My Family Just Moved In Upstairs

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I'm Jane Marie, and this is the dream.

Do you have a fun story for us?

Or even like a not fun story?

Or just like a weird story?

Or do you just want to say hi?

You can call us at 323-248-1488 or email us at hello at little everywhere.com like today's guest did.

He contacted us about a rather new form of therapy that's infiltrated the recovery world.

It's called Internal Family Systems or IFS and he's concerned.

My name is Aaron Barrow.

I'm a peer specialist.

I'm a veteran who's in recovery, who's duly diagnosed.

I've been in the field for 14 years.

Before that, I got a degree in psychology, partially because I watched Fraser and I thought it would be a glamorous thing to do.

And partially, I think what I discovered as I was getting my education was it was more to try and figure out what was going on up here,

you know, and less about what was going on out there.

I'm the liaison to the Veterans Mental Health Advocacy Council, and it was a council created by a Bush-era initiative like a million years ago to gather the voice of veterans who receive mental health care or people that work with veterans and then provide the feedback to leadership.

But for a while we didn't know if we could exist after the kind of crackdown on public communication started.

So I'm still able to meet with the group and bring that feedback back to the mental health leadership, but it's been pretty tenuous.

How long ago was that?

Just I want to say a year ago.

It was pretty quick.

As soon as the new administration took office,

the crackdown started really fast.

And

it was pretty terrifying for a while.

I didn't know if I'd have a job anymore.

Most people didn't, you know.

So it's funny, Dan and I were just talking about all of these people that are supporting the administration wanting to get raptured this week.

I didn't hear about it.

Seriously?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it was supposed to happen on

Tuesday on Rosh Hashanah.

It didn't happen.

Crazy.

Yeah, so they really wanted that.

And I'm like, how did you want everything everything that's happening right now?

All this horrible stuff, but then you also want to get the hell out of here.

Yeah.

Like so badly.

It's always funny because I grew up as a Star Wars kid.

I'm sure you guys did too.

And when you watch Star Wars now, I'm like, okay, now if we're going to like take an objective perspective here, who's the evil empire and who's the plucky rebels?

You know, if we looked at the federal government.

I want to get like a little lay of the land of what you actually do day to day.

And then I want to talk about this IFS stuff.

So start with just let me know kind of what do your days look like?

So I'm a peer specialist.

Nobody knows what that means.

Yeah.

So

I know what it means because one of my best friends

helps train them.

Well, as a person who's in recovery, to be a peer specialist, you need to be someone who's been in active recovery.

In most states, the laws kind of vary depending on where you're at, but for at least two years, and then you have to get a certification.

It's like one to two weeks certification.

And your on-the-job training, your college training, so to speak, is your life experience as someone who's in recovery.

If you look in the community, there's like different types of peers.

There's prison peers, people who have been through the penal institutions and go back to help other people adjust to life on the outside when they get out or they go into the institutions themselves and work with them while they're there.

There's substance peers.

I work in that field.

So you work with people who have substance substance abuse addictions.

You're someone who has actually worked through your own or are working through your own addictions if we're going to follow the recovery model and helping them on their journey.

There's mental health peers,

say someone who's diagnosed with bipolar disorder or maybe has a schizophrenic diagnosis and they go into the mental health world to help other people who are trying to navigate mental health treatment.

It just is a mirror.

And when I started where I work,

I was one of like the first 40 people hired, a little over a thousand now.

And in my opinion, that is way short of what we should be.

Well, let's talk about what the peer specialists, like essentially

counselors.

So our job is to help someone figure out where they want to go.

And we do that in part by telling a little bit of our story and sharing a little bit of where we've been.

peer support at its very essence.

And of course, people do it different ways.

and it's been reconstructed in a million different ways.

In its essence is to help other people figure out where they want to go and then help them realize how to get to that point, like how to set goals, how to get to those goals.

With the thinking being that it's easier to hear it from someone who's gone through the same stuff.

The metaphor I always use on the job is if I'm building a fence, I'm definitely going to want to find someone who's built a fence before or built several fences to help me build a fence.

