Bob Falconer on IFS, Spirituality, and Trauma

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In this soul-stirring conversation, IFS pioneer Bob Falconer returns to explore the intersection of Internal Family Systems (IFS), spirituality, and trauma healing. We discuss how trauma creates separation, the necessity of spiritual connection in deep healing, and how curiosity can be a transformative force. Bob shares insight from his upcoming books and over 50 years of clinical experience, emphasizing the porous nature of the mind and the healing power of respectful engagement with all parts of the self—both personal and transpersonal. This episode is a heartfelt invitation to open your inner world with compassion and wonder.

3 Key Takeaways:

✔️ A surprising reason why many trauma survivors don’t fully heal—and what might be missing.

✔️ The two types of curiosity—and why only one leads to transformation.

✔️ What Bob means when he says “the mind isn’t just multiple... it’s porous.”

👤 Guest: Robert Falconer

Robert Falconer is a dedicated therapist, teacher, and global educator of the IFS model. Author of The Others Within Us, Bob brings over five decades of experience to his work exploring the porous nature of the mind, particularly in the context of trauma and spiritual experiences. His latest books, Opening the Inner World and Spirit Speaks, delve into the intersection of IFS, mysticism, and healing.

Get your copy of Opening the Inner World and Spirit Speaks: https://swedenborg.com/product/opening-the-inner-world/

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Transcript

0:00

And McGilchrist makes this wonderful point, which at first really pissed me off. Usually when there's a radical new idea, it pisses me off because it takes me outta my comfort. He says, how we pay attention is a moral act, and I think how we pay attention is a choice like that determines the nature of the world we live in. Going Inside is a podcast on our mission to help people heal from trauma and reconnect with their authentic self. Join me trauma therapist John Clarke for guest interviews, real life therapy sessions, and soothing guided meditation. Whether you're navigating your own trauma, helping others heal from trauma, or simply yearning for a deeper understanding of yourself, going inside is your companion on the path to healing and self discovery. Download free guided meditations and apply to work with me one-on-one at John Clarke therapy.com. Thanks for being here. Let's dive in. Bob Falconer is the author of The Others Within Us is a pioneering IFS therapist and global educator drawing on five decades of clinical expertise in helping others heal. Bob, you're a fan favorite of this show and welcome back. Great to be back. We were chatting a little bit before the show about the mini projects you have. Swirling around your world, it seems you're as busy as ever. So I'm with you. Been ever at the age of 77. One time when I was finishing college, they had a speaker come. His name was Donald Miller. He's an author and now like a marketing guy. But he gave this keynote speak speech on how people should aim to peak when they're like 65, 70 years old. So if that's the case, then you're nailing it. Yeah, Confucius said Humans don't reach their full potential until they're 70. That gives me some relief, but yeah, that's why I'm just edging into my work. I don't wanna be too successful too soon. Yeah. So we are gonna talk about a few things. One is a workshop that when this goes out, we'll have started a couple days ago on spirit trauma and healing, and then the other is. Yet another book you have coming out called Spirit Speaks. Yeah. Maybe just catch us up on, on what you're up to with these projects. I already, I have a book coming out in three days called Opening the Inner World about Swedenborg and IFS with a couple other people, Swedenborg experts. And then I will have this other book called Spirit Speaks, which is. The summary of over 3000 pages of written dialogues I've done with Spirit over maybe 10 years now, and I think this will blow away the last tatters of respectability that might cling to me that secondary objective of yours. I'll be officially weird when you Yeah. Bio certificate in the mail. Yeah, I'm proud of it too. But I've always identified as being part of the counterculture and I still feel that way and run it. Yeah. I don't really wanna be respectable. Yeah. So there's those things and then this project that the workshop, which will already have started by the time this comes out, the first day of it, will be over on spirit trauma and healing. I'm that I think will be my next major book on the scale of the others within us. I've been researching this and focusing on this for a long time, and I'm struggling to rake all these ideas together in one place so they're usable and basically the idea is we don't heal from major trauma without some form of spiritual connection. That's exiled from polite discourse. It's funny, you can talk about any sexual thing you want and oh, that's totally what, but you start talking about spirit and they go, oh and no, you're, oh, how we can help people access, materialistic society has done everything it can to X somehow and denigrate these kind of experiences label. Pathologize and label them as mental illness. It makes me think about what are the bounds of being a therapist. And some things that I was thinking about last week and talking to a therapist friend about is see therapists who are making Instagram videos about politics or doing groups that are. Political groups and taking very clear political stances and I'm, I wonder about that in terms of a therapist's ability to then work