Developing Meaning
A podcast about healing trauma and finding meaning.
Have you ever wondered what your therapist has figured out about life's big questions?
Join psychiatrist Dr. Dirk Winter as he speaks with colleagues, therapists, and other healers about what they have learned from their clinical work about how to heal trauma and build more meaning and purpose into our lives.
Developing Meaning is NOT CLINICAL ADVICE and is NOT AFFILIATED WITH ANY INSTITUTIONS. It is intended to play with ideas that are emerging, fringe, and outside of the mainstream in order to discover the meaning of life.
Produced by Dirk Winter and Violet Chernoff
Developing Meaning
#7: Bruce Hersey - How I Built the Syzygy Institute - Healing Trauma by Combining EMDR, IFS, and Coherence Therapy.
"The more efficient a force is, the more silent and the more subtle it is. Love is the subtlest force in the world." ~ Mahatma Gandhi
(quote lifted from Bruce's bio page)
How can you know what type of therapy is most likely to be helpful when the number of psychotherapies is vast and growing ?
One way is to learn from Bruce Hersey, who has 30 + years of clinical experience and a wide range of expertise, including Ericksonian Hypnosis, Psychodrama, EMDR, IFS, and Coherence Therapy.
In this episode Bruce describes his evolution as a therapist, and how he found convergent principles between 3 treatment modalities: EMDR, IFS, and Coherence Therapy. Bruce describes his integrated approach for healing trauma, and how he created the Syzygy Institute, which teaches these methods to therapists.
You will also hear about Bruce’s take on Meaning, and how music and the song Titanium helped him during a challenging time.
Timestamps:
00:00:23 - Intro
00:05:00 - Concilience and EO Wilson
00:15:00 - Ericksonian Hypnosis and NLP
00:17:19 - Psychodrama
00:28:00 - EMDR, bringing adaptive and dysfunctional memory networks together
00:34:12 - Power and Challenges of EMDR
00:40:17 - Ego States and IFS in EMDR
00:44:00 - Understanding IFS and EMDR Connection
00:50:52 - Comparing Dual Attention in EMDR and IFS
01:02:00 - Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories
01:14:20 - Caution and Meaning in Healing Therapies
01:19:00 - The Meaning of Life According to Bruce
Produced by Dirk Winter and Violet Chernoff
Theme Music by The Thrashing Skumz
Hi, welcome back to Developing Meaning, the show where I, your host, dr Dirk Winter, a child psychiatrist, seeks to alleviate my own existential anxiety and distress and figure out the meaning of life by speaking with my colleagues, other mental health professionals and healers to see what they've learned, what we've learned from our clinical work about meaning and how we apply our clinical learnings to our own lives. Today I'm very excited to present my conversation with Bruce Hersey, who is a really wonderful personal mentor and has found a convergence or a conciliance between three very interesting and powerful treatment modalities EMDR, ifs and Coherence Therapy and he's built an institute which is called the CISGEE Institute in which he trains people in this integrated treatment method. So EMDR Eye Movement, desensitization and Reprocessing is a treatment that was invented by Francine Shapiro in the 1990s. It's a treatment designed to rework components of traumatic memories while moving eyes back and forth or doing some other kind of bilateral brain stimulation. Ifs Internal Family Systems Therapy is a treatment that was created by Richard Schwartz in the 1980s, and in that treatment he creates a model of the mind in which he personifies various self-states or aspects of ourselves as parts, personified almost like little people, that represent different aspects of ourselves, and then he uses a systems approach that comes from family therapy to heal our inner family of parts and create inner harmony. Coherence Therapy is a treatment approach developed by Bruce Ecker that uses scientific understanding of memory, reconciliation and neuroplasticity to, according to him, permanently eliminate symptoms by changing the brain structures that underlie these symptoms.
Dirk:And if you are new to these modalities which I think many of you I was until recently and you might be we are going to go into them in a lot more detail in our conversation and I'm also going to leave some links in the show notes. And so what does all of this have to do with meaning? One of the main components of meaning is connection and connectedness to each other, to nature, to different parts of ourselves, and the author, johann Hari, wrote a book called Lost Connections in which he makes a compelling argument that much of our current mental health epidemic is caused by is a result of our modern world's isolation, or the isolation and lack of connectedness that exists in our modern society. And I do have a brief review of that book on my developing meaning website if you're interested. I really like that book and I agree with a lot of its message. I very much want to build connections.
Dirk:In my personal life, in my professional community. I believe that a major challenge for us as mental health providers is that we often don't communicate well and connect well across different treatment modalities. The CBT cognitive behavioral people often don't value and connect a lot with the psychodynamic and psychoanalytic people and those guys don't speak a lot or value EMDR people Maybe I'm exaggerating, but not so much and not just those communities. There are many powerful treatment modalities out there and as a provider it's easy to join one group, learn one approach and then be inculturated and become unaware of all the things that are discovered in other groups, and a major exception to this is Bruce Hersey.
Dirk:You are about to hear the story of how Bruce traveled through the worlds of hypnosis treatments, psychodrama, other modalities and then into EMDR, ifs and broadened coherence therapy, and found a conciliance or a convergence between these last three treatment approaches. And before we hear Bruce's story, I want to talk briefly about the word conciliance, which is a word that's meaningful to me because it comes from my favorite biologist, or one of my favorite biologists, the late great EO Wilson recently deceased. Edward Wilson was a field biologist studying ants all over the world and he published beautiful books about ants. And then he had a book that I loved called the Naturalist, about his boyhood learning about the natural world. He had this southern gentleman style and was really warm and articulate and he testified brilliantly in Congress about the importance and value of biodiversity. He also wrote a controversial book called Sociobiology and then he wrote a book called Conciliance in the 1990s, which is about different bodies of knowledge coming together. This was and is quite an exciting thought for me that we can bring together knowledge from spirituality, from science, anthropology, philosophy, et cetera, and find meaningful, deep connections when we bring together perspectives from different fields, from different bodies of knowledge and the opposite of conciliance to me is disconnection and people just kind of being in their own camp and not talking to each other.
