Richard Schwartz on Internal Family Systems

We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on

this episode is Richard Schwartz. He began his career as a systematic family therapist and academic. He developed internal family systems or i f s in response to clients descriptions

of various parts within themselves. He focused on the relationships among those parts and noticed that there were systematic patterns to the way they were organized across his clients, and then found that when the client's parts felt safe and were allowed to relax, the clients would experience spontaneously the qualities of confidence, openness, and compassion that he came to

call the self. Richard is a featured speaker for national professional organizations and has published many books and over fifty articles about I f S. Hi Richard, Welcome to the show. I am a excited to have you on. We're gonna be discussing your book No Bad Parts, healing trauma and restoring wholeness with the internal Family Systems model. But before we do that, we're going to get to the parable

that I know you're excited to answer. In the parable, there's a grandparent talking with a grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents as well, which one wins, and the grandparents says the

one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you how that a parable applies to you in your work and in your life. Well, it sort of contradicts my work. My path and passion in the last four years has been to try to reverse that kind of thinking in our culture. So I'm not a big fan. So I think that will be clear to people here in a little while. Why so, I guess let's jump into it, and I'm going to assume that listeners don't know anything about internal family systems. Some uncertain do, but

many don't. So broadly speaking, what is I f S Well, I developed it to be a form of psychotherapy, but it's kind of evolved into being more like a life practice and for some people of spiritual practice. Basically, what I found four years ago when I started on this journey is that things we think are bad, which would be the qualities that you mentioned about the was it a black wolf or something? No, no, no colors? Do our wolves? Bad wolf, bad wolf, greed, hatred, fear, all

those things aren't what they see. They're not just negative emotions. They're actually eminations from parts of us that, because of traumas in our lives or bad parenting. We're forced out of their naturally valuable stays and forced into roles that they don't like, which would be the ones you just mentioned and others, and carry a lot of the extreme beliefs and emotions that came into your system during those

traumas and drive the way these parts operate. So what I learned very early was, first of all, that we all have but I call parts, that it's the nature of the mind to be subdivided that way, and that they're all valuable, but that they get forced out of their naturally valuable states by traumas and attachment injuries, and they pick up these what I call burdens, extreme beliefs and emotions that drive them into actually being negative and actually can be damaging to you or two people around you.

But that isn't who they are. And when you think that's who they are and you starve them as in the parable, they just get stronger and try harder to get your attention or take over your life. So I was working with eating disorders back in the day when I developed this, and that's what I was trying to do. I was trying to get my clients ignore the voice that told her to starve herself or the one that forced her the betage or fight with it, and they

just got stronger that way. Just at some point decided, I've got to explore this and see what's going on. And that's when I started to learn that they're not what they see. So in essence, the idea is that we're not a single mind. We have multiple parts within us.

And I've got some questions about how many parts and what types of parts, But we've got these different parts of us, and those parts I think you were describing as naturally sort of beneficial, but that they then take on I think the term you use in internal family

systems would be burdens. They take on burdens based on traumas, challenges, injuries in the past, where a step into a role where they think they need to protect and thus then create behaviors and feelings and things that we might looking at it externally go, well, that's not good. That's not serving me, that's not helping me anymore. But it originates from these parts deep desire to protect us, exactly right.

And in addition, they're frozen in time usually so they're stuck in the time of the trauma, and they think you're still five years old or whatever age you are, and that you're as vulnerable now as you were back then, and that you live in as dangerous a context as you did back then. So there's a lot of reasons why they do it, and you know, it's common sensical to think of them as just bad and to try and get rid of them. But yeah, that's a big mistake.

Our culture is made for centuries now. According to internal family systems, we have parts, whether or not we've suffered injury, trauma, neglect or not. It's just that if we have, those parts have been forced into roles. They don't necessarily want any idea like does everybody have a similar number of parts to start with? Is it radically different? If so, any idea why it's different? I mean, do you have any underlying ideas there? I have no idea about any

of that. Okay. I know that with the client, we're mainly working with the parts that are stuck to the problem, helping them transform. And the range in terms of numbers could be I would say from ten to okay, as we go through corsotherapy, sometimes more, But in terms of how many are there, I have no idea, and so the question then comes up, if there are all these parts, then who's me? When I talk about me? Who am

