part and I would become the you know we couldn't access their self so I had to do it and the part would start talking about its parts huh wow and and it would start we could get it to access itself and work with its part oh yeah and so you know from a ontological point of view it's you know Turtles all the way down apparently I don't know I haven't gone much further down but do you ever think about some kind of general purpose functionality in the human mind that of that can essentially generate selfhood and then that multiple that general purpose functionality then gets deployed or in involved with each of the parts and then the parts of the part yeah I mean it it just feels like fractals to me I mean it's wow at some level it just totally makes sense that third goal as is is in particular as they depolarize as self becomes the leader and and can go to each polarized part and then bring them together and help them talk it through just like we did in Family Therapy it's really I just took a lot of family therapy and brought it to the C system yeah as as that happens the parts you know people just feel more whole they feel more unitary even though the parts don't disappear thanks for letting me uh kind of interrogate all that oh sure I would love to ask here about applying some of the things that we've talked about for the past 20 30 minutes or so to a sort of practical situation or a practical problem that a person might be dealing with because one of the things you've said a couple of times here is the notion of extreme behaviors and we're trying to um one of the goals being to unburden these parts of what they think that they need to do in order to keep the system safe so I would love to paint kind of a pretty typical picture of a family of problems that a person might be dealing with and then you could kind of talk me through how you would think about those family of issues inside of more of an ifs framework does that kind of make sense sure so let's say that somebody walks into the room there there to do therapy with you who is more sensitive or emotionally vulnerable maybe they uh to use attachment language they're more anxiously attached they're a highly sensitive person in quotes use whatever phrase you like they tend to feel pretty overwhelmed emotionally they tend to struggle with more of their emotional regulation and they have a really tough time internalizing nurturance experiences to use my dad's language they have a tough time with taking in the good and this is causing a lot of issues in their relationships because they're prone to those kind of clinging complaints that tend to end up pushing people away there's a lot of love me love me uh you're not loving me quite the right way whatever it might be and their goal they're coming in because they're having these issues and they want to resolve them in some kind of a way and this might happen by becoming more internally resourced that's kind of a phrase that they've heard before and they're like yeah that sounds good to me or maybe they want to build up a a stronger sense of kind of authority inside of themselves or the ability to actually go out and do things in the world and the feeling like they can do that and so some kind of a positive way how would you think about a common set of issues like that through more of the ifs framework D I actually wrote a book about this but what it's called You're the One You're the one you've been waiting for such a person generally had some childhood experiences that left them feeling very alone maybe or desperate for to be redeemed and made them feel good about themselves or and uh and so they have these Exiles that perpetually feel anxious and uh needy and wanting some kind of validation or love from somebody that they didn't get from some caretaker Pro usually and when you have a bunch of those Exiles and you think you've got to get that from another person which most of us think most of us are searching for that person who can redeem us who can Comfort us and protect us protect these particular Parts when that's the case you've got all these protectives who are out there looking for a certain you know character who can who fits the who fits the profile of what you didn't get from your parent ah looks often looks or acts like that and and when you find that person and they are they do love you they do what you want it you desperately need it there's this kind of infatuation because finally you know I'm redeemed I'm not worthless but generally that person actually is like your parent and so they wind up hurting you in the same way and then you go into all these protector projects to you either get them to change or or or get more clingy that way or or you know they're not the right person I've got a that person's still out there I've made a mistake or so um so the I first answer to that is to help that person find those well first get permission from their protectors to go to these Exiles and for their s to become that that um attachment figure good good attachment figure uh this kind of good inner parent to these parts that so desperately think they have to get it from somebody else in the outside world and once they can trust self to get it and self becomes the primary attachment figure their partner can be the secondary attachment figure and so their partner feels out the relief from not having to constantly take care of their exons and reassure them and not be subject to their protectors when it when it doesn't do it quite right and so that's the the basic idea and and to not only have selfo hold these little ones and comfort them but also ask where they're stuck in the past and get them out of there and help them unload the distrib and emotions they got about what they need in a partner and so on well I'm absorbing this and I'm doing therapy on my own mind right now I'll spare you some of the intimate details with though I'm I'm in it well this I this kind of goes beyond Force question deck you know