The Tim Ferriss Show - #492: Richard Schwartz — IFS, Psychedelic Experiences Without Drugs, and Finding Inner Peace for Our Many Parts

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Starting point is 00:03:26 year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Tim. start shaking. Can I answer your personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. Meet Tim Ferriss Show. Greetings, friends. This is a rare preface to the intro, so there is a separate intro, but after recording this episode, which I was very happy with, I wanted to add a number of additional notes. First, IFS is an incredible system and it really goes far beyond any type of trauma. So it applies to,

Starting point is 00:04:17 I would say, each and every one of us. It will help you work with your inner critic. It will help you to befriend inner voices, not in the pathological sense. And at one point in this episode, I do a live demo as the patient with Richard of IFS. So that is a real life, real subject matter demo. And be patient. This is a dense episode at points, and you may find yourself wondering, what the hell are these two talking about? Be patient. Just sit with it for a minute or two, and it'll get back to terra firma, and you will have your bearings. And you can think of IFS also, which has been very helpful to me personally, and I've seen some incredible, I mean, I would say almost miraculous before and afters in video of therapeutic sessions sessions can be compared to perhaps GTD, getting things done. So Getting Things Done by David Allen, incredible system,

Starting point is 00:05:10 David's been on the podcast, is excellent for getting rid of all the stuff, right? The work, death by a thousand paper cuts and open loops and things floating around different systems, things that aren't captured, getting all that stuff, which a lot of people would think of in a work capacity into some kind of flow and system so you can work with it and give yourself some peace of mind. Imagine if you could do that, if you had a system for doing that for your emotions, for the flare-ups of energy, of anger, of sadness, of self-flagellation, if you had some kind of system that allowed you to contend with all of that stuff. IFS is one such system. And also, this episode is the first time that I talk openly, and I did not plan on this, about everything that has happened since I published my episode on childhood abuse.

Starting point is 00:06:06 So there you have the preface to the intro. And now to the intro. But before I get there, I can't help but read one quote, which applies to all of this episode. It's a quote from Jack Kornfield. If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete. And with that, to the intro we go. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today, I've wanted to have on for years now, Richard Schwartz. He began his career as a family therapist and an academic at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is now on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. But it was at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he discovered that family therapy alone did not achieve full symptom relief. And in

Starting point is 00:06:50 asking patients why, he learned that they were plagued by what they called parts. And we'll get into what that means. These patients became his teachers as they described how their parts form networks of interrelationships that resembled the families he had been working with. He also found that as they focused on and thereby separated from their parts, they could shift into a state characterized by qualities like curiosity, calm, confidence, and compassion. He called that inner essence the self and was amazed to find it even in severely diagnosed and traumatized patients. From these explorations, the internal family systems, otherwise known as IFS, model was born in the early 1980s. IFS is now evidence-based

Starting point is 00:07:26 and has become a widely used form of psychotherapy, particularly with trauma. It provides a non-pathologizing, optimistic, and empowering perspective in a practical and effective set of techniques for working with individuals, couples, families, and more recently, corporations and classrooms. And I want to add just a little bit more context, which Richard may or may not disabuse me of, but one way to think about this is as a toolkit for reconciling parts of yourself that may have conflict amongst them or difficulties amongst them, parts of yourself that you've disavowed, and therefore it is not limited to heavily traumatized patients in a psychotherapeutic context. So what we're going to be talking about in this episode, I think applies to just about everyone. I'm going to

Starting point is 00:08:15 hedge by not saying everyone, although I, if I'm being honest, think everyone in many, many, many different contexts. So with all of that preamble said, Richard, welcome to the show. Thank you, Tim. I'm honored by those words and also just so excited to be with you. I've been a fan and particularly a fan of the session you did several ago where you were so disclosive about your own history. Just thought that was amazingly courageous and a service to everybody. Appreciate you saying that. And it's been one hell of a journey, both since the podcast and leading up to it. I was wondering what it's been like and what kind of feedback you've gotten.

Starting point is 00:09:01 Well, let's talk about it. I haven't spoken publicly about the after effects or the consequences, positive and unintended. I will say that for those people who don't of sexual abuse. So suffering at the friend of mine, Debbie Millman, who also is a survivor of sexual abuse, although we both take some issue with that word, survivor. But nonetheless, putting that aside, that was the episode. And I expected, since it was, in some respects, many years in the making, I anticipated putting it into book form after my parents passed away. So to ever see the light of day or be shared with the public for 15 to 20 years. And it was bizarre. I had girded myself for a tsunami of emotions and difficulty and maybe attacks and so on. I set rules with my team and policies so that I could stay entirely off of social media. We turned off comments on certain types of posts really to stem the flow. And the first two days, I'd cleared my entire calendar for that week to have space. The first two days were very tranquil.

Starting point is 00:11:14 And I don't know if that's because I was genuinely at peace, if there was some type of shock. I couldn't tell you. I don't claim to have that level of self-awareness, but it was very, very calm. And then having so much space for the rest of the week was very challenging. I typically run pretty hot in the sense that I like traveling in sixth gear and doing a lot. So having that much time to ruminate or to experience consciousness uncluttered by activity, in retrospect, maybe was a little harder on me than filling my calendar, if you can imagine that. I remember having Rabbi Jonathan Sachs on the podcast, and he said, to avoid depression

Starting point is 00:12:02 after certain points, he just made his calendar very busy. And he said he would recommend it to anyone. And I did the opposite. And it was very challenging. So I had a lot of, just as an example, and I haven't spoken to anybody publicly, but here we are. And I'm pretty well caffeinated, so I'll try to cut short my monologue here in a second. But I had a lot of anger and rage come up, but the way in which it came up was very surprising to me. I had this flood. I remember it was on the Wednesday after this podcast came out on Monday. This flood of memories of past slights, many of them really trivial, emails I didn't like or rejections that hurt my feelings or fill in the blank. And I was so pissed off all day on Wednesday. And I didn't try to fix it. I didn't

Starting point is 00:12:57 worry about it. But I thought it was really quite surprising that this anger was coming to the surface, but it wasn't specific to any of the abuse. It was in just dozens of trite or inconsequential slights from my past. And I was just pissed off all day long. And then when the podcast really hit escape velocity in the sense that it was widely shared enough that a lot of my friends had heard it, that's when things got a little harder. Because I would say of my very close male friends, and I don't have that many close friends by design, let's just arbitrarily say 20. I would say seven or eight of them reached out to me to confess that they had been sexually abused and never told anyone. And some of them sent me voice memos, really kind of tear-jerking, heart-shredding

Starting point is 00:14:01 audio. And I mean, just thinking about it, I'm like welling up with tears a bit because it was fucking emotionally difficult for them and also very challenging for me to act as a sort of recipient or support. And I'm glad they reached out. I'm really glad they reached out. I expected there would be a lot of this. So we received tons of emails, tons of blog comments, tons of handwritten letters from people describing their experiences. But that was really very difficult. And to wrap up, since this is an interview intended to ask you questions, I'm very, very, very proud of it. And I'm not proud often. That's something I have always had difficulty with. I don't accept praise well or let it land well. I'm really proud of it. And it did a lot of. I think it really served us to have some of your stature be that open about it and live to see the light of day because you have worked in many places with many people and some of those people perhaps have resigned to a life of darkness or a life that is shadowed by certain experiences, trauma, depression, suicidal ideation, etc.

