The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - An Ecological Psychology: Internal Family Systems for a Turbulent World with Richard Schwartz & Steffi Bednarek

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Most of us were taught to treat emotions like distress, numbness, and burnout as private failings to manage and move past, rather than normal responses to living within a world full of crises. The unintended result is a distrust in our own bodies and mind, further leading to more confusion about what is 'normal.' One framework offers a potential path to living in harmony with all of the mind's distinct parts, breaking the defensive and counterproductive loops we tend to get stuck in. What sort of systemic ripples might become possible if we stop trying to smother uncomfortable parts of ourselves, and begin embracing them as critical pieces of our own mental ecologies? In this episode, Nate is joined by Dr. Richard C. Schwartz, the therapist who developed Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Steffi Bednarek, a climate psychologist applying that same model to organizations, governments, and culture at large. Dick walks through the origins of IFS, which describes the mind as naturally made up of "parts" – protectors and exiles – with their own histories, fears, and roles, which are all held by an underlying "Self." Steffi extends the model outward to show how institutions and even entire countries can be read as systems of exiles and protectors, and shares how she uses IFS with governments, financial institutions, and wealth holders to defuse shame and effectively guide toward pro-social behavioral change. Together, they explore why healing our relationship to our own most despised parts may be inseparable from healing our relationship to the rest of the living world. How can looking inward to our own thought processes and patterns help us better understand and relate to others, especially those whose behavior we find hardest to accept? As we continue through challenging times, how can we balance critical physical and policy work with the internal work of healing our relationship to the mental parts we shy away from? And would our decisions and actions change if more and more humans began to lead from curiosity and compassion, instead of fear, and could that be enough to shift the larger system? (Conversation recorded on August 5th, 2026)   About Richard C. Schwartz: Richard C. Schwartz, PhD, is the creator of Internal Family Systems, a highly effective, therapeutic model with a growing evidence base, that de-pathologizes the multi-part personality. Richard is also the Founder of the IFS Institute that primarily offers training for professionals. He is currently a Teaching Associate in Psychiatry, at Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate. Richard has authored or co-authored more than ten books on Internal Family Systems and related topics, including No Bad Parts and Internal Family Systems Therapy. He lives near Chicago with his wife Jeanne, Vice President of the IFS Institute, close to his three daughters and six grandchildren.   About Steffi Bednarek: Steffi Bednarek is a gestalt psychotherapist, trauma therapist, and climate psychologist. Her work explores the interface between climate change and mental health. With twenty-five years of experience in depth psychology, complexity thinking, climate psychology, and grief tending, Bednarek has worked for national governments and global institutions to prepare leaders and organizations for the psychological dimension of climate change in decision-making processes. Her work has been featured in the Huffington Post, BBC, David Milliband's "Reasons to be cheerful" podcast and numerous international publications. She is the co-founder of "Explorations into Climate Psychology" journal and an associate member of the American Psychological Association's climate change group.   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners  

Climate psychologists get asked to work with groups who actually feel distress. And the implicit invitation is often, can you make this go away? And it has something similar to how we manage the land, how we manage monocultures. Certain emotions are wanted, others are not, nobody wants discomfort and distress. But that's the appropriate response to the external conditions. That's where I think IFS has a very powerful lens to say there's an ecology of parts and I can be hopeful and hopeless and these contradicting things can be there at the same time. You're listening to the great simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and ensure. inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification.

I'm very pleased to be joined today by therapist and founder of Internal Family Systems, Richard Schwartz, along with psychotherapist and psychologist Steffi Benarik to discuss how the internal family systems model can help us work through crises at every level, from individual trauma all the way up to our shared more than human. global predicament. Dr. Richard C. Schwartz is the creator of Internal Family Systems, or IFS, a therapeutic model that depathologizes the multi-part personality. Dick is also the founder of the IFS Institute, which offers training for professionals, and is also currently a teaching associate in psychiatry at Cambridge Health Alliance. Steffi Benarik is a climate psychologist,

Gestalt psychotherapist, systems thinker, and IFS therapists, as well as the founder and director of the Center for Climate Psychology. With over 25 years of experience in systemic change and trauma therapy, Steffi invites us to reimagine our place in the broader web of life and advocates for restoring soul to our collective culture. Her work has supported national governments, the corporate sector, global financial institutions, the sustainability sector, and large NGOs. In this conversation, Dick walks us through the basics of IFS, a framework for naming and recognizing the parts of ourselves that often come into conflict with one another, which he variously categorizes as the exiles, the managers, the firefighters, and the self with a capital

S. From there, Dick, Steffi, and I explore how the expression of these parts and our relationship to them has shifted over time and how that shift has contributed to many of the unhealthy behaviors so many of us grapple with today. Most importantly and most interestingly to me, we apply the IFES framework to the level of the global economic superorganism, examining how these aggregate behaviors have built into the dysfunctional system we see today and identifying the parts at play within that system itself. Though perhaps slower and more introspective than some TGS episodes,

I find conversations like this one to be some of the most valuable for understanding myself and how I reflect the larger system that I'm a part of, creating potential space for system level change that starts with the individual. I hope you are able to take the time

to reflect in the same way you listen and watch these conversations. With that, please give a warm welcome to Richard Schwartz and Steffi Bednarik. Dick Schwartz, Steffi Bednarik. Welcome to the program. Nice to see you, Nate, and thanks to having us. Thanks for having me as well, Nate. I'm honored. Dick, you have spent your career developing the evidence-based internal family

systems model that has changed how hundreds of thousands of people relate to their own minds and behaviors. But probably many of our listeners will be hearing the term internal family systems IFS for the first time. So maybe before we go any further, could you give us an internal family systems 101? So basic premise is we all have these what I call pirates, other systems call sub-personalities that it's the nature of the mind to be subdivided that way, that's actually healthy because they're all valuable. They all have qualities and resources to help us in our lives. But trauma and bad parenting, attachment injuries, things like that,

force them out of their naturally valuable states into roles that can be destructive and freeze them in time during the trauma and inject them with what, what we call burdens, which are extreme beliefs and emotions that came from the trauma and then get injected into these parts and then drive the way they operate like a virus. So good parts in challenging, difficult roles, not unlike families, wherein in dysfunctional families, kids are forced into roles that aren't who they are, but they're necessary to protect them,

to protect the family. So that's parts. And as a systems person coming from family therapy, I was interested in how that operated as a system. So it became clear there was a distinction between parts who initially you would think of as these loving inner children, but they're also the most sensitive parts of us, so they get hurt the most.

So they're the parts that take in, the emotional pain or taking the terror of these traumas or taking the sense of being worthlessness of being worthless and once they get burdened that way and frozen in those places we don't want anything to do with them because they can pull us back into those times and they can overwhelm us with those feelings they carry now even though before all that happened they were playful and loving and open and creative now they have the power to make us feel terrible So we naturally tend to lock them away inside and just move on. And our culture is a just-movon culture.

