Developing Meaning

#15: Do You Have One Mind or Many? How Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) Heals Trauma by Embracing Our Inner Multiplicity.

• Dirk Winter • Episode 15

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Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS) is a type of therapy that views the normal human mind as an internal family of inner conscious beings.  In this episode we unpack the key IFS concepts of 'Exiles,' 'Firefighters,' and the 'Self,' offering insights into how our childhood experiences shape our inner dynamics and how we can harmonize our mental orchestra by putting the 'Self' back into our mind's conductor seat. This episode sets the stage for a multiple episode series that brings you with me into my IFS level I training experience and community.

Timestamps
0:14 - Introducing Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS).
5:30 - Definition of Consciousness and Multiplicity.
9:45 - Historical Perspectives and Evidence for Multiplicity.
12:45 - Exiles and Firefighters.
16:00 - The IFS Self
19:20 - Blending and Unblending.
20:40 - Evidence for the IFS model of the mind.
23:00 - IFS Explanation of Psychopathology.
28:55 - Healing and Rewiring Through IFS.
30:30 - The Unburdening Ceremony in IFS.
31:00 - Bruce Ecker and memory reconsolidation
34:00 - Ten things I like about IFS.
42:00 - A caveat and some disadvantages.

Theme music by The Thrashing Skumz.

Dirk:

Welcome back to Developing Meaning, the show where I, your host, dr Dirk Winter, child and adult psychiatrist, take you along as I explore the wide world of mental health treatment communities, looking for meaning and purpose, seeing how I can find more meaning and purpose in my own life and sharing that with you. Taking you along. We humans are meaning-making creatures and I am extremely curious about how our mind creates meaning, and today I am very excited because I am beginning a multi-part series on a new and exciting therapy model called IFS Internal Family Systems Therapy which has a unique perspective on how our mind operates and creates meaning. So what is IFS and why has it become so incredibly popular over the last several years? Ifs Internal Family Systems Therapy is not family therapy. Family systems therapy is not family therapy. It is a one-on-one, individual therapy that looks at each of us, each person, as having a mind that is composed of inner little people, beings, parts that interact to run our lives. This is depicted beautifully in the Amy Poehler Inside Out movies, where she shows, in cartoon version, the mind of a little girl or a middle school girl or teenage girl as having inner beings that vie for control.

Dirk:

Ifs therapy was created by Dr Richard Schwartz, who at the time was a family therapist, and it was created in the 1980s and for a long time it was sort of a fringe therapy. I had never heard of it until about two, three years ago, but it has now exploded in popularity. It was featured in Bessel van der Kolk's the Body Keeps the Score. Richard Schwartz was interviewed on Tim Ferriss. There are now thousands of people trying to get into each level one training. It took me over a year to get a spot in one of these trainings in order to be able to pay thousands of dollars to be trained, which is kind of incredible. Most trainings you just sign up but there's a waiting list with a lottery. Many people have tried to apply for years and years and have not gotten a spot. So what's the big deal? Why is this so popular now? Is it a fad? Is it a meaningful new treatment? Let's get into it.

Dirk:

So in this episode I plan to explain what is meant by a multiplicity model of the mind versus a mono-mind model of the mind. I will attempt to explain what is IFS. How does IFS describe the components of our inner system? There is an IFS lingo which is now seeping into popular culture, with words like parts now seeping into popular culture, with words like parts exiles, firefighters, self-burden. I am going to define these and explain how they can be used to understand our inner system, how we create problems or symptoms, how these parts can create problems or symptoms or interactions between parts can create problems or symptoms, problems or symptoms or interactions between parts can create problems or symptoms, and then also how this understanding can be used effectively to resolve symptoms. I will point out which aspects of this model I think are truly unique and not just a repackaging of old approaches, and as much as possible, I will give evidence for and against different aspects of this model as I present it. And then this episode will lead into a series of interviews where you get to hear from interesting IFS teachers and practitioners that I met during my level one training and hear what they have figured out about the meaning of life and how to create meaning and how they think about meaning from a multiplicity model of the mind, from an IFS perspective, and you'll get an audio diary of my own experience in a Level 1 training. So you'll really get an inside look, an in-depth look, at this IFS model. I should add that there are many great podcasts explaining this model from Richard Schwartz and other people who have much more experience than I do with IFS. This series of podcasts is intended to take you along with me as I encounter this model for the first time, and so is giving you a newcomer's perspective, and so I will also link to some podcasts and books that you can go to where you can learn from true experts.

