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Richard, or Dick, Schwartz is the creator of Internal Family Systems. Many of you will be familiar with the therapeutic model of IFS and the idea that each of us has many parts within us. If you’re not familiar with IFS, no worries, Dick gives a quick breakdown in our conversation. And if you want to go deeper, I’ll link my other conversations with Dick, and more, in the show notes.
Thomas Hubl is a teacher and group facilitator whose work focuses in part on collective healing. I’ve talked to him several times on Pulling the Thread—he’s brilliant.
I was very excited when I heard that Dick and Thomas started collaborating with another. One result of that partnership is their new joint book, which is called Releasing Our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral, and Collective Trauma.
Not surprisingly, it’s excellent—and so, so helpful. I loved getting to talk to them about it, and to learn more of their tips and tools for making better use of our energy, our emotions, and our relationships.
FROM THOMAS HÜBL & RICHARD SCHWARTZ:
MORE FROM RICHARD SCHWARTZ:
On Pulling the Thread: “Recovering Every Part of Ourselves”
MORE FROM THOMAS HÜBL:
Part One on Pulling the Thread: “Finding Shadow in the Body”
Part Two on Pulling the Thread: “Staying with Discomfort”
Part Three on Pulling the Thread: “How Do We Work With Our Darkest Energy”
Part Four on Pulling the Thread: “Understanding Evil”
On Pulling the Thread: “Feeling into the Collective Presence”
On Pulling the Thread: “Processing Our Collective Past”
Thomas’s Podcast, Point of Relation
Thomas Hübl’s Website
Follow Thomas on Instagram
EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:
ELISE:
This is thrilling because I have had conversations with both of you independently. So Dick, for context, Thomas and I have done, I don’t know how many, six or seven podcasts maybe at this time about collective shadow and evil, and we just like to get in there and mix it up. That’s true. Yeah, it’s good times. So seeing the invitation to talk to you guys about a book that you’re doing together was thrilling. I’m not surprised that you know each other and that you work together, but how did this come about?
DICK:
I have a terrible memory about most everything, but
ELISE:
Same.
DICK:
I do remember getting very interested in collective healing and hearing about Thomas’s work, and I think reaching out to him to talk about how he does it and see if he could be a resource. As I started to head in that direction,
THOMAS:
I also felt there was an immediate resonance, and so over the time we unpacked that resonance.
ELISE:
One of the things I think from experiencing both of you too, and for I think most listeners to this podcast are now quite familiar with IFS and with the theory behind both of your work really, but you both have such extreme self presence. It’s such an intense experience, hopefully for the listeners as well. But whenever I’ve been in your presence, there is a self presence I think in the way that you guys are R some of the time all the time. I don’t know.
DICK:
I would say much of the time I still can get triggered by a few things. My wife is what we call a great tor mentor. She mentors me by tormenting me sometimes, and she forces me to work with parts that I need to work with is what I’m saying.
ELISE:
Yeah.
DICK:
But yeah, no, I’ve been at this 40 years and after you do it long enough, you can stay in self much of the time. And as Thomas said, I sensed that at him right away as well. And I was saying to you earlier, it’s a rare experience for me to encounter a leader who has developed something that’s different and has a big following who isn’t also wanting to prove that his is better than mine and all that macho stuff. And so that’s just been delightful too, to brainstorm about similarities and differences.
ELISE:
Yeah, there’s such an interesting Venn diagram too, in the way that you guys process with people together and collectively. And what I think is so exciting about this book and the fact that a significant portion of it is devoted to other therapists as well is that the scale of healing that we need on this planet and the muscles that we all need to build to manage ourselves while we’re also contending with culture and everything that’s coming up and wants to be integrated, the thick shadow swamps that are coming through right now, we need people who really understand the micro and the macro who can work with themselves while working with other people, whether as a facilitator or just being a person in the world where everyone is very scared and anxiety is high and people are very activated, and so it’s both wild and wonderful to imagine a scaled approach to IFS that also works on Thomas. When you think about collective shadow, is that also another way of talking about collective exiles?