You know, you get hurt and you forget about it. You don't look back. You just keep going. And thinking that you're just moving on from the memories, but really you're walking away from your most precious qualities simply because they got hurt. So we call those exiles. And when you have a lot of exiles, you feel more delicate.

the world seems more dangerous. Some other parts are forced to become protecters. And they try to protect some of them by managing your life so that nothing similar ever happens again. Or you don't let anybody close enough to hurt you like that again. Or you make you look perfect so that you get, no one rejects you or make you achieve at a high level to get accolades to counter the worthlessness and so on.

So there's a whole set of parts we call, managers, manager protectors, that other systems would think of as the ego who are kind of running your life and they got you here and they deserve a lot of credit for that. But they're very afraid of opening the door to these exiles. They want to keep them contained and protect it. Spent a lot of energy doing that and doesn't always work. Exiles do get triggered when that happens. It's like an explosion of raw flames of emotion. coming out of your gut that's going to consume you. So there's another set of parts who are standing by

and go into immediate action, impulsive action, to get you higher than those flames or douse them with some substance or distract you till they burn themselves out. So we call those firefighters. So that's the map that's held up these 40-some years. But the big deal about IFS is that in addition to all of these parts,

there's a kind of essence I stumbled into as I was trying to get people like, Nate, if I was, I don't know if you have one, but if you had an inner critic, and I was trying to help you with it by listening to it rather than fighting with it. Let's say we were doing that. And it was going okay, but suddenly you hate the critic

and you're, and things are going south because now it's getting defensive. and what I thought when clients would do that, something similar was going on, but maybe a part who hates the critic has jumped in, just like in families. I'm trying to have two polarized family members talk to each other,

and suddenly a third one sides with one against the other, and everything goes out. So maybe this part that hates the critic is doing the talking. So I would have you focus on it and ask it to just relax back for a few minutes. and let you finish the conversation. And what I would find is, and most people can do that pretty readily,

and when they do, it's like another person comes out, and not only doesn't hate the critic, but has compassion for it, suddenly out of the blue, and also calm relative to it and confident and curious, just purely curious about why it does it. And in that state, the critic relaxes and tells its secret history, And there's a lot more to it, but we can actually help it out of that role and help it unburdened and help the parts that protects unburden. And so when I would ask clients what part of you is that, because that's great, they'd say, that's not a part.

That's myself. That's me. So I came to call that the self with the capitalist. And the big deal about IFS is that that's, and everybody, can't be damaged, just beneath the surface of the. parts so that when they open space, it pops out, and knows how to heal. It knows what to do to heal both internally and in external relationships. And so a lot of the work is designed to first access that self, and then when somebody's in that state, begin to get to know and actually help transform these parts. So that's a Cliff Notes version. So excellent. I now have

so many questions, but I want to invite Steffi into the conversation. Steffi, my understanding is that your current work is kind of applying internal family systems, not to the individual, but to the broader culture. But maybe you could start by sharing what drew you to IFS and maybe how are you applying it today. Yeah, thanks, Nate. I am both, I'm a climate psychologist and a psychotherapist. And IFS is a rather late discovery for me.

So there's a lot to say, but just maybe three short things. The general Western, that's important to say, very young profession of psychotherapy, has a very anthropocentric out there. look. So we, our theories are just paying attention to what happens in human relationships. So there's no real theories or also assessments that we do around how we might be shaped by place as much as our moms and dads and caregivers. How we might, how the education system may have left an imprint on me so that I can't even see the dysfunction that is within the system

and how I start to automatically, intrinsically adopt these values and start to collude in them. How I zoom in on the individual and then forget to zoom out again and see the individual within their context of life. I became really frustrated around this and then in the early, 2000s when I became painfully aware of climate change through watching my little daughter asleep. And all the data that I was holding started to really sink into my heart and I just was heartbroken and tried to turn to professionals in my profession and I realized how unequipped

a lot of my colleagues and myself were in holding something so big and devastating as the current predicament we're in and how the same well if you now move into IFS language the same protectors the same exiles the same firefighters that we may try and change out there actually were enacted through us and at the time I was trained in IFS and I tried to apply to individuals and suddenly I've found that IFS itself is a wonderful lens that can turn both ways and it depends on which ontology it sits in so which outlook it sits in and it doesn't have to sit within the outlook of Western psychotherapy it can actually be brought into a living systems theory.

And whilst it's not going to be the answer to everything, it will help us see, A, how the systems we may talk about is out there, are also showing up in us, but also allows us a certain system's literacy without having to, do a five-year course in systems thinking and without having to do a four-five-year training in psychotherapy. So it's a wonderful, quite intuitive framework. And yeah, I'm really excited at how beautiful it kind of lends itself to seeing a little bit more of this hyper-objects that we're dealing with. Now I even have more questions. So really, really, A real quick question for you, Dick.

It seems that I hear IFS in conversations all the time. Like how many people globally are trained in this modality? It'll be just an estimate, but my best estimate is about 50,000. Yeah. And then they're working with other people. So it's, that's a lot. Am I correct in inferring that we have external family, a mother and a father and a brother and a nephew in my case.

But you just think that we then have an internal family as well that populates during our childhood and everyone has their own portfolio of exiles and protectors and firefighters and some of the words you used. But is that how you look at it? We have an external family and an internal family. Yeah, very much. And a lot of times there are parallels among them. I want to ask about not just modern Western culture,

but on this show we think a lot about human behavior from an evolutionary standpoint. So from that perspective, why would the mind be built in a Swiss Army knife sort of way that IFS allows for? Would that have been adaptive? Yeah, I think so, because I've thought about that a lot. And it seems like if you only have one mind,

that has different thoughts and different emotions, you can't focus simultaneously on enough of things that we need to to actually survive. So it really helps to have this collection of minds, each one with different little specialties, that can talk to each other. The modular mind hypothesis. Exactly, yeah, modular mind,

that then work out problems with each other and have dialogues and then ideally to have a leader of all that. So in evolutionary terms, it makes sense in terms of how much we have to do at the same time. Well, who's the leader? The self, or not necessarily? Well, not necessarily, but ideally the self becomes the leader. Yeah. So, Steffi, let me ask you this.

For a modern, healthy, productive, Western human going about their lives, and then learning full on about the planetary boundaries, not just climate, but the implications for coming decades on the environmental situation. Using IFS language, what happens to that person? Do they have a new firefighter or exile? Or can you explain what happens to such a person? So again, it's like, do we zoom in on the individual,

what happens in them? and then do we say that's their individual parts? Or do we also look at what are we encouraged to, what are the responses that are encouraged by the culture that we live in? And what are the options? So who am I allowed to be? What kind of responses are okay? And so I'd like to start with the culture

and then move my way in rather than the other way around. Well, the culture says to ignore it pretty much. Exactly. Exactly. And the culture offers me an enormous range of firefighting options. As soon as I switch on. Yeah. Exactly.

