Developing Meaning

#20: How IFS Helped Me Face Cancer And Myself - Audiodiary of My Level I IFS Training.

• Dirk Winter • Episode 20

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In this episode, I take you inside my experience of learning Internal Family Systems therapy while simultaneously navigating prostate cancer surgery and recovery during the fall and winter of 2023-24.

Through audio diary entries recorded over three months, you'll hear my real-time reflections as I move through an intensive experiential training that forced me to find and confront parts of myself. From the corporate retreat center where it all began to the post-surgical reflections in my bedroom, these recordings capture the disorientation, insight, and healing that unfolded as I allowed myself to be both student and subject.

This episode may be helpful for therapists considering IFS training or for anyone facing illness or supporting someone through health challenges.  It is the final episode in my five part series on my IFS level I training experience.

This episode of Developing Meaning is produced by Dirk Winter and Caroline Hinton and brought to you by Consilient Mind LLC.  

Developing Meaning is NOT AFFILIATED WITH ANY INSTITUTIONS and NOT CLINICAL ADVICE.

Theme Music by The Thrashing Skumz.

Dirk:

Welcome to Developing Meaning, a podcast where we seek to understand mental health from a perspective of meaning rather than psychopathology. I'm your host, dr Dirk Winter, board-certified adult and child psychiatrist. I work in community mental health and in private practice in New York City and am on the psychiatry faculty at Columbia. I am a mainstream psychiatrist who has recently become fascinated with alternative healing approaches and want to take you along as I participate in experiential trainings, learn new models of the mind and interview fascinating healers I meet along the way about how they create meaning in their own lives and in the lives of their clients. This is a show for mental health professionals, clients and anyone seeking to build more meaning and purpose into our lives. This show is intended to explore serious topics in a fun and playful and informative manner, but is not affiliated with any institutions and is not intended to be mental health advice. Mental health advice Hello, welcome back. Meaning Seekers.

Dirk:

Today's episode is a bit different. It is an audio diary of my experience going through my level one IFS training during what I would consider one of the more intense periods of my life. I was also going through prostate cancer surgery during that time. This is the fifth and final episode of my series on my IFS level one training. In episode 15, I introduce and explain the internal family systems model, and then in episodes 16, 18, and 19, I interview remarkable teachers that I met during this training my lead trainer, minister Jory Agate, and then two assistant trainers Ridgehouse, who's an expert in adoption, and Margaret Connolly, who's an expert in complex trauma and legacy burdens burdens of racism, sexism and cultural burdens that we pick up from our society and from our ancestors. They all have amazing stories and are great teachers of the IFS models. I definitely recommend checking out those episodes if you haven't listened to them yet. Each of them has their own amazing story of healing and insight. And now, in this final installment of the series, I turn inward. Over the course of three weeks in October, november and January the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, I recorded brief audio diary reflections into my iPhone as I was going through training in this model, and what made this experience quite a bit more intense and meaningful and at times also disorienting, was that I was going through treatment for prostate cancer. During this time, I had surgery midway through the training. Everything went well.

Dirk:

I'm clear at this point, but you'll hear traces of this process woven into the story. So this is not a totally polished and linear episode. But if you're curious what it's like to learn IFS, not just as a theory but as an experiential healing process, I think this episode may give you a nice window. I think it may resonate most with therapists who are considering IFS training. It is an expensive training, it is emotionally intense and it takes a lot of time. So anyone who's interested in signing up for this training may be interested in hearing my experience of what it was like and it may also connect with people who have experienced cancer or some illness or are supporting somebody who has. This is a bit similar to my earlier audio diary episode where I took you through an experiential training of ketamine-assisted therapy and what it was like for me to experience taking ketamine for the first time. It's part reflection, part exploration. I would love to hear your thoughts and see how you like this episode. Please sign up to my newsletter at developingmeaningsubstackcom. That's a place where you can comment and I will respond and we can have conversations. I would love to have you part of our Developing Meaning community.

