Richard Schwartz: No Bad Parts

Yeah, you know, it took me a really long time to come to that conclusion, and a lot of work with clients, testing that out. And clients who not only had parts that procrastinated, but parts that had done heinous things. It turns out that if you can focus on whatever the part is, say it's a part that makes you addicted to something or has made you hit somebody, or one of these nasty inner critics, if you can just get curious about it and ask inside about why it does this inside of you, and wait for the answer, don't think of the answer, you'll begin to hear about how it got forced into this role that it's in. And a lot of the time, most all the time, how much it doesn't like the role but feels like it's necessary, usually to protect you or to protect other parts of you that are vulnerable. And that's a big paradigm shift, as I try to make clear in the book, because our culture and also a lot of psychotherapies sort of demonized various parts of us and think they are what they seem to be, which never turns out to be the truth.

Well, yeah, this goes back maybe 40 years now, so I'm pretty old. And I was a family therapist who was one of those obnoxious family therapists that thought we found the holy grail, and the people who mucked around in the internal world were just wasting their time because we could change everything that needed to be changed by just reorganizing families. And I decided to prove that and did an outcome study with bulimia. I brought together a bunch of bulimic kids and their families and found I could reorganize the family just the way the book said to, and still they kept binging and purging, much to my frustration. And I began asking why, and they started talking this language of parts and would say some version of, 'When something bad happens, this critic attacks me inside, and it brings up a part who makes me feel worthless and empty and alone, and that feeling is so dreadful that the binge comes in to rescue me from it, but the act of the binge triggers the critic again.' And it sounded, as a family therapist, familiar because that's what I'd been studying, these patterns in families. And at first I thought, well, that's a nice metaphor for different emotions and thoughts, and we can work with that. But they were talking about these things as if they had full personalities and a lot of autonomy, and that they couldn't control them. And then I got scared. I thought maybe these are people with multiple personality disorder, until I started listening inside myself and, oh my god, I've got them too, and mine are as full personalities and sometimes as extreme as theirs. And then I just got curious and have spent the next 40 years studying these internal systems. And in the process of doing that, and trying to get my clients to relate to them, initially because I assumed they were what they seemed, trying to get my clients to stand up for themselves to the critic or control the binge or things like that, clients were getting worse and worse. But I didn't know what else to do. And then there was a client who had a part that made her cut herself, and I decided to try and control that part so it didn't do that to her that week, and had her fight with that part for a couple hours until finally it said, 'Okay, I won't do it.' And then of course she opened the door and she had a big gash down the side of her face. And I collapsed and just out of the blue said, 'I can't beat you with this.' And the part said it didn't want to beat me, and that was the turning point. Because I just became curious and I asked the part why it did what it did, and it talked about how it needed to protect her when she was being sexually abused as a child, and one way to do that would be to get her out of her body, and you could do that by cutting. And then I shifted again. Now I have a kind of appreciation for the heroic role it played in her life, and I convey that to it, and it broke into tears because everyone had demonized it. In talking to that part more, I learned that it was still frozen in time during those sex abuse scenes and lived as if it thought she was five years old, and it protected other vulnerable parts, and so on. And it carried these extreme beliefs and emotions that came from those traumas that sort of drove the way it operated, like a virus, almost like the coronavirus. So with all of that, I started thinking maybe these parts aren't what they seem. Maybe like kids in a family who get forced into an extreme role because of the dynamics of the family, who can be released from that extreme role by changing the dynamics of the family, maybe that's what they're like. And then I proceeded to do that same process of just getting curious, getting my clients to get curious with these very damaging parts. And now, 40 years later, having worked with parts that have killed people, parts that have molested little kids, I can safely say there aren't any bad parts. They're all just stuck in the past, trying their best to keep you safe, and carrying these burdensome beliefs and emotions.

