How to Achieve Inner Peace & Healing | Dr. Richard Schwartz

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Richard Schwarz Dr Richard Schwarz is the founder of internal family systems therapy which is a unique form of therapy that's less centered on your relationship to other people but instead focuses mainly on identifying the parts of yourself and your personality that tend to emerge in different situations and that tend to create anxiety resent or depression another key feature of

internal family systems therapy is that it's not just focused on fixing challenges within us it also teaches you how to grow your confidence openness and compassion now today's episode is different than any other episode of the podcast that we've done before and that's for two reasons first Dr Schwarz takes me through a brief session of ifs therapy so you can see exactly what it looks like in practice and then he takes you The Listener through it as well so as you'll soon observe and experience internal family systems therapy allows you to work through challenging sticking

points basically the parts or feelings within you that you don't like to have and then it shows you how to convert those feelings into more functional aspects of yourself so as you'll soon see internal family systems therapy is both super interesting and it's an incredibly empowering practice it's also a form of therapy that's now been studied and for which there's a lot of peer-reviewed science to support its efficacy by the end of today's episode Dr dick Schwarz will have shown you that a lot of the negative reactions that we tend to have with different people

and things tend to originate from a few basic patterns that once we understand we can really transmute into more positive responses it's a really interesting practice it's one that you can apply today during the episode and that you can return to in order to apply going forward in your life before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in

keeping with that theme this episode does include sponsors and now for my discussion with Dr Richard Schwarz Dr dick Schwarz welcome thank you Andrew it's a delightful to be with you yeah I've uh heard so much about you and your work and internal family systems models um I've had the opportunity to do a little bit of that work to be honest I don't know whether or not the person I did that work with um was formerly trained in it so I'd like to start off by just asking you what is internal family systems and what

are the different components and as we do that I'm sure people are going to be thinking about these various components for their own life and the people in their lives corre yeah well originally I developed it as a form of psychotherapy which is probably the way it's used most now but it's also become a kind of Life practice and a just a a paradigm for understanding the human mind and to as an alternative to the cultures Paradigm so that's um saying a lot uh and it's been quite a journey I know of fraan psychoanalysis I

know of you know any number of different branches of psychology that have a clinical slant to them there's cognitive behavioral therapy what are what are the core components of internal family systems yeah so one basic assumption is that the mind isn't unitary that actually it's uh we're all multiple personalities not in the diagnostic sense but we all have these what I call Parts other systems call subpersonalities ego States things like that uh and then it's the natural state of the mind to be that way that we're born with them because they're all very valuable and

uh have qualities and resources to help us survive and and Thrive but trauma and what's called attachment injuries and the slings and arrows we suffer Force these little naturally valuable Parts into roles that can be destructive often they don't like it all but because they're frozen often in time in the during the trauma and they live as if it's still happening they're in these protective roles that uh can be quite extreme and interfere in your life and uh yeah so I just stumbled on the phenomena 40 now I think it's 41 years ago and it's

been you know amazing ride so at the time were you already practicing as a clinical psychologist I actually have a PhD in Maryland family therapy so I was part of the movement in Family Therapy away from inas Psychic work and there was a polarization and we thought we could reorganize families and heal all these symptoms just by doing that we didn't have to muck around in the inner world and I went to prove that and this was about 1983 by getting a group of bulimic kids together in their families and tried to reorganize the families

just the way the book said to and failed that the the kids didn't realize they'd been cured and they kept binging and purging so out of frustration I began asking why and they started talking this language of parts and they would say some version of when something happens bad bad happens in my life it triggers this critic who's calling me all kinds of names inside and that goes right to the heart of a part that feels empty and alone and worthless and that's so distressing to feel that the binge part comes in and takes me

out takes me away from all that pain but the critic comes in and attacks me for the binge and then the criticism goes right to the heart of that that worthless part so to me as a family therapist this sounded like what I'd been studying in external families these circular sequences of interaction and so I just got curious and just started to explore are these different parts that exist within each and all of us are they represented by a clear and distinct voice from the other or do people typically experience them as just the self

like my inner critic uh um you'll give us the other names and titles um or is this happening typically below people's conscious awareness some of both so most people are aware they're critic and uh but other other times you're not aware of these parts call Exiles that you've locked away because you didn't want to feel their feelings they're stuck in these bad trauma scenes and to survive in your life you had to push them away and so with those parts a lot of people aren't really consciously aware of them until these protector Parts give space

and open the door to the Exiles I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor better help better help offers Professional Therapy with a license therapist carried out entirely online now I personally have been doing therapy weekly for well over 30 years in fact I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise which of course I also do every week there are essentially three things that great therapy provides first of all it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about pretty much any issue with

second of all it can provide support in the form of emotional support and directed guidance and third expert therapy can provide useful insights insights that allow you to better not just your emotional life and your relationship life but of course also the relationship to yourself and your professional life and to all sorts of goals better he help makes it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you resonate with and that can provide you those three benefits that come from effective therapy also because better help allows for therapy to be done entirely online it's

super time efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule if you'd like to try better help you can go to betterhelp.com huberman to get 10% off your first month again that's betterhelp.com / huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by David David makes a protein bar unlike any other it has 28 gram of protein only 150 calories and 0 gram of sugar that's right 28 gram of protein and 75% of its calories come from protein this is 50% higher than the next closest protein bar David protein bars also taste amazing even the texture