Dirk:

And now, without further ado, I present to you my experience, my audio diary of the Q Center in beautiful St Charles Illinois I'm saying that, I guess, trying to tone back my sarcastic parts I am finally got into a level one, ifs, internal family systems training. These trainings have become so popular that there's a lottery. There have been people on waiting lists for years and I finally got into this training and here I am at this massive corporate retreat center. It's sort of this campus in the middle of nowhere, with concrete building and some nice landscaping and fountains and running water. It's actually a pretty nice location. It's next to a river. So I got here Sunday for a four-day training Monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, all-day trainings. There are about 40 people with us. But getting in here I had sort of this reaction of oh my God, how am I going to make it, you know, being sequestered in this kind of a corporate retreat center. I had a weird reaction. But I very quickly started to really enjoy myself. They have bicycles so I could bike down to the river and into this cute little town of St Charles Illinois and then had quite a nice dinner and I'm just sort of settling in here getting work done. This is now. So I got here Sunday.

Dirk:

Yesterday was the first full day meeting each other and training and then it continues today. I just wanted to sort of capture this in real time in case any of you are interested in doing this training, in case I want to share this at some later point. So the first day started at 9 am. We have jory, a really nice and smart instructor, leading a group of about 40 learners, and then there's a ratio of one to three teaching assistants, so there's a small group breakouts and she comes from a divinity school background, our main teacher. She is barefoot, very warm, very welcoming, very nice and smart, and so the whole morning was basically introductions, creating a safe space, first the instructors introducing themselves and then all of our participants, and then we had a buffet-style lunch, hour-and-a-half lunch break, and then came back and did teaching or listened to teaching of this IFS Internal Family Systems Therapy model, and then did experiential breakouts where three of us and one teaching assistant went and did parts mapping of each person, with one person being an observer and then one person being the speaker telling about some kind of an issue that we're struggling with, and then the parts detector, therapist, learner is asking questions and saying hey, did I get this right? I'm hearing this part, I'm hearing that part, taking sort of a jumbled story and then splitting it into components. So that's sort of the very first basic step of this level one teaching program. It's going to continue until Thursday I will give you a probably keep updating a bit every morning and then there's three weeks to this training. So after this week there will be a week online in November and then another week a week, meaning four days, full days of training in January.

Dirk:

So part of me feels like I'm kind of crazy. What am I doing? 52 in this corporate retreat center where at night you know, there's these big parties with, you know, large clouds of CPAs who have gathered and we kind of blend in and drink some of the free beer and wine. And you know what am I doing away from my family Learning this stuff Definitely have a part. That's sort of giving me a hard time. On the other hand, I truly am excited. This is really an exciting model and being in person with really nice people is great. I am the only MD in the group. Pretty much everybody else most people are social workers. Some people have other kinds of therapy or life coaching degrees. So I'm feeling a little bit different than the group, but the people are nice and smart and have interesting stories. So I'm open and we will see what today brings.

Dirk:

So today is Wednesday, day three of the training. It's 10.51. The day is already in full swing. I did not get up early and do a dawn recording. I'm just sort of I don't know what I'm in it. Yesterday the highlights were a long demonstration session. That really was pretty amazing, starting with a small symptom and then getting to a lot of deeper things in a really beautiful way and then getting to a lot of deeper things in a really beautiful way. So this is an experiential process we have a lot of. So there's some demonstrations, there's a little bit of didactics. The model, I think, itself is simple and elegant, and then it's really we break down into small groups and we see what are our parts, and so that's kind of the training, what are my parts. And then there's these small groups with three learners and one teaching assistant and I had a pretty interesting experience yesterday being the therapist yesterday being the therapist, really feeling like I was pretty well informed going in but really missing something, and it's all about, you know, a client picking a part and us helping work with that and unblend and build a self-toart relationship.

