Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Guest: Joanne Twombly

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Guest: Joanne Twombly · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the System Speak podcast. If you would like to support our efforts at sharing our story, finding stigma about dissociative identity disorder, and educating the community and the world about trauma and dissociation, Please go to our website at www.systemspeak.org, where there is a button for donations, and you can offer a one time donation to support the podcast or become an ongoing subscriber. You can also support us on Patreon for early access to updates and what's unfolding for us. Simply search for Emma Sunshine on Patreon. We appreciate the support, the positive feedback, and you sharing our podcast with others.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: Joanne Twamley is a psychotherapist in private practice in Arlington, Massachusetts. She has over thirty years of experience working with complex PTSD and dissociative disorders and provides trainings and consultation. She has written chapters on EMDR and dissociative disorders, EMDR and internal family systems, and on working with perpetrator, introjects. Her book, Trauma and Dissociation Informed Internal Family How to Successfully Treat Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders is just out this year and is the first book to integrate internal family systems with knowledge from the trauma and dissociation field. Her commitment to providing clients with healing has resulted in her becoming an EMDR consultant and a trauma and recovery HAP facilitator, internal family systems certified, and an American Society for Clinical Hypnosis consultant.
• 2:04
  She's a past president of the New England Society of Trauma and Dissociation, served on various ISSTD committees and on the board of ISSTD in the past. She received ISSTD's distinguished achievement award and is an ISSTD fellow. Welcome to our guest, Joanne Twambley. Hello. Hi.
• 2:27
  I am excited to see you in Kentucky soon, and I am excited to talk to you today for a variety of reasons. One, I appreciate, and I have to start with this, how safe you were as a friend when we met in Seattle. You just walked up to me signing, and it made me cry. I was so anxious and so nervous to be there, and it just put me at ease, and I so appreciate that.
• 2:58
  Speaker 3: Oh, that's great. Thank you. I feel bad my sign language is has dwindled so much, so
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: it was really fun being able to sign with you a little. You did so great. You know so much. Like, you're really fluent.
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: I was fluent. I'm not fluent anymore, but, thanks. Oh my goodness. Very fun. It was great meeting you in sign language and speaking both.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: Yes. Oh my goodness. The the other reason I'm very excited to hear from you today is because it has been a year so far of diving into internal family systems. For a variety of reasons, it has never clicked in my head. I don't hate it, but I cannot make sense of it.
• 3:51
  And then just so that you know where listeners are, there was the Janina Fisher webinar with ISSTD, and a colleague and I watched that and did a recap. And it has been much discussed in the community, finally starting to make sense for some people. But your new book is about how to use that appropriately with dissociation and trauma. And so there are so many things I wanna talk about today. Great.
• 4:24
  Yeah.
• 4:24
  Speaker 3: I felt like it was I mean, I really pushed myself to finish writing it, and get it out because the internal family while I love internal family systems, it it just doesn't integrate trauma and dissociation. And, I thought it was really important for IFS practitioners to have some resource source that integrates them.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: Well and I what this is what I appreciate about you is that just from lived experience perspective. Right? It's hard to find a starting place when we're skipping that piece. So for you to say it explicitly and then say, now that we understand that, here's how we can, that's a starting place. That gives us a place to talk about it, and I appreciate that so much.
• 5:14
  Thank you.
• 5:16
  Speaker 3: I I was hoping it would be comprehensible.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: I I'm I really am grateful, and it's very kind of you to be here today. Just for people to get oriented to the sound of your voice, I have read your bio already. But can you go ahead and just introduce yourself however you want to today, and then we'll back up a bit and go from there.
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: Okay. I'm Joanne Twombly. I have a private practice in Arlington, Massachusetts, and I do a lot of consulting and a fair amount of training. And right now, I'm cutting down my practice to do more training because, you know, I just feel like that's important. And I've always been committed to teaching people how to work with people with dissociative disorders because it gets missed so much, and there really is a clear path to healing.
• 6:11
  So, you know, therapists need to know that, and I think people need to know that when they're looking for a therapist.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: Yes. Yes. So going back all the way to the beginning for you, how did you even get interested in studying or much less helping with trauma and dissociation?
• 6:29
  Speaker 3: Oh, well, I read Sybil and, was fascinated. And then I, and I worked for the army. I worked I worked at a bunch of different places. But then I, was working in an agency, and there was a client with MPD, what DID used to be called. And, her therapist went out on maternity leave, and I thought, well, I should ask for this case.