Starting point is 00:15:44 Could you, and I don't know if this name is going to ring a bell because I'm not sure if you anonymized it or somebody else did, but there's a great piece in Medium inside the revolutionary treatment that could change psychotherapy forever. And in it, I read about the story of Roxanne and how that was part of developing IFS. Could you share that story, please? This was in the early 1980s, and I was a fresh graduate of a PhD program in marital and family therapy. And I was trying to prove that family therapy was the thing, found the holy grail and so i did an outcome study with a bunch of bulimic clients which was a syndrome that was new on the scene at the time and she was one of them and as i was trying to do this family therapy with all these clients and and succeeded and actually reorganizing

Starting point is 00:16:42 the families the way the book said to, they kept binging and purging. They didn't realize they'd been cured. And so out of frustration, I began asking why, and they started talking this language of parts, which was sort of bizarre to me. I thought maybe they were sicker than I thought because they were talking about these, what they called parts of them that could take over and make them do things they didn't want to do and had a lot of autonomy inside. And they were talking about them as if they were sort of full range personalities. And so I, after I got over my fear about it, I got curious and I started to try and get my clients to relate differently. So they would say something like, something bad happens in my life and this critic attacks me inside, calls me all kinds of brutal names. And that brings up another part of me that feels

Starting point is 00:17:36 totally worthless and alone and empty and desperate. And that feeling is so dreadful that to the rescue comes the binge to take me away from all that. But that brings back the critic. So I'm hearing about these interactions among different seeming to be entities inside of them. And as a family therapist, that was intriguing because that's what I studied, these interactions among family members. And I began to explore trying to change some of this. But I was assuming that these parts were what they seemed to be, which is what the field sort of still assumes, that the critic is just a critical parental voice that they internalized,

Starting point is 00:18:23 and the binge is an out of control impulse and so from that frame of understanding it you're limited what you can have your clients do so i was getting my clients to stand up to the critic and don't take it and control the binge and they were getting worse but i didn't know what else to do when i didn't. I was like the man in a hole with a shovel. You just dig deeper. So until this client, who in addition to being eating disordered, also cut herself on her wrists, and I knew had a bit of a sex abuse history. I didn't know the extent of it. And so I began to try and work with that cutting part in the way I had with these others. And so I would get her to have a dialogue with it in which she would try to tell it. It couldn't do this to her anymore. That was done. No more of this.

Starting point is 00:19:23 And I was sort of saying that to the part two. And after a couple hours of badgering it that way, it finally, in her head, agreed to not cut her that week. And then I opened the door to the next session, and she has a big gash down the side of her face. And I just collapsed emotionally inside when I saw that. And I spontaneously said, I give up. I can't beat you at this. And she said, the part said, I don't really want to beat you. And that was a turning point because I shifted out of that controlling, coercive place to just being curious. And I said, so why do you do this to her? And I had her ask that. And the part said, sort of told the story of how when she was being sexually abused, it had to get her out of her body

Starting point is 00:20:14 and contain the rage that would get her more abuse. And I shifted again. Now, I don't see it as just, you know, I had appreciation for it, but it was like a hero in her life. It really saved her during those abuse scenes. And as I listened to it more, it sounded like it was still living back in that time, like it still thought she was five years old and it still had to protect her in this way. And that it carried these extreme beliefs and emotions that we call burdens about the world, about her, about how dangerous everything was, that drove it. These extreme beliefs and emotions were like a virus, it seemed,

Starting point is 00:20:59 like the coronavirus that drove the way it operated. And so as I got all that, I started to think, maybe these parts aren't what they seem. Maybe they are like kids in a family, a dysfunctional family, where they're forced out of their naturally valuable states to be in roles to protect the family or because of the dynamics of the family that aren't who they are and don't serve them but they think are necessary. And in exploring that, it turns out that's true.

Starting point is 00:21:32 That, first of all, we all have these things I'm calling parts that they called parts that, from my point of view, aren't the product of trauma, which has been the way it's been viewed, you know, multiple personality disorders. The unitary brain got shattered by the trauma. Well, for me, it's the natural state of the mind to be multiple, to have these parts, and they're all valuable. We wouldn't be born with anything that wasn't valuable, and they come into our life from birth with us. And then trauma and attachment injuries and things like that force them out of their naturally valuable states into roles that they don't like, but they think are absolutely necessary to keep us safe

Starting point is 00:22:16 and then can become symptoms and problems. But they also, if they are listened to and actually loved ultimately by our clients and ourselves will transform so anyway i got rolling on this but well that's why we have a long form podcast you can get rolling and i just want to say for people who are trying to envision what this might look like, and you and I will attempt to do a live demo of this using me as a guinea pig a bit later in this conversation, but I recall the first time that I saw IFS in action. And I will say that the, and I'm sure you've heard this before, but the internal family systems brand name, so to speak, initially led me to have a bit of a knee-jerk aversion because I assumed that I would have to – I took it very literally.

Starting point is 00:23:14 I assumed, although I didn't read the internal, I wasn't quite sure what that referred to, that I would have to sit down with my mom and my dad and my brother and do family therapy of some type. And I was like, I'm out. I don't want to do it. But when I saw IFS in action for the first time, it was when I was going through the MAPS MDMA-assisted psychotherapy training program. As an auditor, I'm not in any way licensed as a psychotherapist or psychologist or otherwise. But as an auditor, I wanted to experience the program and was able to see session footage of people with severe PTSD, so post-traumatic stress disorder, in many cases vets, who certainly with the amplification and assistance of MDMA,

Starting point is 00:24:04 but nonetheless, in this particular case, under the care of Michael and Annie Mithoffer, going through IFS to see where someone could start with their, say, relationship or thoughts, perspective on rage and where they would end up was truly mind-blowing. I mean, to watch it in video form was so impactful. And I want to highlight one aspect of that that really struck a chord with me on a whole lot of levels. And I'm going to do this by referring back to this medium piece. And I'll link to this medium piece in the show notes for people at tim.blog.com slash podcast if you want to read this as piece. And I'll link to this medium piece in the show notes for people at tim.blog slash podcast if you want to read this as well. But I'm going to read a paragraph, and then I'm going to dive into one particular aspect of it. So here we go. Frank Anderson, a former clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, was working as a staff psychiatrist at

Starting point is 00:24:57 Bessel van der Kolk's renowned trauma center in Brookline, Massachusetts, when he first encountered Schwartz and IFS. For people who don't know the name Bessel van der Kolk, he's the author of a book called The Body Keeps the Score, which is a bit of a classic in this world. All right, so back to Frank Anderson. First encountered Schwartz and IFS, it flipped his world upside down. Quote, I'd been working with severe trauma for a long time at the trauma center, and I was one of the many people who go, oh, wow, Anderson recalls, within the mental health world, it's a huge paradigm shift. IFS is very non-pathologizing. Every part, every symptom has a positive intention. That kind of blows therapists away. What do you mean shooting heroin has a positive intention? What do you mean cutting yourself or

Starting point is 00:25:38 binging has a positive intention? End quote. So the non-pathologizing nature of IFS is what I want to hone in on because you very often hear, and this is speaking as a layperson, if you start kind of wading through the books and literature and even in-person conversations in psychiatry, you very often hear the term maladaptive, right? This behavior is maladaptive. What this person's doing is maladaptive, meaning it's some kind of perversion of an adaptation that doesn't fit, at least the way that I hear it. You could correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding and the way that I've been able to finally find some compassion for myself and parts of myself is to recognize that the things that we view in ourselves as totally fucked up, totally self-destructive, totally