Dirk:This developing meaning podcast grows very much out of me, feeling not as empowered and connected as I wanted to during the pandemic and seeing that disconnection and discord all around me. I wanted connection and I'm often frustrated about mental health being so subdivided into so many different camps. And that feeling of wanting connection and better tools led me on a sort of a walkabout through various different worlds of mental health treatment approaches and so, a little bit like David Carradine in the 1970s TV series Kung Fu, I have been walking the earth and still walking the earth, joining and learning various mental health communities and approaches and since the pandemic I've done trainings and read a bunch of books on a bunch of modalities. I'm just going to list some of them EMDR, ifs, coherence therapy, which we'll talk about today. Hypnosis, neurofeedback, where you put electrodes on your skull and use video feedback to control electrical activities in different parts of our brain. Then also breath, body mind, using breath to create relaxation and other benefits focusing, which you heard about in the episode with Annette de Broil, polyvagal theory, ketamine assisted therapy, also Dan Siegel's interpersonal neurobiology, emotional freedom techniques and tapping. I've done a lot of different training I've kind of gone a little overboard with this so I have done, and still am doing, a lot of exploring, having fun doing that and meeting many great people along the way, and one of the real treasures that I found on this journey has been Bruce Hersey. So enough of me rambling, let's get into it.
Dirk:We begin our conversation talking about punk rock spirit of this podcast, referring to punk rock energy. I think about breaking down barriers, doing things DIY, do it yourself, grassroots questioning authority, going for authenticity, and I really relate to that spirit. And I want to take down some of the old dogmas in our field, especially the dogma of therapist therapeutic anonymity, the Freudian tradition that we as therapists are not supposed to talk about ourselves and not talk about our real lives. And I think that dogma has been more unhelpful than helpful in many ways and it creates barriers to connection and deeper truth. So I want us therapists to put our nickel down, say what we know, what we don't know, talk about how we apply things to our own lives, what works, what doesn't. And so welcome, please enjoy my conversation with Bruce Percy. Welcome Bruce, so excited to have you join me and I just wanted to maybe just start with some open loops and then we can see how we can cover these later.
Bruce:I like jump through them like a circus dog.
Dirk:Yes, and maybe you can just say what open loops are.
Bruce:So it comes from hypnosis and so I don't even know that term.
Dirk:Oh, so this is from Mike Mandel hypnosis and he talks about, you know, this is a common technique of sort of raising a question and so that our listeners are going to be so curious that they're going to definitely want to stay.
Dirk:You know, in our unconscious mind is just going to sort of in the background, be working on this, but sort of we're raising these questions, and so questions include I want to ask you and you don't have to answer right away, the ideas will get to this, but you know, what are you most excited about in mental health right now? What are you maybe least excited about, or what are some old dogmas that that maybe could fall away? And then also I want to ask questions about meaning and meaning of life and what you've learned from your experience, your clients, how you, how you apply that to yourself and and help your clients. And then I definitely also want to talk about the Sisigee Institute, and you are really an expert in these kinds of therapies that I have become really very interested in. And so, just to begin, maybe I to put our conversation into context how are we connected?
Dirk:I came to you because I had been, I guess, somewhat frustrated by using medications and and wanted to make a change, and then an advisor that I trusted said hey, check out what's happening in trauma right now, learn about EMDR. So I had did some EMDR training. I had a supervisor who said oh well, bruce Hersey, he's also introducing IFS internal family systems in this, and so I think we'll explain what these different terms are. But so I went to the trauma conference best of I read Bessel van der kocht's book went to his trauma conference and and all of a sudden IFS was all the rage. That I had never heard about this at Columbia in my training. But now everybody wanted to get into these trainings. Nobody there, there's hundreds or maybe even thousands of people trying to get into, and so then I found your training for combining IFS and EMDR and and did your three training modules. So maybe just I've been talking a lot, but Sisig Institute. Maybe can you tell us what the word Sisig means and then what the Sisig Institute is.
Bruce:Well, sure, but I want to. I just want to say thank you for inviting me. This is really exciting and it's exciting for me.
Dirk:Yes, I feel like I've been invited to to be part of your punk rock garage band so this is this is really cool it is a punk rock like I for me to get to ask questions of my supervisors and the people that I admire. It's sort of I'm flipping it around. It's like, okay, well, you're in the hot seat. Now let's see, let's see what you know. So it is a punk rock kind of energy.
Bruce:So you want me to do a solo already I have to do a solo in your, in your punk rock garage band. So, yeah, thank you for inviting me here. So Sisig is like a astronomical term I think it's Greek, but it means the alignment of like three or more celestial bodies visually, or perhaps even in a within a gravitational field. So I think of it both ways, so either as stars or planets, like aligning, or, and maybe in a gravitational way or a visual way. So it's an alignment of three bodies and there's gravity involved. And so I'm thinking of different approaches to psychotherapy. You know some of these. You know really powerful, new and exciting, relatively new and exciting things like EMDR and IFS, and now coherence therapy, which is about memory reconciliation and how that can be interpreted in a clinical way.
Dirk:So that quick overview, and so you have these three types of therapy EMDR, ifs and coherence therapy that you combine. Maybe let's back up, and I want to hear, because I do think these really align very nicely maybe I hear your story of going into therapy, I mean becoming a therapist, and then and then how did you encounter each of these different modalities? Sure, yeah, well.
Bruce:So I'm an old guy, I'm 68 kind of old for punk rock, garage band. But back in the early 80s is when I was in the Graduate School of Social Work at Rutgers and befriended a fellow, bill Sanderson, who was another student there with me, and what we were exploring and he introduced me to was Milton Erickson, the grandfather of like permissive clinical hypnosis.
Dirk:Yeah, maybe say a little bit about who Milton Erickson is.
Bruce:He's like a rock star, a legend. He's gone now, but you know he was a man who I forget what his medical affliction was, but you know he had polio and he cured himself of polio supposedly this is the lore by going on a canoe trip down this Mississippi so he could sort of barely walk.
Dirk:And then he, he did this canoe trip and by the end of it he was healthy and walking. And he is the father of Ericksonian hypnosis, which is indirect.
