Hello, you beauties! Here we are with another episode of Therapy Natters, the podcast for people who might be a little bit interested in counselling and psychotherapy, either because you want therapy, are already in it, or maybe you think you know better than any therapist anyway and you want to hear us talk about it to prove it. Hello Fiona, welcome to a new episode.
Episode 75.
Yeah, just thinking, one of the things that we've not had a question about but it's just popped into my mind. Do you think therapists make worse or better clients?
Yes.
Yes, I think,
they could, they literally could be
Both.
They could either. I've had some therapists, usually people who are coming to get their hours, and I'm making quote marks with my fingers as I say that some of them will be doing it to tick the box, although a heck of a big expensive box to tick if you're not doing it for good reasons, if you're not getting something from it.
But the ones who are students or therapists who really engage, that can be some of the best work, because you can get really deeply into theories and this is what this means, whereas that doesn't always apply to others. So, yeah, they can be absolutely brilliant or not. But yes, I want to say 75th episode. That's a nice number.
Ah, because it's three quarters of a hundred.
is three quarters of a hundred and it's also 50% of 50 onto the 50. And it was 50 where we started to have guests.
What a great segue, well done.
I like numbers I was actually quite miffed the other day when Greg and Louise worked out that they'd been together for half their lives without me having told them that they had got to the point, because that's the sort of thing I do. But anyway, no, I like numbers. And 50 episodes we decided to have guests every other episode and we have one today.
Yes we do
We do! We have David Corr. Who is a psychotherapist working in Ashtead in Surrey who I've known for rather a long time, I think we've trained together, supervised together, we've, collaborated on things and David is one of the trainers for the National College that I used to run, but I still have some connection with and I would say that of the people I know, David is one of the people who really works almost automatically on a very deep level.
Some of us, me included, will start sort of, do we need to go deep? we've talked about this before that you get the clients you get the ones that suit you. David doesn't get the ones that start on more surface level. He gets the deep clients. So I'm hoping that we will get to hear about some of this today. So, hello David.
Hello, hello, thank you very much for the introduction, Fiona, and good morning, Richard.
Hello.
Absolute delight to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me. Yeah, just picking up on what you just said, Fiona. I mean, that could be me, really. It may be that some of my clients are coming and actually want to work on less deep issues. But I guess my particular Psychology just takes me into the deep, usually fairly quickly and it is possible to work deeply and sometimes briefly. Deep doesn't always mean long term. Sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't.
So yeah, so let's talk about going to the deep, and there are many, many ways to do that, but working with Parts is a really profound way of getting to the deep. So I'm happy to talk about that if that would be of interest.
Absolutely. And we, we did a, an episode on that episode 49 was about parts, but without going to the deep. So this follows on nicely from that. And yes, I would agree with you completely that depth does not mean that it has to be long term vice versa.
I was listening to one of these online summaries of books that you can get these days just this morning and it was on still use the old term borderline personality disorder, but maybe the book, I didn't actually go and check when the book was written, which I meant to do and I didn't, if it was from a while ago, then that explains why they were using that term rather than emotionally unstable personality disorder, but it was with the absolute presumption that with a diagnosis like that had to be
long term. In fact, they were even suggesting that you'd never be out of therapy with a diagnosis like that.
Maybe that book was a US book, because they still call it Borderline in the States. They don't call it E. U. P. D.
Oh, well
And even, although,
Even though DSM is American?
Yeah, still a lot of people use Borderline Personality Disorder, but I'm just intrigued that it's called E. U. P. D.
what a horrible title though. Your personality is emotionally unstable, that's who you are as a person. That's horrible. a
referred to borderlines as the title,
an identity!
identity of the people.
When they've got what is kind of like complex post traumatic stress disorder, or a heightened rejection sensitivity because of trauma. Oh, okay, they're just words, aren't they? But they're words that mean something, and words will always mean something different to one person to another, if we're not
Yeah, that phrase, sticks and stones may break their bones, but words can never hurt me, is absolute rubbish.
Pfft. We wouldn't have a job if words didn't hurt people, believe me. It's not all about experiences. It's, it's, yeah, those words are important. They really, really are. So yeah, we have spoke about parts a little bit before. But, we are gonna repeat ourselves as these episodes go on. And also, our listeners, and myself, and even you, Fiona, who I put up on a pedestal, we're gonna learn, and of course I do, we're gonna learn something ourselves as these episodes go on.