A lot of the time, when people are in mental health treatment or addictions treatment they go to someone who's read a lot about fences in a book and is going to help them figure out the fence building process but actually hasn't ever built their own fence or if they have it's been a different type of fence you know maybe it's like a little french fence versus like a big you know backyard fence or right Some of the amazing thing about a peer specialist is I can be hearing someone's story and I can say, oh my gosh, I remember that.

Or I remember when I had something similar happen to me, you know, and I can tell a little tidbit of my own story and it just creates this like instant bond, you know.

Yeah, there's a level of vulnerability and a level of honesty that I have to be able to hold on to to make it work.

So, if I'm not vulnerable, if I'm not willing to talk about the stuff that hurts me and only like the hero stories, then it doesn't work, you know?

Well, for people who haven't spent a lot of time in the rooms, which I have, yeah, um,

there is uh

a very common experience with addiction.

Like, it's so weird how

similar the patterns are and the experiences that you go through.

It's remarkable that the stories when people share at AA,

how similar everyone's stories are.

Yeah, as I'm thinking about this topic, I was thinking

it's more about the permission structure, I think, when it comes to addiction treatment than it is about

the therapeutic approach I was going to be talking about today.

But it's the idea that working with people in recovery is really hard.

It's devastating at times.

I've lost...

Sorry.

It's okay.

Yeah.

It's okay.

I've lost

so many people.

Yeah.

And

it's

a little different being a peer because you form more of a personal connection.

One of the keystone rules of, and I learned this in college, and I've also,

I know this from working with therapists and social workers, is that when you're doing traditional therapy work, there's a separation.

There's an us and then there's a them.

And they're the ones you work with and they're the ones with the problems.

And I'm the us, and we don't blend the two.

Like, I'm the expert, and they're the

people with issues.

Okay.

But when you're a peer, it's we're on this journey together, you know?

Right.

We're walking side by side.

We're taking the same road.

And it's hard on everybody.

I've probably worked with 2,000 people now and lost hundreds to suicide or to

heroin overdoses, fentanyl overdoses.

One of my favorite clients,

I've worked with her for years and years, graduated last year and I found out about a week later that she had gone into a fentanyl overdose, you know, and it's devastating.

And so I think this kind of creates a permission structure where you can experiment.

You can feel free as a practitioner.

To connect with people differently.

Yeah.

I grew up in a blended family.

So my parents, my dad was,

he has some mental health stuff that he wrestles with too, but his fix was Christianity.

He was a very erratic,

just super angry, intense person.

You never knew from one second to the next when that switch would flip, that little like crease of the eye or a little pucker of the chin and, you know, kind of a nightmare was headed your way.

Don't trigger me and Dan while you're saying this stuff.

stuff we both have angry dads well that's that's the story of addiction right there i ended up um with a couple dads and then a bonus mom and then um bonus siblings and there was always a lot of moving around and a lot of chaos and not a lot of money and um i was working a minimum wage job full-time while i was going to school mostly to get away from myself plus i was playing sports and i had a girlfriend i was super overwhelmed and uh i i i just I remember this really clearly one night when my mom and my stepdad came to me and they said, hey, we're not trying to kick you out of the house, but we think you should leave.

And I really think it'd be a good idea for you to talk to a recruiter.

And I never thought I'd join the military.

I was always kind of like this countercultural.

Don't like being around people, kind of like doing my own thing kind of guy.

But I ended up following their advice and talking to an Air Force recruiter.

And the recruiter is like, hey, we're going to give you three swears a day.

We're going to cover all your needs, medical, dental, housing.

Plus, you'll get $860 a month.

And I was like, sign me up.

I'm sold.

I'll put me on the next plane.

In fact, I was so excited.

I ran to my counselor the next day and I asked her if I could graduate early because I was like in the beginning of my junior year.

And she's like, well, okay.

Of college or high school or what?

Out of high school.

Yeah.

Wow.

So she's like, well, we can get you out about middle of next year.

And I said, no, I went out this year.

