The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Seeking … Finding … Healing …: The Complete Guide to Self-Directed Inner Family Healing by Becky Lu Jackson

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

Seeking … Finding … Healing …: The Complete Guide to Self-Directed Inner Family Healing by Becky Lu Jackson Innerfamilyhealing.com https://www.amazon.ca/stores/Becky-Lu-Jackson/author/B07PN1PD4J If you experience a yearning to make peace with your history and a desire to create a compassionate and loving relationship with all of your inner ages, this book will gently lead you along a path of inner healing with rewards beyond imagination or expectations!Using various writing exercises, you will tap into the wisdom, strengths and clarity you need to become the loving parental support and guide all your inner selves have yearned for and deserve.Following word-for-word visualizations, you are introduced to an inner spiritual team that includes the support of future selves. Then, by utilizing Becky’s style of meditation, this self-directed, creative path to healing honors your inner timing and gently leads you to healing, where you will experience peace, self-love and freedom as a strong inner family.For further inspiration and encouragement, throughout the book the author shares her path of inner family healing spanning over forty years through personal visualization and stories of her ongoing healing. In addition, you’ll be provided with various healing stories of others who the author has guided along this path. About the author Over 40 years ago Becky L. Jackson found a path to freedom by addressing her own eating and weight problem as an eating addiction and through her books, she outlines her personal path to recovery in a concept-by-concept, step-by-step, chapter-by-chapter approach to help others find and enjoy their own recovery road.

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Today, our author is Becky L. Jackson. She's the author of the book called Seeking, Finding, and Healing, the Complete Guide to Self-Directed Inner Family Healing. And she began her recovery in 1974, arresting and eating addiction and chemical dependencies using a 12-step path. She helped design a ground-breaking social model recovery home. for women with eating addictions. She opened an educational center where I worked with individuals and groups.

I designed, she designed and led workshops and presented educational lectures at colleges, high schools, as well as the Miramar Naval Eating Disorder Treatment Center. Her first book was published in 1991 called Dieting, a Dry Drunk. I like that title. It's kind of interesting. I used to drink a little bit back in the day, too. And then she did a companion book, Dieting, a Dry drunk, the Workbook. And she published the Becky L. Jackson eating addiction recovery model.

And then she switched all individual groups and workshops to Zoom in 2018. And in 2021, she published this latest book. Welcome to the show. Becky, how are you? I'm good. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming. We're so excited. Give us a dot com so we can find you on the interwebs.

I've got two different ones, InnerFamily Healing.com, and Eating AddictionReckon. Recovery.com. I have two websites. I have Instagram and Facebook, but I'm a recent widow, so I've kind of backed off on both of those. Okay. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside this book? Well, it's inviting people to realize that they have a path to becoming the parent, that their younger ages have always wanted, needed, and deserve. And allowing them to step forward is that wiser self and to become a trustworthy parent to them allows them to bring any unresolved issues,

traumas, pain, and we can guide them toward that healing path. The healing path. Now, is this kind of different than the other books you've written about addiction, I think, I'm assuming addiction and stuff like that? A little bit in that. I probably had about two years. I was about 32. I had about two years and had, you know, kept my word about being sober and about being absent from the eating addiction was doing a lot of my own inner work. And I happened to see a made-for-TV movie called Sibyl, which is about.

a woman with, I think, 16 multiple personalities. Very fascinating, made-for-TV movie. And when the therapist character started introducing some of these alternate selves, they were younger. And I started to identify, even though I'm not a multiple personality, that I had younger selves that really needed to have a voice and to have a safe setting. And because the therapist character in the movie did it through a visualization, I thought, yeah, how hard can this be? I can give it a try. And so I kind of, the first one I did, I kind of wrote out what I would call an amends and a commitment to those younger selves. And I just thought it was going to be delivering it to

and I didn't have any experience meditating, but I just thought in my mind's eye I would see these younger self-spaces and deliver that message to them. I did not know they were going to talk back. I didn't know they were going to talk to each other. And so it really started me down a path of incredible tools for healing.

