00:00:01 Terry

It really is amazing the parts that we meet. They can drive physical symptoms, they can drive chronic pain, they can drive autoimmune, all these things Gabor talks about, and they’re the ones getting triggered. So when we’re triggered, that’s a part getting activated based on what that part’s carrying from the past. These are inner children. They’re younger than we are. They’re stuck in the past in a prior space and time, and they really need our help. There are some parts that we call protectors, who are trying to help. They take on roles when we’re very young and they often save our lives over that age because we’re too young to regulate our nervous system. So they, whether they dissociate us or whatever they do, it’s literally a survival response in a lot of cases that then outlives its usefulness. As you experienced. When we get older and part of our healing process is we bring the part to the present and we get it out of that traumatic scene and we update it about here on the self, 40 something years old. It’s safe here. And it’s such a dramatic difference in the intelligence behind it.

00:01:06 Rosemary
This is The Gifts of Trauma podcast stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry. 

Welcome to The Gifts of Trauma. I’m Rosemary Davies-Janes, and today I’m meeting with Terry Baranski to talk about Compassionate Inquiry and Internal Family Systems and the areas where they agree and the areas where they diverge. Terry, welcome to the show, it’s a delight to have you here.

00:01:46 Terry
Thank you so much, Rosemary, for having me. It’s an honor and I look forward to our discussion today.

00:01:51 Rosemary
Thank you, I could do the usual thing and read your bio, you have provided it to me. But what I’d really rather do is ask you to tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.

00:02:04 Terry
Thank you so much, Rosemary. I’m an Internal Family Systems Practitioner and this has been a career change for me. I did IT, information technology, for quite some time over 15 years, and as the passion for that started to wear off, I had more or less resigned myself to just keep doing it because I didn’t know what else I would possibly do. And then this new awareness of trauma just hit me. I saw somehow… a random video of it on YouTube and it just resonated right away. It made so much sense, It was actually a little clip from Gabor. And I had read When the Body Says No 10 years prior, but it’s… I recognized the name, but I couldn’t place it right away. But it just made so much sense about raising children and how we get that so wrong here in this culture. And then I just became hooked on, what’s this trauma? What’s this developmental psychology? And it really resonated with my left brain at first, in terms of how this explains so much about me and my patterns about the world. And then I discovered IFS probably six months later. And that made sense to me right away, that very different perspective of looking at the mind and how the human mind works. And eventually it became clear that this was a calling for a new career, which I never saw coming. But it was… the time was right. It wouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have taken off even a year or two before. I just wasn’t ready yet. Timing wasn’t good. And it just kind of… it just flowed since then, it’s been quite a journey. It’s a big shift from it to this, but it’s been so rewarding. It’s so beautiful to have a passion for work again and to be contributing in some way to the world condition. And I’m also a father of a delightful 7-year old girl. Her name’s Anna, and I live outside of Washington, DC and I love walking, climbing, nature, some of my passions on all sides of the spectrum.

00:03:56 Rosemary
Thank you so much for sharing that, Terry. Yeah, it’s a… almost a mind boggling shift in career. Do you remember when you saw that clip? And thank you. I was curious about what clip you saw and why it had such a big impression. But the second part of that question still holds true. What about it did you find so fascinating or captivating that it would inspire such a huge transition? Can you remember anything specific?

00:04:24 Terry
Yeah, looking back, it was a clip on how we get virtually everything with parenting wrong. And I think he even says, in a very funny way, just whatever your instinct, whatever you would do in this culture as a parent, just do the opposite and your children would be much better off. But I think part of the reason I had done a lot of reading on hunter gatherer cultures before I had any inkling of a career change, and it was primarily because I was nerding out on nutrition at the time and I wanted to see how they ate. But a lot of other things resonated too, such as how they parented children, and the observations that were made by anthropologists over and over again about these children being just so balanced, so, what we would call mature, No tantrums. They’re such a presence, and just, the polar opposite of what we often see here. So I think with that background that this little video clip made a lot of sense, but it was something else I hadn’t thought about for a few years. The… was my daughter. Yeah, my daughter was born, but she was very young. And so I think that’s part of. And then once I saw who it was, I recognized the book. Then I’m like, oh, yeah, that was an amazing book I read. So then I just started Googling everything about what he was up to. And that naturally led me to trauma.

00:05:31 Rosemary
Thank you for filling in the gap, that makes perfect sense. So I’m also curious, you talked about nerding out on nutrition and anthropological interest, if I can say hunter gatherer tribes, you must have some interest in the history of humans to go to that extreme to check out nutrition, like historical nutrition. I’m curious if there’s anything that was really a strength during your tech career that is serving you now in this new line of work

00:06:01 Terry

Yeah, there… there have been some interesting parallels and tech is very, of course, left brain oriented, very analysis driven, and what we do here is more balanced, therapeutically. But you need both and there’s a lot of… particularly in IFS, we’re not trying to… and in Compassion Inquiry too, the idea is not to figure anyone out. It’s not that kind of analysis. But there’s… when you’re with someone and you’re seeing how they’re triggered and you’re hearing their stories. And from an Internal Family Systems perspective, when you’re working with multiple parts, in particular the dynamics between them, how those parts are relating to each other within the larger system, that’s a lot of what we do in IT, as well. So the… what I had worked with was really big, really complex IT systems and there are made of components invariably that have interactions, and you really get to see when there’s an issue there. OK. How do we kind of trace that down to get to the root of it, which is a big thing with, I think both of these approaches to therapy is they’re very root cause oriented, which talk therapies are not in my view. They’re very symptom-oriented. So that’s what these two approaches do differently. So I think that’s part of why that really resonated with me. And on a related note, one of the other things is, if for troubleshooting something that’s not working in IT, it is very tempting to just observe what the symptoms are and try to work around that somehow. But what you earn with big systems is it’s just going to come back unless you get to the root cause and see what’s driving it. And that is exactly what we do here therapeutically. So that really made sense to me as well.