Dirk:

I'm discovering a lot of parts in my own system. Those parts include judgmental, being quite judgmental. I'm noticing parts that are critical, narcissistic. They definitely hide those. Well, I can be very charming and I think I don't come across with those, but those are there and so it's kind of what are they doing for my system? Right, that's a question. Who are they? What elements in my system are they protecting, or what is their positive intention? Who are they? What elements in my system are they protecting or what is their positive intention? So lots is swirling around in my system. I have a lot of thoughts about clients at home, that things are happening there, things are happening in my family. I have some health things going on. Things are happening in my family. I have some health things going on, but I am also you know that's life and I'm so.

Dirk:

Today, this morning, so far, we had some teaching, we had some group discussion and, yeah, I'm feeling right now this isn't so interesting, but Wednesday a lot of buffets, a lot of eating, a lot of hanging out and socializing, a lot of group building, team building. I'm the one MD. I feel like I kind of stand out and I'm, you know, I kind of hang back. I feel like I have a little bit of a hanging back role, but I am also enjoying this process. Yeah, nothing so deep right now, I'm just in it and we'll see what the rest of the day brings. Okay, bye. So today is Thursday, the fourth and last day of this first module. It's 5.30 am.

Dirk:

I am sitting in my little cubicle room at the Q Center, no-transcript and embodied parts, and then left those parts and stepped away and we sort of looked at a relationship between ourselves and our parts. There were some team-building, group-building exercises and I was kind of drained. I've been drained, but really by far the most powerful experience has been the small groups, ifs teaching, where we have three people in a little pod with a TA, who then and there's one observer and one client, and then the TA is sort of whispering over the shoulder and starting off by talking with the interviewer, the therapist in the exercise, seeing what parts are there, getting those to step back, trying to have this person embody some self-energy, and then following this model, and then each of us work with a part. And I have not been the client yet. I was the therapist on the first day and then I was the observer yesterday and our pod, this group I'm a little bit of an oddball because I'm the only MD in this big room and then it's mostly female, mostly social workers, but our little pod we're like the three old white guys somehow in our little count off. This is how the stars aligned and we have this little old white guy pod led by a younger female African-American therapist, and it's been fascinating, I would say. I almost made a joke when we walked into our room and saw the boxes of tissues on the ground and I was like, oh well, we won't be needing these, being sort of men and I'm glad I didn't say that because that has not been true so far. I haven't been the client yet, but each client has really touched some deep emotional stuff and there have been tears and powerful what feels like powerful work has happened really quickly and as I'm talking, you know I don't know what my experience is going to be today. I do think this is a powerful model. I don't want to say more, but I have some stuff going on right now that I'm not going to get into, but I don't know how I will react. I'm a little bit nervous about being the client, because this approach is so kind of at an angle that it bypasses a lot of my and everybody's defenses. I can keep it together, I can present well, but there's also parts of me that want to open up and want to heal, and so we'll see how this goes today. So day four, that's where I'm.

Dirk:

At Okay, 7.56 am Friday morning, I'm back in my office in NYC, got back at 1 am to the apartment and I'm feeling pretty darn exhausted, with a lot of clients and work waiting for me. The last day was pretty great, I would say. I'm hesitating to talk because a lot happened and I don't know how much I want to disclose, but the structure of the day was some teaching in the morning about direct access versus insight. Those are the two main ways of working in IFS. Insight is when you connect the person's self to their parts and you have them bring the attention of their own self consciously to the part that they are working with. Direct access is if parts are just there and blended and it doesn't seem like there's enough self or enough separation. So then you work directly with the part. This is a really weird and kind of scary way of working because it comes at all of our defenses at this slanty angle. And so in all of the demos there's this very quick progression from some symptom that seems superficial, not such a big deal, everybody's sort of trying to pick something. That's not going to be like really super emotional if they're doing a demo in front of a group or in front of other people that they don't know so well, but then it just gets really deep very quickly, and so we had a demo in the morning and then we had our groups.