Bruce:Yes, very indirect, very permissive and conversational, and so he so learning that form of clinical hypnosis just by practicing, reading about it and practicing it with each other. So Bill and I would go to each other's apartment or room or whatever and we'd practice on ourselves like we practice on each other. We practice on, you know, anything that moved, and so that that was just a lot of fun. It was fascinating, it was really interesting and along with Milton Erickson's hypnosis approach, neuro linguistic programming, nlp, bandler and Grindr, who kind of formalized Erickson's work and made it even more accessible, and so we would just be playing with that and between that and exposure to psychodrama in the same time period, you know these were things that really fascinated and interested me. They were, you know, a little outside of the box, you know not, not mainstream stuff very experiential, you know really magical kind of things, and they really just captivated my, my imagination and was something fun to explore and very, very powerful.
Dirk:Can you say a little bit about what psychodrama is Well?
Bruce:psychodrama is another experiential approach. That was kind of a street form of therapy, experiential therapy that Jacob Moreno, back in I think that 1920s, developed. He was like a in the same time period I think that, as as Freud, but basically I think he was working with prostitutes in Europe. That was his, his population trauma, and it's such a powerful experiential use of drama in physical space where, essentially, if you understand parts work you, you will see that this is like being able to enact and role play all of the parts of yourself and of anyone else, utilizing the other people in a group to stand in, while you kind of reverse roles and and experience, you know, all kinds of dynamics that emerge from your own psyche to solve inner conflicts and to transform and to heal.
Dirk:So I'm imagining, if I'm entering this kind of therapy back in whatever early 70s with you, I am coming with some kind of a trauma and and then I say I'm experiencing this feeling of being criticized or this feeling of intense distress, and then you embody it and and have different people act out, these different characters or parts of ourselves.
Bruce:Sure, so you, you know, so you would, you might be, we might even say so this, just you know, speak from that place. You know, say everything that you want to say that that comes from that anxious place. And and so you would start speaking and then you would say pick somebody, the director would pick, say, pick somebody from the audience to play that part of you. And you pick somebody and they would kind of repeat your lines and your gestures, and and then so you'd be standing watching that and then you know the director might say so, what do you want to say to that part of you? And and then you know you might say something. And then the director would say reverse roles. So then you would step back into the, the role of the physically switch places did step back into the role of the anxious part. The person who just played the anxious part is now the you who had something to say to the anxious part. Like I wish you could just calm down and relax. Let's say right, so so then there would just be this conversation that evolved, that that basically emerged only from you, but that you would physically be switching positions and roles, and so the, the people that you would pick from the audience to play the different roles really would contribute very little from their own psyche, but there would be some energy that they would bring to it that would kind of create this spontaneity. And spontaneity was a key ingredient in in psychodrama, because you'd be on the spot, you know there'd be this dynamic happening all along and then there's doubling. So what would happen is someone, so you, you might be in the role of the, the anxious part, but there might be something left unsaid, that not quite voiced, and you would pick someone from the audience, at the director's suggestion, to double for you, and so the double would then stand behind you at a slight angle and and kind of sense into what is the unsaid thing here, the thing that you know may be is pretty obvious but isn't really coming out, and that person would would say that, and then the, the person who was in the, the role, would have the veto power to say yeah, yeah or no. No, that's not it, you know. And if it was a yeah, yeah, then the director would encourage you then to repeat those, those words and and that energy and that gesture and it just built, and it built, and it built and, and it was so amazingly magical and transformative.
Bruce:The things that would happen and the choices that people would make would be based on some kind of unconscious knowledge of the person that you're picking for these to play these different roles, because afterward there'd be a big debriefing and everybody would share and then the people sharing would say, would end up saying that they would have that role in their life and they were like the perfect person unconsciously picked by the, the protagonist, to play that role. And it was like how did that happen? And that there's a and there's a term for how that happened and that's called tele. Say that again. What is the term? Heli?
Dirk:like television, telephone, tell ya tell me tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me so our unconscious gets expressed in this really powerful way that there is somehow a sense of the energy behind whatever the character is, and then somebody steps into the role and says it, and and the the director says, yes, that feels right or not, and so you're well, the director doesn't say yes, the protagonist, the protagonist the director is just the one who helps select the the
Bruce:technique or you know the next step, but all of this emerges totally from the person, totally from the person, and so it's that you know. So the topic, the subject could be a trauma. So you might go back in time and there'd be different characters and so somebody would play your father in this particular interaction that happened, you know, between you and your father, etc. So you might end up playing different parts of your, your father and and totally understanding then from having this interaction, replaying this interaction with, with your father, but playing all the roles, playing all the parts of your father, all the parts of you, etc.
Dirk:I feel like this is coming back now.
Bruce:There's an interest of a resurgence, an interest in this, this approach, but it's always been around and Fritz Perls with, with the empty chair and all of that. All of that actually originated from psychodrama that was taken from Jacob Moreno and so what year is this now?
Dirk:so you're, you're learning this, you're involved in this 1980, 1981 so.
Bruce:I'm learning about psychodrama while I'm in grad school and my MSW program and I'm having fun with Bill Sanderson playing with hypnosis and NLP people are signing up for these groups like how long is this like a weekend thing?
Dirk:is it like oh? The psychodrama yeah how did? What is the therapeutic model?
Bruce:oh, where did I so? So basically I was a social work intern working at a mental health center and my social work supervisor invited me and another person to go to a one-day psychodrama training workshop, but very small, was sort of like our private little group in a room somewhere, and that was my first exposure to it. But but then you know it was fascinated by it. And at another internship that I had now wasn't an internship actually I had a part-time job at Fair Oaks Hospital in New Jersey run by the. The four horsemen from Yale, the four psychiatrists from from Yale started this very high standard private psychiatric hospital.
Dirk:I hadn't heard about the four horsemen Summit New.
Bruce:Jersey and you know, of course, a lot of celebrities ended up being the patients there and that was quite interesting, but that was my. My summer job was to be a mental health tech there and they had a psychodrama test on staff. Hmm, so the mental health techs, like me, would, would accompany the group of patients from the unit over to the psychodrama room and we would do psychodrama. And so then after that I started going to this national or international psychodrama conferences in New York City that they would typically end up having them annually. So I went to a few of those and that's how I learned those sound like fun conferences oh, they were fantastic.