• 7:07
  But I didn't get around to it, but they gave it to me anyway. I think they always I I worked with people with complex trauma disorders, so I guess it was a natural fit. And unlike anybody who worked with her before, I thought, gee, maybe I should do some reading up on this. The psychiatrist said, well, I don't know anything about it, but maybe you should avoid talking to parts. So then somebody else at the agency sent me to a Grand Rounds or said there's a Grand Rams on it at a hospital, and it happened to be Jim Chu who was talking.
• 7:40
  So that was great. And I chatted with him afterwards, and he said there's a local group. So I joined the ISSTP component society and then started learning. So I've had many teachers and mentors, Rick Clough, Claire Frederick, Kathy Steele. Just I've done lots and lots of training, and I've also done a lot of training.
• 8:07
  So that's how I started. Oh, and I was in a a group therapy training program. And at one of those meetings, somebody announced that he needed a new coleader for his DID therapy group. So I volunteered. So that gave me a lot more exposure, and, we made a lot of mistakes.
• 8:28
  But, eventually, the group was pretty was really useful for a lot of people. So that's how I got into it.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: How do you explain dissociation?
• 8:38
  Speaker 3: I'm I'm basically I think of myself as fairly concrete. And one of the ways I stick reasons I stick with that is because Rick Clough said if you're gonna work with well, actually, what he said was, if you're working with an astrophysicist from MIT with a dissow with a two year old dissociative part, then you've gotta speak concretely. He may have a great vocabulary, but the two year old part isn't going to. So I explain things concretely. And, so what I say is we've walked up parts.
• 9:17
  I'm gonna just say one other thing. For some people who come in, the concept of me knowing that they have parts or that they know they have parts is terrifying. So, you know, if if I get a width that my talking about parts is terrifying a person, then I'm gonna start talking about it in a different way and setting a context that they can take that information in and actually hear it without feeling horrible. One woman said just sitting here and knowing you know about parts makes me wanna run. And I I sometimes say to people, you know, having parts is what got you through your childhood.
• 10:06
  Keeping parts secret from yourself and secret from other people helped you survive, and therapy is like doing a one eighty. And it's not intuitive, you know, that you have kept secrets about parts your whole life and suddenly a therapist says, okay. Now talk about it, is, can be really profoundly disturbing. Once we've gotten past that, what I basically say is we've all got parts. I've got my hyped up professional part, like, when I'm doing podcasts or, trainings.
• 10:45
  I've got my relaxed professional part. I've got my couch potato part. I've got the play hair monster with the kid kids across the street part. But I don't get stuck in parts. So if I'm playing with the kids across the street and I get some phone call or have some emergency to deal with, I just easily shift from that child part of me into an adult part and handle it.
• 11:13
  When people have big trauma histories, it's like there's cement walls among the parts, and they can get stuck in a child part. Or the child part might not have access to adult skills that another part have. When I think of therapy, I think of helping people dissociate better. I don't want them to stop dissociating. I want them to be able to use their ability to dissociate to help with their healing.
• 11:43
  For instance, taking some of the walls that are unconsciously automatically there and evolving them into containers so that they can put a lot of traumatic material in the containers and work with it a chunk at a time. I mean, I think one thing I I sometimes say is, you know, all this stuff didn't happen to you in one moment. It happened over time. We can't work on it all at once. We've gotta chunk it down.
• 12:14
  That will make it doable.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: I love that framing for pacing therapy and for the idea of using those walls intentionally as containment. That's really powerful. I'm gonna have to think about that. How did you find out about internal family systems? What got you into that as a tool specifically?
• 12:38
  Well,
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: I was the president of the New England Society for the Treatment of Trauma and Dissociation and, which just unfortunately folded, but it was a great group for a long time. And I think at some point, they'll probably be resurrected in a new form. But in any case, Michael Elkins, who's an IFS trainer, came and presented on internal family systems. And I started listening, and I thought, this is garbage. I heard him talk about exiles.
• 13:14
  I'm I'm not that always that open. So I heard there's firefighters, and I was like, oh, please. I've been working with ecostates and people with dissociative disorders for years. The last thing I need is get another ego state model. Then I went to work the next week and had some consultation groups, and everybody I talked in to go into these NES GTD meetings where they were all asking me questions about internal family systems.
• 13:44
  So I was like, dang. I have to learn about it now. So I started going to trainings, and now I have a lot of trainings in IFS. And it really is it's an elegant eco state model. And, you know, I like the concept of self energy.
• 14:01
  First, I thought about it as a kind of a positive suggestion, but I think the concept that we all have an internal solidness. This is the the IFS concept of self energy, which, you know, it's not the only place where there's a concept of self energy, but their concept anyways, you know you're in self. Because when you look at parts, you feel some kind of they have a list of c words. The ones I tend to think of are compassion and curiosity. So you look at a part and you feel, yeah.