I talking about? Yeah? I had that question too when I first ran into the phenomena by backgrounds of family therapists. So as I was fearing about all these parts, I started overlay my family therapy ideas onto them, and just to make one parallel. So family therapy is big insight was you can't take an acting out kid out of

his family and tell him to cut it out. You have to understand the role he has been forced into by the dynamics of that family and change those dynamics and liberate him from that role so he doesn't have to protect himself for the family anymore. He'll naturally transform into who he really is. And that's what we're finding

with these parts. It's the same process. So as I was getting that, which took quite a while, as a family therapist, I was trying to help change these internal relationships, and I was trying to get my client to actually listen to the parts rather than ignore or hate them or fight them. And so I was having these inner dialogues and I might have you Eric talk to your critic, your inner critic, and instead of yelling at it, or ating with it, or ignoring it, I'd try to get

you to listen to it. And why it does this critical thing inside of you all the time? What's it afraid would happen if it didn't do that? And as I'm having those dialogues, maybe you eric suddenly get angry at the critic and the dialogue goes south. It reminded me of family sessions where maybe I'm having two family members talked to each other and trying to get them to listen, and suddenly one of them is angry at

the other. And we were taught to look around the room and see if somebody isn't covertly signaling one that he disagrees with the other one too, And you've got these alliances happening, and we were taught to get that third person to step back and not interfere, and then things settle down between the other two. And I thought, maybe the same thing is happening in this inner system.

Maybe as I'm having these two parts, or my client talked to the critic, a partner hates the critic has jumped in, and so I asked my clients, could you get that one to just relax an open space, step back in there. And my clients would say yeah, okay, and I'd say, okay, now, how do you feel towards the critic, And out of the blue, it would be this completely different answer, like, I'm just curious about why it calls me names. Seconds earlier they hated or they

were terrified of it. You get that to separate, and it's like this other person popped out and knew how to relate to the critic in a healthy way. And when I would do the same process with other clients, it was like the same person popped out with the same curiosity, calm, confidence, compassion, even I'm sorry, I feel sorry for the critic clarity. Oh it suddenly it doesn't

look so scary. I'm naming what we call the eight seas of what I call self leadership, because when I would ask clients what part of you is that, they'd say, that's not a part like these others. That's myself or that's me. So I came to call that the self and an answer to your original question, it turns out that that self isn't everybody can't be damaged and knows how to heal, and it's just beneath the surface of these parts such that when they open, space pops out.

And that's who we really are. That essence is in everybody, and these parts are also who we are, except they're just part of us, and they add a lot of spice to our lives and a lot of discernment, and that could be very helpful. But who we really are is that self. So we have this self then, and you use a capital S for it. We've got this self that has these qualities that you are able to notice. You call them the eight sees curiosity, calm, confidence, compassion, creativity, clarity, courage,

and connectedness. So our parts take on roles based on the things that happened to us. Right, they are conditioned, Right, they are conditioned by the experiences that we have. Is this self something that we would consider unconditioned? And so it's beyond personality. So is myself in essence the same as yourself? I think? So yeah, okay, I think that's right. So for me self has taken on and this took quite a long time too, more of a spiritual connotation,

you know. I like the metaphor from quantum physics of photons being both a particle in a way, and like there's a way of state of self that when you meditate, you feel you kind of lose your separateness and you become oceanic. And then there's a drop of that ocean that's in each of us, and particleizes when it's in us, so that we do feel separate from each other, but it's really the same self. So in that way, yeah, I would say it's all the same. I want that place, okay.

So that is uh, something closer to what in certain schools of Buddhism we might call Buddha nature. Certain ways of thinking of Christianity, they might call that the karmic Christ, or the inner Christ, inner Christ, or the soul. Yea call it coadtive book where we looked at it. Avirtually every religion and every spiritual tradition, they've all got a word for it, even though almost no psychotherapies know about it. Yep.