with any one of different values. Therapy's not supposed to be values driven, and yet some therapists are stepping out and saying, here's where I stand politically. There's also therapists that post a video of them and their partner having brunch on a Saturday, and it's there's this kind of unveiling of sorts, and this makes me feel old, but even younger generations like Gen Z therapists that are more open with their personal lives and stuff like that. And I, it's interesting for me because I was trained so psychodynamically and this kind of iteration of the therapist being the a blank slate. But really playing it more conservatively in terms of our transference until it plays out, and then being able to use that, really being able to invite any type of transference that needs to come out. Whereas in this case, some of these more like personal expressions from therapists seems to probably sway that. But depending on how you work and the frameworks you're using, maybe that's not a problem. Who am I to say? Oh, that's, talk about spirituality is a big No, that was the point I was trying to make. I want to take a moment to chat about our sponsor, Jane, a clinic management software and EMR. Your evenings and weekends should be spent with loved ones not chasing down your patients and clients for payment. That's why Jane has designed a secure payment solution that helps reduce the amount of time you spend manually following up with patients. Patients can save their credit card details and insurance information securely through your intake form, which can then be conveniently processed after your time together. And if they've got an outstanding balance, you can send a payment request email or SMS that allows your patients to pay off their balance online from the comfort of their homes to see how Jane can help you reclaim your after work hours. Head to the link in the description or show notes to book a personalized demo. Or if you're ready to get started, you can use the code, John, at the time of signup for a one month grace period applied to your new account. Yeah, it is a problem. I think you're right. I probably, usually, I have a very minority view. I think allowing politics to get into the therapy run is a big mistake, and in the supervision groups I do not allow political discussion and I get a fair amount of resentment and pushback on that the atmosphere has become. So it's all hate, fear, and self-righteousness. If you get down in either side of the. From both sides, everybody's guilty. I don't wanna be in a world of hate, fear, and self-righteousness. Martin Luther King said a long time ago, hatred is never healed by hatred, only healed by love. And you say, you start, when I start saying things like that, people on both sides hate me here. Whoops. The IFS Institute itself has really positioned itself is on the Democrat side or left side. Sure. You wanna call it, I think that's a big mistake. Because early on, a lot of the people who were very interested in IFS were evangelical Christians and boy could IFS be a wonderful thing for the evangelicals. So we just had you and the, your co-authors of the Swedenborg book on, and that was interesting too to see a world that Swedenborg came from in being basically, would you say Christian philosopher of sorts or? I wouldn't call him a philosopher, What was he A mystic. He went into his inner world and he saw things and had these profound experiences and then just wrote like a descriptive geography. I. 'cause he was a scientist. He didn't create cognitive scaffolding and he didn't create all these you shoulds. He just described the depths of his inner world and he was able to explore his inner world in incredible depth. And he used the language of his time, which was highly Christian. But still, I know some people call him a philosopher and that sort of. We start talking words like visionary and everybody cringes and runs for the exits. That's another word. It's interesting, a lot of what he talked about was his exploration of his inner world through the lens of what we would call parts and spirit guides and to your point, framing a lot of that through Christian language and the language that he had and knew at that time, but really a willingness to go inside and see what's there, which is a big piece of your work, right? Huge. I have, I think this is an exaggeration, but I think real curiosity is a panacea in the inner world. Yeah. A panacea, it cures just about everything, but there's two kinds of curiosity. There's Sherlock Holmes, let's nail this thing down. Curiosity, and there's wide open heart center curiosity. At the start of any inquiry, they look the same as you go down them. That Sherlock Holmes kind of attitude, it gets really narrow and really focused and really laser-like and very precise, and much of the world disappears, and when that kind of curiosity is satisfied or complete. The issue is over dead, done solved, QED done, but the heart-centered curiosity, as you start going down that path, instead of narrowing down, the focus widens and widened becomes 360 degrees. Instead of moving towards certainty and an answer, it moves towards wonder and awe. And then as you move even further, it moves toward love and ecstasy and euphoria, communion. Now, I think obviously in terms of other people in our scopes, we want that other kind of curiosity. Now, Ian McGilchrist discusses this in terms of right brain and left brain. I think that the example he gives, which I think is very revealing, he says, imagine that you're a bird standing on some gravel pecking for seeds in the gravel. You have your Sherlock curiosity. Yeah, folks on the gravel picking out the seeds. Your