I'm getting to know you a little here and I I'm very struck by the feeling of your kindness and kindness as Central in ifs and the the doing of it so I first I just wanted to say that that's you know yeah I really mean it um and I I sense that in you as well I'm two for two on Christmas presents this episode that's the second one I really appreciate it um yeah so I'm just kind of feeling my way into it I mean ifs because of course it's dealing with complexity inner complexity the the account of I ifs is fairly complex and through all that complexity though is this kind of radical commitment to kindness in relationship to all that yeah totally thank you I guess I find myself wondering how that emerged in you in your in the Genesis or the role of that in the Genesis of ifs your own Journey as a therapist yeah so uh if You' known me maybe 20 years ago you wouldn't uh say that so relative to what I just described in terms of the the client you presented for us so I came out of my family with these Exiles that felt totally worthless and uh I was I don't know how much to get into this but I'm the oldest of six boys and born to this high-powered academic medicine father and I just didn't have a head for school I think I had ad actually undiagnosed and so I was terrible at school and drove him crazy because I was supposed to be a doctor three of my brothers are very prominent and so I was a big loser in his eyes and so I had that and then I for various reasons had a problem with my mother and and didn't um feel at all connected to her so I was pretty much on my own and felt pretty worthless and and that you know drove me to bring something to the world to prove that I was valuable all other parts of me do that and to to build this model I had to rely on the on that Driver part but also on part on parts that didn't give a what people thought because I got a lot of attack in the early days for this idea and so I had to rely on this part that could say okay I don't care what they think yeah and so that combination of this sort of maniacal driven part and the part that didn't care much about people doesn't make for a good leader of a community as as I presented the model and people started to be drawn to it I found myself in that role of being some kind of uh leader and I was lucky that I had some students who let me know that I was way out of line in a lot of ways and I had to work on myself M and so uh I took that seriously and I started trading sessions with people and and really did a lot a lot of healing of those Exiles that I mentioned so that that driven part could calm down and the protector that let me not care about people could relax back and not ironically I became a much better therapist because in the early days I was attracted to the idea that itself could do it because I didn't want to have to have people Clinging On to me you know I I I didn't like the psychoanalytic thing where you become the the self to the client's parts and and that was my parts that didn't want that and then but people could sense that they could sense that I wasn't fully openhearted with them and that would get in the way and so I got that feed back and started to work on that to the point where now you know when I'm with somebody they really do sense that the kindness you're talking about and the and when clients protectors sense that they relax back quite quickly even in serious kinds of sessions so yeah so I can access self is kind of contagious so if I can bring a lot of self that pulls for the client self as well and then when their self is there then we can start doing the work and obvious feature of ifs and of just how we're talking throughout this conversation is this extreme personification of aspects of Personality um aspects of our mind aspects of how we think and move through the world just the language of parts of viewing these different aspects of ourselves as different characters in this kind of internal play is totally personified and and it's it's Phantom to some extent right um like there's not an actual physical character that we're interacting with but we can really feel like we're doing that inside of ourselves when we're having direct access or conversation with a part or whatever else it is that's kind of going on in there and other approaches to therapy have come up with other kinds of language to describe the function of Parts like we'll talk in terms of defenses or uh take a purely behavioral stance with like inputs and outputs and different systems and I'm wondering what what you think is particularly valuable for people many of whom will never have an ifs session most of the people listening to this podcast right now will never go to therapy at all um of thinking of their internal system in this way and particularly in this like heavily character driven kind of personified way as opposed to just thinking in terms of like oh that's just my defensive strategy or something like that so there's a lot in what you just asked so yeah take your time yeah I'll take my time so for me it isn't a metaphor it's not uh you know something that I'm putting on to people or having having them think of it as a a framework that I came up with um for me these are real inner entities they they're they're they're not physical in the sense that you can't reach out and touch them physically but everything else about them is quite real you know because I came to it thinking oh because my clients started talking about these parts I well that's a nice metaphor for understanding your mind and your thoughts and emotions and let's just go with it and then at some point I couldn't deny the fact that it wasn't a metaphor that there was something actually quite real to this and what happens in this inner world has found implications on on what happens in the outer world and so once I got to that point and started taking it very very seriously as something real everything got a lot better now in terms of the other question of what's