And so I'm never really asked to stop and let it sink in. I'm fed a certain kind of hope that has less and less actual ground in reality. I'm fed scapegoating stories that make it easier and easier to kind of blame other people and vent my, the rising of fear, so this, what in IFS, my, what in IFS, my, might be called or it would be called exile or strong emotions. There is no space for grief and we haven't got a real word for earth grief for our connection to the loss of home, the loss of, yeah, our deep earth connection. So it is very difficult to talk about what.

what would be a healthy response? Because the system around us is so wounded, is so dysfunctional, is so, in a way, also death-bringing that often climate psychologists get asked to work with groups who actually feel distress. and the implicit invitation is often, can you make this go away? Can you help people to just function in the society as it is? And that's often also the wish, like nobody really wants to suffer,

nobody wants discomfort and distress. But that's the appropriate response. to the external conditions. And so it makes it very confusing in terms of where is the leverage point and what do we help people to do? What does it even mean to be a psychotherapist, apply a psychological lens to these times? I think there's a danger if we just focus on the individual. There's a lot of pathologizing that goes on and a lot of categorizing.

this is a good response, this is a bad response, how can we transform the bad response? And it has something similar to how we manage the land, how we manage monoculture, certain emotions are wanted, others are not, this is okay, this is not okay. And so how do we use psychological roundup to get rid of the things that we don't like

or that cause discomfort? And that's where I think IFS, in its entire outlook, has a very powerful lens to say there's an ecology of parts and that can be hopeful and hopeless both at the same time or hope free. And these contradicting things can be there at the same time. It can simply be said that that normal, healthy, productive person, when they come across all this news, there is some suppressed grief that doesn't have an outlet in our culture, and there's probably a lot of humans that are feeling some version of that. Dick, do you have your take on that question? Yeah, well, when you have a lot of exiled parts,

parts that you really don't want to feel because you can't stand that, you can't stand what they carry, one of your managers is going to be denial. And so you use it to try to minimize what happened in the past, but you also use it in how you see the world or how you operate in the world. You just don't let negative information in because that negative information is going to trigger your exiles, which then becomes a big catastrophe inside. So when I work with somebody with that part,

that manager that has a lot of denial, and they get it to step back and they actually go to some of these painful places, there's initially this terror of being overwhelmed. And so we have to work with the parts that are so afraid of that. And ideally, as people are able to do that work, and they can no longer fear their exiles, then they can look at things that would in the past have triggered the hell out of them. So the denial kind of evaporates, and they can lead from self.

And self has these, you know, a lot of people think of self as this wonderful passive witness state, like through mindfulness or something like that. But self is also has a C word of clarity and sees injustice and can see these problems without denial, and that has the courage and confidence to act to change them. So I work with a lot of social activists, and a lot of what I'm doing is helping them do their activism from self rather than from their righteous parts, which only polarize. And they have great success because, yes, you're using three of the C words, which are courage, clarity and confidence, but also with compassion.

So you have, people don't polarize. Given all the things in the world, how many humans, again, Steffi, in Western culture, because I do see that that's an important distinction in this conversation, in every conversation, are having a manager of denial show up, because that manager is protecting them from all of the very extremely uncomfortable identity, life-altering circumstance, changing implications of if they understood and metabolized all that's going on. Do you think that's quite prevalent? I think it becomes more and more. So what I see is that denial has been around for a very long time. and then in the last 10 years,

I think that shifted to what psychologically we would call disavowal because more and more climate information was available. So the context brought the actual data more to us. And so what we then saw, so disavowal is where two realities exist at the same time. And so that's, means that most of us can have a pretty informed conversation about climate change and make sense, but that at the same time, people then might engage in behavior that completely contradicts

this information, so that people kind of can be at home, let's say CEOs of companies that are responsible for a lot of damage to the ecosystem, will deeply love their children, will also very likely love engagement in beautiful natural surroundings. And then something happens on the way from home to work, where they slip into a role where a lot of that is split-off. and they enact something that they know robs their children of a safe future. And these two realities are currently able to run side by side.

And so that's disavow. And what's difficult about this is that in terms of climate activism and the kind of work that maybe you and I, I think we're involved in, the more we bring this information to people. So disavowal also means it's a protective aspect protecting the vulnerable parts of me that don't want to know. So I kind of know and I don't want to know at the same time. Right.

And so if we don't pay attention to the, it's an actual vulnerability that is behind that. And we start to blame and shame people or ram in traumatic information down their throats. There isn't much wriggle room because their system, the internal system, but also our external systems are not prepared at all in supporting people in really digesting the enormity of the situation in any form of psychological coherence and support. And so where have people got to go?

And so the protectors are likely to become more extreme, and I do believe that we see that. So with more aggression, with more bypassing, with greater scapegoating. And so there is a dynamic relationship that I see between climate activism, information that is pushed out there, and the defensive responses that are coming up.

And so what I've been wondering and also writing about is whether that kind of splitting, this polarisation can lead to something that is actually much deeper than denial or disavow, which is a proper loss of reality. So everything has to get more extreme. the more this reality that I can't deal with is coming my way and I don't have the external resources. I either have to collapse into emotions that I can't deal with, which is deeply traumatic,

or I have to become more extreme in my denial. And so we see quite irrational forms of coping and that can be manipulated. So that applies what you just said to an individual. You could predict that, but then an aggregation of individuals, you can make kind of a culture like Isaac Asimov, psychohistory prediction of given the events and the horizon climate just being one of them, that is a default scenario unless things change. Yes, and I think we're seeing this already. We see this in the culture or an organization. I wouldn't talk about parts, but I could talk about pockets of society. And so you have pockets of society that display certain forms of firefighters

that are actually really dangerous to the time we're in. Here, here. I'm so glad that I arranged the two of you to come on together. It's just so obvious to. me that at the core of the human predicament, or the more than human predicament, as I say, is the human. And we talk about emissions and economy and debt and energy and all the things. But this is the conversation on human development and how we're going to grow up, or at least some subset of society, hopefully. I've had many guests on the program discusses.

different human development theories, some more esoteric, like integral theory and ego development theory, and there's some more mainstream, like attachment theory. Dick, where does IFS internal family systems fit between the esoteric and the mainstream human development models? Well, I think one of the strengths of IFS is that it isn't so esoteric, that it's actually very practical, in the sense that all I need to do is have whoever I'm working with focus on whatever thought or emotion or sensation they want to get to know or is causing them trouble and find it in their body and then get curious about it, which often means moving other parts back that don't like it. And once they're in that kind of calm, curious, even compassionate stay, then you direct questions to that place in your body and you wait for answers. So, and everybody can basically do it and often are very surprised at the answers they get.