heart-centered curiosity is scanning the entire rest of the universe and it is primarily interested in surprise, the new. Anomalous what doesn't fit, and two of its major focuses are potential mates and predators. And mcg gilchrist makes this wonderful point, which at first really pissed me off. Usually when there's a radical new idea, it pisses me off. Yeah. Because it takes me outta my comfort. Yeah. He says, how we pay attention is a moral act. I think how we pay attention is a choice Like that determines the nature of the world we live in to a large. If we can live in this right brain, heart-centered curiosity, I think it solves an incredible number of problems. And if we can bring that attitude, that moral choice to use mcg, gilchrist's word to our inner work and to other people. Including the ones you hate politically. Our lives will go much, much, much better. My sense is if we could do more of that, it would literally save the world. McGilchrist is one of the, if I can, he says the real way to change, 'cause he is very distressed about the world. He says, what will change is a change in conscience. And he said, I don't know where he got this number, but he says if 3% of the people on the planet can change their consciousness, that's probably enough to tip the balance. So that makes me very optimistic. If I and you and others like us, keep helping people heal and get more and more deep inner awareness and more and more come from the heart-centered curiosity, that could be what changes the whole planet. Instead of going out and screaming, hatred, fear, shame, nasty mess. The more I do this show and talk to people like you, I come back to the central question of what is trauma and how do we heal from it? What does real healing look like? And a lot of therapy intending comes from a place of figuring stuff out or insight, not the IFS insight of going inside, but insight of if I can just figure out why I am this way. I'll be able to heal from it. And what I tell my clients, and I work with very smart people. I've been here at Silicon Valley my whole career, right? And people with MBAs and Ivy League degrees and all this stuff is, if it was a matter of just outsmarting your trauma, you would've done it by now. You don't need my help with that, right? You can draw the dot between. My mom was horrible to me and now I seek out partners that are horrible to me, even though another part of me knows better. That's great. You got that now what? Yeah. Don't you still have to heal? So to me, like IFS is relational. It's a way of relating to these part parts of you that hold the pain, parts of you that protect the pain. And IFS has a texture to it that I would really call love. I think that's essentially what the model is. But even again, as a therapist, there's pardon of me that's don't say love. You're gonna Yeah. I really gonna, you can lose your license. Yeah. Even that is too mushy or abstract or spiritual or whatever it is. But that's really what it is. And there's a texture of that. There's also a lot of IFS. Therapists, especially when we're starting out that have these figuring out parts of, I wonder how many parts are here and what to call 'em. Is this a protector? Is this a ub, whatever? And in reality, it doesn't really matter if the work is safe, if the quality and the texture of the session is safe, if there's safety and the client system and the therapist system, that's when really magical things just naturally happen and the healing happens naturally. Oh, and what a relief that the therapist doesn't have to be micromanaging every part of that. Yeah. Definitely. I think the word love is key. Do it all, but we can do that. Yeah. I'll bleed that part out when I edit this. No, please. It's really important. So I use the word respect of art, and I know it doesn't start with the C, so it's not CH Cs, but I think that's the a core value of IFS is we respect the person's system and we respect all the parts. The suicidal part, the drinking part, the obnoxious part. We respect them all. And this connects to what you were saying because Melody used to say often respect is the minimum. Although I love that phrase and respect is respectable. You can talk about it by the way, the melody died. Oh, sweet. One of the, I didn't know that. One of the greatest addictions treatment. People ever. And I was lucky to get to work with her a lot. No kidding too. She has a lot of, had a love impact on The Meadows, which is a treatment facility out here not far from you and I here near San Jose, and they have locations everywhere, but they have a lot of her stuff built into their curriculum. They have a lot of Dick's stuff too, but yeah. And even in the realm of nonviolent communication, you see a lot of her stuff. Yeah. Massive contributions. I. So you ready for some weird stuff or do we have I'm ready for it. This is, it's exactly what I'm wanting. The others within us was primarily focused on unattached burdens.'cause that's what came up and got right in my face and said, you pay attention to me, Bob. And so I did. And working with unattached burdens IMP implies that our minds are porous. I think Dick has done a superb job of following out the implications of the idea that mind is multiple, and just that idea that mind is multiple revolutionizes psychotherapy. Many of the old values are turned on their head, and it makes it incredibly more effective. I think this idea that mind is porous is similar to that, and we have not yet explored the implications of really accepting this idea. Little bit. There's legacy burdens, unattached burdens, guides, all that kind of stuff. So there is some recognition to it, but I think a lot more work can be done