Dirk:

So, before I can tell you what is IFS, I need to explain what is a multiplicity model of the mind, and that is a mind that is made up of multiple conscious minds existing in parallel with the ability to interact and influence each other. And in order to explain that, I need to tell you a definition of consciousness. So, in order to define consciousness, I will refer to Dr Dan Siegel, who is a professor of neuropsychiatry at UCLA and author of Mindsight and many other books on consciousness and mental health. So Dr Siegel has organized interdisciplinary conferences on consciousness where he brings together experts in neuroscience, math, physics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, humanities, religion, and looks for consilient definitions of consciousness that come together. And, according to him, consciousness is a combination of subjective experience, awareness and self-reflection.

Dirk:

So subjective experience, that's being in the first person. So subjective experience, that's, being in the first person, having thoughts, emotions, sensations, perceptions. And then awareness is the ability to know that this is happening and focus attention internally on these perceptions and experiences. And then self-reflection is the ability to go deeper and reflect on one's own mind, and those together comprise consciousness. So I think that essentially nobody would argue that we as individuals have the ability to have subjective experience, awareness and self-reflection.

Dirk:

The radical shift that Dr Richard Schwartz discovered or rediscovered from his clinical work is that each one of us is made up of multiple units of consciousness that exist within us, that are running sometimes in parallel and interacting with each other in ways that are relatively stable and predictable. If you want to read a fascinating book about this, I recommend a book called Many Minds, one Self Evidence for a Radical Shift in Paradigm by Richard Schwartz and Robert Falconer, and this looks at models of the mind throughout history, where many ancient models of the mind, including Plato, socrates and the Greeks, believed in a multiplicity model of the mind. They actually have very elegant proofs of multiplicity in our mind the Egyptians, the early Christians, many religions have this idea that our mind is actually multiple conscious beings existing together, and then this became pathologized with a more modern medical model that looked at the idea that we have different inner personalities as pathological, and so there's been a historical shift back and forth between multiplicity models and unitary models of the mind, and it's really fun to learn and read about. So what's the evidence for this? You say, well, if you invite me to a party at your house, there's going to be part of me that's very excited to go and thinking about what kind of a great evening it's going to be, and then there's going to be a part of me that wants to stay home and just do nothing. So it's very common to have a part of me that wants this and a part of me that wants that, to have a part of me that wants this and a part of me that wants that.

Dirk:

That was actually the proof of the mind being at least dual in Plato's Republic. Socrates said to a student in order for us to both want and not want at the same time, our mind has to be at least dual. It can't be a single conscious entity. Also, if you and I are having a conversation, part of me imagines you and what's going on in your mind, and part of me is imagining what I want to tell you, if we have a debate, I need to mentalize what's going on in your mind. I need to mentalize what's going on in the mind of the judges and in my own mind. So we have these abilities to create and hold multiple perspectives, multiple minds, at the same time, and so any kind of conversation has multiple models of the mind happening inside each individual. There's also dreams, and if I have a dream, there's part of me that's creating the dream, that's creating a story, and then there's a part of me that's watching it and thinking, holy shit, what's going to happen next? How can we tell ourselves stories that we don't know what's going to happen?