THOMAS:
Yeah, I think that’s what Richard and I kind of found out by collaborating and teaching together that actually we use a different language and a different way to describe things, but what we are actually describing is very similar. And so yes, we are also talking about applying this in maybe different parts of the world as networks are coming together and really applying this on collective levels to support collective processes or conflicts or whatever is happening right now and to work on the collective level. And I have seen in our groups when there are hundreds of people, and let’s say we worked for a long time on the Holocaust for example, or the second World War I, and you can really see in the group when there is enough self energy in the collective through some practices that we can enhance that a bit. Then you can see I think what Richard, you would call the ex collective ex, and I will call this the collective defense mechanism and the protectors so that then you can really see how that protection function comes up and how almost everybody in the room, hundreds of people notice that now it’s there.
This is amazing. You can really feel what’s being kept suppressed in society. You get to the edge and you can make that process visible. And I was always fascinated and then when I heard Dick’s description and I thought, wow, this is very, very similar. There is something,
ELISE:
And I know people who are listening probably know the basic components are parts, but do you mind just reorienting us really quickly, Dick, just so people when we say exile, protector, firefighter manager, they know.
DICK:
So the basics idea is that we’re all multiple personalities in the sense that we all have these parts and that that’s a good thing. They’re all valuable, but they get forced out of their valuable states by trauma and attachment injuries into roles that can be damaging. And they take in extreme beliefs and emotions from the trauma or as we’re talking about from our ancestors that are related to traumas that happened decades or centuries earlier. And these extreme beliefs and emotions almost infect these parts and organize the way they are. They operate like a virus. So you have a lot of parts who before they were hurt were these younger inner children, child parts that we love, but they’re also the most sensitive parts of us, so they get hurt the most by what happens in our lives. And once they get hurt and frozen in time frozen in the past during the trauma and they get burdened with these emotions like pain and terror and worthlessness, they now have the power to overwhelm us with that and make it so we can’t function and pull us back into those scenes.
So we lock them away inside and try to spend the rest of our life not letting them get triggered or keeping them contained. And then other parts are forced to become these protectors. They have to abandon their naturally valuable states and take on protector rolls to keep those exiles contained. And some of them will do that in a managerial way. They’re trying to preempt anything that would trigger the exiles. Those are what we call manager protectors. And then there are these reactive parts that if an exile does get triggered and all that raw emotion comes pouring out flames of raw emotion, there are parts that immediately get you higher than those flames or doubted with some substance or distracted until they burn themselves out. So we call them firefighters. So it’s a pretty simple map. But then the big deal about IFS is that in addition to all those parts, there is this inner leader, this essence inside of us that has all these great C word qualities that’s covered over by the parts initially.
So as we help them trusted safe to open space inside, that person emerges spontaneously with calm and confidence and curiosity, pure curiosity about the parts or about the outside world or compassion out of the blue. Suddenly they have compassion for this critic that seconds earlier they hated and want to get rid of. You get that part to step back and now they feel sorry for it. So that person is in everybody and is covered over. And a lot of the work in I Fs is helping to access that state and then when the clients in that state have them begin to help their parts transform out of these roles they got stuck into and help them unburden. And as I was learning all that, I started to see how some of these burdens weren’t from your personal history, but actually came down through the generations and struggling about how to unload those. I ran into ancestral work and also got the vision of how this could be done at a large level because these what we call legacy burdens really do drive many, many conflicts in the world and color our ability to see the world purely and for those of us schooled in the western culture keep us disconnected from spirituality really or keep us seeing nature is something to manipulate rather than to appreciate. So that’s the short version.