Bruce:They were really great. I'm sure they still have them.
Dirk:So okay, so now you're a psychodramatist, and then how does your therapy interest evolve from there?
Bruce:So so basically then I had this experiential understanding of these like internal dynamics and how we would. People would represent their experience in their head Like there's an inner world that we have, that's our kind of representational map of the external world, and that operating in there. Actually that's the operating, what do you call it? The operating system like a computer, and so we can kind of work in that that realm, make changes in here that would result in changes out there, and so, you know, somewhere along the line then I encountered EMDR, heard about EMDR, powerful new technique. I learned that it was fascinating about how?
Dirk:What year would that?
Bruce:have been. That was back in the mid 90s, so 96, 97.
Dirk:So pretty early days of EMDR.
Bruce:I learned about EMDR.
Dirk:I took EMDR training and maybe just let's just say briefly what what EMDR is, so that everybody's up to speed. And I feel like EMDR was a radically different way of thinking about brain problems from what I had learned sort of cognitive, behavioral and psychodynamic approaches. And here the idea is that there are certain kinds of memory that are just so intense emotionally that they don't get integrated in the same way and they are sort of frozen in time. And so somehow Francine Shapiro figured out that by moving eyes back and forth while recalling all these different components of memory and then also toggling in and out of the memory the full bodily sense of the memory and then into a relaxation state, one could change so memories are. This is kind of a big new way of looking at things, like memories are changeable and EMDR is a way of sort of bringing it up without really talking about it very much and changing, changing memory, so movement, desensitization and reprocessing or reprogramming.
Bruce:Reprocessing, yeah, reprocessing. So, so you, yeah, is there anything you want to?
Dirk:add to what.
Bruce:EMDR is Well, yeah so. So that's a good kind of thumbnail sketch of it. But basically the understanding of trauma and the resolution of trauma that EMDR kind of brings forward is based on an information processing kind of model that we're really working with information networks in the brain, and so the idea is that, if we can, that there's a natural healing process, there's an adaptive information network that's how it's termed, and so that your adaptive information network is basically the healthy, adaptive knowledge and learning that kind of accumulates over time and that, if everything is going well, your adaptive information network is just kind of rolling along, processing information, absorbing it, growing, learning things that are helpful and good. But when trauma happens, other networks are formed that are split off or separate from this adaptive network and they're these kind of dysfunctional learning, dysfunctional memories, and they never change because there's some kind of dissociation or separation, fragmentation away from this adaptive network. And so the healing happens by kind of bringing these two information networks together.
Bruce:And so that's what, when we do that and we add this eye movement, which is a form of bilater, alternating, bilateral stimulation moving back and forth, something's moving back and forth, some kind of stimulation is moving back and forth from one side to another, which originally was eye movements, but then subsequently it was found that auditory and tactile or kinesthetic movements, alternating bilateral movements, also worked, not just eye movements, and so alternating bilateral stimulation, or shortened to bilateral stimulation. Plus, this, bringing these two networks together, are the key ingredients of EMDR. So the key ingredients, so this bringing these two networks together, is called dual attention.
Bruce:You know, one foot in the present I'm here now and one foot in the past I'm stuck there, and bringing those two experiences, those two neural networks together at the same time, and providing this bilateral stimulation, then results in this kind of natural healing process.
Dirk:And so just to make it a little bit more concrete sort of one way I think about it is, if I asked you, what did you have lunch for lunch to Thursdays ago? Nobody can answer that question, that that somehow integrated and the salient parts are. But if there were a car that came through the window while you're in a diner, you would be able to recall every little thing that you ordered and everything that happened around it. So that kind of memory might be intensely burned into our mind. And so now maybe if that happened, somebody would have a panic reaction anytime they're at a diner or near diner. They might not even know what the triggers are, but they have these triggers that just sort of turn on the amygdala, flutter anxiety system.
Dirk:And so then what one can do is there is a part that that sort of has perspective and be like, oh, that reaction was over the top, I am really safe. But so then you're, you connect the memory, which is the experience of this traumatic thing that happened, with this other. So you go into that memory and you're moving the eyes back and forth while bringing up the smells and sounds and feelings, and then and then you take a break and you go into this relaxed place where you can then sort of have this perspective and and have a bigger brain network that then looks in on this trauma and and so somehow that sort of toggling back and forth, the dual attention that you're mentioning is important for the healing, and this is now a widely accepted evidence-based treatment for all kinds of trauma. So it's a it's a really cool way of thinking about our brain and how we heal trauma, right.
Bruce:Right, very powerful, very powerful.
Dirk:How long were you doing that before you then started adding in the next?
Bruce:Well so, so you know, it was fascinated by how powerful it was, but at the same time and so I was very interested in discovering number one, I thought it was the bilateral stimulation. So number one, why, why does, how does bilateral stimulation work? What does it actually do? And then, secondly, I realized, a little further down the road, that the dual attention piece of it was critically important, and and then started to to wonder well, what is actually dual attention? What is that really? So I had these two questions and I was really very interested in understanding how does this all work? But at the same time as I was fascinated and impressed with the power of it, I also noticed that it can- so I'm going on one second.
Dirk:I have a siren going past my window.
Bruce:Oh no, Is that, is that triggering? Is that triggering?
Dirk:you.
Bruce:Well it just. It'll just give you some bilateral stimulation.
Dirk:It's triggering me at being annoyed that I'm not sitting out in nature and I'm, I'm, I'm listening to sirens and sitting in a hot, city, but Everything is really okay.
Bruce:Yes, it's all. It's all good, thank you.
Dirk:I'm feeling much better.
Bruce:Yes, I have a bilateral stimulation here and things begin to to move forward and and heal. But so I was really at the same time so interested in finding out how all these things worked, why it worked, but then I was also discovering that it can go very badly and that it could really upset people and really destabilize people.
Bruce:What would that look like if it yeah, if it goes badly and I've seen that too yeah, Well, a person would become more troubled, more upset by by, you know, by the process, so much so that they may do one of any number of things, but they could simply cancel the rest of their sessions and not come back for therapy and that happened to me several times and or they would come back to the next session and say I'm not going to do, don't, we're not doing EMDR again, I didn't like that, et cetera. So it would just really their reactions, their, their feelings would become more disturbing.
