Hello, welcome back, meaning seekers. I am your host, Dr. Dirk Winter, child and adult psychiatrist and fellow meaning seeker. In this show, I take you along as I enter various healing communities, learn new models of the mind, meet fascinating healers. My intention is to figure out what other healers have learned about what Victor Frankel says is the central human question: meaning, how we create meaning in our lives. I want to learn what people know, and I want to become able to apply that to my own life, and I want to bring those insights back to you. Today we are going to explore what happens when you combine group therapy, ketamine, and internal family systems therapy. This combination has become increasingly popular in retreat settings, and I wanted to understand it more deeply. So I traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, to take part in one of these group ketamine-assisted IFS experiences led by Ted Riskin, who is one of the leaders in this field. Ted is an interesting guy. He started as a computer programmer living in an ashram, and then later trained as a social worker. Along the way, he integrated conventional therapy approaches with energy psychology and holotropic breathwork, as developed by Stan Groff, and then went on to become an expert in internal family systems therapy and in group work and in ketamine and psychedelics. So he's done a lot and he has led many of these retreats at his beautiful home in Asheville, North Carolina. And there he co-creates these group healing experiences with Amy Borsky Duffer, who is a dance and movement therapist and is also a central part of these experiences. You won't meet her today, but if you ever participate in these retreats yourself, you will meet her. I'll also mention that one of Ted's areas of expertise is his interest in anger. And we learned today that anger is something that we don't always need to suppress or push away. Anger can be something that we need to listen to and respect. It can signal that something important is happening, a boundary is being crossed, we are not being treated right. And at several points during this weeklong experience, we didn't just talk about anger, we expressed it fully with a baseball bat and a cushion and a lot of sound. So in this episode, I will take you inside this week-long experience. First, you will hear my conversation with Ted Riskin, and then in the next episode, I will share my audio diary from this retreat experience. So come along, let's do this. Please enjoy my conversation with Ted Risken.
Welcome, Ted. I'm so happy to get to talk to you after doing the ketamine group experience with you. Since this is kind of an IFS podcast, sometimes I I'll uh uh start with a Tammy Sollenberger question of what do you see out your window um right now? I see a sunny day, I see uh my solar panels and a lot of greenery, which I love.
TedUm I'm not tempted to go out there because I know it's hot.
DirkAh. So you're in your beautiful home in Asheville, which I got to stay at and visit. And so this brings me to my question of what kind of a healer are you, and what does your world look like right now as a healer? And then we'll get to the story. But I had the fortune or pleasure of being able to visit you and participate at your home in one of your healing experiences. And and maybe you don't see all of this outside your window, but I got to stay in your Airbnb upstairs, and so you are right next to these beautiful trees and nature and and stream, and you've really built an amazing home where you host your groups. And so maybe paint a picture of what your life looks like right now as a healer.
Speaker 3Hmm.
TedSo on the life aspect, I guess I'm always moving towards balance the best I can. So my life isn't my work, although it's a big part of it. So yeah, my life feels like just always shifting around and feeling into what would be a balance.
DirkSo tell me about the balance. What does balance look like right now, maybe this week or this month?
TedSo, you know, in IFS we say we have parts, and also we would say that self doesn't have an agenda, and so but my parts do. So I have a lot of different parts that want different things, and those things often conflict uh with each other. And um so I definitely have a part that's like, why would you do anything other than work? It's so amazing what you get to do, but then other parts are like, what? Like, don't do that so much. Like, we we want to just relax or we wanna go have fun experiences, and I feel my job as self is to hear them all and find a balance that they can all feel like, okay, getting enough of what I need, and it seems fair. So just to expand upon what I just said a little bit, I would say self is who from this model we would want to come from, who we are. And it's as I said, there's no agenda in self, but there's a perspective, there's witnessing, there's presence, there's spaciousness. And then if I'm gonna be here in a body, I mean if I if that's all I'm gonna experience, I might as well not even be on the planet because I don't need to be on the planet to experience that. But if I'm here, then I need my parts to be able to enjoy what's going on and take advantage of it. And and there's so many fun attractions at this amusement park, and they all want to do their thing. And you know what's interesting about the model is what happens when all these different parts are happening in the same system and they start to push against each other, or one starts to feel like a threat to the other, or they can't agree on where we should go as a person.
DirkI love the model, and we're gonna get into it. Curious, what is so you run groups using IFS and Cadamine, and you host those groups, you do individual therapy. Like, how does your professional life break down and how does the social life balance complement that right now?
Speaker 2Well, this summer the balance is moving towards more not working. And um some of my parts are very happy about that, and a few are like, I hope this doesn't go too far in this direction. But in terms of of the work, you know, you say, well, what kind of healer am I? I mean, I don't I don't it doesn't feel good to put myself in a box or say that I'm sort of exclusively applying a certain model. I can tell you what I think healing is, and and then what I do is sort of different ways to try to affect that.
DirkThat sounds good.
Speaker 2Yeah, let's
start there. So from an IFS perspective, healing would be becoming more whole, and they come from the same root, uh wholeness. And what makes me not whole is that I have parts that are exiled or split off. So healing to me just means finding these parts that have been split off and re-establishing connection to the center, to self, and welcoming them into the system where they're welcome to be experienced. And it's the trick of that is that two other parts, which we will call protectors, that is a bad idea.
DirkBecause can can you give an example for yourself?
