Hello, welcome back, Meaning Seekers. I'm your host, Dr. Dirk Winter, and today's episode is not intended as a standalone episode, but as a companion episode to the previous episode in which Chris Burris and I talk about how he created a healing circles model for group psychotherapy that combines the power of internal family systems therapy with group therapy. And in that episode, we get into the nuts and bolts of the model. This episode is an audio diary, a behind the scenes unfiltered look, or rather listen, as I travel to his home in Asheville, North Carolina, and participate for five days with him and ten other IFS
trained therapists doing this model, forming a group and using it to work with, help, and heal each other. You're going to get a chance to listen behind the scenes as this process unfolds.
SPEAKER_00Here we go.
DirkSo I drove down from Manhattan yesterday to Johnson City, Tennessee, and I'm standing next to an amazing raging flowing water Camp Stonefly. Which is a fly fishing, little fly fishing campground. And I ended up here because I'm on my way to doing a healing circles training with Chris Burris in Asheville. So I'm going back down to Asheville. I decided to drive because the Blue Ridge Mountains are so pretty and I just love having time to think and listen to podcasts and drive through the Rolling Hills. And I got to check out these little towns. I ended up s uh renting a camp site for $35 because I didn't really want to stay in some crappy motel and I didn't know where I would go. But then I ended up they had a Airstream trailer, which I'd never stayed in. So anyway, I'm having a good time. Excited to meet everybody else. Seven people had a fun dinner. They sent pictures, so some people have already met. I missed the Zoom intro meeting, so I'm behind meeting people, but uh it's 7 a.m. I'm about to pack up and drive down to Chris Burris's house for his Healing Circles training.
I just pulled into the driveway at Chris Burris' house, which uh we spent all day at yesterday. So we met here. It's this beautiful house on top of a kind of a hill, uh tons of beautiful places to sit outside and and just uh beautiful tall trees and green rolling hills. It's a pretty spectacular setup. We um met in the morning and did introductions, group norms, leaving a sacred item that is sort of a promise to the group. So there's some norming, setting expectations, and then um doing an exercise with with intentions, where do we want, where are we now, where do we want to be, and what's in the way. And then we had a lunch, which Dina made, uh baked potatoes, sweet or white with all kinds of toppings and salad. It was really delicious and just nice to sit together and eat together. They really are great hosts, and then we had some sculpting in the afternoon, it was a long day, and um today I'm back. It's 8 30, and I'm back for more learning how to run groups and for sure a bit tired for my trip, but we'll see how that today goes. Bye.
This is the fourth out of five days with Chris Burris and ten other IFS therapists at his house learning his healing circles model. I didn't record anything yesterday. I am feeling tired. I miss my family. I do feel like I'm learning. I had all these expectations about how I was gonna get a lot done. I'm staying really in an amazing, beautiful cabin in the woods that doesn't cost very much money. Uh it's kind of an inexpensive Airbnb, and it's beautiful here. I thought I would have all this quiet. I thought I would be able to catch up on my work and uh uh plan this new clinic and see some patients uh remotely. And it's just been draining. I feel drained inside. And so what's happening in this in this week is ten of us gets to be the client one time and be the therapist one time, leading inner constellations, IFS work. And so what that means is we have started by drawing a picture, uh taking a page, dividing it into three sections. Uh, bottom section is our life now, depicting how that looks, uh, and then the top is where we would like to be, and then the middle is what's blocking us. And uh so then we're working on a concise statement that captures where we want to go, and I'm coming up with something like I want both peace and uh creativity, and I want both connection to family and to nature and uh something simple, but uh I'm feeling uh just a lot of external pressure kind of to get back to the city to get even though I'm learning a lot about just feeling like I've become kind of too porous for the city. I don't have that sort of protective shell, and so all of the uh stimuli of New York City are just kind of too feeling too much for me, but I need to kind of steal up and uh get back to it. I don't really have another option right now. But uh in terms of the work, people are doing very, very deep work. They are identifying parts of themselves and then having people in the group represent those parts, not in kind of a um drama therapy acted out kind of way, but just as kind of a constellation and putting this inner emotion or the part of us that holds that inner emotion at a certain distance, at a certain space, and then having different parts that might represent a conflict or might be protecting some aspect of ourselves, show us what they're protecting, and then going in, finding the more vulnerable parts of ourselves, locating them in space and time and bringing them to the present. There's a lot of expression. I feel like some people really are having very powerful, very transformative experiences. It's a nice group of people. We all have lunch together. Dina, Chris's wife, makes really nice lunches, which we eat out on his porch, and two days ago was sandwiches and salad. Yesterday was uh spaghetti, gluten-free versus normal meat sauce, not salad. So there's a lot of time together every day, 845 till about five, and it feels very intense. I don't quite know how how to translate this into groups that I want to run, but I do feel like I'm learning, I do feel like I'm missing my family, and I feel like I'm more exhausted by what's happening than I had realized. I've been the therapist now, I was a therapist yesterday, and I think some of my parts are just making it very hard to just really kind of relax. But there's another part uh aspect of this, which is that a lot of this work feels very strange and weird to me as a um more of a mainstream traditional psychiatrist that people are noticing unattached burdens. Some people are very spiritually oriented, and it gets very woo-woo, which I think is important for people, uh important for people's healing. But to me, I'm not quite sure how to take it all, how what to make of it. So I'm excited to do my own constellation that'll either happen today or tomorrow. And I'm also excited to get back home. But I do love it here in this little cabin where I'm sitting right now.