Starting point is 00:26:32 fill-in-the-blank pejorative term, very often are not maladaptive. They are perfectly adaptive. They've just outlived their usefulness, or they've kind of expired, but they still remain, if that makes any sense. And so the non-pathologizing and any piece of what I just said, I'd love to hear you respond to. Well, you said it really well. And it's been a tough sell in my field, but that is what I found back with that client and subsequently with thousands of clients, not just myself, but all the people using this around the world, are finding that these things we thought were symptoms are maladaptive in the sense that in our current context, they may not be needed, but they were definitely needed. They were like heroes, like I was saying, back when we were being hurt, and they get stuck back there. So, again, I'm a family therapist, so I'm trying to understand the context of all kinds of both external people's behavior and internal. And the internal part's behavior made total sense back when you were being hurt. And they think they

Starting point is 00:27:46 still need to do it because they think you're still in the same kind of vulnerability. So yeah, so it has been a tough sell. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. The new year is here and it marks a fresh start for your small business. Whether you're shifting business hours or hiring more remote employees, one thing that remains unchanged is the importance of having the right people on your team. When your business is ready to make that next hire, LinkedIn Jobs can help by matching your role with qualified candidates so you can find the right person quickly. And to lend a helping hand,

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Starting point is 00:29:06 conditions do apply. I would say that many of the most important and impactful inputs that I've had in the last handful of years from a healing perspective. And furthermore, not just from a healing perspective, getting back to whole, but even just becoming a, hopefully, I know this is a really generic term, like better human. So not just getting to baseline, but actually going beyond baseline in some ways has related to self-compassion. And Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach would be a very, in some respects, Buddhist mindfulness approach to that. And I feel like IFS is a very tactical, practical framework for actually getting after it almost in a tennis match type of way. I mean, not that it's adversarial, but with the assistance of someone else. And I'd love to explore what some of these parts are

Starting point is 00:30:12 and to explore, for instance, protectors and some of these other labels just to give people an understanding of what this looks like in practice. What do you think the best way to do that is? Is it giving a conceptual overview of some type? Is it just getting into it and you and I rolling up the sleeves and seeing what happens? If I gave a brief conceptual overview, then what we do with each other would make more sense to people. So let me do that. So as I was exploring this with clients back in the day, I'm a systems person.

Starting point is 00:30:49 I'm looking for distinctions and patterns. And the big distinction that leaped out immediately as I was doing it with more and more clients was between parts that were very young. young, and the culture has been called these wonderful inner children, who were vulnerable and sensitive and often were the parts of us that are the most hurt by the traumas. They take it the most personally, and they get the most frightened and feel the most worthless often. And once those young, formerly happy-go-lucky, delightful, creative inner parts of us, once they get hurt that way, they have the power to overwhelm us and give us all the burdened emotions that they carry. So not knowing we're locking up our most juicy parts, we tend to try and get away from them and put them in inner basements or abysses or caves. So I call them the exiles. And we've all done that to one degree or another, even if you haven't had a lot of trauma. There are ways our culture or your family didn't accept certain parts of you, and so you had

Starting point is 00:32:06 to move away from them. And we do it not realizing. We think we're just moving away from dreadful memories or sensations or emotions, but we are locking up these parts of us that are so wonderful and have so many talents when they're not locked up and when they're not stuck in the past. So when you have a lot of exiles, then the world becomes a lot more dangerous and you feel a lot more delicate. So other parts have to jump into other protective roles, some of which are designed to control the world so your exiles don't get triggered. Because if they get triggered, then it's like flames of emotion threaten to consume you, and these protectors often think you're going to die if you stay with that.

Starting point is 00:32:55 So there are parts that will keep you a certain distance from people. There are parts that will control your appearance so you don't get rejected, parts that try to make your performance perfect so you get a lot of accolades to counter the worthlessness. So all that we call protectors. Those are manager protectors because they're managing a lot. They're like what in family therapy we used to call parentified dinner children. In a family where the parents abdicate, the kids have to

Starting point is 00:33:26 become the parents. They were called parental children. This happens inside of us too. These younger parts have to kind of run our lives. And they get extreme because they're in over their heads. Often they become these critics. They're yelling at us just to try and get us to behave. They don't know what else to do than to yell at us. And so those are some of the common manager roles. Others are these massive caretaking parts that don't let us take care of ourselves, only take care of everybody else. There's just a lot of common manager roles. When that doesn't work and the world breaks through those quote-unquote defenses and triggers our exiles it's a big emergency and so there's another

Starting point is 00:34:13 set of parts who's on call almost who immediately goes into action to take us out to get us higher than the flames of emotion or to douse them with some substance or to distract us until they burn themselves out. So those we call firefighters because they're fighting the fire of this exiled emotion inside of you. And we all have some of those and most of us have a kind of hierarchy of them. If the first one doesn't work, we go to the next one. If that doesn't work, the next one. and the top of the hierarchy is often suicide. It's a big kind of comfort to many people to know if things get bad enough, there's always that safety net, exit strategy. But other kinds of firefighter activities

Starting point is 00:34:58 include a lot of addictions. And for me, it sounds like for you too, work is one of mine. Firefighter activities, eating was one of mine. It's not anymore. So, you know, those are some of the common firefighters. So most all of us walk around with some version of that system. The more trauma you experienced, the more exiles you have, then the more extreme your parts often are. In addition to all of that, though, and this is actually the big discovery in IFS, as I was doing this work and I would, as a family therapist, try to have dialogues

Starting point is 00:35:34 inside among these different parts like I would in a family, often I'd have to get one part to kind of separate or move back or step out for a second so I could have two others talk to each other because the other was interfering. And as I started doing that process of getting parts to open more space inside and not be chattering all the time, slowed it down, it was like another person would pop out who took the lead and was just immediately curious about these parts, or even had a lot of compassion suddenly out of the blue, and also was calm and was confident.

Starting point is 00:36:17 And the parts would relate well to this person. And when I asked what part of you is that, clients would say some version of that's not a part like these others, that's myself. So I came to call that the self with a capital S. And it turns out, and this is really totally amazing, but given all the 40 years we've been doing this and the thousands of people doing it around the world, I can safely say that that self, capital S, is in everybody, can't be damaged, and knows how to heal, and can be accessed simply by getting these parts to open space, because it seems it's just beneath the surface of them. So when I'm working with somebody, I will wait until I hear some of those C words. In addition to the four I mentioned, there's also courage, clarity, creativity, and connectedness. So I'm waiting to hear when my client is in that place before I have them work with their parts.

Starting point is 00:37:23 And when they work with their parts from that place, they just them work with their parts. And when they work with their parts from that place, they just naturally know how to heal. If I may just reflect on what you said for a second, this is for people who have never had a psychedelic experience. If we look at the etymology of psychedelic, I mean, it is mind manifesting in a sense, if we want to roughly translate it to English. And it's incredible how much your description of working with IFS parts and then this self, right, this sort of central observer who has, as maybe a Stan Grof would put it, an innate healing intelligence or something like that, how much it mirrors what some people can only achieve with drugs, meaning psychedelic drugs or plants or fungi of some type, right? It's pretty remarkable that you're able to sort of engineer and back into, without any type of pharmaceutical intervention, something very similar and

Starting point is 00:38:35 get to a very similar place. Let me comment on that for a second. Sure. Because you mentioned Michael and Annie Methofer, and in phase one, when Michael was using MDMA with these mostly combat vets, but PTSD clients, and he started talking excitedly about this because they're both well-trained IFS therapists, I started to feel more and more validated because for some reason, the MDMA seems to get all your protectors to relax. And so you, just by virtue of having taken the medicine, you're in self with those C words that I described earlier.