00:07:33 Rosemary
Thank you for sharing that, that’s great. I have one last question about your career shift, and then I want to get into the meat of the interview, if you will. I’d like to ask you about your professional title. You call yourself a mental health practitioner, and I’m wondering why you chose that professional title as opposed to perhaps, a psychotherapist, trauma therapist. Can you give us a little insight into that?

00:07:59 Terry
Yeah, the main reason was I’m not licensed to be a therapist. So when I really started digging into trauma, what became clear pretty quickly is that this is not the traditional teaching. This is not what people are taught in school, for the most part. Now that’s changing very slowly, but the idea of going to grad school for some number of years and having supervision for another year or so, all to learn things that I wasn’t going to use, was something I just couldn’t justify. I have parts who are impatient and wanted to start doing this as soon as they could. So that was a big driver. It was tough because there’s therapy and then there’s coaching, a lot of times, and this is not coaching either from my perspective. So practitioner was the closest I could get, and there were several options there, but that’s the gist of how I ended up with that. Something in between the two.

00:08:45 Rosemary
Yeah, fair enough. A very good work around. Thank you. Now I want to, as I said, dig into the heart of what you’re here to talk about, which is you’ve trained in Compassionate Inquiry, you’ve trained in Internal Family Systems. And I’d really like to get into that. What came first, the chicken or the egg? But in true compassionate inquiry form, I’d like to set an intention now, and I’d invite you to as well. I’ll jump in first because you’ve had no warning of this. I’ll give you a couple seconds. I would really love our listeners to walk away from this episode with a really vivid sense of what our Internal Family Systems are, how they live, how they breathe, and what to look for in a practitioner that they may want to consult to really help them gain the full experience that we’re going to be discussing. Clarity, vivid descriptions, and a real sense of what’s possible. That’s what my intention is. What would you like the audience to take away after this conversation?

00:09:54 Terry
Your intention is beautiful. Thank you for that.  I think what, what’s interesting to me and I hope it will be interesting to the audience is the parallels and the differences between Compassionate Inquiry and Internal Family Systems. So I’m going to be speaking manually through the latter lens, because that’s what I do for the vast majority of the time in sessions with people. And that’s the view of the mind that resonates with me. So I think if I want to caveat, if at any point I sound dogmatic on something that’s just for the sake of not putting the words I think in front of every sentence, so I want to be upfront about that. There are different views on this. Gabor sees things quite differently than Internal Family Systems does in terms of how we look at the mind. But I think a, maybe not a synthesis, but just an understanding of, OK, where are the differences, where the similarities, and then we all find eventually what resonates with us, both as clients and practitioners. And I think it’s just fascinating to be able to dig into these things with an informed audience.

00:10:50 Rosemary
OK, All right. So coming back to the career transition, actually the inspiration for the career transition, it hasn’t happened yet. You’ve seen this clip on YouTube. You’ve connected the dots between the speaker and the book that you read some time ago. Can you walk us a little bit through the progression? What did you do next? You are trained both in Compassionate Inquiry and Internal Family Systems. What came first? How did that all roll out?

00:11:17 Terry
Yeah, it’s a little fuzzy, but what I first started doing was just watching and reading everything I could find from Gabor, and then from him I found Bessel van der Kolk and Internal Family Systems and all these kinds of parallels. Peter Levine and just started taking information. I got trained in IFS first. I think it would have been Compassionate Inquiry, although they rejected me the first time, because I wasn’t a practitioner yet, which was another chicken-egg thing,  my argument was. “I don’t want to subject people to being my clients until I’m trained.” And then it was the same discussion with the Internal Family Systems people as well, which I get as there’s a lot of demand for the trainings, but the training came first. A year later I, I got into Compassion Inquiry and went through that. By then I was already practicing as an IFS practitioner and was adding in the elements from Compassion Inquiry as I went, while in parallel just again, taking in information from other sources that resonated. And particularly over the last couple of years, it’s been more of a focus on Eastern wisdom, Daoism and Buddhism. But really not so much how it’s translated here in the West, which is very problematic a lot of times, particularly Buddhism. It’s not even close to what they wrote a lot of the time. But really digging into that and just exploring, OK, what are the parallels here between how we see trauma, how we treat it, and then all this wisdom over here that they were seeing 2500 years ago. So that’s been my passion more recently.

00:12:44 Rosemary
Yeah, it sounds like you’re an absolute sponge for information. You just love to learn.