Now, back in 1974, sharing that, you know, that was not an easy thing. everybody could grasp. But over the years, after I had about 10 years, I started working in the recovery field. And I think that a major component that fuels addictions is a yet yourself's dependency on any addiction to deal with historical pain or unresolved trauma, etc. So I started incorporating this particular model in working with addicts to give them a safe setting to understand that they can help those younger selves break their dependency on the addiction. Yes, you can stay sober, yes, you can stay absent.

But really what you want is to be not dependent on them, but to have really mature, sound spiritual ways of dealing with life as a lot. opposed to those immature ways. You know, trauma is a big thing. Things happen, our childhood really shape us. Absolutely. And I know I used to watch, what was that show? I used to watch all the time.

I think it was Dr. Dr. He was on MTV with Adam Carrell for a while. They had Love Line. What's the name of the show? And I don't know why I can remember Adam's name, but I can't remember he has ever. But he ran a rehab, I think in La Cresena, Pasadena. California and you know he had they had a lot of the the Hollywood you know rock and roll people

you know stars there and it was interesting to me I love watching car crash stuff so you know like cops the movie there's TV show cops and stuff like watching people's lives be a mess because then I can get done and be like my life isn't too bad uh I mean I'm not I'm not I'm not you know trying to say I'm better in those people anyway shape or form but sometimes you get a little depressed and you want to see somebody else suffering I don't know. It sounds like a horrible thing, the way I'm describing it, doesn't it? Anyway, all right.

Well, you know, but I did, you know, I empathize with the people and their journey that they have through rehab is really hard. But one thing I noticed was a consistency of sexual assault or trauma from childhood. And a lot of the time, the addiction was really them trying to mask that, numb the pain. And since they hadn't ever dealt with that particular trauma, You know, until they heal that wound, you're just throwing wallpaper on it, I guess, or something. Well, one of the things in the book that I try to encourage people to do is read the book, cover to cover at least one time, but then start to work on becoming the parent that those younger selves need. And by younger self, I mean if you're 40, you got a 38, 38, 35 year old self in there too.

But to become that person, you really have to create a new foundation and create trust. They cannot and will not, I don't think, come forward with much willingness unless we have really made it clear. We are on a path to become the parent that they deserve. And one of the things that I explained to people in the beginning is a tool that I stumbled on to, way back in the beginning as well. I had a kind of a mentor that was helping me stay sober, and she said this one thing to me that was really helpful. She said, in times of stress, upset, confusion, don't do what you would do. I want you to start right now and make a list of three to five people you admire and respect. Pick one of them, do what you think they would do.

And I found when I did that, I accessed some level of wisdom I didn't consciously feel I had. And after doing that a few months, I thought, I'm going to call these my future Beckys. So I was, you know, 33, 33 at the time. So I started doing a meditation where I would see myself at 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, I took myself up into my 80s. And now I am at my 80s. And I really built this, you know, it takes a village to raise a child. I really built this village with wiser aspects of myself. And that's an important concept to have in place before we start bringing all these wounded selves to us when we don't have the tools or the wisdom to help them yet.

So that's a major component that I have. have at the beginning of the book, how people through is really building a foundation that's going to allow them to be a person that they can respect. Building a foundation. And yeah, I mean, if these inner wounds,

these trauma wounds, they're like poison in your system. They just fester. Yeah. And they affect you in so many ways, sometimes subconsciously. You know, a lot of people sometimes have childhood trauma and they never, their mind,

you know, we've talked to this a lot on the show. The mind goes, hey, this person is really young, they can't handle this right now. This is too overwhelming.