Starting point is 00:39:17 Right. And he found, and he kept track of this. He tracked that phase one group and he found that over 70% spontaneously started doing IFS without any coaching from him. Because in the protocol, they set it up where they couldn't lead the client. It was all kind of following. Yeah, non-directional, right. Exactly. So that confirmed to me that I had just stumbled onto a process that people naturally know how to do when they access enough self, and they'll do it on their own. And that's true too. It's become a kind of life practice where people do this on a daily basis often. So how can we demonstrate this for folks? And I'm not going to lie, I'm a little nervous about

Starting point is 00:40:07 opening the kimono on the podcast, but I seem to be setting a trend in doing that with recent episodes, so I might as well just go for it and for a penny and for a pound. So what's a good way for you and I to have a chat to try to illustrate some of these things? Well, if there is a part of you you'd like to get to know better or change your relationship with, or if there's something still getting in your way from, you mentioned that there was a very angry part of you that came up and had all these, what in retrospect seemed like minor quibbles, but we could go there. It's really up to you, not exiled or not disavowed, but it's not as high volume as it used to be even a few years ago. But I do think that the anger is very often a byproduct or a symptom of fear.

Starting point is 00:41:23 And so the fear, I think, could be worth digging into. And something that I've noticed as I have successfully contended with and healed from depression, that anxiety has become more pronounced. And this sort of vague sense of unease that something bad can and will happen, that type of anxiety that I then create narratives around because I'll say, I'll sort of have this wave of anxiety and then explain it in all sorts of ways that may not be accurate. But that has become something that I've noticed more and more as depression has become less and less of an ongoing battle for me in the last five or six years. Okay. I've tried many things to move from a place of anxiety and fear to a place of trust and faith. And God damn, is it hard.

Starting point is 00:42:34 Maybe I'm just exposed to too many ugly aspects of the world where I get to see really bad behavior and sort of Lord of the Flies type dynamics quite a bit. But that is something I wouldn't mind digging into, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Happy to help you with that. And, you know, that trust in the world is safe is tough to get through willpower. So we'll try it this other way.

Starting point is 00:43:05 So are you ready? I'm as ready as I'm going to be. Okay. So the way we start is have you focus on that anxiety and find it in your body or around your body. Okay. And as you notice it there, where do you find it by the way uh right now as i'm thinking about i feel in the throat and that's quite common like a constriction in the throat okay uh i also will feel it basically right over the heart like a constriction on the left side of my chest okay but right now i'm feeling it mostly in the throat. All right. So let's start there.

Starting point is 00:43:47 So as you notice it there in your throat, tell me how you feel toward that part of you that's so anxious. Well, if I'm being honest, I suppose I want it to go away. I want it to let go so that I can look at my life and my surroundings and everything's fucking great. I mean, we're like, you know, so I get very upset at that part. Which I can understand. It does get in your way.

Starting point is 00:44:42 But we're going to ask the one who's angry at it and the one who wants it to go away, both of those parts, we're going to ask to give us a little space to get to know it just for a few minutes and actually maybe try to help it in a different way rather than try and make it go away. So just see if those parts would be willing to relax in there. So you could open your, open your mind to it a little bit. So the,

Starting point is 00:45:13 just for clarity, the angry part and the anxious part, fearful part, I'm asking both of those to kind of stand down for a few minutes. No, no, no, no.

Starting point is 00:45:21 We want the anxious part to stick around. We want the one who doesn't like the anxious part to step back and the one who wants to get rid of it. So just see if you can open your mind to the anxious one. All right. So how do you feel toward it now? I feel more empathetic. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:51 I mean, it just seems like a scared child. There you go. So let it know you have some empathy for it, and you care about it, and you want to get to know it better. And just ask what it wants you to know. And don't think of the answer, Tim. Just wait for something to come from your throat. Yeah, it already came as soon as you prompted.

Starting point is 00:46:16 It was, I don't know what to do. Yeah. That's what came to mind. And how do you feel toward it now as you get how sort of confused it feels? Yeah, I feel a lot of compassion for it. So let it know. Let it know you get. It's confused and scared.

Starting point is 00:46:38 And just see if there's more it wants you to get about. It's that feeling of I don't know what to do. Just see if there's more that comes. Yeah, I don't want to mess things up. Like, I'm not trying to mess things up. Something along those lines. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 00:46:59 And let it know. You just want to keep getting to know it. Why does it worry so much about messing things up? Whatever it wants you to know about all that. Well, it seems like... It just seems like kind of a confused, scared child. And I guess what it's trying to communicate is that it's not intentionally trying to mess up my life.

Starting point is 00:47:33 It's just unsure of how to sort of quell that fear. Uh-huh. And do you see this child in there or you just sense him uh yeah it's you know it's this is kind of a uh you know an unusual practice and visualize it so i'm highly visual. So for me right now, as I'm talking to you, I'm looking out a window and I kind of feel, at least I've been envisioning this part, this scared part to my left, like the kind of left peripheral visual field. And for whatever reason, it's not a child. Like in my, it's actually an adult version of myself that just has the fear and the wide-eyed look and the scattered nature of a fearful child. Okay. And as you see him there in your periphery, how close would you say you are

Starting point is 00:48:48 to him in terms of feet away? Like eight to 10 feet. Okay. And is it possible to get closer to him and turn more toward him? Yep. It's possible. So how close can you get now well since i'm sitting in front of a mic i'm kind of inviting him over okay good otherwise it's going to make this podcast very difficult so so i invited him to have a seat at the table so we are about uh four four and a half feet away now we're we're sitting more or less directly across the table from each other. Okay, good. And once again, just let him know

Starting point is 00:49:31 that you get these other parts have been very hard on him, but they're not around right now, and that you actually care about him. And just see how he reacts. Yeah, seems to be sort of softening and relaxing in my mind's eye.

Starting point is 00:49:50 Okay. And just again, ask if there's anything more he wants to know about his anxiety and confusion. There's nothing coming to mind immediately. He's just sort of sitting more relaxed at the table. Ask him this question then. Does he protect other parts of you? Hmm. I was going to say, I don't know if I'm making this up or not, but I guess one could make the argument that I'm making none of it up or making all of it up. give the commentary. But yeah, the part of me that was abused, the part of me that was

Starting point is 00:50:48 constantly at risk of some unpredictable abuse as a little kid. And it wasn't limited to the two to four sexual abuse. There was was a lot of other i was bullied really really severely up until about sixth grade it's very very small kid so it's there's a lot of unpredictability in my life uh just kind of start to finish as as a kid so protecting uh that part of me that was always kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Okay. So this is a kind of choice point for you, Tim, because I'm happy to go to that one,

Starting point is 00:51:33 but that would be more vulnerable and more exposing. So it's your call. And I don't want you to feel any pressure to do it. Well, I mean, I don't want to get into specifics of the sexual abuse or anything like that. No, you won't have to disclose anything about what you see. Yeah, okay, well, let's try it. Let's give it a go. Well, before we do, just check around inside and see if there is any fear about doing it.

Starting point is 00:52:02 I want to be sure we're doing it with full permission. I mean, there's a little bit of trepidation, but I know I can always cut. Right. I am the master of the audio, so I feel okay with that since we're not live casting this. All right. So then go ahead and focus on that abused part of you

Starting point is 00:52:26 and find him in your body or around your body. Hmm. Okay. Where do you find him? You know, I'm also I'm still feeling the dominant constriction is in the throat.