Dirk:Nightmares, dreams, depression, increased anxiety, panic, you know all the, all the symptoms could increase, they could become I think this is a really this is a really big deal and I've seen it too, and with having much less EMDR experience. But but the idea, I think, is that we we have this trauma, but we have sort of a defensive system that protects that trauma from interfering with our daily lives. And so now we have this technique that can sort of bypass these defenses and go very fast and open up all these varied feelings and all of a sudden the person is flooded, feels horrible, can't really go about the rest of the day, and then they're, they say no, I no more of this, I'm not coming back. So yeah, I think that that's a big part of EMDR and learning to work with trauma in general. But so then that led you to, to what so?
Bruce:at the same time, you know, I'm really interested in how it works. I'm discovering that it sometimes it can can really go go very badly, and I'm very curious about that as well. And it turns out that you know a lot of people you know learn EMDR and then abandon it, don't, don't continue using it for for the same reason. But what happened in the field of the EMDR is that pretty quickly, dissociation and the idea of ego, states or parts of a person became a very useful new information, new way of looking at what we're dealing with when we're we're doing EMDR.
Dirk:And what do you mean by ego? States or parts of a person?
Bruce:Yeah, so typically way back when the terminology of ego states, I think, kind of came from hypnosis, the hypnosis field and psychodynamic psychotherapy and it just meant that there can be very distinct parts of a person, like separate personalities that are palpable, they're real, they're kind of, they're separate states of consciousness that are kind of predictable in terms of the way they, these parts of you, will act, behave, react, feel, think, and that you can have very different and even conflicting parts of yourself.
Bruce:And these were called ego states.
Bruce:And the terminology of ego states was popularized by Watkins and Watkins John and Helen Watkins who came from that psychodynamic and and hypnosis background and working with trauma and using those ideas and forms to to work with people with with trauma, and so these ideas then became part and parcel of the EMDR terminology and EMDR world. So people who were practicing EMDR and learning EMDR and teaching EMDR really started to think in terms of ego states and talk in terms of ego states and this awareness of ego states and dissociation, which means that this complete separation and more and more separation of parts that could become so, so distinct and separate from other parts, that even could become unknown and unconscious and more and more autonomous and to various degrees, can take over for periods of time and, and you know, the more traumatized a person is, the the more increased possibility of like amnesia, losing time, where one part of a person you know would take over for periods of time without their, their awareness and and there's could be this switching back and forth from you know, one state to another.
Bruce:So I'm imagining extreme end of the ego state and dissociation.
Dirk:So maybe somebody with, like a sexual trauma, who has a part that feels very horrible and ashamed, and then another part might kick in that that is is very sexual and is acting out and and might not be aware of why they're sort of flipping into this state Exactly. But sort of having these different aspects of the personality and having dramatic shifts between them.
Bruce:Right, and so all of these things can happen in in in various degrees and and so if we use a powerful technique like EMDR and and we don't have an awareness as a therapist of these possibilities and we're not, you know, looking for these things and we're likely to, to, you know, have some problems with certain types of people, certain types of traumas, we have to have this awareness, we need to so. So there are an ego state understanding of some kind really became kind of a necessary tool for the EMDR therapist to have in their toolbox.
Dirk:And that led you to to learn IFS, or how did the IFS come in?
Bruce:Well, so that's the background. From the EMDR background I stumbled into IFS separately. I was just this person who became a part of me, fascinated with how powerful EMDR could be, but then also the harm that it could potentially do, and so I was using it less and less. And what happened was I did, kind of accidentally, stumbled into IFS at a psychotherapy network or conference back in the early 2000s and was a Sunday, and one part of me was ready to go home and another part of me didn't want to have wasted the money that I spent, even though I got all the credits I needed for my licensure. So those two parts of me came up with a compromise Well, we'll just pick one of these workshops on Sunday here, we'll go to it, we'll stay till lunch and if we like it we'll stay, and if we don't like it we'll go home early.
Bruce:And it happened to be Mike Elkin, a brilliant IFS therapist and mentor and trainer, who was also, just, you know, very entertaining, funny guy, good storyteller and had a background in NLP, by the way, and he basically was substituting for Dick Schwartz that year. Dick was supposed to teach the IFS piece at the network or conference, but Dick had a health crisis and couldn't make it. Thankfully got through that and you know the rest is history. But Mike was captivating and the model was incredible and so obviously I stayed after lunch and then I, you know, couldn't get enough of IFS after that.
Dirk:Can you briefly explain what IFS is?
Bruce:Well, so it is about finding and knowing the parts of a person and helping the person to recognize their own parts and to be able to separate from them and have a relationship internally with all of their parts, particularly parts that are, you know, wounded, burdened, hurt, stuck, traumatized or whatever, but that there's a self, that's not a part. There's a like a core self that has the healing capacity, healing power, just like the adaptive network in EMDR, but this is kind of personified and very relational and not about information networks. So it gave a whole new layer of understanding, a whole new and helpful dimension regarding this same kind of dual attention idea that comes from EMDR. So the dual attention here would be the self and the part and being able to separate the two but then form a relationship between the two of them.
Dirk:Yeah, it's a, it's a really neat model and just the idea of sort of we have these different aspects of our personality and and how do they interact and how can we get, get to get to know them? And and then this idea of that they're not. They're not bad, they're, even though we have probably have parts of ourselves that we dislike or want to kill off, and in a lot of therapies are like, okay, let's, let's get rid of this part, and and and the internal family systems therapy flips it around and says, okay, let's get to know. Well, what is the positive intention of this part of you that wanted to get drunk last night and and what is it doing for you and and how does it relate to other aspects of yourself? Yeah.
Bruce:Positive intentions. So so just kind of having this kind of welcoming and positive view of even the, even the worst parts are in their own way trying to help the, the total system of the person, that even the and that that positive intention may be misinformed, it might be distorted in some way, but but the intention is there and and if we can, if we can discover what that intention is, then we can align with the intention of the part. Then where we we recognize we have some kind of common ground, right?