They don't even understand what it is. And so what we're going to do is pack it away and then we're going to bring it up later. And that's why you see people that, you know,

later on, they start remembering things. And that's when the brain has decided that maybe they might be in a place where they can handle this. But it's still, you know, lives inside you and is a part of you. And so, yeah, having these things. Now,

you talk a lot of it, a little bit about word for word visualizations, to an inner spiritual team that includes the support of future selves. Tell us about how that works. Well, I think there's a, at least I've heard concepts out there, you know, write a letter to yourself from an older self. So the concept isn't brand new out there. But I really, think that for me to do a visualization where I imagined what I would look like if I kept on this path, imagined myself at 45, 55, 65, and allowed these younger selves to have grandmas and older selves. I really had a really bratty adolescent, and it was really important for her not to be bully to some of the younger ones, right?

And so I really created a family where they all trusted each other. And that was done through visualizations. That was done through keeping my word no matter what. That I stayed sober no matter what. I stayed abstinent from the eating addiction, no matter what. I became trustworthy in their eyes. And I invited these older images of me to become part of their support team.

I know it sounds very bizarre, but it's really magical healing. Yeah. Sometimes if you can kind of, in your head, if you can separate yourself and see yourself maybe like from above or from another thing, you can kind of start maybe getting perspective. Is that a good analogy of what you're describing? A little bit, yeah, because I think, quote, unquote, if we see ourselves from a,

we're oftentimes seeing more of our souls view or our older selves view. So I have the future selves which are helping us become a village that's going to help raise the kids. But I also encourage people to build a spiritual team so that they have a trust in the universe. They have a, you know, sometimes people like the word spirit guides. Sometimes they like guardian angels. but it's a spiritual energy that we can rely on as well. And I had decided I wanted to live in a world where I could trust the universe. And so I decided I would look at everything as in my highest good.

So what could I have learned from that, even though and helping the younger self to realize, like a lot of my clients who grew up being chubby and being teased and, you know, being rejected? What can we have gleaned from that? And very often what I find is that they have a real wonderful sensitivity for empathy for others. That's a wonderful skill to take forward in our life. So I try to help people and myself always look for the divine order in everything. Everything works to my highest good.

And yeah, that's a pretty important concept that I've lived by. A higher good. A spiritual team concept. Yeah. And so when they work with you, you show them how to develop the spiritual team, how to utilize it, how to understand it, all that good stuff. Because I work with a variety of people, people that are atheists or agnostic or, you know, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, I've worked, Hindu, Buddhist, I've worked with every aspect of it. It isn't about making them believe one thing. I have them put together a packet of their favorite

quote, spiritual quotes, spiritual passages, poems, and we go over them together and we kind of glean what their heart truth is, and they go from there. So it isn't about embracing someone else's. about finding our own heart's truth about how we want to live. Finding your true, you know, that's really important for people to do. A lot of people are on autopilot. They just kind of accept whatever life gives them. You know, they're kind of, you know, they're busy sometimes too. I mean, oh, they're busy all the time.

I think everyone now is pretty stressed, pretty thin with their time. And in today's world. And so, you know, between working, trying to raise kids, family, all that stuff, you know, sometimes by the time people wake up to the traumas they have, you know, they got a lot of busyness going on in their professional adult life on top of everything else, right? So it can be challenging to, you know, suddenly deal with these things. You dealt with them at 32 years old, and I'm sure your life was probably busy at that point. You're like, this too?

Well, I'm coming up to the 10th anniversary of the death of my son, who was only 46 when he died. And, you know, to realize that I had a young mother inside, you know, kind of Becky's from 35 to 45, that had so much need to go over anything she thought she might have done wrong, could have done better, to help him along his path, blah, blah, blah. And I really, you know, for me, my belief is the soul is eternal. I loved him. He loved me. But my young mother's selves really needed me to help them grieve and to give them a safe setting to really work on remorse and regrets for anything that they could have done that contributed to his demise. that's one of the most important tools I've found in the long run. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, it's, and, you know, people go through these. But, you know, the one thing, it's always funny, and I've said this on the show a lot. My audience is going to go, he's going to say it again. And it's probably a good point for everyone. People always ask, you ever see somebody on Facebook? They're like, hey, what would you go tell your young teenage self, you know, where you're starting out in life or, you know, coming out of college?