Starting point is 00:52:54 And I also find myself wondering if this frightened part of me is one and the same with the abused, but I don't want to start. No, you'll get the answer if you just ask. Ask if that's the case and just wait for the answer.

Starting point is 00:53:21 Yeah, I think it is the same. Okay, good. I think it is the same. All right. and you're still across the table from him yep still across the table and ask if he trusts now that you care about him yeah he does all right then if he's up for it and ready then tell him to show you and let you feel and sense and see whatever he needs you to about how bad it all was and again don't think tim just wait and see what comes to you and you don't have to disclose any of it, but you can disclose what feels okay.

Starting point is 00:54:26 Yeah, it's just a horrible stream of images and scenes of abuse and violence and a fearful little kid who was just constantly hypervigilant because of that. And are you okay watching all that? I mean, I don't enjoy watching it, but I feel like I can handle it. Yeah. So let him know you're okay so far. You really want to get how bad it was for him as much as he wants you to. So just tell him you're ready. Just see if there's more.

Starting point is 00:54:59 Yeah, there's more. Nothing shockingly new, but just painting a fuller picture of a, you know, pretty scared, pretty sad childhood for a lot of the time. Not always, but for a lot of the time. Yeah. So it's really good that you're getting how bad it was and getting more of the of either the details or the emotions. And just tell him to keep going if he needs to. We're going to stay with him until he feels like you really get it now. Yeah, I feel it petering out a bit.

Starting point is 00:55:40 I mean, I got a lot, So I feel like I've received what has been sent. But just ask him directly and see if he agrees this is what he wanted you to get. Yeah. It would entail so. Alright, Tim.

Starting point is 00:56:00 So now I want you to go to that boy in that time period. Some boy in that time period, some point in that time period, and be with him in the way he needed somebody. And just tell me when you're in there with him. Yep, I'm there. And how are you being with him?

Starting point is 00:56:23 Oh, well, he's actually sitting in a chair. Another chair. It's like the board of directors here. I'm sitting in another chair just a few feet across from me. Okay. But you're in that time period with him? Is that true? I can be, yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:44 If you want me to sort of transport myself back to that time period, I can do that too. That is what I want, yes. Okay, got it. Tell me when you're back there with him. Okay, I'm there. And how are you being with him back there? I'm sitting on the floor. He's playing with blocks on the floor and I'm

Starting point is 00:57:06 just sitting there being with him in the living room. And how is it for him to have you there? Can you tell? I think it's comforting to have sort of a non-threatening, I suppose in some ways protective male there. So he does seem to acknowledge you're there and feels comforted. Yeah, feels comfortable. All right, then ask him what he wants you to do for him back there before we take him out to a good place. There's something he wants you to do,

Starting point is 00:57:47 some person he wants you to deal with, whatever he wants. Yeah, this is where we get into territory that might not make it onto the live version here. Hmm. Yeah, I mean, he would like me to say a few things to some people, I would say, for sure. I don't know if I'll get into the specifics, but I can think

Starting point is 00:58:15 about the specifics, certainly. Yeah, you don't have to disclose what you say. It's just for you to do for him. So while he watches, go ahead and say those things to those people. Okay, done. okay done and ask him what that was like for him to watch you do that for him um how well you know the he he has a sort of my hero type look on his face. That's great.

Starting point is 00:59:10 To have somebody stand up for him in that way. That's right. So tell him you're going to be doing that for him from now on. And see if he'd like to leave that time and place with you. And come to a safe, comfortable place now. Okay. Yes. Okay, so take him wherever he'd like to go. It could be the present, it could be a fantasy place, whatever he'd like. All right.

Starting point is 00:59:47 Where do you have him? Took him to this farm property that I own. Lots of trails and woods and room to play and roam. Beautiful. All right. And tell him he can stay there. He never has to go back to that time, and you're going to take care of him. And given that,

Starting point is 01:00:12 ask him if you'd like to unload the feelings and beliefs he got back there from those times. Answers yes. And ask him where he carries all that, in his body or on his body. First thing that came to mind, I don't know why, is the traps, like the trapezius, kind of between the neck and the shoulders.

Starting point is 01:00:40 Yeah. And ask what he'd like to give it all up to, light, water, fire, wind, earth, anything else. What he would like to give it up to, like an element? Yeah. It doesn't have to be. It could be anything else. I think I'd... Could you give me, again, some examples? Just because I'm not sure how to answer that.

Starting point is 01:01:08 Yeah, so light or water or fire, wind, earth, anything else. That's a light. Just check with him. Let's have him pick. Okay, revision, fire good all right tim so set up a fire for him and tell him to take all that out of the place in his body and to let the fire take care of it just put it in the fire until it's all gone. Done.

Starting point is 01:02:05 Good. How does he feel now without it looks a lot happier looks ready to jump up and down that's great and before he does that if he wants to he can invite into his body qualities that he'd like to have and you can just see what comes into him now yeah confidence that he'd like to have, and you can just see what comes into him now.

Starting point is 01:02:27 Yeah, confidence. Uh-huh. That's the first one. Okay. Yeah. That might be all he wants. So he seems good? Seems good, yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:50 All right, so let's bring in this original guy, the anxious adult guy. Yep. Have him see how this boy is doing now and just see how he reacts. Yeah, just deep, deep exhales, kind of sighing exhales of relaxation that's great and you can see if there's anything he'd like to put in the fire too just ask him yeah okay so you did yeah let me just make sure that i envision that really clearly give me one more sec sure yep done just just to to add some color for people who are listening along i mean hopefully people can listen to this and kind of take themselves through it as well uh possibly but it's so fucking bizarre how these things sometimes work i mean and it's uh also kind of magical and in a sense i mean because he's he took fear out of his abdomen and put it into the fire

Starting point is 01:04:07 but was not premeditated I don't know where that came from but who cares I mean it's good enough what you're getting is that this is a real other world it's not like you imagine it

Starting point is 01:04:22 so okay how does he seem now yeah much much more at ease good and uh yeah um does that feel complete for now? Yeah, I think so. I think so. And I'd love, if you mean by complete, we can,

Starting point is 01:04:49 we, we would then do sort of a post game analysis and you can add, add onto that. Yes. That feels complete for now. So we can, uh, yeah.

Starting point is 01:04:59 So focus back outside. And before we stop, just notice your throat and see how it feels now yes that's it's like if it was at an eight volume before it's at like a two two or less volume now that's great okay yeah we can do our post game so maybe let's start with you and what it was like i mean this is i'm gonna sound like a one-trick pony here so you'll have to forgive me and i'll beg forgiveness from my audience also but it feels very psychedel of the non-pathological therapeutic splitting

Starting point is 01:05:50 of the psyche or maybe it's just the recognizing of separate parts of the psyche better put right that uh i mean it puts you in a very non-ordinary state, or at least that was my experience. Very much, yeah. And it's the same state that shamans take people into. It's a real other world. And I stumbled onto this way of accessing it and operating it. And in terms of my post-camp, we could do all that because you had access very quickly to a lot of self, with a capital S. And I gauged that by when I asked you initially how you felt toward the guy in your throat, and you said you didn't like him, and you wanted to get rid of him,

Starting point is 01:06:46 and then I had those parts step back, and I asked now, how do you feel toward him? Immediately, you had empathy. You remember that? Yeah, I do. And so, that's what we find over and over. When these other parts step back, you enter that empathic, compassionate leader place. And once we got you in that place, I knew we would be able to do a lot because you just started to do it. I led you to some degree, but your parts responded really well to you as this leader that they didn't really know that well. And so, yeah, then we could get to know the anxious man. And so he turned out to be a manager in that classification I gave earlier.