So you know that's what I'm talking about. And so internal family systems then, as a approach, is where we're working with trying to understand what is going on with the parts, why they're the burdens that they are carrying, trying to get them to perhaps set those burdens down so that the self, this thing that has clarity and connectedness and the rest of the seas naturally sort of emerges and we spend more time living in the place of the self versus living sort of through the perspective

of or in battle with the parts. That's part of it, okay, But it's also what I found in contrast in some ways to some of the spiritual traditions we mentioned, which where self is a kind of state that's fairly passive, witness state that you meditate to get to and and

maybe try to lead more of your life. From when I would get my clients to access self in the way I described earlier, self became a kind of active inner leader that could not only interview the parts, but also often see them and go and hold them and comfort them, almost like a parent with a child, and actually sort of would take over the session and do what the part needed in a healing way, which just amazed me because I was working with clients who had terrible,

terrible childhoods, and by most psychologies have no business having any of those qualities, But here it was, and they were actually healing themselves basically with me coming along for the ride. And so this concept of self isn't just a passive witness, but it's an active leader, both in the inner world and in the outer world. One of the goals is to help the parts trust that self

can do that. Because when you were little and you were hurt and yourself couldn't protect you, your parts lost trust in its leadership and they thought, like a child in a family who becomes like a parent, they thought they had to take over and run things. So it's a big relief usually when they actually realized you're not still five years old, and you are a person who can handle them also handle the world. And you talk

about different types of parts. I'm just trying to sketch the groundwork here for people before I start to go into maybe some some deeper questions. You talk about different types of parts. Maybe we could walk through those quickly. The first is exiles. Yeah, so just to clarify, these are not types of parts so much as the types of goals. These parts are forced into by what happens to them. Exiles. You know, we all are born with

these what other systems call inner children. These very young, vulnerable, but also when they're not hurt, playful and creative and loving and open and ah yeah, on and on, all these wonderful qualities they have that we love to be with.

But when they're hurt or terrified or shamed and made to feel worthless, they take on those burdens, They take on those beliefs about themselves, they take on the emotions from those experiences, and when they carry those burdens, they have the power to make us feel all those feelings that they still carry from those experiences, so they can overwhelm us and make it so we can't function and

make us feel terrible. So we kind of naturally try to lock them away in inner basements or abysses and just move on from the trauma, thinking we're just moving away from the memories and the emotions of the trauma, not realizing we're locky way our most precious qualities simply because they got hurt. And so those we call exiles, we locked them away, and for them it's insult to injury. The injury was the trauma, and the insult is we

abandoned them and left them in the past. And when you get a lot of exiles, then you feel more delicate and the world feels more dangerous because so many things could trigger them, and if they get triggered, they blast out of the basement and they overwhelm you and make you stay in bed for a week or whatever they do. And one other sorts of exiling is also if there are emotions in your family when you were getting raised that weren't acceptable and you had to luck

away the parts that felt those things too. I think that was all of them. That's true for many of us. Yes, So when you have exiles, you've got to have protectors because so many things can trigger them, and so a lot of other parts are recruited out of their naturally valuable states to become these protectors, and they spend nervous amounts of energy trying to manage your life so that no one hurts you. Again, no one gets close enough

to hurt you. Maybe no one rejects you because you don't look right, or everybody gives you accolades because you perform at such a high level. So these we call managers, they're just trying their best to manage your life, to please people and control the world. And they'll also control your body by making you a little bit dissociated from your feelings and keeping you in your head. And it's all an effort to contain these exiles and also keep

them from being triggered. And then the world still triggers your exiles, so when that happens, it's a big emergency, and these flames of exile emotion encompassing you, so you need and other parts forced into this role of being what we call a firefighter. They're trying to fight the flames of exiled emotions, either by dousing it with some substance or getting you higher than the flames, or distracting

you until they burn themselves out. So we all have these firefighter activities that immediately happened in an impulsive and I don't care about the consequences to your body, to your relationships. I've just got to get you away from that. That's another set of protectors. So the very simple Matt, we've got protectors, one group of which is called managers. The other is called firefighters, and they're both trying to

contain and protect these vulnerable eggs. Parts of those. Let me relate some of this to my own life and my own story and see if it helps apply this in some ways. And I've I've got a couple of questions, So a little bit about me, you know, recovering alcoholic heroin addict. I've been in recovery fifteen years this time, and it was about ten years before that, so most of my adult life, and I certainly recognize the firefighter role. Right, That's what my addiction was, right, it was I can't

handle how I feel, So let's douse the flames. Let's let's get rid of these feelings that we don't like. So lots of people are able to overcome their primary addiction, this and again depending on how the person recovered and the things that they did. But is it possible that in one case, what's happened is that that person's managers have gotten really skilled and the managers now have got things under control to the point that the exiles don't

break loose. Thus we don't need the fire fire meeting in the same way. Yeah, that's what most addiction treatment is in this country, or I guess around the world. Even it's showing up the managers so that they not only contain the exiles, but they also lock up the firefighters. And that takes a lot of work. You know, it takes a lot of vigilance and a lot of you know, go to the meetings constantly and reinforce it. And that's good.