What would you tell yourself? that might change the game. And I always tell people, and they're kind of, like, shocked a little bit. I'd be like, hey, you need to go into some psychotherapy, man. And you just deal with trauma. Do you with your childhood trauma, like now? Because I didn't really address it until 45 to 50. And by that time, I could see this trail of wreckage, you know.

And you can look behind. You'd be like, there's a pattern here, wreckage. Maybe I should fix it. maybe it's me and yeah that's I mean that's that's just really important man and the sooner you can do it

the better because I I remember seeing leaving Neverland which was a movie about Michael Jackson and some boys and then afterwards Oprah had a show where she interviewed the boys after the movie played on TV and or TV in the movies

and one of the guys got up and he talked about how he'd had been sexually assaulted by a police officer who back in the day you know they used to trust police officers i think he still kind of do and he gone on to be an NFL football player and he talked about how the poison inside him was just festering and it's kind of like a snake bite and he learned that when he finally talked and to open up about his trauma about the things that had happened to him started seeking help it was like letting the poison out from a from a snake bite you know You bleed out the poison, you give you squeeze or suck it out, you know, I guess if you're in the Old West.

And then he's like, then you can finally heal. But until you address it, until you talk to somebody about it, you get it outside of yourself, your inside. Your inside just want to beat you up with it. And so, you know, better now or sooner than later and anything you do. It sounds like you've got some really cool techniques that you use on ways to kind of, you know, give people that it's hard for us to see outside. of ourselves, right? What's that old line? Fish, fish, fish, fish can't see water because they're in it. Right? Just like we can't see air. And that's kind of the problem we have yourself. You can't really see how you are, especially with the ego controlling so much stuff. And, yeah.

One of the important points of my book is to do the inner work before you are. overwhelmed with their trauma, the younger self's trauma, to do the strengthening of the wisdom within yourself, to become trustworthy to any child that you might have, then they can trust you enough to come forward with hope about healing. Otherwise, all they do is come forward with their pain and blame. We want them to come forward with hope that we are going to be a resource for them. Yeah. Being hope is the thing on everything. And so you focus on building a foundation and visualization. And visualization is a really powerful too. We've had like Olympic coaches on the show. And you know, Tony Robbins talks about the center of people. If you can visualize using,

you know, overcoming the obstacles that you have and then what your future self is, like, you know, what you want to be and understanding who you are so that you can make those changes. I mean, that's a great way to do that. And then, and then that way you really start changing your future. You start developing yourself and growing. And you see yourself in a better place. You know, if you're doing drugs and you're maybe living on the VDOC or maybe, you know, you're just doing drugs.

You know, you have a problem. You can't stop. you know, you can start thinking about, okay, what would it look like if I lived a life where I wasn't addicted? How much better would that be? What would that feel like? And feelings are real important, right, in this sort of visualization process. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I do try to put in word for words so that it takes the person, you know, they can actually record it using my words or tweak them to make them their own. But it opens, going from beta brainwaves to alpha brainwaves really opens the door

to creativity. When I've done my workshops to where I lead the meditations, no one has identical experience. It's all their own creativity that opens the door to their healing. And I allow everybody to kind of share what they're comfortable. sharing, but it lets the person know there isn't a right or a wrong way that their path can be their creative healing. Yeah, yeah, creative healing. What are some other things about the work you do and things you discuss in the book that

maybe haven't asked you about? Well, I have one that I use. It's one that came on a little later in my life called the Board of Directors. I am the visualization. I stay the mental self. And then I have like a board meeting room. And I have my spiritual self, my emotional self, and my physical self, all there for a meeting. And the first time I did that, the physical self came in and said, you like all them better than you like me.