So does someone need to find one of these trained IFS therapists or is there something they can do in the quiet of their own home to get started to talk? work with their parts. I'm glad you asked because for years, I was afraid to bring it directly to the public because there's some delicacy to it. And as we invited people to go to these exiled parts, sometimes they would have very big backlash reactions. So I was reluctant to do that. But we figured out a way that can be done safely.

And so the last several years, we've been bringing, offerings to the public, including a workbook, and we're now talking to people about some kind of AI product, not an AI therapist. There are a bunch of those, but a way to help people kind of get to know different parts and work between sessions and so on. And we're having, soon we're going to have an event for the public of teaching people how to do this on their own. So, Yeah, so that's been one of my goals is to go beyond psychotherapy so that it's available to people more broadly. What about people like me, to be honest, who have trouble connecting with or identifying their parts or said differently, I guess, does this model work for everyone, for every human? For people who have trouble doing that, often there's a part in the way.

There's a part that doesn't want them to, and I don't know that that's true for you, Nate, but when I'm working with somebody and I say, okay, focus on that part and tell me where you find it, and they say, I don't know, I don't know what you're talking about. Usually there's a part that isn't ready that doesn't quite trust me enough or is committed to not going into the parts that are in their body and wants to keep them in their head all the time, or there's generally some reason for it, but a lot of it is they're just not, they're worried about my judgment if they went there.

There's generally some reason that comes out. If I back off and maybe do something else for a number of sessions and then bring it up later, it turned out they just didn't trust me enough that I wasn't going to judge them. So things like that. So, Stephanie, I want to ask you a question, but I thought of a little anecdote first.

Earlier this year, we had indigenous climate activist Shia Bastide on the program. She lives in Mexico. And I said, what do you love to do? What do you like to do in your free time? And she said, hanging out with my climate friends, not talking about climate. And I thought that was a nice phrase at the time. But two weeks ago, I spent a week with a lot of people working on the more than human predicament in person.

We didn't talk about climate or energy or the wars or polarization or any of that stuff. We just talked about life and made jokes. And it was so refreshing and healing for me to just be with people that kind of are aware of this stuff. And maybe my parts felt more free or liberated or I don't know. but do you have any thoughts on that? And maybe you could talk about how IFS model specifically interacts with people's feelings of shame or blame in our culture that are bubbling up all the time in our unfolding predicament.

And why is that helpful? I can very much relate to needing a break from it. And I find it really interesting to think, sometimes I go to mythology, not just necessarily to IFS, and the story of Medusa just came up here around if you stare at the abyss for too long, you risk turning to stone. And that sometimes we need to address something that is too big for one skin to bear. we need community and also we may need to start looking at it sideways

in playful ways you know so when I feel very overwhelmed I go into a manager part that feels like very busy very sincere very on switched on all of the time. And in terms of IFS, that is a manager part, managing the horrendousness of what it would be like

to feel completely like helpless. And when I also, when I lend from that part and access self-energy. just my capacity to hold things becomes wider. It doesn't mean I no longer know about what's around the corner, but I can also hold beauty. And I can also hold deep intimate connection and love for people and love for everything that we are starting to lose. And with that, there's this deep grief that comes.

in. And one of the exiles that I see in so many of us, and I include myself, is our wild and undomesticated capacity to feel love, to feel grief, to fall to our knees and to howl together in a wild way, rather than these kind of polite tears that you wipe away in the therapist's office. and there's something in that that when we go to self-energy, which I can find through this introspection way, but which I can also find through community and connection with others, a larger self energy, something comes in, like in mythology. And I love what Martin Shaw, the mythologist said,

and I hope I remember it right, He says that's how we can encounter the thousands of shimmering secrets that have been there all along and waiting for our attention. So when I'm just zooming in on the atrocity, I miss everything that is waiting to be seen and included. And there's a lot of beauty in that too. As I said earlier, I work with a number of social activists and help them with the burnout. out. And it does help to balance things more and have, you know, times in your life where you're just enjoying yourself. But when we go inside, many of those activists have a part that takes in the pain of the world and thinks to help people, it has to do that. It has to feel the suffering of

everybody all the time. And that will burn you out. So when we find that part, we help it understand that in order to do the activism, it doesn't have to do that. And it can let self have compassion, but it doesn't have to take it all in and hold it. And we'll also find many people, because of their childhoods or their histories, have an intense desire to help and have these massive caretaking parts that don't let them take care of themselves, and that that also burns them out. So we try to balance things out a little better inside and do more of what Stephanie was calling self-leadership,

which when you can do all of this from self, you don't really get tired in the same way. It's like you have this wellspring of energy that flows through you that can keep you going. Here's a random question, Dick. you've done IFS therapy for a long time with a lot of people. And increasingly there are a lot of people in our sphere that are very worried about the future

and of humanity in the biosphere for climate and other reasons. Have you noticed any commonality of the individual human's family history and childhood trauma that predisposes them to try to caretake for the natural world, or is that a silly question? No, I think that's some of what I was trying to say, that there are things that happened that made these caretaking parts take over and sometimes had to do with,

if they didn't take care of one of their parents, the parent would get depressed and leave them or something, or their marriage would fall apart and they'd be orphaned. So they become these big parents, these big caretakers of their families, and then that translates into larger systems too. And if you do your activism from those places, you will burn out. So helping people heal the parts that got them into that role. So they're doing it from a very different place. And sometimes they think, well, if I don't have this to motivate me, I just won't do it. But it turns out to not be true

at all. I'd like to add to that as well. So what we were looking at the center for climate psychology is around that question as well. And I also noticed that a lot of people who are neurodivergent are in the climate space. And so we had a series of looking at neurodivergens in the metacrisis. What role does that play? And, you know, new divergence, not from a pathological point of view, but as a superpower because a nervous system that is already very aware and more prone to systemic sensing is likely to make more connections and is also likely to see really unusual leverage points. And so it's an encouragement to celebrate the people amongst us who already display a different lens and to treat them well at work

and to be curious about their perspective, rather than funneling them back in through HR kind of initiatives into mainstream paradigm. It will take a village. I totally agree with you. So let me take it a level higher. I think both of you are at least moderately aware of my framing. of this podcast and what I call the economic superorganism, which is this metabolic global economy

that behaves in aggregate like a single organism that's compelled to grow and consume without limits. Dick, imagine the superorganism came to your office and was interested in doing internal family systems work. What parts might find and what might work and what would it need to operate from the self-energy if that metaphor holds? Yeah, that holds.

I love the question, actually, because I have versions. I have miniature versions of that in my office a lot. And I would start with that striving part, the part that sees growth is the big goal and doesn't think of the consequences of unrestricted growth. either in an individual or as a planet. And as you get to know that part and what's it afraid would happen if we didn't keep doing this?