• 14:39
  I wanna get to know this part. I'm curious about this part. If you look at a part and say, I want this stupid part to stop tormenting me and get out of here, then you know you're blended self is blended with a critical part. And so you have to ask the critical part to relax back so you can focus on the part with, say, anxiety from a place of curiosity and compassion, which I also think is, you know, consistent with, say, phase one of treating trauma disorders. Because when we're working with people with parts or working with anybody, we always want everyone, I mean, the system, to have some kind of communication, cooperation, and compassion among each other.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: So what that actually makes me think of, just trying to apply it for for listeners who are not clinicians, I it makes me think of and really honestly be uncomfortable with, but in a good way, like, in a therapy kind of way, with the idea Like, in a growth kind of way. Right. And in in, the idea that some of my, I don't know, phobia of some parts would actually be a critical part, or some of my let's not do that or go over there would be a critical part that in some ways I'm not aware of at all yet because I don't wanna be in touch with that. And yet at the same time, I continue experiencing this passive influence of don't go there, it's not time yet, or things like that. So the idea that that is that's really unsettling, but in a good way.
• 16:34
  Like, I can see it, and I can agree with it, but it's really hard to hold on to. I think the other way that I've been experiencing that is I am learning a lot over the last year about boundaries, not boundaries in relationships, but boundaries with myself of how I want to be treated by the people around me and Mhmm. Recognizing that sometimes my discomfort with that is also kind of what some would say a passive influence from another part in the way that you're talking about it. And so Yeah. To have compassion and curiosity about that is really disregulating, but I get it.
• 17:17
  I get it. So
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: It's a wonderful example, Emma. And, you know, in theory, I like it when I see something my unconscious is coming up with that's something that I haven't finished working on. But in practice, I hate it. So I have a lot of compassion for not wanting to work on things. You know, obviously, overall, it's so much better to work on the things that we don't wanna work on.
• 17:46
  But I just wanted to acknowledge that. It's it's uncomfortable. It's scary. It's difficult. But I think what I like with VIAF and, you know, it's not as I say to people, we've been healing, treating, and healing people with dissociative parts for years with that IFS.
• 18:09
  I just think IFS is is a a useful addition. And IFS is training so many therapists in the world, and there are so many people drawn to it because they have parts. And they're like, wow. This is a therapy that says everybody has parts. That's normal.
• 18:30
  That's a very attractive message for a lot of people. And I think that, you know, a lot of my colleagues have said, oh, you work with people with dissociative disorders. I would never do that. And now they've all learned IFS, and they're all working with parts. They may not know how to work with dissociative parts, but FS has done a lot to introduce people to working with parts who never would have done it.
• 18:59
  And, you know, it's a great intervention even with people who aren't on the dissociative spectrum.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: How would you explain to clinicians the difference between parts the way IFS generally uses them and dissociative parts specifically?
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, ISS says that I mean, there are a bunch of things that ISS teaches that that I think maybe are okay for peep I don't know. One thing they say is that they believe that parts are whole. They all have, like, a range of feelings. They have no concept of fragments.
• 19:39
  And I work with people who have fragments or they have parts who aren't whole. Like, I think in my book, I put an example in of a woman who had a part who was only in pain and a part who only scratched her face and a part who only screamed. And we could work with we could not work with those parts until we temporarily blended them with the part that could think and talk, which we did systematically over time. But those are examples of fragments. Those aren't parts with the full range of feelings.
• 20:15
  And in terms of IFF, I guess they wouldn't exist, but there they are. So, this is sort of where I see some limitations. They also talk about parts or parts or parts, and you never lose any of them. None of them get integrated. They're always there.
• 20:38
  And another example from my book. And mostly, I put them in the book because they're just such pure examples. I worked with a woman who had 50 baby parts, and I'm like, nobody needs fifth baby parts. And once we process whatever was going on, they all integrated into one stronger baby part who who just felt much more solid and, you know, wasn't traumatized. So, well, those are a couple of things that are differences, a couple of ways that ISS talks about parts.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: So it's it's really helpful in introducing some general concepts and in normalizing what what happens with dissociation, but then the limitations of understanding the dissociative process specifically.
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah. The other thing that ISS you know, I I sometimes think that ISS is very enthusiastic. And so when they meet with people, they're likely to be saying something like, we've got this model. Everybody's got parts. And then if somebody is afraid of having parts or has had parts that they've had to keep secret, they're out of there.