Dirk:

There's different conscious systems that are running in parallel. This really makes sense from an AI, artificial intelligence and computing perspective as well. If you want to build a very powerful computing system, you want multiple systems running independently that are interconnected and that will create a much more powerful computing system than one computer that you build that is supposed to do everything. So, just in terms of creating a powerful computing system, it just makes sense that having that system be powerful and efficient would involve multiple independent, interlinked systems running in parallel and interacting. And from neuroscience and brain imaging, there's evidence that different states, different brain states, involve different neural networks. There's a lot of different evidence from different angles supporting multiplicity models of the mind. What IFS does that is different is that it really personifies these different components and describes different types of components and how these create a system that we can work with in a clinical and therapeutic way.

Dirk:

So, when looking at our mental health, what are the different components of our internal family system according to this model? So, according to this model, there are two types of parts. One type are wounded, hurt parts, things that we do not want to feel. Intense emotions like shame or worthlessness. Things like that are called exiles. These are things that we do not want to feel and that we want to push away from awareness as much as possible. And then there are protectors. Protectors are parts that protect our exiles from getting triggered, and there are two types of protectors. There are before-the-fact protectors, which are parts of ourselves that plan ahead, that prepare, that organize, that do things that are proactive to make sure that we don't screw up, end up in some bad situation where our exiles get triggered. And these before-the-fact protectors are called managers, and oftentimes these are well-liked by the outside world and by ourselves. And then there are after-the-fact protectors. Those are called firefighters. So that's once the exile is triggered, once I screw up and experience this feeling of humiliation or shame, then a firefighter will come in and it will put out that feeling.

Dirk:

And those are sort of extreme behaviors. They can be drinking or sexual, acting out or spending a lot of money or doing something risky. So I remember when my kids were little we had a apartment on the fifth floor of a building with a roof terrace and I was hanging out with my kids on the roof terrace. We had a little plungy pool and I had planted these nice potted plants and I had this beautiful clematis climbing plant. And one day I was hanging out on the roof and suddenly this fire, this ladder appeared and this firefighter in full gear jumped over the wall and landed square plop right in my Clematis flower pot, stomping on the plant and there was no fire. There was some kind of a false alarm that I hadn't been aware of, but I got it. I didn't blame him for ruining my Clematis. I know that his job is to put out the fire and if he needs to break a window or break a door, we all get that.

Dirk:

So firefighters are parts that will squash the feeling, the fire of our bad feeling, and oftentimes they don't care so much if there's collateral damage that happens along the way. So this is a major cognitive reframe because in general, we don't like the parts of ourselves that drink and do extreme things and the outside world doesn't like these things, and so by calling them firefighters, schwartz is honoring their protective functioning, saying that they do have some positive intention and that has some value, and by doing that, that then allows these parts to become more flexible and allows us to work with them in our system in a more helpful way. So there are protective parts and exile parts, protective parts and exiled parts, and then there is also an aspect of ourselves, a brain state, which is not a part which Richard Schwartz defines as the self with a capital S. This is actually a major difference between IFS and other therapy models that I have encountered so far and the way Richard Schwartz talks about it. It was truly a surprising discovery for him.

Dirk:

So the lore of this discovery is that Richard Schwartz was getting to know people's parts and getting protectors to reveal what vulnerable exile they're protecting and then getting to know the burdens carried by these exiles and healing the exiles and helping people's system and essentially in everybody. What would emerge at some point is this quality that he would say, well, what part are you? And they would say, no, this is not a part. And they would say, no, this is not a part. And that would be a quality that is deeply compassionate, curious, calm, confident, clear, creative, courageous and connected. Schwartz really loves alliteration and uses eightCs and 5Ps to describe this capital S self-state brain state, a state of maximal flexibility and integration that is different and has much more of a healing quality than other brain states and apparently this exists in all of us, in everybody, and it's not damaged by trauma. He's gone into the worst prisons and talked to murderers and people who've done horrible things and had the most horrible childhoods that we can imagine and after working with their system, he really says in a convincing way, to me at least, that all of us have have this capital S self brain state and this is really a central core concept in IFS. The capital S self in IFS is essentially similar to the Buddhist no-self concept or Zen-like or Zen-like calm, wise perspective, the wise mind, if you're familiar with dialectical behavioral therapy, or the ventral vagal, connected state, if you're familiar with polyvagal theory.