And those are the questions we ask, protectors, then you'll learn what drives it. And both the legacy burden it carries, but also are there other parts that protects that are very vulnerable or that it's trying to distract from. And as we learn about that, then we'd get permission from it to go to those other parts and actually help them.

So the exiles of the United States, for example, or because as long as all those parts are still hurting so much, it's very hard for these other protectors to slow down and try to pay attention to them, actually. It's kind of a fascinating question because you could treat the United States with this, but then if you go up to the global level, a lot of the exiles are countries themselves. That's right. And it becomes quite fascinating psychoanalysis of the superorganism. Steffi, practically, you have worked with governments and global financial institutions piloting the integration. of models like IFS, especially a project that you called systems wayfinding. Could you maybe tell us what that actually looks like in practice and what you hope it will

accomplish? So I love the question about the superorganism coming to. Oh, please, if you want to weigh in on that, go for it. Okay, so I backtrack a little more then. For me, there would be two stages to that. and the first one would be in the contracting in itself because the superorganism wouldn't come as a neutral client. It would be challenging for any therapist

because the therapist is as much involved in the logic and the patterns of the super organism as the super organism as the client. So there's already an enormous amount of collusion which is likely to make us blind to what the superorganism actually presents. And the very first question for me is, am I actually sufficiently equipped to do the work? And so that immediately brings me to the other question you asked, what is my work? I think for anybody who is working in this time as a changemaker, we can't just work. on systems out there. The very first step is how have these systems influenced us, our outlook, the dreams we have for the future, what we get excited about, what we see is success.

All of that is already tainted by this superorganism or hyperobject. And so I have to ask my manager parts, my exiles, my firefighters, how have they adapted to living within this? And for me, that's the very first step before I call myself a changemaker. I have to see how it turns up in me. And there's no end to that story because nobody gets to live outside of the system

that shapes all of us. And so it's an endless question. And so we don't get to say, I'm the one who has it. We need each other and we need to help each other to see how it shows up. And so there is no neutral therapist. That's the first challenge. And I would have to ask myself, I have to bring humility to this. Am I the right person at this time to work with this particular aspect?

And the second one for me is, why would the superorganism come to therapy? So what I see is manager parts that hold an enormous amount of power. Don't tend to come to therapy to give up that power. They usually come to therapy because they don't like the responses in other people that hold them to account or they don't like the unintended consequences of their behavior and they want to get rid of that. Well, the superorganism might potentially come to therapy only when it hits rock bottom. Exactly. Exactly.

And in our time, that means an enormous amount of disaster for both humans and more than humans. And that's the predicament we're in because from a psychotherapeutic perspective, you can't make someone willing to change. They have to be willing. And often that is when crisis is really present. Do you want to give an overview of your wayfinding initiative? Yes, sorry, I forgot about that. So, yeah, so that's the first turn. It's how does it turn up in me?

But then also, and that's what I love about IFS, when we take it into larger systems, it allows us to see the pattern in a fractal. So how does it show up in the relational field? How would it show up in an organization? And I'm not saying that it is like for like, like living systems theory, but it's a lens that allows for both, because at the moment a lot of systems thinking is so fragmented from any kind of inner

approaches, so that I can, for instance, work with an organization and become really interested in how structurally, rather than individually, an organization might already set up fragmentation and polarization. in its departments that is never addressed? What is habitually, for instance, exiled in an organization or in a country? What are the voices that are always silenced that are never listened to? What's the data that never really gets an airing or the kind of knowledge systems that are always exiled or dismissed?

And what would happen? How would we need to change? So IFS says everything belongs. We don't want to get rid of any parts. And that also includes the parts that go into potential fascism. These parts belong to the system. So how do I need to engage with them? What is it that I need to listen to?

They show extreme behavior. And so what is it that, like when, usually when I am encountering, in systems wayfinding, there's one little exercise that we give people to do very much at the start, which is, can you just in the next week go to the wrong pub? Don't put yourself in danger, but go to the wrong pub and order the wrong drink. and encounter and stay there for long enough to maybe listen to the wrong people having the wrong conversation. And what we then encounter are our own parts that turn up and are full of judgment or,

you know, like that create our attachment to identity. And how do I need to attend to these parts in order to soften and be able to. able to hear what the wrong people are really concerned about. So people who come to therapy will be more likely, especially if they choose IFS therapy, they will be more likely to already have an affinity and it might work for them. If you bring this, and often I don't even call it IFS, into organizations, there's already a defense. And for a good reason, I don't think we can come into an organization and just declare this is a safe space where I'm. don't you share your innermost fears?

It's not a safe space. And so instead of asking people to make themselves very vulnerable, I worked with an artist Alan Bolden, and so we developed some images that I just want to show a few, just to say this is another way. So I worked with, for instance, wealth holders and philanthropists. And instead of shaming them or blaming them for not giving more than, I think, globally, 2.1% of the global financial wealth goes to climate initiatives,

we brought up parts, but we showed them images. And so this is one, this is another one. So we've got a number of parts that actually to get somebody to say, actually I want to build a wall of money around me to protect myself, is very shameful. So for an individual in a group to actually get to the point of saying that is very unlikely to happen. But when we come and we say there is no way of functioning within the Western system, without having a part that learned that this is what we do to be safe,

already takes out the shame of that. It kind of, so I then become the voice of acceptance and compassion and that invites these parts in. And what was extraordinary is that so many, we had 100 people in the room, that so many of them started to say, yeah, that's me. I have that part. So we have an image of a parent attending to a child.

So very often I'm talking about work with wealth holders, but it would be similar in other organizations. When we're in our parent part, very often we get activated and want to be generous, want to kind of do something meaningful. And in that case, that part often gives away, the more the negotiation moves to actual giving. The part that has gone to business school kicks back in and says, oh, is this a clever kind of return on investment? And it's a completely different part that comes forward that is no longer connected to the parent that wanted to make a safer future for the children.

And the more you move towards actual capital moving, the more these kinds, there are some parts that are very invested in holding the power, holding control, or not wanting to look bad or make a risky investment. And it's at what point have we forgotten? And so again, if we're in self and we can see all. of these parts, it makes it less shameful to say I have this part, but I also know that in order to become a good ancestor for the children of the future, I need to call in parts or I need to act for more self-energy. And so it kind of just makes something visible without asking people

to go into their deepest, darkest personal aspects and helps people have a conversation. So the real goal is culture needs to move towards in service of living systems in the broader world, but we need a lot more humans working from self-energy in order to navigate towards that. So Dick, do you have any follow-up comments to that? I loved listening to Steffi described that work she's doing with benefactors And it's, you know, to globalize, first of all, just the language by itself frees people up to say it's a part of me. I have a part that's kind of greedy. And then I have another part that really wants to help people.