00:12:49 Terry
That has been the case, yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it’s hard to do something else so that I have parts who would just focus on that all day if they could. So as always, it’s OK, let’s find a balance that works.

00:13:01 Rosemary
Well, let’s jump right into it. We have many people from the Compassionate Inquiry community listening, many people who haven’t. But there are, I believe, a number of conversations between Gabor Maté and Dick Schwartz and Gabor representing Compassionate Inquiry, Dick representing Internal Family Systems. Now, maybe you could just distinguish, like, what are the points of disagreement? Can you jump into the deep end there where I’ve just put you? 

We’re taking a brief pause to share what’s on offer in the Compassionate Inquiry community. Stay with us, we’ll be right back.

00:13:42 Kevin
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00:14:25 Terry
Sure. Yeah. I think the most fundamental one is how to approach this. Look at the mind. So we tend to, in this culture, think of the mind as one thing. We say I and we say me as if we’re referring to a single entity. An IFS says no, actually, the mind consists of parts rather than being a single thing. And critically, that these parts are real. They’re not metaphors and they’re not something we just pretend are there, but they’re behind it as this one thing in reality? And that really shifts how IFS works with parts, because if our position is that they’re real, we’re going to relate to them differently, particularly over the long haul, than if they’re metaphors, but they’re not really in there. What we would consider pure IFS work is working with parts, usually directly. The client looks like they’re meditating, they’re in their internal world, similar to CI in a lot of cases. And they’re meeting their parts and getting to know them, establishing relationships and building that trust inside. So that what we call the capital S Self, which is the aspect of us that’s not a part, is then the one who is in charge of the healing inside. So I’m here to guide it as a practitioner, but as Gabor says, our job is to get ourselves fired as quickly as possible. And IFS lends itself very well to that because we empower the person to be the healing agent, so to speak. So what I’ve heard when I hear Gabor talk about parts, it’s the metaphoric approach. He has flat out said I don’t see them as real. I disagree with IFS on that. Now Compassionate Inquiry, more and more, and I saw this through my cohort where there were updates being made to the documents that were more parts focused, working with parts, but still through that metaphorical lens. So that’s really from that comes a lot of differences just in terms of where the focus is in treatment.

00:16:12 Rosemary
I’m going to invite you to paint us a picture. Maybe you’ve worked with someone, you obviously, there’s no need for names, but can you share with us the experience of being on the other side of the desk, or the computer, depending on if you do this in person or virtually. Can you share a story of somebody who went through this experience that kind of illustrates for us what the parts are? Why you are convinced that they’re real, not metaphoric?

00:16:45 Terry
Sure, yeah. When you’re on the client side, again, we’re focused inside and parts appear in many different ways to different people. And sometimes, there’s… a lot of times there’s a visual that will come and sometimes there’s, it’s primarily somatic. Sometimes there are memories that come or just like a sense, like a felt sense, we’d say in focusing, that there’s a part there and it’s hard to describe beyond that, how I’m noticing it. And we talk to them. Now that’s done silently inside. So I’ll guide the person through meeting the part and making that connection. And it becomes, a lot of it becomes, inner attachment work at that point in a sense where these are inner children, they’re younger than we are, they’re stuck in the past, in a prior space and time, and they really need our help. And they’re… And the beauty of this approach a lot of times is the degree to which they’re hurting and that they’re alone and they’re and how much that shifts when the capital S Self comes into the room, makes that connection, offers that attunement to them. And that’s what they’ve been waiting for decades, in a lot of cases. So that right there is OK, now there’s a connection. Now there’s a connection between self and the part, and now the healing can begin, the attunement, the witnessing of what the part has been through. There’s a very shamanic healing process in IFS to unload the trauma that may be too in the weeds for this discussion. It really is amazing the parts that we meet. They can drive physical symptoms, they can drive chronic pain, they can drive autoimmune, all these things Gabor talks about and they’re the ones getting triggered and us. So when we’re triggered, that’s a part getting activated based on what that part’s carrying from the past. And I’m happy to give specific examples of this, but it’s… there’s nothing they can influence in the mind or body.

00:18:31 Rosemary
I’m going to share a little experience I had when I was going through. I’ve done some IFS training as well. And this is what I’d love for you to share because I’m sure you have a way bigger repository than I have. So I had this part. I have, yeah, she’s still there. I have this part. Who is a little mischievous and very concerned, a little OCD. I call her Calamity Jane because this part is the part of me that as I would drive away from my house, would say, are you sure you locked the door? So I would turn around, go back, check the door. It’s locked. It’s like the same thing. Was the stove on? And this part had me going back and forth and back and forth so many times… and it was getting really frustrating. So when I got into my IFS training, I learned a lot about my parts, and I learned that Jane was trying to protect me. And that’s when she got her name too, and I was able to have a dialogue with her, thank her for her diligence and her concern, and reassign her from Calamity Jane – everything has to be checked to really being a red flag spotter. You know, if something was really dangerous, really risky, I would welcome her pointing that out to me. But having me run back and forth to check the door, check the lock, go inside, check the stoves turned off, check that the curling iron is unplugged. I understood her motivation, but that was not helpful. She accepted her new assignment, and now she shows up in a very somatic way and just gives me a nudge if there is something that I really need to attend to. And that’s been incredibly helpful, as opposed to like having me run back and forth like that chicken with its head cut off. Can you share an experience like that? Many of our guests have been through a CIA training or through a different training, IFS or another approach and everyone, I think everyone inclusively, has spoken about how much they learned and how much healing they did personally through the training. So I’m wondering if you can share a story, talk about your training journey and what came up for you. You could go either way.