• 21:57
  So I think it's better to go in a more, let me figure out who this person is and, you know, not be so direct about introducing parts unless it really feels like it's safe or practical or productive. And then they have the concept of self energy, and, basically, all healing is done through self. But a lot people with dissociative disorders, you start talking about self energy and they're like, no. There is no self. And it just kind of, like, you know, leaves them out.
• 22:36
  And the it's just not productive. I I've worked with people who've been in IFS therapist in therapy where they and their they felt like they were knocking their heads against the wall trying to figure out this self thing and feeling hopeless and despairing because they weren't getting. I like that IFS says that as a therapist, we should be in self when we're working with clients. I think there's a limitation about that too. But generally speaking, I wanna be in my adult therapist self when I'm doing therapy with someone because if I'm in self, I'm pulling for self energy from the client.
• 23:18
  If I'm in a frightened child part, I'm gonna pull for frightened child parts of my clients. So what I picture is myself joining sort of energetically with the self of my client and that all parts have self energy. So that's kind of how I'm sitting energetically, and I'm working on parts developing self energy. And then, eventually, they get, you know, more of a sense of the ISS what ISS self is described as.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: I know this I know this crosses schools of thought a little bit, but I interviewed Steve Gold a couple weeks ago. And one of the things we talked about in that interview was how with attachment, like that broken mirror concept and different parts or different views of the mirror. But one of the things that he talked about that can happen with trauma and deprivation is that there is no mirror. There there is no mirror. So in this case, when you're describing this, what I'm visualizing is the therapist as finally being a mirror, which is different than sort of poor boundaries parenting, but a safe boundaried authentic mirror so that they we can develop a self to to go from or start to frame some kind of selfness even.
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And what ISS would say is self is always there, so everybody has self. And what I would say is trauma obscures that completely. So parts are blended. Like, you were talking about your thinking about a part of you and thinking, I don't wanna go there.
• 25:12
  So that would mean that yourself is blended with a part that is spobic or critical of another part of you. So the IFS work would if so when you we were doing straight IFS, we would wanna get you into self and be able to be in relation to that part. With generally, what I'm doing with people is is having a part develop some kind of curiosity towards that other part, which usually people can do. You know? And it's not like you have to be a % of self.
• 25:54
  I just try to work in a little bit of self energy. Sometimes a width of self energy is just acknowledging that the part's there. Like, say, I might say to you, that's great. You're acknowledging that there's a part there that you don't wanna know. Just let that part you're not ready to get to know that part.
• 26:16
  You're afraid of that part. And then one of the things I say is tell the part that you're working with me, and I've said that to heal, you're gonna need to get to know that part at some point, but you're not ready. So it's kind of a message to the part that I know the part's there. I know the part needs to be worked with. And I'm like, you can't lie inside parts.
• 26:44
  So, you know, you can't say, oh, I love all my parts. You have to say, I'm not interested in you. I want you to go away. But Joanne says, I'm stuck getting to know you. So I guess I will have to at some point, but I'm not ready now.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: That's that's so interesting because I'm still trying. I'm trying really hard to grasp an idea of the selfness. And so where my mind goes next, is it is it Mosquera who talks about the emerging self? That that concept of a self that is not yet, I feel like, okay. I've done enough therapy.
• 27:19
  I can I can hold on to that that there's a self still unfolding, still developing? But then to think to bring that into the present so that I'm not stuck in the past with lots of layers of blending of different things, not realizing the passive influence there, and not only focusing on the future to avoid the present, but sort of bringing all of that into the present and sitting really still with that concept. That's part of why, I guess, that there is sort of a feeling of clarity in those moments when you are super grounded and super centered for lack of other language. Because in those moments, there's less blending happening.
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: Less blending while there's blending. You know? It it's just I think the softness is in is in acknowledging, you know, and this would be a process to place in therapy. Right? It's like I'm not ready to get to know you.
• 28:26
  I'm one part. I'm not ready to get to know you because I'm afraid of you. That's just an acknowledgment, and it's also acknowledging the presence of that part that you're afraid of. So that's a whiff of self energy. That's, like, solid.
• 28:42
  And I'm stuck working with Joanne. I'll have to get to know you at some point. So there's a commitment there, which is which is a really positive message.
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: When you say when you say make a commitment of acknowledging even if it's not yet time, two two more thoughts come. One, that feels safe enough, Like, less binary. I don't want to do it at all, or I have to do it right now. There's, like, a safer dialing in that of I can make that safe enough to acknowledge even though I don't yet feel safe enough to actually deal with it. And in that, that to commit to that requires some use of agency, which does by default just logically indicate a degree of self.