the value in thinking about it that way yeah what do you think really serves people in doing that aside from the fact that it's quite real yeah um the value is if you think of these as simply extreme beliefs or emotions or behaviors or I forget what else you call them defenses or defenses yeah just the typical like psychoanalytic language yeah yeah if that's what you think they are it doesn't make sense to try and talk to them or get to know them or try to yeah have compassion for them they're just the structure of the mind that sort of mechanical and you need to find a way to get them out of your way yeah and too often that involves ignoring them or exiling them or or fighting with them uh and that's the opposite of what we're trying to do totally and and for me it's I just what you said there about the compassionate aspect of it and the collaborative aspect of it like for me in terms of my own process of I don't know the the inner work that I've done over the last 5 to 10 years that those Notions have been totally essential for me um in anything that I've done the notion of working with aspects of myself and attempting to move them to a position in the system uh with their consent that is more kind of appropriate for that tendency as opposed to kind of going into conflict with it yeah um because a lot of the time we we construct a real narrative around defensive Behavior where defenses get a really bad Wap in like pop psychology yeah you know your your defenses are problematic your job is to get rid of your defenses stop being so defensive whatever language is that people use but the reality is that those behaviors are there for reasons that's right they exist to serve a purpose and it's a very very functional purpose most of the time in most people when we're not dealing with like extreme pathology here even extreme pathology even extreme pathology you go yeah and the thing I would add is that it's not just pop psychology it's also spirituality too often and from my point of view the ego is seen as a big obstacle and something that you have to get away from and ignore it's and that's just a collection of little managers trying to keep you safe how do you think about this Dad yeah you're describing dick you're you're asserting um an extraordinary pervasive process of personification in the human mind right in which various parts are personified and they sometimes even in a fractal way say have parts that have Parts Etc let's let's take that as true wow yeah do gorillas do that do dogs do that do lizards do that do crabs do that and and and Etc we don't know for sure and wow how would it be that this profound general purpose module I described it earlier of personification this functionality the right uh would would evolve would emerge in the human mind in terms of the Buddhist project if I could say that broadly one major element of it is to recognize the emptiness of all phenomena as a means to the end of disengagement Detachment non- clinging uh with which one does toward the end of the ultimate forms of inner peace okay so here we have on the one hand this tendency toward personification which tends to reify essentialize it's probably the best word you know into entities inside on the other hand we have the value of being able to regard any and all phenomena inner and outer right thoughts and things as existing emptily made of parts that are connected and changing right and so how how do we put those two things together including wow how how could it be what that what you're saying is true in terms of the personification the proliferation of personification inside us down to a very granular level wow yeah again I'll cbble a little with language personification sounds like it's something you're doing no I don't mean it like that just this yeah okay yeah bottomup process how could it be that this is the nature of the mind and yeah that we come into the world with these Hearts uh in terms of why it's like that you know all I can say is that that one mind can't do and think and act in all the ways we have to to survive so it does make sense that we would have we have a bunch of them working on different aspects of things like a company you know so like Whitman said well Whitman I am a I am multitudes right you got to be multitud multitudes yeah you gotta be what is it to play you know the one you got to be somebody before you can become nobody and that that emptiness you talk about um there's a guy whose name I can't pull up right now as a Buddhist scholar and wrote Because he also got a diabet and he wrote a piece about how what the Buddhists call no self is really what I'm calling self huh it's it's the emptiness that exists when Parts open space and it's just pure space yeah inside but people said that was myself so that's why I called itself the capital S yeah but it's really just getting your ego to open lot of space and that's what's there so so they all exist in this emptiness all that fits pretty well yeah with Buddhism the only issues I have with Buddhism there are those some Buddhist practices that don't like certain parts and like the ego I was talking about you have these good qualities and you have these bad qualities and you need to replace the good with bad with the good let's go there for a second because there there is a certain um well there there there is Def Ely a progression in practice in which we ultimate we abandon we truly extinguish certain qualities and it's not that they're bad bad it's that pragmatically they create suffering and harm so but there is that notion of the gr you know nibana means Nirvana means extinguishing putting out right no more fuel so ultimately we defuel there's this notion of withdrawing fuel nutrients from different aspects of ourselves and yeah that would be quite inconsistent I think with your approach totally you're you're not trying to defuel the inner critic let's say you're trying to be friendly with you're you're being kind toward it right we be