Podcast appearances and mentions of toni herbine blank

Liz Phillips is an Intimacy from the Inside out (IFIO) and Internal Family Systems (IFS)-certified therapist, as well as an IFS approved clinical consultant working in Toronto, Canada. She began her career with a focus on somatic approaches to trauma and moved into couples therapy. Liz's passion for understanding why people hurt themselves further when they've already been hurt in the past led her to explore IFS, a therapy model that supports people to discover their in-born agency and empowers them to heal themselves. With her heart set on helping people in intimate relationships, Liz then trained in IFIO, an IFS-based relationship model developed by Toni Herbine-Blank. After experiencing IFIO's power first hand with her clients, Liz's passion for the model led her to become part of the teaching team at the IFIO organization. Liz now trains other therapists to apply the IFIO model in their work with the goal of supporting clients to shift their defensive dances into safer, more loving connections. https://www.lizphillipstherapy.ca/ Find a Therapist: https://www.toniherbineblank.com/therapist-directory.html https://ifs-institute.com/practitioners/all Thanks to our sponsor: https://nutritionwithconfidence.com  

Season 2, Episode 29, Release Date: 5-4-2024 IFIO with guest Toni Herbine-Blank   Today I have the pleasure of sharing my conversation with Toni Herbine-Blank, MS. RN, C-SP. She is a Clinical Specialist, Psychotherapist, and Senior Trainer for the Center for Self-Leadership. Toni began training students in Internal Family Systems Therapy in 2004 and since then has been instumental in designing programs and writing curricula for Levels 1 and 2 IFS training programs.   Toni has been in private practice since 1996 specializing in the treatment of couples and individuals. In 2009, after designing a training for IFS therapists to apply the model to couples therapy, Toni offered the first Intimacy from the Inside Out (c) Training Program in Boston, MA. Since then the program has been received with great enthusiasm across the United States.   Whereas IFS focused on the internal aspects of an individual, IFIO focuses on the interdependance our internal system and external relationships. We turn inward (known as a "YOU-turn") to help us in our connections ("RE turn" to relationship).    Toni shared how the heart of her model is "Courageous Communication." When we feel healed, we open up to conversations. In this way we can stay connected with our minds and hearts, and are able to tune into how we might be impacting other people in the conversations.   Within intimate relationships, there is mutuality, as well as exploration. Although skills and tools could be extremely helpful, we need to have a critical mass of self energy in order to access these skills. Self-energy helps us listen and speak from our hearts.   We spoke about how Shame is a verb. When we have difficulty connecting and commnuicating with one another, we can explore what is coming up within us, and there is always some path that connects us back to shame, shamfulness or shaming behaviors. Shame is a "rolling" energy, where we sometimes replicate within our systems what is done to us. Additionally, what we do to ourselves, we do to others.   In IFIO we are "helping people free themselves from the myth of Unloveability."   Through IFIO we earn the trust of our internal system, and in this way recognize who we can extend this trust to in our external world. As these people are welcomed into our internal universe, we co-constuct authentic and meaningful connection. 

Having worked in community mental health at the outpatient department of the Cambridge Health Alliance for 18 years as a therapist, supervisor and the associate director of the DBT program, Martha Sweezy experienced with a wide variety of mental health challenges, many related to the sequelae of trauma. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and a clinical and program development consultant at Cambridge Health Alliance. Until January, 2015, Martha was the Associate Director and Director of Training of DBT at Cambridge Health Alliance. In addition to being the author of several articles, Martha is a co-editor or co-author of eight books related to IFS (see Publications), and co-leads (with Toni Herbine-Blank) workshops for IFS trained therapists on shame and self-compassion, fondly nicknamed “Shame Camp” by participants. Martha has an online private practice.

IFS Talks will be back soon with a brand new episode.  In the meantime, we're excited to introduce you to a new IFS Podcast: IFS Masters, an Internal Family Systems audio podcast offering a different format.      In this second episode of IFS Masters,  "Living and Teaching IFS" is shared and discussed.        Cece Sykes is a consultant and senior trainer with the Internal Family Systems Institutewhere she specializes in trauma and addiction and educates therapists around the world on how to apply the IFS model to addictive processes. Cece's new book IFS Therapy for Addictions was just released. Additionally, she is exploring how psychotherapy affects the therapist's life. Toni Herbine-Blank has been an IFS trainer since 2004 and has been instrumental in designing programs and writing curricula for IFS trainings. Toni is the developer of Intimacy from the Inside Out, an IFS-based couples therapy program in which she trains therapists and offers retreats around the world.      We hope you can find the time to enjoy this conversation among this two seasoned and renowned Lead Trainers, that we believe  helpful in many ways both to our personal and clinical lives.      So please welcome and Follow this new and free IFS Podcast pressing this link IFS Masters   or copy and paste this one:  https://podcasts.apple.com/pt/podcast/ifs-masters/id1663565953?i=1000603449820

Conflict and discomfort are inevitable–in all areas of our work and life. Now, most of us carry some kind of relational or betrayal trauma.And these burdens impact how we lead and move through conflict, discomfort, and difference. So when a rupture happens, there is often a rush to find comfort with some kind of a bid for repair. But if we do not do the work to reflect on our own systems' needs first, we can end up doing more harm and continue to feel hooked by a situation.Without this internal reflection, we can often default to actions that result in the opposite of our desired intention.But this work gives us more choices and when we have more choices, we are less likely to feel trapped, panicked, and stuck. And when we feel like we have more agency in our relationships, we feel more connected and close to those we lead and love. Toni Herbine-Blank is the founder and director of the Intimacy from the Inside Out© training programs. She is a senior trainer for IFS-I and has been developing curriculum for the application of IFS to couples therapy for many years. She teaches nationally and internationally, delivering workshops and trainings for therapists interested in using IFS with multiple systems. She has co-authored two books on her methodology and enjoys time with her partner and her animals in the mountains of Durango, Colorado where she lives.Listen to the full episode to hear:Why the ability to differentiate ourselves from our partnerships is necessary for connectionWhy the Intimacy from the Inside Out process starts with a U-turn toward the selfHow the U-turn subverts the protective urge to blame and shame in moments of conflictHow our early wounds around getting our needs met impact our adult relationshipsWhy shame is the most common source of relationship ruptureWhy the existence of conflict in a relationship isn't the problem, but the way we pursue repair can beLearn more about Toni Herbine-Blank:WebsiteInstagram: @intimacyinsideoutLearn more about Rebecca:rebeccaching.comWork With RebeccaSign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader EmailResources:Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World

As you might imagine, the most talked about topic in my office is relationships. To paraphrase a great quote, relationships are one of life's biggest predictors of our happiness… or misery. Yet, as we all know, relationships can be super challenging, and they tend to require practice, humility, resilience, and learning. Worse still, we can easily get in our own way and sabotage our love connections by using our voices in ways that we think will protect us, only to discover that we've actually broken a bridge rather than strengthened it. Fortunately, relationship therapy has come a long way, and many thought leaders have helped move the ball forward with exceptional insights and tips. One of the most inspiring models for relationship therapy I've ever seen comes from the field of Internal Family Systems, also known as IFS. At first, understanding IFS may seem daunting but, by the time you're done with this episode, I'm confident you'll have a good basic grasp of the model and how it can help you in your relationships. My brilliant guest, Toni Herbine-Blank, MFT (https://toniherbineblank.com/), is a relationship therapist who found a way to weave the IFS model in a way to help couples connect more fully. She calls the model Intimacy From the Inside Out (IFIO), and I love it. She is also the co-author of two books on how to perform this type of relationship therapy and she trains therapists all over the world in this model. So, listen in, as Toni and I talk about how to get out of your own way to enjoy Intimacy From the Inside Out! Book Link: https://tinyurl.com/pvjsf2tw

Was ist Internal Family System (IFS) eigentlich? Woher kommen unsere „inneren Persönlichkeitsanteile“? Und wie hängt unser SELBST mit dem Körper zusammen? Uta Sonneborn ist Allgemeinmedizinerin, Fachärztin für Psychotherapie und Gründerin des IIFS-Institutes in Heidelberg. Sie ist IFS-Therapeutin der allerersten Stunde und spricht in diesem Podcast mit Lienhard über "Innere Manager", "Feuerbekämpfer" und "verbannte Anteile". Zusammen beantworten die beiden die Frage, wieso IFS so wertvoll ist, wie wir am besten mit unseren inneren Teilen in Kontakt kommen und wieso Achtsamkeit und Mitgefühl dabei so wesentlich sind. Mehr über Dr. med Uta Sonneborn: https://www.iifs-institut-heidelberg.de Dieser Podcast ist ein kleiner Vorgeschmack auf unseren Online-Kongress 2023. Der IFS Online-Kongress findet vom 25. Februar bis 3. März 2023 im Arbor Online-Center statt und präsentiert täglich kostenlose Interviews rund um das Thema „Internal Family System“. Mehr Infos und kostenlose Anmeldung unter https://www.arbor-online-center.de/ifs-kongress-2023   Das Modell des inneren Familiensystems (IFS) ist ein integrativer Ansatz zur individuellen Psychotherapie, findet jedoch auch im Coaching und in der Beratung Anwendung. In den 1980er Jahren von Richard C. Schwartz entwickelt, trifft IFS weltweit auf immer größeres Interesse. Der Ansatz beruht auf der Annahme, dass der Geist (oder die Persönlichkeit) keine Einheit ist, sondern aus verschiedenen Anteilen besteht, die miteinander sympatisieren oder auch streiten können - ganz wie in einer großen Familie. Uns liegt die Verbreitung von IFS sehr am Herzen, da diese Methode nicht nur zur Selbstheilung beitragen, sondern auch auf zwischenmenschlicher und globaler Ebene wirken kann. Wir wollen mit diesem Kongress vor allem Wege zeigen, wie und in welchen Bereichen man mit IFS arbeiten kann. Internationale und nationale Expert*innen sprechen über zahlreiche Einsatzgebiete, Hintergründe und ihre langjährigen Erfahrungen mit diesem wirkungsvollen Ansatz. Mit dabei sind internationale Expertinnen und Experten wie der IFS-Gründer Richard Schwartz, Uta Sonneborn, Vera Schmidt-Riese, Bonnie Weiss, Loch Kelly, Eva Orinsky, Christiane Wolf, Lienhard Valentin, Ana Cristina Pires, Tom Holmes, Birgit Rohm, Christa Middendorf, Christine Minixhofer, Heike Mayer, Julia Süßmann, Uta Sonneborn, Vera Schmidt-Riese, Anne Hackenberger, Lisa Spiegel, Sarah Powers, Usha Swamy, Susan McConnell, Toni Herbine-Blank und Britta Hölzel. Hier geht's zur Kongress-Anmeldung: https://www.arbor-online-center.de/ifs-kongress-2023      

Today on Explorations in Psychotherapy, we are joined by Dr. Martha Sweezy.  Dr. Sweezy is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, a program consultant and supervisor at Cambridge Health Alliance, and the former assistant director and director of training for the dialectical behavior therapy program at the Cambridge Health Alliance. She is a co-author of multiple books, including Internal Family Systems Therapy; The IFS Skills Training Manual; and Intimacy from the Inside Out: Courage and Compassion in Couple Therapy.  She is also an author and the co-editor for Innovations and Elaborations in Internal Family Systems Therapy and Internal Family Systems Therapy: New Dimensions. She has written articles on IFS for the Journal of Psychotherapy Integration and the American Journal of Psychotherapy. Most recently she has co-authored, along with Toni Herbine-Blank, the Internal Family Systems Couple Therapy Skills Manual: Healing Relationships with Intimacy from the Inside Out.  She has a therapy and consultation practice in Northampton, Massachusetts. INTRO/ LEXI: Today, on Explorations in Psychotherapy, we are joined by Dr. Martha Sweezy. Dr. Sweezy is an assistant professor, part-time, at Harvard Medical School, a program consultant and supervisor at Cambridge Health Alliance, and the former assistant director and director of training for the dialectical behavior therapy program at the Cambridge Health Alliance.She has co-authored several books on IFS, including:1.    the Internal Family Systems Couple Therapy Skills Manual: Healing Relationships with Intimacy from the Inside Out with Toni Herbine-Blank2.    the 2nd Edition of the book Internal Family Systems Therapy with Richard Schwartz3.    the IFS Skills Training Manual with Frank Anderson and Richard Schwartz4.    the book Intimacy from the Inside Out: Courage and Compassion in Couple Therapy with Toni Herbine-Blank and Donna KerpelmanAdditionally, she co-authored and co-edited two chapter books on various applications of IFS with Ellen Ziskind:a.    Innovations and Elaborations in Internal Family Systems Therapyb.    Internal Family Systems Therapy: New DimensionsShe has published articles on IFS in the Journal of Psychotherapy Integration and the American Journal of Psychotherapy.She has a therapy and consultation practice in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Our primary teacher Sarah Powers has spent decades studying, living, and teaching from the Wisdom traditions--Buddhism, Yoga, Taoism, and contemporary western psychology. As the new coronavirus pandemic spread, Sarah joined us via Zoom from London to talk about the wisdom and opportunity for awakening amidst this suffering. From how to be sick, to parenting, to lifestyle medicine, in this episode we hear about aspects of the harmonious approach to living Sarah developed well before our current circumstances. We examine the question, "how do we foreground what is most important and bring meaning to this precious, impermanent life?" In repsonse, Sarah discusses developing an inner life, taking risks, and healing ourselves as well as supporting others.Sarah illuminates our 21st-century predicament – violence, environmental crisis, the harm caused by industrialized food – and shares her vision of the gifts in this global pause. May we look back on this five years from now and see, as Sarah envisions, that this is “the moment we kicked over into something totally renewed.” During the recording of this episode, Sarah generously led an inquiry meditation for holding and healing wounded and distressed parts of ourselves with compassion. We decided to release this meditation separately as a bonus along with a very potent dialogue about Internal Family Systems (IFS) parts work.Find out more about Sarah Powers and in the Insight Yoga Institute.Inspiring books mentioned by Sarah Powers in this episode:The Legacy of Luna by Julia Hill ButterflyLessons from the Light by Kenneth Ring, PhD, and Evelyn Elsaesser ValarinoThe Light Between Us by Laura Lynne JacksonThe Overstory by Richard PowersJust Mercy by Bryan StevensonUnattended Sorrow by Stephen LevineIntimacy from the Inside Out by Toni Herbine-Blank, Donna M. Kerpelman, Martha SweezyFollow us on Facebook and Instagram, or send us a note at feedback@skillfulmeanspodcast.com with your comments. You can get in touch with Jen directly at https://sati.yoga and Sarah Jane at https://www.sarahjaneshangraw.com

With so many different potential approaches to helping your relationship, how do you choose the one that’s right for you? And how do you make sense of them all together? John and Julie Gottman, Sue Johnson, Esther Perel, David Schnarch, Stan Tatkin, Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson, Terry Real - they’re all describing different ways of getting the same thing - a loving, thriving, passionate relationship. Today we’re going to tackle how it all fits together, so you’re better prepared to steer your own relation-ship. To help us integrate in a way that makes it practical and clear, we’ve invited Dr. Keith Witt back to the show. Keith Witt is an integral psychologist, which gives him a unique perspective in making sense of all these roads that lead to Rome. His most recent book, Loving Completely, details his approach to bringing all of the essential parts of you to your relationship. Along with having written 7 other books, Keith has conducted more than 55,000 therapy sessions with his clients! If you’ve been wondering how to make sense of it all, this episode is for you! Also, please check out our first three episodes with Keith Witt - Episode 158: Loving Completely,  Episode 80: Bring Your Shadow into the Light and Episode 13: Resolve Conflict and Create Intimacy through Attunement. As always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Please join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it! Sponsors: Along with our amazing listener supporters (you know who you are - thank you!), this week's episode has two great sponsors, each with a special offer for you. For a unique gift to discover meaningful stories from the life of someone important to you, visit Storyworth.com/ALIVE for $20 off a subscription. Share the memories with your family, and preserve them in a beautiful hardbound book. It’s a perfect Mother’s Day gift! Want to experience a Luxury Suite or VIP Box at an amazing concert or sporting event? Check out Suitehop.com/DATENIGHT to score sweet deals on a special night for you and your partner. Resources: Check out Keith Witt’s website Read Keith Witt’s new book: Loving Completely: A Five Star Practice for Creating Great Relationships Check out Keith Witt’s other books as well! FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide - perfect help for handling conflict… Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner's Needs) in Relationship (ALSO FREE) www.neilsattin.com/integrate Visit to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Keith Witt. Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out Transcript: Neil Sattin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. And if you can hear it in my voice, I'm particularly excited for today's conversation. Of course, we've had so many different viewpoints represented here on Relationship Alive because there are so many roads that lead to Rome, the Rome of romance and romantic partnership, and how we sustain loving, thriving, monogamous relationships, and it's not always that one road works for any one person. And this has come up several times in the show, this question of, well, “so and so says their way is the way and they sound so convincing when you're talking to them, Neil, so what do I do when it doesn't work?" And this happens sometimes. Neil Sattin: So, if you've tuned in for a while then you know that the reason that I have all these different voices on the show is because I really believe strongly that it's whatever works that's important. And I suppose for myself I might put some boundaries around that; what I'd be comfortable with or where I'd feel a little edgy or stretching, but for the most part, I think that it's up to you to really get informed about what's possible and then make choices that really align with you or maybe stretch you in a direction that feels like a light way to be stretched. At the same time, they all form part of this big puzzle that makes sense. And so, I wanted to have a conversation today about how we integrate as much as possible the way that we think about all of these different methodologies so you can see how they all fit together, they don't exclude each other, for the most part. They actually all find a place in the big picture of how we make relationships, what we want them to be. And as much as some of the people on my show might want you to think otherwise, this is my personal belief. Neil Sattin: And so to have this conversation, I've invited one of my favorite guests to have here on the show who also happens to be someone who's very good at integrating all these different approaches. His name is Keith Witt. He has been here before to talk about his books, "Loving Completely", "Shadow Light", "The Attuned Family"; and he is an integral psychologist among other things. And so the integral perspective, I think will help us understand how all of these different pieces fit together in a way that actually does make a coherent whole, it makes sense. So, Keith, thank you so much for joining us today on Relationship Alive. Keith Witt: I am always happy to be on your show and it's one of the pleasures of my life, our conversations. [laughter] Neil Sattin: Awesome, well, the feeling is mutual. I do want to say before we dive in deep that we'll have a transcript of this episode. If you're interested in downloading it, you may want to read it a few times, you can visit neilsattin.com/integrate 'cause we're going to be integrating everything today. Or, as always, you can text the word "PASSION" to the number 33444, follow the instructions and you'll be able to download the transcript to today's episode. So, Keith, let's start with maybe where you orient in terms of this conversation. And before we got started, you were talking about this sense of, as we talk about all these different schools of thought, we're really talking about the founders of modern relationship theory. So, where do you put yourself and how do you make sense of where you are in this conversation about how we're tying all of these things together? Keith Witt: Well, first of all, being a founder is a peculiar thing. I've developed various systems, all of them interrelated generally, under the integral umbrella. And integral has worked for me greatly. [chuckle] The reason why integral has worked for me greatly is the integral is a meta theory, not a theory. And so, I had actually generated systems and written some books about systems before I encountered integral. But then the integral, looking at the world through the objective and the subjective, the individual and the collective; looking at the world through types of people, states of consciousness, through people being at different developmental levels, including therapists, I realized that when you put any system into that, including the systems I developed, it expanded. And it made me just fascinated with the commonalities that affective systems, particularly of relationships and of love because I think everything's relationships is. Keith Witt: And so, one of the things that's different for me and other founders is that, even though I've... If you look at my eight books, there's essentially seven different systems interrelated of doing psychotherapy and of doing couples work. I'm not particularly invested in any of them. Those systems are useful, they're coherent, they have a lot of technical and theoretical interconnections with everybody else and with the research. But I agree with exactly what you said. Ultimately, when a couple or an individual wants to love better, they come in, it's the goodness of fit with the therapist and it's how effectively they move forward, and there's an alchemical experience that happens with that, that can only be described in the intersubjectivity of the session. And meta research on psychotherapy has shown this again and again, and one of my favorite meta-analyses, which they took lots of studies and put them together, they found out a couple of very fascinating things. One, therapy helps people, okay? That's good news for everybody. Neil Sattin: Good to know. Keith Witt: The second thing that the variance of change was explained by 40% in this meta-analysis, 40% of the variance of change was client variables; how resilient they were, what kind of social networks they had, what kind of resources they had; 30% of the variance of positive change was the relationship, what was the solidity of the intersubjectivity of the alliance between the clients and the therapist; 15% was placebo effect. If you go to somebody, give them a bunch of money and they expect to change, you're going to change. [chuckle] Keith Witt: In fact, that's something that has completely confused the field when it comes to the whole psychotropic thing. Probably 30% or 40% of the effect of most antidepressants is placebo effect, 8%-12% is probably the drug. Okay, so 15% placebo effect, 15% method of treatment. Okay, well, method of treatment 15% is significant. In poker, 7% is skill and the good poker player always wins but that 15% isn't as big as the client variables and it isn't as big as that 30% of the alliance. And so, I'm aware of that and so I hold my systems lightly, even though I love them. And so, I look at the other systems and I look at my relationships with the other systems, and I get a lot out of all of them. But also, I noticed that as we moved through the fields, our own little blind spots tend to affect how we absorb systems, how we enact systems, and how we integrate them. And I find that interesting because every time I find a blind spot, that's an opportunity to wake up. And this is where our conversation went when we were talking about this. So, how do they fit together? Well, as it turns out, even though they look very different from the outside, most of them fit together quite well in terms of the constructs that the various therapists bring to bear with couples and individuals for that matter and what they have to do in a session to help people move forward. Keith Witt: So, that's pretty much it. My Loving Completely approach is approach that I love a lot, and you can check it out in my book, "Loving Completely". And my book, "Waking Up" that was the first book that I wrote after I had my integral awakening, is one of the first texts on integrally-informed psychotherapy, and it has sections in it around integrally informed sex therapy and marriage counselling. And I'm quite proud of that, and I think that works a lot, but are those more effective than Gottman's approach. Schnarch's approach, or Perel's approach, or Tatkin's approach? I don't think so. I think pretty much you have a good therapist, who's enacting their system and is attuned to their clients, they're going to do pretty well. And this goes for me, all the way back to my doctoral research. I was always interested in this, and so my doctoral research was I took three different kinds of systems and researched them in terms of how much they enhanced the health of clients. Talking plus touching, talking without touching, and touching without talking. And I found that the people got better equally, which led me to conclude that in psychotherapy, people