ELISE:
No, it’s a beautiful system and for people who are curious, I’ll link the episode where Dick does IFS on me so you can start to understand how it works on an individual level. And then in the book there are transcripts of conversations. So for anyone who’s like, I don’t understand what it would be like to work with an IFS therapist, they outline that pretty clearly. And to go into what you just said about these ancestral burdens, because of course we all have our own personal exiles, but in my work I’ve come to the quite obvious realization that so many of our stories are the same and we pick these stories up from the culture, we imbibe them, we take them as our own, particularly in our highly individualistic culture. And then we think I’m the only one who’s dealing with this thing and we become quite scared and hardened around some of these stories.
And so to go back to what you were saying, Thomas, about working for example with Holocaust, both survivors and people who are from a Nazi lineage and working with those people in the same room, the villains, the victims, the heroes, whatever way we like to culturally label everyone. I think the point of your work, and what you’re saying too, Dick, is that when this doesn’t get processed and metabolize and it’s impossible to metabolize and process it all in the moment, but it gets passed down, these then become these cultural stories about, and you write, there’s a whole chapter devoted to systemic racism, but then the way that that comes down into everyone in the culture is like, I’m a bad person. I’m an oppressor or I’m a victim, I’m oppressed. And then we get really scared. Is that accurate? We get really scared and we start exiling those parts of us.
DICK:
Yeah, I totally agree with what you’re saying. The reason a lot of this doesn’t get metabolized is because of the cultural propensity to exile. So most of us were raised to, and especially men, that if you hurt, you just leave it in the past. And that’s encouraging the exiling of trauma. And then as Thomas was saying, the more of that you walk away, the more powerful it gets to organize unconsciously what happens to you and the more you fear it and it becomes a vicious cycle that way.
THOMAS:
Yeah, the pain that needed to be absenced thrown painkillers on and suppressed is the inability today to feel each other, to resonate with each other, to listen to each other, to hear each other, to be close to each other. And in that absence space, a lot of the trauma that Richard just said is in the past is actually circling through us and comes back as another cycle and then we say, oh, history repeats and say, yeah, of course history repeats. And many people say, yeah, it’s because of the others. There’s always somebody that repeats history. Instead of saying, no, no, wait a moment, we are all part of this repetition compulsion, and it happens through all of us because we are shareholders of that absence tool. But if we do that integration work, which means also we allow some of that pain to slowly come back, but in a way that we can digest, then the self energy as Richard would say, grows.
And I would say we are more integrated, that we have more capacity to be with the current process. And if not, then we say, oh, the current process triggers us. It’s challenging, it’s all this, but it shows the lack of resonance that is happening. And I believe that something very tiny actually that is often overlooked that in trauma, the capacity of the nervous system to modulate internal data input and external data input. So how I feel and see you right now and how I feel myself right now being modulated together into one reality, so a healthy integrated nervous system can do that, or when we are in our ourself, then that’s what’s happening. But in the trauma, when somebody gets abused, hurt, beaten, that trauma is being inflicted, that bridge breaks so then inside and outside us to a certain degree or very strongly separate, and then we wonder why we can’t listen to each other in intimate relationships or also in conflicts because we can’t because that function, that data flow is broken or suppressed. And if it heals, then we feel, oh, we can actually, even if you disagree, be more in the same space. That doesn’t mean that there is no difficulty in the world, but it means our capacity to handle it or to be with it and find solutions is much higher. And I think that’s what, correct me if that’s wrong, Richard, that’s what you mean when you call self-leadership is a higher capacity to be with challenges not the magical wish that there are no challenges anymore because life has challenges.
DICK:
You’re very well said. When you exile a lot of parts of you, not only does that hurt these parts that got hurt in the past, but you’re cut off from the resources they give you before you left them away. So as people bring them back home, they suddenly have creativity that they didn’t have before because they had cut that off. And as Thomas is saying, when something happens in your relationship, it doesn’t trigger these parts that are stuck back when your father did something similar. And so you feel more integrated in the sense that you react from self, you don’t react from the protector of that exile part who then lashes out at your partner for doing that thing. And these protectors will keep you a little bit distant from your body so that you don’t feel as much because if you feel too much it’ll trigger them or they’ll keep your partner at a certain distance.