TedSure. So I have a part that feels shame. Like I suck. I like I I got nothing good to offer, and I'm just kind of useless and not really worthwhile. And that is a part that feels threatening to the system. I mean, if I get overwhelmed with that experience, I'm not gonna be able to function well. And so protectors take on the job of keeping that away. And just to be a little IFS-y, we call the managers and firefighters. So the managers are gonna live a life where I accomplish enough to ward off that sense that I'm really not worth much. And in order to find these exiles and reconnect with them, somehow the protectors have to give us access. And to me, that's the art of how do we get the protectors to give us access to these exiles so that we can bring them back into the system, given that in their in our history, the protectors have learned it's dangerous. Because when I'm a little person, I can't hold that. I can't I'm not big enough to hold the intense experience of these exiles. And so when I'm young, I have to keep them away to not be swamped and overwhelmed by them. And so protectors that worked. That you know, that's worked for them. Like, well, that that's worked their whole life. We've survived this, so we're gonna keep doing it. So they don't tend to like bringing the exiles back into the system.
DirkSo you're talking about uh shame, not good enough exile. And one thing that I like about the model is I feel like I have that part. Many people have similar exiles we can connect and share. One question I have about exiles is do exiles have a function? What is the job, or I guess they don't have a job? That's the difference between an exile and a manager, is an exile does not have a job per se, or how do you think about this?
Speaker 2That's exactly how I see it. If I'm trying to understand, hmm, is this an exile or a protector? I would just ask, is this part trying to do anything or make anything happen? And if so, I would see it as a protector. And if not, you know, exiles to me just have their feelings and they have often some beliefs that are difficult, but they're not wanting to make anything happen. Now, some of this is arbitrary. How do you call something? And you might have an exile kind of paired with a protector that's trying to keep those feelings of the exile away, and you might say, well, that's the exile that doesn't want to feel that. I think it can work either way, but I like separating it out. So the protectors are trying to do something like make me not feel those exile feelings. The exiles are just holding the feelings.
DirkI like that. Sometimes I think of exiles as having their job is to hold the memory. Like if there's some traumatic experience or something bad that happened, we need to learn from that. We need to be aware of that so that the same thing doesn't keep happening. So they, I guess, store that information of the painful experience, and then our system builds adaptive functions around that. How does that sound to you?
Speaker 2It's interesting. Do you do you feel that they have that as an intention, or is it just a byproduct of their being there that we're we're sort of holding that memory? Do you think they have a conscious intention? Like, I need to hold this memory for the system.
DirkI don't necessarily think that. I think it's more that that's just the biology of how we're built and how we evolve, and that it's a lot of those imprints become unnecessary to hold on to, but stay there. And so what IFS does is gets back to these exiles and unburdens or reprograms them so that their the system overall becomes more peaceful. So it's not an intention, it's not a conscious it intention, but I'm still sort of working it out, figuring it out for myself.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, and and besides that, they without necessarily having an intention, they bring certain qualities of self like playfulness and innocence and spontaneity and openness. And so there's a lot of good that comes from exiles, but it feels to me like they're not having an intention to do any of that.
DirkThat makes sense to me. So maybe we'll
loop back to this, but now I'd love to hear your story of becoming a healer, starting with where were you born? And uh, and was there anything in the ether, either genetically or environmentally, that that sort of set you up to to kind of go in a healing direction? That's interesting.
Speaker 2Yeah, and so part of me wants to say I I I hope we do circle back to more conversation about how to work with those protectors. Because in a way, that would be my answer, is what I see my job is to find ways to get access through the protectors to the exiles. But yes, we can come back to that. I don't, you know, I I don't so I have parts that believe different things. I really don't know like where I was born, does that make a difference? I think mostly I don't pay much attention to these kinds of things. But I was born in uh just outside of Cleveland, Ohio. And um I guess what was in the air was that you know, I was born into an intellectual family, and so logic and reasoning was valued, intelligence. And then how that kind of affected my trajectory of of the work I do is I worked as a uh computer programmer and systems analyst, and then became interested myself in the inner world.
DirkAnd is there like I I I'm always curious, uh are there sort of sliding door moments that I mean that's a big career shift.
Speaker 2You know what a but as you said that what popped into my head is so I was following a spiritual path and also intended to go to medical school, and I was at an interview and was basically told I'm in, like by one uh, you know, in this this they have a clinical interviewer and a and an academic. The clinical one said, Yeah, you're good. The academic one asked me a question about Angola, and I just went off on this thing, like, I don't know what that is, I don't I don't read the news, I'm not interested. And she was incredulous, like, why don't you? And then I started telling her about my spiritual teacher and how I wanted to live in an ashram, and that pretty much guaranteed that I was not admitted to medical school. So that was a that was a fork in the road.
DirkDid you at that time regret being so honest? I guess a little part of me was like, oh, I just threw that away.
Speaker 2But I was pretty clear that and I haven't had regrets since, yeah, somehow I feel more freedom not being in that kind of constraint.
DirkSo then where did you go from there?
Speaker 2Well, to so to be in this spiritual community, I needed a job, and uh I sort of eked out a degree in math from the school I was going to. They just wanted to get rid of me at that point, so they gave me the degree and I got a job in computers. And how long did I work that job? Probably a dozen years. But then because of my interest, I just basically I decided I wanted to debug people and not computers.
DirkTo seem much more interesting to me. Cool. That's a cool way of thinking about it. Can you paint me a picture of the ashram? Where was it? What how many people were there? What was it like?