friend I just did a training at a treatment center called high watch we're training the whole staff in ifs and they're yeah 12 steppers you know it was total 12 step and and so they had an attitude about the addictive part and they oh yeah they would try to get people to ignore it or or you know override it and so on and we I'm doing these demos where we're going to the adictive part and we're loving it up and we're thanking it for its service and and how it helped save their lives and learning about what it's protecting and negotiating permission to go to what it protects to get it out of this role so it can trans form and be who it's designed to be so for so many things like that this is really you know it's in some ways um counterintuitive oh yeah have you ever had someone from the Buddhist World say hey let's apply this ifs approach to the so-called hindrances or the poisons or afflictions like greed and that's what I'm talking about exactly have you ever done that have you ever played that out uh yes there's a I'm doing a one day workshop with a woman named uh llama Willa Baker do you know that yeah not personally but I know of her yeah so she's now into ifs and she's now renouncing all that uh language about emotions and thoughts and yeah and so we're gonna talk about all that and she's now doing a very different practice with her followers I think it's really great like just to name them for people like greed like say the greed parts or the greed tribe because Parts have parts right like right okay how would we approach the greed tribe or the hatred tribe yeah totally doubt the doubt tribe pernicious doubt okay great uh laziness sloth torper that one check right love be posy Rick because just calling them that yeah takes away their Humanity for you cool yeah the greed part is a part that got stuck in the role of trying to acquire a lot of things to protect you yeah but it isn't pure greediness it's really just a part stuck in a bad role yeah and that's going back to our earlier discussion of why is this a valuable way to think about it because if you think of it as just greed or you think of just Envy or all the things you just mentioned then it makes sense to see them as poisons you need to get away from but if you see them as valuable inner beings who got stuck in roles they hate and would like to get out if they could then you're going to relate to entirely differently this is incredibly good it's great thank you I want to kind of take some of the inquiry that you guys are doing here about the non-pathologizing nature of ifs to put that phrase on it one step further because my understanding is that ifs is like pretty radical in terms of that non-pathologizing stance exactly like you guys have been talking about like these are all just functional if we interact with them in a more positive and supportive way and when I say them I mean these structures or Tendencies or characters or tribes inside of the Mindy there too for us because and shift that language a little bit many of them are not functional while they're in these roles they actually are causing lots of damage yes but that isn't who they are and they they think they need to do this they have good intentions but they become very functional when they're released from these roles totally I wonder how you think about something like clinical level depression where somebody looks around their life and they say my circumstances are not depressing in kind of objectively like I've got a pretty functional life I've got a pretty normal support system it's not not perfect because life isn't perfect but there's not something that is going on around me that would immediately lead to my clinical depression or something like that I've done a fair amount of work inside of the mind it feels like this is just kind of how I'm wired um this person then goes and takes an anti-depressant feels good bit better not perfect but like good enough better inside of how you think about something like that dick is this more of like oh well that's kind of like a biological issue and we just sorted out their no chemistry they were good to go or do you think that there's kind of an ifs answer to that person's situation or is it just Case by case for many conditions you know we we do it sometimes with schizophrenics and people like that or even with alcoholics and so on I think that people have genetic predispositions for certain kinds of conditions and depression may be one of those as well now whether or not that manifests can have a lot to do with parts so I have genetic predispositions for asthma and for migraine headaches and if I'm in a Dusty room and I'm stirring up a lot of dust I have an asthma attack it's got nothing to do with my parts but h if for some reason a part's scared and wants to take me out it might give me a migraine headache push that migraine button and so with a lot of medical symptoms we start by having quite focus on whatever it is we did an outcome study with rheumatoid arthritis and that was very successful because we would have people focus on the pain get curious about it ask what it wanted them to know and we would hear from the parts that were sabotaging them and hated the caretaking part that dominated their life and didn't let them take care of themselves and as we worked out a time sharing thing with those sets of Parts the pain some people got totally into remission but most people got a whole lot better so that's the perspective is that there is some kind of a button that these parts can use to get your attention or to scrp your life if they want to but if you find why they're doing it and you shift that and they don't have to keep pushing the Buton and just to be crystal clear so dick you're saying that in that study it was not just that people's tolerance for stable levels of pain increased through mindfulness self-acceptance and so forth but the actual pain of the rheumatoid arthritis decreased implying that it had to some extent at