here. Hey, if you're a therapist, I wanna help you deepen your client work, help them get better results without burning yourself out. You can do all this by learning to harness the power of IFS. So I want to tell you we've got a free IFS resource library that you can download now. This is full of resources like my Quickstart guide to IFS, the full IFS protocol, a bunch of demos of me doing IFS with real people and extra self-care practices for therapists. You can get all this for free in the link in the description, and I hope you enjoy. A couple things First, I think in exploring this porosity of mind, the things that are not part of us or our personal history, or even our family legacy, the weird stuff that's deep in the weeds when you start exploring deeply in your mind, because I was coming from a therapist's point of view, I saw the painful stuff first. I didn't see the benevolent. Stuff very much because people don't come in complaining about, that's the therapist bias to begin with. We go in looking for the hurt, looking for the pissed off part, looking for the troublemaker part. And it's why people come to us. So why not work in reviewing the anthropological literature? And I do have an undergraduate degree and a little bit of graduate work in anthropology in talking about spirit possession, which is completely acceptable. Thing, respectable thing to talk about in anthropology, but not okay. In psychotherapy. Yeah, in reviewing the anthropological data, which is too vast for anybody to really grasp on spirit possession, but the va, I believe the vast majority of these kinds of contacts are positive and sought after. And in many traditions, people do all kinds of stuff. To elicit these kinds of contact and to expla expand and explore the poorest porosity of their mind and the antipodes of their minds these far territories go into when we really explore our inner worlds. So I think I'm paying more and more attention to the positive experiences people have, and I realize most DMT containing psychedelics. People report meeting age agentic conscious beings, which is a nice way of saying entities or spirits. And in Roland Griffith studies, 80, 90% said these were positive. Yeah. Ayahuasca, it's very, which is A DMT campaigning, psychedelic, but also most people meet Mother Ayahuasca or other guide energies. There are of course nasty ones around. So I think. People get so scared of the inner world and we tend to ignore the fact that there are all these wonderful resources there. Yeah, so that's one the first point I wanted to make about this other world. And the second, and this is we need spirit to heal. We need this kind of contact. If all we're seeing is the nasty stuff, we're still frightened at the depths of our own minds. Hard, hard to enjoy life when you're constantly frightened of yourself. Yep. The other thing I'm trying to, just as Swedenborg dated his way, he created a geography in our world. I'm exploring that idea too, and I think it's a continuum, but there is. Subject and objective, do not divide. It is not a bifurcation like that. I believe it's a continuum, but many traditions have said there are three, not two. And I think a lot of people blame poor old Decar for a lot of stuff, the Cartesian dualism and all of that, but I think they're right. His dividing the world up into raise kajuan thinking stuff and raise extension, extensa stuff that has takes up space. That's a big problem. There's actually a third realm in between that Luis Eduardo Luna, the RO from Brazil, who's my age seventies and probably done six, 700 ayahuasca journeys. All this middle realm, the Rays fantastica. Because it's inhabited by the imaginal realm imagery. But I want, I've discovered that the Sufis had a very similar idea, Barza, and they say that we humans are in between beings. We are like an isus of land between the divine, the continent of the divine, and the continent of the material things. And we are an isus of contact. An InBetween between the interior subjective and e external world. And they have many other things they say and they say, this is not, this is actually wonderful and it's who we are. And EI Abi, who was one of the greatest lot of people think the greatest Islamic philosopher even said, recognizing that our nature is to be a barza is the beginning of wisdom. And the West totally denies the spike. So we don't get to, we don't get to even start on the staircase to wisdom. Winnicott had a very similar idea. He said that children learn by playing and playing is a fusion of imagination. And he used the word illusion with reality and he said, this kind of play creates an intermediate realm between the person's mind. Subjectivity and objectivity. And he even said, all human creativity and culture come from this intermediate realm. And one of his commentators or followers, acolytes, whose name I'm spacing out right now, called this the psychological continent, but they saw this as being foundational for all of human culture. One more. If I'm not going too far, John or Keith. He talks about the subjective realm, the objective realm, and he also says there's a realm he calls the trans. And the example he gives is from that evolutionary psychologist Gibson affordances. The idea that what we perceive in the world, we don't perceive things. When you see a coffee cup with a handle. What your body perceives is the ability to pick that thing up. It's a good thing to grab, affords us the possibility of grabbing it. And there is some laboratory evidence, like when we see a staircase, we see, it gives us the possibility of going up and down. Affordances are neither subjective or objective. They're trans. They're, they come from the interaction of these other two realms. And you can go even further with this. Just like the Sufis say, this is key. And Winnicott says this is key. This is where human meaning comes from. This is where we actually, the live our lives in this realm. And I'm going, what? We live our lives in a realm we've been trained in the West to believe does not exist at all. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. How foolish we are. Being in control of your mind and of your life is like the ultimate goal for most people. Yeah. Illusion of being, and this is all antithetical, the illusion of it, right? Yeah. The thing is, it's like you can't be in fear and in curiosity at the same time, and sometimes even in a given session, right? We're swaying in between the two and what the therapist is really trying to do is help. Access, curiosity in their own system and help the client do the same. Because when we do that, the work is safer and hey, every now and then, healing just tends to happen, right? Trauma is about unsafety and a loss of agency, right? And what you're talking about is having frameworks in words to what has happened to you or what might happen in a session or what might be happening right now helps create safety, right? It's also the same reason why a lot of folks from. Doing psychedelic work, a way to keep it safe is creating some scaffolding around like what could happen in their experience, and then helping them integrate that experience. It can be unsafe when people go in and have really traumatic experiences and their systems get blown out, and then they don't have a way to integrate what happened, right? So yeah. So much of it is about, yeah, safety, curiosity, having a way to explain things because humans, we like to explain what happened to us, right? We build a story around what happened to us immediately. Or someone that comes into my office and they've had a story around something that happened to them and they're looking to really just get that story confirmed right when they come to me again, it's like my mom was mean to me and now I seek out mean partners and that's why I dream. It's great they come to me for that. They came to the wrong guy. But I think you're right. I think you are talking about something that's super important and a lot of people don't like this idea. We live inside of a story, all of us. Including the hyper-rational alleged scientist. That person has a story about the nature of the world and what's morally right and wrong, and they just wanna pretend it's not a story, that it's a story just like anyone else's. And I think of stories as prisons. We choose to live inside most often. That's how they function, and I think need to get into a story, explore it. Then get out of it. Climb on top of that box and see where you can go next. Yeah, I think the stories are really pernicious. I think the idea of predictive coding or predictive processing is super important. Your story tells you what's relevant, what has value, what matters in your life. That's a big function of having a story. What is relevant to you on a deep level, what matters, what you value will determine the world you perceive. It will actually determine the world you live in. And this predictive coding model shows us how that happens. And it all happens pre subconsciously. You get raw sensory data down here somewhere, and there's lots of it. Less than only maybe a few, two, 3% of that gets up into your brain. There seem to be all these gates and the raw sensory data is coming up and there are these grids that determine value or relevance or whatever you want to call it, that come down. And if the grid says, nah, you're not relevant to my story. You never get to experience that in any way. And some of these models have six grids and some have 10 who know? I don't know who. This means that what we value deeply, not what we say we value, that hardly matters at all what our behaviors determines the world we perceive in the world we, yeah. So things are super important. Yeah. A lot of this comes down to how do we receive information, right? And bring it back to, I bring a lot of this back to the IFS basics around. Helping a client experience, insight, and how that's different. If not only you're aware of this critical part that tells you that you suck, but you can become more aware of him and when you open yourself to him and speak curiously toward him or whatever, and wait. And just wait and don't think and just wait. He might talk back to you, right? And let you know more about his story and why he does what he does or whatever. So that's a really weird thing to do. It's really weird to get information that way. Again, when so much of our culture is around, I am this person who has thoughts and I can control thoughts, right? Or from a CBT lens, right? It's like my thoughts are just distorted and I just need to undistort them and twist them and I'll feel better. Which to an extent is truer from a parts perspective. It's like there's a part of you that offers that distortion of you suck. Or really what if you suck or really. I'm afraid of you sucking.'cause that would mean disconnection, right? And loss of love. So that's what I'm trying to help you do is, oh, that makes sense. So it's like parts hold these core beliefs, parts hold these fears, these wounds. But that's a different way of getting information is like hearing from a apart. And then in the realm of a lot of your work, hearing from these other elements in the system, whether it's spirit, a spirit guide, ancestral guide, right? Something that is not native to your system is like the next level of kind of experiencing a different way of getting information, right? And I