Speaker 2Well, this ashram, it's it's was in multiple locations. So I lived a few different places in New Jersey and uh New York City. And when all this was happening, when I was applying to medical school, I was in England just because that's where I found a community where I could also get school credits. So I I lived in uh in a house in Leeds, England with a bunch of guys.
DirkAnd uh it was a blissful life. Blissful life sounds nice. It was a Buddhist ashram, or uh I don't even I'm really revealing my ignorance now. Like I don't even really know what an uh what it means, the word ashram. I mean, and I've heard it a bunch, but what is an ashram? And yeah.
Speaker 2My teacher's name is Premrawa, and he went by the title Maharaji back then in the 70s, 80s. And I think ashram just translates to shelter. And so it's it's a place where you don't have to worry about accomplishing your finances or building your life, and you can just focus on your inner world, and and it's just set up to be a place that's conducive to that. So a lot of meditation and discourse and service.
DirkAnd so then you wanted to debug people, and what did you do? How did you set yourself up?
Speaker 2Well, so my interest was in cognitive therapy, and I just found that fascinating. And and I guess you develop an intuition working with computers, like if something's not working right, like maybe it's this subroutine that's has an error in it. And so it was interesting to see if that could apply to people. So if a person is not functioning properly, what's wrong with their programming? So that was initially my orientation as a therapist, but then a friend of mine gave me a rebirthing session, which is a breath work, that launched me into a profound non-ordinary state where I just experienced so much outside of the realm of logic and intellectualism that felt valid. It felt more real, maybe even than all the stuff that I was figuring out in my head.
DirkSo tell me
about that rebirthing session.
Speaker 2Well, I I got in touch with emotions, which were kind of a new thing to me. I actually, my first session, I had an image of what I assume was the last time I had cried as a child, and I saw that I come to the conclusion that crying was pointless, and why bother having these feelings? And um, and then the second session that I did of breath work basically cried through the whole thing, and that felt so good, you know. It's it was just a whole new world to come out of, I guess, what we would call secondary process awareness into primary process of just not being with a bunch of words and thinking, but just feeling and being in the moment.
DirkThis is huge, yeah. The difference between the frontal lobe thinking, intellectual parts and the body experiencing emotional parts. How how old were you at this time? Wow.
Speaker 2I would guess I went back to school when I was 35, so just probably late 30s.
DirkAnd that was social work school at 35?
Speaker 2Yeah.
DirkNYU where you are. Cool. So you were computer guy doing the cognitive stuff, and then uh somebody you knew said, let's do this breath rebirthing session, and they took you into a room and started breathing. Like what what does this look like? I've never experienced this yet. I'm curious about this.
Speaker 3Oh, okay.
Speaker 2Well, these are all techniques for the protectors to let go, especially the intellectual ones, the thinking ones. And there's many ways that human beings can do that. But connecting your breath in a faster and deeper way and staying at staying with it for a while is really effective at just shifting into a more primary process way of being in the world. What um so and I and then I eventually trained with Stan Groff. He used the terms holotropic and hilotropic. So holotropic is when we're in that place of no boundaries and transcendence, hilotropic, holos, holos is Greek for matter, tropane moving towards. So hilotropic means moving, holos is wholeness, hilos is matter, so moving towards matter is the our normal way of being in the world and how we need to be in order to function on the planet, basically.
DirkStan Groff is amazing, and I got to meet him, and not meet him so much as just see him at the psychedelics conference in Denver a couple years ago, and I read his Way of the Psychonaut, part one and part two, and just the way he thinks about pre-birth memories and just our development. He's so brilliant. So I don't really know what my question is here, but getting back to what you had flagged, the working with protectors, getting them to relax. I guess it makes sense that if you if you have certain kinds of breathing, you can kind of shut off the thinking cognitive critical parts enough to connect to the primary process. How do you think about this? Yeah.
Speaker 2I believe that the mechanism is as you are breathing faster and deeper for an extended period, you're blowing off carbon dioxide, which changes your blood pH, which changes how hemoglobin is bound, and you end up having a little bit less, well, not no, I mean how hemoglobin binds oxygens, and then you end up having a little less oxygen. And I imagine that in your brain, and I imagine your brain is gonna triage. Your brain's gonna go, well, we can't like sacrifice the brainstem and the deeper layers. Like, we're gonna sacrifice the cortex. We don't really need that to survive. And so it just starts to go offline, and then the deeper levels of reality start to emerge.
DirkI like that explanation. For me, it was huge to read Bessel's Body Keeps the Score Book, because I had been trained in medical school and then cognitive. There was sort of this battle between the cognitive behavioral people and the psychodynamic people, which were huge, are huge in New York. And all of them are these talking-thinking approaches. And then Bessel's book says, well, trauma's more in the feeling parts of the brain. And so we need to find ways of working with the body. And that's how I shift it towards learning EMDR and IFS and ketamine-assisted therapy.
Speaker 2Yeah, but when we talk about memory, we use that word like it means something that it doesn't, in that the memory, the our declarative memory or explicit memory, the memory in the cortex is a totally different thing than the memory in the amygdala, our implicit memory, our experiential emotional memory. And I think first we got to understand that trauma has almost nothing or maybe nothing to do with explicit memory. It's all about the implicit memory.
DirkSo you experienced this in the breathwork sessions, and then how does your story continue?