So we scraped together some credits.

I took a bunch of night classes,

did some college coursework, and I graduated that year.

And on the day after my 17th birthday, I was on a plane to Germany in the Air Force.

So

you liked it?

Oh, I loved it.

It was definitely isolating at times.

It was hard being neurodiverse

in that community.

I got in a lot of trouble.

Also, one of the upsides of being annoying is that the shop constantly wants to get rid of you.

So

I shoveled coal for a month in German housing.

I was sent to Korea for two months to do electrical work for the joint games over there.

So you're in the military.

You, I don't know what it's called.

You graduate from the military.

And just tell me

how you fell into addiction or was that already happening?

From my view of addiction, this is something I've learned over the years.

You're working really hard, or I was, to escape from my mind and my body.

I didn't want to be here.

You know, there's a lot of alcohol and it's widely accepted.

As an 18-year-old, I'd go to these big going-away parties every Friday because, you know, it's a big squad and there's always someone leaving or coming back.

Also in Germany, like there's no rules about drinking, right?

Where you were.

Like, it's not the same as here.

As soon as you can reach the bar in Germany.

But it wasn't until I got out, really, that I found my first love.

And that was, that was always weed for me.

It had the least amount of repercussion.

And it's a painkiller, which is nice.

So I kind of started a long-term love affair that it took a long, long time to come to terms with.

And one of that reasons, too, is it's more societally acceptable than most drugs of choice, you know?

It's not a story you hear very often.

It isn't.

Why is that?

Because

it is societally acceptable.

Yeah.

So is alcohol, and you hear about those stories a lot, but you don't hear a lot of stories.

Why do you think we don't consider it like a problem?

Well, it's not stigmatized like meth is stigmatized.

It's not deeply stigmatized like opiate addiction is stigmatized.

Yeah.

It doesn't carry that same level of stigma in the recovery community.

So if you go to an NA meeting and you talk about being addicted to weed, you usually get some pretty funny looks, you know?

And probably more manufactured in my head than you actually get in real life.

But

you know.

I guess everyone's seen that scene from Half Baked where Dave Chappelle is in this meeting for addicts and he's like talking about using weed.

And then some guy from the audience is like, weed's not a drug.

But also, weed is kind of still widely accepted in the AA community, not widely.

Well, that's Cali Sober, right?

Like that's what we call it here.

California sober, yeah.

Where you don't drink, you don't do other drugs, but weed's fine.

And my comeback for that is alcohol has been considered a miracle medicine for like 100,000 years, you know?

Jesus made it, yeah.

Yeah.

And it also, it's good for pain.

It's good for, it's an antibiotic, antiseptic.

If you're trying to heal wounds, it's but it can totally ruin your life.

100%.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's some people that can use it and they use it on a regular basis and it doesn't cause a lot of problems and it's it does good things for them and that's cool.

I just don't happen to be one of those people, you know.

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Well, when did IFS become a thing and how did it enter your life?

So it is the creation of one, Dr.

Richard Swartz, and he works a lot in the trauma community.

He's working with folks with serious trauma after effects, cutting

diagnoses of multiple personality disorder.

And the way it works is you have what's called yourself.

It's your core you.

And then you have all these other people that are living in your psyche.

And they claim there's a lot of neurobiology that goes into this.

So you've got your core you.

How is this different from Freud?

with the id and the ego and stuff like is it it's really similar it's it's a similar to a lot of different things Yeah.

That's sort of what makes it kind of dangerous and wonky.

Yeah.

So you have all these different personalities that live in your head.

Yeah.

And they're not personalities that you create to do the therapy.

It's personalities that live inside of you.

So you have your core you, and then you have all these other personalities in you.

One of them's your dad and one of them is your, is that, am I no.

No.

Oh,

sort of, yeah.

But when you're a kid, say there's a part of you that expresses itself, like your genuine curiosity.

And you get into some sort of trauma-based situation,

and one of your caregivers doesn't like this or is having a bad day, and they yell at you, you better cut that out.