And having them identify those parts and how they get along inside. And that reduces the shame enormously of saying, I'm a greedy person. And secondly, like Steffi, my focus is on leaders, and we're starting a training for leaders in IFS. We also have trainings for coaches that work with leaders. And I do believe there is, you know, economic trickle-down theory doesn't work at all. But I believe that self can trickle down from the leadership. that self is contagious in a way, and that parts are contagious too.

So if your leader is dominated by the kind of parts we've been talking about, that's going to affect the whole culture of whatever company you're working with. But if you could have a self-led leader, that pulls for the self of everybody around that person. So that's been our initiative. Except our current system doesn't select

or reward people that would be led by self-energy. That is true, yeah. So let me ask you a specific question on that, Dick. Last year, we had two psychologists on the show to discuss people with dark triad traits, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, and the fact that they often rise to the top of our modern institutions. So through the IFS lens,

when you look at these type of people who are many of them running our most powerful institutions and systems, what parts do you think are in charge? Well, you could describe each of those as parts. There is a manipulative part. There's a part that is totally self-focused and driven and so on. And those are some of the people that I've worked with the past. I don't do a lot of ongoing therapy now, but, and what is missing in that description is how those are protectors

that are protecting a lot of exiles. And that if, and you guys are right that those people don't show up unless they're hitting bottom or there's something, their marriages are falling apart or something like that. But when they do, and I can get them, Or like Steffi's saying, as these donors separate from and notice the parts that are driving the way they do it, as people can separate from those that triad and see them as parts that are trying to protect them. And instead of hating themselves for having them, begin to get to know these parts and what they're afraid would happen if they didn't make them feel all these things.

then you get more access to self. And then we can actually go and maybe do some healing of what drives them. And it's true that those are the people that ascend in this system. It takes that kind of ruthlessness often to get to the top. And there are now people,

and I did a recent workshop, A lot of leaders and a lot of coaches who are working with a lot of leaders who say when they go in to these systems and get that kind of separation, there's such relief to be able to talk about this and to talk about the parts that drive them. And yes, it's true. I've worked with some of these CEO types that wound up having to quit because they couldn't stay in that system. the system was driven so much by the culture that they just couldn't stay in self and stay there. But I've worked with other people who were able to change the whole culture of their company. This is all so fascinating. I'm working on a frankly on public choice and the ranking of where our information and behavior is way down the bottom of the pyramid and worldview and status and things like that are.

higher and this just fits right in there. Stephanie, did you want to add something? It's very contextual. I have seen huge change when individuals change and when their mindset changes. At the same time, I also see that in order for, especially when we work on individual leaders, they are beholden to a much larger structure. So what I also see very often in friends and colleagues that are coaches and OD consultants is this Machiavellian attitude, if I work within a system that kind of creates success if I display these attributes. and then I go to a coach that kind of has a mission to make me feel.

I create an enormous amount of tension where all the change is down to me personally. So I think it creates the risk of a double bind where the individual has nowhere to turn to. because if they become more aware of their values, their life is just going to get a lot more difficult and certain things are unlikely to change in this superorganism. And what I see a lot of, and I don't think we talk about that enough,

is that this coaching approach often also produces results where the individual, instead of being equipped to change the system from within, actually is in a position where they leave the system, and a lot of them then become coaches and train coaches to do the same kind of thing. So it becomes a sort of self-exam. fulfilling industry. I think it's about time we ask some questions about that. And that's where I, where I think we need to come together where people who do inner change and individual change really need to come together with people who work on larger systemic change. And the methodologies

are going to be different and I need enough systems awareness and system sensing to know it what point do I need to intervene individually and at what point do I need to intervene structurally? And one example of that, if I may, is Sweden is a country that already has enormous amount of gender equity. When policies were introduced to take paternity leave, hardly anybody took this up. I think it was 6%. There was an enormous amount of attempts to change mindsets and big communication strategies that had absolutely no effect. Until there was a legal change that said that if there are two parents and not, and if both parents don't take some form of parental leave, nobody gets any mind.

And suddenly, 96% of all dads that were in a relationship took parental leave. And that allowed mindsets to change. So sometimes it's the inverse. I need to change the structure before I can actually have a context in which my personal change kind of is possible to find roots. You said something, well, you said many things that were kind of deep, but one thing landed that once people learn this and start operating from self-energy and they're in a riding high in the superorganism in corporate world, they leave because it no longer aligns with their self-energy. But the only job they can find in our culture is doing. coaching because there are no other jobs that align. So right there is a big gap. We need to have more jobs and vocations for people that come to terms with all this stuff. Yes, but they're

badly paid. And so it means that I also need to work on the parts that feel actually quite scared of less and lost. Yeah. And that is going to be a huge coaching. job for a lot of people in the not too distant future. Dick, do you want to add anything there? Just that that is true. And like I said, a number of the people I work with actually quit their jobs and moved much more toward service kinds of work. And, you know, fortunately had enough money they didn't have to worry so much about making that same level or they'd already worked with those materialistic parts. But that's what happens. When you become a lot of, you become a lot of self-led, you are less focused on getting things for yourself and you're more focused on

helping the collective. I don't imagine that it's binary being self-led or not self-led because there are times that I feel a clarity and a compassion and I'm my demons and trauma are at bay and I'm just forging ahead, but that's probably 10 or 15% of my life. So it's a spectrum, right? Totally. I'm the same. I have to say,

as I've healed a lot of my exiles, my percentage has gone up considerably. But, yeah, there are still times, and my wife's not here so I can say this, that she can trigger me like no one else. Well, she'll watch the podcast, Yeah, so you just said it in front of her. Okay.

And I totally lose it. And a protector comes in, and she's saying, look at you now. You know, tomorrow you're going to get up and tell everybody how to do it, but look at you now. But that's actually quite rare. And my first marriage was quite common. So the healing actually does work. And even when that happens now, I catch it quickly and I say, you know, give me a second, let me work with this, and I'll come out and say,

okay, yeah, I'm sorry this part took over and I'm going to keep working with it, see what it's protecting. So we're both able to do what we call a U-turn in our focus, rather than the protector wants to focus on how to change you. But ideally, you're going to go inside and find these parts and see why they got so triggered and be able to speak for them when you come back, and particularly speak for the exiles, the vulnerability that triggered them. And that gets you back on track really quickly.