Speaker 2I guess I just straddle the worlds, which is maybe the message I or the advice I would hear from Stan. Like the holotropic reality is real and hilotropic reality is real. And if we're too far in one or the other, I mean if we're too far in holotropic, it's very hard to function. And if we're too far dialotropic, we're not going to feel meaning. You know, I know it's your topic here. So like, what's the point of it all? So I think we need to find that balance where we can both function but also feel something that's transcendent, feel something that is meaningful beyond just surviving. And also to feel we're connected, you know, what that we're not. I mean, in the highotropic world, I'm an individual unit that needs to take care of itself and it's alienating. We need those transcendent experiences to feel that we're part of the whole thing.
DirkAmazing balance that you're describing between the the ashram spiritual life and the computer programming, and then wanting to help people reprogram themselves, and then you're in this straddling world, post-social work, where I imagine you're starting off doing pretty conventional therapy, CBT, and then also and then adding in these other modalities that that you pick up. Can you tell me that story a bit of of I guess in a hilotrophic way, what came next in in terms of sort of this tool set that you have?
Speaker 2My my biography is hazy here, but I think you know, obviously I I would read and learn things, but I did a big training in core energetics, which is a somatic psychotherapy that comes down through Wilhelm Reich. And um all these
things basically I could just feel their validity, I could feel they were working for me, I could feel things were shifting that I would not be able to shift just by thinking through it.
DirkWhat does that work look like, the core energetics work?
Speaker 2Well, it's very much about working with the body. Almost like not even separating the psychological work from the somatic work, that it's all expressing through the body. It works with energy. So we're wanting to open up energy blocks. We're wanting the director of the program for most of the time I was there, I remember him saying, the purpose is to know what you feel, to put it all together and be present.
DirkCan you give me an example of a session that like an early session that either somebody did for you or you did for somebody else? Where I think people I don't know much about this, I read a little bit, but it's sort of focusing on like a muscle discomfort, and then it it uh develops into powerful emotional shifts and m and movements, but I've never seen it. Can you think of an example that would be illustrative for people who are not familiar with this?
Speaker 2Well, I mean, I think you've seen how we'll invite people to express anger and with the cube and hitting the uh cube with the bat. Yeah. So you can talk to people about anger, and then they'll go, I understand, oh, I can feel some anger in there, I know what it is, or maybe they'll go, I don't feel it. And but even if they don't feel it, if they're willing to start hitting this thing and emoting and making noise, they'll start to get in touch with their angry parts, really. So we kind of use the body to bring out the feelings that if we just talked about it, someone might not ever get in touch with.
DirkThat anger is one of your interests and and areas of expertise. And I remember one of the things you were saying or teaching was that the angry parts have this function of protecting ourselves or setting boundaries, and that that's actually really important. And uh can you tell me how you how you came to appreciate anger and how you see anger as working in our system?
Speaker 2I guess I came to appreciate it by hitting that cube for five years. And when I look at our culture, it seems there's a really apparent distortion about what anger is. Like anger has a bad name. And understandably so, because as we the more we try to suppress it, the more it pops out uncontrolled, or in FS we'd say not self-led. So the more anger blends, in other words, takes over. And if anyone saw that movie Inside Out, or maybe it was Inside Out too, I don't know, maybe both of them, you know, there's scenes where there's a control panel, and the angry part, like an anxious part is like, don't say this, and the angry part just pushes it out of the way and hits the button, and the person, so that's blending. And so the more anger blends, the more it's destructive, it's rageful, and it gives anger a bad name, and then the more we try to suppress our anger. And I I think we all live in this culture where we're afraid of anger, and it has pretty negative consequences, and this is a whole other thing, which I'll I'll let you either continue or not, but I would say that if I can't set a boundary with anger, then I'll resort to judgment. In other words, if I can't say no to you and keep you at a safe distance just because I want that space, then my part will start to judge you and make you wrong, which will give me the feeling of separation. And this notion that there's right and wrong and how we make other people wrong is what fuels the polarization that you have either within one person or in a couple or in a family or in our country right now.
DirkYeah, I'm associating to a lot of what you're saying, and and this is a nice example. So I guess I'm thinking of my own life and I be married, and if I want to go on a retreat and learn something, and my partner says or someone doesn't want that to happen, I could either kind of swallow my anger and and become judgmental, or I could say, look, this is what I need, and I'm gonna stand up for myself. And uh so is there a way to have a productive limit, is I guess what I I'm hearing you say. Or how do you think of this about this?
Speaker 2So, two things. If I can't just fight for what I want and set a boundary that says, I know that you don't want me to go, but this is important to me, and I'm gonna advocate for it, then I'm gonna make my partner wrong. Like, what's wrong with you that you're trying to stop me from, you know, that's wrong.
DirkYou're but you're blocking my personal development and and that's shifting into a judgment right there.
Speaker 2Yeah. And that judginess is what I find working with couples is is is the the toxic thing in a relationship. That if I'm making the other person wrong, that hurts. If I'm just angry, that's about me. Right? I'm not saying anything about you. I'm just saying, no, I'm not willing to do what you want me to do here, and I'm pushing to do what I feel is right for me. That's not saying anything about you. But if I'm saying what's wrong with you for trying to stop my personal development, that is the toxicity, I think.
DirkYeah, I'm just taking a moment to take that in. I think this is a huge deal, and it shows up over and over again.