Dirk:

I'm still working in our little group with the three old white guys and the African-American younger female group leader and it was wild yesterday and the overall arc of our little group was pretty wild. I remember walking into the. You know it was weird to be all men being picked for this little group. The room is overwhelmingly female and so this was sort of a random organization and somehow it spit out the karma of the universe, spit out this combination. And I almost joked when I walked into the room and saw the tissues on the floor, like, oh, we're not going to be needing these. You know, walked into the room and saw the tissues on the floor, like oh, we're not going to be needing these, we're not going to get emotional. And then it got really emotional really quickly for everybody.

Dirk:

So it was three days, three different turns of rotating around being the therapist and then I was the client at the end, which I had been kind of hanging back and the part that I was working with, that I chose to work with, was a part of me that's reserved, that hangs back, that likes to appear in control. It's very helpful, it's very conscious of how I present and it's been helpful to my system. It's a popular part, well-liked by the outside world and by my internal world largely also. But it's squashing down a lot of other parts and so as soon as I was able to focus some attention on it, I got to see kind of all the stuff that was underneath attention on it. I got to see kind of all the stuff that was underneath which included parts that were very angry, parts that were creative and really wanted more space and were thankful. Then I've been hanging back because I'm the MD. I'm the one MD in this whole group of 50 people, so I don't want to seem like an arrogant asshole, which I definitely have. Those parts too that are kind of narcissistic and judgmental, critical and all of that. So piecing those, giving those some attention, is interesting.

Dirk:

But the thing that really I had been careful about and holding back and was making me nervous throughout this whole training is that I have cancer prostate cancer which I'm not happy about. It's horrible. It snuck up on me. I don't know if I'm going to tell you this story now, but I think it's localized, it's caught early, but I need surgery. I'm going to need surgery in a little bit less than a month and I didn't want to get into it. I didn't want sympathy from people, I really didn't really want people to know.

Dirk:

And during this week, four days, I did become comfortable enough so that I did mention this and I talked about how my control part didn't really want to reveal all the fear around this surgery that's going to happen and the whole idea of having cancer and what that means and being mortal, and then also uncertainty and how there's this sort of there's not room in my system for uncertainty or there hasn't been, but yet there's this sort of there's not room in my system for uncertainty or there hasn't been, but yet there's a lot of good that can come from welcoming uncertainty a bit more. I feel much more of a spiritual connection. I feel like there's the universe has a way of operating that surprises me if I'm open to it. And oftentimes, when I don't get what I want, lately I've just been sort of noticing and being like, oh, I didn't get what I want, let's see what happens and how this plays out. And often it plays out in really interesting ways. I'm not going to get into examples, but you get the idea I have a lot of emotional stuff with this cancer prostate cancer diagnosis and I had been squashing that away and then I really was able to let it out in a very nice way, very helpful, very surprising. It was led by me but I felt connected. So I guess the bottom line is I'm pretty blown away by how quickly and how nicely this creates an approach to disarm defensive structures and that can be scary, but if you do it in the right way it's super powerful. And now I'm back and I have a ton of patience and things to do and so I'm getting back into my busy day, but pretty impressed overall with week one of level one IFS training.

Dirk:

Okay, that was week one. Let's go of week two of IFS training. This is a remote week. It's four days Monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday. I did my first day yesterday and it was nice to see everybody again.

Dirk:

I have been through a lot since the part one training. I've had prostate surgery. Today is the first day that I'm not wearing any kind of pad or learning to control my urine again, so this has been. I'm not good at health, having health problems, so this has been a challenge and having this IFS training has been really incredibly helpful. I got to know this group of 50 clinicians in Chicago or outside of Chicago and now I'm again working with them online. So we're identifying our parts. We're breaking down into small peer groups. I'm very lucky my PA is somebody who has built a nature-based IFS program clinical practice and I'm extremely interested in nature and I have a very nice little group that has also been really supportive with my surgery and recovery and the demo yesterday was probably the most powerful part. It seems like that is consistently a very powerful component of the training where just starting off with parts and having somebody who is initially reserved, skeptical, because they are doing their own internal work which is being witnessed by a large audience, everybody wants to kind of keep things. You know is a little bit nervous to open things up too much, but somehow things get deep in a really positive way very quickly.