00:21:09 Terry
Yeah, that’s a beautiful example that you just shared with us. And I’ll key off of that, there are some parts that we call protectors who are trying to help. They take on roles when we’re very young and they often save our lives over that age because we’re too young to regulate our nervous system. So they, whether they dissociate us or whatever they do, it’s literally a survival response, in a lot of cases that then outlives its usefulness as you experienced when we get older. And one example that comes to mind because this was pretty recent with a client that I was working with, her symptoms were waves of very severe depression lasting for a few days at a time. And she’d come out of it, they more or less OK for a week or so. And then it would come back, just these tsunamis, and she couldn’t get out of bed. That’s how bad it was when this was happening. OK, so let’s explore which parts are involved in this? So we find a protector part who’s bringing on the depression intentionally, and we inquire into why. And these parts are usually very happy to explain why they’re doing what they do because they think it’s very important. And it was. But this part told her very frankly that the man in your life right now is toxic. I’ve had it with him, and when you’re depressed like this, you don’t want to see anybody, including him. So this keeps you away from him. Yeah. And so that always makes sense. Now with the parts that don’t see a lot of times is the second order consequences of that, they have a very narrow vision of how painful is this for other parts and for the whole system when I’m… when I can’t get out of bed for three days. But the goal is accomplished, the goal that the art wants, and there’s an intelligence there, and we honor that with this approach. But as soon as the agreement was made, OK, you’re right, this man is not appropriate for me, at least not right now. Then all of a sudden, no more waves of depression anymore, and they’ve maintained a relationship since with that part. The part has a name that has a look to it. It’s an animal. They’re not always human in terms of how they appear to us, but that’s the part who’s on guard for her, and for any future encounters with men. That part will be letting her know very quickly if it sees any problems, and a lot of times the parts will know before we do so there. There’s just a beautiful intelligence at work here that we really honor, and it’s a shame how much that tends to be pathologized with a lot of other approaches, you know, medicate it, fight it with willpower as the case may be, and those things, that’s why those things are not so effective.

00:23:40 Rosemary
Yeah, I know with mine, Calamity Jane, she would not be out will powered. Yeah, she… because she was so soft and gentle. I could try to shut her down, but there was like this whisper. Are you sure? And actually, part of her effectiveness was the dysregulation around anticipating her question. Could I be sure? Had I been paying attention when I turned the key? Not necessarily, because I was just like, let’s get this done and away from the house before she shows up. It was almost an adversarial relationship so I love that example you shared though… Do you have another story that could illustrate how art would show up that’s a little bit different?

00:24:27 Terry
Yeah, because the key with this, another example I like to give is because it always goes back to the past, somehow, like we’re.. our parts are carrying trauma that influences dramatically how they behave and what they’re worried about. OK, so another client had insomnia. Now insomnia is not something we would typically in this culture say, OK, well tell me about your trauma, tell me about your past. We would medicate it. We would teach skills on how to relax, whatever the case may be. But we just got curious about it. And we went inside and I asked her to think back, as early as she could and tell me did she ever have? Was she ever scared of sleeping as a child? And right away she said no. So right away, I know it’s a rational part answering, right? So we invite that one to relax and then I say just sit with it for a moment inside, see what comes up, Sit with that question. And then it within 30 seconds or it’s like a bus hit her. And she said, oh, you know what? I used to be so terrified of falling asleep because I thought a monster was going to come and take me, to the point where she eventually connected her ankle to the bed with a rope so that if someone tried to take her she would feel it and wake up. That was one of the workarounds back then. So notice that’s something that completely was outside of conscious awareness at first and as soon as she remembered it, it’s almost, how could I forget because this wasn’t one or two nights. This went on for some time. So now there’s a part who’s scared of falling asleep and while and behold is an adult. Now we say it’s insomnia, which it is, but there’s always a reason with this approach. So then once we work with that part and that part, because that part still stuck back there, when she was four years old ,and it’s still living in that time. So that fear is just as real now as it was 40 years ago, in this person’s case. And part of our healing process as we bring the part to the present, and we get it out of that traumatic scene, that traumatic house. And we updated about, oh, here I’m the Self, I’m 40 something years old. I don’t get overwhelmed. It’s safe here, all those types of things. And then when the healing is complete, now that part doesn’t have that fear anymore. And low and behold, I’m not up all night anymore. And it’s such a dramatic difference. And again, the intelligence behind it. Because if I’m scared to fall asleep then I’m going to do everything to not fall asleep. Just makes sense.

00:27:00 Rosemary
Yeah, so I’m curious, and I’m sure you’ve looked into this. Gabor wrote another book called Scattered Minds, where something happens to us when we’re young and that is a protective response. And I’m bringing that up because I’m wondering if there’s sort of a connection when we scatter our minds, can we also create these various parts of ourselves? I guess really what I’m asking is, obviously there’s a connection to trauma, but what creates a part? What brings a part to life from something a child is experiencing?