I was wondering about doing an episode on Patreon about Impostor Syndrome, and I thought, I'm sure I've done an episode about that before. And I did, back in 2015. Had a quick look through the transcript and went, that's a bit rubbish, really. I need to do that again. Because it was seven or eight years ago. Of course I think and feel a little bit differently nowadays.
almost certainly I'd be looking at using a parts model to find out about, the part that believes that the person is an imposter. I mean, a little bit of context. I was trained in parts work initially in hypnosis, so it's kind of ego state therapy, then more training in NLP, which developed its own parts model. And I think NLP was probably the first discipline that really highlighted that every part has a positive intention.
And Internal Family Systems, which is in many ways the sort of the new kid on the block, it's only been around about 30 years, I think. A fundamental presupposition is that there are no bad parts. Every part is trying to do something valuable for the person. I've heard it said that i f s is just old wine in new bottles. And I, I, I really don't believe that. I think what I F S has done is it's it's brought some new ideas into the world of working with parts.
Perhaps the most significant is the idea that at the core of every human is the Self. And that's the Self with a capital S. And the Self isn't a part. Another word for Self which comes out of the field of focusing is Presence. And when the Self is in the leadership role we have an open hearted approach to life. We're able to be curious, compassionate, playful, calm, confident, et cetera.
And what parts work up to internal family systems did it would work with sort of inner conflict, but often side with one part of the conflict. So the client might come in and say, you know, I want to get out and be active, but, you know, I sit on the couch. And the therapist and the client might align with the part that seems to be healthier, i. e. the part that wants to get out and do some exercise.
What IFS said is what we need to do is to help the client move into the state of self, so it's not taking sides, and that way we can learn what are the histories of these two parts, the part that wants to exercise, the part that doesn't, what's their positive intention, and a great question. for identifying where the client is in relation to their inner world is how do you feel toward this part of you?
And if the client says, well, I'm angry at it or frustrated, you know that that is another part talking. And we ask that part to step back. Bringing the client back into Self. So that's the sort of basic idea of it. There's a very interesting question is what exactly is a part?
And I've got a couple of quotes I'd like to read, but the first one is from Robin Shapiro who is a wonderful EMDR therapist, she says ego states or parts are bundles of neural connections that hold consistent patterns of information, affect or feeling, attention, behavior, and sometimes identity, which belong to specific developmental ages or situations. So in this way of thinking, and as a lot of people would agree with this, you know, that parts really do have an ongoing reality.
However, we turn to Eugene Gendlin, the developer of Focusing. He says, This vocabulary of parts must not trap us into thinking they are static parts. They are parts of temporary constellations. Now these are two very contradictory um, definitions. So either one is right and the other's wrong, or they're both wrong. Or, as I believe, they're both right.
That parts are these sort of consistent patterns, but when they show up you know, when you're working with parts, they can be very, very temporary, so that's probably the hardest part of working with parts for a therapist, is keeping track of who is talking. And it's very easy to start a conversation with a part, and then sometimes, seconds later, You're actually talking to another part, and it doesn't identify itself.
And that's where parts work can go, you know, you can sort of become very unproductive. And again, it's, I think that's one of the things that IFS has brought, is this greater awareness that we need to keep coming back to self. And that way we can really help parts grow and develop.
And the self, in this world, in this theory, it's more than, it's not the sum of all the parts, it's something, it's something else.
Yes,
Is an essence?
yeah, essence or you know the the ground of consciousness and I mean according to Dick Schwartz who is the primary developer of internal family systems, you know, the self is there right from the beginning. And in certain spiritual traditions, they may say, well, you know, it's there before the beginning. I don't really have a strong view on that one way or the other. But our parts differentiate post postpartum basically to deal with life.
And so some of our parts, you know, take on a protective role and very often the issues that bring clients to therapy is when they have two or more protective parts which are disagreeing over how to do their jobs.
So if the self wants to be loved... And one part says being loved is safe, then you'll lean into it. If another part says being loved is dangerous, because then you could get rejected, then it pulls back and the self needs to work out that both of those parts have the same goal, which is you want to be safe.
it's a really important question you just raised. The self doesn't want to be loved, the self just is love. That's part of its, its nature. It's polarised parts, so a client says I don't love myself. What that means is there is a part speaking that is not loving or rejecting another part of the person. So, if the self can hold the centre ground, it can then meet with both of those parts, treat them with equal respect, and find out what it is they're trying to do.