ELISE:
Yeah, okay. Obviously we live in a culture right now that is very focused rightly on victims. And what I observed though is that then there’s this strong instinct to claim that place that’s a protective part in our culture to be like, I’m a victim, therefore I cannot be a villain and I am sort of off the hook in terms of claiming any responsibility for my actions or for the lineage, whatever needed to happen for me as a human to be alive on this planet in my ancestral line. How is that guilt? Because the reality of being alive is that animals die. Things happen in order for us to stay upright and keep moving through this world. And of course we do grievous actions against each other all the time. Are those hurt parts too or is that a different part of the system or can you stay open to accepting that and integrating that responsibility? The more work you do and the more self that can come online and hold that tension of opposites, really, I’m a good person and I’ve done bad things and I’m capable of doing bad things and I own a certain amount of this collective shadow just by virtue of being alive, but maybe I’ve also done some grievous things to other people.
DICK:
So it’s one thing to say, and I spent two years working with sex offenders in a treatment center. One thing to say I’m a sex offender, and another thing to say, there’s a part of me that did these horrible things and I’m going to get to know that part and help it so it doesn’t keep doing that. Before I did that work, I wasn’t sure I could say that all parts are good, no bad parts. But then I did that work and we would go to the perpetrating part and the client and see where it was stuck in the past and it was stuck in scenes where as a boy he was being perpetrated, not necessarily sexually but hurt badly, and the part looked around the room and said, who has power in this room? It’s this guy doing this to me. I’m going to take in his energy to protect my person from him. And then it gets stuck with this desire to hurt vulnerability that he inherited as a legacy burden from maybe his father or something. And when we would get those parts out of there and help them unload that, they would change just like any other part. So yeah, for me, violence is the product of violence and the legacy burdens that come with it. And so some of our mutual interest is in helping download in particular those kinds of legacy burden.
THOMAS:
When we looked at victim perpetrator or transgressor dynamics, what became very apparent to me in the moment, there is a transgression of what I would call the law of life and inner a law of integrity, honesty, connectedness, many spiritual traditions have different ways to describe it, but every time we cross the line and hurt the integrity of another person, there is like a split. Life gets split in in this traumatic moment, and then there’s a fixation into victim perpetrator locations. But they are always entangled. And I believe, and that’s I’m sure, Richard, in your work that’s being passed down the generations, it doesn’t go away just because one generation passes away, this kind of entanglement is being passed down. So those as parts show up in the next ancestral generations. And so on the one hand I believe we have to have rituals, collective rituals where that pain and victimization less the name that we give this, but more the pain that happened needs to be witnessed and seen and recognized to be reintegrated.
But it doesn’t matter which pole we are suffering is in the split of this polarized two parts victims and perpetrators. So once it’s polarized, it’s going to create more polarization and it can’t create more integrated life because it’s not integrated. And in the shadow of that pole, you’ll create naturally suffering. So that’s in the moment I’m fixated in a specific role or place in life. It’s not coming from the self that Richard described because the self is open and present and can respond to what’s happening now, but that role of victim and perpetrator cannot because it’s stuck in the past. As long as we don’t release those, that’s why we often say hurt people, hurt people because it’s fixated in the past. I think that’s very important even for all our justice systems to find new ways how to work with that because some of the ways we are doing this now are just contributing to the perpetuation even if some of the interventions are needed, but that can be the endpoint that needs to be the starting point for something new. So how can we create this massive integration processes that we can release ourselves also in the country, for example, a strong political polarization and the reenactment of certain victim perpetrator dynamics. This can go on forever if you don’t go to the roots of it. I think what Richard described before, if that integration happens, then naturally certain things will stop.