you can talk to your emotional self. You can talk to your spiritual self. You don't talk to me. And so I realized that giving my physical self that setting, she could tell me that she felt like the stepchild, and she didn't want to be the stepchild anymore. And that has really helped with physical symptoms, et cetera, et cetera. You know, I can go in and talk to the gang,

the board of directors as a whole. That's been a really wonderful one as I've gotten through a lot of other issues in life that have to do with health stuff. Ageing and health stuff, yeah. So is it harder to do this inner family work? Does it help in aging? I mean, you've been using this for almost 50 years. Yeah, it has really made a wonderful difference because,

just to give you an example, probably when I was about 45, I was getting out of the shower and saw my naked body and kind of put my hands under my breasts and lifted them up and said, oh, they belong up here. And one of my wiser women selves said, you'll wish you had this body when you're 65. And I thought, oh, yeah. So now I'm in my 82nd year, but I'm actually 81. If I get out of the shower and I see the sagging, the wrinkles, I hear with a big smile, you know, a giggle, you'll wish you had this body when you're 101. So there's been so many benefits to having those wise voices inside. And that's what the foundation part is about so that you really have this strong team to help. you support and walk through with the younger selves, any of their healing.

Doing it alone. I'm never alone. Well, that's important. That's important. I mean, people can find out more, read your book. And then on your website, how can they reach out and work with you? I see there's a work with me tab on the website there. This is probably my last year that I'm going to be taking clients on since I celebrate

my 82nd birthday in July. So I am still, you know, working with clients and doing groups at the moment. And the plan is even though I'm going to be letting go of some work, I probably will do a workshop as long as I don't get dementia, a workshop every year and probably work individually with people, but I'm going to not have, I've had ongoing groups for decades where people stay on them for decades because there isn't a lot of support for people out there to, you know, walk this path. And so although I'm winding down, they can still go to either of the websites to get my 800 number and call to see if we're a match. Actually, I don't work

with just anybody. I always screen people because I want to make sure that they feel like their response to the interview or the screening is, that makes sense, tell me more, as opposed to me trying to convert anybody. I only want to work with people that really at a heart level feel like that makes sense. Okay, I'm ready to learn more. I'm ready to learn more. So people can do that when they order your book. As we go out, give people your final pitch out and tell people where they can get the book

and all that good stuff. I think there's a variety of places you can get it online. Amazon predominantly is the one I usually refer people to. All my books are on Amazon. I would invite people to believe that they have resources internally that they haven't necessarily tapped into yet, that they can tap into, and that they can step into being a person that they respect, that acts on their own behalf with grace and dignity

and can allow those younger selves a safe setting to be with you, meaning the person, become the parent that they've always needed, they've always wanted, and that they deserve. Well, Becky, it's been very insightful, and hopefully we're going to save a bunch of people. They're going to buy your book and read it. Reach out to you for services. Folks, fix your trauma now.

Like, seriously, pick up the phone. pick up the credit card, get on Amazon. You know, the sooner you deal with it, when you get clean out the other side, when you wash all that stuff away, it is so nice having that inner peace, you're not trauma responding to everything. You're not feeling gaslit.

You know, you know, people, you know, because a lot of people don't realize a lot of times in your life when you have trauma, you're doing trauma responding, you know. Somebody gaslets you, you're going to hit the roof because in your brain you think you're being re-victimized. You know, someone's taking advantage of you again. And so, yeah, really important.

And take care of it now, folks. Don't wait. Becky waited to 32. I waited until 50. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you. And thank you for coming by. Or up her book, wherever fine books are sold.

It's called Seeking, Finding, Healing, The Complete Guide, to Self-Directed, Inner Family Healing, at March 9th, 2021, Becky Lou Jackson. Thanks for us for today and go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, for just Chris Foss. Chris Foss 1 on the TikTokity, and that'll do it. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain

and your life. Warning, consuming too much of the Chris Walsh Show podcast can lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger, and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. Consult a doctor for any resulting brain bleed. All right, Becky, so we got out.