You know, it gives you a really violent reaction.

You're like, oh my God, I better lock up this part of myself

because it puts me in danger.

And people that grew up with a lot of abuse or neglect have a lot of these parts of their personality that are creative or excited or curious, get locked away into like psychic cages within your psyche.

So you're suppressing these vibes within you.

Yes, essentially.

Yeah.

So you're suppressing these guys.

And they're called exiles and they're these

people living in you.

Already, I don't like it.

I know, right?

But then you have these other people.

So you have these people called managers because

the managers.

come in to take over because essentially when you're little and you're in trauma you can't take care of yourself and so the managers come in to help you cope with this dangerous world by keeping the exiles under lockdown and keeping you out of your body, out of this horrible stuff that's happening.

And they're still there and they grow up with you and they live in your psyche and they're called managers.

By the way, Dr.

Schwartz was a family therapist.

And so

when he was creating this, that's where the family system came up with, because he started to see all the things living in people's psyche, like the family structures that he was working with in his in his therapeutic practice i have so many thoughts about this but let's keep going for now but this is all right fascinating what some of your managers have a really special role they're called firefighters no stop naming things stupidly dr schwartz but anyway go on i know

So when you're extremely triggered by something that reminds you of a horrible thing that happens in your past and one of your exiles wants to come out and talk about it, the firefighter is like, no, and they ring out and the lights are going off and they say, oh, we got to stop this.

So they either get you out of your body somehow, out of your mind.

So they get you to do substances.

They get you to cut.

They get you to

whatever it is that's going to take you out of yourself.

So you don't actually have to interact with these exiles.

They're going to get you.

out of here.

He connects this with a lot of traumatic reactions like disassociation.

So disassociation is a firefighter tool, you know, to get you out of here.

Okay.

So these, so this creates like a thing where you are cutting off from part of yourself, essentially.

Yeah.

Yeah.

These firefighters are coming up and being like, you can't experience this.

And so they do drugs or watch cartoons or do porn or do anything that makes it so that you don't have to feel or think or be a part of this experience.

Right.

And he goes as far to say that people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia have just like a heightened version of what everyone has in these, all these personalities that live inside of you.

That seems ridiculous.

We could talk about that a lot because I've worked with a lot of people with this diagnosis and I've worked in the peer community.

The general approach to multiple personality disorder is to shut it down.

And so they will give people who have this diagnosis like some really heavy-duty medication that just it's meant to just shut all the voices off because the voices are the enemy.

So here, take all of this medication that makes you flat and numb and causes a bunch of physical reactions.

I was working with one guy who was court ordered to have a Frisperidone shot, slow release every month, but it was making his ankles swell up to like these giant balloons, but he couldn't not take it because the mental health board had court-ordered that he has a shot every month.

Oh.

to shut the voices off.

So what usually happens is someone who experiences schizophrenia, this voices scare them or they do things that are troubling or they, for him, he got really paranoid because he was isolated and cut off from people.

And he ended up scaring one of the apartment maintenance guys where he lived.

And that's what got him arrested and got him in the middle of health court.

And as a condition of his getting out of the penal system, he had to have these regular injections, you know.

Yikes.

And it's also how I ended up working with him because the other condition was he had to go to a treatment program.

And that's how he ended up in our program.

Well, thank God that's the one he got sent to, right?

Oh, he was such a sweetheart.

He said he'd been hearing the voices since he was a little kid.

They whisper to him from the vents.

He found them very comforting, something he used to use to help get to sleep at night.

And yeah,

he always sticks out to me, you know.

You had this guy on that was talking about this word association therapy that he does.

And what stuck out to me about that interview is it has a lot in common with cognitive psychology and cognitive psychology.

And one of the reasons I liked it so much when I was in college is it has one of the highest effectiveness rates when it comes to helping people with depression get better without taking a bunch of meds.

And the way cognitive psychology works is you examine the things you say to yourself for all these negative interactions.

And then you challenge those negative interactions, you flip the script, start speaking in a positive manner to yourself, and you start feeling better, less depressed.