I mean it's good in the sense that you're not you're not addicted, but you become addicted to the meetings, or you become addicted to whatever program is you're doing to try and show up your managers, and you become a kind of dry drunk in a way, and you're not that much fun because you're dominated by these managers. A better way, from my point of view, is to actually honor the addictive part for its attempts to try

and save you from all that pain. It literally thinks it's say in your life every time it does that. And also go to the critic who's attacking you for not being able to control yourself and thinks you should have more willpower and so on, and get it to back off, get it off your back, and then get permission from those parts to go to the exiles that

are driving the whole thing. And we have a process, it's like a five step process from which we can actually heal those parts and get them out of where they're stuck. In the past and help them unload what we call unburdened the feelings and beliefs they got back there, at which point it's like a curse has been lifted and they'll transform into who they naturally are. And then we can bring in the addictive part and the critic and see they don't have to spend all this time

trying to deal with this pain. And then they shift into totally different roles themselves and they start to get along with each other. So it's a very different approach. It's like almost the opposite approach, sort of like what I was saying earlier about the two wolves. And it's a tough sell because the addictions community is very attached to the disease model and the sense that these addictive

parts are just what they are. I got sober at twenty four from heroin addiction and very traditional twelve step approach, you know, Central Ohio, and not a lot of you know, not a lot of progressive thinking going on at that point, you know, And the basic idea was, you don't need to know why you're an alcoholic, you just are. Let's not talk about your parents, let's not talk about your childhood, Let's and and that approach worked. I got sober, but a few years into being and sober, I had some

things happened. My marriage fell apart. I fell apart very promptly after that, and that led me into a type of therapy. At that time you already addressed one of the words for it. You know, my therapist was very influenced by a gentleman by the name of John Bradshaw, and we did a lot of you know, inner child work, which a lot of it feels similar to what I see happening in parts work. We didn't necessarily talk about

the protectors in the same way. We kind of tried to get right to the exile if I had to, if I had to translate what I saw happening there and your approach, although I think what happened with me was indirectly. We were working with those protectors for a long time in order to get there. But at that point what it was is the work was really about letting that exile basically have the the emotions that it

was unable to have when it was younger. Historically, I did a lot of this similar type wor a long time ago. And I have a question for you, though about some of this type of work, and you and I talked beforehand about, well, maybe we'll do some parts work here on the show. You'll you'll do some with me. And what typically happens for me and a lot of these areas is that I have precious few memories of being a child at all, Like it's a blank slate

back there. And despite doing lots of inner child work and lots of different things, like I don't have memory of like three days ago. So it's not it doesn't appear to only be my childhood. It seems to be a broader system. How do you do parts work if

you don't have memories? When we get to these exiles, these inner children start the healing process by what we call the witnessing stage, where I would have you ask this vulnerable part what it wants you to know about what happened in the past and where it's stuck in the past, and you might get memories, you might get images, but sometimes people don't. They just get the emotion or they just feel the sensations and their body just starts

to move in strange ways. And many parts can feel fully witnessed without having you to know exactly the details of what happened. So it's really not a problem if you can't get the details. There are some parts that do want you to know the details, and the reason you can't get them is because other parts are afraid

to let you know these things. So then we would work with the parts who are afraid for those memories to come, and just go over all their fears and try to get permission for you to see what happened. And because these parts, even though you consciously don't have memories much of the time, and this has been true for me, if you get permission, the memories will start

to come too. And so you know, the other lenge that I found therapy wise in general inner child and a variety of different kinds, is I get asked a question. I looked at some of the exercises in your book, and I know some people that, like you know, Ralph Delarosa and I are are close, and I know he's a big proponent of your work, and so you know,

I've been around this kind of work. Part of what happens is if if we were to say, like, okay, let's talk to this part in Eric, right, I have a very difficult time differentiating is my brain generating something that I know to be what I think that part should be actually thinking, saying or feeling because I kind of know the answers quote unquote in a way, right, I mean? Or is it really organically happening? It's very

difficult to tell that apart. How do you help people differentiate that is this an authentic part speaking or is this a brain that knows what it thinks? The answer

should be. So there are ways that you get tipped off, or I would get tipped off as your therapist that it was a part just trying to please me or trying to get through the session without getting dirty, you know, something like that, And I would just say, Eric, could you just see if there's some part of you that's just trying to do this, and then we would talk to you and see if we can get it to step out. So that's not a huge problem in this system.