Starting point is 01:07:33 He was trying to keep you from taking risks probably and sort of manage your life through anxiety. And then there was a point where I had you ask him if he protected somebody else remember that I do and then he lets you know he protected this exiled boy who was still stuck back in those traumas those scenes of abuse and bullying and so the way we heal those parts is what you did, which was to become a compassionate witness to the boy so he feels like finally you really get everything about how bad it was. And then to actually go to him in that time period and do a redo in the sense of being with him and talking to the people he needed you to talk to. And for him, you know, people say you can't change the past. For these parts in this inner world, that literally changes their experience of what happened.

Starting point is 01:08:38 And so then we could take him out to a safe place on your farm and at which point these exiles generally if they trust they can stay there and you're going to take care of them are willing to give up the emotions and beliefs they've been carrying even though i don't know how old you are but it's it sounds like it's maybe been 30 years or so yeah it's been a been a long Yeah, I'm 43. I forget how old I am. That's probably a sign I'm getting older. Well, wait until you're my age, yeah. Yeah, so that's what we did. And then once we unburdened, is my language for letting all that go,

Starting point is 01:09:20 he gave up the fire, and we bring in the qualities of confidence, then we have the protector come in and see he doesn't have to protect this boy anymore. And he, as you can see, felt much more relaxed, and we could help him unburden too. So that was actually quite a piece of work. And again, the reason we could do so much is because you had so much access to self pretty quickly. For many other people, it takes a long time to get those other parts to step back and not interfere. Yeah. Parts work is just... You would think that at this point in my life, having been exposed to parts work in different ways, in very different contexts also, in some cases enhanced and in some cases not, that it would just be another day at the office.

Starting point is 01:10:16 But I am always, when I experience it firsthand, so impressed by how powerful parts work is and can be. And I would love to hear you speak to how this applies to people who might suffer from suicidal ideation. And I'm referring to another editorial piece. And there's a quote here that I'm going to read from one such patient or client who had suicidal ideation. And here's the quote. For me, the most amazing thing was learning about a part of me that was suicidal and knowing that that was just a single part of me. It wasn't my entire being. That changed my world. I try to share that with a lot of people because I know a lot of people who get very depressed and sometimes feel suicidal. If you can step back from that feeling and realize that it's just a part of you that's trying to take away your pain

Starting point is 01:11:11 and suffering, then you can move through it and find a different way to deal with it to help that part. Could you expand on this or speak to it, give examples, however, whatever makes sense in terms of fleshing this out. Because speaking as someone who's came very close to taking his own life, this is a very, very, very big lens swap for someone who is suicidal or suffering from suicidal ideation. So it really does help to know that all these things aren't you. They're parts of you that often are just trying to protect. So for me, there aren't alcoholics.

Starting point is 01:11:53 I'm against all these monolithic labels because, yes, you've got a part that tries to protect you by getting you drunk all the time. But it's just a part of you. And it's one of your firefighters. And then most people don't realize that if they took away your drinking, suicide is the next one on the list, the next one on the ladder. And that would be jumping in, if not for the drinking. So then you got to honor the drinking part for keeping you alive. And I'll go to suicide. So I've worked many, many years with highly suicidal clients. And they, as you can imagine, as you probably were, were terrified of that part of them. And like you said, they were so blended with it, they thought it was who they were.

Starting point is 01:12:39 So yes, that first step of seeing it is just a part, like you just did with the anxiety. Not only that, but if you began to get to know it, I can tell you the common dialogue we have. So I would say to you, Tim, ask that part why it wants to kill you, or what's it afraid would happen if it didn't kill you? Do you want to give a spontaneous answer to that? Oh, I wasn't. I didn't have my shoes on ready for the starting gun. Could you say that one more time and then I'll... Yeah, it's okay. No, I'll give you the common answer. So, I would have you ask the part, why it wants to kill you, what's afraid, what happened if it

Starting point is 01:13:21 didn't kill you? Generally... Yeah, I mean you generally the first thing comes to mind is i just want it to stop like there's a loop that i can't turn off it's just a thought loop of hatred or self-loathing or whatever it might be and then there's another part that knows life is pretty good and it's like well shit if this is never going to stop what's the fucking point i just want it to stop that's that would be that's right and so if we were doing the work i would say ask this part if we could get that loop to just to stop in a different way without having to kill you would it still want to kill you and most of these parts say no no yeah but the answer would be no yeah it would be no but i don't think you can do that, or I wouldn't try to kill him, right? And I'd say, if you give me a chance, I can prove that we can.

Starting point is 01:14:09 I guarantee it. So I'm what I call a hope merchant. I'm selling hope to hopeless systems. And I wouldn't do it if I didn't know we could follow through and actually stop that loop. So that's generally how we work with suicide. And once these suicidal parts trust that there is this alternative, they know they're going down with the ship. They don't want to die. So if there is an alternative, they'll go for it. And do you stop the loop just to not leave that cliffhanger of a promise? some fashion getting them to the point where they are speaking from the place of the self where they

Starting point is 01:15:06 can excuse and re-invite different parts including the part with the loop is that how you shepherd them to that yeah yeah it's accessing self and then finding the parts that are creating the loop and then doing what we did with your parts you a different version of it, because they would be different parts. And then just like as you found, this one doesn't have to keep you so anxious now, they wouldn't have to keep doing that loop. And then the suicidal part would see that and would say, oh, okay, I guess I was wrong. You could pull this off. So yeah, be like that. There are circumstances where the external world is so dreadful for somebody that you can't just do this inside. You have to actually, I'm still a family therapist, so I'm going to still do what I can to change that external context too. So I didn't want to be facile and say, all you got to do is this healing inside and everything will be fine.

Starting point is 01:16:07 Yeah, sometimes you got to take the rock out of your shoe and not just change how you relate to the rock. That's right. The quote I was going to read is from Carl Rogers. And I know you are familiar with this quote. And it is, quote, the curious paradox is that when i accept myself just as i am then i can change end quote is there anything you would like to like to say after my mention of that is there well that you know that's sort of the foundation of this work is not just accepting you know you could get to a place of acceptance of that anxiety guy,

Starting point is 01:16:46 and that would help him not feel beat up by those other parts. Are you with me so far? Yes. But that wouldn't necessarily help him unburden. You know what I'm saying? It wouldn't necessarily help him actually transform. So this is a step beyond what a lot of maybe spiritual traditions do, which would be to get you mindfully accepting of your parts, radical acceptance.

Starting point is 01:17:15 You know, that's all a great, it's a great first step. But then rather than having yourself be a passive witness, accepting witness, you became, with your parts, an active inner parent, an active leader, an active, I'm going to help you. So that's one of the big differences with IFS. Let me return to psychedelics for a moment and the psychedelic experience, it's perhaps a, it's not, I wouldn't say it's a common misconception because I do try to be the voice of restraint and caution as often as possible. But just for the sake of making the point I want to make, I'll say it could be a misconception that I want or think all people should have psychedelic experiences with strong compounds, whether it be psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, ayahuasca, or otherwise.