ELISE:
And in your experience when you’re working with these groups and you’re processing, let’s say the Holocaust, which is of course as we know, endless cycle, and you can trace the lineage of Jews as a Jew and it’s this endless cycle of victim perpetration, et cetera, through time, right? We’re seeing this across the Middle East too, and it will keep going, right? Until there is some sort of ary force or some reconciling force that emerges and breaks that binary. I’m sure you experienced this not at the level at which we culturally need it, but in these rooms, and obviously Dick, you’ve experienced this too on an individual level, but when those parts get integrated or whatever the bite of shadow that you’re working in the room gets metabolized or at least held and grounded, what emerges? What does that feel like?
DICK:
So when we can convince people to do the opposite of what they have done with their pain or terror, which is to go to it and to open their heart to it and to get the parts who were living back in those scenes out of there, retrieved them, witness them, Thomas and I are both into the parallels. So any oppressed group in a country, what do they want? They want to be witnessed. They want the perpetrators to see what they did and how bad it was, and then to have some kind of compensation. And it’s the same in this inner world that these parts that we did simply because they got hurt lock away. They want us to see what that was like for them to be rejected that way by us, but also where they’re stuck in the past. And so there’s a big witnessing that needs to happen.
I would’ve you Elise go into the scene and be with that younger girl and help her come back home, come back maybe into your body and help her let go of unload what we call burdens, the emotions and beliefs she got from that experience or any legacy burden she carries, at which point she will transform and she’ll feel much lighter and playful and want to just be a happy little girl inside of you. And as you do that with more and more of these parts, and then you can show the protectors of her, but they don’t have to do that and they can shift roles and they can be who they’re designed to be again, which is always valuable. It’s either they become advisors or maybe cheerleaders or some other role. And as all that happens and then you help them get to know each other in a new way, you feel this harmony happening inside and they don’t stand out anymore. You feel much more, as Thomas said, integrated because it is because they disappear. It’s simply because now they all coexist well and work together and trust you as self to lead the system. So that’s the goal we’re heading toward.
THOMAS:
Yeah, and I would say in the groups I experienced a very similar process that Richard described right now that in the groups, the fragmentation that you can feel as the pain comes up, it needs the right pacing. But when so many people witness something, let’s say there are hundreds of people. So you have in a way hundreds of nervous systems that become aware of something that they’re not really aware of because it’s a collective shadow. But with the right facilitation we can make the outskirts. There’s something that you don’t see and suddenly you see a little bit the silhouettes. And at the beginning of an awareness process, the strong polarization of victim and perpetrator starts to be held because in society there are poles and in between is a very strong tension and that tension is being rejected by most of the people because it’s uncomfortable.
But if you can host that tension as tension, then you don’t need to polarized. And that’s the beginning of feeling a deeper cultural pain. And when we feel that pain together, then the cold separation in the room turns into a warmer atmosphere of really being able to feel this together. And I have seen amazing processes with the most horrific things that people experience or their ancestors experience. But when we were in the room, wow, you feel some sacredness is present. And that sacredness, I think is a capacity of what we call the collective witness. It’s different than many individual witnessing something. There is a bigger thing that’s happening and it needs a certain coherence in the group, but when that happens, a new level of witnessing emerges and that is very powerful. You sit in the room and you feel now something sacred is happening and everybody in that room knows that everybody knows now something special happens. That’s amazing.
ELISE:
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Lisa Miller’s work on spirituality and she’s a psychiatrist. It’s fascinating and you guys would love it, but essentially when they put sort of F MRIs on people and they have, I think it’s nine or 10 people praying, which sort of goes to that idea in Judaism that you need 10 people in order to convene and pray, but that you can see the mental entrainment, the way that it gets super powered, that there is enmeshment in our brains a cohesion. I think group work is so powerful and that anyone walking into the room is immediately entrained into that vibration or whatever is happening at that level. Listening to you both too. I come more from the Jungian tradition, but when you think about what we siphon off and condition is bad and put into the shadow, our personal shadow, and we’re carrying that around like a hefty bag, not only is it so heavy, but going to what you said, the amount of energy that we spend keeping those parts, keeping that shadow away from us, away from our acquired personality is so intense that to be able to reclaim that gold, reassign it in your lineage and just take the charge out of it is an incredible, a much better use of energy.