• 29:35
  Yes. Don't you got me.
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And, you know, like, Dick Schwartz, the guy who developed IFS, he has all the c words. And I think acknowledging that a part is there is is one of my non c word c words. Because, you know, what do most people who abuse kids don't acknowledge that they're there. They don't acknowledge that they have needs and that they're people.
• 30:07
  So acknowledging that a part's present, you know, or I think of the parents who don't acknowledge that their kids have needs. So acknowledging the presence of a part is is getting there. It is like an essential piece of of the process.
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: Acknowledging is what turns us from objects back into people. Yep. Ouch. Wow.
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: And that's you know, I think the goal is and people ask me, like, you know, what do I see as the goal? You know, is integration the goal? You know, I think people have healed with the goal of integration. Personally, I think, people integration. Personally, I think, people integrating and when I'm using IFS speak, I talk about people integrating into a healthy self led system.
• 31:03
  I mean, it's always best if we're, like, say, getting ready to do this podcast. I always get anxious about presenting. And so instead of, like, sitting with my anxiety, what I do is kind of focus on the anxiety, get that anxious part of me to relax back, and then I can sit with more curiosity about it and say, okay. This will be interesting. Instead of freaking out about that, and I was like, oh, this is interesting.
• 31:36
  We'll see what happens at 10:00 so I could stay more centered. Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah. I've listened to some of your podcasts, so I wasn't and then I just kind of settled into some self energy where I could just sit with some calmness and curiosity and just say, okay.
• 31:54
  I'm gonna let this unfold. We'll see.
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: Well, then it's interesting to see that externally, I guess, on my end, which normally would have been an anxiety I have of, right, back to trauma. Right? Oh, they forgot or, oh, I'm not important enough. Those kinds of old thoughts. But I didn't have that with you.
• 32:12
  And I think I didn't have that because we had that exchange in Seattle, and it somehow solidified safety for me enough to even be able to have this conversation. Because it's not a polite thing to do, to say, hey. Will you talk to me about your stuff? Because I don't get it. And so for you to come and talk to me and explain all of that, I felt safe enough to ask because we have that solid like, the relational piece.
• 32:40
  Right?
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: And so for us to be able to sort of walk through that, but together and it's it's, I guess, another mirror or a modeling of that externally, what I'm learning to do internally.
• 32:56
  Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Mirroring. That reminds me. I I we started talking you were talking about mirroring, and I wanted to say something more about that. And I I do think what we're doing when we're working with people I mean, people people with dissociative disorders didn't grow up with healthy marrying.
• 33:17
  So I'm not trying to reparent, but I'm trying to help people kinda fill in the blanks of the stuff that they didn't get when they were kids. And some of that is correcting crazy mirroring. So you know? And I wanna teach people or help people learn discernment. Like, how do you tell that someone's trustworthy?
• 33:41
  And it's not an all or nothing thing. It's a percent thing. So I might trust somebody to, show up on time. I might not trust them to tell me the truth about everything. I might trust someone to be there for me most of the time, but maybe not in an emergency.
• 34:04
  When I work with somebody, if they say to me, are you feeling or you seem angry? I'm gonna think about it. Because for one thing, I think the people I work with tend to be more skilled or have bigger antenna than I do. So they may notice things about me that I'm not noticing. And then, you know, what is it if I'm feeling angry?
• 34:27
  Where is that anger coming from? And with one client, we sorted it out. She thought I was angry at her. I didn't think I was angry at all. Turned out I was angry about something that was happening at home, not angry at her at all.
• 34:41
  And I put it out of my mind when I went to work, and, I figured it out after the session. And so I called her up and said, you know what? You were right. I was angry, but I was not angry at you. It was a nice change because she was right.
• 34:59
  I was angry, and she was she interpreted it incorrectly. Her worry was I must be angry at her. So it's a time when we could think of, well, what are the other possibilities? And it turned out it was something concrete I was angry about that had nothing to do with her. So it was like correcting that kind of, you know, what is someone picking up?
• 35:23
  And when you grow up in a family where things are dangerous and you're a target, you know, most of the time, you're gonna think it's me. It's me who's gonna get hurt here. It has to do with me. And, obviously, in these families, a lot of times, somebody might be angry at something at work and go home and abuse their kid, but that's not responsible. I also I've also had clients I said to one woman, I said, I was picking up anxiety.
• 35:54
  And, I said, you know, it feels like there's a lot of anxiety in the room. What's going on with you? And she said to me, I'm not anxious. I think this is you. What's going on with you?
• 36:07
  Are you giving a talk? Are you is there something going on in your life? And I'm like, no. And then five minutes later, she said, you're right. It's me.