So you feel like over time by working with somebody that it starts to emerge when something real is happening versus something is not very much. Yeah, it's not hard to time. And then I think you still do parts work right, So this is an ongoing practice for you. Would that be a safe way to say it, you mean me personally? Yeah, totally, yes, Yeah, I mean I've done a lot of work over the years, and still my wife has an ability to tugger new parts that I need to heal. So it never ends, it seems,

and you know, many many ways. I'm a lot better. I feel my power and I ever have, but there's still work to do. Yeah, you know. So a question that comes up for me a lot that I've been thinking about a lot recently is what is mental health or what is when you're done? Or what does it mean to be healed? Or what is good enough? Or what is how healthy? Do I think I'm going to get? You know, I think that's a question that comes up a lot in my mind. How do you think about

that question? Yeah, I'm a big transformation guy, so you know, maybe in contrast to some schools of Buddhism, where the goal isn't too heal per se, it's really to become very acceptable what's in there and kind of live with it. But from a different place, this work actually helps you unload pain, unload terror, unload all the emotions or or

the emotions you lead with. In terms of the second Wolf, it helps you unburden all that and when you do, not only do you not have to deal with those feelings that came into you they aren't native to you, that came into you from the experiences, but also these parts will transform into being very valuable allies. And whereas you didn't have access to much creativity before, you do this unburdening with this part, and now you have all kinds of creativity that helps you steer you in a

different place in your life. So and there are four main goals of ifs. The first one is what we've been talking about, the liberation and transformation of these parts from the roles they've been stuck in so they can be who they're designed to be. And then the second we also talked about restoring trust of the parts in self as a leader. And then the third is bringing

harmony to this inner system. So not only are the parts different, but they're getting to know each other and working together in new ways and feel more unitary because they're not battling all the time. And then the fourth goal is to be more self let in the outside world and bring more self to the world in that way.

So that's for me what healing entails. When I look at your list of seas for the self, I look at them and I'm like, you know, I feel like I spend a lot of time around many of those sees. You know. I feel pretty calm, pretty confident, pretty curious. I think, naturally compassionate. I'm not trying to toot my own horn here excessively by any stretch. But what I don't feel, I think there's a see in here that is. The one that I would describe as doesn't feel as

present is connectedness. And I've described it this way before. I've described it that I think I've done a lot of work over thirty years, in a lot of different ways and a lot of different schools, and I have taken away what I would call the vast majority of obvious suffering, right Like, I don't feel like I suffer a whole lot. And yet if I were to describe what I would say, it would be Okay, here's where

I want to continue to grow. It is in feeling more connected or in not having what is from time to time sort of a low mood, flat effect. There's nothing going on there. It's like when I look at it, I'm like, well, nothing is wrong that I can tell a matter of fact, everything is actually pretty darn good and you know. And so then you read lots of different things that you hear or about happiness set points like well, a certain amount of happiness is just going

to be, you know, genetic. And that's where I start to get into when do you go, okay, like just onwards with living and when do you continue deeper into a healing journey? Well, you mentioned earlier the possibility of working on that you want to spend some time, check again on that. I am willing to try it for sure. So I guess we would start with the part of you that makes you feel so separate and flat. Does

that sound okay? M hum yep. So Eric, see if you can find that feeling in your body or around your body? Okay, got it? Where do you find it? It's kind of in the pit of my stomach. And as you notice that there, how do you feel toward it? In other words, do you like it or you hate it? Or you want you're afraid of it, you wish it would change, you wish to go away? How do you feel toward it? I certainly wouldn't say that there's a hate,

but sure, I'd love to see a change. Okay, So we're gonna ask the part that wants it to change to give us a little space now and step back in there so we can just get to know it and and maybe you know, get to know why it's doing this better and just see if that one give us a little space I think so, then go ahead and focused in the pit of your stomach again and tell me how you feel toward it. Now. Well, here's the problem I described earlier. The answer that came to

mind was curious. But I don't know if that's because I know that's what I'm aiming for. But let's just