Dirk:

So today is day two. I'm feeling a lot better than yesterday. Yesterday I was pretty wiped out, still recovering from my surgery and happy to just be listening. And they make a lot of room in this training to engage, to sort of let your system do what it needs to do. So there's a lot of space to learn. But also we have parts that sort of distract and protect and keep things at a level that's comfortable, and so that's been nice. So I'm not going to ramble too much more. Today is day two and we'll see what it brings. All right bye.

Dirk:

So it's Wednesday and yesterday was the second day of the second week of IFS training. First week was in person, second week is online and then we have another in-person week and all day I was feeling just weird, discombobulated. I'm recovering from prostate surgery. That's sort of the big health thing that's happened to me, and so I'm enjoying being able to just learn but really be very passive and lying around my lunch break I slept, and then the highlight yesterday really for me was me being the client in the small group and having another peer learner guide me through an IFS experience where I really did not know what to expect. Going in, I was really. What was on my mind was that I'm missing a prostate, I'm missing a part, an important part that I like very much, and it's gone now. And so that affects, you know, my whole internal system. I have holes in my stomach that are covered with glue, that are healing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 from the laparoscopic surgery and I'm regaining bladder function. My internal system, you know, in whole. You know, I never thought of myself as somebody who was sick, who had cancer. The pathology came back, it seems like probably they got everything. The lymph nodes were negative. I still have to wait for a PSA in February to confirm that.

Dirk:

These last few months doing my work, learning what I can, dealing with a move after a renovation, and then this cancer thing and this surgery, and so the IFS experience was really powerful. I started off just on focusing on my internal system and this feeling of chaos, and what I came up with was this part of me that just doesn't like uncertainty. So there's the part that I wanted to get to know was uncertainty, which shows, you know, I have a lot of parts that push that away, that I like to plan things, I like to be prepared, I like to know what I'm doing, I like to seem like I'm competent, but life does not. You know, life is not life without uncertainty, and tragedy and health issues and other kinds of problems get, you know, interfere. And so I, you know, worked to invite, you know, to have all the parts step back that dislike uncertainty and then let's hello, uncertainty come on in, let me get to know you. And that was a really powerful experience and it just sort of emotionally really like I realized how scared I was going through the surgery and I cried. It was a and I cried. It was a pretty intense emotional but also very positive experience. I felt like it was healing. Today my whole system feels better. I feel like I'm aligned.

Dirk:

One thing that happened that was really strange and almost psychedelic was I had this sort of this part uncertainty, which I visualize was sort of when I closed my eyes, it was these waves, it was this internal churning feeling and then I was sort of intellectually recognizing that, okay, uncertainty is important. It's an important part of life. I should welcome and make friends with uncertainty. I should not hate uncertainty. But I was realizing that was sort of like this head cognitive approach and so I put my hands on my heart and I opened. I wanted to extend heart energy towards this feeling of uncertainty and when I did that it was like that uncertainty part just melted into my whole system and it had this feeling of like every cell, like uncertainty is not a part, it is itself, it is a yin-yang, critical component of every cell, every molecule.

Dirk:

That was a weird experience. It was not a textbook experience, but it almost sort of was this sort of Buddhist I don't know if I'm searching for the right word vision, experience of suddenly knowing that uncertainty is everywhere and it has to be. Without uncertainty, life wouldn't be life. Anyway, it feels. It's sort of like it's psychedelic in that it's this noetic experience. It's hard to put into words. Noetic experience, it's hard to put into words. It feels really powerful and meaningful, but when I explain it you're probably thinking, oh, this is trite, but it was powerful.

Dirk:

So I had a powerful day two of the training, even though I was super lazy, most of the day had my camera off, was just lying down, not feeling great. And so now, and feeling like this is so long like? Why does this go on and on? So here I am, wednesday, day three out of four of the middle week, and we'll see what today brings. All right, all right, it is Friday.