have a natural healing style. Keith Witt: And what you want to do is you want to identify it and enhance it and let it and help it grow as you grow throughout a lifetime. And I think that's probably the best way to go, as a psychotherapist and as a marriage counselor, and certainly when I train people and supervise people, that's my perspective. What's your natural healing style? How can we help you expand that and grow within that natural healing style? And that natural healing style has to involve, not just your style expanding, but you expanding. If we don't grow as individuals, we're limited as clinicians. Neil Sattin: Yeah, that's... I really appreciate your saying that and it's making me think about that problem of when someone comes to me and says, "I tried. I found an EFT therapist and that didn't work, or I found a Gottman therapist and that didn't work." I wonder sometimes if that might be, because the particular therapist isn't necessarily 100% aligned in terms of their healing style, which you just mentioned, with the system that they've learned. It may be that they believe 150% in the effectiveness of that system, but if it doesn't tap into their own natural alignment and integrity and how they create resonance with their clients, then I could see it falling flat at times. Keith Witt: Oh yeah. Before, let me see, probably 2000, I've been doing this since I first started studying therapy in 1965. I mean, I've been studying bazillion systems. And so for me, until I was around 50, every time they discovered a new system, I go, "Oh, damn." Because I knew that I was going to get disintegrated. I was going to learn this system and it was going to disrupt my understanding of the psychotherapeutic universe. I would have to climb into this system and enact it until I could actually enact the system naturally, I could answer questions from the system. And I knew that it would re-organize my understanding of the universe, and it was a lot of work. So, every time I found a good system, I go, "Oh Jesus, not another one." And then I would study it and I would... Sometimes for years, and it was always difficult in the beginning because it would destabilize, and that's very much how development goes on any developmental line. You expand into the current world view, and something comes and causes that world view to not quite be enough, and so the old one disintegrates and you go through that period of disintegration before you re-integrate into a more complex system. And I kept hoping that it would be the end of it. I'd finally get a system that was so great that I wouldn't have to have go through that experience. Keith Witt: And then after I was 50 and studied integral and wrote about integral, I realized that I was enjoying the process now, that when someone came up with a new idea, like EMDR that it actually was... EMDR is wonderful in certain situations dealing with trauma. And so that was great when as soon as I identified it as a great system, I saw a research that persuaded me, I dived in and I had a lot of fun learning and acting EMDR until I could bring it into my repertoire of theoretical and practical understanding. Now, what did that reflect? That reflected my consciousness changing. Keith Witt: I shifted from being more egocentric in my understanding to being more open, so my unconscious was actually aware. Keith, there will be great systems that will happen and when they arrive, they'll help you grow and be a better therapist, they're wonderful. And so, my subjective reaction to them shifted from, "Oh, no," to "Oh, boy." And this is how you notice that you grow. You don't notice that you grow particularly because you have a new idea, you notice that you grow because you have a different natural reaction to something that you had a different reaction to before. And it's very difficult to notice a shift of world views from the inside. It's easier for other people to give you feedback about it until you get to a certain level of development in the integral, we call that the "second tier" and then it's just easier to see that kind of stuff. And so that's been my experience with this over the decades. That's my current experience with it. Neil Sattin: Great, yeah. And just to give you listening, a full sense of what I'm bringing to this conversation, I mentioned in the introduction that a lot of this is about you finding tools that work for you. I also have another bias that comes from my position of being able to talk to so many of the founders of relationship theories, which is... And it comes from my upbringing I think, which is this kind of like, "can't we all just get along" mentality. In an ideal world I'd be having this conversation, Keith, you would probably still be there and we would have everyone on a stage as a panel, but the express purpose of that conversation would be like, "Let's figure out how we can all work together." And my understanding is that, that's been challenging in the field to bring everyone together like that, but that's another thing that... My own agenda that I bring to this conversation is, I want everyone to get along and to commit to the overall betterment of how effective we can be in our lives or as therapists or coaches, or people who help others. It's really important to me. Keith Witt: Well, Amen. [laughter] Neil Sattin: And some other things that you were mentioning made me think immediately of John Gottman. And I can't remember if he mentioned this actually in our first interview, if it was part of what I recorded or if it was just part of my conversation with him. But he talks about how important it is for him to know when he's wrong. He keeps a very detailed record of all the ideas that he's ever had and I think he might have said that he's wrong more than half the time. Keith Witt: Yes, he says that. More than half of his hypothesis have been proved false. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: Right, right. And so for him, this is one of the things that he stakes his claim around is that, he's distilled a body of work that statistically has been shown to work more than 50% of the time I think, in fact it's like 86 or something percent of the time. And that being said, he's also... What I love about that statement is one, his embrace of the willingness to be wrong, which is so important at any level of relationship, relationship to an idea, relationship to your spouse, so I really appreciate that. And also it seems to be his major critique of people who would use other systems that maybe haven't been empirically proven to be effective because what if you put it under a scientific scrutiny and found that it only worked 10% of the time, like your best placebo on its, without; or sorry, your best drug without the placebo effect. So, that's where it gets confusing for people I think, because they're like, "Well, if my local shaman hasn't undergone scientific study, what do I do with the fact that it's actually been really helpful for me? Versus going to my Gottman-certified therapist? Keith Witt: John Gottman is the only founder that I know of whose psychotherapeutic approach and theoretical approach literally arose out of his research. That's not true for any of the rest of us. Everybody else was doing stuff that worked really well for them in certain situations and they saw how things fit together, and then they fitted it together with other stuff that they found out and created a structure. That's not a bad thing. That's how theories historically have arisen, in my opinion, except for say, physics. And John Gottman started out as a mathematician. Keith Witt: I went to a three-day workshop with him and Julie, and at the very end, I went up to him, I said, "You know, John, I've done a lot of this stuff, okay? And your system has the most amount of good stuff and the least amount of bullshit than any other system that I've seen." And he laughed because he got it. Another thing that endeared me to him, and I gotta say I am biased towards John Gottman, I love that guy, I think he and Julie are great. Keith Witt: In a conference where everybody's talking about how their system is the best, he went up on stage and says, "You know, I think about my treatment's failures." And I thought, "God, John, thank you." I think about my treatment failures too, what the fuck. What can I do different. What's the new stuff? He is a researcher. Now, I use a lot of his research to validate my approach, I've changed things that I've done in response to some of his research. I've changed some of my understandings in response to some of his research. Why? He's just the best and most comprehensive couples researcher around. In terms of my approach, almost every psychotherapist and all couples counselors to a certain extent through psychoeducation, you're basically teaching people about themselves and about how relationships work. Keith Witt: The nice thing about Gottman's approach is that he didn't really, in most of his work, he didn't really have confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is what most founders bring to their research, if they do research. Okay, well, if you're doing research to show that your system is great, that's confirmation bias. Now, human beings, when they develop, when they develop from fundamentalist, which is I'm going to enact the EFT system or the crucible system exactly how it's supposed to be, and I'm not going to really think about whether it's working or not, that's a fundamentalist system. I'm going with the structure, but because it's the structure. Keith Witt: When you go to a more rational system, a rational system is, "Well, I want to cross-validate things and see how they work, and if they work better, I'll shift into a new system." In between that conformist and that rational system, there's an in-between stage. Susanne Cook-Greuter and Beena Sharma who studied developmental stages, they call it the 3-4 stage 'cause 3 is conformist and 4 is rational; they called it the 3-4 stage. In that stage, people experience themselves as open to input, but actually they have confirmation bias, they're looking for data that support their preconceived notions and they very much resist change. Keith Witt: You know, back in the '90s, I went to a David Schnarch workshop. And so, David Schnarch was all about differentiation, a concept he obviously lifted from Murray Bowen and never gives him any credit for, which pissed off Dan Siegel enough in the conference so Dan Siegel called him out on it. It was one of those little conference snafus that happen, it fascinated everybody. So I went up to Schnarch, I said, "You know, I think there is a more fundamental construct than differentiation." He said, "What?" I said, "I think it's health." He said, "That's too broad." Now, maybe he's right. Maybe my orientation towards what's healthy and not healthy is a too broad concept. But his immediate reaction was dismissal. He didn't want to consider that there might be a more fundamental organizing principle than his, okay? There was confirmation bias. Now, he's a good counterpoint, to me, to John Gottman. John Gottman doesn't like people making assertions without doing research, but I don't care, I still love John Gottman. Keith Witt: David Schnarch spent minutes on stage during that workshop warning people to not use his stuff 'cause it's all trademarked and I found him arrogant and narcissistic, and to this day, irritating. Now, what is that? Both of them have their own critiques. Why do I find myself really liking John Gottman and irritated with Schnarch? Even more importantly, whenever you get irritated with someone, there's a tendency to dismiss what's great about their system. And this is what is beautiful about integral, integral says, "Everybody gets to be right, nobody gets to be right all the time." And Schnarch's concept of differentiation and holding on to yourself and the whole crucible approach to couples is a really good approach. Okay, that is very effective, particularly with some couples where they keep trying to move out of the container and you keep them in the container until something pops, and out of that pop come something new. And sometimes that newness is a new discovery of love for each other. Now, Esther Perel does a similar thing, but she's more of a practical romantic. I see Schnarch and Susan Johnson as more practical moralistic, in that they seem to literally have moral disgust for other people who disagree with them. [chuckle] Keith Witt: I go, "Okay." [chuckle] Maybe that's what irritates me about them. Like Susan Johnson says, "If you do your work, you have to be slow and soft." Okay, well, that works for her with couples. But you know, as people might have noticed so far in our conversation, I'm not a particularly slow and soft guy, okay? So, my natural healing style, sure, I can get really gentle with people, and I actually was critiqued by Gestalt therapists in the '70s by being too nice to my clients. "You're too nice to your clients, Keith." "Oh, I'm sorry. Just because Fritz [Perls] is an asshole doesn't mean I have to be an asshole when I do therapy." [chuckle] Keith Witt: And so, sorry, Susan, slow and soft is not my natural style, okay? It's alright. Now, does that make me less effective than her with a couple? Probably with some couples, I don't know. Neil Sattin: Right, and it would probably make you less effective if you were implementing her system. Keith Witt: Yes, that's exactly right. And when you learn a system, it's good to implement it. Now, even though I love John and Julie, John and Julie, when they talk about implementing their systems, they use a lot of their research tools. They give people like questionnaires, they give them cards and stuff, and they have their structured things that they recommend people doing. I'm sorry, I don't like doing that stuff. [chuckle] Keith Witt: My clients don't like doing stuff like that, but even if my clients liked it, I don't like doing it. If you go to a risk management workshop, they give you a five-page thing your clients are supposed to sign about all the horrible things that they can report you for and that the therapy does and doesn't do. I'm sorry, I don't do a five-page thing. We all have our different styles. Now, that being said, I just love that guy, love him, and every time he gets a new thing out... I studied his last book from the beginning to end several times, and except for the math, just found it utterly fascinating. And I see him as a practical scientific guy. He is a true scientist. John Gottman will change an opinion on a dime if you give him persuasive data. And that's just not true for many people. Neil Sattin: Yeah, so, since you've brought up David Schnarch, and unfortunately, he hasn't been on my show yet, so we haven't had the benefit of being able to hear from him directly. I still... I reach out to him every so often and I'm hoping that one of these days he will. That being said, it's funny. I have my own bias when someone doesn't want to be on my show. [chuckle] I'm like, "Well, what's your problem?" What you just mentioned about your experience with him, that seems in some respects, to make sense given that he's staked his claim on differentiation, that that's where he's coming from, differentiation being that sense of holding on to you and your sense of who you are no matter what someone else is throwing at you. And so in preparation for this conversation, I really dove into his passionate marriage work, which is sort of the lay person's approach to crucible therapy, which is what he calls his work in the therapeutic realm. And I found myself really appreciating it, in fact, and it got me irritated because even... I was listening to this one recording of him and he said something that was dismissive of attachment theory and... Keith Witt: Yes. Neil Sattin: And I love what attachment theory brings to the conversation about relationships, both how you come to understand your own dysfunction in a relationship or how you come to understand the function of the dyad, what that does for you. And concepts of safety and how that enables you to differentiate. I love that, and it kind of bridges into Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson's developmental model too, which we can talk about in a little bit. But that all being said, when I heard him talking about the importance of knowing who you are, and at the same time being able to remove your distortions of who you are. And he talks about part of crucible being that your partner being there, that's a great way for you to learn where you actually aren't who you think you are, just as one example. Or you get to, through self-reflection, see some of the dysfunction in who you are, and actually work towards growth and improvement. But when he talks about differentiation, he talks about some things that I think are key. You talk about, not only holding on to who you are, but also your ability to self-soothe, so to take responsibility for yourself when you're triggered. How many times have we talked about that on the show? He talks about getting over your reactivity, so taking responsibility for not freaking out at your partner when they trigger you. Neil Sattin: Again, so important, and fits right in. And then, he talks about, and I love this concept, the idea... And this is a place where I feel like he's kind of unique, and you can correct me if I'm wrong here, Keith, 'cause you have a broader perspective, perhaps, than I do. But he talks about... He names his approach as a non-pathological approach. In other words, if things are going wrong, then nothing is wrong. It's like, that's what you would come to expect. And that part of what he holds as an ideal in a relationship is the ability to hold onto yourself, to self-soothe, to not get reactive with your partner, and to hold the container of a relationship when things get uncomfortable. And that does seem so important, being able to grow with your partner. If you're so focused on fixing things and one of you capitulating to the other, it's not that there's never a place for compromise, but it's like, I think, and so many couples rush to that, they overlook the actual growth potential that happens in truly experiencing themselves as separate individuals with different ideas about how to live and how to be in the world, or how to be with each other. Keith Witt: It's a wonderful approach. It's a wonderful understanding. I like it. And I use those concepts and those understandings, and have, ever since I learned the system. That the system has great efficacy, practically speaking. Now, that being said... So let's just expand. Okay, so it's great to say it's a non-pathological system. Okay, fine. And basically, effective therapists operate from that perspective. Here's two people, they want to change, they want to grow. That power of a human consciousness wanting to change and wanting to grow is so robust that there's a lot of details of self-regulation and moderation and holding on to yourself and understanding. But there's that basic core of power, of human consciousness wanting to grow. That's true, and psychopathology has existence. If somebody has a personality disorder, there's no couples approach that is going... In my experience, maybe I'm wrong, because I've been doing my own work. My lab is my practice. I've done 65,000 therapy sessions. And so, I take stuff into my lab, so to speak. So psychopathology has existence. Sometimes you need to go into that to help people grow. You have tell somebody, like, "You have a distorted view of the world," and need to have some individual work to deal with that, or, "You are so overwhelmed by your trauma history that you have to go resolve that trauma before you can experience sexuality and intimacy with your partner comfortably." Keith Witt: That needs to be normalized and there's a subtle bias. In integral, we would call that a pluralistic bias or a green bias, to treat everybody like they're the same. This is what causes David Deida to dismiss psychotherapy in general. Now, that's an interesting thing. I'm a psychotherapist, I teach psychotherapy, I write about psychotherapy, I've generated systems, I'm a founder of systems, I go to David Deida workshops. He generally puts down psychotherapy as being kind of a pluralistic, limp-wristed, egalitarian, second stage, you know, wimps, so to speak. And I still love the guy, okay? [chuckle] Keith Witt: Okay, so why is that? Probably part of it is because I see him as a kindred spirit, as a fellow warrior. But when you and I were talking about this earlier, but part of it is I probably have more projections with people like David Schnarch or Susan Johnson, like that moralistic... Maybe there's a part of me that has moral disgust that I don't like and I project onto them. I do that a little with Dan Siegel. I love Dan Siegel's work, I've studied his books, I've listened to his lectures endlessly, I've enjoyed his lectures. And every once in a while though on stage, he starts complaining about how somebody treated him badly or how somebody doesn't understand him or he had to push back, and I just find that icky. I go, "Dan, don't say stuff like that. That makes the rest of the cool stuff that you talk about. You know, you're a brilliant man, and you've changed everybody. Your book, The Developing Mind, was my foundation of neurobiology, interpersonal neurobiology." Keith Witt: Alan Schwartz is similar. He says everybody bow to evidence-based treatment. He's irritated with this American Psychological Association privileging the research of, particularly, cognitive behavioral therapy, I suspect because cognitive behavioral therapists and the labs around the country get a lot of money and other people don't. So there's a lot of personality that comes through and yet all these systems have wonderful things about them. So, Schnarch is more practical moralistic in that sense. Esther Perel is more practical romantic, she's practical. All the good therapists are practical. You're with a couple, we're going to help 'em move forward and understand them individually and as a couple, and we have a vision of good relating that's for effective therapists is similar. But she has basically a romantic approach. You have your own way of understanding yourself, and of love, and I support that as a therapist. And you have your understanding of what you want with this relationship and I support what you want. And your partner is similarly. And we deal with that and from an accepting standpoint and a practical standpoint, how can we move forward? Keith Witt: You feel enlivened by your secret affair that devastated your partner, I understand how you feel enlivened by that. I understand the draw of that. I understand your resentment at your partner for not being more cooperative and creating better love, the partner is outraged that you did this. Well, I understand your outrage. I understand your desire to love better. It's a very romantic approach, but it fits very well with all the scientific approaches, the moralistic approaches, with even David Deida's mythological approach. David Deida is basically a practical mythological approach. He draws from the wisdom, traditions of masculine and feminine. He used to teach the Shiva and Shakti scale, just brought it out of the Eastern traditions. And yeah, it's practical. This is how we can help you understand yourself, understand your partner, and understand how you enhance the polarity to have the intimacy and safety and love and the passion that you want. And if you get down to it in the psychotherapy session, if you watch any of us doing a session with people, you'd see very similar constructs that we're applying and you'd see very similar interventions. Neil Sattin: Yeah, it's so funny I was listening to the first season of Esther Perel's podcast that she put out with Audible. I think it's called Where Do We Begin? Or something like that. And one of the sessions I was like, this might as well be Harville Hendrix that I'm listening to, just in terms of how she was showing up for that couple and talking about safety and the way they were constructing their communication and it was like right out of his getting the love you want workshop practically. So that was fascinating for me and I think worth noting because if you're just a bystander and you're like, say, listening to the Relationship Alive podcast, you can be so persuaded by one person's viewpoint or the other. And in fact, I find myself, like you were mentioning earlier, Keith, persuaded over and over and over again. Keith Witt: Yes. Neil Sattin: Because everyone's system has so much merit to it, that you might lose sight of where they both offer you something important. Sue Johnson and David Schnarch, it's interesting that you've paired them together because, obviously, they're in some ways they would see themselves as being in opposition to each other. Keith Witt: Yes. Neil Sattin: And yet, how many times have I seen with clients how important creating safety is to them, taking a stand for who they are? And vice versa, if they're all about the safety and they never take a risk by being who they are, I've seen that be problematic too. So, it's like everyone is reacting to the... What's the word? The distorted, the extended version, like if you go way too far into differentiation, that's not going to be a relationship. If you go way too far into creating safety or your couple bubble, like Stan calls it, Stan Tatkin, then you might lose the edge or the eroticism, which is what Esther would hone in on. You've lost your sense of the other person as other, you're too safe. Neil Sattin: So, it's so interesting because even in just this past three sentences or so, you've heard me jump from one to the other to the other trying to show you, like, "Yeah, they all actually feed into each other." If you're really, really stuck, like a lot of people are, I think that's why Esther's TED Talk took off because so many people are stuck. I think she writes in "The State of Affairs" that sexless marriage is one of the top Google searches or something like that. Keith Witt: Yes. Neil Sattin: So, if you're in a sexless marriage, then when someone starts talking about how you feel too safe and you've come to not think of your partner as someone else. And so here are some ways to get you back to a more erotic, playful space with your partner, then you're going to listen and that's going to make sense to you. But it wouldn't make sense to you if you had no safety in your container and your partner was constantly texting other people and flirting with the waiters and waitresses at the restaurants, and if you were in a totally unsafe world, then that's not going to be a place where Esther's work might, or at least what you might initially think she's getting at. But again, this is just her TED Talk, you hear her in a session and she's talking about creating safety within a couple. Keith Witt: Exactly. That practically speaking, everybody comes from constructs that involve relational patterns, a developmental orientation, that people are influenced by unconscious influences and trauma programming. Everybody has a vision of happy relating for every couple they work with. No effective couples counselor doesn't do that. We all, if we have a couple, we immediately start having a vision of how they could be getting along better with each other. And all couples counselors are informed by the psychological and psychotherapeutic traditions, therapeutic relationship attunement, and that kind of stuff. Keith Witt: Now, when you look at it, for me, the breakdown between Schnarch dissing attachment theory and Susan Johnson saying, "I have the only couples therapy. We never had a theory before me." Okay? Well, look, if you say to a bunch of founders who have their own theories, "You never had a good theory of couples until me," everybody's going to get pissed off. So, Susan Johnson says that, I go, "Susan, you've got a good system, you got a good theory. You don't have to piss us all off by saying that. You can say, 'I got a couples thing that I prefer to yours.'" And so, John Gottman will go up in a workshop and say, "Well, we have our theory." You know he's speaking directly to that. Keith Witt: Now, that being said, Esther Perel and Schnarch make a point that a lot of other couples people miss, they go, "Look, sexuality is a big deal and it's been neglected by the field," and they're right about that. That was true. In the '70s, therapists wouldn't even ask their couples about sex, it just drove me crazy. I did a lot of sex therapy training in the '70s because I realized that to be effective with couples, I need to be really good at helping them have better sex, and integrated that into my work and have ever since. And David Deida's stuff has been priceless around that stuff. Keith Witt: And so, the field has grown to that. And to their credit, once again, John Gottman and Julie, they have their system of expanding the conversation about sexuality and the behaviors about sexuality because they've demonstrated from their research that it's not enough to just down-regulate conflict with a couple, you have to up-regulate good times. And as I make... The point that I make in my Loving Completely approach, a marriage is a friendship, a love affair and a capacity to heal injuries and ruptures. That love affair is a big deal. That first star, this erotic polarity between me and my partner, gets more space in my book than any of the other stars. Why? If that love affair isn't happening then there's a lot of problems that arise out of that, and that's that sexless marriage statistics that Esther mentions in her book. I wrote a book called "A Hundred Reasons to Not Have a Secret Affair", I couldn't find a publisher for it. And I read "State of Affairs" and I said, "Well, I like this a lot better than my book." [laughter] Keith Witt: And really I think that's a really good book about affairs and you can just feel that practical romantic orientation on her part. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and when you say romantic, let's just... Can you get more clear on what that means, just so we get you there? Keith Witt: Esther has... Now, this is just my reading of her, okay? And I've never talked to her. I hope I do some day. There's this sense for her about love. There's a mystery, a cross-cultural mystery about love, that there's love is, I want to be loved, I want to love and I want to do it in a way that works for me. And if it's not happening, I'm suffering and I want to make it happen. And if it's not happening and I'm suffering, I need to take that suffering into the world and into my own development, into my relationship and make love happen. And there's a certain mysterious quality about it. And yes, there's things that interfere with it like lies and abuse and all that other stuff. And to a certain extent, because she works an awful lot with infidelity and that kind of stuff, you can see our practices shape our theoretical understanding. There's that sense of, if we open that up, then love will happen. Now hopefully, it happens with us as a couple, but if it doesn't, okay. It didn't happen. Love, the relationship just because it ends wasn't unsuccessful, we lose each other, we move on and we find love some place else. Keith Witt: Okay, to me, this is very romantic. This is a subjective love-based, romance-based orientation towards eroticism and sexuality. And it's very effective because that's how in terms of the neurobiology of bonding, yes, we go from our various arousal systems, into attraction, into distracting attraction, into romantic infatuation, into intimate bonding, into life stages. Now, what I think Esther misses, because she doesn't seem to be as interested in the science, is that it's an apples and oranges comparison that early attraction, distracting attraction, romantic infatuation, sexual drives, with the sexual drives that exist in intimate bonding, okay. Keith Witt: In intimate bonding, I have discovered or it's been my experience, to go into those romantic infatuation circuits, it's very, very intricate and detailed and it's not nearly as easy as finding a new person that you don't know. And so you can't compare, "Well, it's very hard to develop romance and passion with my husband, but really easy with my lover." Well, of course it is. We're wired to have that be the case. That's not the point. The point is that... And now we're getting into an integral understanding of evolution of consciousness. As we expand our consciousness, as we get more world-centric and more compassionate and less bullshit, our relationships are more demanding. And so it's very, very difficult. I haven't found relationships where people have the depth of connection that they want, knowing each other and accepting each other and loving each other deeply, that they have that and that that container, which is powerful but fragile, can tolerate one of them going out and falling in love with another person. And also, that container suffers if they don't do what they need to do to take care of their love affair. They have a love affair that they believe in that they're sustaining with each other. Keith Witt: So, why is that fragile? Well, because it requires an awful lot of attention and knowledge and understanding and self-regulation. Why is it great? Because there's deeper intimacy available in that container than in previous containers over the last 10,000 years and it's more demanding. If you have a very, very primitive... Say you have a relationship that's pure conformist. We're getting married, we're going to have kids, we're going to do what the Bible says or the Koran says. In those cultures, women stop having sex with their partner when they stop being of childbirth age, in general. Fascinating study. They just go at that point, they go, "Well, I'm not going to do it anymore." A lot, not always, but a fair amount. Why is that? Because there isn't a developmental layer of intimacy that they and their husband are working for, because they're in a system where he's in charge. She has to do what he says. I say "yes" to sex, until I can't have kids anymore and then I can say "no" if I want. Keith Witt: And if we don't have a certain level of intimacy and a commitment to depth, why would we be interested? He would be going after youth and beauty and maybe I'll have an affair or maybe I won't. It just depends. If you're going in, but if you both have the sense of equal depth, if you both are post formal operational, if you both want to sustain your friendship and your love affair and expand it and expand each other, well, then that requires a different kind of inner subjectivity. So these are very complicated forces that are operating on all of us. Now, they're explicit in integral psychotherapy because we always look at lines and levels, and probably, you're going to tell me about Ellyn Bader, probably in their developmental model, because developmental models notice that people's worldviews change, and that relationships, demands of relationship, change as we go into different developmental levels. Keith Witt: The other ones, the effective ones, unconsciously adjust for different people's worldviews, but sometimes don't consciously do it, because it's not visible to them, consciously, but unconsciously, in the session, they get a feel for it and they attune to it. Just like if you're an effective therapist... Stan Tatkin has practically nothing about sexuality in his system, but I'll bet if people come in to his system suffering from not being sexual, he climbs in, understands their experience from the inside, finds out where they're turning each other and on and off, and helps them find the kind of safety that they need to move into eroticism. Keith Witt: And eroticism's very central, because it's like the canary in the coal mine. Everything else has to be going pretty well for you to be good lovers with your partner. It's very rare, as a couples counselor, for people to come in saying, "Yeah, we're both fulfilled, sexually. We enjoy sex, we have sex regularly, and we want a divorce." That actually happens once in a great while, but that's like one in 100. Usually, when people come in and say, "Sex is great," there's a solidity to their relationship, and they're coming in to talk about other kinds of issues; money issues, sometimes... Often child issues and parental issues, sometimes physical issues, that kind of stuff. Neil Sattin: Okay, so... Yeah, there are several different directions that I feel myself being pulled, and... Keith Witt: Great. Neil Sattin: I think where I'm going to go right now is on this practical level, because I want this to all be practical, and we're talking about all these systems as practical systems. I think I heard Schnarch say that... And I don't think this is an actual statistic, I think he was just making a point, which was, in a good relationship, sex makes up about 10% of what you think about and care about, but if the sex is bad... No, if the sex is good, then it's about 10% what you think about and care about. If the sex is bad, it's 90%, or non-existent. And so, I'm thinking about that in light of what you just said and wondering, okay, for people listening who are in this place where they're like, "Okay, well, I'm not connecting with my partner erotically. Should I be going to a sex therapist? Should I be going to an EFT therapist to work on my safety? Should I be... " I could feel... I can feel confusion there, around, what do you do, practically? 'Cause so many people might see like, "Oh, you're not having sex? Well, then, let's talk about sex." Others might say, "You're not having sex? Well, that's a symptom of so many other things going on in your relationship, so let's talk about the other things, and we'll talk about sex later." Keith Witt: Well, first of all, go to a good couples therapist who understands eroticism. It doesn't matter what system they're operating in, if they're a good therapist, a good couples therapist, experienced and know how to attune, and have the things that I mentioned, those qualities, and understand eroticism. One of the reasons that Schnarch says that is that, in general, human consciousness goes where the pain is. We have a half-dozen sex drives, we don't just have one, we have lots of them. And so, if one of those sex drives is activated in a negative way, say jealousy, that's a lot of pain. Say frustration... Frustrated... This happens a lot with guys after the first baby is born. A baby is born. Okay, their wife kinda gets over the birth, and he finds her utterly adorable and desirable. Yeah, this is adorable and she's in love with his kid, she's full of love, "We're sharing this thing," and he wants to have sex. She's in love with the kid, she's got follicle-stimulating hormone up the wazoo, her desire is down, biochemically. If she doesn't have a commitment to re-establishing their love affair, then he's in pain. Keith Witt: And so, what does he do? He makes jokes about it, and there's all these bazillion jokes about men wanting more sex, mothers with small children, and guys... Women don't want to have sex. And these are hostile jokes and these separate people. And, in general, three years after the birth of the first baby, according to the Gottmans' research, 70% of couples are doing worse. But what if you teach them about affection and eroticism and sensuality and say, "You need to sustain this after the birth of the first child. You need to both be onboard with it." Well, if you teach them that, then three years later, 70% of them are saying, "Yeah, we're actually better as lovers." Now, you need... In my experience, that's useful information for me to have, as a couples therapist. Keith Witt: And it's useful for me to know the parameters of that. Just like it's useful for me to know about psychopathology. You know, if somebody has some kind of trauma thing or a personality disorder or some kind of debilitating or God knows, you know, bipolar. That kind of stuff. That has to be addressed. That really has existence. You go to a therapist that has a general understanding, and is good with sexuality in general. I don't know if I'd want to go to any couples therapist who didn't understand the principles of sexuality, and the sex drives, and the stages of sexual bonding, whether I was working on sex or not. It's such a central part of the life stages of a relationship, you know. You don't just have one marriage, you have many marriages. And there's different demands at each developmental level of marriage. And you want to be true to those demands and help each other with them, and good couples therapists all do that. Whether they do it consciously or unconsciously doesn't really matter, you know. They do it. Because, they're inside the universe of these couples helping them grow. And they discover these blocks, and they have their own orientation to help people through them, and help people into deep inter-subjective, into love with each other. Keith Witt: And so, that's... All good couples therapists can attune. They all interrupt people all the time. 'Cause you gotta interrupt toxic patterns, and they all have some sense of what a positive pattern is. You know, all couples therapists suspend their ego in service of their clients. If you have too much ego in the session, you lose your capacity to help people. All good couples therapists are willing to share their clients' pain. All good couples therapists tell vivid enough stories, have vivid enough metaphors that they register, they land with people. They're bringing their best selves into the work, so that's... If you took anybody from any system and saw them work, and they were effective, you'd see that in my opinion and so, that's their natural healing style. And, you know, you keep expanding that and after a while... And what breaks my heart about this is since people resist change, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of natural healing styles in existence being embodied by great practitioners, that we'll never find out about. Because, you know, there's a resistance in the field to new systems. And these people don't have as much... I don't advocate much for any of my systems. Keith Witt: As a founder, I haven't like pushed to make one of my systems famous. Okay, well, that means a lot of people haven't encountered a bunch of my systems. Okay. Well, that's kind of a weakness in my approach as the founder, really. Because if I want to make an impact, I should go out and beat drums about my systems and I don't. I go, "Well, yeah, I like my systems but the other ones are great too. Use the one that... Study the ones that turn you on. Turn that and have that enhanced and expand your natural healing style." What lights me up is people doing that. And if they want to use my system, if they like it, of course, I get a little ego rush from that, sure. That's great. [chuckle] Everybody likes to be told they're great, you know. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: You're great, Keith. [laughter] Keith Witt: Yeah, there you go. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and... Keith Witt: Well, I'm actually a little embarrassed, but you know, I often do if my clients compliment me extravagantly, I'll get embarrassed. Partly because of the transference stuff, you know. Okay, so people go through stages, and partly because, I'm uncomfortable with my ego. I don't want it to show up in my session. Anyway. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. And I'm thinking of something you said earlier about systems that maybe do or don't actually handle mental health all that well. That there's, you know, a lot of these systems work well in the context of someone isn't suffering with major depression, or borderline personality disorder and that made me think of certain modalities that are helpful with that. Like in particular, what came to mind was Internal Family Systems, Dick Schwartz's system, and... Keith Witt: I love that. Neil Sattin: And there's been an evolution of that intimacy from the inside out which is basically applying Internal Family Systems to couples therapy. Keith Witt: Yes. Neil Sattin: And that Toni Herbine-Blank, she's been here on the show to talk about that. This is something that I feel particularly connected to, is this question of how we, in a relationship, actually show up for each other to help heal. 'Cause I don't think that there are many people in our world that have escaped some form of trauma or another. I think we all have like places where we're wounded or where we don't want to go. We're talking about all of these systems in many ways from the perspective of going and seeking help, which I definitely encourage you to do. It's a good idea to go and, as Keith was talking about a little while ago, to have that outside perspective until you're really good at getting outside perspective on your own. Neil Sattin: But that being said, I like those modalities because the more conscious I think you get of how you heal from trauma, so I'm thinking of, yes, Internal Family Systems, somatic experiencing, the things that really enable you to identify what's happening within you, both your body awareness and how you attune to your body, but also what Dick talks about in Internal Family Systems, literally identifying the different personalities in you who are competing and at war, he calls them parts. Keith Witt: Yes. Neil Sattin: And then you can bring those dialogues into your conversations with your partner. Then I think there is a lot of potential through that, through co-regulation to actually heal with each other. But I don't know about any studies that show that that's going to be curative if your partner has depression, for instance, but I do have a pretty strong belief that that's going to help you show up in that relationship in a way where you're still feeling connected and you're in integrity. Keith Witt: There are studies that show that it is curative to expand into your intimate relationship, your family relationships, and your social relationships to be curative with depression, just like there are many studies, overwhelmingly, that show that exercise is a better anti-depressant than any drug. So, that's all true. And your central point, I think, is huge, and that central point is when a couple has mobilized to, one, have compassionate self-observation of both their healthy and unhealthy sides. In my Shadow Light book, I talk about growing your shadow, and that our unconsciousness is constantly giving us constructive and destructive messages, and that we have resistances, defenses against being aware of them, and to the extent that we do that, we have problems with ourselves and in relationships with other people. Because, let's face it, the more intimate you are with yourself, which is having compassionate awareness and acceptance of yourself and self-regulation, the more able you are to be intimate with other people. So, that's just how it works, ask any therapist, any couples therapist. Keith Witt: And Dick Schwartz's approach is wonderful in that, one, he develops... You'll notice there's always a compassionate witness observing these inner parts, okay? Just like meditation increases the capacity of the compassionate self-observation, the witness, as we say in the wisdom traditions, so do these systems that look at these inner parts. Because if I'm looking at inner parts, who's looking? The compassionate witness is looking, and awareness regulates. So, as I'm looking at these parts and I'm identifying the constructive and destructive ones, already I am unconsciously up-regulating the constructive ones, down-regulating the destructive ones. Okay, that's a great language, and it's nonjudgmental, but it's very, very powerful. Now, say you do that with your partner. Instead of taking offense when your partner says something nasty, you go, "Wow, that was that nasty sub-personality." And you go, "Whoa, that was kind of nasty." And they go, "Ooh, that was my nasty self, I'm sorry." Now, at that point, the nasty self isn't in charge. The compassionate witness is in charge regulating the nasty self and now bonding with that partner, and they are collaborating to help shape each other to be their best selves. Keith Witt: When you get to that point with a couple that are doing that with their friendship, their love affair, and their capacity to repair injuries, that's a self-sustaining system that creates the great relationships. And you see the great relationships, you see that, it's called the Michelangelo Effect, it's been studied, and people, they end up talking more like each other, and looking more like each other. But even more, they get up... Long-term couples will tend to get happier with each other because they're receiving influence to be better. And it takes a lot of courage and a lot of openness to receive influence, and a lot of self-regulatory capacity, and that always runs from some kind of compassionate witness, and all the systems encourage that. They all have their different names for it, but if you don't have that, then you're kind of left with raw behaviorism. And if you do have that, which most of us do, or formal operational or post-formal operational. Keith Witt: Having that compassionate witness be more robust gives us more options, response flexibility and interpersonal neurobiology, they would say. And response flexibility isn't random. I want to choose the healthy responses, which support love and support health and I want to say no to the unhealthy ones. But I have to be aware of them, I have to be able to regulate them. That's where Allan Schore comes with regulation theory, that's where Harville Hendrix. His systems basically force people to self-regulate because they can't go into their fight patterns 'cause he's given them different patterns to do. Keith Witt: And so, probably the power of this system is as much by not allowing people to do their hostile patterns as it is giving them new patterns, and I think that's true for Dick Schwartz too in Internal Family Systems, and it's especially useful in trauma because we get overwhelmed with trauma. So, anything that causes us to observe trauma without being overwhelmed, whether it's somatic re-experiencing, EMDR, Internal Family Systems, all those things are drawing from the same well in terms of helping us be aware and regulate and then attach and then connect, love other people and be loved by other people. These are the things that the affective systems have in common. Like, practical mythological, somebody might do better if they see themselves at a particular stage of the Hero's Journey. Great, I love the Hero's Journey, I'm all over that, I've been studying it all my life and practising it. Keith Witt: Somebody might do great in seeing, "Well, I have this destructive... An Internal Family Systems thing. One of my firemen is just driving me crazy by giving me all these impulses to regulate myself in unhealthy ways." You go, "Oh, yeah." But he wants that fireman and he wants to feel better and what's a healthy way to feel better? Oh, now, I'm going to these other selves. Okay, these deeper ones. Oh, and here's this injured self that just really never felt good and still doesn't. Oh, well, we need to love that self until it begins to feel like a legitimate person who's in pain. When that begins to happen, say a childhood injury, most people hate that little kid who was abused, if you had early abuse. Once you start loving that kid who was abused, feeling the pain but loving him, saying, "Hey, look, it wasn't your fault they molested you or beat you up," things change, there's more freedom of motion and you can love better. Neil Sattin: Right. And this goes straight to the strengths of a system like EFT, and that's based around attachment and why it's so important to recognize the bonding, the safety, the ways that you are trying to regulate your safety in relationship. And if you're not conscious of that, how the ways you do it are probably going to be jeopardizing, ultimately, the safety of your relationship, even though, ironically, you're trying to keep yourself safe in those moments. Keith Witt: Yes, and now here's the paradox of the whole attachment stuff. The attachment theory just kind of blew the lid off of the developmental orientation. People have been resisting psychoanalytics... The cognitive behaviorists, the cognitive therapists have been resisting for decades the psychoanalysts' assertion that infancy and early childhood really matter. Well, attachment theory showed that it really does, that we do get set up for secure and insecure attachment, and that there's elements of that that go all the way to the adult attachment industry that the researchers in Berkeley, I forget their name... Mary Main came up with. Yes. Keith Witt: Now, there's a little switch here because that attachment has to do with mother/infant attachment. Okay, now, we go on to couples and then we gotta add that sexual component. Adding that sexual component to secure attachment is tricky. I really don't want to be having to be secure with my wife exactly the way I was secure with my mom. I want to have elements of that, but there's not a lot of eroticism there, or hopefully there isn't, and if there is, there's more problems, that would be more complicated. And so now we have to add that erotic component. Now that erotic component has a lot of other elements in it. It has adventure, it has transgression, it has change, it has whoever we discovered we are from a gender standpoint or whoever we discover we are in terms of our own kinks, whatever our culture told us about our sexuality, whether it's good or it's bad. Keith Witt: People discover their sexuality, and if they're lucky, the culture says, "Oh, that's fine sexuality." Say you discover you're a heterosexual g