Bruce:We all want what's good for all right, what's good for the whole system. Well, the whole you, this part, wants what's best for you, but it's idea of what's best for you and it's idea of how to accomplish that might be in some way, you know, unfortunately harmful, or there may be some, you know, harmful side effects, let's say, of that byproducts of that way of accomplishing the goal. But if we can really, if we're really interested, if we're really curious, we can discover what that positive intention is and align with it and move forward and that can be transformative.
Dirk:Sort of softens and relaxes the system. And so then, how did you figure out how to sort of then combine this with EMDR and then also the? This relates to coherence therapy. So we can, we can get to coherence therapy, but but so maybe first explain sort of how. How then?
Bruce:you became, it became clear to me the resonation between the dual attention from EMDR and the self-to-part relationship and the correspondence of the adaptive information network to the core self, that basically it sounded very much like the same thing to me, but like a new and improved version of that, a new, deeper way of understanding what the adaptive network is, we're, if we attribute certain qualities to it, and I call those qualities conscious relational entity. So if, if we view the adaptive network as a conscious relational entity and we view the disturbed part, the target network, as a part, as a conscious relational entity, then viewing it that way creates the possibility of a relationship between the two of them, relationship between two conscious entities. That is healing. And so we're really just embellishing, we're fleshing out this sort of baseline substrate that EMDR gave us of the, these information networks, and we find that the information networks is just some aspect of this deeper phenomena and so if we understand it in in that way, that becomes very helpful.
Dirk:And so then, how does that play out in a practical way Now? Now your clients who normally would have, or with just straight EMDR, would have had a big reaction. Let's say it's somebody with maybe a sexual trauma history and in some kind of acting out behavior. How is it different if this person now comes to you and you, you use this combined?
Bruce:approach. So the key to the dual attention is actually the understanding of what the self is, because that very often when we go about using EMDR and we don't have an IFS map, an IFS view of it, we may. It's very easy to believe that we have dual attention, which is a necessary starting place to do EMDR processing. Very easy to believe that we have that when we actually don't. And so the key to it is that if we understand it in terms of self-to-part relationship and then we're making sure that there is a self present, and what often happens instead of that is we have a target part that we're targeting and we have some kind of a, a protector part, a defense, and EMDR doesn't really include in the model of EMDR processing anything regarding what to do with a defense except don't do EMDR. So in the EMDR model, how to deal with the defense is don't do EMDR, do something else until you've gotten past the defense.
Bruce:But what if there would be something within EMDR that you could? If there's a protector present instead of self, or defense that's present instead of self within the defense, or the protector being another ego state and not the self, then how can we use, how can that fit into the model. How can we use EMDR then? Or is there some way that we can handle that that's effective? So that's the key thing. So, if we understand, it's the self, the presence of the self, versus the presence of a. We call it a blended protective. So yeah.
Dirk:so the dual attention is really important and so just see if I can sort of formulate this or if I'm getting it. So we have a wounded, traumatized aspect of ourself and then we might have some kind of a defense like an acting out behavior, cutting or doing sexual things or whatever, and then we have this bigger self which is the wider perspective. That in the dual attention is sort of this big perspective. And for EMDR you need that big perspective, meaning I can sort of calmly look and self reflect, and then the intense trauma memory and you want to sort of be able to toggle back and forth.
Bruce:But the IFS allows it, but it's more than the calm and detached. It's relational.
Dirk:So in other words, that compassion has to be part of it, so compassion towards ourselves and towards our wounds.
Bruce:Detached and separate can also be protective and that we could consider that and other ego state and not self. So self includes certain really important qualities and compassion would be, once it's relational, so not just separate and detached and calm, but also interested, connected and compassionate, and it's that relational part of things that's really part of the healing and that's really not.
Dirk:That is not explicit in the EMDR model and it is in the IFS that that's sort of a really important aspect of ourselves that we need to get to know this big, self healing, compassionate side, and then and then you have this nuance of choice where you can pick, maybe a defense. We don't have to go for the deepest, most intense trauma first. We can sort of ask our system where do we want to start? And go at a much slower pace.
Bruce:Yeah, the system will tell us. You know, when we orient toward that wounded target, traumatized part, the system will tell us by some kind of protection showing up. The system will show us the first place to focus by doing that and whatever part that is, whatever protector that is, it might be an avoiding part, it might be I don't want to go there, that's too scary. And so if you think about that, I don't want to go there, that's too scary is a self protective part, not the self. The self would be calm, curious, confident, would seek connection to the burden, wounded part, would care about it, want to help. Those are qualities of the self. But if there's a detached standoffishness and avoidance I'm not wanting to then what we have is this blended protective part and then that is the obvious first place to start. That could be our first EMDR target If we had a way to tweak the EMDR framework to do that.
Bruce:And a couple of folks in EMDR history you know pioneered how to target defenses and those were AJ Popkey and Jim Nipe, and you know. So they started to use scales to measure how much some other part, some part other than the top, the initial trauma target part, how much that part wanted to do something defensive, and AJ Popkey was the first one and the thing that he measured was the level of urge to use. So particular kind of defense would be can I numb myself or distract myself through some kind of substance use or compulsive behavior? How much do I want to do? That, you know, would be a measure of the presence of a protective part. And then later Jim Nipe came up with a level of urge to avoid. How much do I not want to pay attention, to focus on, deal with a certain trauma target?
Bruce:And then with IFS and Form DMDR, I've just created a more general scale that can cover any type of defense or protection, which I call the level of urge to protect. So no matter what it is that the person needs to or wants to do, that's protective. You know, how much do they need to or want to do? That? From zero to 10 would be that scale and that would tell us just how much a protector is present, how powerful he present. You know that protector is right now, at the moment.
Dirk:In a protector. We haven't said, but it's an aspect of ourself, it's a defense that protects us against some vulnerable feeling being triggered.
Bruce:And the idea of this is that this isn't something that you might run into. This is the normal human condition. This is how we survive. We have defenses, and so if there is a trauma target, the more impactful that trauma is, the more likely we're going to encounter just normal, natural human defenses that person has, their system has developed, and so these are parts that have particular ways of helping the person manage, avoid, escape from the effects of some trauma or some prior experience or some anticipated, you know hurt or pain.