So we're all on a journey and we're improving and the goal is to be more in self-energy and in service. And may I add to that that it's... also important to create structures that allow for that. And so it is so much easier for me to be in self-energy when I can tap into other people who hold me in this, who remind me, rather than seeing myself as it just all needs to happen in me. In the same way, it is easier to work on my trauma when I have others that are around that support me so that I don't feel alone. And I think Francis Weller, for instance, talked very powerfully on your podcast about the need for communal structures, rights and rituals that are not about accumulation and

constant busyness and success and striving with rights and rituals that invite us into relationship and belonging. It's so true, and I'll just share, maybe overly share, but holy crap, we've been on this call for an hour and a half. I didn't even realize that, but what I was about to say is I feel like I've been in self-energy since this conversation started because maybe they're allies and we're all. seeing the same thing and I feel more free or I've been wrapped attention to what the two of you

were saying. But you brought up Francis Weller. That was my first exposure to that conversation. I had never talked to him before. And it was all very novel and fresh and strange to me, this conversation about grief and the various aspects of our grief, including ancestral grief and grief for the natural world. And now, 18 months later, it finally makes sense what he was saying. So this is all a journey and an exploration internally and externally. So I, despite the length of our conversation, I still have a few more things that I wanted to ask the two of you. Stephanie, you have said in podcasts and elsewhere that our culture has lost its soul. And Dick, over the years, you've grown more open about a spiritual dimension to the internal family systems.

So maybe starting with you, Dick, could you share more about how you came to that conclusion? And then, Steffi, could you share more about what you mean by a culture's soul here and what the connections are to IFS? core self. Yeah, when I first stumbled onto self and clients, again, by just getting these parts to separate, this other person would pop out. I thought, isn't that great that there's this psychological aspect to us? Just like when we cut our arm, maybe our body knows immediately how to go into action to heal that.

Maybe that's what this is emotionally. And I held that view for quite a while. But I was finding the same essence, the same self in people who didn't have some traumas but had otherwise decent lives. I was finding the same self in people who had been tortured on a daily basis. And at some point I couldn't maintain that perspective that this was psychological. And I had some students also. And I came into this work as an atheist, basically, a scientific atheist. I had some students who started saying,

maybe this is like Buddha nature, or maybe this is like Adman and Hinduism, or maybe this is like Christ's consciousness. And I took a look, and lo and behold, each spiritual tradition had something parallel and described it in a similar way. Just didn't know how to access it as quickly, but it was very similar.

So I started to think, maybe this is a drop of something much bigger. And so that's my position now, that what I'm calling self is the particle state of the big wave of what many people call lots of different things. What I call the oceanic self,

but other people call Brahmin or the non-dual or there's lots of names for it. It's the place you go with psychedelics, it's the place you go when you meditate a lot, and that we can embody that, and that's why it can't be damaged, and that's why it shows up the same in everybody, because that's what it really is.

The self can't be damaged? Yes. So we have the protectors and the exiles and the firefighters and all those parts, but the true self within each of us is solid and there all the time and can't be damaged. Correct, that's right. And our parts don't know that,

so they think they have to protect us. And it's a big relief to them when self emerges and can say, no, I can protect you. You don't have to protect me. So this is a conversation that I'm currently having with Dick and I really love it. So originally, the way I use soul is different from what Dick has just described, because we can use soul in a sort of almost religious way.

And when Dick and I started the conversations around this, my use of soul. So Francis Weller was for a long time, a long time ago, a mentor of mine. And I studied Jung and mythology. And so from that tradition, soul is actually something rather than the ascension, is something that binds us deeply into life and gives our life meaning through participation. So it's not in me. It's also not in the world. It's this mercurial quality that is in between relations,

but that deeply gives our life meaning, and we can't define it, but we can sense it. We know when it's there. And from that perspective, that quality of soul communicates to us through the imaginal world, through dreams, through our bodily sensations, and just intuitive knowing

that is, if I try and grasp it intellectually, it's gone. But there's a, it can come in a longing for meaning. And that aspect of soul is not interested in happiness. That is so surface level.

So sometimes that aspect, that aspect of soul actually wants us to engage and really stay with the trouble, as Donna Harroway says, or to encounter difficulty in life in order for us to become large enough, to become fully, well, Jung would say, individuated. And so when our firsts, wayfinding, that's the notion. that I came with. And I thought, well, let's try an experiment and see souls apart. And so I experimented with that and I told Dick about it. And I was just so surprised because the beauty of IFS, it's so experimental and experiential.

It's not just a theory. It's like you have to ask the part. And so when people access that aspect, it said to them, I'm not a part. I'm also not self. I'm like there is something bigger and there is what Dick just described. And what was just for me so mind-blowing is that then that part, whatever you call it, started to take people on a journey. It's like, let me show you.

And a lot of them in it wasn't directed by me. It was suddenly this essence or presence, whatever it is, took over and it gave people an embodied experience of what it means to, well, Ticknahan talks about interbeing, like what it means to be interconnected with life. And I remember one person said, like there's something. happening in my brain. There's this tingling. I have never experienced it. It's kind of unpleasant and pleasant at the same time, but it is just so taking me into an experience that my intellectual brain can't, like I need to give up something of this holding on to control. Just to be clear, that was without psychedelics, just therapy session. Yes, and that's where I thought I haven't done psychedelics, but a lot of friends have.

And it was like a shamanic journey or a psychedelic experience, but through accessing this part and allowing it to take the experience into an imaginal realm where a lot is possible that in our physical body we can't hold so much complex. Well, as a rationalist and scientist who's deeply interested and curious about non-duality and these other things, it seems to me that our society is suppressing some natural emergent longing for meaning and creativity and connection to the broader world. and it's just been squelched down and muzzled. And so when a therapist, I'm just making this up, I'm hypothesizing, when a therapist opens up and allows that part to express itself

when it's been squelched, there could be an amazing response. Well, my translation of what Steffey just shared, and I've again, just this year, become open about the spirituality of IFAS and in addition to self being both the particle in the way aspect of the spirituality, I've had for 30 years or so the experience of having clients as they become more self-led. Suddenly these what we call guides show up and often do or act in the way that stuff you described.

when I would ask them what part of you are, what part of you are, and they say, I'm not a part like these other parts, I'm something else. And so there is now, for me, there is, getting fully into self provides a kind of opening or a portal to that level of wisdom that is, just around us wanting to help all the time. Young had one, he called Philemon, but he didn't go fully spiritual with it. He said it was part of the collective unconscious. And I don't know. I don't know from, you know, what it is exactly, but it's a phenomenon. And they're always very valuable and helpful, and some of them help in the way that stuff he described,

and some are just comforting and, and, uh, But, yeah, it's a whole phenomenon that I'm actually writing a book on now. I often argue on this show that you're both probably aware that human behavior is largely currently emergent from energy and the economy. And the great simplification, the contraction as we come off the fossil field peak is inevitable and coming either way. And so the real question is whether that dissent is brutal or humane. But many of our viewers come from an ecological energy, systems, finance, and myself even for a long time came from that background, might not initially see how frameworks like IFS can truly make an impact on that trajectory. So I'd like to ask each of you to directly respond to that critique. How might this type of work, if it were carried all the way up to institutions and cultures,

beyond just individuals, but starting with individuals probably, actively and tangibly support a more peaceful, lower suffering transition and simplification. Yeah, I think no psychological approach can stop the unfolding of biodiversity loss that is already underway. So the question is, how do we meet? and I think that was part of your question, how do we meet this loss and what kind of humans do we want to be as we face this and what do we want to lean into?