think IFS provides totally necess even necessary groundwork or foundation for this other work. Because in IFS, it becomes super clear that we're made up of parts. These parts are fully formed people, they're not a drive or some two dimensional thing, and we can and should form relationships with their whole persons. I'm a big fan of Martin Buber. I know Dick is not a big fan of Martin Buber, but this whole issue of personhood. A personal relationship is very important. And these people can hijack you. They can take you up and, oh, some. I don't do it so much anymore, but used to be if somebody would cut me off on the three-way, there was a tantruming 3-year-old driving my car all over. Oh yeah, I've got one of those. That's not the news. It's 70 miles. It's not good news. But anyway, once you. Get this way of interacting with other people of the subjective realm as fully formed people and having respectful relationships with them. It's much easier to start relating to spirits or whatever we're gonna call them in that way too. And I find this idea of personhood, it gets the most pushback and the most contemptuous sneering from people who don't like what I do. What is the idea of personhood? What does that mean? I'll go back to er 'cause I think he's the father of this. No, he is not. It goes back thousands of years. He says there's two possible, he calls 'em words, but they're actually word pairs. I thou or I it. And you can relate to everything either way. And he says specifically, you can relate to a stone in Anile way. Then he says, if you see the full dimensions and there's respect involved, he also says early, he seemed to say that all evil comes out of I it relating after the Holocaust, I think. I think his opinion of evil changed. Yeah. As it did for many people. But Martin Luther King was a personalist, he thought, and it was the basis the entire civil rights work. He had a great way of saying it. He said, we have to respect everybody because everybody has somebody this, there's this unique essence of them that will never be repeated and you know that requires respect. Where we recognize that in people, most of psychology treats our internal parts as it Freud. Never used the word ego, super ego, or Id. He just used the simple German pronouns I it and over I. So he thought everything that wasn't your ego wasn't the, I was an, it was a thing, and he tried to relate to the rest of the mind that way. Again, it's like. What is compassion and going back to this piece around a therapist making political posts, and I to your point, really agree we shouldn't be doing that. If you can think of someone you really don't like and hold them as a collection of parts that are well-meaning, and for some people, like very intricately designed protective systems that are doing what they believe they should do for survival, then you start to soften toward the person a little bit. Some people have parts of fear that means I'm gonna condone someone if I have compassion for them. And I find that really weird and I don't think that's like at risk. There's a difference between condoning someone or the behavior versus what's the real risk of cultivating compassion in your system toward that person. It's actually like the ultimate hack. It's like the ultimate way to actually find like love in your heart, right? It actually would be a way to be able to work with this person or have a conversation with this person, right? Or talk politics with this person if you're gonna do it right from even a 1% more self-led way. Right here, people have, their protective systems are so up around people, and then it creates this loss of connection, this further divide, and it's, I think, a crisis that we're right in the thick of right now, and, yeah. Dick says, protectors almost always create what they most fear in the external way. That's right. Yep. I can be pretty snarky. I'm no, I'm better on the snark meter than I used to be. But he said to me, Bob, you have x-ray vision for the protectors, but you often don't see the Xs behind them. And that was so painfully true, painfully accurate. I wanna give you an example of someone I consider like a Mount Everest of spirit. It was this Tibetan Buddhist monk who'd been captured by the Communist Chinese and held litter for 20 years. For much of that time, literally chained to a wall, and when he got free and was out in Darsala and was back to health, he was interviewed. These Western people were interviewing him. And one said, and he said that Monk said, oh, I was in grave danger. I was in grave danger there. And one of the Western reporters, oh, did you think you were gonna die? And the monk laughed. He said, no, I was afraid I might lose compassion for the Chinese. And I knew what that mean if you first one degrees with me politically. Oh my Lord. Yeah, we're all trying and something. So I actually had one of your buddies on the show him talking about his work in education. Great episode that's coming out today, May 19th, and then this will be out a week from today. And part of his framework is this loss of connection or the threat of loss of connection in the classroom and like that, that really is the heart of all of it. In the heart of really what our parts are trying to do is help us to create and maintain and preserve and not lose connection. And then yet, to your point, a lot of times we end up doing the very thing that we're trying to prevent. But it really is about that. And when we're doing that stuff, it usually creates isolation, which is, Elkin keeps saying, hiring, driving force of the universe. I was typing enough. I'll be talking about them in the conference I'm doing on spirit and healing, but also, I'm