least a psychogenic as it were origin right that was a good study with a control group we published it in the Journal of Rheumatology yeah that's an enormous result yeah there many implications how do you deal with people who then in a weird way get caught up in blaming themselves so we do a lot of work with those kinds of critics and I would have you focus on it finding your body how do you feel toward I would work to get you curious about it yeah because most people hate those parts and once you were I would have you ask yet what's it afraid would happen if it didn't call you names all day or blame you or shame you all day and there are three common answers to that that one is I have to do this to get you to motivate you to yeah try harder to work harder to that that was what that was mine thanks Dad second it wasn't my dad's voice the second one often it's if I let you feel good about yourself you're going to take risks and you're going to get hurt so I've got to keep you down yeah the fear keeps you safe yeah yeah so if I can make you feel like then you're not going to get hurt but there's always some kind of positive uh intention almost always sometimes they're just pissed at you for various reasons like the arthritis patient related to this I I had a reflection I was talking with Forest about this and getting ready to prepared to some extent to talk with you which I'm extremely enjoying the notion if you may know it uh in the Buddhist psychology of the first start in the second art of life um no it's oh this might be helpful I don't know oh this is this is going to be great actually yeah yeah so let's say a person is experiencing physical pain or maybe they've had a loss and they're experiencing sorrow okay or maybe they recognized they've done something that for them genuinely it feels like it's appropriate to have remorse about all right that's the so-called first start of life kind of I think of it as primary uh quote unquote negative experiencing painful you know okay there it is that itself is not a problem the problem starts when we add the second darts that we throw ourselves of our defense ensive Maneuvers our exiling our firefighting so so much of the um that which is uh addressed through ifs strikes me more in that second art category it doesn't mean that let's say the sadness at losing your cat will go away it's just that it's a lot easier to to Bear it and be with it in the context of capital S self as a whole totally agree with that and if you go to that grieving part and embrace it it'll still feel sad and feel the loss yeah but it will feel the comfort of not being alone with all that or not being like you're saying not being as shamed for having it it's beautiful it's great thank you yeah this is great for me too that's good could I could I ask you about how because we're getting toward the end here and I I could I'm just just trying to imagine somebody who's listened to this conversation to this point which has been wide raging we've explored a lot of stuff here in a very cool way but they might also be going well wait wait wait wait wait you said a lot of parts inside of the self I got all the different things kind of going on and a lot of the the things that are frustrating me about the way my life is or the way that my behavior structure works with other people or how I show up in relationships or whatever else are kind of tied to the behavior of these various entities inside that I really authentically don't have like a great feel for right now I I don't I don't know who the characters are involved in the play I'm not really sure where they come from I don't really understand what their function is but you're telling me I got them in me somewhere how do you typically go through a process when somebody's beginning this kind of work of of developing that self insight into the structure of what's going on it's actually for most people a lot simpler than you might think somebody comes in and they describe a problem they're totally naive D ofs and talking about their problem and as they do I'm saying oh so one part of you says this to you this happens is that right yeah yeah that's right I want another part makes you do this is that right yeah that's right oh because they're just telling me their story and I'm just translating it into that language and most people already use that language so which is why I use the word part doesn't didn't serve me that well in you know Academia but it's you know if I said one of your subpersonalities does this and one of your ego states does that they say what are you talking about so people say yeah and we've got in that opening five minutes maybe three four parts on board that they've described they said okay and then I would say do you want to change change or help any of them change or do you want to get to know them in a different way or are you interested in a lot of people are okay with that much but when I tell them to go and focus on it and start talking to it like it's to then there sometimes there's this big push back like what do you think I'm syil or I don't your voices what do you mean but if you can get past that and also some people will say I don't hear anything I don't see anything which means generally that in their head and there's a thinking part that's keeping them from feeling much in their body and so we have to start with that part usually and I don't know if I'm getting to your question exactly Forest but you you are you are and you're talking about working with people I'm wondering a little bit from the stance on their own yeah of like people on their own how can they investigate themselves or go through this process with themselves yeah a lot of it is just getting curious just taking uh an emotion or a sensation inside of yourself and you know starting with the kind of mindfulness Place separate from it and get into that mindful State and then just start following your curiosity the big difference is in ifs you expect a