Dirk:

I didn't record anything yesterday, on Thursday, friday. I didn't record anything yesterday on Thursday. So Thursday was a long another day. My mind is blank. It was a parts filled day.

Dirk:

I feel like the main event was me being a therapist for my small group and really struggling to be helpful to the person that I was working with and then getting some supervision and then being able to fall into this mode of working with parts, building relationship between the part that we identified and self and going back and saying does this part see you're there? Anyway, I'm not going to explain this now. It's too weird, I'm too tired. I've been going through a lot of stuff. I'm recovering from my prostate surgery and starting to see some patients and I recognize that I have parts myself that are uncomfortable with uncertainty and protecting my system in a lot of ways. I can't see me using this, but I just wanted to say that, overall, the second four-day training I think was very helpful in building my skills, building connections to this very nice group of a new batch of IFS people, very nice group of a new batch of IFS people, and I think we should just jump ahead to the week in Chicago because I am out of sorts. I'm back to work after having had my prostate surgery two weeks ago exactly and I'm feeling much, much better. But I'm also feeling tired and I'm going to do an interview with April Manjaris in a little bit, who's an EMDR supervisor, so I just I want to rest and clear my mind and just align my system. So no big insight into the last couple days of week two of training doesn't seem right. Yeah, I guess there's just a wiped out feeling that's come over me and I guess that can happen with these trainings and with surgery and life. All right, peace out. So between week two, which you just heard two, and week three, which you're about to hear, there is a transition day online, so I'm going to share my thoughts on that now.

Dirk:

Seventh, yesterday we had the transition day focused on working with protectors and I was feeling a lot better physically. I really enjoyed the teaching. It fits very well with where I'm at in trying to implement IFS. I'm having challenges setting up self-to-part relationship in my patients, and this session today focused on the protectors that get in the way of that and how to work with them, and there was a nice model of validate I get it. Then addressing fears you're the boss, we don't have to go faster than you want. Then giving hope we can do this. You're going to be better off once we do this. And then setting up a win-win situation. So, talking with protectors, we had a ton of role plays. It was so nice to see my group, the overall cohort I'm very fond of at this point, as well as my mini-cohort.

Dirk:

And then for the last session, I had to quickly go down to my office. I had a 15-minute break and I live close to my office, and because I'm not supposed to bike because of my prostate surgery, which I'm feeling much better from I'm basically back to normal or I'm healing well from that I decided I had this idea of taking my kid's scooter and I fell and I broke two ribs and I had six stitches in my chin. So if you're thinking about IFS training, be careful not to crash your kid's scooter. That's kind of the take-home message of this day. Ah, I feel like such an idiot and I know that's a part. So that's my report. It would have been an awesome day if it weren't for that, and I feel like I deserve the pain that I'm feeling now. All right, there's a part there I need to work on. Okay, bye. So I'm looking out at a snowy, bare tree beautiful, picturesque view out of my Q Center, chicago Not Chicago, but outside of Chicago, charles Illinois Q Center Convention Center landscape, where it is now January 8th, 7.30 am.

Dirk:

I just arrived for the third week, the third and final week of my level one IFS training. I'm excited. I'm about to go get some breakfast and see all the people that I haven't seen now in a while when I'm at in terms of this training. It's a three-week training. We had the first in-person week here in October and then we had one transitional day online and then we had another week, four-day week online in November and then we had another transition day and now we're here and ready to sort of complete this experiential training.

Dirk:

I started the training sort of right before my prostate surgery and had that on my mind very much and was just sort of keeping it together while this experiential training was opening up a lot of, you know, emotional content for everybody. It was a wild week looking back. And then the last online week I did right after my prostate surgery, so recovering, and that was pretty nice actually to be lying on my bed with my camera off, being able to learn, which I love to do, and being part of this very nice and supportive group. But I feel like now I'm in a different place. My surgery went well. I'm feeling physically much better. It was kind of a stupid thing I did. The last training was a one-day transition and I was so happy to be feeling better that I was having a great day and I at the end of the day wanted to be efficient and during a 15-minute break I decided it'd be a good idea to use my son's scooter to get to my office and I slipped and fell and landed on the scooter and broke two ribs and got six stitches in my chin, and so broken ribs are crazy. So I had this prostate surgery and then I was deconditioned from that and then I had my broken ribs. But those have healed, feeling good and I'm very excited to be here. I will tell you more about how all of this goes, but now I got to go get some breakfast and go say hi to folks. All right, bye.