So it's the morning of September eleventh, Thursday, it's the last day of the Healing Circles training.
SPEAKER_00I haven't gone yet as a client. Taking a breath.
DirkThis has been an intense learning experience. People came from all over the country and Canada, California, East Coast, South, lots of different places. And everybody has a lot going on inside, and these are powerful. This is a powerful experience to be in a group from nine to five, having home cooked meals made by Dina Chris Burris' wife, who has a PhD in economics and is kind of an amazing person to get to know, and uh being in their home and then doing these healing circles where there's uh recreation of our inner constellations. We have um elements of ourselves that are protective, and we have different people represent those in space around us, and there's a therapist who helps guide this process. We take turns. I've gotten to be the therapist once. I still have to um wait to be the client, so I'm kind of nervous about what that experience is gonna be because it's been very intense and wild. There are shamanistic elements that are brought in, there's incense, crystals, music, there's I've seen rebirthing, and I've seen people really settle and change and feel more comfortable with these treatment methods that are not mainstream Western medicine. They're not really the world that I grew up in and come from, and yet they do kind of make sense to me in a neuroscience-y way, that um if you really connect with a felt sense of important memories, you can change them in a way that your whole internal system softens. And I think Chris Burris is just a really experienced and talented and warm healer who brings a lot of these elements together, and so it's been pretty wild learning from him. And uh I'm nervous. I'm gonna be a client, so I'm gonna kind of see what's happening in my internal world and if I can kind of rearrange things in a way to create some more peace. I do want that. I feel like there's been a lot of churning, a lot of transition, a lot of stress. I feel it in my face, even though I'm in this cabin and the trees and uh crickets are pretty beautiful and spectacular.
I have a lot of intensity waiting for me back in the city, and so and I'm gonna drive. I'm gonna drive back. So a lot ahead of me. It's gonna be a long day, and um that's where I'm at. So I'm back in New York after the five-day Healing Circles training. It's Saturday, I think the 12th, and on Thursday, I did my sculpt, and then right after we did a closing ceremony, and then I started driving, and I drove all the way back to New York. I stopped at a little motel, crappy motel, and slept for a few hours, and then I came back, and then I saw a lot of patients on Friday, and now it's Saturday, and so I'm collecting my thoughts and trying to find a way to summarize and capture this experience. I would say the last day was the most powerful for me because I did my sculpt and I had my intention for having both inner peace and room for creativity, both connection with family and with nature. And I got to see what all the other people's parts were, and it was always every person sculpt was seemed felt powerful, and they're able to represent their inner response to whatever challenging situation they were in. And I got to do the same thing. And by the time I did it, I kind of knew personality styles, and so I got to pick somebody who could represent my pleaser, peacemaker part, and uh warrior angry part and creativity and internalized pressure from parents' expectations and also from historical family lineage things. And and as I'm talking about this, I can I can visualize it and I can see exactly where in the room all these different parts were. There are other parts as well, and then I could, during this sculpt, I could step away, look back, and then um move back into the particular situation that I was working on, and and then see kind of like the the chain of like, oh, here's the appeaser, and then the angry part steps in, and then uh so so um and and so it's a embod empowering way to sort of embody and uh personify and externalize our internal system. And so then there's young parts that are carrying beliefs that are not really helpful anymore for current situations, and you can kind of unburden those, move them into the present world, and move your whole, move yourself into a more of the self-leadership, capital S, Dick Schwartz, IFS self-leadership way. So all of us did something of this uh and at the end, there's just this feeling of closeness and wow, something really happened. And there were also some group processes that played out, and it was really cool to see how Chris Burris handled um when concerns came up about certain things and addressing concern, BIPOC concerns in the group, and how those balanced with other needs of the group, and and and so we sort of lived through this five-day process of forming a group and then norming, and then there's the storming and then the performing, and so there are these different group stages that we learned about. So five days of being together, sculpting each other's processes, doing 10 different sculpts, having lunch together prepared by Dina, being in Chris Burris and Dina's home and working on things together. So that happened. And uh I feel like it was powerful and meaningful, and it's spreading now. They're traveling lots of places, his groups are filling up, and he's a really impressive person and healer. So I'm excited I got to learn from him and uh feel like I have a lot to think about and uh work with now.