response so if you start asking what do you want me to know to your critic or to your anger or you're going to get an answer if you're just in a purely curious place if the part thinks you're you've got an attitude toward it it's not going to talk to you that's right that's really right that was one of the big lessons for me doing Parts work that if if the kind of the core functionality had an agenda Visa V A Part not right it is um not it's neutrality or kindness you know yeah that's right necessary I I was reflecting also on qualities you have um dick it's a c I don't know if it's in your SE list courage yes it is one of the seaw oh good I'm glad I they was think about the professional courage you had to have and also differentiating from your dad and all courage but just the inner courage it takes I think for us for for a civilian a regular person not you know deep in the weeds and receiving ifs therapy the courage to to shift perspective and that's right to look in effect look at yourself through other eyes inside yourself right and we haven't really named this particular I'll just say for myself that something that has helped me to access these different parts um is to tune into the somatic sense of each of them the Nuance the texture like what does it feel like I'll I'll do it now people can see it in the camera to to the the scared soft little child you know I'm already doing it you know like like that and you know or maybe another part that's like a like a righteous outraged critic I'm leaning forward Forest knows this part of me I've tried to regulate it over the years like what you know you just feel it in your body and so tuning into the body of it if and even you can help yourself if you're willing on your own to kind of move slightly into the posture of it you know it can kind of help you get in touch also with that part of yourself totally agree and and before we started I was saying that I have this condition of a Fantasia where in contrast to most people who see images I don't see anything when I work inside so I have to rely on kind of thing you just said which is how do they manifest the sematic or physical way and then then I can dialogue with them and I'll hear the voice isn't exactly right but I'll hear thoughts coming from them and I'll be able to dialogue with them yeah a view or a perspective yeah a line yeah yeah and I think that did loop back to something I asked a while ago uh here this is some of the value of the model itself just to like a normal person who might never walk into a therapeutic space the cuz what you're saying dick which is actually really profound if you if you think about it is that there is something about this whole thing that is kind of intuitive to people if they open up to the possibility of it yeah where if they're able to shift into a stance where hey what if what if there was this whole cosmology inside of me what if there were these different parts with these different motivations that influenced my behavior in different ways once they're able to do that if they start asking the questions start going hey where where is that coming from hey what's going on with that a lot of the time they'll kind of get an answer you have to be willing to ask the questions yeah and you have to be willing to kind of like give over to the model in some kind of a way and look there there are different strokes for different folks people are going to some people are going to be vastly benefited by this some people they're going to be like hey for whatever reason maybe this model isn't for me but if you're willing to give it a shot at least in my experience um I think you're totally right on that for a lot of people the part finding process is actually pretty intuitive at least at a surface level in terms of like who the big big big players in the room are for some of the softer and more vulnerable Parts it can take a while maybe to get down to the bottom of that rabbit hole but in terms of the big loud voices like people generally know yeah they do know [Music] and you were asking about how much can people do on their own and yeah to make it safe will generally say it's really um useful to get to know your primary protectors but before going to and trying to heal these Exile Parts typically that's a lot more delicate and you may need to at least have a a friend with you or ideally maybe a therapist because uh it that can be a little challenging by yourself I there are people that do the whole thing by themselves and swear by it but to encourage people to do that there is a percentage of people that are going to have some trouble with it and have back backlash and stuff you a familiar model for you transactional analysis in child critical parent nurturing parent and then updated right uh the if you will victim and then perpetrator rescuer or the way I like to think of it is sort of the you know the baguer self for the that's kind of put upon and then the inner nurturer inner attackers and then think of thinking of those inner nurturers as a kind of committee a caring committee and inner attackers in much the same way and then in that frame uh just naming it itself is really quite useful because where often I think the action is for people is not so much around the attackers quote unquote I always knew he was an but it's more the failed protectors in their personal history and the lack in themselves these days just factually no blame uh of strong inner protectors inner nurturers so starting by building up the inner nurturers first before trying to you know come to terms more with the inner attackers let alone the exiled Parts I find often is this progression that people can manage what do you think of that yeah I like that uh although inner nurturer uh ideally what I'm calling self will be the biggest gener nurturer yeah because some of these parts these caretaking parts or these what we call self-like parts are over promoted and they they carry too much responsibility a you