And so when you were talking to him, it was like, oh, well, that's just cognitive psychology kind of repackaged.

Yeah.

That's CBT, right?

Cognitive behavioral therapy, essentially.

Not just CBT, but all of cognitive psychology is based on that premise that the things we tell ourselves affect our mood and affect our reality.

And that's also a very popular thing right now is like the daily journaling or make a vision board or,

you know, like affirmations, those sorts of things, right?

100%.

Okay.

Well, that's, that's where Dr.

Schwartz, I think, gets it right is that.

The premise is that there's no part of you that's bad.

It's all good.

It's all there to help you.

It's all there to protect you.

It's there for a reason.

His book is called No Bad Parts.

And that's sort of his underlying premise is like that exile is a good part of you.

It needs to be let out and understood and shown compassion.

That part of you that hurts you to distract you or disassociate you.

Is that how you say it?

Dissociate, dissociate you.

They're good.

They're good.

They're protective.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so instead of fighting these things, you get to know them and you nurture them and you say, oh, protector,

you bring me, you taking care of me and I want you to be in my life.

I just need you to do something a little different because you're causing problems.

I just want to clarify for the listener.

This is not what people mean by multiple identities or something.

Multiple personality disorder.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, this is where it goes off the rails for me because I think it's really helpful.

The stance of the IFS community is that everyone has basically multiple personalities that live within them.

And so it's not different because people with multiple personality disorder just have an exaggerated version of what everyone has naturally.

And it's okay.

And all those parts are okay and acceptable and good.

It's just you need to learn to work with them, understand them, and then parent them from your true self.

So there's the self that's the actual core you.

And then there's all these other personalities living in you.

And so the job of IFS is to help you nurture and get to know your different people so that yourself can be like the head of your family, so to speak, in a way that's, that's healing.

Oh my God, I'm exhausted even listening to you describe that.

I feel so tired.

All of a sudden, I just feel really tired.

Yeah, that's where it got exhausting.

I did this other therapy with one of the practitioners where you personify things about yourself that you don't like.

For instance, I have this thing that i do when i'm hurting and kind of scared where i throw up a big wall and then i start lobbing grenades over the wall and so i personified that part of my personality as this guy called the mustache he's like like one of those old comedy versions of a german soldier with a big bushy mustache and the pointy helmet he's there to protect me and he like i love it puts the wall up and you know what i mean And this was really helpful and healing for me because then I could work with him and I could be like, all right, buddy.

It helps you see something as it's happening, happening, right?

And identify it as like, this is a thing I don't want to be like.

Yeah.

IFS in a way is really beneficial because it does something really similar.

Right.

You know, it takes the parts of you that are scary or that you don't like or don't understand or are trauma related and it helps you to.

form a relationship and show that part compassion.

And when you show that compassion, then you can reintegrate that part of yourself into a helpful mode versus a hurtful mode.

So internal family systems, how does it enter the addiction recovery world?

And then tell me how it shows up in that world.

I, well, working with people who are actively trying to hurt themselves because the addiction drives them to do horrible things to themselves and to the world around them.

And watching people that you really get to care about

go out into the world and just beat themselves up and they come back and they're torn up and messed up.

And they come in and you work with them and you help them to patch up their life and clean up and get healthy again.

And then they graduate and they go out in the world and they do it all over again.

It can be really painful and really maddening.

And so I think that's why there's such a big push sometimes to create an us versus them kind of structure in addiction treatment.

It's me, the person, and you, the person with problems, and I'm going to fix the person with problems.

And that gives us permission to be wildly experimental in our approach.

And we have to micromanage your life because if we don't, you are going to go out and kill yourself.

You know what that sounds like?

That sounds like internal family systems.

100%.

It really does.

Coming up, Aaron's experience as an IFS guinea pig.

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but and

what's the problem well dr schwartz put this whole therapeutic thing together over like 40 years and he's a doctor, and he's got a lot of background.

But I think where it goes off the rails is when you start to teach other people to do it.

When you say teach other people to do it, you don't mean teach your clients.