Yeah, and you know, it was one of those things where I would try this process with this one and think, 'I can't imagine that this one isn't bad either.' And then in listening to it, it turns out it's not. So talk me through that, help me appreciate it. Yeah, so as I had my client focus on the sex offending part, and the process is to find it in their body and then get all the parts that hate it or fear it to open space to just get open-minded, curious about it, and asking questions, it took us back to its abuse scenes, when the perpetrator was being abused as a boy. And when that was happening, there was a tremendous feeling of powerlessness, and this part stepped up to try and protect the whole system from the abuser 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 try and protect the system from him.' And then got stuck with the perpetrator energy and the desire to hurt vulnerability. And so that's the burden that that particular protector wound up carrying. And the nice thing about IFS is there's a way to unload that kind of thing. And when you do, when the part is willing to give up whatever burden it carries, it's almost like a curse is lifted, and it transforms immediately into its naturally valuable states. And even those parts will do that as well. So as you're getting, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners are getting, this is a radically different paradigm for understanding the human mind that has lots of implications for lots of things in our culture, including the way we treat sex offenders and prisoners in general.

Yeah, so the idea that the mind is unitary has a history that I cover to some degree in the book, and is also related to the fear of being thought of as a multiple personality, which I alluded to earlier, or the fear of hearing voices means you're crazy, which is true in some cases, but that's a totally different phenomena. The delusional voices of schizophrenics, for example, are not the same. So there is that kind of stigma that's come from the mental health system, and so you wind up thinking that I'm just one mind with a bunch of different thoughts and emotions that are fairly ephemeral and not necessarily worth getting to know, because it's just a thought. And that has really kept people from doing this kind of process inside, where it turns out that what I'm calling parts are ubiquitous. It's the nature of the mind to have them, and it's actually a good thing because they're all valuable. They have valuable talents and resources to lend to us to help us in our life, but like I was saying, they get forced out of those naturally valuable states into destructive roles sometimes. So the mono mind is a big obstacle for me, because it's not uncommon that as I would start to introduce this to people, they would say, 'What, do you think I'm crazy? I don't have these things inside.'

Yeah, and Tammy, are you speaking of your own inner critic or just in the... How did you know? I picked it just as an example that I could relate to, but I think many people can relate to as well. Yeah, for sure. So I could offer to help you find out about your own if you're up for it, but I don't want to pressure you into anything you don't want to do in public. Let's keep going in general terms for now, but we'll see what happens. All right, sounds good. So if you were up for it, I would have you focus on that critical voice, find it in your body. Most people find that particular part in their head somewhere. And I would ask you, Tammy, how do you feel toward that critical part of you? And it's likely you'd say something like, 'I hate it, it just makes me feel really bad, and it keeps me from doing what I want to do in my life, it holds me back.' But we would ask the ones that hate it to give us the space to get curious. And I wouldn't have you talk to it until you had at least some sort of open-mindedness toward it. And at that point, I would have you ask, 'What's it afraid would happen if it didn't do this to you all day?' And it's likely you would say, or you would hear without thinking, just wait and see what comes back to you from that part, that it's afraid if it didn't do this to you, you'd get hurt maybe, or people would judge you, or you wouldn't be perfect and then you'd be abandoned. There's always some kind of protective reason. And then I would have you say to it, 'If we could go to the part of you that it protects that has been hurt in the past and heal that so it wasn't such a threat, would this part have to keep doing this?' And most of the time they'll say no, they wouldn't have to. And I might ask what it would like to do instead of being this critic, and often oddly enough the answer is the opposite role. So you might hear it say, 'I'd like to be your cheerleader, I'd like to help you get out in the world, I'd like to help you feel good about yourself.' And so we would then negotiate permission from it to go to what it protected, that vulnerable hurt part, and we have a process for actually unburdening that part so that it felt much better and less vulnerable, and then bring the critic in to see that what it was protecting is no longer needed, and see if it would like to shift into that other role. So that's sort of in a nutshell the process we do.