and and everybody else yeah I find functionally for a lot of people they're they're really weak like soothing or Compassion or or encouragement or guidance distinct from criticism that tend to be fairly developed what do you think of that well um they're overridden by these these uh very what you call perpet attackers it's kind of like you know Godzilla and Bambi you know Bambi get bigger totally well you can try to beef up Bambi yeah like typically I'll go the other way and I'll try to get the attacking Parts yeah to drop their weapons and transform first I wonder if that's risky for a person to do on their own that isn't so risky it's it's getting to the parts that these attackers are trying to protect that can be risky aha but that's but um you know as long as this guy doesn't want you to feel good yeah and you try to get your nurturers going he's going to get even stronger so that's the systems aspect of it interesting well then building on this and as we finish I want to connect uh the fundamental enabling condition for a person to do this work effectively to the fundamental enabling condition necessary in a society as a whole for it to work with its parts and I was just reflecting that what enables what you're doing what we're talking about to work it seems to me is accessing the capital S self which is provided sometimes through the auxiliary self as it were of the therapist who right just this inquiry this curiosity okay the courage to to stay to hold the frame okay great right you need that and then I was going out to America these days and the the the we have these parts so I start thinking about how can we manage these parts but to be able to manage the parts of our society r at large we need that fundamental capacity to connect with capital S self at the level of country as a whole which for me has to do with fundamental institutions and cultures of Civil Society respect for the rule of law at bottom willingness to Peaceful transfer of power things like that and when that itself is undermined much as it is in a person it's hard to it's hard to adjust the ecosystem of the Mind the Ecology of Mind bats in's term in a helpful way it's really hard to do that in a society if a society doesn't have access to its version of capital S self it strikes me okay what do you think about all that totally agree I mean that when I when I'm thinking about larger systems it's checking is there do we have access to enough self and yeah in the US in the US that's it's really decreased enormously and the other thing you see and this is true of people too is after um 911 you know after certain kinds of traumatic events there's big increase in anxiety generally and now with climate change and AI dangers and yeah yeah and also um with the disparity in income and so many people living paycheck to paycheck and there's huge amounts of Exiles in our culture in our country and those people are looking for a redeemer a savior they're looking for fire a super firefighter would you say super firefighter strong man on a horse that's the classic exactly and so that's the firefighter that these Exiles are looking to yeah so it's you know it can be applied to a lot of different things are you hopeful looking out of humanity maybe that's our final question I'm 74 and I'm still working really hard and the reason is similar to what you were saying that I in working with clients um who when we start out it looks totally hopeless because they're so dominated by these protectors and there's no self to be found but as soon as we get what we might call the critical mass himself as soon as they can access that things change really quickly so since I've seen that in many clients I have a kind of hope that that's possible in much much bigger systems we're talking with someone obviously you're going to be in the history books you know uh I think about the folks I read about when I was in you know grad school or taking classes people are going to be reading about you for a long time thank you we have this Mutual admiration thing going it's really great that's good I like it this is I I I feel like we could just kind of keep going here too I Tru Dr Schwarz like thanks so much for doing this today this has been really wonderful this has been a very unique conversation I've loved it honestly I really have so it's really been great and it's great to see your relationship I'm very very very fortunate I'm glad you were able to keep that critic off of forest back yeah yeah I almost we all made it through we found found our way through occasionally stormy se but we found our way and that's what really mattered um this has been really great again thanks so much dick you're very welcome guys I really love today's conversation and one of my favorite Parts about it was just listening to Dr Schwarz and Rick go back and forth these are two people who have thought about the mind really really deeply and they come at it from kind of different angles and seeing them interact and go back and forth while also having clearly just like so much respect and appreciation for one another was really lovely uh and was really fun to be a part of and that started pretty much right off the bat because we began the conversation with kind of the end in mind ifs has this notion of a self with a capital S and it's kind of what people are going for it's our Target it's what happens when all of the different parts inside of us quiet down and are in the right roles this other thing sort of emerges and comes forward but in the Buddhist tradition as you might know not self is really more the target to massively oversimplify here and so Rick and Dr Schwarz just went back and forth about what we mean when we talk about a self what's the nature of the self how does the capital S self and ifs uh different to or the same with how we think about the self in more Buddhist theory and practice and what are the kind of commonalities and differences here in these approaches even before then