let's just go with it and see what happens, all right. Again, I haven't detected it, okay, Okay, ask the part who's so skeptical about this to just give us a space to give it a try, all right, and to not constantly comment and how you're making it up, okay, And then follow your curiosity and ask this one in the pit of your stomach what it wants you to know, and don't think of the answer, just wait and see what comes. And if nothing comes, that's okay, just kind

of be patient. What does it want you to know about why it does this to you. It makes you feel this way. Three things are happening. One is the feeling in the pit of my stomach is slightly more intense good. Secondly is um an idea that it provides me an excuse to hide, And third is the the podcast host part of my brain going is this make good audio to for it to be quiet this long? But we're gonna ask that part to step aside hide, and we're gonna you can always add it it's right, okay, okay,

So something about an excuse to hide? Did you say? Okay? So ask this part what it's afraid would happen if it didn't help you hide that way? I have to do things I don't want to do. You have to do things it doesn't want to do, or that it thinks you thinks aren't good for you. Um okay. The response I seem to get is I'm too tired. Okay, So it's ask if it's keeping you tired or it thinks you're too tired to do these things. I don't seem to be getting a clear answer on that question. Okay,

try this one. Then, what are the things it's afraid you would do if it didn't do this job? Can you repeat the question over time? Yeah? Just again, I'm directed right to the pretty stomach. What's afraid would happen in terms of the things you would wind up having to do if it didn't do this? Inside tell people how I feel? Okay? So it's afraid that if you felt more, then you'd have to tell people about those feelings.

Is that right? Yes? So it's keeping you flat so you don't feel so you don't take the risk of talking to people about your feelings. Just trying to get this right, Just ask what that's right? Yeah? I think so. It seems to be providing a little bit more information about the type of feeling. Perhaps, can you share that or you want to keep that private? That I'm angry with them and I don't like them, Okay, I wasn't afraid would happen if you did share that with somebody?

Either they or I would get hurt? Okay, So it's really trying to protect you and other people from being hurt. Are the angry part of you? Sounds sorry? I'm checking that. Hang on, just check your Yeah, So how do you feel toward it now? Eric? As you learn how it's trying to protect you and keep you safe that way. I feel like that part is starting to take up more more bandwidth, the angry one or this one, I think the protector part the flat car. Yeah, and how

do you feel toward him though? As you learn he is trying to protect you from being hurt? I feel compassionate towards him. And and now I might be using a term I know from reading the book blended, but because I also sort of feel like his arguments makes sense. Yeah, Like like I'm like, well, okay, I get your point. That's that's a good point. So I don't know if I'm blended with that part or but that's sort of what's coming up is like, hey, like we're waiting into

what feels like slightly dangerous ground here, I understand. So, um, you're blended with a part that kind of agrees with him and relies on him, and it's also afraid of the anger. So uh, and that's fine. But for now, just extend some compassion and appreciation to the flat part and just see how it reacts to being understood and appreciate it. I don't know what the part feels. I just noticed my stomach sort of that that sensation sort of fade away a little bit, Yeah, relaxed. Yeah, so

that's typical. And ask h and we you know, we won't do it. We don't have time. But if at another time you could go to that angry part and help it so it wasn't so angry? Would this guy have to work so hard to contain it? Just ask that question? Maybe it's fair. Yeah, And if it didn't have to work so hard at this job, let's suppose we could do that and it was freed up. What might it like to do instead inside of you play baseball? Cool?

And ask if it would be willing to let you do that at some point or is it really still very very frightened of the angry part, whether it let me play baseball now, whether it would let you go to the angry one and he would yes? Okay, okay. And I don't know how long you've got, but does this feel like complete peace for them? Yeah? It's reminded me there's a batting cage right around the corner and I ought to go visit it. Yeah. I think this is like a like a good just thank the part,

thank the part for sharing so much. And when you're ready, come on back. Okay, Yeah, so how do you feel now? I mean, that's a slightly awkward thing to do in front of, you know, thousands and thousands of people, but but okay, I feel okay. I felt something happening there.