00:27:40 Terry
You know, it’s a great question. And so from an IFS perspective, we’re born with parts. They’re not created by trauma, but they are impacted by it, significantly. And so these parts come online developmentally. And then when they’re, when they’re traumatized, whether in an acute situation or more commonly chronically, over years, some of them will take on these protective roles. Those are the protectors. Others will just absorb pain, and we call those exiles. And if those are the young ones who are usually locked away inside, and that’s where the bulk of the healing takes place, and that’s who the protectors are protecting as those younger ones. The protectors more often than not don’t even know Self exists. They’ve never met the Self. They don’t know there’s an adult here because there isn’t when the parts are running the show. So it’s a very interesting example in terms of neurodivergent because there’s a lot of debate in the IFS world about to what degree, if I present as ADHD, whatever that means, to what degree is that parts? Who, as Gabor points out in that book as an example. Of course I’m absent minded because that was a smart thing to do back then because I was in a traumatic environment. So how much of that is a protector who we can work with and get to relax as you did with your part? And how much of that is just baked into the brain wiring, at this point, which will then make the parts neurodivergent, and then we work with them in that context, right? So there’s a different way of working with parts who are neurodivergent. So there’s lots of different perspectives on that. I don’t have enough experience with those clients to have a strong opinion on it. But what Gabor talks about in that book is that’s that. And then from this perspective, the question is how much of that is a choice parts are making, versus how they are as a result of how the brain ended up wiring?

00:29:29 Rosemary
Yeah, because it was so, a lot of that dissociation, distraction, so self protective. Yeah, fascinating. I’m curious also, IFS work with chronic pain, have you worked with any clients who have chronic pain that they are trying to work through that they’ve somehow connected to something they experienced in the past?

00:29:52 Terry
Sometimes it’s to get the person’s attention. Very effective approach for chronic pain there. The parts sometimes will bring that on to get the person’s attention. That’s the simplest scenario. Or it’s a little red flag that goes up because they can’t do it any other way and pain’s a good way to get someone to at least hopefully focus on themselves and see what’s going on. Sometimes it will connect to a specific event or type of event from childhood, where once we go there in the body and focus on that, we’ll find one of these exile parts. Because of something that happened in that area of the body, that’s where they’re stuck somatically, and the pain is simply the result of the emotional pain that they’re caring as a result of what happens. It translates into physical pain for us. So there’s a spectrum there, but absolutely not… And I think what we find with trauma work is that when there’s chronic pain, that where there isn’t a physical explanation for it, there’s something – again, there’s always a reason in my view. I’ve never been convinced by the fibromyalgia type of… it just happens. It’s genetic. All these types of explanations. There’s always a reason. And both of these approaches that we work with are very good at being curious about that, not pathologizing it, and just really inviting. OK, tell me what… Let’s see what’s going on and what help we can offer.

00:31:14 Rosemary
Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Did you work with anybody? Is there an example you could share that illustrates chronic pain the way you illustrated depression? Yeah, if depression is going to keep somewhat in bed and away from someone else, chronic pain is a different way of shutting somebody down.

00:31:32 Terry
Very much, yeah. There’s one person in particular comes to mind, where it had just been debilitating really all over her body for years. And I think actually over a decade. And that’s a tough one because they’re, so we have this notion in IFS of polarities, which is when parts are at odds with each other, they either disagree about how to protect or they’re triggering each other somehow. And with chronic pain, that’s a given because the parts who are involved in the pain, there’s going to be other parts who aren’t happy with them because of the impact on the person’s life. So the parts who want to be physically active, for example, are going to be, they’re going to be fighting the ones who are bringing on the pain. Because I can’t be active when I’m in pain. It can take a lot to untangle that because the first thing we have to do is get those parts. So the parts who are fighting against the chronic pain parts, they need to relax first and they need to trust us to get curious because when they’re fighting each other, they’re, it’s like politics. They’re pushing up against each other. They’re both scared to give an inch and you can’t… It’s just a battle of wills and you’re stuck. So we do that. We have to establish trust first with those ones who are opposed to the ones bringing on the pain and get them to trust us. Then we can relate to and get curious about. OK, tell me about this pain. And for this client it was… ended up being both of what I just described. There were some parts who were just doing it because it was anarchy in there and they needed help and it was a signaling mechanism then. Or some other ones who were so badly hurt from what they went through, it was just the natural outcome of what they were carrying that that translated schematically into pain signals. Typically we’ll… we work with and heal these parts individually, so we notice the difference. It’s like a, it’s a progression, in terms of OK one part we take care of and then OK and then the person slowly over, I think it was four months. I worked with her weekly, but it was like a stock market graph in terms of how well she was doing, and it was a night and day difference at the end. And she would have continued longer, financially she couldn’t. But it’s just amazing to see something that Western medicine has no explanation for. To be able to go in there just with curiosity and have such an impact as it was beautiful to watch her do that.

00:33:56 Rosemary
Very fulfilling, I’m sure.

00:33:58 Terry
Yeah, absolutely.