I asked for a general framework of IFS from Dr Schwarz and so I'm going to give that again here toward the end uh if you were listening to this conversation and you were going wait like Defenders and firefighters and Exiles what are we talking about here I'll do my best to break it down for you uh at the end of the podcast so the whole notion of ifs the whole structural framework of it is that we have what's called multiplicity of Mind there are these different parts different characters different subpersonalities call them what you will that are running around inside of us and each of these parts have their own agendas their own role inside of our Collective system they all think that they're doing good and this is really really critical it's actually the title of Dr schwarz's book no bad parts parts might have dysfunctional behaviors or be in problematic roles in our overall system but the part itself is not evil it's not ill in its intent it's trying to do what it thinks is the right thing to do and this is one of the great insights of ifs and it's one of the the lessons that we could take into our own life it's one of the parts of it that has been incredibly useful for me personally which is to view my behaviors through a less pathological lens and to be more compassionate and understanding toward the behavior of my various parts parts are typically grouped into three large categories there are managers firefighters and Exiles managers are the parts of us that kind of keep the trains running on time they tend to be uh more disciplined more task focused and uh they tend to live a bit more cognitively for most people firefighters are the parts that jump in when we are beginning to experience the painful feelings that are often associated with our Exile Parts uh these are the classically quote unquote problematic behaviors that a lot of people have are typically tied to their firefighters it's possible that Dr Schwarz would push back there on my usage of the word problematic um but if you think about addictive behaviors or more consumptive behaviors these are ones that are associated with firefighters the body is experiencing pain in some kind of a way and so it goes to a soothing Behavior like consuming excessive drugs or alcohol or other substances and that's just one example there are many many different kinds of firefighters and many many many different kinds of defensive behaviors that a person could have and that gets to one of the underlying themes of the whole conversation defenses exist for reasons there are reasons why we do the things that we do and most of the time these reasons are extremely understandable the behavior might be dysfunctional in terms of the ends that we're searching for out in the world but it's coming from a pretty Justified place in terms of the experience of the part that's motivating that behavior and this can again help us view ourselves more inclusively the problems for people emerge when they try to push their parts away when they don't include them in the overall system when they try to push them into problematic roles when we don't think of them as being aspects of ourselves that are at least in some way authentic to us and this gets to the third family of parts that people have which are Exiles these are the parts that are carrying the pain of the system these are the parts that really really felt that painful thing that happened to you when you were younger for example Dr Schwarz talked about a lack of nurturance in his own life and some of the difficult experiences that he had with his parents when he was growing up and this part of him that felt hurt or pushed aside or not cared for not valued for who he was from there I asked Dr Schwarz to go through a pretty specific case study of a kind of person who might walk into therapy and the kind of work that he would do with that person and this is somebody who had more classic anxious attachment issues maybe they're more of a highly sensitive person they get overwhelmed emotionally there's this quality of a kind of clinging complaint directed at other people and that was starting to create a lot of problems in that person's life and in their relationships and I asked Dr Schwarz for how he would start working with that person from there the conversation expanded out again where we talked about uh why personify Parts at all like what's the value of doing that and Dr Schwarz I think you know with a with a lot of patients said well part of the value is that I just think this is how things actually are ontologically but in addition to that hey here's why it's psychologically useful to think in this kind of way and again it all comes back to unifying it comes back to compassion consideration unifying the system as a whole getting on the same side as these parts being in a word non-pathologizing about how we treat our internal system and then Rec conductor Schwarz closed the conversation by talking about the more systemic ways that we can think about ifs how we can apply ifs systems thinking to larger systems uh whether it's our families or a company a group of friends hey even a country or the global Community altogether how are we interacting with each other in ways that are creating different Exiles and pushing groups of people away when health is found if we can in integrating the whole system I hope you enjoyed today's conversation I had a wonderful time recording it today and if you've been listening to the podcast for a while and would like to support us you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com bewell podcast and if you would like to check out more from me you can find me on substack and I've included a link to that in the description of today's podcast episode hey and if you'd like to support the podcast even more simply than that the best way you can is by telling other people about it that always really helps us out so until next time thanks for listening and I'll talk to you [Music] soon [Music]