Dirk:So this is a way of both healing traumatic memories and also understanding our system and all these different aspects and getting getting sort of our internal selves, aspects of ourself, aligned so there's not that internal struggle anymore. So how does the coherence therapy fit in? When did that come into the picture?
Bruce:So it turns out that for the longest time it was believed in the larger field of psychology that traumatic memories are, or implicit memories, let's call it emotional learning and implicit memory, you know, might be equivalent kind of terms, but that these things are indelible, they're really fundamentally unchangeable, and so so a lot of therapies have been really based on just controlling the effects of that, managing symptoms and and this would be this would be called by Bruce Ecker and the folks and coherence therapy, countermeasures or something like that. That would be the approach. How can we just teach a person to stop doing a certain reaction, stop doing a certain behavior, stop having a certain feeling, because we wouldn't be able to erase and rewrite the code?
Bruce:Lo and behold, neuroscience discovered a form of neuroplasticity which is now called memory reconciliation, memory reconciliation, and so what that means is your memories get consolidated in a certain way, you learn something, and there's such a thing as one trial learning. You put your hand on a stove, a hot stove on the flame, and it hurts, and you reflexively remove your hand and you probably don't need to learn that lesson ever again because it hurts so much that first time. You will never put your hand on a hot stove again, so that memory becomes consolidated, that learning is consolidated, it's done, it's there right, and so this is typically that's kind of an equivalent or a metaphor for trauma, and it was thought that then that can never be unbroken, that can never be redone. But memory reconciliation means that somehow we can open that up, unlock it and change it, overwrite it, transform that memory, update it somehow.
Dirk:Erase that structure and build another, different one.
Bruce:Yeah, yeah. Or modify really significantly, modify it, update it. I would look at it more as an update than an erasure, Although it's been called that, but it seems to me it's more like an expansion and updating.
Dirk:Let's sit. Yeah, I mean Bruce Ecker and his. I was sort of blown away when I read his rewiring the emotional brain book and just the two images of one. We have a traumatic association and so I'm afraid of elevators or closed spaces and so I can build a new pathway in my brain that's going to override that memory, but I can make it more powerful. So it's sort of and he sort of says some, there's sort of these two types of therapy approaches. One is you build a new structure that overcomes the fear, memory. Or there's this reconciliation approach, where you bring up the old and you change it so that it's no longer distressing. And it has all these examples that are quite compelling of really dramatic transformations. And he also cites neuroplasticity work, that if you have a certain kind of a aha moment, there's a plasticity window of four or a certain number of hours where then you can do this rewriting. And he's built a whole therapy approach around this.
Bruce:Exactly, exactly, yeah, and so the core of this type of neuroplasticity, this memory reconciliation, is the juxtaposition experience and a juxtaposition and before I go into what a juxtaposition is Bruce Ecker and company with coherence therapy. Basically they're saying that coherence therapy is not really like a model of therapy, it's kind of a construct of a sequence of experiences that can be accomplished by any number of other models of therapy. So it's really interesting and names specifically, among many other experiential therapies, ifs and EMDR as types of, you know, models of experiential therapy that can facilitate memory reconciliation. So, that said, the juxtaposition experience is basically when you have activated the traumatic learning or the implicit memory, which is also called emotional memory or emotional learning or the emotional truth of a part we activate that, we get that activated but at the same time, if we can activate some incompatible experiential knowledge, which is called disconfirming knowledge. So if we have this learning, this emotional truth, but at the same time we have some incompatible experience that disconfirms this, and when we push both of those buttons at the same time that we kind of have this experience of there's an unlocking that is unlocking the old consolidated memory and opening it to the possibility of transformation, updating, overwriting, etc. So we want to create this juxtaposition. Well, it's easy to activate the old learning, but we want to be precise and really identify what exactly that learning is. So coherence therapy will go into detail about that. The harder part is to find this disconfirming experience, or create this disconfirming experience.
Bruce:And how this applies to EMDR and how this applies to IFS is we're talking about dual attention. We're talking about basically activating two states at the same time. In EMDR, those two states are the target network and the adaptive network. In IFS, those two states are the target part, the burdened part and the self. In coherence therapy, we're talking about the emotional learning or the implicit memory, and the disconfirming knowledge. So if we have these three templates, these three lenses that we understand as really looking at the same thing in the real universe, but that we're kind of looking at it from three different angles, aren't we going to be able to then have more precision about lining up these things and creating a dual attention experience that is very well-formed, precise, precisely aligned? So we have these three ways of looking at it. If we understand all three ways, then we have this triangulation, this way of kind of precisely aligning them.
Bruce:You can kind of wiggle it and get it precise.
Dirk:So it's beautiful to see how these three different perspectives come together, and you have incorporated that now into a nice institute treatment model, where how many people have done your trainings at this point, oh my?
Bruce:gosh. So CISIGI Institute is really not even two years old yet. It's maybe a year and a half old, but before that I was teaching the same things for a few years, so I'm sorry, I'm forgetting your.
Dirk:How many people have done your trainings?
Bruce:So with CISIGI, hundreds of people and so more hundreds of people before CISIGI became a thing. So hundreds of people. And then I've had people, many people take my online courses at emdrifscom where I have pre-recorded courses and that's been going for about I think about five years now and many hundreds of people have taken that. So I think we're in the thousands of people who kind of learned this overlay of EMDR and IFS that I've been teaching, but more recently we've included the coherence therapy piece of it, and that started really just before, a couple of years, before the CISIGI was formed.
Dirk:So let me ask you we'll shift and say what are you most excited about in mental health world these days and what dogmas are maybe outdated.
Bruce:Well, I'm most excited really about these integrative therapies, how it would seem to me that the more you can find some kind of overlap and the more you can find some kind of alignment between different kinds of therapies, it seems to me then that we're arriving at a truer universal truth, some kind of general principles.