00:34:00 Rosemary
I am building this impression, this picture in my mind and I wonder I’m going to just present it to you and you can tell me it’s way off or it’s got some elements of the truth in this picture is, it’s like a video and it’s the internal family system. What’s coming to mind for me is an inner City High school with not enough teachers, protectors, and a variety of students. Some more mature, some less mature, some rough and a little dangerous, some wounded and scared. It sounds chaotic, because again, if we say the protectors are like teachers or the principal or people who manage and take care of all these students like how do you grock a client’s internal family system?

00:34:57 Terry
It’s a great question, and I love the metaphor because it is. It’s like a bunch of kids in there and it’s kids who have been parentified. I would even in terms of protectors, there are kids too. They’ve just been forced into these roles. So they’re like 16 year old teachers, if you can imagine how that would go.

00:35:14 Rosemary
Yeah. Or in old school style they’d be prefects. And we know that lots of things did not go well in those old school setups. With prefects, they could be dangerous too.

00:35:25 Terry
Yeah, yeah. What we can’t do is try to get to know every part at once and try like that. What I’ve found is there’s a wisdom in terms of what parts present when in therapy and we just go with that and then things go fine. If we have too much of an agenda gone in, which is common. So a client will come during a consult and say, I have anxiety, chronic anxiety, for example. And quite naturally that’s their focus. That’s where they want to start. That’s not necessarily the part that’s going to present first because there’s trust that needs to be built. And so we’re never going to get to the deepest stuff first. So the invitation is always, we’ll just be curious with what comes, the system knows what to do. And then some subset in a first session, maybe it’s two or three of them for example, that will come up and they’re typically they’ll have relationships with each other, somehow. One might be protecting the two others. Whatever that becomes comes the analogy Dick Schwartz uses, who invented IFS, is it’s like a clove of garlic. So it’s not an onion that you’re peeling back. It is from another perspective, but it’s these individual cloves, in their little clusters have relationships to each other. And that’s a more kind of piece meal way so that it doesn’t overwhelm the client, It doesn’t overwhelm me trying to keep track of everybody. Now there are systems at first where it’s just such anarchy in there that as soon as we turn inwards and give them attention, one of two things can happen. One thing is it’s like a bunch of kids having a sleepover and the parent comes in and turns the light on and everyone freezes. You’ve never heard it so quiet. Sometimes parts will do that and it’s just, oh, there’s nothing in here. But we sit with it for a while and they’ll show up . But more commonly it’s, I just hear all these voices, I can’t keep them straight. I don’t know who’s who. I don’t know. I can’t tell one part from another right now. So then we have to invite them to give space so that we can choose who to focus on. Who needs attention the most in this moment? Who’s the loudest one right now and we’ll get to everybody. But it, it does have to be, I think what you were getting at, it does have to be a few at a time, especially upfront or it’s just going to be the client won’t be able to remember who’s who, which is important for the ongoing relationship building in between sessions that we do. But most systems, again, there’s such an intelligence, that’s just what we get after the first session is two or three parts, and then there’s a progression after that.

00:37:52 Rosemary
I’m curious, you mentioned the client who had the dramatic results and they would have continued but they weren’t able to financially. What this brings up for me is how many parts might a single person have? Because I could foresee someone emptying their bank account trying to work with all of these characters who are inside of them, playing different roles.

00:38:19 Terry
Yeah. There’s no set number. We usually very informally say 30 to 40 ish is what we might run into over the course of therapy. But everyone’s histories are very different, so it doesn’t mean that everyone of them is traumatized and needs to go through what we call the full healing process in IFS and we’ll meet them. They’ll need something maybe relatively minor from the client, either wants or in an ongoing way like some type of communication going forward and then they’re good. They just wanted to be acknowledged and now that they’re seen… but other ones do or carrying so so much. And there may be a lengthy healing process with them. But the question everyone asks in a consult is how long does this take? And my answer at this point is I have no idea. I would just be guessing for you. Some people really there’s a spectrum in terms of how much people can do on their own in between sessions, which really is probably one of the bigger determinants of the overall pace. Dick Schwartz, who created it, ironically, can do very little on his own in terms of the healing. He needs someone to hold that space for him. But some people, they just run with it and they’re meeting new parts on their own during the week and giving me reports and it’s beautiful. Yeah. The timing is very different for everybody and not every part needs so much help, which is very, very good. And, they respond much quicker than real children do in terms of how quickly they trust you because they really want help. They’re overworked in there, or they’re overwhelmed with this pain. And once they get what we call self energy, which is who I am as my capital S Self, once, once they sense that, they can tell right away or this is what I need. And so it tends to be a quick, very quick moving process, certainly compared to talk therapy.

00:40:03 Rosemary
That’s the good news. When you went through the Internal Family Systems training yourself, was there an opportunity to get to know your own parts? Was there some self work that happened as part of that process of training?

00:40:18 Terry
Yeah, it was a similar layout in terms of the triads that we would do. I’d already done IFS as the client for that. So I had started work as a client first because when I first discovered IFS, I was like, this sounds amazing on paper could it really be this good? So I did it myself 1st. And yeah, I met so many of the, again, the hyper rational ones, the work focused ones, the ones who get triggered, the ones who react. And I’m so thankful that it worked out that way because we had to start with ourselves. I think that’s super helpful, and that gives context to everything we’re going to do when we’re working with someone else, as Gabor says. If we’ve been there ourselves.