Dirk:

So it's January 10th, day three of my final week of IFS training. I'm sitting in my little cubicle hotel room in the Q Center looking out into a Chicago snowstorm, still dark out at 6.45 am. I haven't showered yet. I did have some coffee. I didn't record anything yesterday, but I just wanted to speak a bit about where I'm at and what's been happening.

Dirk:

So every day has kind of this pattern, starting with a group meditation, then a teaching about a topic like how to get in touch with self or how to recognize self-like parts. Then there are small group practices, the most recent practices, so it's three. It's always three people plus a TA. And we did a practice on fire. Detecting is the idea that certain patients will trigger parts of ourselves, and so we had one person act out the sort of patient that would trigger us and then we would see inside what parts, as therapists, are activated and work with those parts. So that was a neat experience. And then there's a big group demo where one person in front of the group works with the group leader, jory, and that was great. It's always really powerful to see and I can see I still have quite a ways to go, but things are starting to come together. And then we have a small process group, which is really nice. That's been the same group since the day one of the first week of training and so we get to know each other better and better and it's really a lovely community that I'm getting to know more and more.

Dirk:

So we're here at this Q Center, I roll out of bed and go downstairs into a huge buffet with people making omelets and salmon bagels with the works, and every meal is just massive piles of food like a cruise ship, and I have parts of me that feel like the food is free so I should just eat as much as possible. So we'll see how that turns out for me, but I'm in good spirits. You can tell by my voice, right? So I also felt excited. On day one I kind of made a little mini breakthrough or realization where I'm really starting to get a sense of how this healing model works, and I'll talk more about this at a different place.

Dirk:

But there's this idea of witnessing grief, that when bad things happen, when there are emotions, there are painful emotions. We, from a perspective of big self, need to witness those parts of ourselves that absorb that and for emotions and grief it's important to witness. But then we also pick up extreme beliefs about ourselves like I'm bad, I'm unlovable, etc. And those need to be unburdened, which is kind of this weird ritual exercise that Dick Schwartz came up with, where you, after fully witnessing the whole story and the full extent of how the belief came to be whatever part holds that belief can sort of let that go and do a ritual where they burn it or send it into the universe or out into the ocean or something. So it's like a ceremony, getting rid of a bad belief. So you're really making internal neurological brain changes using very simple techniques that have this intuitive, felt sense impact. So I didn't say anything yesterday but I just wanted to catch you up and now I shower and eat breakfast and do it all again. All right, bye.

Dirk:

So it's Thursday, january 11th. 8 am the last day of my level one IFS training. I need to pack, I need to get to the airport. I'm going to do kind of an Irish goodbye leave a couple hours early, as I tend to do. I maybe need to think about why I like to do that. Yesterday the training has been amazing. Yesterday we had two amazing demos and those demos happened in a group, very warm, comfortable feel in the group.

Dirk:

So people get very far with personal stuff and Hart's approach is this it's a different approach, so there's a lot of surprises. Somebody pointed this out, and so that I think is an important thing to note that when you think of, when you're talking to your parts, it's not like rehashing something. You have a different way of exploring yourself and it there. All this surprising stuff happens, it's in surprise, is important for changing changing brain. That releases chemicals that signal that we can change things. So it's the difference between a therapist being kind of a rent-a-friend, validating and keeping all your old patterns in place, versus really surprising moments which seem to happen a lot. So then we also had an experiential. This is a small group where each of us took turns and I was the client, the patient, and that was very interesting. Our leader, halfway through, sort of switched into sort of an IFS psychodrama where there were two parts of me these were sort of classic parts, wanting authenticity, wanting connection and sometimes being in conflict with each other and then externalized and had the two other guys in my group play out those roles, and so that was cool, that was super cool and so I want more psychodrama and IFS psychodrama, psychodrama and IFS psychodrama. So that's cool.