Starting point is 01:18:09 And that's just patently not true because it's not suitable for all people in all circumstances. It just simply is not. And there are risks involved. So I'm fascinated by the prospect. I mean, it sounds like for you a reality that this is an alternate or complementary way of accessing, in some respects, the same space and the same workspace. Have you also found or heard anecdotally that IFS or working with IFS has helped prepare people to be more adept or, I hesitate to use the word, productive, but to be more adept or hesitate to use the word productive but to be more prepared for psychedelic experiences with compounds yes and uh we're doing ultimately we're going to do some

Starting point is 01:18:54 training but uh you know i like michael and annie's training but i think there could be more IFS in there to use more IFS in those prep sessions and then in the aftermath to actually help people understand what they experienced and to follow up to have them keep going. So, yeah, I'm hoping, I've been working at it, that IFS can be kind of the map to that territory in general. And so that, yes, in addition to the prep sessions where you would first check the parts that might be scared to do it, or the kinds of parts that might come up during the time and just help the person get to know those a little bit in advance and get permission to do the psychedelic experience. And then during it, as these parts come up, even scary ones.

Starting point is 01:20:00 There is such a thing as post-psychedelic trauma syndrome where people... Yeah, please speak to that. This is important. People do have really bad experiences. I've worked with people who were severely traumatized and, you know, and it's an emotional kind of psychotic process. So these are delicate ecologies we're entering, and we need a very ecologically sensitive map. And so if that were to happen, either during the psychedelic experience or as a kind of backlash afterwards, for the guide to know what that is and not panic themselves and to be able to to work with the

Starting point is 01:20:47 part that that is come out in a soothing way which also involves the self-energy of the guide so that ifs can also be used to help uh the sitters work with themselves and get their parts to open space for their self to be very present, which really makes a huge difference in the experience of the person doing it. Yeah, absolutely. And to just reiterate something you said, I mean, the stories that are that are still advertising are the ones that survived. And it can create a very distorted picture of just how safe these things might be. And that's true also with drugs, where the people who died of heroin overdoses aren't available for interview, so you don't get to hear from them. Psychedelics, generally speaking, physiologically not being anywhere close, at least if we're talking about the classic psychedelics

Starting point is 01:22:10 like LSD or psilocybin, physiologically their LD50 is going to be nowhere close to something like an opiate. But the point being that if you are a clinician as you are, you get to see the whole spectrum of post-psychedelic experiences, and that includes people who have psychotic breaks or people who suffer from what some scientist friends of mine have called ontological shock, where they aren't completely unraveled, but they really don't know what is real anymore. Or who they are. Or who they are. And you also have people, I'm a case study in this, who go into an experience thinking they have no trauma or a certain level of lowercase t trauma and then under the influence of these compounds have the opening of the flood gates where they suddenly realize that there's a lot more in pandora's box and once that is uncorked and they return to ordinary reality don't know how to metabolize that or work with it or contend with it which can lead to all sorts of problems. And I just want to make it really clear

Starting point is 01:23:27 that these are very powerful experiences that I think require the same type of due diligence and forethought as going into neurosurgery or a process like that. And you wouldn't look for your neurosurgeon on Craigslist or encourage them to buy their tools through the dark web. So similarly, how can one make, if they can, IFS or this type of work a daily practice? Is it a daily practice? Or is it something that you just go for the gusto with every once in a while in a really intense therapeutic session? How do you think about that?

Starting point is 01:24:11 Yeah, one of the things I like about it most is that also the listeners don't know, but we had some technical snafus in the beginning, and I could feel my panic parts coming up, and I knew you were waiting. And so inside, I'm saying, I get it. I get you're scared. This isn't going to happen. But just trust me. Just relax. Just step back. I can handle this. Remember, it always goes better when I'm in the lead.

Starting point is 01:24:53 Just let me handle this. And during that, even that time when they were so panicked, I would just feel this parting of the seas, and my self would come back. I'd have access to it again and my confidence is back and all those C words. And so I do that on a daily basis. If I'm going to face something scary, I'll do a little prep session with my parts, a little pep talk about, okay, I know you guys, this will be triggering, but just let me handle it.

Starting point is 01:25:26 And then if they get triggered during a session or during a time during the week and I can't unblend, I can't separate from them, then I bookmark that. And I call my therapist and I do a piece of work around it, like the piece of work we just did. And so then I do a lot of unburdening in the session, but then I follow up after the session. So my homework for you is to check on that boy and that adult part of you every day for about a month and just make sure they're still doing okay. And treat it, you treat it very seriously, like it's not your imagination, it's actually real. Even if you don't believe it, treat it that way, and this will stick. Yeah, so when I'm working with clients, and we've done a lot of work, and at the end they'll say some version of,

Starting point is 01:26:20 you're a pretty good therapist, but I healed myself. And that's really what we're shooting for. I like that. How do you suggest people build in this check-in? I would imagine this is common homework, where they are checking in on these parts. When do they do it? How long do they do it for? When they first get up? When they're're eating breakfast what does a check-in or what might a good check-in look like yeah just it's very variable different clients do it differently there are some who will do a sit for an hour every day and just really keep it going and they actually get to where they can do unburdenings on their own. And the first 20 minutes of our session, they're just telling me all the stuff they did at home. And then I, okay, let's go in and do some more.

Starting point is 01:27:10 And then there are people who are more like me who, you know, I'll remember, especially if I write it down, a part that I've been working with and needs my attention. And like I said, when I get up in the morning, I'll just lay in bed and check on it and see how it is. But I can't do a whole lot more than that for some reason. I've got parts that interfere on my own. So I do a lot of the big healing work with somebody else, and then I do the maintenance work on my own every day.

Starting point is 01:27:41 So it just varies from person to person. But I can do that, notice a part's getting triggered, and not think it's me. Know it's a part, and separate from it in the moment is the process we've been talking about a lot. Let's talk about adding in some additional variables. So you've said that often when couples are fighting, they're in a protector war, if I'm getting the reference right. Can you expand on that? What does that mean? What does it mean? And then how might you approach resolving it? If there are couples listening who are in quarantine who might not have access to a therapist?

Starting point is 01:28:23 Yeah. So often I give my wife and I as an example, but she got tired of me doing that, so I'm not going to. Yeah. Yeah. That's understandable. So when I'm working with couples, most of the time it is these protectors who have taken over each of them and are doing the talking.

Starting point is 01:28:46 So it's maybe the man's angry part. I don't want to be gendered about this. It's one partner's angry part. Yeah, it's okay. I mean, you could give the hypothetical heteronormative just to make it easy for just the example example of course people chill out this can apply to any couple but let's just yeah let's just go with all right so in this case we have a man and a woman the man has the angry part yeah so he's really angry about something his wife said. And she's in this big defensive part and is just trying to justify it and so on. And it's just these two parts interacting in a nasty way a lot of the time. And unbeknownst to each of them, or maybe even known to each of them, those protectors are triggering the exiles of the other person each time they say something.

Starting point is 01:29:50 They're hurting these wounded children inside. And the more those exiles get hurt, then the more extreme the protectors become. And that's the loop that most couples are in. I believe it's an Indian saying that goes something like, when the water buffalo battle in the marsh, it's the frogs who suffer. So when these protectors go to war, both parties often don't even know the damage they're doing to the other person at all

Starting point is 01:30:22 because all they see is the protective part. But that damage really can erode the relationship ultimately. So when we're working with such a couple, the first move is to do what we call a U-turn in their focus. That means get each of them to stop, focus inside, noticing the parts that are doing the talking, get to know them a little bit, come back out when they can speak for them rather than from them. So if you and I got into it, Tim, I might say,

Starting point is 01:31:01 so Tim, it really, really, I just can't stand that you just said that. So that would be a protector speaking, period. And if our therapist said, okay, Dick, just go inside, listen to that angry part I just spoke, listen to what it protects, and come back when you can speak from this open-hearted place for both of those parts. And I might say some version of, okay, I did that, and I noticed this angry one, and it really wanted me to ream you out. And then I asked what it was protecting, and it was this boy who would hear something very similar from my father when he would yell at me.