Yeah, so I would again have you focus on that one that felt that way, any of those ways you just said, and I would ask you how you feel toward it. And often you might spontaneously say, 'I feel sorry for that part of me that feels so bad.' And I would say, 'Could you internally convey that compassion to that part?' Often it's a younger part of you, maybe a little girl in your case. And tell me how it's reacting to your compassion. And you would say, 'You know, she doesn't totally trust me because I haven't been there for her.' Okay, and we would spend time helping you connect with that little girl, for lack of a better word, until she did trust you. And again, all this is happening spontaneously without you imagining anything or making it happen. And then at some point I would say, 'Tammy, ask this little girl what happened in the past that made her feel so bad.' And you would maybe see scenes, you might start to feel the emotions, you might start to feel the sensations. And I would help you stay with all that until the girl felt like you finally got what happened and how bad it was. Because most of us, when we get hurt like that, we have a rugged individualist society that we are, we just try to leave it in the dust and don't look back and just move on. And so we have all these what I call exiled parts of us who get locked in inner basements and abysses and are still hurting, they're still frozen in those scenes. And so we would do that until the part felt like, 'Now you get what happened.' And then I would have you in your mind's eye enter that scene and be with her in that terrible time in the way she needed somebody, which is a process we call a retrieval. And we would do that until she was ready to leave with you and come either to the present with you or to a fantasy place that was safe. And once she was there, I would have you ask if, now that she trusts she never has to go back there again, she's willing to unload the feelings and beliefs she got from those times. And most of these exiles are at that point willing to give all that up because they know now they're safe. And so there's a ritualized process for that. Find, ask her where she carries the belief that the world is terribly dangerous, ask her where she carries that in her body, the part can tell you. And ask what she'd like to give it up to. And we have a menu of the elements really: light, water, fire, wind, earth, or anything else. Maybe she wants to give it to light. We have the light come in, she lets it go out of her body. And as soon as she lets it go, now she feels much lighter, she wants to play. And then we can bring in the critic to see that it doesn't have to protect her anymore and now see what it wants to do. It's very helpful, those specifics.

The study I like best actually was done here in Boston at Brigham and Women's Hospital with 30 rheumatoid arthritis patients as compared to another group of 30 rheumatoid arthritis patients. So the first group got six months of IFS therapy, the other group got a kind of educational control. And the focus was on their arthritis, on the joints, number of joints, the amount of pain, but also on level of depression and anxiety and a number of other things like that. And after those six months, the therapy group, the IFS group, showed vast improvement in all those areas, including the rheumatoid arthritis as measured by blinded physicians, much more improved than the control group. And followed for some months afterwards, and some people went into complete remission. And to give you a sample of how that worked, these were, to generalize, Irish Catholic Boston mothers who had these what we call massive caretaking parts that took care of everybody else but never let them take care of themselves. And as we had them focus on the pain and ask good questions, the parts that were giving them the pain began to talk about how much they hated the caretaking part because they wanted to have a life, they wanted to assert themselves, they wanted to have more balance or justice in their lives. And as we worked that polarization out, again the pain really started to change because these other parts didn't have to keep pushing the arthritis button to get their attention. And so that's just one of the outcome studies and is published in a very reputable medical journal called the Journal of Rheumatology.

Yeah, again, if you were to ask that part what it's afraid would happen if it didn't constantly do this, usually there are beliefs about your value, and it's afraid that this is the only value you have is to do this for people. You know, it comes from the messages that many women get in their lives, and it carries that particular burden. But it's also protecting parts that are afraid to lose the love of the people around them if they don't constantly do this. So it's generally just trying to make everybody happy. And there's some belief in there often that they don't deserve to be taken care of or to take care of themselves. And that's an exile that we often will have to get to before this caretaking part is willing to lighten up.