And then when you think about that in the collective and the amount of energy it requires to polarize how much of our vitality here in the states at least we’re spending, how much of our attention is going right now to maintaining this extreme polarity? It would be wonderful to have that energy back and to use in that self-energy space of what are we going to do? What’s the vision for the future? How are we going to remodel these systems? How are we going to build this world that we want? I feel like in both of your work, another insistent theme is this self-energy is so good and holy, both whole and holy and really, even though we want to assign people to these horrible roles, and some of them might want to exterminate us, yes, but that it’s done mostly from a place of fear terror and a desire for safety or to keep loved ones safe, but that it’s really not what we would call evil. It comes from a place of fear. Is that accurate?
DICK:
It is for me, yeah. We have what we call the fire drill exercise where if I was having you do it, you would think of somebody in your life that you see as an enemy or that triggers you all the time that you think is really bad person, and you would put that person in a contained room and you’re outside looking at the person from outside the room. And I would have you watch as the person did the thing that bothers you so much and notice what happens to your body when that protector jumps in. And then also notice how the person looks when you look through those eyes of that protector. And then I would reassure you that you’re not going into the room in the exercise. So this protector can stand down, it can separate, and if it’s willing to, then you notice the shift in your body.
And then also as you look through the eyes of yourself, most people see a totally different person and they can seep through, they can see past the protectors, this is what you were saying, they can see past the protectors of the person who’s doing the bad thing and they can see the exiles that are driving a protector and they have compassion and they still aren’t going to allow the person to keep hurting, not like they’re going to become passive, but if they do act, it’ll be from self with clarity, confidence and courage and compassion. And so as I’m working now with social activists for example, that’s what I’m trying to help them do is get the righteous parts that are dominating them, that are polarizing people to trust their self to say the same message and to see people through those eyes.
ELISE:
That’s beautiful.
THOMAS:
Yeah, that’s very beautiful. I’ve seen this many, many times that when Ben relaxes that suddenly you have a whole different view of the person that triggers you, and that in itself changes already. The dynamic often. And I wanted to say, I think Elise, when you spoke before about the polarization in the us, one interesting process would be to look at what actually needs that because we are treating it as if the polarization in the US was a bad thing. And I’m not saying it’s a good thing either. It’s something, but it’s a process obviously. So that strong polarization is if you say no bad parts. So there are parts creating that,
DICK:
And
THOMAS:
I think what’s happening in the US could be seen as I could look at that poll and I can look at the other poll and then I’m already part of a dynamic or for a moment not to say that what’s happening is good and we just should be bystanders and let it happen. No, that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is let’s be engaged in a different way and say, wow, there is a process and we want to understand more what are the forces driving this process? Because obviously in this strong situation right now, something is being expressed or there’s some dynamic that we don’t get. And I think if we were to create the right self energy driven witnessing and apply it to that collective state, maybe we would, and maybe Richard, you want to speak to it because you did already some work on the collective burdens in the us what is actually happening here?
If that’s a process that expresses something, not just a mistake that’s happening that oh, this myth that we could do things better when we actually do them the way we do them, that in itself is already a sign of our disconnect because as long as we do it that way, we are doing it that way. Let’s own it. Instead of saying, oh, I disown it by saying I could have done it better. Maybe if I own it then I can learn how to do it better or develop. But I would be curious, Richard, to hear from you what you think about that, what’s happening right now and what are the parts that are producing the very process that we are seeing?