Speaker 2And when people tell me I'm wrong, I'm not likely to then go, oh, thank you for letting me know how wrong I am. I'm gonna just double down and be right, because that's the shame, exile, right? Like that I'm wrong. And if I can't feel that, which most of us have a hard time with, you know, this whole thing with SignalGate, I thought that was such a beautiful example of people who could not just go, sorry, I made a mistake there, and just came up with this outlound outlandish explanations and actually attacking someone else to try to distract from what they did wrong. They couldn't just feel like, oh my god, I feel so shameful that I screwed up like that.
DirkThis was the story of the whatever the military people who were giving away secret information or sharing top secret stuff on Signal apps, and then uh I I didn't follow it closely, but someone accidentally invited a journalist of the Atlantic, and that's how this whole thing blew up.
Speaker 2And it was just interesting to watch their protectors jump into action because they could not feel the shame of having made a mistake.
DirkSo you figured all this out hitting a cube uh with a bat for five years. How often were you hitting that that cube?
Speaker 2I don't know. I guess I had my individual therapy, and that some people think pro energetics is like, oh yeah, you go hit stuff and that's it. So so I don't want to give that impression. It's like very deep and nuanced, and there's a lot to it. But but you know, at times in my individual therapy, and then all the training programs, there would be groups, and that would tend to be something that would happen in a group because people have anger and it's useful to bring it out.
DirkHow did you then find IFS?
I saw Dick at uh Dick Schwartz, so he's the developer of the model at um uh psychotherapy networker conference, and I had been doing hypnotherapy and just finding myself talking to parts through that lens, especially like physical sensations in the body, like personifying them, and and it was interesting and seemed useful. And I felt like I was just exploring the terrain, and I met this guy who just came out with a map of the whole thing and said, Yeah, I already been here, I figured it all out, here it is. So um that got me motivated to pursue it more and as much as I did the the training.
DirkCan you say a bit more about that? The so hypnotherapy, you're having conversations with parts, and I guess you're using hypnosis to sort of turn off the thinky parts of the brain and get into the core feeling parts of it, and so you're shifting into more trance work, or what does hypnosis look like? And then how does IFS give you a map?
Speaker 2What hypnosis looks like, my analytical parts think they have all the answers. They think that they have a monopoly on truth, and they have a monopoly on figuring stuff out, they're good at figuring stuff out, but there's other truths that you don't figure out. You just tune into or you know, or you feel, or so the in the sense that hypnosis gets you out of that thinking place, now you're open to other kinds of insights that aren't arrived at by analysis. Uh, what's interesting is once I started doing IFS, I stopped doing hypnosis, but I did hypnotherapy. So I find that people go into trance as soon as you ask them to talk to a part, they kind of go into that place. And I really enjoy not having to get out my little tape recorder with tinkly music and have people walk down 10 stories of stairs or whatever. Steps.
DirkYeah. And so then IFS gives you a map because there are these different types of protective parts, the managers and the firefighters, and then there's exile. So you kind of know who you're working with and how different parts relate to each other, and you have this self-quality behind all of that that that kind of sends healing energy, or or how do you think about this? So your cat misses you, and this brings back a lot of memories because in our group, your cat really made some uh some appearances. Yeah.
Speaker 2That's funny because it I usually do these things by Zoom, and Zoom has some kind of software that filters that out. So nobody hears it. So I didn't do it. Yeah, well, I may put her outside because it's distracting. She gets very loud.
DirkOkay. But uh for me it's nice to hear her. Tell me her name again.
Speaker 2Black job.
DirkIs that that's her legal name that you gave her?
Speaker 2Yeah, that's on her birth certificate.
DirkAmazing. So yeah, so now you have Yeah, I know where we were.
Speaker 2So insight one is that we have parts. And that didn't originate that. But since he was working in family systems, he was able to transport the techniques of working with the family and brought those techniques to working with the inner family. And that's sort of, you know, my sense of sort of the confluence of where he was at in his life, where this model was able to be sourced.
DirkYeah, I agree. That's a big deal. That he's a systems thinker, and in families, you think about it's not the angry teenager that's the problem, or the alcoholic dad, it's sort of what's the system, and how do you work with the system? The problem is sort of between and in the interactions, and and they're trained in that way of thinking. And so then he really applied that to our inner system. So I agree, that's an amazing, helpful move forward. I don't know why he I feel like in New York y Columbia psychiatry circles, people don't really appreciate this model sufficiently yet. I it's caught on, it's become huge in a lot of places, but there's also a lot of resistance to it. I don't know what that's about. I don't know.
Speaker 2I know sometimes people feel a little scared to give up the sense that I am I am me or something.
DirkAnd to kind of one me, there's one mind.
Speaker 2Yeah.
DirkBut from computers and AI and getting back to sort of the be debugging, to me, it's kind of a eureka moment. I feel like of course our mind is multiple little neural networks or little thinking machines in parallel. That's much more powerful than any one clunky computing system could be. And so now we have a map and a way to sort of find, well, where's the bug in the program? And we can find that part or system of part or little network of parts and tweak and adjust.
Speaker 2Yeah, and in the end, you know, my sense is I'm doing cognitive therapy, but now I get to do it with the part that needs it, rather than just injecting this intervention into a whole room full of parts, and some of have nothing to do with this, and who will fight back. And so once we isolate a part that we're focused on, the work does include an unburdening of beliefs, which is really what cognitive therapy is doing.
DirkAt what point did the group work and the ketamine
come in? So we've talked now about all these different tools you're learning, you're doing trainings, you're doing the the Rykien and the holotropic breath work, and alongside the CBT and and then hypnotherapy and and then IFS and then there's group work and ketamine.