Bruce:Yeah, and so there's many therapies out there and I only really thoroughly know a few, and I don't think it's possible for any one person to know all of them and there's lots of good ones. So the three that I know pretty well right now have this kind of alignment, and so that's exciting to me and sharing that with other people is pretty exciting to me. And maybe dogmas might be, where you choose one of those things and to the exclusion of others, and I guess I don't know about dogma. But concern that I have is there's a lot of powerful, very powerful things out there, and more and more newer approaches are developed all the time that are extremely powerful.
Bruce:But I think the lesson that I've taken from EMDR, for example, but other things like, I think, even now, psychedelic assisted psychotherapy the lesson that I would put out there as a caution is powerful, also can be dangerous, and so it really needs to be whatever it is.
Bruce:Whatever new powerful thing there is needs to be used in a kind of a delicate and wise way, and so to me that would mean finding out where, how does it align with with these other therapies. So it was to arrive at the truth and to produce not only powerful results but but safe, safely. And I think that the helpful thing about IFS is the ability to value the protective parts of a person's system and to work with those protective parts of the system rather than against them or trying to bypass them. And some of the most powerful therapies out there have the ability to bypass kind of blast through protection, and I don't see that as a good thing necessarily and I think that that can. And even if there are some, some apparent, you know, wonderful, remarkable, transformative gains, it's possible that there can be this backlash and so the longer term negative result, even if what we're seeing immediately is this powerful process, this powerful change.
Dirk:Yeah, I think that's well said and I think, yeah, being mindful of the defense is not blasting past them, and yeah, there's so much more that we can talk about. I want to shift to meaning, and I'm curious what you've learned from all of your experience with clients and exploring the mind in different ways, and how do you think about meaning and meaning of life and how does that fit into all of this.
Bruce:Well, I feel that you know my purpose is to, you know, help heal fellow human beings from various different kinds of psychological suffering, and so that's been the story of my life, my path, and I see that as kind of a really a very human thing, that that to be human is to be a healer, and I see that as something that's part of our DNA.
Bruce:We would not have survived as a species if healing wasn't in our DNA, and so that some of us, like myself and you who are in this healing field, are just expressing some part of the, you know, the human DNA, because you know a certain segment of the population has to be devoted to healing from trauma, because trauma keeps happening and as a species, you know, as individuals, as societies, as groups, we need to be healthy to survive, and so I see that as a that I'm just a human being and my purpose in healing is really a very human characteristic, and you know we need as many of us expressing that aspect of humanity as possible and hopefully that'll be enough to keep us going as a species for a longer time. So that's, you know, my own personal meaning. But I see that as a greater.
Dirk:We're to push you to do a sentence completion.
Bruce:According to me, Bruce Hersey, meaning of life is Healing love connection and healing this journey, being on this journey together. And the most meaningful thing I did yesterday was it wasn't battling with the airlines and the over over the canceled trip to Italy flight to Italy. What was it yesterday? Because that's my trauma from yesterday.
Dirk:That was the trauma memory from yesterday.
Bruce:So that's very powerful. And so to, to, to, to, for me to to, to see past that into. You know what about yesterday? Well, yesterday was filled prior to that, you know, was filled with with this purpose. You know, where I met with several individuals and and several groups to do consultation, so to to share my wisdom, meaning, experience, you know, and learning whatever I've experienced and learning in, in, in my journey as a healer, with fellow healers, to support them and to help them to, kind of, you know, develop their healing abilities and their ability to, to connect to fellow human beings who need healing, to understand this convergence of these different approaches to, so that they can get at a truer, deeper level of healing with with their their own clients.
Dirk:And if someone comes to you and says I lack meaning, I'm just feel like this speck of dust in the galaxy and what? How would you approach, being helpful to this person?
Bruce:Well, the, the the first thing is, you know, my, my own human response to that is is empathy and compassion, like I, I, I, I get it, I, I can understand feeling that way and I also have great compassion for one who is suffering in that way. So that's the first, the very first thing that happens that this is this is not an encounter between a therapist and a client. This is a human encounter. This is an encounter between one human being and another human being, and we're really the same.
Dirk:Nice. Are there any meaningful books or works of arts or music that that you've enjoyed in the last week?
Bruce:Music is is an amazing thing. It's a, it's a another healing device. There's really something about music that that really touches me, and so so I speaking of our, our garage band connection. So I've been spending more and more time singing and playing my guitar and so particular pieces of music. There's a few of them. I'm trying to. I there's there's one song, titanium. Are you familiar with that? It was.
Bruce:It was popularized by Sia S-I-A-S-C-I-M right so she sang Titanium but but there's another version of it by Madeline Bailey which I enjoy more, but I like to play that on guitar and I was playing that. I learned to to play and sing that song when my wife was was going through, she was battling cancer and and even though the song it sounds, if you listen to the, the lyrics it seems like it's like a about a relationship between a, you know, a person who has been kind of beaten down, you know by some other person, but but they're like, they're Titanium and they're, they're strong and they're gonna, they're gonna get through it and you know, you're, you're not gonna, you know you're not gonna tear me down, and and so this was very inspirational for me, sort of. I thought about my wife and her battle with cancer and she was Titanium, she, she got through it, and so it was a very, very powerful song for me.
Dirk:Yeah, I'm feeling a little bit of chills as as you're talking, and I know you need to get back to healing people and spreading your wisdom. So are there any last thoughts or comments or big message that you would like to share with with this massive audience of this podcast?
Bruce:You're a massive audience. It's intimidating. I mean, I'm intimidated by your massive audience, gosh, I, I some it's hard for me to think into you know these kind of grand, grand scale like that. But this has just been been fun, it's it's. It's. It's really great to to have this opportunity to to answer these questions and to, you know, to be with a fellow healer you know, who shares these interests and and you know, is interested in hearing about it. So it just feels it's a good feeling. It's a good feeling.
Dirk:I feel the same way.
Bruce:Yeah.
Dirk:It feels great to share this time with you and I looked forward to our our continued relationship and and yeah, thank you so much for for doing this and making the time.
Bruce:Thank you, Dirk, it's been. It's been wonderful. I really appreciate it.
Dirk:So I hope you enjoyed that. I know I did. Please hit subscribe and I would appreciate it if you support us by leaving a nice rating or review and join us next time. Until then, I hope you have a meaningful and meaningful month and, as always, figure out the meaning of life. Let me know.
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