Well, as I was interviewing parts of people and their parts about their parts in the very early years back 40 years ago almost, I was hearing about parts and I got hip to the fact they're not what they seem, but they're in these roles. And I was clearly making mistakes early on because clients were having pretty bad immediate reactions after leaving my sessions, and they were often sessions where we were working with these hurt parts that the client would talk about. And so I got very scared by that because some of the reactions were quite severe, and I almost backed away from it. But then I got curious, and again I'm a systems thinker, I'm trying to figure out how this whole inner system works. And in interviewing clients, I learned that I was violating the rules of these what we call now protectors who had spent 30 years trying to keep these exiles locked up, and here I was coming in and opening the door and trying to bring all that raw emotion forward. And so my clients were being punished by these other parts for doing that. And so then I just started to again learn from clients the various distinctions in there between these parts. And the big distinction that's held up over all these years is between these exiles, who generally are, before they got hurt, these what are called playful inner children. They love to be around them because they have so much creativity and delight in the world and want to be close to people and a lot of innocence and playfulness. But after they get hurt or terrified or shamed, because they're often the most sensitive parts of us, so traumas, they're the ones who take in those burdens the most, of fear or worthlessness or emotional pain or sense of abandonment or so on. Once they get burdened by those feelings, we no longer want to be around them anymore because they have the power now to overwhelm us with that and make it so we can't function or think a lot of the time. So we and everybody around us tells us just move on, don't look back, and so we lock them away, not knowing that we're locking away our juice and thinking we're just moving on from the memories of the trauma or the emotions of the trauma. And when you get a lot of exiles, you feel a lot more delicate, the world feels a lot more dangerous, and other parts are forced into these protector roles out of their naturally valuable states, and they become the critics or they become the binging parts. And as we've been talking about, their MO is to keep the exiles contained and to keep the outside world from triggering them. So they become very controlling of what happens in your life if they can, or keep you in your head so you don't feel much in your body. There's a whole variety of common protector roles. Some of them are trying to manage your life and preempt anything that might trigger these exiles, so we call them managers, and the critics are one class of manager, for example. And then others react after the fact, after an exile's been triggered. There's these flames of emotion explode out of your inner basement and threaten to consume you. Somebody's got to do something to get away from that, and so there are parts that will then scramble to dissociate you or scramble to binge on something to get higher than the flames, or douse the flames with some substance, or get you into a rage so instead of feeling powerless you feel strong, or they'll write another article so that you get accolades and you counter the worthlessness. So those we call firefighters because they're fighting these flames of exile emotion. And most all of us have both kinds of parts, managers and firefighters, trying to protect these very raw exiles.

Yeah, as I said, I just started to ask clients what am I doing wrong, and they started to teach me that I'm not being ecologically sensitive. And these are delicate ecologies we're entering when we do psychotherapy, especially this kind of intense inner work. And these ecologies have their rules, and I was bypassing protectors and going right to exiles without their permission, so they were what we called backlashing on the client. And I had clients get into an accident just leaving my office, didn't see the other car, or spike a big fever right afterwards. And at some point I got hip to the fact there's a connection between what was happening in the session and these big reactions afterwards, and decided to just try and learn what I was doing wrong.

Yeah, so what I learned the hard way was the importance of respecting these protective parts. So if you, Tammy, were to say, 'I've got this really young feeling inside, it feels so worthless, can you help me with that?' I would say, 'We can get to that, but first I want to talk to the parts that don't want us anywhere near that. And let me just see if there's some fear about going there, and let's start there. Let's focus on that one first.' That would be a protector. And so we would just get to know all the fears about going to that place. And there's a way to get permission to go with permission rather than to bypass. And some therapies are very effective at bypassing protectors and then triggering these protector backlash afterwards and not understanding that's what it's about.

I don't really know how to describe it other than as you ask these questions inside. I'm not talking about literal bodies, but for example, if we did a piece of work with that worthless part and we got it out of the past and we got it so that it trusted you and you were taking care of it now, and I wanted to know if it was ready to unburden, to release the extreme beliefs and emotions that it's been carrying since the time it felt so ashamed, I would have you ask it if it's ready to unload all this stuff. And it said yes, the next question would be, 'Ask where it carries that in its body or on its body.' And it would give you an answer: it's this fireball in my gut, or it's this weight on my shoulders, the slime on my arms. And I would say, 'Okay, is it ready to let that go out of its body?' And it would say yes. So I'm what's called an empiricist, I'm a phenomenologist. I just study the reports from clients. Do I absolutely believe in all this stuff? I'm not sure, but if you ask, parts will describe their bodies.