• 36:16
  There's a part that's really anxious. But, you know, another time, she asked me if I was anxious, and I I said, you know, you're right. I'm anxious. I'm going to a big dentist appointment later. It's driving me crazy.
• 36:30
  And I think fair is fair. You know? If I'm gonna ask people about what I'm picking up with them, they get to ask me what they're picking up about me. And then we we figure out what's what. And in that process, they can learn to evaluate what's going on with me in a real reality based way that's not attached to trauma.
• 36:56
  And it gives me you know, it's something that helps.
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: I think that that helps us develop confidence and assurance
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: that our intent is our right, which helps us with that mirror, which helps us with ourself. And it sharpens the antennas. It it upgrades the antennas so the antennas are, you know, tracking more accurately and considering possibilities, not just something that is, you know, something that has a big load of trauma on it. Like, is Joanne angry at me, or is she angry about something else, or is she just generally pissed you today?
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: That's so interesting. You one of the things we emailed about before was you were asking me about if there were specific things I wanted to talk about. And with the podcast is one of the ways I learned to sit with anxiety because I am also terrified every single episode. Every single time I do an episode, it's so scary. And interviews are especially scary for all kinds of reasons.
• 38:00
  But I have found that if people come very prepared, then the interview is completely locked down. Like, they're they have it limits the parts using IFS language and limits access to blending to where then it becomes only presentation and not
• 38:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Conversation.
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: Yes. And so I know it makes other people anxious when I invite them on the podcast, and there's not good preparation for what is gonna happen. And it makes me terribly anxious because I have no idea what I'm gonna say or not say or what is gonna happen. But the beautiful conversations we have had on the podcast have been because we have sat with that and because we have allowed that blending, I guess, those those access to other parts in sort of a different flow rather than only doing a lecture. I mean, certainly, some people have come on and just done lectures, and and it's fantastic information, but it's a different experience.
• 39:08
  It is a left brain experience instead of a whole brain experience.
• 39:13
  Speaker 3: Mhmm. Absolutely. So I'm I but I do wanna say a couple more things of IFS that I actually thought of before we met. Is that okay? Let's do it.
• 39:25
  ISS teaches that that stage oriented trauma therapy is bad. You know? And for some reason, they have the idea that phase oriented trauma there you know, the three phases of trauma treatment, that the those kinds of therapists take parts out of treatment. And I I was, like, so shocked when I heard that. I was like, where the hell did you get that?
• 39:55
  I've been doing this for years. I've never kicked a part out of treatment. And so, you know, that that was partly an inspiration for writing this book because I wanted it to correct some of that misinformation. They also don't diagnose because it's felt that diagnosing is pathologizing, and I've never found diagnosis pathologizing. I I find it kind of like a a shorthand bit of information about somebody.
• 40:31
  If if somebody comes into me to see me and they've been diagnosed with ADHD, I have an idea of what kind of symptoms they have. That doesn't necessarily mean that I think they have ADHD because a lot of times people get diagnosed with ADHD, but nobody's thought about their trauma history and what kind of symptoms they might be having because of untreated trauma. They just, you know, kind of paste a a symptom pattern diagnosis on, but it still gives me information. So I think of diagnosis as something that gives me a snapshot, and then I'm gonna go from there. And by IFS not diagnosing, that means they don't notice that people have dissociative disorders.
• 41:23
  They don't since they think parts are parts are parts, they don't have a concept of what's different about dissociative parts or a concept of how you know, I know that there's connection, but, boy, that dissociative barrier can be pretty extreme sometimes. And I've treated people who went through ISS treatment with some good therapists, but they never got to a whole bunch of dissociative parts because it didn't seem like they were there. So I just those are a couple of other things about ISS that I think are important for ISS therapists to be able to sort through. Now, also, I I know a lot of EMDR therapists who learned IFS, and they stopped doing EMDR. And I think that's really too bad.
• 42:16
  I'm, like, not into throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. I think sometimes when people have an acute trauma or something that sort of solidified or they're not dissociative, you know, doing that EMDR takes away a lot of pain really quickly, then you can work with parts later. I've worked with done EM I do EMDR a lot. I do IFS a lot. I like things to be say, I like to have many options about how I treat people.
• 42:45
  I feel like some people really fit into that structural dissociation model. Like, I talk about it with some clients, and they're like, that's it. That really helps me understand. Others, it doesn't compute. So, you know, I don't like being locked into any one thing.
• 43:05
  So here, I'm I'm starting to talk about IFS and drifting back into myself again.