And I guess in a way that my answer would be very much what I've said already, it is both. I have to work on my capacity to mature through the suffering and the loss that I'm going to to encounter. And no amount of self-energy is going to make this loss go away. But it will help me to meet others with compassion, not just my own parts, but others with compassion. And I think we also see this in hospices, in hospice work, that when, and I don't say this to dramatize things in terms of we're all going to die, we don't know what the future is going to hold. But there's enormous beauty that can happen as things die either literally or metaphorically.

but we need containers that can hold this, which means work on myself, but also on creating systems and structures and rituals, and I don't just mean this in a sort of new agey kind of ritual way, rituals that hold people as they struggle, as they fall apart, as they rage, as they grieve, as they numb, and all of these parts. And I think IFS is a very powerful model that can contribute to this collective container building.

Well, that was beautifully sad, but I'll take a little different tack. So we need a different paradigm for understanding and relating to the mind. and the current paradigm has got us in the place we're in, which has to do with fighting ourselves inside and locking away parts of us and being dominated by the protectors that result from that. Without that shift in paradigm of understanding and relating to the mind, a lot of what we're going to try to achieve will be what Basin called,

or thought of as first-order change. So one of my goals, and it's not likely I'll achieve it in my lifetime, is for, and this might sound grandiose, but for IFS to replace the current paradigm, for understanding and relating to yourself. And that, then, if we could all access more self and heal so many of the parts that dry our extremes, that that would have an effect throughout.

And so that's what keeps me going. So, as you know, this podcast focuses a lot on energy, fossil energy, rebuildable energy like solar and wind. But we don't often talk about the self energy of human beings. Actually, never. So what would a world made up of people and leaders who are primarily, like we said, it was a spectrum, but to a large degree are led by self-energy look like.

Well, Stephanie alluded to this, but for me, it's all parallel. So if you can relate to even parts of you that ordinarily you would hate or that have caused you a lot of damage in your life, and you can come to love them and help them transform, then you can do the same to people that even resemble those parts of the outside world. And so hence the parallel. So Stephanie was talking about how when you really become self-led, your heart opens wide.

And you see beyond the protectors of your enemies, and you can see the exiles that drive them. And then you might still work to stop them, but you're doing it with a level of compassion that doesn't polarize. So my coach who introduced us, Dick, refers to that aspect of me, but of broader society as our Buddha nature.

So there is a little bit of an overlap, right, between Buddha nature and self-energy? Very much. Totally. Yeah. So, yeah, you have some percentage of humanity leading from Buddha nature. it would make a big difference. Yeah, I love the fact that Buddha Nature came in, right?

Because there's also, I'm also one to honor that there's lots of different kinds of knowing that are practiced in lots of areas in the world that are not IFS met, that bring us into a similar kind of wise mind. So we may come from lots of different. directions. But it's a state of being that is wide and open and can bridge polarities and hold them not as a conflictual thing that can collaborate with people that we don't like. And the beauty for me is what we know about social tipping points is that we don't need 100% of a culture to do that. We need 25% of a culture.

in order to have a social tipping point. And for me, that would not be a society where there's no conflict, where there's no kind of difficulty that will always be part of it, but the way we meet that is different. And if the policymakers have 25% of people in them that can hold, for me that that really is the attitude of maybe what in indigenous cultures we would ask of an elder to not be reactive and to think seven generations ahead we would also then create the context that encourages that so that we have feedback loops

that are actually encouraging this and where we create the structures that allow for and reward a stretch. We're coming up on two hours. This is one of the longer conversations I've had this year. And I actually have a lot more questions because I'm really curious about this. But I think I will just now ask each of you a couple of closing questions. that I ask all my guests, but this has been great. So taking off your IFS hat just briefly, maybe, what advice to each of you have for someone listening to this episode now,

aware of all the problems our culture faces? What personal advice do you have for them being alive at this time, at this moment? I would say just to know that there are no bad parts, of you, even though it seems like there are bad parts and that a lot of parts that have done damage in the world, and I have worked with a lot of people who've done heinous things, even those parts, if you go to them and get curious, we'll talk about the burdens they carry and what happened to whether they're protecting and so on, that that's a radical different understanding of human beings and that one way to start to change your, both internal world but also

the world around you, is to begin to get to know all kinds of different parts of you from a place of curiosity and that that ultimately will have a big difference in your life. I would say to remember that we are not alone, that, um, this predicament that we're in to remember that there are other life forms and other beings around and that we don't have to figure this out on our own and that wisdom can come sideways

from lots of different directions and to listen out for something that is more than human include that in the conversation. If you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your decision, what is one thing you would do to improve the future? I'm going to be a bit cheeky and say for people to not ask for the one thing, but to always allow for multiples and for an ecological

awareness to be taught to our children right from the start. But actually if it was the one thing, there's an artist, Tracy Waugh, I think, who asked policymakers that took decisions about water to step into water as they made the decisions into the polluted rivers. So there's something about including the places that we make decisions about in our decisions

and being in these places. That makes sense. Dick, any magic wand wishes? I guess it would be that there was more self-energy available that there would be more opening. in the world for that.

Thank you both for your time here today and for your ongoing work. Dick, do you have any closing comments for people watching, listening who understand and agree with what you've laid out here today? First, I really love this conversation. I really always love talking to Steffi. And, Nate, your interest and your questions really elicited a lot of, I think, important things that, you know, I couldn't have provided by myself. And so, and I'm very grateful to Steffi

for taking this places, I can't take it, and loving our collaboration. And, yeah, I just really enjoyed the whole process. I guess it's going to get dark, and if we can all kind of stay connected and hold on. One of the other of you alluded to this earlier, that there is a brighter future,

but it's not apparent right now, and that there are lots of light sources that don't get a lot of attention that are collaborating right now, and IFS is one, but there's lots of them. So there's hope. Steffi, I'll give you the closing word. Just, yeah, thank you.

Beautiful conversation. And I loved every bit of it. And, Ned, you were very present through your questions. And I kind of would also really would have loved to hear your, you know, for you to contribute. Well, then it would have been three and a half hours. I know. And my mom wouldn't have been happy, probably. So we'll have to look forward to a round two.

Wonderful to talk to both of you. Gaya Speed on all your work in the world, and to be continued, my friends. Thank you. Thanks for having us. If you'd like to learn more about this episode, please visit the great simplification.com for references and show notes. From there, you can also join our Hilo community and subscribe. to our Substack newsletter.

This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani. Our production team also includes Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann, Julia Maxwell, Gabriella Slayman, and Grace Brunfield. Thank you for listening,

and we'll see you on the next episode.