gonna do a book on this. All these people's different definition of what the real core of trauma is. A lot of people, it's separation was the big thing you've been saying, separation from who you really are, your real self separation from any contact with the divine. All these other ideas, numbing, which creates a universal separation. One woman said not having anyone to talk to about the trauma afterwards, which is another flavor of separation. I think this idea of numbing that trauma, creating this numbing is super important. The HA work, which is, I don't know, a spiritual or emotional healing. I don't even know what to call it. Found by Eva Parus a long time ago. They had a wonderful theory of the origin of evil, and I think it's right this, the evil begins in numbing to our own pain because once you've numbed to your own pain, in order to maintain that numbing, you have to numb everybody else's pain. Then to maintain that numbing and numb to everybody else's pain, you have to start poking at them to keep them away from you so that they don't trigger any of your stuff. Once you've started doing that you're rolling down the hill toward cruelty and it just, every little bit further you go, the meaner and meaner you get. So the origin to evil is numbing to our own pain, and that's what trauma often causes. So I think that's how trauma propagates itself. I've been wondering there's all this trauma and evil in the world. It's, it seems to be running the show here. How does it propagate? How does it reproduce? Would love to take a peek into the therapy profession 30 years ago, and part of how I got started on this work is upon. Finishing graduate school. It wasn't 30 years ago, but , the mention of trauma was virtually non-existent. Non-existent. We talked about like crisis intervention, like what to do when someone's activating crisis or there's a mass casualty or something like that. But we had virtually no training on trauma, and so like many therapists, you get into the field. You're sure comfortable with clients talking about these horrific things that happen to them, but then you don't really know what to do with at all. And unintentionally you might put them right back in their trauma and then you go, oh, I'm sorry, your time's up. See you in a week. Good luck surviving for the next week. And they go and are numbing and dissociating and all these things, right? Have explosive fights with someone on the freeway or every, there's partner, their friends who, whomever, right? I'm also on that. Getting trained in somatic, experiencing the Peter Levine stuff, and he talks a lot about the trauma vortex and the healing vortex. And he is got these images for it. And I actually, it helps me frame up what you're talking about, right? In terms of the trauma vortex and being in that hurt and in that pain and in that numbing and in that cycle. And some people, when they come to my office, they've been in that trauma vortex for a decade or decades or whatever it is, right? And the good news is just spending time in the healing vortex. Is healing in itself. And I think, again, a lot of that is getting into that compassion, love, a lot of things that I can help us access, but just being in that is healing in itself. The work isn't always necessarily about going back there, quote unquote, and reliving every excruciating detail. Of your actual trauma, the traumatic events, right? You already know what happened, right? It's like your parts were there and have every vi vivid detail already. But there's also, again, this split among therapists of, to what degree do you need to relive all this crap to in order to heal, right? So the EMR folks would say that we gotta go back there and we gotta hold that memory of mine and start the bilateral simulation and whatnot. And one thing I love about IFS is we don't necessarily have to go back there. The parts will show us the way. Primarily, it's if the parts need to be witnessed in that painful moment and then brought into the present and brought into the loving leadership of self, that's a much gentler path in my experience. But yeah, that's key difference between IFS and the of the world. Yeah. Catharsis versus witnessing the rest of the trauma world was catharsis. You have to pump all this stuff, get it out. It's what the part needs. Yeah. What does the part need you to know and see so that it doesn't feel left alone with that stuff anymore? Yep. The parts in control and they sound quite similar, but I think in practice they're very different processes. Yep. The something else I wanna say about this trauma, I'm old enough so that I can remember when therapists alleged that child sexual abuse almost never happened. The major textbook of psychiatry in America in the late sixties and the early seventies said Father-daughter incest happens less than one in a million times. Its vanishingly rare, and when it does happen, it's often good for the child. That was what was being taught. Psychiatrists and the whole movement, the survivor's movement was a grassroots movement. With some therapists and more therapists joining and the therapy schools and the quote experts we're all against it and did everything but to crush it, which is a dismal fact. And the recognition of trauma PTSD, that did not come from these fancy institutions that are not claiming to be the big trauma experts. It came from the Vietnam veterans rap groups. They knew PTSD 'cause they all had it. They were organized by one guy, the psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Lifton, and they went and they didn't go to the schools. The schools were hopeless. They went to Washington, DC and then Washington because they, you can't