Oh yeah, many. So I don't know how much to go into my history, but I came out of my family. Part of the reason I mentioned worthless so much is that was a big one for me. I'd rather go into your history than my history, so let's go there. All right, all right. My father was a big name academic physician, and I'm the oldest of six boys, and I was supposed to be something like that, and I just didn't have a head for his school, and frustrated the hell out of him. And three of my brothers followed in his shoes. So I felt coming out of my family like I really didn't have much value at all. Parts of me felt that way, but I had reasonably well exiled them, and became dominated by protectors that could be quite arrogant and angry and dissociating in a way, which is part of why I wasn't a good student because it was very hard to concentrate. I probably qualified for ADHD or something like that. And I also had a part that was determined to prove him wrong, which actually gave me the drive to get this far, to bring IFS to where it is. Once I started to have these discoveries and thought, 'Wow, this is really interesting, I don't see it anywhere else, maybe I could get some self-esteem from doing this.' And so I did, and I took a lot of hits along the way and relied on a part of me that didn't give a damn about what people thought and just kept doing it. And then I became a leader and had a community, and all of those protectors were getting in my way in a big way as a leader. And I was lucky to have some colleagues who could point that out to me and basically said, 'You better do your work. Your own work. Here you are espousing to everybody else this is what you got to do, and look at you.' And after getting very defensive and fighting with them, I started to actually listen. And so I went to the part that felt so worthless and saw scenes of my father saying, 'What the hell is wrong with you?' and just shaming me in a merciless way. To be balanced, he was also one of the two parents that I felt a lot of affection for at other times. I was pretty disconnected from my mother, so just to be fair. But those intense shaming episodes really went into my heart. And so I was able to witness all that very painfully, and then go in and get that boy away from him and bring him to live with me and unload a lot of the worthlessness. And I'm still finding some here and there, but ever since that, I just haven't felt that at all. And then all these other protectors could calm down, and I could lead this journey of bringing IFS to the world from what I call Self, which we really haven't talked about yet, in a much different way. And so it was at that point it started to become received by the listeners in a different way, because before I would have to put down all kinds of other therapies and say this is the best, and just anyway. I hope all that made sense.

Well, you know, the vegetable that psychotherapy has been compared to the most is the onion, where you peel away the layers, you get to this core, heal that, and the therapy is over. But I was finding that we would work with one set of parts around one particular trauma, and we could unburden them and the client would feel better, but there were all these other little inner systems that hadn't been touched by that particular work. And so the onion didn't work for me. I had to find another vegetable. So it is like we have all these clusters of protectors and exiles based on one trauma in our life, and we work with that, and then we've got to go to the next clove of the garlic, it's about some entirely different trauma maybe, some entirely different episode, and we work with that, and then so on. Nice, smelly, stinky big glove of strong, powerful healing garlic. I like it.

Yeah, so as I was doing this work and once I got hip to the fact that parts weren't what they seemed, I would try to get my clients to be respectful and listen and learn the secret histories of these parts, and they weren't cooperating. My client, say the critic again, 'How do you feel toward it?' 'I hate it.' 'Okay, well try to talk to it anyway.' And you can imagine how that went. And at some point I started thinking maybe this is like working in a family session where you're trying to have two people talk to each other, but there's a third person who's jumping in and muddying the water. And so I would say, 'Tammy, can you find the part that hates the critic, and could you get it to just relax and step back inside or open space?' And to my amazement, clients could do that. And when they did, it was like some other person popped up and would take leadership inside. And that person, instead of hating the critic, would be curious about it, would be calm, would have confidence relative to it, might even have compassion, 'I feel sorry that it has to do this job.' Also would be clear and courageous. And so I'm naming what we call the eight C's of Self-leadership: curiosity, calm, confidence, compassion, creativity, clarity, courage, connectedness. And I would do the same process with other clients, and it was like the same person would pop out who knew how to relate in a healing way to these parts. And when I would ask clients, 'What part of you is that?' they'd say some version of, 'That's me, that's not a part, that's myself.' So I came to call that the Self with a capital S to distinguish it from the common use of the word self. And now, 40 years later, thousands of people using this all over the world, we can pretty safely say that that Self with those C qualities is in everybody, can't be damaged, and knows how to heal both inside and in relationships, and is just beneath the surface of these parts, such that when they do open space, you become that person. And that person is what people meditate to get to. That person is, in other traditions, would be called Buddha nature or atman, there's analogies in most every spiritual tradition. And I stumbled onto a way to access that person pretty quickly, and not only have it become a kind of observing presence as in mindfulness, but to become an active leader.