Dirk:

So I've told you about parts and the self. And then there is also a seat of action like a control center in our mind-brain. And when one of our parts is in charge of that control center for example when we're angry and there's some angry part that is yelling that is called being blended. Having a part in charge of the control center is being blended with that part, and then having that part step back and having our calm, curious, compassionate self in charge of our system, that is called being unblended or being self-led. A nice metaphor for this model of the mind is an orchestra where parts are the instruments and self is the conductor. Parts are built to have some kind of a function violins or drums and the conductor, the self, does not actually make but helps direct the system of instruments into optimal harmony. And disharmony happens when some instrument is damaged or some instrument takes over the conductor's seat, and the goal of IFS therapy is to restore harmony by putting the self back in charge. So what is the evidence for this? I've talked about evidence for parts that there's a part of me who wants this, a part of me who wants that. I've gone over, that Evidence for the self exists also.

Dirk:

I feel like strong evidence is that this zen-like state exists in many cultures Also. There is a polyvagal science that shows that there is a ventral vagal branch of our autonomic nervous system that controls our heart, our facial muscles, our voice, our inner ear, all the muscles of human connection. That only exists in mammals and when we're in this state we have a break on our heart and high heart rate variability and this state predicts long life. If you're in an insurance company, you can use heart rate variability and time in ventral vagal to predict people who are going to live for a long time. So it's a low stress state and it's also a state of greater cognitive capacity. Once there is some kind of a fear trigger, that ventral vagal state shuts off and now we have less cognitive flexibility. So I think there's compelling evidence for a ventral vagal self-like state.

Dirk:

And then there's also, I think, evidence that there is a seat of consciousness, that some aspect of ourself is running the show and that, for example, we have different modes depending on context. And if I'm standing on a New York City street corner and I raise my hand, everybody knows that I am hailing a cab, whereas if I am in a classroom and I do the exact same thing, everybody knows that I want to ask a question or say something. So we have a context-dependent part of us that is running our responses. And also I think magicians know this, hypnotists know this once you fill up a person's center of awareness, fill up their attention capacity, it's possible to manipulate us in ways that are out of our awareness. So there's an awareness center that can be controlled by some aspect of us and always, generally, is controlled by some aspect of ourselves. So we have multiple different parts. We have the self, we have this control center.

Dirk:

Now what? How is this helpful for understanding our inner system and how is this helpful for mental health? Well, problems arise when we have inner polarizations between different parts of us that tear us in different directions and that creates tension, or certain parts become extreme and take over our system. And much of the system of parts is set up in early childhood development, where we have certain needs and we have intention of getting those needs met. And when they aren't met, then we learn from that and we basically learn strategies to connect and attach or get fed or meet whatever need has to be met and when there is shame or some kind of a trauma that leads to aspects of ourselves that have extreme beliefs about ourselves that can be extreme and intense and cause symptoms. So, for example, believing that I'm bad, I'm worthless, I'm shameful. Those parts form early on and then we develop strategies to protect against those feelings.

Dirk:

And one very common exile or wounded part that many exile or wounded part that many, most or maybe even all of us have comes from a psychological machinery that holds ourself responsible for what happens in the world. So if I am neglected or abused because the world around me is messed up, a little kid, instead of blaming their parents or blaming somebody else, they will internalize that and say I'm bad, the world has to be good. It's better to be a messed up person in a healthy world than to be a healthy person in a messed up world. And so early on, when bad things happen to us as little kids, we develop parts that believe that we're bad, we're worthless, it's our fault. Those are very strong and they can become extreme when there is abuse, neglect. The more extreme that is, the more extreme these early beliefs can be. And holding those beliefs can actually be necessary for healthy development, as is the ability to dissociate sometimes and to avoid thinking about distressing things, to focus our attention on tasks at hand. So early on.