Speaker 2Like, how does that all when you are training with Stan, people are going to be inviting you to do other things? You know, just Stan developed holotropic breath work basically as a replacement for LSD when he can no longer use LSD. And you know, Holt teaches that there's a bunch of ways for humans to access that holotropic state. Temperature extremes like a sweat lodge and pain and fasting and sleep deprivation, sensory overload, sensory deprivation, on and on. So these substances, to me, just fall in that category of ways to shift out of that primarily mental way of being in the world, that hilotropic way of being in the world. So I had through the years, you know, experimented with various ways, uh, chemical ways to do that. And when I read about, you know, I read um I'm blanking his name, but the guy who wrote the first book, uh, the Kennedy Papers, I guess it was called.
DirkOh, um Phil Wolfson.
Speaker 2Wolfson, yeah. So I was like, wow, this this is legal, like you can actually do this with people. So I was intrigued. By the possibilities. And then training.
DirkI'm sorry? You trained with him, or how did you do the tr training?
Speaker 2I didn't do any ketamine training. I figured having done holotropic breath work so long, understanding that the maps training was all based on that. And I sort of grandfathered myself in. And that is actually the analogy I use for how to work with protectors. But maybe we'll come back to that.
DirkI was just thinking, as you were about to say that, yes, this you asked an interfering protector to give you some space.
Speaker 2Basically. Well, actually, I didn't ask. I did of the three ways to do that, I did one of them. What are the three ways? Well, if you want to move a cat out of a room, you can push the cat, you can entice the cat, invite the cat, you know, with a treat or something, or you can pick up the cat and move it. And to me, these are the three ways to work with a defense, with protectors. And um just to continue on this rift. So the the first one is my sense of like beginning therapists who will just push. Like, oh, maybe you should stop drinking, or you're not that bad of a person, you know, or something like that, just pushing back. And then the second one of the modalities I'm familiar with, I would say IFS and somatic experiencing are representative. So do not push on the defense, don't be forceful. Work with the protectors until they're willing to give you access. So it's very gentle. And that has the benefit of, in other words, now that I just picked up my cat and moved her, next time I move towards her, she might run away because she's going to expect that again. Being gentle keeps a good relationship with those protectors where they're going to trust you more. But I find often it's not enough to get them to move and to give us access to exiles, to give us access to the trauma. And so the third one, just picking up the cat and moving it, holotropic breath work, psychedelics, core energetics, I think these are examples of ways that we just say, listen, I'm going to just disable you for a while.
DirkAnd we're going to see what happens. And so you you like to combine that, or it makes sense to combine that with IFS, because then you have less backlash, or you're more get more, make sure you have full buy-in of the system or as much as possible. Is that how you think of it? Exactly.
Speaker 2As much as possible. It's kind of like, listen, I'm sorry, you're not going to like this, but we're going to do it. But I'm I want to hear about your fears about it first, and we can talk about it. It's not, as long as we're going to disable that the ability of protectors to do their job, at least we should have compassion for them that we're doing that.
DirkYeah. So tell me how you started doing the groups. How many cycles now? So I participated in I don't know which one it was, the 10th or something. And people come, groups of eight-ish, and it's you and Amy, and and people get to know each other and form an intention. And then there's sort of the group forms, and there's three different like when did you first come up with this model? And what's the story of the model? How is it, how did it start? How has it evolved?
Speaker 2Yeah. So I I think I might have been saying when my cat interrupted that in my the very beginning of my first session, I just thought, this feels like holotropic breath work. First time I take enemy. And why are we, why are we all like why does everyone have a paid, trained facilitator to hand us a water bottle and write down the stupid stuff we say? I shouldn't say it's stupid stuff. Sometimes it could be insightful. Because in holotropic breathwork, you have naive, you know, untrained people who do a beautiful job of that, of holding space, of being present, of meeting someone's physical needs in their session. So it just seemed obvious like, why not just do holotropic breath work workshops, substitute the ketamine for the breathing?
DirkSo that's where you're. You had already been lots of training in the holotropic, and then you just substituted the ketamine for the breathing.
Speaker 2Yeah. Actually, I find ketamine easier, less challenging than breath work for most people, because it's such a calming medicine in and of itself. And we did find we did a couple of cohorts where we followed the model where you would each day there'd be two sessions and everyone would have a sitter. And we just found very quickly that in breath work, people get very active sometimes and emote and need need someone to protect their space or hand them things because they're crying and growing up. And and kind of mean mostly people just are lying there, and the sitters had virtually nothing to do, and we realized that that was extraneous and not necessary. So we just um we just went to doing how you experience it with one session in the day.
DirkYeah, so you really have this beautiful space, the this built-out basement in your house with a porch that wraps around and a lot of windows, and I everybody has their mat, there's sort of a circle. People talk and get to know each other a bit, and then the group forms, and then there's
music and eye shades, and yeah, I felt like there's a lot of connection that happens, there's a lot of movement that happens. For somebody who's never been in this kind of an experience, can you maybe give an example of like the type of person who would come in, what kind of motivation or trouble they they would bring, and and how that might be helped in this kind of a situation, uh this kind of a group treatment?
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, it raises the question of what are we doing? Is it is it ketamine therapy that we happen to do in a group, or is it group therapy sort of lubricated by ketamine? And I think it's all the above. Yeah. Um the group aspect, I mean, as you're talking about, I'm remembering how it felt to be in the core energetics training and to be part of a class, and I was with these same people for four years, and what came out of that, and how that really is more than anything got me in touch with my defenses, right, and my protectors more than any kind of individual session would do. But also many of our wounds are with people, and many of our burdens have to do with relationships. And so to have people what we found is that the people who are most hesitant to work in a group were the ones at the end who said I got more about the from the group than I did from the medicine. So just the opposite.