Well, you have them luckily. You already have them. That's a good start. But how do you access them? That's what you're asking. So in the book, I have a series of exercises designed in different ways to help people do that, which generally involve, one exercise would be: Tammy, think of a person that generally triggers you in your life. And it may well be that there isn't anybody in yours anymore, but I can come up with a few, don't you worry. At least come up with a politician that triggers you. And then put that person in a room by him or herself, and you're outside the room looking at him through a window. And as you watch him do the thing that gets to you, notice what happens in your body, what comes up, what kind of thoughts, what kind of emotions. So that would be mindfulness, you're just noticing. But then pick one of those protectors and begin to focus on it, and notice how you feel toward that protective part of you that tries to protect you from this person. And ask any other parts that don't like it or are afraid of it to just relax inside. And people will, through that much instruction, often start to feel open to this protector they didn't like and will begin to have this kind of dialogue spontaneously. So it really turns out to be just that simple. Just getting parts to open space releases the Self. And a lot of those exercises are designed to help people do that on their own.

Yeah, so let's say you make a mistake and all of a sudden you have this rush of shame and you see yourself as this really worthless person. That would be that critic totally blending with you, and you became that part and walked around feeling totally worthless for some period of time, often until it does unblend and you have a little more access to Self again. So you know, I think I mentioned that our little dog just died yesterday, and both my wife and I are finding parts that will blend and make us feel like, 'If only we had done this, if only we had done that, why didn't we spend more time?' And you're just in it, you just feel like you should have done. And then we'll separate to help each other separate and find the part that's feeling so guilty and begin to work with it. And then I shift from being this little kid who feels like I really screwed up to being in these C qualities, feeling really bad for that little kid and wanting to help him. So that would be unblending from that part.

Yeah, well, as you get more into this, it becomes a daily practice. So as I go through my day, and particularly if I'm facing an interview like this, which you know there are parts of me that would have some anxiety about it, I'll just notice the anxiety. And it typically happens in my chest and my throat, across my forehead. So I can physically notice the parts that are scared. And part of the practice then is to just ask them to relax a little bit and let me handle the interview. And because I've done this many times, they trust it's safe to let that happen. And so as they separate in response to my request, I just start to feel more what might be called centered, for example. Don't feel afraid anymore. There's a kind of energy running through my body that's vibrating. And I see you clearly. I don't see you as some big scary authority, although you have a lot of authority. And I feel my heart open. I feel very interested in engaging with you, relating to you. I feel... I'm just checking. I have four or five common markers I check: Do I have a big agenda here? Do I want to really impress Tammy? Do I really want to sell this book? Do I really... All right, all you guys need to open space too, so I can just be there and have this interesting conversation. Is that helping?