You mean teach practitioners?

Sorry.

Okay, this is just going to be my own experience, and this is why it's been hard to think about this.

and experience it and to go back to it because it was really...

I'm holding your hand as we do it.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

So about five or six years ago, one of my colleagues brought this thing in.

He said, oh, I bought a subscription to the internal family systems training program.

And it's like 200 and something bucks back then.

Nope.

It's a six to eight weeks.

It's a series of video-based lectures

that teach.

Right.

Can I tell you how much it is?

Yeah, please.

It's $4,000 now.

What?

Get the F out of here.

$4,000.

Yeah.

Whoa.

I was thinking it was like...

For the level one.

That's just for the first level.

Wow.

Just for the first level.

Just for the first level.

That's level one.

Oh, my God.

Whoa.

That's just one of the programs, but that's the, that's the

program.

So for money, you can learn to be this internal family systems either instructor or therapist.

Okay.

And so for a while, a couple of my colleagues were getting together at lunch and we were watching these videos about internal family systems.

One way we do that is called unburdening.

So the concept of parts carrying burdens as defined as extreme beliefs and emotions that came into your system from the outside world through a trauma, through an attachment injury, something like that, and graft onto and attached to these parts

is a key concept in IFS.

So we start watching this series of videos, and it's interesting because when Dr.

Schwartz in the videos talks about addiction and IFS, I'm bringing it into my own experience with addiction.

But I never felt like it hit the mark with my colleagues who aren't in recovery.

It was pretty clear to me pretty quickly that they don't get it.

They haven't sat through a thousand support groups.

They haven't done this deep level work.

They haven't had to rebuild their life.

They haven't hurt the people that they love in that way.

And so they don't get it.

you know and i'm not saying that as a negative it's just they've never built a fence so they don't know know what the hammer does really.

Yeah.

Some of them are in social work.

Some of them are in the chaplain field.

Some of them are just nurses that don't have any therapeutic training at all.

And that's where it kind of goes off the rails for me.

And there's one person I work with who takes a lot of alternative approaches to recovery.

And the one where I was describing personifying the parts of yourself that you don't like, that's one of them.

But she decided, okay, well, we're going to do this.

I'm going to start teaching this.

And so she has a class she's already running that she turns into an IFS class.

So she has a large group of veterans who are in recovery, males and females, trauma histories,

serious PTSD from being stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, like really hardcore, deep level trauma.

So she's like, I'm just going to use IFS and all these veterans to fix them, you know?

And Mew, as a peer specialist, are going to join me.

So I was like there to set up the camera and set up the room and sit there in the corner and be quiet.

And they made that very clear to me.

And I was supposed to do IFS work in the room on myself as an example to the other veterans in the room on how to do it and what it looks like when it's done.

And so not only am I doing this thing that's very intrusive, kind of bizarre, but I'm doing it on show.

to the other people in the room who are trying to recover from trauma by using this tool.

Are you genuinely giving it a go in this moment?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I created a whole pantheon of internal people that I was working with.

You said created,

you created them on the spot.

You're kind of performing for this person.

Yeah.

Coming from a Pentecostal Christian background, I'm really good at this, right?

Because like I grew up speaking in tongues.

Have you ever heard of that?

Bearing the lead, Aaron.

What?

Sorry.

Okay.

I was speaking tongues when I was a kid, and I didn't realize till later in life, I was just like inventing words and then stringing them together.

And that was this foreign language that God had given me because I'm Pentecostal, you know?

So I'm good at this stuff.

You know, it's like, it's part of my growing up in a highly Christian family.

So, so, no, I actually, I actually came up with several figures that live within me for my family.

I have the mother figure who puts a blanket over me.

She likes, she's the one that gets me high because she doesn't want me to feel anything, but she does it in a way that's like warm and surrounding.

Then there's like the orator, the guy that speaks for me.

Then there's like the wild child, like the caged kid who like wants to just get out there and like have tons of energy.

But I locked him up because that was really problematic when I was little.