00:40:55 Rosemary
I was really asking because if people are listening and saying, wow, I didn’t realize there was this level of complexity and engagement with all the parts. Maybe they’re considering taking the Internal Family Systems training and knowing that there is a certain degree of experiential work where they can come face to face with their parts and work with other students in in small groups and get to know their own parts. I think that’s a really important piece of the process. Yeah. Speaking of that, obviously you’ve been sharing examples from one-on-one sessions with clients. I imagine that’s the way that you work mostly. But I also saw on your website, which will be linked in the show notes that you do group sessions and I wondered if you could talk to us a little bit about how those work. I saw two different groups on your website, so perhaps you can talk a bit about that.

00:41:54 Terry
Sure. Yeah, it’s a workshop format, so it’s not group therapy. The first one is, so what I call authentic self relating is an intro, it’s an IFS 101. These concepts, that terminology, some of which we’ve been discussing and we do some what are called IFS meditations where we guide people to go inside and discover some of their parts or discover what Self feels like and interact with some parts. So it’s experiential, which again I think is important and that way, and then Q&A, that’s the one. And then the other one I’ve been doing more is a fusion of IFS and what’s called authentic relating. Authentic Relating is a practice and the details can vary, but the gist is … People show up for a workshop, a lot of times they’re strangers, and the facilitator facilitates fairly short but fairly intimate conversations between pairs of people, usually. And then we’re rotating through so it’s a different partner each time. And the prompts are questions such as what feels alive in you right now? And so it’s not the small talk kind of stuff that we do. And the first time I did authentic relating, I was blown away four or five years ago, just how different it was to make these deep connections with strangers in a very short amount of time. And then you switch partners and you make a deep connection with the next person. So my workshops incorporate IFS into this, which I think is, to me it’s so much fun, because now we’re bringing parts awareness into these one-on-one discussions. So there’s an overview of IFS. Again, terminology. We do one group exercise first and then we’re breaking up in these pairs to talk about our parts. So what parts do you tend to notice day-to-day? What parts dominate your day-to-day experience? And I think reflecting on that is so helpful. One of the things I hear so often with these workshops is I thought it was just me struggling with this, struggling with XYZ, whatever it is. And then they’re sharing it with someone else and the other person is… me too, you know, or something very similar. Because these are things we don’t talk about so much, other than with our closest friends, if we’re lucky, and a therapist. So there’s often this impression that it’s just me struggling so badly with anxiety, for example, because everyone else seems like they’re fine. That’s a big part of the beauty of these one-on-one shares is really connecting with someone else and being validated and then also hearing from them what they’re going through. So that’s the second workshop. I do those both in person and online. I was hesitant online at first. I didn’t know if it would work on zoom, but the breakout rooms are great.

00:44:30 Rosemary
Yeah, I was curious about that. And this authentic relating, is that something that you invented or is that something that you’re trained in?

00:44:37 Terry
No, that’s been around for some time. There are a couple of books on it from the people who did invent it and the other is training on that. There’s a, I think it’s ART, authentic, relating. I can’t remember what the T is teaching or training maybe. But yeah, that’s a beautiful and there are levels to that too that I think just to do it, that’s for facilitators. So to just do it, you can just go. There are people who do workshops online and you can just show up and it’s a beautiful thing.

00:45:03 Rosemary
Thank you for sharing that. And I’m glad that there is the virtual opportunity as well, because people are listening from all over the world. And if it was, you have to show up in Washington, DC in the US, that could be limiting for some, but…

00:45:17 Terry
A long commute, yeah.

00:45:19 Rosemary
I’ve done a lot of traveling this past year and yes, another plane. No!. But I’m sure there are benefits to the in person and possibly benefits to the virtual as well. So thank you for thank you for doing it that way. We’re coming to the end of our time together, and I wonder, is there anything that you’d like to speak about that I haven’t asked you?

00:45:42 Terry
Good question. There’s two things struggling for attention in my mind. I’m going to go bold and go with the second one. So the beauty of the pioneers of Internal Family Systems were just so open to anything that came whether it made sense or not, which has allowed them to tie into a whole other realm that we would call supernatural, that they were finding these energies in people that were not parts, which drives our Western minds crazy. But rather than just ignore it or say, alright, that doesn’t make sense and we’re not going to worry about that, they got curious, in the same way and they started finding what we might call entities in people or we might call angels, depending on where we’re at spiritually, we might even call demons, sometimes. And so there are some of these that IFS calls guides, that are positive that are like a higher power or whatever we want to call that. And they have such wisdom to impart. And so we connect with them and we hear from them. And there are others that have gotten stuck in there and they’re primarily negative. It’s these energies that are lost. They’re confused. They latch on to a part, usually during trauma, and then they’re like leeches and they exist by fear. So when we’re afraid of them is when they have power over us, and there’s a process to get them out. It’s not like in the movies with The Exorcist. It’s not nearly that dramatic. Whether they want to go or not, they have to go. It’s not a democracy, but there’s this shift that that I’ve seen in people like these things can cause such havoc.

00:47:15 Rosemary
Yeah. Could you share an example?