Dirk:

We do not have so much access to this ventral, vagal, calm, capital S state. We're essentially mostly run by parts that are getting our needs met, avoiding distress, and so we have the system of exiles and protectors, and so we have the system of exiles and protectors. The problem is that often when we're grownups, these little systems are still running our lives but are no longer useful or adaptive for the current situation. One analogy that I like is that some of these extreme beliefs, like I'm to blame, they sort of save us in the moment, but then they become burdens later on. So it's as if I get swept away in a flood and there's this branch, big branch that comes by and I grab onto it and it gets me to safety, but then years later I'm still walking around with this big branch holding this branch, and it's just cumbersome and causing all kinds of problems. This is how I see burden's, extreme beliefs that we have somehow picked up in a deep felt sense way, and so now, with IFS, we have an approach to unburden, to heal from that.

Dirk:

So how does healing happen in IFS? Healing happens in IFS by connecting that big capital S self energy with the wounded, burdened part in a way that honors that part for the hard work that it did at the time to get us through that horrible experience, and then updates that part to the present moment and allows it to unburden whatever the no longer necessary belief is and assume a new role. So if I am an IFS therapist, which I am now, I would listen to your story around, whatever problem there is, and then break it down and say, okay, here's this part that is having this function and it's protecting maybe this part, and here are the constellation of parts that might be relevant when done well. This does not happen by explanations or interpretations, but is an approach where the client is the expert and the therapist is a guide that helps the client get into the internal system and connect with parts in a way that feels true and real and meaningful and often surprising. And if I were using some kind of a cognitive therapy approach, I would then say, okay, this belief is wrong, it's catastrophizing, it's overgeneralization, and I would use logic to convince you that your belief is not accurate.

Dirk:

In IFS I would say hello part that's holding this belief Come on in, let's make space, let's get to know you. What's your story? Where did you pick up this belief? What type of part are you? If you are a manager, what are you protecting against underneath? Do you really need to be working so hard? Maybe if we heal the exile underneath, you can still do your thing, but do it in a more relaxed, better feeling way. If you're a firefighter, instead of saying this is horrible, you're drinking, you're ruining your life, I would say come on in. What's your story? How did you? What is your intention for Joe Smith? What would happen if you didn't drink?

Dirk:

Where did you learn how to use this approach and then slowly move from one part to the next with curiosity and compassion and something about that dual attention and compassion and something about that dual attention, that ventral, vagal, connected big brain energy and connecting that with the intense, felt sense energy of whatever the part is, together with a lot of validation for the positive intention of that part, allows change to happen. If a part is approached with curiosity and compassion and warmth, rather than attacked and pushed into the background, something about that allows these parts to unburden, to give up these extreme beliefs that have been so deeply helped for so long. And in IFS there is this kind of an unburdening ceremony where you can sort of imagine the part releasing this burden, giving it up to the air or fire or wind or something like that, so creating almost like a shamanic type unburdening ritual during the therapy session that heals whatever the part is that has been burdened. So to summarize, healing a part in IFS does not mean getting rid of a part. It means keeping its positive function and helping it release its extreme belief or an overly intense emotion so that it can then have a more optimal role in the system, essentially updating and optimizing that neural network.

Dirk:

And Bruce Ecker has a book called Unlocking the Emotional Brain where he talks about memory consolidation and what sort of conditions are important for allowing a brain network to rewire and reform. And those conditions include a meaningful disconfirming experience, a felt sense of oh my goodness, the belief that I've held actually does not apply to me anymore. And having that in a sort of a powerful felt sense experience can create neural flexibility that actually brings up the neural structures that generate symptoms and underlie symptom pathology and permanently rewires them so that the symptoms are permanently gone. And I do plan to release an episode at some point about memory reconsolidation and how memory reconsolidation relates to healing and that there are essentially two types of healing approaches in therapy. One is building new memory structures that override the old symptom-generating structures, versus therapy approaches that call up and bring up the structures that generate symptoms and then actually rework, permanently change the neural networks that are creating symptoms. It's kind of an amazing development that's really nicely described by Bruce Ecker and his colleagues in the book that I mentioned and I'll link to that. And Bruce Ecker does cite IFS as a modality that is particularly well-suited for rewiring outdated symptom-generating brain structures in ways that can create permanent healing. I highly recommend his book for any kind of therapist. But he does speak about IFS as being a type of therapy that is well-suited for accessing networks that are underlying pathological patterns and creating conditions that allow rewiring of those networks and memory reconsolidation, which is really what you want if you want healing from trauma and if you want permanent change. So if you're still with me, still listening, you probably have the sense that this type of approach to therapy is weird and different, and I certainly have that feeling and I think that's accurate. It is a weird and different approach to healing and therapy.

Dirk:

So now I'm going to talk about the advantages and the unique aspects of this model and then I'm going to talk about some of the criticisms of it. I came up with 10 advantages off the top of my head. I'm going to try to be quick. Number one it's non-pathologizing. The idea is that all of us have a system of parts. All of our parts have a positive intention. There are no good parts and bad parts. We do not need to be at war with ourselves. This is non-pathologizing and that can be extremely helpful. Number two the idea of self capital S self-state or energy that is not damaged by trauma, not damaged by neglect, that, no matter what happens to us, even the worst of us, once we work with our system we can access this self-energy state, is extremely hopeful and changes the view for a lot of people who've lived through bad situations, from I'm damaged to I have this inner core that is good and healing and I can learn how to access that and really recover entirely, no matter how bad my early situation has been. So it creates a really much more hopeful perspective than a lot of other mental health models that I've encountered.

Dirk:

A third advantage and I think this is an advantage, although it might not always be is the role of the therapist in relation to the patient. In IFS is much more that of a guide and not so much of an expert. In IFS, the therapist, their job is to know their own parts and to access self themselves and bring their self, energy, curiosity, compassion to whatever parts the patient or client is bringing in and helping them. So the therapist is not an anonymous person who is a blank slate and getting projected on and making interpretation. The therapist is more of a guide or a coach and the expert really is the client and we just ask what feels right. Let's get to know this part, let's get to know that part. If you feel like it makes sense, then that's what counts. You are the expert of your inner world.

Dirk:

Number four there is also kind of a DIY, do-it-yourself aspect to this therapy approach that once you learn how to access your own parts and learn how to access self-energy, once you can do that, you can do a lot of work on your own and I have had clients who have had a few sessions and now have this approach. That has been extremely helpful and then they can go off and they don't need ongoing therapy for years and years. They have kind of this inner compass and approach that they can use to understand themselves and heal themselves. I don't want to misrepresent that. I think that many times it really does take still quite a bit of time and it is helpful to have long-term therapy with an IFS therapist. But the goal of each therapy session is to help a client connect better with their own self-energy and that can then be an ongoing process that people take into their day-to-day life and the therapist can continue to deepen that process and help it along. But the goal is to transfer that healing capacity to the patient in a way that they can use in an ongoing way and a lot of therapy models have this as a goal. But I think IFS does do a particularly nice job of promoting independent healing.

Dirk:

Number five another positive is that it brings in working with the body. There's a lot of inner attunement, using physical sensations to access parts, and that allows work in kind of a more right brain, felt, sense way rather than a cognitive talking and thinking approach, which I think is the core message of Bessel van der Kock's, or one of the core messages of Bessel van der Kock's Body Keeps the Score book is that when there's trauma, the left brain thinking verbal parts become suppressed, the left brain thinking verbal parts become suppressed and the trauma really sits more in the right brain, emotional aspects of our mind. And so IFS really works with felt sense body, which can be powerful and helpful. So it brings in the body and it also brings in spirit in a way that it has this kind of almost spiritual aspect that there is this self-energy, higher quality that all of us have and share and that if we access that, that then allows us to heal ourselves and heal other people. So number five was bringing in the body and number six is bringing in the spirit. Number seven is that it's a great therapy model for improving relationships and is extremely helpful for couples work, parenting work, group work. That is because once we know what our own parts are and how to get ourselves into a high self-energy state, we can interact with other people from a place of calm and curiosity and confidence. That leads to much more effective and positive relationship interactions than if we have our angry part, bouncing off the other person's vulnerable part and then getting a backlash from their angry part. It is a challenging but also powerfully simple way of empowering ourselves to have much more effective and positive relationship interactions. Number eight IFS is a modality that combines well with psychedelic work, which is a leading edge of therapy and mental health at this time. I will have episodes in the future on IFS and combining that with psychedelics. I'm not going to say more about that now.

Dirk:

Advantage number nine is that I think the IFS multiplicity model of the mind is a more accurate model of the mind than the single unit models of the mind that I was trained in before learning IFS. And number 10, and I think this is a really important one is that it was designed by a systems-trained thinker, and so this creates a very helpful map of what are the components of the symptoms and how do you deal with different components. What part do you work with first? Where do you start? In IFS, you first work with protective parts and get permission from them and assess how much self-energy there is in the room before moving towards more intensely traumatized exile parts, which can be overwhelming, and this allows a more subtle therapeutic interaction and creates a helpful map for how to approach complicated internal systems that are more flexible and less likely to get overwhelmed and out of control than other therapy models that I learned before. So those are 10 advantages.

Dirk:

I do want to add a major caveat here, which is that I have seen people who don't respond well to IFS, who don't like it, and I have seen people who respond great to other therapy approaches. Everybody is different and these are decisions for you to make with your own personal mental health experts. I am not making a treatment recommendation for you. I am just telling you about a new treatment approach that could potentially be helpful but which is still very new. And this brings us to the potential criticisms and disadvantages of IFS.

Dirk:

So what are the weaknesses? One is that there are not a lot of studies yet. It is not an easy approach to learn. It is different. You have to say go inside, find this part. How do you feel towards this part? Often this looks different than therapy models that we might be familiar with, where people are sitting in a room talking to each other, or one person is lying on the couch and talking. In IFS, people close their eyes, they go into almost a trance-like state where the therapist then guides them to have a conversation with these parts of themselves and not an intellectual thinking about what I would do in this XYZ situation, but asking that part and getting a response and having that response be surprising, and so it's a very different and weird process. I am only now starting to get to feel a bit more comfortable with it. So one difficulty with IFS is that it has a weirdness factor and another is that there are not a lot of studies yet. There is one study that was done with women who had rheumatoid arthritis in Boston and that study found that IFS could be an effective treatment reducing pain and functional limitations in this inflammatory condition and that made it into an evidence-based treatment. But there are small studies with trauma and depression and OCD and substance use, but they're not big trials yet. So it is new, it is weird, it is different and I think all the skeptical parts that we have need to be welcome and we have to really look at this carefully and with skepticism.

Dirk:

So thank you for listening. If you have questions, please send them to me through the link on the podcast website or through the Developing Meaning website. I find this therapy approach very weird, very exciting, and I'm really looking forward to take you along now into IFS land as I introduce you to some of the teachers and trainers and program assistants and just a really interesting group of people that I've met and also share my Level 1 audio diary with you. The next episode will be with my Level 1 lead trainer, jory Agate, who is an amazing person and also a minister as well as an IFS expert. Stay tuned. Thank you for listening. If you could leave me a nice rating or share this episode with a friend, I would definitely appreciate that, and until next time, I hope you have a meaningful and meaning-filled month and if you figure out the meaning of life, let me know. Thank you, I'm going to go. Some of these would have been me. There's a good death that is Reflected on the wall, shedding his tears and eyes out With a deceitful eye.