I used to get in a lot of trouble being, you know, loud, obnoxious.

I'd be yelled at and spanked and put in punishment.

And so I had to lock this kid up.

He was one of my exiles.

I had the wolf.

I had like all these like.

But you're, but you're coming up with this to satisfy this colleague of yours.

Like this isn't something that you had thought of before.

I was performing it for the group to satisfy this colleague.

Got it.

But I was doing it with a genuine desire to get better.

Sure.

You know what I mean?

Oh, yeah.

Like I really embraced it sort of like I embraced speaking in tongues as a kid.

It's like, this is happening.

This is living in me.

I'm fixing myself by getting to know all these people.

It's reminding me of recovered memories.

Like

which is the same thing, like you're recovering the memories to get better, but they might be manufactured.

Yeah.

How would we let's let's I want to give the audience this experience somehow.

Maybe I can

spend $4,000 and take a class.

Oh, no, just go to YouTube.

There's a number of videos where he is doing this work with people and you can hear it in real time.

Andrew Huberman actually got Dr.

Schwartz to do this on his podcast, The Huberman Lab.

Would it be possible to just pose the questions to them

as an exercise that they could do in real time?

Totally.

For once, I'm going to be quiet for a little while, folks.

And you are the lucky patient that gets to talk to Dr.

Schwartz here.

Yeah, and let me lead by saying, please don't do this if you have fear about doing it, but if you're

interested in some inner exploration, then I'll lead you through some of the steps.

So as you've been listening to our conversation, I'm speaking to listeners,

you may be thinking about some of your own parts, particularly your own protectors.

And if you can't think of any, most people have a kind of critic inside or a part that makes them work too hard or a part that takes care of too many people.

So I'm going to invite you to pick a protective part to try to get to know for a few minutes.

And just notice

that inner voice or that emotion, that thought pattern,

that sensation.

Just focus on it exclusively for a second.

And as you do that,

Notice where it seems to be located in your body or around your body.

Some people don't find a location.

Some people they still sense it, but it's not clear where it seems to be located.

But if you do find it in or around your body, then just focus on it there.

And as you focus on it, notice how you feel toward it.

And by that I mean...

Do you dislike it and want to get rid of it?

Are you afraid of it?

Do you resent how it dominates?

Do you depend on it?

So you have a relationship with this part of you.

Because I imagine from someone who really believes in this, it's more tapping into, correct?

Like

you're finally acknowledging and recognizing this stuff.

But right now, as you're talking about it, I'm feeling like I would have to pretend.

Yeah, that's where I kind of got stuck, right?

Because I'm like, I'm doing this work that's supposed to make me better i'm i'm already feeling really offended that i'm not part of the group leadership but i'm just sitting in the corner being the example and doing this really painful stuff for other people sort of like as a show

uh

and then what happened was one day we were in group and this is like several groups in and one of the people in group asked uh her a question hey what about this and i knew the answer because i had just read this chapter a couple of days earlier.

Like, oh, I was like, I know exactly what you're talking about.

I just read this chapter.

And then I could tell she was really puzzled and had to be like, oh, gosh, I don't know.

And then she came up with this like really loopy answer that had nothing to do with a system or the book.

Yeah.

And I'm like, oh, I've read more of this book than she has.

Like, not only am I like here to demonstrate how it works, but she's teaching this as an expert to a bunch of people with severe trauma.

And she has no idea what she's talking about.

Not only that, but she has given herself permission to teach as an expert something that she doesn't understand or really fully grasp

because she's the authority.

They're the broken people.

So obviously the authority can just impose themselves on the broken people this way.

She has the certificate.

She didn't even have a certificate.

She'd only read like three chapters of the book.

Like not even like the whole freaking book.

She hadn't even watched more than two videos and she was teaching it

as an expert.

And that's what broke me.

What's the downside for the folks in the world you work in?

What's the downside

to treating them with this modality?

Or what worries you?

Because

you had the experience yourself, but like what worries you about other people?

Yeah.