Yeah, so just the language of parts is very useful in relationships. Because if I were talking to you and we had a big conflict just now, and I said, 'Tammy, I hate it when you do that,' that's me blended with this protector, and it's not an accurate statement because all of me doesn't hate that. All of me doesn't feel angry at you. There is a protective part that you triggered. And if instead I was to stop and listen to that protective part and learn about what it was protecting, and then spoke for it in the sense of saying, 'When you said this thing, Tammy, it triggered this angry part of me, and I learned it was protecting this worthless part that I've been talking about,' that's a very different message to you than 'I hate when you do this to me.' And so a lot of times when we're working with couples, we're inviting what we call a U-turn in their focus. So as they get into it, instead of continuing to have these parts battle with each other across person, we have them both stop, focus inside, notice the parts that have been doing the talking, separate, unblend in the way we've been talking about, get to know them, and don't come back until you can speak for them from Self rather than from them. And we find that when people can do that, it's a very different conversation. Self-to-Self communication is entirely different from protector-to-protector communication.

Yeah, okay. I won't give you the content of our fight, sure, makes me look pretty bad, it's fine. But we did have a recent row that lasted quite a while. And this protector of mine, when it comes out, I think I alluded to, I wasn't close to my mother and had a lot of resentment about the fact that I think she liked my brothers better than me. So that part that felt that way about my mother, which is called transference of course, starts to feel that way about Gene. And when it takes over, it really makes a very compelling case about why I'm right and she's wrong. And actually, if I look through that part's eyes, she shifts from being very attractive to not being that attractive, and I start having these thoughts about why am I with her again. And then my interactions with her are all quite surly. Again, I'm making myself look pretty bad here, human. But yeah, and then we both learned the value of separating. I don't mean that we were getting away from each other for a few minutes, and then going in. And I would notice, okay, there is this part that got triggered by her being very critical of me about something I'm not doing. And I could get it to separate. And once it separates, I can say, 'Well, you know, she has a point. I really haven't been coming through in that way.' And I can hear from a lot of other parts where I can't when I'm totally blended with that one. And so I can then come back and say, 'You know, there's this part that really didn't like what you said and made me feel like you really don't get me, you don't care about me. But then I got a little distance from it and I listened, and you know, you do have a point about this thing, and I do apologize for that. And I'm going to keep working with this part so it doesn't totally blend the way it has, and I'm sorry that I haven't been able to control that. I know I've been kind of angry and mean lately.' So I don't know if this is doing what you're asking, but no, it's a great example.

Okay, yeah. That's the way I've come to see Self, that it isn't individualized. It's not this little particle inside of us, but that actually it is a field or a wave. And that when you enter that, and mystics have entered that for years, people can enter that these days through psychedelics often or meditating, and you lose the boundaries around your individual body actually a lot of the time, and enter that field. You do feel this enormous connectedness and sense that we aren't really different, we aren't disconnected in the way we have been. And that then, if you can bring that awareness, that C word connectedness, back into your individual body-bound Self, which is a lot of the impact I think of psychedelics now, it really changes many things in people's lives, just that knowledge that we're not these isolated little units. So I think that's what you're getting at.

You know, it varies a lot. So there are people who amaze me who can take some of the exercises in the book or some of the meditations I have online and can do an enormous amount just from that. And then there are other people like myself, because I can't do that. And when I start to go to my own exiles, I definitely need somebody in the room. I can't, it's too scary. And so I'm not going to, I can get to know a lot of protectors by myself, but to do the really deep healing you're talking about, I need someone to guide me. So yeah, there's just a range.

Well, you know, if this were to pan out and go as far as it could, it does change the way people understand themselves and each other in a very profound way. And so if everybody knew that there was this undamageable, intact, C-word Self inside of themselves and everybody else, and that they were connected in the way we were talking about before, and that these protectors aren't what they seem and they don't have to fight inside with them, instead love helps them transform, and it's all parallel. The more you can love your parts that drive you crazy ordinarily, the more you can love people who resemble those parts in the same way. Then it does change many aspects of human interacting and will have a big impact on the culture. So I used to think this sounded very grandiose because I had my own worthlessness that I had to combat, but now I am convinced that this paradigm is one of many, and it's not the only one, but it's one of many that are starting to become available now that could make a profound change in human interacting.

Thank you, Tammy. I always love talking to you as well, and I'm very honored by your publishing this and your interest now in IFS.