Dirk:

The teaching also was pretty great. It was on rupture and repair, which is really helpful in all kinds of contexts. How do you assess for a rupture a moment that I handled poorly in a relationship and how do I then approach it and repair it? And the steps of approach. You know, getting myself into self, figuring out what all my parts are and then going and asking permission of you know I feel bad about what happened and can I? Is this a good time to talk? And then how to do that whole conversation in an effective, heartfelt way. Pretty useful. And then there were all these workstations and I went to an amazing one on art and that got me excited. I got all my crazy. I want to learn everything.

Dirk:

Parts activated, all the TAs set up these workshops on polyvagal theory, kids and family, how to get more into self psychodrama. There were a lot of interesting ones and I could only go to two. And I could only go to two and I enjoyed the ones I went to. But I really also want to figure out, have this feeling like I missed out on some good stuff and need to supplement. And then I missed the dinner. There was a big dinner in the evening and I had to do a little bit of work and I was feeling like, oh, I should just stay at this convention center, it's all snowy outside and I'm sure there'll be people to chat with. But everybody went off and was gone, and so I had a quiet evening and felt a little sad and lonely that I couldn't just hang out with this group that I really pretty connected and attached to at this point. So I need to pack, I need to get to the airport.

Dirk:

Today we have our last day. There's still a bunch of teaching left, but thumbs up on IFS level one. Whoever's interested. All right, bye. So it's friday, january 12th.

Dirk:

I am sitting back in my office on central park west after flying back from Chicago yesterday afternoon. Yesterday was the last day. There were a lot of goodbyes. I once again orchestrated a Irish goodbye situation where I had to leave early, one of the first to leave at 2 pm, even though things kept going later. That's a trailhead for me. I have done this now at the ketamine training, at the other get-togethers, at the other weeks of this IFS training. So I guess I don't like goodbyes, I don't like to feel the emotions of this and it's kind of a. It was kind of an amazing.

Dirk:

I know I say that a lot, but three weeks together with the goal of creating a heart-opening, healing atmosphere and directing that at all of our own worst parts, the worst aspects of ourselves. Learning how to connect with and appreciate parts that we don't normally like to connect with is kind of the essence of IFS and they have a lot of exercises that bring this out and it just brings this whole energy of connection and so many people that come from all over the country and places in styles that as a New Yorker I a few years ago would have been very arrogant towards I think is an appropriate word. I now feel like I see people differently, so I feel like this has changed me in ways that I like. We'll see how long that lasts.

Dirk:

The last day there was a neat exercise where we split into groups of six and everybody got a chance to talk for two minutes and then all of the listeners had a chance to serve an assignment either report back the main content for a minute or comment on the body language or comment on our own internal reactions that were coming up or commenting on the overall level of self-energy in the room, and everyone ended up being really heartfelt and positive.

Dirk:

So I am deeply grateful to everybody who participated, and before this I would have never considered doing something like TAing for one of these sessions, which is a way to re-experience and lead and deepen knowledge, but I would never have considered it and now I feel like, wow, that would be a cool way to get to deepen this experience and I'm using it with clients, as already this morning on Friday, as I'm back, and so, thumbs up, this was awesome and I will probably try to do some podcasts with some of the people I met there. So, yeah, that's it All right, thanks for listening. Please sign up for our newsletter at developingmeaningsubstackcom to hear about all of the latest new episodes, retreats that are planned, events that are planned, join our community and, as always, 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. Smurfs, pop-tarts, pomegranates Dance the wave across her Cheeky-breasted chest. Moscow pumpkins Take your needles, provide their teach desire. Thank you.