My experience is what worries me is that the people I work with who don't really understand it fully, who've only watched a few videos, read some of the book, are handing out the book to everybody and saying, here, you can fix yourself this way, read the book.

But they haven't even read the whole book.

And the book isn't for

the book is to tell you what it is and how to like maybe practice it.

It's not read this book and you can fix yourself.

And even in the book, he says, you know, when you're doing this work, you can really have some psychological harm.

He said there's people that get suicidal because their protector will jump up and try to kill them to protect them from the exiles, you know, or they'll they'll relapse really hard.

Wait, do you mean that they're handing the book out to the client?

Yes.

Oh, I thought you meant the books are being handed out to the practitioners.

No.

No, I'm talking about they bought like tons of these books and given it out to tons of clients to read themselves, which I think most of them don't because they go.

And why are they buying tons of books?

It's part of the wonky treatment system that is a recovery community, you know?

Uh-huh.

uh-huh but so they started giving everyone who took the class an ifs book you're supposed to be doing it in the group which is really uh painful because you're like trying to you're supposed to like pull all these really wounded hard-to-face parts out in front of everybody in the group while you're trying to learn how to do it from someone who doesn't know what they're doing

and then when i would talk to them they'd be talking about their parts, like interacting with them, who's interacting with you.

So it gets super complicated.

I can't even express how maddening it can be to know that this is really a bad idea, but knowing that there's a real harm here, but not being able to do or say anything about it was really,

has been really challenging for the last several years.

So then let's talk about how that could be dangerous for someone in recovery or, you know, in trauma therapy, or not dangerous necessarily, but unhelpful.

I think it can be a helpful therapeutic modality with the trained practitioner in a one-on-one setting with the understanding that you're kind of manufacturing these personalities to work with this part of yourself and to find resolution.

That would be like the helpful scenario, you know what I mean?

But not necessarily sitting in a room with someone who took an online course as part of a multi-level marketing life coaching scheme.

100%.

And not only the entire online course, but just a couple of classes of the online course and part of the book.

And now they're going to tell you how to do it as an expert.

And you're going to try and do this, work with some some of the most challenging traumatic parts of yourself with someone who doesn't really know what they're doing in front of a group of people who are watching and you're exposing some of the most raw painful parts in front of a bunch of people.

It sounds just so absolutely difficult and stressful.

And like in watching this facilitator that you know, have you seen people really, really connect to it?

I have people that have talked about it a little, but I've never actually talked with someone who's been through that IFS class that's like, oh my God, it was amazing, changed my life.

So no, yeah.

No.

And it's funny.

I always say that my brain's like a hamster wheel.

And when something gets stuck in there, it'll spin and spin and spin and spin and spin and spin and spin and it goes nowhere.

But if I can take that thing out of my head and put it out in the world to somebody else, I can actually see it.

on the outside or even write it down do some art around it and then it becomes something that i can work with but if it's just stuck in that hamster wheel oh it's not going anywhere you know yeah Yeah, this IFS shit is like, how many more hamster wheels can I create?

To me, yeah, like a whole bunch of them.

And let's just hang out with these guys all the time and talk about them all the time and talk about it with other IFS people all the time.

And

spend the rest of your life finding exiles and nurturing the protectors and being your core self.

He makes some pretty wild claims in the book, too.

Like one claim is he's you can use this to cure racism.

What?

Yeah.

Like we would live in a racist society.

So the exiles are like built into us or these racist sides are built into us as kids.

And so we can actually work with our racist parts.

Except for that, like, all right, well, yeah, everybody's kind of racist, but then also like the managers are often the racist parts.

Yeah.

Well, that's, he doesn't really go into a lot of detail.

He just, he just leads you through an exercise in the audiobook where you imagine your racist racist part and you have a discussion with it.

I don't want to get to know my racist exiles.

100%.

Or my racist uncle.

Like,

I don't want to spend time with those people.

Well, you'd be like, racist part of me, why are you exhibiting these racist qualities?

Oh, I'm trying to protect you from this, this, and this.

Well, this was great.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Bye.

Bye, guys.

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