DirkThere's people who, for example, might say, I I don't deserve to take up space, my pro my problem isn't important, I should can't or shouldn't share that, and then they share it, and people are very happy that they share, and and it ends up being a big experience, for example.
Speaker 2That's a great example, yeah. And because if you're in one-on-one therapy and you say something like that, and then your therapist goes, No, I want to hear what you have to say, you're important, or whatever, their parts are gonna go, I'm paying you to be like that. So that doesn't count. But to just have random people be kind and mirror back good qualities is often so important for people to shift their sense of who they are and then how they conduct their future relationships.
DirkDo you get a lot of follow-up after people do the group? Do you stay connected? I guess some of them are your clients, so you get to hear how the process impacts their trajectory and their healing.
Speaker 2It's a mixture. Yeah, there's some people I never see again, some people I'm still in touch with who've done it years ago. But how do you know you can never say it's very hard to attribute someone's shift in life to a particular intervention, but the self-reporting is generally positive that it that one, whether it was a four-week series that we'll do or a one-week intensive, that significantly moves somebody from one place to another place. And of course, we do you notice we were bothering you to fill out those scales, so we're we're actually looking at quantitative data to see uh reduction in anxiety and depression and stress and also increase in self-leadership scores.
DirkAre you looking to publish a paper on the data that you're collecting at some point?
Speaker 2A couple of people have taken that data and published something. I'm too lazy to do all that work. So I barely can make myself continue to compile the data.
DirkUm shifting towards meaning. I started this podcast feeling like I want more meaning, or I feel like I went into mental health thinking that by talking to people in their moment of crisis, hearing their innermost thoughts, I would learn something about how to create meaning for myself. And so I assume that that everybody went into mental health, kind of wanting to understand meaning, which is partially true, not necessarily fully true. I think there's lots of ways to um to enter our field. But I'm curious about sort of what's the difference between a symptom that's more we need to treat, or just sort of an internal sign that we're depressed or anxious because there's something in our life that we need to change. Yeah, I'm curious how you think about meaning in mental health. Any way you want to take that, I'm not phrasing this as a real question, but maybe just riff on meaning and your take on meaning any way you want to go with that. Sure.
Speaker 2Well, first, what you're saying about symptoms, I mean, that's the wonderful messiness of this field, say compared to computer science, that things aren't just one thing, right? I've given up on is this symptom this or that? Is it organic or is it psychological? It's just it's everything. And the question is, where might I want to intervene? And when people have a sense of lack of meaning, you know, that's what I was saying about the need for the holotropic, have one foot in the holotropic world. Like we need meaning is not worked out in a logical way. And whereas without meaning, we can totally function, but why would we function? What's the point of it all?
DirkYeah, and for me, meaning means sort of connectedness. How connected am I to everybody, everything, and do I have an impact? The opposite of meaning is sort of randomness, disconnected, there's no impact. And so just feeling like I fit somewhere and have some kind of a purpose is kind of where I'm at this point in terms of meaning.
Speaker 2Yeah, which makes sense. And you see in this culture, you know, which which a country that was founded on the ideal of individualism and the rights of the citizen above the needs of the populace, I guess. And it's just people are devolving into more and more meaninglessness, right? And the more we fill our own individual needs, but we don't care about others. I agree with you that that feeling my connection with others and valuing their well-being and caring is a huge source of meaning.
DirkSo I'm just gonna ask you some rapid fire questions now, so starting with according to so this is sentence completion. According to me, Ted Riskin, the meaning of life is whatever you want it to be, whatever you make up, whatever you're willing to take responsibility for declaring for yourself and living into.
Speaker 2Maybe I should let me credit. So I I you know, um, Werner Earhart, and in the 70s it was called Est, and in the 80s, I think it was the Forum, and then there's like landmark education. But No, I know nothing about this. So this course called the Forum, I believe their stage intention that you're supposed to get it. But what you're supposed to get is that everything is empty and meaningless, including the fact that everything is empty and meaningless. So when people go halfway and they go, everything is empty and meaningless. Oh my god, I should just probably kill myself, they're halfway there. You gotta continue and go, well, that doesn't mean anything either. And when you can do that, there's a certain freedom, and you've created a blank slate, you've cleared your canvas of all the meaning that was fed to you, and then you have the potential for creating your meaning. So that's how I think it works. I think there's no meaning out there, you can't find meaning. Where do you look? There's there's nothing there, it's just something we generate. And people are attached to the what you could see in these workshops like the forum, people are attached to their meaning. And if they'd be like, Well, my dad killed himself when I was six, and you can't tell me that doesn't have meaning, and then the person leading the seminar would have a conversation with them and kind of destroy their their logic about that. And basically,
if people were getting it, they would admit in the end, like, yep, there's no meaning out there, and then that from there is where we can create our meaning in life.
DirkIt's a yin-yin, or the sort of almost like a death and a birth. I don't know. The so it's about creating meaning and finding some freedom. Yeah, I feel like there's like a deep drive in me and most people towards meaning. And yet it's it's tricky, it's confusing. And it's not. Uh you could just let go of the question and and and feel it, and and you're all set.