say no to a veteran in Washington. The Washington put pressure on the therapists association, and that's how PTSD got in the DSM. It's a pretty ugly and distressing story. We've come a long ways just in my lifetime. Yeah. And still have a long way to go. Part of my personal and professional life mission has become like, I would love for healing from trauma to be a no-brainer. Something that is completely accessible and when you walk into a therapist's office or a whomever's office, this is a thing that we can help you heal from. And not this mysterious beast of a life sentence, right? Or like having complex PTSD being a life sentence or whatever. That's what I'm up to here and I'm excited for this moment in time of the things we're learning, the things we can realize were not working back then. Even again, like Tim being in the schools and having kids take, fill out the ACEs scale to start scanning for this screen, for this stuff. Or a kid who can't sit still. Okay. He might have a DHD, he also might be highly traumatized. That's. That's a novel idea that's just now arriving in some school systems and public systems, and it's, let's keep going with that and be curious about the bigger picture and the many ripples of trauma. Bob, we got about five minutes left, so I know you mentioned you have yet another book coming out called Spirit Speaks. Tell me just a little bit more about what that book's about and what people can expect from it. Okay. About over 10 years ago now, I was at a workshop. Assisting Kay Gardner, who I admire. She is wonderful. All you IFS people. I believe she's gonna be coming out with a book on legacy burdens if you ever get a chance to work with her. Anyway, she suggested this exercise and I thought it was so stupid, but 'cause it was, Kay, I did it. And the exercise was you just think of something that you really want some guidance on and you just start a written dialogue. You put your name and then hi there, whatever name you wanna put in for spirit, and you ask the question, then you just put the spirit's name and write an answer. And I did this for about 10, 15 minutes and I was astounded. Answers came out of it that were wiser than what I was aware of. Clearly some something in there knew more than I did, which sort of makes sense from an IFS point of view. So I started doing this every day for 10, 15 years. And then I, this voice once said, you should publish this. And I went, oh, that's gonna, I'm gonna be totally the flake now. But then I've summarized, I've got about over 3000 pages for this stuff now, and I've summarized it, and that's what the book is gonna be about. It is clearly wiser than my conscious mind. And one thing I love is it has a great sense of humor. Great. We can't wait to check it out. And again, Bob, you have quite the following. I was in my level one training and people were plugging resources or institute approved resources and then people in the chat were plugging Bob Falconer interviews on Going Inside podcast. I don't think I'm institute approved, I might be in on the fringes style. Yeah. Rumors that they're talking nicely about. Yeah. Even despite that people are plugging your stuff in the chat and my level and training. So you're still in, you're on your own list. It's still very much appreciated by people and I've had people reach out to me and say. These chats with you are among their favorite episodes of this show. And I think it you, one of the many things you do is you give people permission to be curious. You give people permission to help their clients be curious about what else could be happening here, what else is happening in the system, right? And when we go beyond just like the ordinary parts that we learned to work with, what the magic and the phenomenon that can happen in our systems. Yeah. Kudos for giving people that permission and their. Rebellious, curious parts to see what's beyond. I wanna say one more thing. One thing that gets clearer and clearer to me after 50 years, more than 50 years of studying this stuff diligently. I do my homework, I have my hard work. The most brilliant, insightful and wise human beings on this planet are astoundingly ignorant. We know just about nothing. And we are in preschool. The most brilliant ones of us are in preschool. Most of us are wandering around in diapers, pretending we understand the universe. It's the poet. William Butler. Yeats had a beautiful image for this. He said, imagine all human knowledge is one bubble with that beautiful iridescent shame that moves around a bubble. Yes, it's beautiful, isn't it? Now? That bubble is one of many bubbles in a small patch of sea foam, which is on a little bit of sand in an insignificant cove on the shore of a vast, dark sea. Epic. Yeah, and this helps me stay curious. Awesome. Bob, it's great to have you back, and I'm excited for your new book. We'll make sure to put links to everything that we have in the show notes and description, and of course links to your website where people can go and see a list of your books, your offerings, your workshops and stuff like that, because I know you have an evolving list of offerings and ways that you help people. So we'll be sure to link all that stuff. Okay, great. Good talking with you again, John. Take care. Thanks, Bob. See you soon. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to another episode of Going Inside. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe wherever you're listening or watching and share your favorite episode with a friend. You can follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok at John Clarke Therapy and apply to work with me one-on-one at John Clarke therapy.com. See you next time.