And I also sort of feel like, back to the point earlier, like I've done enough thinking about my psyche to kind of recognize that I think, I know that this this makeup makes intellectual sense to me, So I'm not sure that I wasn't kind of going where I think it would go. But the same time, there were shifts in internal experience that felt real, and that's part

of the way we can judge. Yeah, my sense was that was quite real, and I would encourage you to try and find somebody can help you go to that anger so it's not such a threat and you don't have to organize so much of your life around not feeling yet. Yeah, it was interesting when we talked about managers, Like I said, I feel like my firefighters have kind

of settled down. Although it's interesting that you talk about firefighters being very interested these are not your exact words, but very interested in finding enlightenment, right right, It's that it's that like, get me out of here, so here. I recognize that. But the thing about managers is they are parentified in her children. They're usually very tired and stressed out. And I'm not much stressed out most of the time, but tiredness is more of a thing, you know.

And I bet if we had stayed in there and asked that flat guy if he was tired of having to contain all this, he would say, yeah, he's very tired. Yeah, I believe that when he asked to expand that kind of energy to contain it, then he'll make you tired. So let me ask a few more questions if that's okay, and then we'll chop up here in a minute. So I want to turn a little bit towards trailheads. Tell

me what do you mean by the word trailhead. Trailhead is any thought pattern or emotion, or impulse or sensation that, if you were to focus on and stay with, would lead you to the part from which it's emanating. So it's like, if you're out hiking, then you find the head of a trail, and if you follow the trail, it leads you to something like a waterfall or something important.

So that's all I mean by so basically, what we're saying is we're using our own experience of difficult thoughts, emotions, tension, things along those lines as a thing to say, Hey, something to look at here. Let's pause here, and let's go in here a little further. Let's find the part that that's coming from and get to know it and

help it. I have this program called Spiritual Habits and talk about triggers, Like you know, we all have different triggers that remind us to do something, and that the most powerful kind of trigger is sort of an emotional based trigger. It's when you recognize an emotional state and that actually gets you to pause and do something versus

just being lost in it. Let's talk about spirituality and and I f S. I'd like to explore this a little bit more because you said, I f S is morphed over time for being exclusively about psychotherapy to becoming a kind of spiritual practice. And I would love to know what that statement means to you, and what the word spiritual means to you, because I just mentioned I've got a program called Spiritual Habits, and I often am like, what should I call it? Spiritual habits. Is it philosophical habits?

Is it psychological habits? Like these things all just there's such a blending and overlapping of them. What do you mean when you say that I f S is morphed you know, from psychology to more of a spiritual practice. Well, people do it as a daily practice often, and as they do it, there are aspects of IFS that help you work with your parts, but then there are others that help your parts relax. And as your parts relax and you feel more and more embodied in what I'm

calling South, you feel like you're meditating. You feel like you're arriving at that place that people meditate to get to. And as you stay in that, you feel a lot of the things that people meditate for, which is you feel like you're much more than this contained body and that you're part of something much bigger, and there's a

sense of well being and everything's okaynus. And so it becomes that kind of a spiritual practice where your sussing, from my point of view, more and more of the big Self what people call God, and you're bringing more of that in and that is very soothing to your parts to know that's who you are. You were talking

earlier about how you don't feel that connected. You feel very separate even though you've done all this work, and that process of embodying the spacious sense of self feeling the bigger sound makes you feel very, very much more connected, not only to that but also to other people, into animals, and to the earth. So all of that becomes a

spiritual practice. Yeah. Yeah, there's a couple of lines that you use that I thought I really liked, which is, I f S helps people become bodhisatvas of their psyche. So for listeners who aren't familiar with that term bodhisatva, it is a primarily Mahayana Buddhist term. I believe it's certainly emphasized heavily and zen practice the bodhisattva as someone who is basically trying to lead all beings to enlightenment. So I love that idea of you know, we're becoming

a Bodhisatva of our inner parts. And you said, or through a Christian lens, I f S. People end up doing what in the inner world what Jesus did in the outer They go to the exiles and enemies, love and heal them and bring them home. Yeah. Yeah, and uh, just kind of getting those insights has been quite amazingly on this journey. Is I got more and more how it's all parallel. How what a lot of these spiritual leaders were saying is true in the under world as

much as it is in the outer world. Yeah, well you you say that in the book multiple times. You say a theme of the book is, you know, exploring how it's all parallel. How we relate in the inner world will be how we relate in the outer world. And that experience feels so true to me. You know, I don't know which lead which what? Where is it? Learning to love the external world more which led me

to love the internal world? Is that the internal world leads the external Like, like you said, there's sort of parallel. I think improvements in one for me anyway, has always led to improvements in the other. But it's hard to improve in the inner world if you think of these things in the traditional way we do, which is the