Speaker 2Well, but I think we need to commit to generating that meaning and maybe even every day ask ourselves Am I living a life in alignment with the meaning that I've created, you know, with the purpose that I've decided is my purpose.
DirkI think it's hugely important. Next question. The most meaningful thing that I did yesterday was got my tire fixed. And that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Excellent. Well uh why is that meaningful?
Speaker 2Because now you can all I guess there's because a part of me would be anxious to not have a functioning car or to have this this thing that needs to happen that's undone. And that was my gift to this part. Nice that was important to this part, and this part got its way yesterday.
DirkI get that. If I come to you and say, Ted, I um I don't feel like my life has meaning, I don't matter, can you help me? What's your next step? Wow.
Speaker 2That's such an interesting question. Like, what occurs to me is maybe what's happening is there's other parts that are holding burdens that are taking up the space, taking up all the airtime. And if those parts could be helped unburdened, perhaps the ability to create meaning would just happen. Like maybe that's something that self can just do if parts are unblending. So I suppose I would have the conversation, but I would also hope or or think that working on burden parts would help that person eventually create more meaning in their life. Nice.
DirkSo meaning emerges from unburdening maybe burden parts.
Speaker 2I think if my parts are at a little bit of a distance from me and I'm resting in self-energy, I'm naturally gonna go, look, what do we want to do? Like what do let's take advantage of this life? And I think naturally a person would generate a meaning for their life.
DirkI like it. The most meaningful work of art that I've seen in the last week could be music or TV or or drawing or anything sort of art related or adjacent. Is there anything that comes to mind? Two things.
Speaker 2So one is I was just in Oslo and saw Munch's The Scream. Oh wow. Which there were there are three versions of that. I think I I got to see two of them. It was a little crowded. So that just pops up. I don't know why. Maybe somehow he hid an archetypal expression that we all have and somehow got it on paper in a way that we could all find out.
DirkProbably, yes.
Speaker 2But the other thing that popped in, because this what we were just talking about meaning, did you watch The White Lotus?
DirkI've seen the first two seasons, not the third season.
Speaker 2Okay. And the third one, it's just such a good example of somebody whose meaning was handed to him. He yeah, this guy Rick. So I think it's such a good example of the cost of not being able to create your own meaning and instead just falling a victim to a meaning that was handed to you.
DirkI need to watch it now. So thank you so much. Anything that we didn't cover that would be helpful today before we finish?
Speaker 2What's coming to me is is that we as humans have an ability to detect what resonates with us. And if people are wondering, you know, should I do IFS or should I like go expose yourself to things and listen to parts of you that say this resonates with me or this doesn't. Um, as you're asking me all the modalities that I've learned, it's always worked that way. Like I've just went towards things that I might not have had an intellectual justification for it, but something in me said yes, and I was able to trust that and have no regrets for any of those decisions.
DirkFollow your curiosity, explore. If I give you like a this is the Tim Ferris billboard question. If you uh want if you have opportunity to get some big message out there, you have sort of a billboard to the world, you can get something out there. Is there something that you would a message you would put on that billboard?
Speaker 2I guess it's if we could support each other, there's enough for everybody. And let's depolarize, let's do that work, let's stop seeing each other as being wrong, or the one that needs to be vanquished and start with little things. And like you're saying, the meaning comes from our connectedness, and the ability to help somebody is gonna give much more satisfaction than one more yacht.
DirkYeah, I love that. And there's so many troubles that come now from our disconnectedness and everybody being in their little group. And part of this project for me is very much exploring different healing groups, entering them, talking to people I meet, doing audio diaries, and meeting, you know, that's brought me to you, and I got to do this group experience with you, which which was amazing. And uh yeah, I'm I'm still in it. I I'm having figured out the sort of that I feel like you
radiate sort of a peacefulness and balance that I'm not yet feeling right now, but uh we'll uh uh we're sort of working my way there.
Speaker 2Thank you. That's nice. Can I give a plug real quick? Please, yes. What you just said, it's uh group cap, G R O U P K A P dot com. And uh we have cohorts this fall and We're very bad at promotion. And so we we are always welcoming people who want to come work with us.
DirkSo we'll link to that in our website and show notes. And that's the main I guess there's tedrisken.com or something, or but there's group cap. Where should people go to find out what you're doing and follow your developments?
Speaker 2GroupKAP. And the other thing that I'm really into is teaching the IFS model. And the website for that is IFS Essentials. And so my colleagues and I train practitioners in how to bring IFS to clients. And it could be any therapists, coaches, psychedelic guides, clergy, all kinds of people who actually want to learn the techniques of the model. So that's that's probably the most fun thing I do is bring that work to people so they can bring it to their people.
DirkGreat. Well thank you. It's so nice talking with you, connecting with you again, and I look forward to keeping in touch.
Speaker 2Me too, Dirk. Thanks very much. This was uh this is a really fun conversation.
DirkAlright. Thank you for listening. I really enjoyed that conversation. I learned a ton. I hope you enjoyed this also. If you want to hear more about what's going on with Ted, check out groupcap.com or tedrisken.com. If you're curious about my audio diary experience, that's gonna be the next episode. After that, I will present another group IFS Therapy Experience in Asheville, North Carolina with Chris Burris, who created the Healing Circles model of Internal Family Systems Group Therapy. So that's gonna be exciting as well. Stay tuned. Lots of interesting stuff coming up. Until next time, I hope you have a meaningful and meaningful month. And as always, if you figure out the meaning of life, let me know.