• 43:11
  Speaker 2: I appreciate you addressing those things and explicitly explaining them for people who are doing IFS because those are concerns from people with lived experience of why how can they this be done safely if this. And so for you to to explain that and to also educate other clinicians is is really helpful. Is there anything else that you would want clinicians to know?
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: Well, I think one other thing that's difficult is IFS has, like, many different therapies. You know, they have their own language. So child parts are referred to as exiles, protectors or firefighters, or parts that act out or firefighters. They're extreme protectors, and then they have managers, which are sort of codependent parts, parts that try to, you know, keep things going. And, and they have a way of working with people.
• 44:13
  And, you know, it's a bit of a it's kind of a system in itself. So IFS therapists tend to get IFS training. They are taught that all you need is IFS. You don't need anything else. So they're not likely to go outside of IFS except for when they are knocking their heads against the wall and things are going badly, which is often with people who have dissociative disorders.
• 44:41
  Because IFS doesn't do coping skills, it runs the risk of, you know, overwhelming people. You start they they have some safety measures. For instance, they might say to a part or they might say, ask the part to not overwhelm you. Is that okay with the part? And the part might say, sure.
• 45:04
  And that works surprisingly well a lot of times, except for if the part is dissociated from how much trauma they're holding. And if the witnessing, which is one of the IFS's phases, is being done and that part suddenly taps into a bunch of trauma that part didn't know about, then everything's gonna go south. But the the basic issue is if people have IFS training, they tend to hear everything in IFS terms. And when we're doing consultation with someone who just has IFS training, it can be very confusing. I've had consultants say to me, you know, this person, IFS person came to me, and it was so confusing.
• 45:51
  So I think that's one thing that's also difficult is that if you are steeped in IFS, you can go to a workshop and not completely get it. Or you can go to a workshop. I remember I was at a workshop, and during the break, a therapist an IFS therapist was talking to me, and she said, who's gonna tell the presenter that what she's teaching is all IFS? And I said back to her, it's not all IFS. This is all standard trauma treatment.
• 46:25
  So that's that's one issue that I hope that I hope that this book will help with sharing language. I mean, it is primarily for IFS therapists, but that language can be confusing. You know what I like about sign language? We were talking about that before. What I like about sign language is that you sign this is American sign language.
• 46:50
  So you sign concepts, not words. Yes. So and that has stayed with me since I started learning it. So, yeah, I may not be fluent anymore, but I feel like some of the learning sign language has given me an ability to sit with somebody who's talking different language, whether it's, you know, dysfunctional family system language, which is often, you know, somebody says love, but their concept of love is steeped in trauma or it's merged with trauma. And my concept of love doesn't have anything to do with trauma.
• 47:32
  So what's the concept of the word love that they're using, and what's the concept of, say, a healthy concept of love? Or, you know, when I'm working with someone with IFS and they're talking about exile. I mean, I know they're just talking about child cards. But I really appreciate that about sign language that that you have to automatically think what's the concept of the word. That's what's important, not what the surface word is.
• 48:06
  Speaker 2: I appreciate that. That that is a concept I definitely can resonate with and understand. Can you can you explain to me what that means about child parts being exiles? How do you connect?
• 48:22
  Speaker 3: Well, I think what IFS you know, child parts often get pushed away. That's what I had best talked about. In an effort to keep the system from being overwhelmed, child parts gets exiled. So a child part who holds a lot of traumatic information, who's vibrating with trauma and anxiety and terror, he gets exiled from the system. So they're kind of dissociated, and pushed to the side so that the person can keep functioning.
• 48:58
  And that's just what they call them, exiles. So
• 49:04
  Speaker 2: so okay. So I'm going back to what you shared at the beginning about blending and about the parts sort of overlapping in that way. So when you trying to use concepts, right, in IFS language, but trying to use concepts. So when I feel using myself as an example, when when I feel triggered, what I'm actually experiencing is the blending with some exile that is a child or trauma part who feels that all the time? I'm just aware of that in that moment.
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: Well, I also think child parts get triggered. You know? So they're not always feeling this the trauma stuff. But, yeah, if you're triggered, just thinking about it from an IFS point of view, self would be obscured by parts. So you're blended with parts or a part who's triggered.
• 50:12
  And what you would in standard IFS, what would you what you do is, I mean, one way of going about it. Simple way would be to say, focus on where you feel that trigger in your body. Ask the part of you that's holding, say, that horrible feeling in your chest to give you some space. Maybe sit next to you. What are you feeling towards that child part?