And very often protective parts are quite young. Because they were developed and differentiated in the early stages of life, so they tend to have limited resources available and very often they're only too pleased to hand back responsibility to the self when they realise they don't have to keep doing the job they're doing.
But you were talking about working deep earlier, Fiona, and I think the real depth of parts work is when we are able to get permission from the protectors to go to the ones inside who are carrying hurt or trauma. In IFS they call them exiles and Ann Weiser Cornell's focusing work, she also uses that term. These are the parts that in a sense have been very strongly rejected by the inner system, but they're still there. They're carrying a lot of pain, a lot of trauma.
Burdens is the term that's often used in IFS. And the protectors work really hard to keep the exiles out of awareness. But yet the exiles want to come into awareness. They want to be seen and heard and they want their pain healed.
just going back to the idea that there was the, the difference, and I can't remember which way around it was, but one theorist was saying that they are fixed and one was saying that they are fluid. I would imagine that in real life working with a particular client with their own parts, I would think that they could easily vary.
That some parts might be quite fixed and others quite varied, but their fixedness and fluidity might vary over time, so that seems like it will be quite an important thing to work with, of how fixed they are, because, as we know, if you've got a part of your, to use the word part again, slightly differently but not that differently, a part of your personality that you feel is fixed. You know, let's take Carol Dweck's idea about ability being fixed. if you, well, she's not saying that.
She talks about whether it is fixed or not. But if you, if you feel that for example, I am bad at maths, if you think that that's a fixed element of, the self, then it's harder to work with it. So the, the malleability, the changeability, the fluidity of parts in general seems like it's a really important aspect of the whole work.
Yeah, absolutely, and I think what you're pointing towards there, Fiona, is the way we identify and someone may identify as an anxious person, so you know, I am an anxious person, and so what's happening there is that there's a very strong identification with that particular aspect of that being, and a very elegant way to help the client start to disidentify is just to say, you know, and you're noticing that there's a part of you inside that is anxious.
Now, It may seem odd to talk this way, but by and large, most clients are, are able to understand the, the idea that way. We are, you know, a multiplicity very, very quickly. Occasionally, some clients balk at the idea, they think it, it means, you know, what used to be called multiple personality disorder or.
Or schizophrenia.
Or schizophrenia. But usually you can you know, address that concern very quickly because, I mean, everyone has had the experience of, being In two minds about something. Immortalising that famous Clash song, you know, Should I stay or should I go? You know, should I stay home tonight or should I go to the party I said I was going to go to? You know, I want to stay home because I'm tired, and I want to go to the party to not let my friends down and have a good time. And we can feel that tug.
Generally what happens is the person will side with one side of that inner conflict and sadly some therapeutic models do as well.
Oh.
What IFS is saying is
it's a system
it's a system and let's find out a way in which the whole system can be aligned. So there's a lot of emphasis in IFS on developing those qualities of self leadership, the qualities they call in the eight C's curiosity, compassion, which includes kind of caring, clarity, calmness, confidence, creativity, connectedness, and courage.
In some humanistic therapies, the idea of therapy is really based around creating a safe environment for somebody to be themselves. And there are plenty of therapists who say, Genuinely, just do that. If you're not quite sure what to do, just do that.
Just help that person to feel lovable, not by saying nice things about them, but just by being present, maybe even kind of re parenting them, being the listener and the the attentive, attuned person that maybe they didn't have in those formative years. But I think it's fair to say that there are going to be many people. That need more than that.
Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure Carl Rogers actually did go on record somewhere to say that the core conditions are the necessary and sufficient conditions for change. I totally agree with Rogers that they're necessary, but I do not believe they're sufficient.
Ah!
You know, a client who is so strongly identified, let's say going back to your imposter syndrome, a client who's so strongly identified as an imposter, it may take many lifetimes of sitting with, you know, a warm empathic counsellor, therapist, for them to shift out of that We can help them, we can assist them much more quickly by really being present with them, but also helping them disidentify from that identity and find out what is that part actually protecting?
if only we could have Carl Rogers sitting here and saying, did you actually mean that? Because my fantasy, and this is not just co, this is not new.
This is your fantasy dinner party with Rogers and Freud, isn't it?
I feel that he would say, I meant sometimes it's sufficient. I think he would say it's always necessary. or almost always necessary, because he probably wouldn't go down the always, but he would say sometimes it's sufficient that that's what they need. That relationship to push them off down a route where they can move towards self actualization. I cannot, for the life of me, believe that he would say that other things wouldn't help in that process.