DICK:
Well, I always like the parallels to internal systems. I’ve worked with so many extremely polarized inner systems where there’s one part that wants to go kill somebody, and then there’s another part that wants to hide and never show themselves, and they battle constantly. And in the absence of self, it just escalates like you’re saying. But then once I can help the client separate from both of those parts and access these C word qualities and then come to each with compassion and curiosity and make a connection with each side, both of them relax. And then just like in family therapy, we bring the two polarized parts together, have them face each other. And the question I would have if it were you to ask them would be, what do you guys have in common? Is there anything you guys have in common? Almost always they say, well, we’re in the same person.
We’re trying, we’re both wanting what’s best for this person. And just finding that common ground, everybody deescalates and relaxes more and just having this grownup there, most of these parts are very young and they can’t run a system even though they think they have to. So just seeing that there is somebody who can steer the ship in a safe way, they both relax more. And I believe that if there could be, and it doesn’t have to be embodied in one person, but if there just could be enough self, and it is all exacerbated by how siloed we all are in these media bubbles where we don’t hear about the other side at all. We hear these extreme things about the other side. If there were a way to connect with both sides and have them trust the same group even and then have them have dialogues, that would be wonderful. Yeah,
ELISE:
I think going to what you were both saying and trying to not label what’s happening as bad, even though it’s very painful and it’s scary and there’s a lot of uncertainty and feelings of chaos, but really chaos is the cauldron of creativity, right? Something is emerging that wants to be healed and wants to be reconciled and it feels do or die. But if we can hold that tension of opposites without feeding it, I feel confident, and maybe this is delusional and I don’t know how long it will take for us to collectively do this work, but that on the other side of it, there will be some massive remediation, the birth of something new that addresses the core, the exiled parts that are driving this polarization in the first place. And I think we’ll end up with this slate of legislation. It might not be for 10 years or 20 years that starts to address which has been present right in the system for a long, long time, but it has been effectively managed to use or protected or pushed down, which is now coming up.
It is bursting out and it is wildly transparent, and I take a lot of faith and the transparency of what’s happening because I feel like it was always there. People couldn’t feed their families. This snap crisis that’s emergent is a symptom of a root cause issue of extreme inequity, right? That’s not new. It’s not new as one example. And so I feel like what we’re seeing is again, very painful, but an opportunity to address what’s been hidden but visible. And to that end, I’m so grateful that you guys are doing this work. And I think the other really important, we’re talking about the power of group work here, which is much more scalable, but that the more each of us can do this work, the more self we can each bring online, the more presence in your vernacular, Thomas, we can access. That’s very powerful. That’s the most powerful thing we can do, right?
DICK:
Totally agree. I’m big into the ripple idea that as you personally unburdened or your client’s unburdened and you access more self, it’s bringing more of that collective self that Thomas has been talking about to the planet and that if we can reach some kind of critical mass than things will start to shift in a positive way. And I agree with you that the opportunity is there that something like that could transpire. It’s unlikely to as long as people carry these burdens, the hardest thing about exiling isn’t just the suffering of the exile. It’s also how hardhearted the protectors have to become to do the exile. They’re human little beings inside. And as they have to close their hearts to these parts that are going to be suffering if they lock ‘em up and then these protectors come to dominate us and they have a kind of disdain for weakness and vulnerability, and they take this attitude of if you’re not making it because you’re not working hard enough and that this is a land of opportunity, so what’s wrong with you and what happens inside gets played out outside. So all that has to change. We need models that say, no, that isn’t the way to go. The way to go is to go back to your pain, go back to your terror and help it transform.
ELISE:
Don’t you feel like maybe this is happening because we are actually more resourced? It might not feel that way, but maybe it’s happening because we actually do have more skills, more capacity, more consciousness to hold it.