How do you actually heal old attachment wounds in partnership - so you can create passionate, secure attachment with your partner? Today you’ll learn how to connect with your partner powerfully, in the present moment, to rewire your brain, break unhealthy patterns, and find the joy and wonder that’s waiting for you just below the surface. Our guest today is Dr. David Mars, the creator of AEDP for Couples. He specializes in helping couples heal attachment wounds and traumas, find each other again in the present, and create a joyful, passionate vision for their future together. His work can help you if you’re in a new relationship, or if you’ve been with your partner for 30 years. David integrates more than 30 years of experience as a couples therapist with today’s cutting edge neuroscience - and you’ll see exactly how that allows you to get into really deep touch with your own experience, with your partner’s experience - and how to bridge the gap between you. I’m so excited for you to experience David Mars’s work, and to see how AEDP for Couples can offer you something new in how you show up in your relationship! As always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Please join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it! Sponsors: Want to experience a Luxury Suite or VIP Box at an amazing concert or sporting event? Check out Suitehop.com/DATENIGHT to score sweet deals on a special night for you and your partner. Resources: Visit David Mars’s website to learn more about his work and therapist trainings. If you’re in a relationship and interested in experiencing David Mars’s work, visit https://www.aedpforcouplestherapy.com/ Check out David’s AEDP for Couples' Training DVDs. FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide - perfect help for handling conflict and shifting the codependent patterns in your relationship Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner's Needs) in Your Relationship (ALSO FREE) Visit www.neilsattin.com/mars to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with David Mars. Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out Transcript: Neil Sattin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. It's been my mission to bring to you the most powerful healing modalities, the most powerful ways for you to find yourself in a deeper state of connection, with the people in your life that you're closest to. And of course, this can travel into all aspects of your life, but nowhere is it more important than with our partners, our spouses, our beloveds. And so it's been really important to me, not only to bring you what I consider to be the best of the best, but to also be uncovering new avenues that we haven't explored yet, because as fun as it is to have John Gottman on the show over and over again, he's a pretty cool guy, at the same time, there are so many modalities available to us that are effective and powerful. Neil Sattin: And you may have heard my episode fairly recently with Diana Fosha, which was all focused on AEDP, Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy. And even though that's a mouthful, in its most basic form, it's about helping us heal the attachment wounds and traumas, the things that get in the way of us having the richest experience of life that we could possibly be having. It's important stuff. And of course, my goal for you is that you can not only access that, but that you can also bring it to your relationship. Neil Sattin: So you get to overcome what it's like, not only to feel alone in you sometimes in some challenging experiences, but also what it can be like to feel alone as a couple, or alone in your couple. How do you bring connectedness in a powerful way to your experience of being with each other, in a way that deepens and leaves you feeling safer, more connected, more passionate, etcetera? So in order to dive more deeply into this topic, today we have an amazing guest with us, his name is David Mars and he is the creator of AEDP For Couples. Neil Sattin: So it is the application of this work for therapists, in... So in a therapeutic setting, towards bringing couples into deeper connection with each other, and bridging the gaps of disconnect, bringing them into a more of a sense of peace and justice with each other, and also how they enter the new phase of their life, like that new phase that happens after the work that they do together, so that it can really be a powerful send-off into this new phase. And in preparing for this conversation, I've had the honor of being able to watch David work with couples, and it has been amazingly powerful. Neil Sattin: So I'm really excited for you to be able to experience him here with me today and to get more of a sense of how this approach to healing some of our deepest wounds can actually be this amazing, life-giving, joyful, burst of experience that you can then bring into your relationship. That might sound like a lot for an hour-long conversation but I'm pretty sure we'll get close. So as usual, we will have a detailed transcript of this conversation, and in order to download that, you can visit neilsattin.com/mars, M-A-R-S, as in David, Mars, today's guest. Or, as always, you can text the word Passion to the number 33444 and follow the instructions. I think that's it. So David Mars, welcome to Relationship Alive, and thank you so much for joining us today. David Mars: Thank you so much, Neil. I'm so touched by your introduction. And I'm just so aware of your dedication to watching all four of these three DVD sets of video training, and just so happy to have this honor of talking with you and with our audience as well. Neil Sattin: Well, it's great to be here, and I appreciate your generosity in giving me access to your work. And as people who are regular listeners of this show have hopefully come to know, it's so important to me to be able to have that level of familiarity so that we can dive more deeply. And otherwise, we could talk for an hour about how you came to be an AEDP therapist, but I want to go more deeply into what you do, in ways that also are in the context of other conversations that we've had here on the show. So for example, we spoke to Diana, so you don't need to give us the full run-down on AEDP. We may do... David Mars: Yes. Neil Sattin: A little bit of that just to bring people up to speed. But if you're watching or listening to this, then I invite you to also check out the interview with Diana Fosha, which is really powerful, and where this, the AEDP, part of the work originates. David Mars: Yes. Neil Sattin: And David, you mentioned to me that you were a couples therapist for 30 years before coming into the AEDP realm. David Mars: Yeah. Yes. Starting in 1975. So it's 43 years. It's hard to believe [chuckle] but that's true. Neil Sattin: Yeah, that's amazing and let's just say that I was one-year-old when you first started. [laughter] David Mars: I should say that my beginnings with psychotherapy and couple therapy were really also working with families and with the groups, and it's a lot of aspects of work that was beyond couples alone. But the couple therapy has always been my strongest affiliation and connection, and my favorite work to do, partly because it's so darn difficult to do well, so it keeps me growing through these four and a third decades and continuing in my personal relationship also with my wife of 35 years, it's so wonderful to be with her and to see how what I learn and she learns because she co-teaches the work with me. Karen Pando-Mars and I teach together and being married together with a 19-year-old daughter and a 46-year-old daughter, from a previous marriage, really gives me a sense of the meaning, a deep meaning of how it is to be alive, how it is to have love be a guiding force and a guiding principle for how to be making decisions and how to exist even in conversation. Neil Sattin: So David you were saying that you have been in, you've been a couples therapist for 30 years, and I'm curious for you, in terms of, as we think about the landscape of what's possible in the couple's world, what was it like for you, even having been a therapist for 30 years to discover AEDP and just can you give us a glimpse of what that brought to you and what that's brought to the way that you've seen your work unfold with couples? David Mars: Yeah, I want to give a little context. In the decades before finding AEDP, which was 13 years ago, that I came to AEDP, I had done work that was very related to AEDP in process work through Arnold Mindell, and in respiratory psychophysiology, meaning the knowledge of how the breathing and the body co-relate and I would... For two decades plus would use monitoring equipment, computerized and very accurate monitoring equipment to look at breathing, heart rate, hand warming, muscle tension etcetera of the couples that I worked with, so that I could see how they're being affected by each other, but even more important, they could see how they were affecting each other, and realize that, for example, if I'm a man who speaks to his heterosexual wife in a way that's very firm and strong and sharp and clear and as expected of me at work, but when I see that her hand temperature drops her breathing rate increases. Her heart rate increases and becomes more agitated. David Mars: And I find out that, wow, that's strong masculine... How I'm speaking actually turns her off rather than on, [chuckle] except for stress arousal gets turned on. But not her closeness to me, if I'm that man, I can learn to speak more kindly and softly and firmly in a way that's more meaningful and sourced by my own experience rather than my judgments, very powerful. And in these decades that I'd worked before finding AEDP, I also was very much oriented toward positivity and would have to be kind of apologizing sometimes because people would find that over the decades, that positivity wasn't really regarded yet as being optimal for psychotherapy. David Mars: Many people felt that going darker, going more into the harsher aspect of life or a scream therapy or whatever it would be [chuckle] in the 80s, for example, or 70s, was really more important than the attending to love, to kindness, the feeling of really modulating harsh impulses and speaking even when angry, about what is really meaningful, what you really want to be understood about where I don't take my "Hurt" and hurt someone else with it, but rather maybe choose a more vulnerable side of feeling sad which is a part of hurt, feeling sad that I'm hurt and angry that I got hurt, but I go with sorrow, then the partner is much more likely to come close to me. David Mars: So, that preceded AEDP. What was different with AEDP, in 2005 for me was that in meeting Diana Fosha, within the first 20 minutes of her presentation, I knew I wanted to study with her. And work with her and come to New York and get trained by her and by the morning break... David Mars: I decided on that first morning break to come to New York and study with her, with my wife Karen Pando-Mars, and in going to New York, I found that I was able to share video of my work even during the first five-day training called an immersion course, and had that thrill of experiencing the cohesion of how I'd been working with AEDP, but also the organization of AEDP's scientific principles, the effect of neuroscience in particular, the understanding about attachment research which has been immense in my life since, to understand how attachment research informs me, and helps me as a person and as a therapist, and also Diana as a person, her remarkable intellect and, genius really, and kindness and humbleness, an odd package to find in a person, [chuckle] and it was so inspiring to me, that within a few years of study and intense work, I was able to become a faculty. I guess it was four years or so, of really intensive study and supervision with Diana. David Mars: And so the quality of, the felt experience of love that I already started with, got more deepened by understanding how the work of AEDP, Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, holds out for individuals and then transfer that understanding into the couple work and adding to it my own background in bio-feedback and understanding how the heart, and breath, and mind correlate with each other, and how we can enhance that loving vibe, which is literally a pulse wave from the heart that can be felt, that that power is so gratifying to be part of an institution. The AEDP Institute in New York is so moving to be a part of. All the people in it, the 24 faculty plus Diana, are so resonant with the values that I hold, it's quite, quite a joy. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I mean, if you get the sense of like... I was watching these DVDs of you working, and found myself moved, moved to tears so many times and laughing and, or accessing even in a really sorrowful moment, we'll talk about this in a minute. But, so tapped into my own experience that I would be starting to cry and then, I'd notice "Oh my goodness. The person in the video is also on the verge of tears right now." David Mars: Yes, yes. Neil Sattin: So it's all about developing that. And so this is just watching DVDs. So imagine the power of bringing that into how couples really learn to experience each other. David Mars: Yes. Neil Sattin: So it's not like glimpsing that level of positive effect, but also living there. David Mars: Yeah, I so agree with you. And I just saw a couple last night, for example, where the couple came in with the dynamic actually, like the one I described, of the harsh speaking pattern in the male in this heterosexual couple, and the woman being quite well-meaning, quite dear, very sensitive, and not used to being talked to harshly. And how she was raised, for her it's shocking to be disrespected, but for him, he grew up with a lot of disrespect, and a lot of challenging behavior from his elder brothers, and lack of protection by the parents, so for him, harshness, is part of a defense structure that is survival-based, and as he lets go of it and becomes kinder and loving with her... David Mars: I was able to say to the couple, "You know I just see how much progress you're making between sessions, how many great examples you've given me today of how I see you becoming more loving with your wife, and she's responding so warmly. My thought is, let's just shorten the session today, I could see you doing the work in between sessions, and you can see this recording of the session and rehearse it at home," And he said, "I'm so glad because I'm exhausted, I would love to go home early." [chuckle] It's a very unusual situation of knowing their work is between sessions right now. David Mars: With their two-year-old son, and that's a joy from me, that that work comes home, and shows up in the next session, as evidence of the work, really, I mean, part of the natural lived life of this couple. Neil Sattin: Yeah, that's an interesting feature of your work. And my understanding is that obviously, it's not a requirement for couples to have their work with an AEDP for couples therapist videotaped, but that is something that you do encourage as... And it gives them the opportunity to see themselves... David Mars: Yes. Neil Sattin: In these, sometimes less than ideal states with each other. David Mars: Yes, yes. Neil Sattin: And also to witness their transformation moments and... David Mars: Yes, absolutely. Neil Sattin: Yeah, that seems really powerful for the couples that choose to do that, and choose to watch the videos that are taken. David Mars: Yup, yeah. It is true that in the therapists that I supervise and train, most do not videotape all their couples. But all videotaped some of their couples, a couple, so they can get trained. And for me, I videotape all the work that I do, and I'm so joyful that my couples that call, I let them know over the phone, that's how I work. And for me, my first experience of video being used with me was in 1970, and I got to see myself several times a week, on video as part of my undergraduate training interacting with others, trying to solve problems and seeing how my brilliant idea when expressed in a certain way, would shut down the conversation. In another way, I could be more humble and come forward in a more soft way, a more relational way that would bring the conversation up, and all of us would rise together, like the tide rises, lifts all boats. David Mars: So, I got to see in 1970, how that is, had that blessing. So for now, all the way from to then, I have this continuous relationship to video as a way to enhance learning, into how people understand, how the reflective function can increase, and the capacity to reflect on oneself accurately is a direct relationship to secure attachment and developing more earned secure attachment. If I know actually how I am being, and I'm aware of myself, I can be aware of you, and by being aware of you and me together, I can become more attuned, and this attunement is so precious because, without it, it's like driving a car around with newspaper glued over all the windows, not knowing where one is going. It's so important. Neil Sattin: Yeah, that reminds me of really learning any skill, and the process of myelination, and how important it is to slow things down in order to get to a new place. And I think particularly around self-reflection, that's something that, it's not easy to, a lot of us don't learn that as we grow up. So I can see that video-ing, process as a way of actually slowing down the circuit, and bringing people into that cycle of self-reflection in a way that would eventually accelerate and become just part of how you operate, from practicing it that way. David Mars: Yup thank you for that. In attachment research, it's very clear that when babies are reflected by their mothers or their fathers, and they are shown that they exist and are recognized in a harmonious way that's reciprocal, that goes back and forth and it's contingent, where the baby's response and the loving parent's response are in harmony with each other, and there's a conversation called the proto-conversation before speech, that baby learns, "I am safe, I am loved, I am delightful, and I'm with delightful people who delight in me being delightful." It teaches that love is a guide, as opposed to fear being the guide, and it's a powerful, powerful example of reflection. David Mars: I'm going to mention something else, Neil, that you mentioned about a couple seeing themselves when they're in these regulated states and realizing how they unconsciously and habitually, they drive their partner away rather than bring their partner closer. What I also really enjoy, is couples seeing each other in love. Pinking cheeks, reddening lips, eyes becoming more vivid in color, bright like shining light, and seeing the light in each other and the love in each other and learning to enjoy love. For many people, love was not something that they had joy with. It's loved mixed with fear, love mixed with danger, love mix with avoidance and dissociation. And so to find that love is safe to soak in, safe to send and receive, and visualize it on the video, visualize it and see more clearly how I can see love in my partner, and feel love for my partner by choice. These are immense, immense powers to possess and to cultivate. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I noticed over and over again as I was watching your work, the refinement with which you were able to notice what was happening in a couple, and then to draw their attention both the person who may be having the experience to, their own experience that they were having, and then to bring their partner in, to invite them into the experience. David Mars: Yes, yes. Neil Sattin: In a way that kept them in dyad with each other. David Mars: Yup. Neil Sattin: Can you talk about that part of your process and why that's so important? David Mars: I'm having such an experience of delight that you've seen these videos, and they're so dear to me, I've seen them so many times in the process, [chuckle] of doing them, creating the workshops etcetera. For me, there's something of great, great delight in being a bridge of consciousness, somatic consciousness, and to see the best in people, and reflect the best of them back to them, and for them to see, hear, feel, sense, even knowing their own movement, that they are vehicles of love when they want to be, with increasing skill, with increasing pride, because it is such a deep deep shame for people and deep sorrow to feel not competent to love. David Mars: It's such a feeling of loss, that I can feel I'm speaking of it. And to be able to love, to be able to be loving, and to be lovable, being loveable, is a skill that many, many people did not learn to do. Survival is not enough in my point of view, and thriving in this world to me, actually, it really requires people to love and be loved. And that's really, I think one of the core elements of how I can help couples to see the best in each other, and to see the moment of a smile before the frown appears to cover it, and just to be there as an open channel for the couples to see, and hear, and feel, and sense each other more vividly in each session. Neil Sattin: Now, if I'm listening, then the question that comes up for me is, "Okay, but how do you address problems then if you're so focused on finding the goodness," I mean the goodness sounds great. Yeah, sure, right. So if you're having this kind of question, maybe one thing to ask yourself is, how open are you to the experience of love, like David was just talking about? And at the same time... Yeah, because people come in right with big, big stuff. "You cheated on me, you're always negative, you're... " right? David Mars: Absolutely. One of the parts I really enjoy about couple therapy is the challenge of having a couple come in, who already is coming in with a dryness, with an anger, with a revenge impulse, with feelings of bitterness, hopelessness, deep, deep, deep even rage, about, let's say, betrayal. And the challenge for me as a therapist, to find the sweet spot with them, in the first question I ask them, which is, "What do you want with each other?" David Mars: What do you want to develop with each other, not for each other or to get from each other? What do you want with each other to experience, should this therapy be successful? And the couple might say I just came in, we have just came in from an argument. I can't think about that right now. I said well I understand this is a transition that's difficult to make. I do see this intention between you, but all the more reason in this therapy, to choose to remember what you want with each other. Because that's our purpose in being. We can certainly talk about what happened in the car before you came into the waiting area. But I would rather have you approach that in a place of loving each other and valuing each other and feeling that you are worth working this through to each other. And from this place we can do great things, working out your conflicts, but only from this place of love can we do it successfully. Neil Sattin: So you're grounding them in that sense of, why are we here? And if this could work, what would we want with each other. And how would you help someone who, for instance, is really landing in a sense of, "Wow, I'm struggling. I'm struggling to even want to answer that question for you". David Mars: Right, so in that case, I might say. I wonder there's a part of you that wants to want to know what you want with your partner and find that part of you that wants to want to be close to her, and just to suspend for the time being the doubting part of you, or the angry part of you that is here. I understand that's a real part of you, but for the time being, to practice a mindful choice to occupy the place of choosing her, just to take the moment. Now, if you will please just see her right now. As you see your partner, "What do you love about her? Just set aside all the rest, just find that 10% of you maybe that really is willing to do this and occupy this part of you". Neil Sattin: Yeah. David Mars: What would I find Neil is that it may be almost unbelievable to imagine people can do this the first session, but it is true. I have video to show it. What I have permission to teach from videos, is very clear that people can choose love over revenge and love over aggravation or love over dissociation because they want to, they get better and better at it. Yes, more, more complete at it, yes. David Mars: Some people can get out one phrase of what they love about their partner, what they want with their partner, and the next Non sequitur is what they're mad at them about. I just need to say, "Wait wait wait, so that lasted 20 seconds. On the positive side, please would you go another minute, just stretch to go a minute of being positive with your partner what you want with your partner. Just one minute." And they go another 14 seconds, another complaint, and I say, "Wow okay, 14 more seconds we're now 34 seconds in, see if you can go another 26 seconds and just be with this that you really want something with your partner, and just hang in." And I'm smiling when I'm saying this, I'm really getting how difficult it is, particularly in contentious couples who come often, at least one of them comes from argumentative family systems. Where learning to argue and have conflict was a skill. And to set it aside, you could hear the armor clinking on the floor, to release that armor is scary, it's downright, terrifying. Neil Sattin: Yeah. And what I love about what you're offering is the way that love and tapping into that energy gives people the strength, and safety to then visit harder places. David Mars: Yes. Neil Sattin: Because I definitely saw that in your work, that there were times when one member of a couple would get to this really vulnerable place and offering something and then the other person just like... And as you're watching it, you're like, "What do you think is going to happen right now?" And of course what happens is it's like, is that love received? No, it's met with some harshness, or disbelief or doubt. And something that I'm curious about is your ability to hold the love and the vulnerability that one person offers and I think this is a valuable skill as a therapist, and also in relationship to be able to... Neil Sattin: For instance, hold that you're offering something that's vulnerable, and at the same time to be met with a no from your partner, a refusal, and to allow them that experience without it necessarily sending you into a shame spiral or a dorsal vagal response. So yeah. How do you hold that dynamic as a therapist? Because I was impressed by how powerful it was to honor, like, it's okay that you're resisting this love right now, I'm not going to force you to accept it. David Mars: Absolutely. Neil Sattin: In this environment, even though that, it's probably what you think. I want you to do... David Mars: Exactly. That's very well put, Neil. Yeah, it isn't about compliance, it isn't about love your partner because I'm saying you should. It's much more really to remember for example in the... That volume one volume two from New Jersey the 30-year marriage DVD set that is a two-part set, when Joanne is refusing Mike's overtures to being loving and at a point, she says I've had 30 years of difficulties with you. I am not going to simply just collapse with my upset with you just because you're nice to me in this session, I'm not, I'm still mad at you. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: Yeah. David Mars: And I have a right to be, and I'm not going to... I'm not going to just set it aside. I'm really, really hurt and lonely. And you haven't gotten it, and I want you to get it. Of course, the way she does it, puts him into dorsal vagal again, but I just love that her assertion is so clearly based in her sense of her rights to be a person who has truth with self as the first prerogative beyond behaving herself with a partner and complying with me or her husband and her ferocity I think is really an essential response to being deprived of having rights all through her life growing up. Neil Sattin: Yeah. David Mars: So, it was such a... She taught me something there in that. Because it went on. [chuckle] It was like a 13-session series of sessions. It wasn't a super long treatment, but it was one that sometimes felt long to me because the setbacks were almost every session. There would be some part of her that just needed to be mean to him and, thump him one, not physically, but with contempt. And I would just go, wow, okay. [chuckle] Ouch. That actually hurts from over here. And that kind of transparent response that often bring humor to her. She said, "Oh that was really sharp. I don't want to be that aggressive 16-year-old right now, I'm sorry". And she'd apologize to him sometimes. It's that subpart of self that really wasn't quite in her conscious knowing, that would sometimes reach out and do something of an ouch to him. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah. David Mars: In the sweetest, most vulnerable moments. [chuckle] Neil Sattin: Yeah. So much here to unpack, first I love that you incorporate that notion of multiplicity and parts that are operating. We've had Dick Schwartz on the show to talk about internal family systems and also Toni Herbine-Blank, which is her incorporation of that into couples work. So I find that to be so helpful in people being able to give a voice to the more challenging aspects of their experience, but in a way that keeps a healthy distance from it, while at the same time honoring it, so that they are not becoming it. So I love that you've incorporated that into your work. And I also just want to give some context, to everyone who's watching and listening to that... So David is talking about this two-part DVD set so it's actually six DVDs that are this couple's Conference and in it they show video of David working with a couple, and this couple had been together for 30 years and they were on the brink, the woman partner had had enough, she was done with things being the way they were, and so... Neil Sattin: And I often get emails from listeners like I've been married for 30 years. Is there any hope for me? I think I literally got that email, like three days ago. So one, yes, there is hope for you. And then we get to watch over the course of 15 sessions how they progress together. So it's not like an instant fix and it's also not an un-enduring length of time that it took for them to achieve a lot of progress as a couple. David Mars: Yeah. Neil Sattin: So, just setting some context. The DVDs are amazing. And if you're a therapist or a healer, that immersing yourself in the approach like that is one way that I think would be super helpful for you. David Mars: Can I add something to this Neil? Neil Sattin: Please yeah. David Mars: I'm thinking about how Joanne and Mike, and they had given me permission to use their first names. Neil Sattin: Great. David Mars: In discussing their work, they're very, very joyful about being of service in the world. So that their couple experience can inspire other couples to grow and develop past traumatic ways of interacting and deadening ways of interaction, to ones that are really truly conscious and enhancing. And the couple was on stage with me, and in the... In showing their videos. So they were being interacted with the audience of about 100 therapists in using language, I-language like I use with them, like they use with each other, with the channels of experience, which are sensation, emotion, energy, movement, auditory, visual, and imaginal and using these seven channels along with I-language. They can communicate about their internal experience, what's moving in them, what they sense in their bodies, what emotions are coming up, what kind of energetic experience they're having. David Mars: And the intimacy of that speech with the audience of 100 therapists gets combined when the therapists are also speaking level, not speaking and pontificating, giving ideas or advice but are actually being moved and speaking from their own experience of their own hope that's being opened in them by Joanne and Mike and speaking from that hope and that joy and that honoring of Joanne and Mike for their struggle and for their breakthroughs, and for their being present with us. They flew all the way from San Francisco Bay Area to New Jersey to be there at that conference, and [chuckle] it's just quite a statement of their dedication to wanting to transform. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah. Joanne, just to revisit something, we were talking about a moment ago, she mentions that one of the most powerful moments for her to witness was the moment where you... To say called her out isn't really exactly the right phrase, probably, but you highlighted how she was coming at Mike in a very cutting way and the beautiful way you said it, it was something like, "Are you perhaps mocking him right now?" but you said it in a way that wasn't at all talking down to her, it was just like, I'm inviting you to ponder, was that maybe mocking him? And she spoke to just the impact of, "Oh my goodness! Right, I am doing that. And that is, as you mentioned, not what I want to be doing." David Mars: Yeah, that's huge, that's huge. And I love this part about tapping in the middle of my forehead, the orbitofrontal cortex, the third eye in more mystical traditions. The orbitofrontal cortex is the senior executive that chooses how to be relational, how to be conscious or it can lay relatively dormant. [laughter] David Mars: If we're really actively choosing our partners in an atmosphere of love, choosing to want to be with them or even to want to want to be with them, as I mentioned earlier, to find the parts of us that are really open to moving away from argumentation and toward really saying, "What do we want to be understood?" As opposed to going for revenge or for an impact, to go instead for understanding is a major, major shift in consciousness and is an invitation to be recognized for the depth of what one wants to say and to bring the partner closer, even though it could be in the context of conflict. It does not have to be in the context of conflict, because I can speak about the part of me that wants the closeness. David Mars: I can also say how I feel saddened that I'm not reaching that, and particularly for a male in this world that I live in, to be soft, the one that I grew up in, in my family it was not such a wise strategy. To be tough, to be resistant rather than resilient, a lot of what I learned, and now in these many years, decades really of practice, how to be soft and responsive, is such a joy in marital relating, because it's so conducive to being understood. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah. For me, what comes up is this vision of true responsiveness. David Mars: Yes. Neil Sattin: Like the more... What I particularly love of the many things in AEDP for couples is, how you're bringing people more and more online into their present moment experience and all the different channels, you just named the different channels of experience, we can maybe talk about that a little bit more. David Mars: Sure. Neil Sattin: But as a way of enhancing how you show up in the moment. So when you say softness, what I feel is my own like, "Oh yeah. It allows me to take in the world, to take in my partner." David Mars: Yes. Neil Sattin: And to not be bowled over by it, but also to really respond to it. I don't have to push back at it, I don't have to react to it, I don't have to shut down typical fight-flight responses. I don't have to do that because I'm learning how to feel that in the moment. David Mars: Yup. I like that. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I wonder if you could give... Just because I'm noticing we've been talking a little while without naming... I would love to hear from you what you feel are the unique features of AEDP for couples and how people learn to experience each other, and how therapists learned to work with couples and bridge, be a bridge of consciousness, as you were mentioning earlier. David Mars: Sure, yeah. I'd be happy to talk about that. I want to spring from what I heard you just saying about when a person knows they don't have to do anything, they're not required to do anything, but it's simply a choice. That's the key to me about AEDP for couples, it's about choosing, about the freedom, the liberty, the liberation from feeling constrained. I must do something for you. For many people already brings up resentment and a hardening inside, to submit one's own wishes to do the wishes and biddings of another. Part of the control struggle that is phase two in marriage. First stage, falling apart... [chuckle] into love, kind of disassembling into love, merging into love, being, kind of losing our senses into love. For many of us, it is how we fell in love, not all, but for many. And that merger state moves into the next state, which is control phase. Who's in control? David Mars: Who's driving this bus? "It's me." "No. It's me. I drive the kids and you drive at work." How do we actually have a life with two steering wheels in the vehicle and not have it be a battle? There's something about the quality that for me is in AEDP for couples, that is symbolized by a marriage ritual where there are three candles and that the two lit candles are the candles that represent each of the couple members, be they same-sex or heterosexual, and they come forward and they light together. The middle candle represents the marriage, but they don't blow out their separate candles. In some ceremonies, the individuals blow out their candles and the union is always left. David Mars: This is a major problem. It gives me chills to think about the fate of that couple that gives up their individuality to become merged into one, and for me, it's a mess that's invited, where one couple gets absorbed... One couple member gets absorbed into the other perhaps and submits to the other and the dying of the self is a tragedy that does not go well, for most couples in my experience. So when all three candles are lit, both individuals are thriving and bringing light into the world and to each other and the middle candle of their marriage is also doing this, that the children that come from that marriage can be, if there are children that come from it, can be loved and loving, and feel the joy the parents share with them as well. As part of that AEDP for couples model, that if the guiding light of love, the consciousness of love and the guiding principles of the whole body. David Mars: Mind, heart, and gut helping the couple members to discern what is right action, what is the correct and wise way to be right now with you my partner, my beloved, my chosen one? How do I be with you in a way right now because my habit right now would lead me into another direction, that I know is going off a cliff of sorts. I'm going to run into a brick wall of sorts. That habit is not my friend right now. How do I, in this moment of activation, of anxiety, of pressure, how do I find myself? Of exhaustion perhaps. How do I find myself freshly, consciously and be guided by my own body to do the un-thought known. David Mars: That's something that I haven't given thought of yet, but it suddenly springs to awareness. I can be like this with you. It's an actual creativity, and that creativity and living is so much part of how we humans, in fact, all sentient creatures can be creative, and I'm thinking about hummingbirds, for example, who are so, to me, remarkable in their durability, and resiliency to get through storms, and cold and rain and to still be there the next day at the hummingbird feeder at the Mexican sage getting sap from the flowers. How they do this is a miracle of their, to me, divine nature to be following their own guidance. They know how to raise a family, how to be directionally wise to go where it's warm, to go where there's food. David Mars: This is part of what the research of Northoff and Panksepp brought forward before Panksepp's untimely death this last year, the trans-species, neuro-biological core self, and this is a consciousness that's in living beings that is not just the high brain, but it's in some cortical areas as well, that guides us toward wise choices and it's tapping into this that AEDP for couples is specialized in, tapping into sentience and the knowing of the self, is biologically corrected and overrides early defenses and early habits that are not necessarily helpful. They're just habits. David Mars: And I want to say one more thinking about this, part of my joy is seeing couples take the best of each of their lineages, the best attributes what they learn through modeling through their parents through being raised, and surviving in that home their, true strengths, but they simply don't need to be all the space junk of everything else that their parents brought through their unresolved trauma that can be moved out of the back yard of this couple's lives and just cleaned up. It does not need to be that the replication of traumas with the couple has to endure together, but rather the healing of trauma through kind firmness. There's a clarity of mind and heart that are really dedicated to having a life that really thrives. That's really the core of AEDP for couples. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I'm thinking of a couple things one like a really kinda broad concept and one like a very specific thing. The broad one being, what we spoke about in the very beginning of our conversation, that the work is about accessing those core states of being and how we bring them to each other. And along with joy and sadness is your lust and sexuality. This is the work you were just referring to and your ability to bring all of those things online is related to your ability to shed your defenses and your defensive states, not in a like laying yourself bare kind of way, but in a practicing new habits of interaction, new habits of handling big emotions, which also seems like something that AEDP and AEDP for couples is really strong at helping people with. Neil Sattin: And then the specific thing that popped into mind is, when you ask people, "How do you know that you're having this experience?" Can you talk a little bit about that question because I think it's such a lovely invitation to bring people more into their awareness and also, to combat the projection, that so often is happening. David Mars: Very well put Neil. Yes, and rather than operating by projection which is... Projection is necessary if you don't have sufficient information of what's going on and projection is not a bad thing, it's just that it's sort of inaccurate often, its approximate and often has our own stuff laced into it or it very confusing and sort of it condemns the other person if we follow projection as our way of understanding our partner, it condemns them to having our internal material put on them rather than really seeing them truly for who they are. Its very lonely to live like that. Neil Sattin: Right. David Mars: So for me, one of the beauties is when couple members have an experience of discernment. I'm noticing, oh, my gosh, my partner right now is smiling at me. I could have totally missed that had my therapist not pointed it out. She's smiling at me and I love her smile and I suddenly realize that her eyes are bright, she still has a light in her eyes even though it's just being disassociated, just that I lost track of where she was in the room even. Lost track of the fact she was actually here. And I was just talking to myself in a way and that moment of seeing more clearly in the foreground awareness that my love for her is in my heart, and I can actually feel heat in my heart. And then this is a quote from a session where the man says, "This is weird, there's heat in my heart. It's so weird." And she says, "I've been waiting for you to say that for 23 years." [laughter] David Mars: "I am so glad to hear you have heat in your heart looking at me when I'm smiling at you." And then he says, "It's actually more like warmth. It's so weird." And I could just... It brings tears to my eyes to imagine a lifetime of his life before meeting her then 23 years later, that she's still waiting for him to feel a warmth in his heart and know the warmth is real and he can trust it and therefore he can trust her and relax his defenses against her hurting him or being less than. And there's something so liberating that that moment changes everything. David Mars: Once the feeling heart isn't just a pump, is actually a heart that feels and knows that sentience of being is with him. This is not a man who studies consciousness. He's a businessman. It doesn't matter, he could be a military person, he could be a dentist, it could be a doctor, whatever it is, we all have hearts of knowing, particularly if we can train ourselves to listen to them, and hear our whole bodies how they can speak to us and get this tingling in my fingertips, I'm having right now, as I'm speaking with you, as an energetic state that relates to the excitement I feel in this conversation and that if I can relax myself a little bit and slow my speech I can feel a heart movement. David Mars: I can start to notice how my muscles can start to relax. I can start to let my excitement tone down some, so I can feel more of the sense of grounded-ness in my chair, the sensation of my chair seat and my chair back behind me and the floor beneath me, supporting me, I can feel I'm really here more grounded with you. I can begin to hear that in my voice, so the auditory channel, come online. I can feel the deeper resonance of my voice coming in. The quality of this self-reflection in this moment that is so much about the sensations, the movement, the auditory, the visual, the whole imaginal field that come alive in me when I imagine the possibility of this being heard by so many of your listeners and just there's something about that awareness and any moment for any couple member's life, any therapist's life, to know I can choose right now to get more grounded and connect more deeply with myself, simply because I want to, is a great freedom. Neil Sattin: So this is so powerful and I want to spend just a little bit more time here and the invitation for you listening or watching, if you're watching is to tune in to each of these aspects of your experience, because at any given moment, you can bring your awareness to them and that will help do what David has been talking about, to bring you more into a sense of presence with your partner and more of a knowing, "How do I know that my partner trusts me, right now, how do I know that I'm safe with them? How do I know that I'm angry? How do I know that they're angry with me because I might be interpreting something that isn't actually happening?" So and to be clear too, you use these channels of experience in a therapeutic way as well, because as a therapist being able to tune in to what's happening in your experience and the overall field experience of what's happening between you and your clients, you're able to wake up in them, all of these dimensions of their experience with each other to things that are happening in their body that they may have not even been aware of. David Mars: Yes. Thank you for that Neil. I'm aware of this two-part way, that I can interact with a couple. One is, how do you know that right now you're feeling sad, or I could even say, how do you know that the wetness on your shirt, the wetness on your cheek is saying something to you and the person literally says, "Really. Oh, right my cheek is wet right." I guess I'm sad. Oh, I am, I'm sad". And then he says to his daughter... Sorry his step-daughter, who is on a video monitor, cause it wasn't really safe for her to come into the session. Cause they had such rancorous exchanges with each other, she's on a video monitor instead, on Zoom, as we are in this session, you and I. And he says, "I'm sorry that I hurt you. I'm sad that I hurt you." David Mars: And she's so shocked because his boarding school in Britain didn't train him to be this way, the beatings that he got from age seven on taught him to never cry. And the tears are leaking out unbidden unknown until he sees them on his shirt and he feels them on his face, and suddenly it brings chills into my legs and my back to feel the power of his being able to apologize for that totally shocks his wife, that totally shocks his wife of 22 years. David Mars: Totally shocks his step-daughter and she begins to weep just weeping and he's weeping and she's weeping and her mother's weeping in this couple session with the daughter there, who's 43, and we're all with tears and the feeling of the mercy of his breakthrough based on him for seeing the tears on his shirt. Answering the question, what do the tears want to say? How can you tell what the tears want to say? And suddenly his apology comes completely out of the blue. And a man who does not apologize particularly not from the heart. I could say as him, "I'm sorry you feel that way." Which, that's not an apology. But in this case, that dearness of his true self, the true core neurobiological self of him breaks through the defenses and suddenly his face is soft, his eyes are loving and his wife and daughter get to see him. At this moment she's his daughter, not his step-daughter, she really is in this united experience that she wants to be in with him as part of family. And the reunion happens this way. It's just so touching. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I can feel that, that that is an example of how we transform in an instant. David Mars: Yes. Neil Sattin: Yeah. David Mars: This is very true. Neil Sattin: And can you highlight because you've gone through them quickly, but can we just spend maybe 10 seconds on each of the channels of experience so we can all really take in what they each are? David Mars: Sure. Neil Sattin: Yeah? David Mars: Yeah. So sensation right now, probably I'll just say, the sensations I can notice are a fine hum that I feel throughout the surface of my body, the sensations of the hairs of the back of my neck, the sensations of my muscles becoming more relaxed, the sensations of my vocal cords and my voice again slowing down. The sensations of resonance in my chest as I'm speaking. Neil Sattin: Great. David Mars: And the auditory channel linking with the sensations that validate that what I'm feeling in my vocal cords and in my chest vibration is related to the pitch of my voice dropping and the quality of hearing my own breath coming in, the friction of my breath is part of that auditory channel that helps me to pace myself in my breathing which is central to self-regulation as a therapist or a partner in a marriage, and the quality of the tonal, the slight raspiness of my voice, the gravely-ness of my voice, the drop in for me is part of the feeling of gratitude for the grace of being with this couple that I just spoke of from last Thursday and to think of the channel of emotion. Mad, sad, glad, scared, disgust and surprise are the six categorical emotions. David Mars: Many of us have one emotion that we specialize in that we can really access and regulate quite well. Perhaps there are other emotions that we don't do quite as well with that are very difficult for us to regulate. But to be regulated in all six emotions is part of the goal of AEDP for couples and AEDP. To be able to be with surprise for example and say, "My gosh, I was surprised you said that. And now I'm still surprised you said that and I'm still feeling the delight in surprise that I'm having this experience with you right now, Neil, I feel so joyful and so connected. David Mars: And to feel surprise is not a fleeting moment, but one that I can continue to experience again and again as a surprise of the enlightenment of moments that are so... Are so precious and dear because they are literally unbidden, they just come sometimes. And if we go on... Surprise really is one of the categorical emotions that is most often missed by therapists because it happens and comes and goes so quickly. Present tense experience of surprise can remain for a lifetime. David Mars: A surprise for example, when I'm 13 years old and I'm really asking for a sign that God exists and suddenly I feel, and see, and sense energetically I'm filled with this purple energy in my... Above my solar plexus, just between my heart and my gut, and it stays with me today at age 67. I was 13 years old, I am 13 years old in this hand dug cave and I have this energy of response and this powerful, powerful combination of imaginal seeing the purple energy, the body sensation of the energy filling my whole body as light, the body sensation throughout my body still now feeling a head to toe experience of being occupied by a sense of some deep surprise, that also is something that was so deeply longed for and wanted as a sense of validation that I'm not alone. So when we think about the emotion of this, for me, it's a combination of the gratitude and the sadness of having missed that in the previous 12 and a half years of my life, and now to feel that joy and connection with still having this as a presence. David Mars: So in terms of what we've covered now, are sensation, energy, emotion, think about movement, as I'm giving these, counting these out my fingers are involuntarily showing automatically showing a counting of four, and these movements are moved by the anterior cingulate in the brain unconsciously, but they inform what I'm saying as I move from my heart out to you the audience to be able to know I'm really wanting to come from my heart and speak, knowing that I deeply, deeply care about, about AEDP for couples and about love and the healing power of love and how hand gestures can also be involuntarily showing push away or put down, or harsh measures of threat that are unconscious, and seen by the other more clearly than by the self often. That is part of the value of tracking movement channel, to my mind its the most unconscious of all channels because it's also clearly visible that it's happening to others but maybe not to us. David Mars: So we have sensation, emotion, energy, movement, auditory, and imaginal. Let's speak about the imaginal channel. The imaginal channel contains the other six channels. I can have imagined emotion, I can have imagined experiences of moving of being free when I'm feeling stuck and I can imagine my couple member and I being joyful, my partner Karen and I being joyful, and in that imagining of joy I bring the biochemistry of joy into my body, the oxytocin, the dopamine, the citicoline come into my body and my brain cells. All the neurons of my body are affected by the imagination of love, being pure and true, and reliable and resilient. David Mars: So for me, it's an upwelling of a combination of energetic thrill and emotional gratitude that it's possible to be 35 years into a marriage and be joyful about it and feel tears in my eyes, the sensation of tears in my eyes that we have this. Not that it's a permanent... That could be just uncultivated because marriage always has to be cultivated. In my mind, either a marriage is improving or devolving at any moment. David Mars: This is not a guarantee. Oh yeah, we're set now. There's no set part of it for me. It's a living organism. So for me that's the channels of experience. I'll just say them again sensation, emotion, energy, movement, auditory, visual, and imaginal. I didn't overtly say the visual part. I just want to mention visual channels are essential to us humans, to see eye expressions, to see facial coloration, to see markers of tension, in ourselves and others, and to be very conscious about our own peripheral vision of our movement. So I'm aware of what I'm actually signaling. It's a great gift to know what I'm actually signaling to my partner or just someone else in the grocery store, whatever, I'm actually showing myself. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Perfect, thank you for giving us the rundown, and I like too in terms of the imaginal, I love that it contains all of those, and I also find that they're such a gift often in those images that come to us. I often offer those in my coaching sessions with clients and Chloe and I, that's part of how we interact with each other, my wife. This image just came to me of blah, blah, and so often that has a really positive and deepening impact on our interaction. David Mars: Absolutely. What a transcendent function to have, to share between you and Chloe. Neil Sattin: We're lucky. David Mars: Absolutely. Neil Sattin: And we practice it, as you were just alluding to. It requires attention. David before we go, this has been such a rich conversation, I could talk to you for another hour easily cause this time has flown by. Hopefully, we will have the chance to talk again. David Mars: I hope so. Neil Sattin: First, I do have a question for you, but I'm wondering... Let's just talk about how people can find out more about your work and if they want to work with you, or if they want to train with you, what's available to then? David Mars: Well, there's a website, the Center for transformative Therapies website, which is, the URL is C-F-T-T site, so it's C-F-T-T-S-I-T-E.com, and also the AEDP Institute site, A-E-D-P Institute, both have programs and training that I'm giving. A five-day program in Cape Cod that will be happening this summer and also in July and also one in Vancouver, Canada will be happening, another five-day training in Vancouver in June, and also other workshops that I give that are local and international and ongoing that'll be on their websites. Also, I give intensives for couples that want to fly in to have a weekend intensive, and also group work. Where a group work can come together and decide they want to fly in to work with me or fly me out to work them to facilitate group work that's transformational. David Mars: And that's direct delivery to people that may want that, couples groups, for example, can fly me in or religious organizations, church organizations can fly me in. And the power of the work is so joyful to deliver because in a day or in an afternoon or two days so much can happen that really changes lives in a forward-moving way. You mentioned coaching, Neil, I'm so glad for that because it's something that's so important in the world to have this capacity, not just psychotherapy to work deeper but also coaching to work deeply. Neil Sattin: Thank you, and we will have links to your sites on the show notes for this episode, and as a reminder if you want to download the show notes and transcript you can visit NeilSattin.Com/Mars, M-A-R-S, which is David's last name, or you can text the word passion to the number 33444 and follow the instructions, and David, I'm curious, do you have time for one more question? David Mars: I do. Neil Sattin: Okay great. David Mars: I do. Neil Sattin: There are actually so many more, so it's challenging for me to pick one, but I'm curious so many couples who listen to this show, so many are married, many are not married. David Mars: Yes, yes. Neil Sattin: And I'm wondering, there's something about being married obviously that elevates our levels of commitments to each other, most of us. How do you work with couples who aren't married, and who are in that dance around, I'm not even sure... You know they could be asking the very same questions that a married couple would be asking like, "Are you the right one for me, do I still want to be in this. Wow, this is really hard, part of me has a foot out the door." Is there something extra that you bring, or that you would invite for a couple that's not hitched as a way of helping then actually stick with the work that's required in order to figure out maybe those questions that they have about each other? David Mars: Yeah, I appreciate the question. You know the DVD set called Infidelity that is about trauma treatment and a case of infidelity, was of a couple that was not married, and they are still not married. They're still very deeply connected and committed, in having a joyful experience of relating, which I just saw one of the couple members just in a restaurant just recently and she was quite radiant and very grateful for the work, which happened five years ago. We're not doing the work anymore, but it's still living in their lives. So the marriage part isn't required, but it certainly does help from my point of view for many, many of us to have a commitment of marriage, to have that knowing my partner is with me in a way that has some kind of a substance beyond our decision making unto ourselves. David Mars: And for me, a couple I'm working with now that is actually not married and they have a child and they're in the process of dissolution of their living together due to some pretty ingrained issues that are not, they're not remedying. I've only seen them twice, but they came in really this direction of unlinking with each other but keeping, of course, the responsibility of parenting. And for me it's a major joy in my life and a major piece of meaning to see that even couples who have never married can be deeply committed, even couples that have a child and who end up not continuing to be in a relationship can be loving parents of that child and can be wonderful co-parents even without living together, even without being married, but can still be in that place of that child coming up with a strong and secure attachment. If they haven't gotten that secure attachment already, they can develop that secure attachment over time by living with parents who are growing and transforming themselves. Neil Sattin: And so for a couple who's let's say, there may be a little bit more in. So they're not actually dissolving but they don't have the, we're married to rely upon. Is there something, is there a way that you invite those couples to find safety, the safety that's kind of inherent in a marriage vow, because I know, as you just mentioned, "Okay, we're in this. We got married". And divorce as common as it is hard and challenging and requires a lot to make happen. So yeah, how to deal with the paradox of safety in a relationship where they haven't spoken vows with each other. David Mars: Yeah exactly. And for me, I want to give the example of polyamory, which is funnily one of the most challenging ways to be in relationship that exists on the planet. I know many people are very keen on that. It works for them but the couples that I've known who have done that work on polyamory, it is a very, very complicated process, and for me, the safety experience is really, in many cases about how securely attached is this person to themselves? There's a recent song lyric I was listening to of an old song, "And I know you won't let me down because I have my feet so firmly on the ground". David Mars: In truth, we're all vulnerable to having our heart broken, no matter how strong we are, and it's one of the greatest agonies that can be, to have a lost love in my experience, and also in research as well, but to be able to feel the truth of one's words is real, that one's actions and one's words match to me that's part of the integrity of married or unmarried, whatever it is, that can help couples to feel truly safe and truly believable and believed is to really make sure that our actions and our words match. That our apologies are followed by corrected action, not just words that sound good, and actually a commitment to live differently. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and a commitment to be in that process of the experience of earned secure attachment with your own being, and I've seen how that even changes what people ask for in relationship. I've experienced that myself, I've seen it in others, so yes, that I think is a great way of confronting that, I'm always safe in me and then I can bring that into however complicated this situation is to try and resolve it for the better. David Mars: Yeah. Wonderful. Neil Sattin: David. It is such a treat to have you here. I really appreciate your time, your wisdom, your work. AEDP and AEDP for couples is such a powerful modality and I'm really delighted that you were able to be here, to share with us, and I hope that for those of you watching and listening, that your curiosity is peaked and you're going to seek ways out of experiencing this for yourself. But, David, I have such appreciation for your work in the world and the way that that's rippling out from here and from the other ways that you're training people and working with people, it's super powerful. David Mars: Thank you so much. What an honor to be in this conversation, with you and to be asked questions I've not been asked, before. Neil Sattin: Oh. Good. [laughter] David Mars: Yeah. It was a joy to be with you and I hope we get to speak again in another podcast another time. Neil Sattin: Great, great, we'll make that happen for sure. David Mars: Okay, bye. Bye.

How do you do the work of true inner transformation? If there are parts of you that are getting in the way - of intimacy, of thriving, of living in integrity - then you’re going to have a tough time realizing the full potential of your life and your relationships. However, you have everything you need inside of you - if you know how to access it! In today’s conversation, we’re getting a return visit from Dick Schwartz, creator of Internal Family Systems. We’ll be exploring this powerful way of finding your core resourcefulness - which he calls “Self” energy - and using it to help heal and grow the parts within you that are holding you back, or interfering with your vibrancy and effectiveness. You’ll learn how to identify the different parts within you, and the roles that they are playing, and you’ll also get a taste of what it’s like to be coming from “Self”. And at the end you will hear Dick Schwartz guide me through an actual journey of identifying a part that’s been impacting me in the here and now - and you’ll hear how he works with me, and that part, to heal and transform. It’s powerful, and vulnerable, and all here for you to experience on this week’s episode of the Relationship Alive podcast. And, as always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it! Sponsors: Thanks to all of YOU who are chipping in to support Relationship Alive! Resources: Listen to Relationship Alive Episode 26 with Dick Schwartz - How to Get All the Parts within You to Work Together Check out Dick Schwartz's website - the Center for Self Leadership Read Dick Schwartz’s Books along with others focusing on how to apply Internal Family Systems - both as a therapist, and for your life FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner's Needs) in Relationship (ALSO FREE) www.neilsattin.com/self2 Visit to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Dick Schwartz Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out Transcript: Neil Sattin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. Way back in Episode 26 of the Relationship Alive Podcast, we spoke with Dick Schwartz who is the Founder of Internal Family Systems which is a way of coming to understand how you operate in the world, the various parts of you that sometimes have very different agendas for you and your life. Of course, this can have an enormous impact on how you show up in relationship and just how you show up in life in general. Neil Sattin: Maybe you can relate to what I'm talking about, that feeling that one part of you wants one thing, another part of you wants another thing and how that can leave us paralyzed or maybe doing things that we're not necessarily proud of or that we didn't expect or that our partners didn't expect. Neil Sattin: The process of working with your internal family, all of the parts within you and how they interrelate and the process of finding your own self to lead the way, that was what we covered back in Episode 26. This conversation that we're about to have with Dick Schwartz about some of the finer points of Internal Family Systems and how it can be useful for you in your day to day life to see how it's impacting you, all these parts within you and to give you some really practical new things that you can try to help you get related to how this is impacting you, how it's impacting your relationship and that's where we're headed today. Neil Sattin: I'm very psyched to welcome back to the show Dick Schwartz to talk more about Internal Family Systems. He is the Head of the Center for Self Leadership, trains therapists all over the world and also has workshops for lay people to go through the process of self-discovery and healing and integration and bringing all of those parts back into harmony with each other. Neil Sattin: Dick Schwartz, thank you so much for joining us again on Relationship Alive. Dick Schwartz: Great to talk to you again Neil. I enjoyed our first conversation and you're a great interviewer. Neil Sattin: Thank you. Thank you. We'll see. I could have gotten worse in the past couple of years. Hopefully, not. I just gave a quick synopsis in that introduction. By the way, if want to download the transcript or action guide from this episode, you can visit neilsattin.com/self2, that's the word self and then the number two, or you can text the word passion to the number 33444 and follow the instructions. Just didn't want to forget that because I'm sure we're going to cover a lot of ground. Neil Sattin: Given what I had said already, I'm wondering what are the salient points, what's your elevator speech about "this is what Internal Family Systems is, this is why it's so important"? Dick Schwartz: Yeah. I got to find the perfect elevator speech but I can elaborate a little bit on what you said. It's my belief that we all are multiple personalities, not in the sense that we have that disorder, but that we all have these what you were saying, we all have these parts that are little sub-minds inside of us and I mentioned too that I just wrote a book tracking the history of that in our culture and in psychotherapy that this idea has been in the field for years and years and comes up and then gets knocked down again. Dick Schwartz: I'm trying to resurrect it, that it's almost like that movie, Inside Out, only with a lot more than just the five that were in that movie where they interact with each other, that's what we call thinking often, and sometimes, one will take over and make us do things we don't want to do like you said. It's a little inner family or society that most of the time, we don't pay much attention to and think of it as just thinking or different emotions coming and going. Dick Schwartz: If you do shift your focus inside, almost everybody can access their parts and will learn that they're all in there doing their best. Many of them are frozen in time in the past during traumas or in psychotherapy, we call attachment injuries in your family. They're as extreme as they had to be back then to protect you and those are often the ones that we don't like and try to get rid of but you can't really get rid of them. When you try, they just get stronger usually. Dick Schwartz: In addition to all these parts, the other thing I'll say about the parts is that the good news is they're all valuable. It's like we're built with this inner multiplicity to help us in our lives. Even the very extreme ones that screw up your life can transform once they feel witnessed by you and you can help them out of where they're stuck in the past and then they become very valuable qualities. Dick Schwartz: The other good news is that as I was exploring all this, I ran into what we'll call the Self which is almost a different level of entity inside of everyone that can't be damaged and has all the capacity you need to heal these parts. When I work with people, I help them access that first, that essence that vital resource and from that place, begin to work with their parts. When people access their Self, we were talking about leadership earlier, they just naturally have qualities like curiosity and calm and what we call the eight C's of self-leadership, compassion, courage, confidence, clarity, connectedness and there's one I just forgot. Neil Sattin: Curiosity, calm and confidence, did you say that? Dick Schwartz: Confidence. I don't think I said confidence. Neil Sattin: Okay. Compassion. Dick Schwartz: Compassion. I did say compassion. Neil Sattin: Okay. Dick Schwartz: Those are what we call the eight C's of self-leadership but it turns out that everybody at their essence, when that's accessed, experiences those qualities in others. From that place, has wisdom about how to heal themselves emotionally. That's as close to an elevator speech as I can get I think. Neil Sattin: Okay. A couple of questions. First, is that even true for kids? Do kids have a Self Energy that helps them heal their parts? Dick Schwartz: Yeah. Yes. Very much, and we use this model a lot with kids. There's a book on IFS with kids fairly recently. It's quite amazing because you would think that that Self has to develop but even in very young kids, you can access that place. From that place, they don't know how to do a lot of things in the outside world but they do know how to heal themselves and relate with love and kindness to these different parts such that the parts will transform. Neil Sattin: Yeah. The other thing I was curious about was whether you could offer an example, just so people know what we're talking about. Can you think of a time or someone you worked with where they had a part that was really destructive and what that transformed into through working with that part in healing just as an example of how that works? Dick Schwartz: Yeah. There are many, many, many because I'm a therapist and I specialized in the treatment of severe complex trauma for years. I worked with people who had intense suicidal parts for example or parts that wanted to hurt them in other ways and would cut them and then parts that were rageful and would hurt other people. I spent seven years using this model with sex offenders too and I'm here to say that all of those parts including the sex offenders when approached with compassion and curiosity would reveal the secret history of how they got into the role they were in and the crime and how much they hated to do what they were doing but they were carrying these beliefs and emotions from their past experiences that drove them to do those things. Dick Schwartz: In understanding that and also getting them out of where they were stuck in the past, they were all able to transform. If I'm working with a suicidal client for example and I would ask or I'd have the client ask the part why it wanted to kill them, it would say, if I don't kill you, you're going to continue to suffer the rest of your life. I would say, if we could get her out of her suffering in a different way, would you have to kill her? The part would say, no but I don't think you can do that. I would say, okay. Give me a chance to show that we can and then we would do that. We would heal the parts that are suffering so badly. Dick Schwartz: You come back and now the suicidal part is happy to step out of its role and we help it into another role which often is the exact opposite of what the protector, the protective part has been in. In the case of suicide, it's often now the part wants to help you enjoy life in different ways. That would be an example. Neil Sattin: Wow. So powerful because I think one misconception that someone might have would be a part like that where you got to get that out of there somehow. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. Neil Sattin: Get rid of the harming part. Dick Schwartz: That's right. That's the way our mental health system and our culture has viewed these things, not as entities trying their best in a misguided way as to protect us but as destructive impulses that we have to get rid of. The level of suicide is going up and levels of addiction. All is because we tend to go to war against these parts. When you do that, they think you don't get how dangerous it is and they'll up the ante and they'll kick your butt. You can't beat them most of the time. Neil Sattin: Yeah. You offer an example in one of your books that I was reading about like imagining you're on a boat and you have a part that is convinced that something is true. The only way they're going to keep the boat upright is by leaning out this side of the boat. Then there's this opposing part that thinks basically the exact opposite and they're leaning out the other way. The more you try and adjust one or the other, instead of coming both in to share tea and crumpets under the mast of the boat, it tends to push them out further to the edges leaning off the sides. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. When any part gets extreme in one direction, there usually will be a part that will get extreme in the opposite direction. It's what we call polarization. You find that in other levels of system, for example our country right now is highly polarized such that the more I as a therapist or anybody sides with one side, the more extreme the other part has to get because they think the boat is going to collapse if they don't lean out in the opposite way. Dick Schwartz: A lot of what we try to do is get to know each side with curiosity and compassion and then help them come into the boat and trust that it's safe to do that and get to know each other in a different way and see that they actually have things in common. They both have the survival of the boat in common for example and then help them find a new relationship. The best person to do that isn't the therapist, it's the client's Self. Dick Schwartz: Frequently, we're helping people access the Self and then from that place, become their own inner therapist to these polarized parts. Neil Sattin: Yeah and that's something that's noticeably different about Internal Family Systems, the role of the therapist. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about why that's so important to usher your clients into being in Self energy and then from that place, more or less doing their own therapy. Dick Schwartz: As you're saying, that's probably the biggest difference between IFS and most other therapies and that is that rather than me, the therapist being the good attachment figure, it might be one way to think of it to the client and to the client's very insecure or hurt parts so that my relationship with the client becomes the fulcrum of their healing. My relationship is important in the sense that if I can be in what I'm calling Self energy, that allows the client to feel safe enough to drop their guard, their protected parts relax, and allows them to access Self. Dick Schwartz: In that state, they become the primary caretaker to their parts, the primary attachment figure which is very empowering for clients and they can do it on their own between sessions and it becomes a life practice that way rather than there being this intense dependence on the therapist. Neil Sattin: Yeah. One of the cases that you write about involves treating someone with bulimia and you detail how 14 sessions and this woman was in charge basically of her life again. I don't know what happened to that particular person but there's something magical and it makes a lot of sense as well, not magical in like fantasy but more like, yeah that makes total sense when people feel empowered that way to work with the parts in them that otherwise were running the show. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. That's part of why this often takes less time than others because as I said, people are doing this work on their own between sessions and many of my sessions, a client comes in and the first 10, 15 minutes, they're just catching me up on everything they've been doing at home. Then we go in and we do some more and then they take it from there so yeah. Neil Sattin: A quick stepping out moment, because I know this comes up as a therapist and it also comes up in life. When you're interacting with other people's parts, I think you use the term blended. When someone is blended with their part, they're being that rageful part or that inconsiderate or mean or whatever it is. What's a way that you use to say in Self energy, compassion, curious, et cetera in the face of someone being potentially really offensive or inappropriate? Maybe I mean this more in terms of interpersonally out in the world versus in the treatment room. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. I've had a lot of practice given the kinds of clients that I was talking about because they often have parts that as you get close enough to them to do any damage, suddenly, their rage will come at you and they've been watching you for session after session and they know your weaknesses and they find just the right thing to say. These clients would be labeled borderline personality which is a very pejorative way of thinking of somebody. Dick Schwartz: It's a lot better to just think of them as having this protective rage that isn't going to let you get close enough. I've had many, many practice sessions of immediately noticing the parts of me that come to protect me, defend me and then in the moment now, not before but now, I in the moment, can notice those parts and ask them to just let me handle this, to just let me stay and I'll feel this shift from my heart being fully closed up and my urge to lash out. That will immediately evaporate and feel my heart open again and I'll be able to see past the protector in the client to the pain that's driving it so I have compassion. Dick Schwartz: I'll be able to stay calm and simply that presence is very diffusing for these rageful parts. Whatever I say, if it comes from that place is going to deescalate rather than escalate. Neil Sattin: You notice that huge difference between when you're coming from Self energy versus a logical, rational manager part- Dick Schwartz: Yeah, absolutely. I can do that with most anybody now except my wife. When she and I get into it, I just notice these parts coming in. I know that it's going to make it worse but I can't get them to step back because she can hurt me like nobody else. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Dick Schwartz: We've learned ways of repairing that afterwards, but yeah. When the protectors, even if it's a logical, rational one which doesn't seem so bad just inflames her angry part and my angry part really sets things off. Anyway, yeah. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I do want to mention that we did have Toni Herbine-Blank on the show to talk about intimacy from the inside out which is the way she applies IFS to couples work and for you listening, that's Episode 52 that you can refer back to. Dick Schwartz: Great. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I'm curious because - full disclosure, I see an IFS therapist, my wife sees an IFS therapist and so I'm a little biased here- Dick Schwartz: Honored to hear that Neil... Neil Sattin: Yeah. The language of are you coming from Self right now? That permeates our relationship particularly when things happen so I know you are just saying that all bets are off when you're with your wife but I am curious if you have … Yeah, two important things here. One is, is there a way that you found reliably to suggest, wait a minute, we're not Self to Self in this moment. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Dick Schwartz: That's been a godsend. At some point, one of us will say, okay, let's just take a time out and work with our parts and come back when we can be more Self-led and we do it. That really has defused things. Then the next step and probably Toni talked about this too is to come back and what we call speak for rather than from the parts that were protecting us but also speak for the pain or the fear or the shame that was driving those protectors. When I can speak for what I call my exiles, those parts that I locked up in the past because they were so hurt or scared or ashamed. Dick Schwartz: When I can speak from Self for those parts, then my wife Jean can hear that rather than when I'm speaking from those parts that try to defend me because they're so afraid that I'll feel ashamed and so on. Neil Sattin: Wow. So many possibilities right now bumping through my brain about where to go. One loose end from earlier in this conversation, when someone comes to you and they're convinced that they are defective or that they don't have the resource within them, maybe they don't have that experience of Self energy that shows them that it's possible, what do you do to help them see actually, you are the one that you need right now? Dick Schwartz: Yeah. A lot of people start out that way. Neil Sattin: Right because they're thinking, if I had all the answers, I wouldn't be so fucked up, right? Dick Schwartz: Yeah and they've never had that experience of what we call Self. They've never felt it in their lives so why would they think they have it? They've been told by their families that they don't have anything like that, that they're good for nothing so they come in really believing that and I'll say, I know there are parts of you that don't believe that's in there but if you give me a shot, I can prove that it is. Dick Schwartz: By that, I'd say, okay. Let's find the part that has this belief and ask it if it would be willing to just give us a little space in there and see what happens. If I'm in Self and my client has some degree of trust, I'll say just for a second, it can come back immediately, then the client will have this palpable experience of all that self-criticism, getting a little bit of space from it and with that, often will come to some little taste of Self. You never get full Self but just a little bit of a difference. Dick Schwartz: Then I'll ask another part to step back and so on. Often, you'll come to some key ones that had been running things and asking them to step back is more of a challenge because they'll say, if I step back, there's not going to be anybody left. I'll say, I know you believe that but I guarantee you're wrong. Again, I would love it if you just give me a chance to prove that. You'll actually like who comes forward and it will be a big relief to you. Dick Schwartz: I'm nothing if not a kind of what I call a hope merchant or a salesman. I'm selling hope to hopeless systems. If they buy it at all, they're eager. They would love to have somebody in there that is Self to run things. They're like in family therapy, we call parentified children. They're likely kids who when parents weren't available, had to run things and they're tired so they're dying for somebody capable to take over. They just don't think it's possible. Neil Sattin: Could we talk for a moment about just the different categories of parts that might make it easier for you to recognize the different roles that your parts play within you and then maybe we'll chat about a way that someone listening could, after we're done, figure out their cast of characters, get related to some of the parts that are operating within them. What are some of the general categories that you see that are most significant in how we operate? Dick Schwartz: Yeah. The word roles is very important to remember because too often, other people, when they come up with category systems, they describe the category as if it were the part. In this system, these are the roles that the parts have been forced in to by what happened to you in your life. There's really one big distinction and that's between the parts of you that usually were the most sensitive, these inner children who before they're hurt are delightful and creative and innocent and trusting and so on. Dick Schwartz: After they're hurt, they now carry what we call the burdens from the trauma or the betrayal and so now, they carry a lot of pain or mistrust or fear and shame and now, we don't want anything to do with them because we assume that that's just a hurt feeling or that's just a shame feeling. We tend to try and lock them away inside in inner abysses or caves or jails. We call these the exiles. Most all of us, partly because of these beliefs about who we are from our culture, have a bunch of exiles. Dick Schwartz: When you get a bunch of exiles, the world suddenly becomes a lot more dangerous because anybody can trigger you. If you get hurt in a similar way again, all that past pain and the parts that are stuck in those past scenes come roaring out and take over and take you down and make it so you can't function often. There's a tremendous fear of the exiles and their being triggered. To keep that from happening, other parts are forced into the role of being protectors and some of them are trying to protect you and those exiles by managing your life so that nothing similar ever happens again and you don't manage your relationship so you don't get too close to anybody or too distant from people you depend on and manage your appearance so you look good all the time, manage your performance. Dick Schwartz: These are parts that sometimes find themselves in the role of inner critic because they're criticizing you to try and prod you to do better or look better or they might be criticizing you to keep you from taking risks so you don't get hurt but there's lots of other common manager roles so there are caretaking managers that try to take care of everybody else and don't let you take care of yourself and so on and so on, but they're all a bunch of often pretty young parts who are now forced to do this role they're not equipped to do. Dick Schwartz: Then the last category of protector, managers are the first, are parts that if an exile does get triggered, have to go into action to deal with that emergency and often, have to therefore be very impulsive and damn the torpedoes. I'm going to get you to do something that's going to take you away from this right now and get you higher than the pain or douse it, the shame, with some kind of substance or distract you somehow. These we call firefighters. They're fighting the flames of pain and shame and terror that come out of these exiles. Dick Schwartz: They're the unsung heroes because most of the time, they do things that get us more attacked or shame but they're just doing their job because they know if they don't do it, the boat is going to sink. Neil Sattin: Meaning, they're doing things like indulging in addictions or sexual compulsion? Dick Schwartz: Right. All of those things. Some of us have more socially sanctioned firefighters like work is one of mine, we don't get as much … Actually, we get accolades for that. Neil Sattin: Right, except maybe from your partner who's like, where the hell are you? You're working all the time. Dick Schwartz: Exactly right, but most of my client's firefighters have been either destructive to them or to other people and so they hate themselves for having them and often, the people around them are critical of them for having them. Again, all of that shaming, both internal shaming and external shaming just adds to the load of these exiles which creates more work for the firefighters that then brings on more attack from the managers. Most people, addicts and so on are in that loop where the harder they try to sit on the addiction through discipline or self-blame, the more that firefighter feels like it's going to do its job. Dick Schwartz: You can pump up the managers to the point where they will sit on the firefighters and the exiles but that's what people call dry drunk, a person become very rigid and the slightest thing could trigger them off the wagon so that's not the kind of healing that we're looking for. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I'm curious the word shame has come up several times. What is the healing path for shame? Dick Schwartz: Yeah. Shame is usually minimally a two part phenomena. There's a part that says you're bad and then there's this part which is usually an exile that believes that you're worthless. Before we go to that exile, we'll go to the critic, the one who says you're bad, first and let it know we get it's trying to protect and give us permission to go to the exile. Once we get to that exile, we'll ask it, we'll have the Self ask it where it got the shame in the past and why it feels so bad about itself. Dick Schwartz: Then people begin to witness scenes from their past where they were shamed or humiliated or made to feel worthless and how terrifying that was and how that part just bought into it then and thought they were a total loser and then how other parts had to combat that the rest of their life. Dick Schwartz: Just that witnessing, once you see and I don't mean get it intellectually but I actually mean see it and sense it and feel almost like reliving it but not be overwhelmed by it. Once you really get what happened and how bad it was, then the part finally feels like you get it and we know where to have you go into the past in a literal way in this inner world and be with that boy in the way he needed when the shaming thing happened and often take him out of there to a safe place where now, he's willing to give up the shame. Neil Sattin: Yeah. There's this quality of hanging on. This is the burden, right? Hanging on to the shame? Dick Schwartz: Right. Neil Sattin: Through being willing to be present with that part's experience and to do something, I don't know why the word heroic is coming to mind but something that you … that had an adult, had a caring, compassionate, courageous adult been there that they would have done. Dick Schwartz: Exactly. Neil Sattin: if you can do that, then that part of you is getting what it needs, the exiled part and no longer requires the shame. Dick Schwartz: That's right. Yeah. People say you can't change the past but it turns out in this inner world, you can. The part's literal experience, once you go into the scene, like if you did that for some part of you Neil and you are there with that boy in the way he needed and you maybe … stood up for him against your father for example- Neil Sattin: How did you know that was what I was thinking? Dick Schwartz: Because I'm so good. I'm psychic. He watched you do that. That literally changes in that part's experience, what happened to him. He now becomes attached to you as the caretaker rather than depending on his father anymore and now, he's willing to leave with you and let you have this ongoing new relationship with him where you take care of him every day which usually doesn't require more than just a little check-in to see how he's doing. Dick Schwartz: Yes. Once, that's all complete, these parts are more than happy to give up these extreme beliefs and emotions like shame that they've been carrying for whatever it is, 40 years. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and this is why it just seems like it's so important to recognize the personhood of these parts within you to see them that way. It's like an individual worthy of curiosity, compassion, respect. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. That's a tough sell on this culture because multiplicity has been pathologized over and over both by the idea that multiplicity or multiple personality disorder is a disorder. It's a scary syndrome and by just our kind of rational culture that says it's preposterous to have these little beings inside of us. It's been an uphill battle to try and make this idea sink in. Neil Sattin: On the one hand, I love it because it's so empowering. More and more I hear from listeners or clients, people in relationship where they're like, yeah, I'm with someone who's … they have borderline personality disorder. I'm pretty sure they're a narcissist. There's some relief to knowing what might be going on with the other people in your life, maybe with yourself as well. I don't know how many people are like, you know what, I think I'm a narcissist. Neil Sattin: At the same time, what I hear you saying is that everyone has this capacity for healing if they're willing to honor these parts within them that are causing the behavior that we see. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. Again, I haven't worked with everyone, but everyone I work with, and I've worked with people that have been written off as sociopaths or various other labels. They have protective parts that fit the profile but when those parts step back, they have everything else like everybody else. Yeah, I bristle at all those diagnostic labels, it's like we take a person's most extreme and maybe destructive part and say that that's who they are. That doesn't give you much hope. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah. What do you offer someone who … let's say they are in a relationship with someone who is exhibiting narcissistic tendencies? I think for those people, there's often this quandary of experiencing the destructive behavior, maybe seeing … especially if they're someone you love, then you tend to also see their capacity, their potential for amazingness. Yet, there's this question about do I really stay in this? Do I go? Do I give this person an ultimatum? You got this part. You got to heal it or else I'm out of here. Neil Sattin: How does that work? Dick Schwartz: Yeah. Sometimes, it takes something like that but you can do it from Self so there is what we call Self-led confrontation and I've done this with people I'm close to and also clients where you can see that there's a part that dominates them, that doesn't serve them and is also getting in the relationship you're in with them in the way but there's a way to say that to them with an open heart that is much more likely to sink in than if you say it from a protective part of you that's so annoyed with the person and also sees them as "a narcissist" or whatever monolithic label you've been encouraged to see the person as. Dick Schwartz: When I'm with someone like that, again, so like x-ray vision, I can see the pain that's driving the protector and I can try to speak to both even with our current president which is a challenge. You know that there's just a bundle of exiles in there that drives all this stuff and if you can hold that perspective, then you can speak from a loving place even to very difficult things. Now, that doesn't mean you need to stay with that person if that part is constantly hurting you and that's a whole different topic of whether or not to stay but the point I'm trying to make is that it's possible even with people like that to stand up for your parts without alienating them. Neil Sattin: What internal work would you suggest someone do to get to Self in order to have that conversation from aSself-led place? Dick Schwartz: Yeah. There's an exercise that I'll do with groups where you could take such a person and put them in a room in your mind that's contained with a window and so you're outside the room looking at that person from outside and have them do the thing that gets to you and then notice the parts that get immediately triggered and come to your defense. As you notice them, start to get to know them and what they're afraid would happened if they didn't jump up to protect you that way and then you'll learn about the exiles they protect and then you can actively ask each of them if they'd be willing to just give you a little bit of space not so you're going into the room with that person but so you can look at them without the influence of all this protective stuff. Dick Schwartz: If they're willing, the person again will notice this palpable shift and I'll have the person look again in the room and again, when you see through the eyes of Self, you have a very different view. The person looks different, less menacing and the person … I feel sorry for him whereas seconds earlier, they were terrified of him or hated him. I don't know if that answered your question but that's an example of what we can do. Neil Sattin: Yeah. It seems like that … that's giving someone an experience, a direct experience of that person when they're in Self that then they can bring to a real life encounter? Dick Schwartz: Exactly, yeah. To really pull it off, you have to return to your parts and find the exiles that get triggered by such a person so much and do the healing we talked about earlier with those exiles because it's really hard to pull it off if your exiles are still vulnerable to that person. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Can we get clear too on some of the terminology like when we talk about asking a part to step back or even just asking a part anything, much less what are you afraid will happen, et cetera? How does that process work? Is that something that … What are the different ways it can work I guess because I'd love for our listeners to be able to get a sense of how this process could go? At least to the extent that they could do without guidance. Dick Schwartz: You want to do a little piece together as an example Neil? Neil Sattin: That would be great. Dick Schwartz: Do you have a part you'd like to start with? Neil Sattin: Let's see. Is there one? There's not one that's like jumping up immediately. Maybe help me get there. Dick Schwartz: Okay. Is there something in your relationship, your intimate relationship that gets in the way? Neil Sattin: Clearly. Yeah. Let's talk about the desire to work, like for me. That was one example you used earlier. That's true for me as well especially because I can feel like others … There's always more to do so it's hard to just close the door and step into time with my lovely amazing wife who would love to see more of me I'm sure. I know that because she tells me. Dick Schwartz: Right. It's very similar. Focus on that part that's pushing you to work all the time and find it in your body or around your body. Neil Sattin: Yeah. For me, it's like right in solar plexus area. There's like a heat and a tension there. Dick Schwartz: Okay. As you notice it, how do you feel toward it? Neil Sattin: I guess I'm a little bit annoyed and also at the same time, I'm like wow, there you are. That was easy to see you there. Yeah. Dick Schwartz: Okay. Let's see if the part of you who's so annoyed or a little bit annoyed would be willing to relax a little bit and step back in there so we can just get to know the work part because it's hard to get to know it if you're annoyed with it. Just see if that's possible. Neil Sattin: Yeah. He's trusting you right now so yes. He'll step aside for a moment. Relax. I think he like that word. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. I will use that word then, relax. Then focus again now on the work part and tell me how you feel toward it now. Neil Sattin: Wow. What I just experienced was another part coming in being like, wow, I can't believe you're not working with me right now. I've really needed some time and attention. Dick Schwartz: Okay. Neil Sattin: Isn't that funny? Dick Schwartz: Do you want to shift or do you want to pass that one to relax too? Neil Sattin: Let's go into that because that feels potent for me and it's just around the wellbeing of my kids and my listeners know that I've been through divorce. I have my kids halftime, I love them and yeah, there's just something about wanting the best for them in a complex world and being afraid that they'll get hurt. Dick Schwartz: Okay, good. Where do you find this one in your body, around your body? Neil Sattin: That one feels like a really intense welling up in my face like a pre-tears kind of feeling and I'm also noticing a hollowness in my belly. Dick Schwartz: Okay. How do feel toward this part as you notice it, those places? Neil Sattin: I really want to help this part. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. Let it know that and just see how it reacts to your caring for it. Neil Sattin: How do I let it know that? Dick Schwartz: Just tell it inside. Just say, I really want to help you. Just see how it reacts. Neil Sattin: In telling that part, I really want to help you, he feels more teary and I also feel relief like he would say, I'm not alone. I'm not alone. Dick Schwartz: That's right. Now, let him know he isn't alone anymore and see now what he wants you to know about himself and don't think of the answer, just wait for answers to come. Neil Sattin: He says, I know the pain of being hurt and I want to save these children from that pain. Dick Schwartz: Does that make sense, Neil? Neil Sattin: Yeah. Dick Schwartz: Let him know you get that. It makes a lot of sense that you value that. Neil Sattin: Yeah. It's huge. He's a huge resource for those kids. Dick Schwartz: That's right. Neil Sattin: I just see too that there's … I recognize times when that fear that they're not going to be okay is running the show and that sometimes works out and other times, it definitely can keep me from being in Self energy around things that are challenging. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. See if he's interested in unloading some of that fear and pain that he carries from the past. Just ask him that. Neil Sattin: He says, if you think that's possible, then sure. Dick Schwartz: Tell him it's totally possible. Neil Sattin: Totally possible. Dick says so, and I believe it too. I do. Dick Schwartz: Tell him to show you, let you feel without overwhelming you and sense what happened to give him all that. Neil, you can share with us what you get or keep it private, it's up to you. Neil Sattin: Yeah. What I'm seeing are experiences of confusion and pain from different parts of my childhood that didn't make a lot of sense and it's just funny, ha-ha, that it does relate more to my father from what we were talking about before in this moment. That's what this part is showing me. Yeah. Dick Schwartz: Just stay with it. Is it okay to see all this, Neil? Neil Sattin: Yeah. Dick Schwartz: Tell him you're getting it and it's okay to really let you get it all and just stay with it, encourage him to really let you feel it and sense it and see it how bad it was for him. Neil Sattin: Yeah. In that, I notice there's almost like a trembling happening in my body. Dick Schwartz: Let that happen. Just let your body move the way it needs to. It's all good. It's all part of the witnessing and just stay with it. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I can feel that pain for sure. Dick Schwartz: Okay. Neil Sattin: What I'm noticing is also that it's not overwhelming me, it's more like I'm getting the tears. I'm getting the trembling but I'm not losing touch with us, here having this conversation or- Dick Schwartz: Ask him if he feels like you're getting this, if this is what he wanted you to feel and sense and see or if there's more. Neil Sattin: He says no. This is it and in saying that I also felt this really quick shift to calmness in my body. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. Yeah, he's relieved? Neil Sattin: Yeah. Dick Schwartz: Ask him if he's most stuck in one of those scenes or if it's the whole time period we need to get him out of. Neil Sattin: He's like, if you could get me out of the whole shebang, that would be great. Dick Schwartz: Yeah, we'll do what we can. Neil Sattin: Right. Dick Schwartz: All right. Neil, I'd like you to go into that time period and be with that boy in the way he needed somebody at the time and just tell me when you're in there with him. Neil Sattin: Yeah, okay. I'm there. Dick Schwartz: How are you being with him? Neil Sattin: I'm taking a stand and saying this is not okay. Dick Schwartz: To your father? Neil Sattin: To my father. Dick Schwartz: That's great. Neil Sattin: I placed myself physically between the young me and my father. Dick Schwartz: Let me ask you, do you see yourself doing that or are you just there doing it and you see him and your father? Neil Sattin: That's a tough one. It feels like it's going back and forth. Dick Schwartz: All right. See if you can just be there without seeing yourself. Neil Sattin: Okay. Dick Schwartz: Keep doing that. Whatever the boy needs. Just keep doing that for him. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I'm there saying, this is not okay and then what feels like it really wants to happen is I turn to grab the boy and pick him up and just take him out of there. Dick Schwartz: Yeah, let's do that. Let's take him somewhere safe and comfortable he'd enjoy. It could be in the present, it could be a fantasy place, wherever he'd like to be. Neil Sattin: I'm asking him where he would like to be. Dick Schwartz: Perfect. Neil Sattin: I think he wants to just hang out  and play with his Star Wars figures. Dick Schwartz: Okay. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I'm like, okay, where can we do that? Can we do that here and now? I'm imagining bringing him here into the room where I sit which is really convenient because my son has all my old Star Wars figures so I can grab some of those. Dick Schwartz: Great. Neil Sattin: Yeah. We're here now and he's just doing that and we're away from whatever was happening, Dick Schwartz: Good. How does he seem now? Neil Sattin: It's interesting because he seems a lot younger than when I was interacting with him as the part that was fearful for my kids but he seems happy to be here and happy that I'm willing to play with him and he seems relieved like that was hard for him and it was a pretty quick turn though to just be here and be safe. Dick Schwartz: Good. See if now that he never has to go back there and you're going to take care of him if he's ready to unload the feelings and beliefs he got from those times. Neil Sattin: I think he says he's not sure what they are but yes, he's ready. Dick Schwartz: Okay. He could just check his body and see if there's anything he carries that doesn't belong to him. Neil Sattin: Yeah, there's that like … he's calling it that weird feeling in my belly, that trembly flutteriness. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Dick Schwartz: Great. Is he ready to unload that? Neil Sattin: Yeah. Dick Schwartz: Ask him what he'd like to give it up to. Light, water, fire, wind, earth, anything else. Neil Sattin: Yeah. He's like, I want it to just get dissolved in light. Dick Schwartz: Okay. Bring in a light and have that happen. Tell him to let that all dissolve out of his stomach and stay with that until it's gone. Neil Sattin: Yeah. The feeling is gone and I'm also noticing that the hollowness I was experiencing in my belly before, it feels warm and full. That feels really important to me. Dick Schwartz: That's great. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Dick Schwartz: Tell him now if he'd like to, he can invite into his body qualities he'll need in the future and you can just see what comes into him now. Neil Sattin: He says, it's almost like cleverness, and the word that's popping into my head is mischief, but like a playful mischief. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. Tell him to invite that in. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Actually, and just like a relaxed happiness, contentment I think is one of those, yeah. Dick Schwartz: How does he seem now? Neil Sattin: He seems really happy. Dick Schwartz: That's great. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Dick Schwartz: Then before we stop bring in the one who was so annoyed with him originally, so it can see that he's different now and see how it reacts. Neil Sattin: The annoyed, I think that might have been more around the work part. Dick Schwartz: That's right. You're right. That's right. Okay. Maybe think about your kids now and see how it feels. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I feel really confident that I'm doing right by them. Dick Schwartz: Good. Okay, you ready to come back? Neil Sattin: I am. That was great. Thank you. Dick Schwartz: That was very cool. Thank you for having the courage to do it. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Wow. A little window into Neil's psyche, into the interpsychic space. One thing that I wanted to highlight that you said that feels important is when you talked about experiencing the feelings without being overwhelmed particularly if someone is doing this inner work on their own like being willing to … like having that be part of the dialog with their part. Neil Sattin: I want to see what you got and you don't need to overwhelm me. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. That was a big discovery maybe 25 years ago that parts can control how much they overwhelm because the trauma field and a lot of psychotherapy has just assumed that if you open that door, you're going to be flooded and there's not much you can do it about it other than practice these grounding skills endlessly and so on. It turns out that if you simply in advance of going to an exile, ask it to not overwhelm and it agrees not to, it won't so we can do the thing we just did with you without a huge fear of that overwhelm happening. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I think some people are afraid to open the door. I'm not going to go there because that's just too much for me and they've probably experienced what that too much feeling is like at least once in their lives, right? Dick Schwartz: Exactly right, yeah. They've experienced. When they open the door, they were flooded. They couldn't get out of bed. They're horribly depressed and they swore never again. It's a tough sell in such clients to allow them to believe that it's possible to not do that. The exile itself to its defense, it's desperate to get some attention. If you open the door, it's going to jump out and totally take over for fear of being locked up again but if it trusts that it's not going to be locked up and you'll listen to it, it doesn't need to overwhelm you. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and because the worrying part wasn't really a part of that thread, we didn't really get to go there but I'm guessing there's something similar that happens. I'm not guessing, okay, I know but there's something similar that happens with the manager where they also get to be relieved of the burden of the protection and to be infused with some qualities that gives them that new assignment, the new role. Dick Schwartz: Exactly. There are also stuff back in those same scenes where they took on the role of protecting that boy and they need to be retrieved that same way and unburdened. When that happens, then they're freed up to do something entirely different that they're much more designed to do and that they enjoy. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I felt like it's important to say it just because we did that work around my father that my dad is a good guy in case, in the off chance he's listening or that people who know him are listening. What I've noticed as a parent is that it actually is, their kids have things that hurt them. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. Yeah. That happens and like my father who isn't alive anymore but had a lot of untreated PTSD from World War II, so everybody has got trauma and everybody has got extreme parts and when they raise their kids, those parts get triggered. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Dick Schwartz: My father was a great guy also in many different ways. Neil Sattin: Yeah. One last thing. I just appreciate how wide our conversation has gone and your willingness to do that process with me as well which I think was very illustrative. You've mentioned that your clients, they have a routine or a check-in that they do that helps them do the work as part of their daily lives and I'm wondering what could that look like for someone if they wanted to incorporate something like that into their daily life? Dick Schwartz: Yeah For some people, it's as simple as just a 10 minute meditation where you can incorporate it into what you already do for meditating but just start by finding, on your case, would be finding this boy and just make sure that he's still in that good place and see if he needs anything. In some times, it takes just a few seconds and he is doing well and other times, he does need more or if he feels like you abandoned him and you got to listen to that and help him with it. Dick Schwartz: Everybody can do this on a daily basis. It becomes a life practice, not just checking with that part but with all your parts and just noticing what they need and taking care of them the way you might take care of your external children although again, they don't nearly need as much as your external children. Often, it's just a matter of minutes. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Dick Schwartz: There's a woman named Michelle Glass who wrote a book on the daily practice side of it. I can't pull up the name of that book right now but you can find it on our website. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Your website is selfleadership.org, and Dick, you also just recently came out with a book that you're telling me about before we hopped on the line here. What is that called and what's it about? Dick Schwartz: Yeah. I coauthored it with a guy named Bob Falconer and it's called Many Minds, One Self. It's about ushering in this radically different paradigm of multiplicity and that there is this Self in there too. It's substantiating these positions I take by going through the history of our culture, the history of psychotherapy, different branches of science and showing how often the idea that the mind is naturally multiple comes up and gets pushed down. Dick Schwartz: Then also going through each major religion and particularly, the more esoteric or contemplative branches of those religions and seeing how every one has a word for Self, it's a different word but they're all talking about the same thing that I stumbled on to many, many years ago that's in there. Some systems call it the soul or Buddha-nature or Atman or various names for it but we try to cover in some depth all of that. Neil Sattin: Great. Is that available through your website and is it on Amazon as well? Dick Schwartz: I'm not sure it's on Amazon yet. It just came out. Neil Sattin: Okay, great. Dick Schwartz: It will be soon but yeah, you can certainly get it from the website. Neil Sattin: Great. We'll have links to that book, your website, the Michelle Glass book that you just mentioned. Dick Schwartz: One more book if you don't mind. Neil Sattin: No. Go ahead please. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. I coauthored another book with a guy named Frank Anderson and Martha Sweezy which is a kind of workbook for applying IFS to trauma since we've been talking about that today that just came out too with through PESI, capital P-E-S-I. Neil Sattin: Great. That's more for the therapist in our audience? Dick Schwartz: Yes. Yes, therapist. Neil Sattin: Okay, great. If people want to find out more about getting IFS training or finding an IFS therapist, is that through the selfleadership.org website? Dick Schwartz: That's right. There's a whole section on those issues. Neil Sattin: Great. Great. One last point of curiosity. We've talked about the self and the qualities that if you're coming from a place that's compassionate, creative, curious, then you're in Self energy. Is there a quick exercise that you have people do to help them get a sense of "this is the inner diaspora of characters that are there within you that you can get to know over time?" Dick Schwartz: Yeah. There's something we call parts mapping for example where just to describe it very quickly, I would have you start with a part. It might be the same one you started with or a different one and just stay present to it until you could for example, draw it in some form or another on a page and then return to it and stay focused on it until you notice a shift. Another part comes forward and then you'd stay with it until you can represent it on the page and then return to it until another one comes forward. Dick Schwartz: In doing that, usually, people will map out one circuit of parts, one cluster of parts that are related to each other and it's very useful for people to do that. Neil Sattin: By staying with one, others will naturally emerge? Dick Schwartz: It seems to be. If you can stay in an open, curious Self place, then, if you stay with one, something will come up, some other one that's related to it. Neil Sattin: That makes sense to me especially considering what we're saying about polarized parts earlier that if one is like, I'm here, then the other one is going to be not far behind. Don't forget about me. Dick Schwartz: Right. That's exactly right. Not just the ones that are polarized. You'll get the ones who protect each other and so on. Neil Sattin: Yeah. The work is really so fascinating and despite having been speaking here now for a little over an hour, we're still just scratching the surface. I loved, in particular, the way that you map the relationships between these inner parts as they relate to each other and then how that's reflected in the outer world. In fact, it seems like that was one of your breakthroughs, right? The sense that you could apply the structural family therapy that people do with the external systems to what's happening within you. Dick Schwartz: Yeah. That's my background, is a family therapist, particularly structural family therapy. For an amazing thing, it turns out that this inner system is structured in a very similar way so I've become intrigued with the parallels between internal systems and external systems at all different levels including our country and international relations. The parallel is when you really explore them are fascinating and very evident. Neil Sattin: Yeah. You, I think, make the whole as, is it as within, so without? Is that the phrase- Dick Schwartz: That is, yeah. Neil Sattin: It feels really practical and- Dick Schwartz: Yeah. Concrete. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I think getting some experience doing that within is also really helpful in being generative like the contentious moments that we experience in our lives whether it's with our partners or our parents or just in the workplace and the world, et cetera. Dick Schwartz: Yeah, being generative and generous. Yeah. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Dick Schwartz, thank you so much for coming on this show again. I look forward to the next time we can talk and your work is just so rich and such a valuable contribution to change and growth and honoring the potential in us. I'm so blessed to have you here, so thank you. Dick Schwartz: Thank you Neil. It's an increasing pleasure to talk to you as I get to know you and also feel your appreciation for it, so I'm happy to do it again. Neil Sattin: Awesome.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Therapy Spot! I recently attended a professional training on working with couples, where I ran into Toni Herbine-Blank. Toni has operated a private practice for over 20 years, counseling both couples and individuals. Along with Donna M. Kerpelman and Martha Sweezy, she co-authored a book about her curriculum, Intimacy from the Inside Out: Courage and Compassion in Couple Therapy. She also appeared as a guest on my podcast back in 2015! I don’t know about you, but 2015 certainly feels like a long time ago to me! My audience has grown a lot since then. Not all of you had the opportunity to hear this podcast the first time around. That’s only one of the reasons I decided to reissue it. For more, visit: bethrogerson.com

How does your relationship within yourself help you develop a deeper connection with your partner? How can you balance the skills of inner work with the skills required for a thriving relationship? By now you’re aware that there are all of these parts within us that shape who we are - both how we see ourselves, and how the world sees us. You have these parts, and your partner has these parts. The more that you and your partner can be the “leader” of your parts, and the more you can interact with each other from that place, the deeper your intimacy will become. Today’s guest, Toni Herbine-Blank, has created a practical way for you to do just that. She is the developer of Intimacy from the Inside Out (IFIO) - which combines the wisdom of Internal Family Systems with Attachment Theory and state of the art couples therapy - to help you and your partner deepen your connection while making it more resilient. Internal Family Systems Recap: For an in depth discussion on the Internal Family Systems model, revisit episode #26 with IFS founder Dick Schwartz. Briefly, IFS outlines that we each contain a Self and many many parts. We have protective parts of our personality (managers and firefighters) which have developed to take on the role of protecting the more vulnerable parts of us (exiles). Exiles are often young parts of ourselves that have been wounded in relationship and have been pushed back and tucked away by the system in order to not get hurt again. Imagine a giant umbrella with two little feet sticking out from underneath. The umbrella is the protective system (sometimes called coping mechanisms, or defenses) covering up the little exiled ones from any harm. We do not get out of childhood without getting hurt. Whether you have experienced BIG T Traumas, or little t traumas, you, and everyone, have healing to do. We have all been wounded, even those with ideal childhoods, and our systems have responded by creating protective mechanisms. Children are brilliant at creating the defensive strategies- and now these ways of being are so tightly woven with who we think we are, and how we operate in relationship that they can go undetected. Why think in parts? Seeing ourselves through a parts lens begins to open us up to connection, awareness, and experience of core Self. Self is unwounded, ever-present, and an incredible healing resource. It is our heart space. Without parts languaging, we can get stuck between the protective system and the vulnerabilities, leading to internal and external tension, stagnation, and cycling in ourselves and our relationships. Access to Self brings energy to a relationship from the inside out. A parts perspective also allows for differentiation between what you do and why you do it. As you learn more about your own internal system, you can begin to take responsibility for how you are showing up in your relationship without getting stuck in the shame and blame cycle that so often takes the energy and intimacy out of relationships. The You-Turn- The You-turn is at the heart of the Internal Family Systems model, and at the core of what develops vibrant intimate relationships. As so many of us know, it is so easy to focus on our partner when we are suffering. We blame them for what they are or are not doing, and hold onto it as though it is the cause of our hurt/grief/disconnection/discomfort. The You-turn is just this- it is a redirection of focus to the internal. Invite yourself to start looking inward with curiosity- what happens inside of you in response and reaction to your partner? Track internal cycles and sequences: By bringing curiosity towards the internal experience, we can begin to observe the unfolding of our interactions. Noticing in real-time what is happening internally slows us down enough to allow for many more options of interacting! To start learning to do this, begin by simply tracking what IS happening. Are you yelling? Withdrawing? Shutting down? Then begin to see these reactions as coming from parts of you. Bring in curiosity- what are these parts trying to protect? Developing this inner awareness takes practice, safety, and often benefits from the support of a therapist. Listening for needs: Many couples lose connection due to communication struggles. How are you using language? What kind of language are you using? Notice your patterns in speaking and in listening. How deeply are you listening to your partner? And what is getting in the way of really being able to listen carefully? As you ask these questions, begin to invite yourself to listen deeper, meaning listening for the underbelly of the conversation. Often the content is a variation on the theme of needs. Listen under the surface of what is being said for what needs you, or your partner, are expressing a desire for being met. Protection evokes protection: Often our conflicts arise from a protector to protector interaction. If you respond to your partner through speaking from a protective part, this causes your partner to react from their protective system, and vice versa. This quickly escalates until both of you are in full defense mode and no connection can be made until safety is reestablished. Using an IFS perspective allows you to see the defensive reactions as a sign that there is a more vulnerable voice trying to be known and heard. There is almost always much more going on in a conflict than the content- in fact, most couples generally have one fight they repeat continuously just with different ‘issues’. Thus, it is not about changing the content but rather about changing your approach to the content/your relationship to the process. You will build intimacy from the inside out as individually and together you are able to explore and understand your internal systems. Choice equals empowerment. The more protective we are, the less we get what we want from relationship. When we are being led by our protective system our options for behavior become limited to either attacking or collapsing. This plays out in all sorts of unhealthy relationship dynamics- causing fighting, distancing, and tension. When we get triggered and hurt we are no longer clear, and when we are no longer clear we no longer have the space inside to make a decision about how we want to respond. Intimacy from the inside out helps us differentiate on the inside, which helps us expand into much more choice! As we allow more room for Self, and begin to address the underlying fears and vulnerabilities causing such defensive and protective measures, we find that we are able to be more confident, calm, creative, curious, and compassionate in our interactions. We find humor, freedom, playfulness, and new possibilities for how to navigate getting our needs met. I have a huge heart! As much as intimacy from the inside out is about building a relationship with our vulnerable parts, it is also about reconnecting to Self. Think of Self as this beating heart that sustains life- always there pumping away in the background. Connect with the knowing that you are more than just your parts- you have a HUGE heart that you can access at any point. How to make a YOU-turn: Conscious awareness-  The first, and often hardest part of making a you-turn is the actual turning towards yourself, instead of the habitual focus on the other. So, with curiosity, turn towards yourself and first name that you are having a reaction/getting triggered. Begin to notice what is happening on the inside by recognizing what is happening in your body (the body is ALWAYS reacting some way or another). Is your stomach clenched? Feeling of anger in your chest? Do you want to run away? Flushed cheeks? Say Hi- Once you have turned towards yourself, begin a relationship with the parts of you that are showing up. Name them, start separating and differentiating from them. Differentiating and unblending from our parts- possible through naming them and asking them to give some space, is helpful in regulating affect and de-escalating ourselves. When you recognize a part, find a way to say “Hi! I get what you are up to, and I am going to help you”. When parts sense our presence (and feel Self energy) they begin to relax and once a relationship is established between Self and a part we can get to understand it and find it’s purpose and impulse. Ask the question- Ask your part ‘what are you afraid would happen if you didn’t do the impulse right now? If you didn’t get angry/attack/withdraw/shutdown?’ If the part trusts you are coming from a place of curiosity and not from a judgmental shame/blame part, then you will begin to hear all kinds of ways that your parts are protecting deeper vulnerabilities. Develop a relationship with the vulnerability. Find ways to be with your vulnerabilities gently and with compassion. Maybe you do this with the help of a therapist, a meditation practice, a support group, a friend, a walk alone, or a creative process. Be with your exiles and let them feel Self energy holding them. Speak for the deeper vulnerability to your partner. When you are ready, share your exiles with your partner. Teach them about what you are learning about your system. Sharing your vulnerable parts with your partner: Know that learning to unwrap protective layers and expose vulnerability, although so crucial for intimacy, is a process that will develop slowly. This requires a level of safety and trust that many couples have long lost. That said, be patient with yourself and your partner, while knowing too that it is incredibly worth learning to do! In fact, there will be a lot of relief for your partner as they come to learn how much of your current reactions are originating in a history that came long before them. As you share how your needs are connected to childhood wounds and past hurts, their heart will soften and they will open to you with much more curiosity and compassion. This is true because as you take responsibility for your internal system, they no longer have to defend and protect themselves due to you entirely blaming THEM for your reaction, nor do they have to feel like they are the sole cause of your suffering. Speak for parts, not from parts: Learning to speak and listen well is a courageous act for all couples. Courageous communication begins with that pause and you-turn. Take those 10 deep breaths, name to yourself what is happening, and then speak FOR your parts, rather than from them. For example, speaking from an angry part would sound like “You aren’t listening to me!”, however speaking for this angry part could sound like “There is a part of me that is really longing to be heard”. Often our parts are just trying to get our core needs met: being heard, being seen, being known, being understood, and being loved. As you begin to unearth the deeper needs and share these with your partner, you begin to engage their curious Self. Parts led interactions are often dysregulated and does not give the space or safety necessary for our partner to understand you. Speaking for your parts, especially for you exiles, invites them in for understanding and intimacy. Furthermore, ask for permission from your partner, such as “I am noticing a part of me that is getting really frustrated and I am wondering if you are available to listen?” This gives your partner permission to check in with their own parts to see if they are open and available for deeper listening. A temporary moment of maturity (TMM):  If either of you realizes that you are having a difficult time unblending from a part, and are continuing to speak FROM parts instead of on behalf of them, someone in the couple has to have a TMM and be willing to step out of the protector-protector dialogue and ask to pause and return to the conversation when you are both more available/Self led. This can be very hard to do because it is hard to truly hear your partner when you are hurt and it is even harder to put your own stuff to the side to be present. Try to simultaneously unblend from desperate parts (those pesky parts that want to fight and want the last word), while bringing your heart forward. Ultimately courageous communication is about how you hold onto yourself even when your partner is unavailable. Experiment: Next time you feel badly about yourself or something in your life try to make a you-turn and notice just how quickly a part of you tries to find someone or something outside of yourself to blame for it. We all have such strong impulses to focus outward when we are having intense and uncomfortable internal feelings! Shaming and blaming: Once you catch yourself pointing the finger outward, pause, take a breath and choose to go inside. Breath and ask yourself: can I just feel into what is happening in here? Remember that if there is a protective impulse, then there is inevitably something more vulnerable going on under the surface. Actually, when you feel a protective impulse coming up, it is time to get excited as this means that you have an opportunity to find out what you really need in that moment and you will then be much closer to getting those needs met! Ask your blaming/shaming parts to step to the side, and check for what that more vulnerable feeling underneath is. A great you-turn question sounds like ‘What am I feeling right now and what am I needing?’ then, ‘can I do this for myself or do I need to go outside and ask for help?’. Inner critic: Shame is often present in us, though very hidden and well-protected. Many of us were shamed in childhood- whether it was overt and explicit messages from parents or implicit ones from school, family, or friends. When a child is shamed over and over again and there is no repair (apology or acknowledgement) they will develop a part that takes on the role of further shaming- what we often refer to as the inner critic. We quickly learn how to internalized the critical voice by developing chronic negative self talk. The ‘logic’ behind this is that this part believes that if it does a good enough job of criticizing us, we will be motivated to do/be better. Thus the inner critic’s good intention is to hopefully improve oneself. Unfortunately it does not work out that well. Not only do we deflate and exhaust ourselves, we also strain our external relationships. This is true because if there is an internal critic, then there is an external one as well. The external critic parts shame and blame those around us, as a way of trying to do to others what we are doing to ourselves in hopes of alleviating the internal dilemma. No one however, has punished or shamed their way into getting the love they want and need. Internal attachment. The more you know how to show up for yourself in hard moments the more fully you are going to show up in your relationship! Bring your awareness to both the external and internal critics- The more you can love yourself, honor yourself, and extend compassion internally, the easier it is going to be to do that externally. As you heal the vulnerabilities that the critic is trying so desperately to protect, the negative self talk will quiet, and consequently the external critic will soften. How big can your heart get? What is your vision? What do you want to create? Intimacy from the inside out creates reverberations felt throughout your entire relationship. Once you and your partner build a relationship with your own internal systems and learn to caretake your own parts (the protective ones and the vulnerable ones), you will move out of protector to protector driven relationship into a Self to Self relationship that is full of creativity, compassion, curiosity, clarity, calmness, and loads of intimacy. Share this heart space together and explore what it is that you want to create together. Build a shared vision. Ask yourselves what is getting in the way of expressing the fullness of your relationship potential. What is holding you back? How expanded can you get? Let your WE expand and strengthen- what a powerful force it is in the universe! Resources Read Intimacy from the Inside Out: Courage and Compassion in Couple Therapy Find more information and Toni’s trainings on her website   Check out the Center for Self Leadership for Internal Family Systems trainings www.neilsattin.com/toni Visit to download the show guide, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the show guide to this episode with Toni Herbine-Blank. Our Relationship Alive Community on Facebook Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out!

An interview with therapist and trainer Toni Herbine-Blank about her own struggle with food and body image. Toni outlines the process by which she was able to listen to herself, and get clear that inner beliefs about unworthiness were false. The post Self-Worth and Food with Toni Herbine-Blank appeared first on Safe Space Radio.