And I just want to, when you were saying about that sometimes therapists, you didn't quite say it like this David, but sort of, that sometimes therapists nudge in one direction rather than another. So there's sort of positive judgment that one route is better than the other. And then Richard, you, you brought in the core conditions of which one is being non judgmental.
It's something that I've seen, and I'm sure you have as well, that with new therapists, they find it much easier to switch on to the non judgmental of things that are, and I'm saying this deliberately, things that are bad as opposed to non judgmental of things that are good. And the number of times I have to explain that you mustn't judge good behaviour, in quotes, as what you're judging as good.
If you're going to be non judgmental, it has to be across the board, and I would hope that that would be part of a standard person centered Rogerian counseling training, but I rather suspect it might not be all be the
it's coming up against, you know, socialization, we are socialized into a world that, you know, some aspects of our behavior, some aspects of others behavior is labeled good and rewarded, and some aspects are labeled, you know, bad, beyond the pale. So, when anyone is starting training as a therapist, you know, they're having to unpack a huge amount of socialization, which, is part of their sort of core values and their core beliefs, which are, to the most part, invisible to us.
And definitely not invisible to other people, but they will be, to a large extent, invisible to us. And that's, you know, and I know you've spoken on this before, but that's one of the really important reasons why trainee therapists have personal therapy to help us explore our blind spots and our prejudices, whether they're, you know, for good or ill. But the other sort of important part about parts work is, is when the therapist parts gets triggered.
So a client might come in and they might start disclosing, you know, a really horrible trauma history, and that might start activating the client's caretaker parts, who just want to kind of help the client, soothe the client, which in the moment is helpful, but long term isn't helpful at all and so, you know, I think also an important part of any therapist training is getting to know their own parts and getting to know those parts that can get activated in the session.
if you think about, core conditions we all agree they are absolutely fundamental. But what isn't spoken about as much is how hard it can be at times to truly embody the core conditions when we ourselves have, you know, parts that are unhealed. And essentially, what our protective parts are doing is they're keeping those exiles out of awareness, but they're still active in our system. And they do need to be healed for us to become, the best therapist and the best people we can be.
there will always still be some that pop up, can't there? never going to be perfect.
and thank goodness for that. A really harsh inner critic can become a tremendous inner coach a part that becomes highly, highly activated in terms of anxiety can become, a very calm and confident part, but yes life has a wonderful habit of, you know, bringing the next damn thing, which is an opportunity to learn more about who we are and the human condition.
And that's really important, especially for a lot of you. There's a lot of therapists who come out of uni having studied counselling in practice, in psychology, thinking, right, that's it, I'm going to be a counsellor, I'm going to be a psychotherapist. And they're quite young, and they can't go into private practice because it doesn't feel right yet. So they look for a job, and the most advertised places is going to be prisons. And they're going to see all these jobs in prisons.
That is going to test everybody's, but all I need to be is non judgemental. Every single person they see in front of them will have done something that society labels as bad.
yeah, I mean, I used to supervise people who worked in a prison it is very, very tough, and I think, you know, it's just not having to go to the prison service. You know, it's doing what it was set up to do, but vastly under resourced, but if they were more therapeutic communities rather than penal communities, I think as a society, we'd be a lot, lot healthier. And I think what therapy, can really, really offer society is we can become a healthier society.
It's not just about individuals growing and healing. It's about the impact that's going to have society wide and by law, do we, do we need it?
and just a quite simplistic way of looking at these things. The vast majority of client crimes, I would think, are where the person who's committing them does not have a significant awareness of the impact on somebody else, whether that's something they think is victimless or they don't care about the victim or whatever.
And if you build up somebody's sense of their right to have their needs met, that actually doesn't increase the other person's lack of need for their needs to be met, it increases it. If, if you, person A, has a right to have your needs met, then so does person B, and therefore person A. would not be stepping on person B's, right, because they recognize that that's how it is.
Yeah, and that comes from self, you know, and all of us have access to self, and we have periods, you know, every day where we are actually in self, where we're able to meet whatever's happening from, you know, this wonderful place of compassion, curiosity, and so on, calmness and confidence.
But I think, when a person's experienced trauma, whether that's developmental trauma or situational trauma, the self in a sense gets covered over and strong protector parts take over running the show and it's those strong protector parts that can lead the person into the kinds of behaviors which could, have dire consequences. Not just talking about criminal behavior, but when, you know, protectors, for example, in eating disorders. Let's take anorexia as an example.