00:47:17 Terry
Yeah, they have such an energy. So if we just take someone who is raging as an example, at his family, now this can be a part too. But when part does it, you can see a protective intention in it because there’s always that positive intention. But this was someone who when this, what we call it’s the IFS term is an unattached burden, which is a little clunky, but that’s it’s a UB for short. So that’s what we call it. The UB was attached to this part. The UB had such a negative angry energy to it that when triggered in a certain way, it would lash out, almost like the person was possessed. Because that is what’s happening. And it was so scary to that person’s partner, to the family, that they were on the verge of divorce. Other than that, he was a loving father. They just couldn’t figure out what… what when the switch flipped like what was happening. And so when we found this energy – they tend to present very differently. They can show up as like a monster. Sometimes they’re growing, they’re trying to scare. But if we’re in Self, we’re not afraid. And then they had no power over us at that point. So then we can… Long story short, figure out how to get them out, which there’s a process for that. And then then the part that they were attached to needs healing, and it’s a night and day difference again. Whatever that UB was doing or driving in the person is completely gone. Yeah.

00:48:43 Rosemary
It’s fascinating because it’s almost as if they’re self nurturing. If they feed on fear and they incite fear, that’s how they keep themselves charged up.

00:48:54 Terry
Yeah. Absolutely.

00:48:55 Rosemary
OK. And now I’m very intrigued. There was one other thing you were choosing between. So what was the other?

00:49:00 Terry
For sure. Yeah. The other one was Self, just to touch on that a bit more. So can the capital S Self is who we are. It’s the aspect of us that’s not a part. Every spiritual tradition has a word for it. Buddha nature, Atman, Christ Consciousness, Everyone’s discovered it independently all over the world. And self from an IF perspective is intended to be the leader of the internal system. So self is the adult. And the idea is in a non traumatized system, self collaborates with parts. We want to hear from all of them, get their opinions when there’s a big decision we need to make, whatever the case may be, but we want Self to be the one ultimately making big decisions. You know, the life direction, all these types of things and Self feels a certain way. It’s different for everybody, but there’s… it’s a very different energy when Self is in the lead versus when one or more parts are what we call blended, which means they’ve taken over our seat of consciousness and then we feel like we’re the parts. Parts invariably are tense. There’s a tension. So one more tense. That’s not Self. Self as open hearted, spacious, calm, present. And one of the meditations that I do in workshops is connecting with Self, inviting our parts to unblended just so we can see. OK, what does it feel like when I’m in Self? And a lot of times it’s somatic. There’s an energy flowing through the body. It can be hard to put words to for some other people, but that’s as I mentioned at the beginning, that’s the healing agent inside. It’s not me that’s the practitioner. And when we become what we call more Self led, which is what I describe where Self is running the show, and there that’s when harmony really returns to the system because that’s how we were supposed to be before we were traumatized. The parts are much happier because they’re not in over their heads anymore with all these parentified roles that they had to take on, and things just function and we’re just present. And this is exactly what anthropologists saw when they studied hunter gatherer tribes 100 to 150 years ago, largely before some of them were colonized. They couldn’t believe how present these people were, how happy they were, how harmoniously they lived with themselves, with each other within their environment. They had never seen anything like it in our culture, and we’ve never seen it since. And that, to me, is how we evolved, like every other animal, other than the ones we keep in zoos, there’s a harmony out there. They balance each other. Nature keeps itself in check and we’re part of nature. We are nature. So that to me is how it was and how it ought to be. And that’s in my mind, one of the fundamental goals of healing is reconnecting with ourselves and our harmony in that way.

00:51:48 Rosemary
Beautiful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that, Terry. Now, we always like to end each episode with a question, and that is you have the opportunity to whisper some words, a truth, something to reflect on, into the ear of the world right now. What would you like to leave our listeners with after what’s been shared in this space today?

00:52:13 Terry
I would tee off of what I just said and say that you have a Self with the capital S when parts are running the show, it’s covered up like clouds covering the sun. So it may be hard to believe. It’s hard for parts to believe often, but it is in there. It can’t be damaged, it can’t be hurt, and it is such a different way of experiencing the world. It’s who you really are in spite of everything you’ve been through, and that’s why we’re here, I think in this healing space is to reconnect with that, and as hard as it may be for some of us to believe, I promise everybody is in there.

00:52:55 Rosemary
Wonderful. Terry Baranski, thank you so much for being our guest on The Gifts of Trauma podcast today. It’s been fascinating and amazing to hear you talk about the Internal Family Systems parts work that you do, and the impact that the work you do can have on clients, the positive impact, how it can totally transform their lives. So I hope we’ve left listeners inspired and curious because, there is a lot of information out there on Internal Family Systems and I will be leaving the link for your website in the show notes. I’m sure people can reach out to you if they want more information about working with you, about your groups, your workshops, everything else that we’ve discussed today. So thank you for being with us. It’s been a real pleasure to have you here.

00:53:50 Terry
Rosemary, thank you so much for having me and for the work you’re doing with this podcast. I remember how happy I was when first saw it come online in the first episode and it’s a beautiful thing, so thank you for that.

00:54:01 Rosemary
None of us who are involved in The Gifts of Trauma can think of any other work we’d prefer to do, so it’s definitely a passion, thank you

00:54:08 Terry
Yeah, it shows.

00:54:19 Rosemary
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, healing, transformation, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. 

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