THOMAS:
I also believe that the power that comes from many people doing the inner work creates a stronger capacity and that more detox to happen. I think that that’s true. What I also hear you say, Richard, is what it helps us to do because I think one of these protection mechanisms is that we envision some kind of ideal world, a good world, and the good world is the opium of our inner world that we don’t need to meet what’s really happening. And even in spiritual traditions, the promise is later
And later is a defense mechanism that is very needed in the trauma because in the traumatic moment later makes totally sense because this moment is so terrible that later must be is the only way to go. But if I’m in my healing, the later needs to integrate itself back into my agency now because if something happens in my relationship now, I need regulation now, not later. Later I will think about why I didn’t say that and why you treated me like this, because I’m lacking that regulation. So I think that one way to see healing is that we have a higher capacity to meet the world as it is and not try to envision how it will be when it’s healed.
And I think the more people can come into that state, which is only possible when it’s a self-led state because all these parts cannot do this. So it’s only that the self is the only place that can meet the world as it is. And in that paradise is happening not after as a compensation on me not being able to meet the world. And so what I also agree with you, Elise, is that democracies are at least one step further to transcend power over hierarchies into something new. But the bruises or the parts, the fragmentation that Richard describes of power over hierarchies is playing out a lot in democracies of course, because they’re bruise the thousands of years of dictators and kings and the queens and people up and people down and worse violations. So then we are dealing now with the bruises or with the parts in the democracy that can’t really live democracy yet, but we are living in a system that created some more safety and some resource for people to speak out, to bring our voices to be more free in a way. And I think this work that’s happening now and also the terminal can be an invitation to a new form of democracy that is more self-led. And so I am very hopeful that that’s what we can be a part of to this birthing process in democracy 2.0, like a self-led democracy. But we have to work with the hurt parts, thousands of years of power over sits in our DNA, sits in our ancestors, sits in our bones, basically. And that’s our journey, I believe right now.
DICK:
Yeah, very well said. Totally agree.
ELISE:
Well, thank you both for your tireless endless work and for giving us these essential toolkits because I think that they are not only formative for right now, but also for later. Just kidding, Thomas. But I think that there’s this convergence around the resonance of these systems because it’s so real. And so thank you for planting all these seeds. I think IFS is such a beautiful system that overlaps so exquisitely with other views of, you could call it reality or spirituality, psychology. It just feels very incredibly resonant and true. And I’ll link all of my conversations with Dick Schwartz in the show notes. I’ve interviewed him. I’m pulling the thread as well as in my last gig, and I’ll link obviously Thomas’s podcast interviews as well, as well as some of their other books, which are also excellent. This new book is called Releasing Our Burdens.
It’s really helpful I think in particular for anyone in a healing space. And there are a lot of, there’s a lot of information for therapists, like what do you do when your protectors come up in relationship with patients, for example, which I thought was a really fascinating read as well. And they also model throughout, you’ll see transcripts from sessions so you can really understand how they both work in very similar ways, sometimes using different vocabulary with people in that type of context. And I’m just going to read a little bit about, this is from chapter two and it’s about why trauma is difficult to address because I think it gets to what we were talking about in terms of these parts of ourselves that become exiled and protected and these exile parts are hurt. They feel vulnerable, they feel judged, they feel terrified, and even listening to them, I’m sure you could start to identify the parts of yourself that maybe you can’t even get close to that are so well managed, so protected that it’s really hard to access them.
So they write to restate, trauma is an unintegrated part of the past that remains stuck in time, creating patterns of reactivity and limiting our ability to fully engage with the present because it’s stuck. Trauma is a circular energy that generates recurrent patterns, and those patterns don’t tend to change or get updated with new information. This is because they can’t, as Sigmund Freud noted, unconscious trauma is subject to repetition compulsion. Specifically, he observed that those who do not remember their repressed past trauma may tend to repeat it in their present life. What’s frozen usually stays frozen despite adaptability in other aspects or parts of an individual. The same dynamic holds true for larger systems as well. Families work environments, local communities and cultures as a whole. And I’m sure you absolutely can understand, particularly when you’re not examining yourself. You can see this so easily in other people or in the culture that wound that there’s something gets slightly close to that wound and the person goes off or there’s an extreme reaction to being triggered.
That’s really what they’re talking about here. Alright, friends, thanks as always for joining. I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.