I don't specialize in eating disorders, but I do work with clients with eating disorders, and those are some of the fiercest protectors you'll ever meet. The, you know, the parts that govern and manage the eating disorder. They're very, very tough cookies to get in rapport with. like all protectors, they won't give up their job until they know that it's safe to do so. And safety is very often, you know, the core of it.
It's one of the terrible legacies of trauma, is the client simply does not feel safe. And unless we feel safe, it's very, very difficult to be fully human.
Well that's a great phrase.
That's not mine
Oh
very little as original. That's the great Stephen Porges, the developer of polyvagal theory
But it seems to be the case, and that's one of the reasons why I think hypnotherapy, in psychotherapy, can be very, very useful because if you can help somebody to learn how to be so vulnerable, because I think relaxing, eyes closed, lying down, maybe if you've got a couch, with a practical stranger, that's a very vulnerable thing to do.
And if you can create a relationship with a client where they can feel that safe, That they can genuinely slow their heart rate down, just because you're there talking to them. Their body can soften. Everything can soften. Then, in that safe moment, you have a window of opportunity to say some of the things that those parts need to hear. Am I right in thinking that hypnosis isn't necessary for parts work?
yeah the great John and Helen Watkins who contributed so much to our understanding of ego state therapy within the hypnosis model. I think they certainly taught that hypnosis was necessary to get access to some internal parts. I don't believe that's true. I think you can access even the most exiled exile I mean, I think it is hypnotic. It's just not using formal hypnosis.
Yeah, I think you're quite big on the informal hypnosis, aren't you, David? You don't sort of say, right, we're going to induce trance right now and sit down and put your feet up and we're going to start. No, it's, it's, it's, much more informal than that and either way can be absolutely fine. Well, I believe it can because I tend to do the more of the former, but it's funny because I just sort of made a joke of it and then I thought that's actually what I do, but that's all right.
I think Watkins, they said it's necessary. Others have said it's not necessary, but sometimes it can just be, you know, I like the little phrase, anything's better with hypnosis. that's a little bit of a strong generalization, but sort not Why not?
certainly believe that being hypnotically informed is incredibly valuable and I don't know why hypnosis isn't a mandatory part of every psychotherapy training. and that's not just because I love and study hypnosis, it's because I think it really is the foundation of good therapy. Not necessarily formal hypnotic work, but the understanding of the power of language, the power of the imagination. Understanding the power that each and every client has to heal.
I think, I would certainly strongly recommend everyone go out and get trained in hypnosis, but I would, wouldn't I?
Yeah.
I think what makes parts work. So valuable is, particularly when it's informed by the IFS model that doesn't replace, you know, your parts training or ego state therapy training. It's an addition to it, but it's ensuring that we get permission from the protectors before we go. And help the exiles unburden and heal and lots of therapeutic models and I practice EMDR, I love EMDR, but it can be very destabilizing for clients. If you haven't got that permission.
So in traditional EMDR, you do a lot of preparatory work, resource installation, and so on. In IFS, you don't, because you'll never go into those hurt exile parts until the protectors have given you permission, and that makes a huge, huge difference. So it makes the therapy very safe and it also makes it so that clients can tolerate it often much better than other approaches.
That seems really, really important information, so thank you for that. Yeah, and I mean, I feel, never have a particular view on these sessions as to where we're going to go, because that's sort of what it's about, and I enjoy that. we're nattering. There's an awful lot in, in this short time that you've given us there, David, so thank you very much for that. Really appreciate
indeed.
pleasure, thank you.
And if anybody wanted to reach out to you because they've got some questions, do you use social media, David? I don't think I've seen you on...
No, I don't but they can certainly contact me via my email address, Richard. david@davidcorr.co.uk
I'll pop a link into the show notes, if anybody does want to reach out because they're interested in what you've got to say, then they know where to find you. Right! Well, Tick tock, we need to wrap up for another episode.
We'll be back next week, as always, and like I so often say, there in the show notes you'll see there's a link to a form on my website where you can fill it in, ask us some questions, give us some topic ideas, and we'll talk about anything that you want to ask, to a degree, of course. Be anonymous if you like. Give us a fake name if you want, you can call yourself Zaphod Beeblebrox, really doesn't matter. Right, I'll leave you to it, have a super week, speak to you next time. Bye everybody!
everybody. Thanks, David. Bye.
Byebye.