Starting point is 01:31:45 And this angry guy said, I'm never going to let that happen again. No one can talk to me like that. And so that's what was happening for me when I was saying that to you. So you see the difference? I do. And once you've had, let's just say, both people in the couple, right? So in our previous example, like the man and the woman, they do the U-turn, they're both able to come back. there or or is there a next step once each person can say this part was protecting this part and i'm able to kind of speak from this calmer observer self about these two now and you get the man and the woman back in the room what happens from that point forward yeah there are several next steps so

Starting point is 01:32:40 one side of ifs is having them interact with each other from self, speaking for their parts, sort of in the way I just described. But my job then becomes simply being the parts detector. So as they talk to each other, I'll say, time out. You're talking from these parts. I want you both to go inside. Come back when you can be more in self when you speak. And then when they can and they stay in self, just hold them in that space as they talk about their issues. And what I find is just that, just being able to have a self-to-self conversation with somebody, you do start to heal on your own, basically.

Starting point is 01:33:21 Just like self can do that in the inner world, self can do that in the outer world. Now, as we do that, there may be parts that aren't willing to step back and, you know, that are still quite burdened. And so, the other thing I'll do is I would do a piece of work with you while your partner witnessed that work. So,, let's say that anxious part was really getting in the way in your relationship, and your partner watched me do that and saw the backstory to why this part's so anxious, what's your partner going to feel? Empathy. Empathy, yeah. So rather than being critical of you for being so scared or whatever it was,

Starting point is 01:34:06 now they have empathy for this part of you and they want to encourage you to keep working with it and healing it. So that's a major intervention in a relationship as well. And so I'll have people work with the parts that are getting in the way of the relationship the most while their partner watches. So that's a whole other side of IFS. Let's talk to another example of being a merchant of hope, as you put it, or a hope merchant. Trailheads. I want to talk about trailheads in an interview. I believe it was an interview.

Starting point is 01:34:41 It might have been a blog post. It is an interview on 1440.org. Here's the paragraph I want to unpack. Quote, if I'm working with a client who is a former alcoholic and they come in and tell me sheepishly they went off the wagon this week, I say, that's great because this is a trailhead. And if we follow the trail, it will lead us right to the part we need to heal that we haven't got to yet. Can you please elaborate on trailheads? Yeah, as you can imagine, that's a bit of a radical statement in this field, but that is my experience, that these, whatever extreme belief, emotion, sensation,

Starting point is 01:35:21 you know, you mentioned on your farm, there are a lot of trails, and those trails have trailheads where you start. And if you start at the trailhead and then follow the trail, you'll come to some lake that's beautiful or something like that. If we take whatever, like in your case, it was this anxiety that you felt as the trailhead that led us to this adult part that was protecting the exile. So any kind of symptom becomes that, becomes a trailhead that'll take us to a in some respects of Gabor Mate and ask not why the addiction, but why the pain. I quote, I use that line all the time. And I know.

Starting point is 01:36:13 No kidding. Yeah. And he and I are good friends and like mutual admiration thing. Yeah. He's a fascinating guy. He is indeed. Fascinating, fascinating guy. Yes, indeed. Fascinating, fascinating guy. For people who want to further explore IFS or get to a better understanding of IFS, perhaps even find a therapist who is knowledgeable with IFS, what are some of the resources, tools that you would suggest people start with? And let's assume, for the there are lots of books for the public.

Starting point is 01:37:05 I've written two of them. One's called An Introduction to IFS and the other is You're the One You've Been Waiting For, which is more about relationships. And there are lots of videos and there are books for kids. And there is a book called Self-Therapy that was written by a guy named Jay Early that does sort of walk people through the process. I'm a little anxious about that because he tells people to go to their exiles on their own, which I have concerns about. But that is also something some people use successfully. I did an audio course on Sounds True called Greater Than the Sum of the Parts that contains a lot of exercises that people like a lot. So I'd recommend that.

Starting point is 01:37:57 And there are more technical books for therapists that lay people seem to get a lot out of too sometimes. What are those books? Well, the sort of Bible for therapists is called, oddly enough, Internal Family Systems Therapy, second edition, which came out just last year. And there's a manual we did for an organization called PESI that's kind of step-by-step, and Frank Anderson is the author of that. For a layperson who really wants to get a brass-tacks grasp of how they might use IFS in their own lives, would the audio course you suggested with the exercises be a good place to start? It can be overwhelming in a paradox of choice sense to have so many books available and not to know where to start. So

Starting point is 01:38:53 to get people to step one, if we were to recommend, that audio course would be a good place to start? Very much. Yeah. And those exercises, I'm pretty careful about exiles, so they're quite safe, I think. Yeah. Great. Wonderful. Well, I will link to that and everything that we've discussed in the show notes for people. So that will be available all in one place at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. Well, Richard, this has been, as hoped, incredibly fascinating for me. I'm glad that we were also able to do a live demo of what it looks like in the wild, in a sense.

Starting point is 01:39:36 Is there anything else that you would like to share, suggest to my audience, ask of my audience before we wrap up? You know, just this is a very different paradigm for understanding human nature. And it changes a lot if you really get it and buy into it. And, you know, I told the story of in the early 80s, when I finally got that self was in everybody, I had this vision of possibility possibility like this could change everything i hope the guy comes along who can take it where

Starting point is 01:40:12 it's supposed to go because i'm just a little kid i'm still waiting for that guy and i'm still trying to take it where it's supposed to go it feels like it's got an energy of its own and because it would change a lot to know that this self is who everybody really is, and that these parts aren't even what you think they are, that they're actually very valuable qualities that have been distorted by trauma and can transform this quickly. All of that make a huge difference in everyday life for most people. And also, we're working with high-level mediators and so on just to try and bring more peace. It's an incredible paradigm and set of tools that I will say was the first framework for talk therapy that I saw in living color via video initially that really, really caught my attention where I was like, holy shit. Okay. These before

Starting point is 01:41:17 and afters are really incredible. And it would have been for someone who hasn't seen these types of transformations, almost impossible to anticipate that you would get these outcomes in such a relatively short period of time, given the starting points involved and the levels of trauma. It's really grabbed my attention, which is why I wanted to have you on the podcast. And I appreciate you very much for taking the time and making the time to have a conversation. Well, I'm very honored and moved, actually, by the depth at which you get this and for your support. And so I've loved our conversation. I really have. Having listened to you a lot, I kind of knew I would, but I still had these anxious parts. So it's just been, moving is the best word for it for me.

Starting point is 01:42:11 Well, I really appreciate you and the work that you're doing in the world. Hopefully, we'll get to meet in person at some point in the not-too-distant post-COVID world. And for everybody listening, thank you for tuning in. You can find the show notes, links to everything that we discussed, including the audio course that we mentioned towards the end at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. You can just search IFS and everything will pop right up. And until next time, thank you for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #492: Richard Schwartz — IFS, Psychedelic Experiences Without Drugs, and Finding Inner Peace for Our Many Parts

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