other wolf? You know, I once I had an audience with the Dali Lama, and my big line was because he talks about similar he talks about their negative emotions, and there are positive emotions and you need to build these antidotes to the negative ones and focus on the positive ones all the time, very much the same as the wolf story. And I said, you know, it's ironic to me that you teach us to go with compassion to our outer enemies but not our inner enemies. And

he didn't really have a good answer to that. My point of view, Yeah, well, I think it's an interesting question because I think about this often and what I see a lot of in spirituality, and I see it in various forms of psychotherapy, although not so much I f S. What I see is two basic approaches for working with things of difficulty. One is, I would say, you get in there and you mess with it and

you try and change. So cognitive behavioral therapy. I'm having thoughts that are difficult, I go in, I examine those thoughts, I look at them, I look for truth, you know, I orient towards the positive. I get in there and do something with it. And the other is, more broadly speaking, what I'd say would be more of acceptance based therapies, which are you allow things to be as they are, and I f S is bringing a little of both

of that together. Right, You're you're certainly allowing the parts to be there, the negative emotions to be there, and you're encouraging them to change and transform. And so the part of Buddhism that I've often heard that sounds very similar to me that would allow line with I f S is this idea of I'm not going to think of the right quote right now, but it's basically the jewels in the lotus, right, no mud no lotus right to use tick not on. I think he's the originator

of that phrase. Yeah, of all the bodies leaders, Tikn his philosophy because the closest time yeah, yeah, you know, in terms of your anger used to take your anger and create it like a little baby. Yeah. Yeah, he's as close as you can come. So within all of this, though, do you find a time or a place or a point where it is useful and there are times where

it is useful to say orient your mind towards the positive? No, No, And that would be that you feel like any time there's any sort of negative thought or thinking going on, that it's coming from burdened part. Yeah, it's a it's a part that needs your attention. And if all you're doing is thinking about the positive you're going to ignore it. You know, there are times where say you're on a date and you just wanna have fun, and some part is reminding you that your dog died three years ago.

You might want to say, Okay, I'll talk to you later. But I hate the power of positive thinking. I hate positive psychology. I had all of that. The doll a Llama, I don't hate him, but I hate his philosophy. That's that's the I'm leading, And we're leading this episode off with that quote. Chris makes you capture that, just morph it. So we got Richard say he hates the doll a Llama. Right,

that'll help my career enormously. So, but just this whole attitude about if you just think, look on the bright side and think positively, your life's going to be good. It leads towards exiling. And I'm a big crusader against exiling anything. So yes, I mean, certainly there are times, well I'll say to these parts, look, don't harass me now,

I'll talk to you later. But it's with a lot of kindness, like you would if a kid comes running in and you're trying to do something else, you know, let me be, but I'm not going to forget about you. Not bad for wanting attention, but now is not the time. That's right. My personal beliefs are there are times that we want to adjust where our attention is. You know, you always want to do it with kindness, and you don't want to do it in the extent that it

becomes denial. The example I often use is like, if I walk into a hotel room, there's gonna be like three things I really love about the hotel room and a couple of things that aren't so good, and I feel like there's a benefit and going, you know what, I'm going to try and give the attention to the parts of what I like and let the parts that I don't like about it, you know, sort of go. It's is not denying anything, it's just saying, you know, where do I want to orient attention in this case?

But I think that's something that's relatively surface. I think when we're talking about inner pain, at least to me, has always made sense to pay attention to it, like what's here? Why, what's going on? Yeah, to go with it with initially curiosity but ultimately with love and Yeah, but it isn't just the pain. I mean again, you've got the wolves of I forgot the three you started with, but agreed, I think and read hatred and anger or envy.

Fear probably might have been in there. Anger. Yeah, all those things that many Buddhist traditions see as negative emotions. Those are just hurting parts, their parts that need your attention to love as well as much as these eggsiles. So the more you think of them as negative emotions, the less you're going to feed them, and the stronger they're gonna get. Yeah, well, I think that's a great place for us to end. Thank you so much for

coming on the show. I really appreciate the chance to talk with you, to share I f s with others. Will have links in the show notes to your book, to your website where people can find you. And thanks for doing a little parts work with me. Yeah, and thanks for being a good sport and allowing that and for being so vulnerable with your audience. I'm sure that part of the reason you have a big audience is because you're very honest about your own experience. So it

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