• 50:45
  And if you're feeling anything but the c words like compassion, curiosity, then it means you're blended with another part. And so then you would have to get that part to relax back. But if you're feeling like, oh, yeah. I'm curious about this part who's so traumatized, who's so anxious right now, then you would be in self energy. And I might say, so send that part some of that curiosity or send her that caring, that that compassion.
• 51:20
  And that usually helps parts calm down. And then the task is to get to know the part. And that could be comprehensive. It's basically what does the part need you to know about her or him or it or whatever. And then once the part feels like you in self completely know the part, then the part can unburden, like which is an IFS word or let the trauma burdens go.
• 51:54
  And it it I thought it was being, as I said before, open and always curious about things. I thought it was a bunch of crap because they talk about you know, they say, what would you like to ask the part? What would the part like to the unburdenist chunk of traumatic material to? Fire, water, air? And I'm like, like, ugh.
• 52:19
  That's just too squishy for me. However, it works really well. But working with you know, people have more complicated burdens of trauma. As I said before, you don't wanna go about it in a straightforward way. You wanna what I wanna do, which is where my integration of, you know, the trauma and dissociation world with IFS comes in is I might want you to get into a little self energy about this part, and then I might say, ask the part if we can make a safe space for the part or tell the part we're gonna make a safe space for her.
• 52:59
  What kind of place or space would she like to start to feel safe in? Or and ask her if she would like to have a container for some of that traumatic material. I'm gonna start with coping skills because I want people to have some control and choices. I say, you didn't have control or choices about what happened to you when you were a kid. You need to have control and choices about your healing.
• 53:27
  And so I'm focusing on that. And what IFS would say about that is they would say, I am dissing the managers, because I'm saying the managers aren't managing well. And what I say about that is, actually, it's supportive to the managers because the managers can be running around and exhausted. And I don't think it's disrespectful to managers to say, hey. I've got some things, you know, you manage this way and this way, but how about if we work together and figure out some other options?
• 54:06
  I have never found any manager parts to be opposed to that. The other thing is is, generally speaking, IFS talks about the, exiles as holding the burdens of traumatic material, but I think managers and firefighters and protectors also do. I mean, managers sometimes hold burdens of I have no needs, you know, some of those old messages. If I don't help everybody in my life, I'm gonna get abandoned and abused. Those are often burdens of old messages that managers hold.
• 54:49
  So I just have a broader view of what what is happening with the whole part system.
• 54:54
  Speaker 2: Well, then it adds that intentionality because which because what you're saying about having choices, which I think is so so restorative and healing just in that piece, but it also means that we are holding space intentionally for what's actually happening internally, which is altogether different from avoiding it. So when I consider that my experience of being a trigger has to do with other parts who are already aware and feeling those things, that's a very different thing than if I just keep trying hard enough and push hard enough, I can outrun my trauma. I can't. It already happened. It already happened.
• 55:39
  It goes back to acknowledging.
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I sometimes say to clients, I'd say, you know, if you and I if we could come up with a way of healing, that means we could avoid, you know, working on the trauma stuff. We would earn zillions of dollars, but it's not gonna work. You know, that's how kids heal. Kids can go through bad stuff if they have a parent who puts their arms around them and says, I'm so sorry this happened to you.
• 56:10
  You get to have all your feelings about it. And I'm here for you, and I'm gonna protect you, and we're gonna work on this never happening again. That's not what anybody gets in dysfunctional childhood. And in a sense, we're trying to you know, that's what helps with healing. So you can't, like, say, oh, that didn't happen.
• 56:33
  That's never gonna happen. We don't need to talk about it. Gotta be it's gotta be based. And facing it can be done in a way that's doable. I figured if somebody got through it all the while they were a kid all by themselves, then me and the person can get through it together.
• 56:52
  Speaker 2: That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Anything else you wanted to share today?
• 56:58
  Speaker 3: I'm sure once we're done, I will think of million things. But
• 57:02
  Speaker 2: And where can people get
• 57:03
  Speaker 3: your book? Amazon. And I think there's some kind of system for buying some at ISSTV, so I'm gonna bring some with me. And so at least I'll have a few then.
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: There you go. And we'll put the link in the show notes. And thank you so much for coming today.
• 57:22
  Speaker 3: Thanks for having me, Emma. I'll I'll see you see you later. I'll see you in Kentucky.
• 57:29
  Speaker 2: Well, I am excited. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
• 57:33
  Bye. Thanks.
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening. Your support really helps us feel less alone while we sort through all of this and learn together. Maybe it will help you in some ways too. You can connect with us on Patreon by going to our website at www.systemspeak.org. If there's anything we've learned, it's that connection brings healing.
• 58:00
  We look forward to connecting with you.