is amazing my favorite bar is the chocolate chip cookie dough but then again I also like the new chocolate peanut butter flavor and the chocolate brownie flavor basic basically I like all the flavors a lot they're all incredibly delicious in fact the toughest challenge is knowing which ones to eat on which days and how many times per day I limit myself to two per day but I absolutely love them with David I'm able to get 28 grams of protein in the calories of a snack which makes it easy to hit my protein goals of one

gram of protein per pound of body weight per day and it allows me to do so without ingesting too many calories I'll E A David protein bar most afternoons as a snack and I always keep one with me when I'm out of the house or traveling they're incredibly delicious and given that they have 28 gram of protein they're really satisfying for having just 150 calories if you'd like to try David you can go to david.com huberman again that's david.com huberman I definitely want to go into what the various protector roles or titles are labels excuse

me and the Exiles before we do that uh since you brought up the topic of trauma this is a topic that I think many many people are interested in I'm just curious you know how do you define a trauma um and why do you think it is that traumas tend to lock us into uh a state that was representative of an earlier time why is it that it's so linked to this thing of time perception yeah the why question I can't totally answer but definitely is and for me traumas aren't necessarily traumatizing so something bad

happens to you and if you can access what you and Martha Beck were calling the the self capital S and you go to the part of you that got hurt by what happened instead of pushing it away and locking it up and you embrace it and you bring it closer to you which means going to your suffering which is counter to what most of us try to do but if you were to do that and you could help it on Lo the feelings it got from the trauma then you're not traumatized what's traumatizing is something

bad happens these more vulnerable parts of us the most sensitive parts of us get hurt or feel worthless because of what happened or get terrified and then we lock them away because we don't want to feel that feeling anymore and everybody around us tells us to just let it go just move on Don't Look Back and so we wind up exiling our most sensitive parts simply because they got hurt and then when you have a lot of Exiles you feel more delicate the world seems more dangerous because anything could trigger that and when they get

triggered they'll they'll blow up they'll take over so it's like these flames of raw motion come popping out so other parts have to are forced into these manager roles or or these protective roles and some of them are trying to manage your life so that you don't get triggered anymore so that for example nobody gets close enough to you to trigger any of that or so you you look really good so you don't get rejected or perform at a really high level to counter the worthlessness many of those become the critics because in their effort

to try to get you to look good they're yelling at you to try and behave and and do what they want so you look better uh and and then there are other what we call manager protectors that are for some people particularly women have these massive caretaking parts that don't let them take care of themselves and take care of everybody else and so I could go on and on there's a lot of common manager roles and I want to make clear as I'm talking about this that these are not the essence of the parts and

that's a big mistake that most of the field has made is to assume the critic is just a internalized critical parent voice instead of listening to it and hearing that it's desperately trying to protect you so none of these are what they seem that's the role they've been forced into and the analogy again is to a external family like kids in in dysfunctional families are forced into these extreme roles that aren't who they are it's the role they got forced into by the Dynamics of the family so the same is true with this internal family

so most of us have a lot of what we call managers they got us here they they help us in our careers and they other systems would call them the defenses or the ego uh and and you know in spirituality they get vilified too but their whole MO is keep everything under control please everybody and you'll survive the world has a way of breaking through those defenses triggering an exile when that happens it's a big emergency because again these flames of raw motion are going to overwhelm you and make you have trouble functioning or even

getting out of bed so there are other parts that immediately go into action to deal with that emergency and in contrast to these managers they're impulsive reactive Damn the Torpedoes I don't care about the collateral damage to your body to your relationships I just got to get you higher than those Flames or D them with some substance or distract you till they burn themselves out so we call those firefighters and again these are just the roles when released from these rolls they'll transform into being something very valuable so the firefighter the inner firefighter role is

one of the Exiles that surfaces under conditions of of a lot of emotion maybe we could um this is a beautiful description and I'm completely on board this idea that we have multiple aspects of self or selves inside Yung said that too I think right like y had all this a long time ago yeah and I what what I like about this protectors uh Slash managers versus again not versus because they're combed but as a distinct category the Exiles is um just feels very true to me um and I like the the directness of the

language so maybe we could just um like create a mental grid for people like if let's say I came to you as a patient and I said listen I you know I'm I'll just be D I'll be honest why not do not let's do it secretly I brought you here to get therapy no no um but okay so I'm somebody who uh for a very long time has been able to organize his life um I tend to have smooth interactions with my co-workers great friendships um I now have a very good relationship with my immediate

family very good in fact I'm still working on a few things with a few people but I'm living in a mode of uh great uh joy and appreciation these days however um I'm I'm not going to give the details of this for sake of privacy but um you know the other day I was in a discussion with a family member and they had a grievance with me that I felt we had already addressed and it um and it became very high friction in conversation very quickly to the point where we tabled as an idea that

maybe we just take some like serious space like um which was not reflective of how deeply I love this person or they love me it was just a feeling of both of us just being in this like high tension place like and um uh fortunately the conversation ended well with a path forward that involved more contact not less that I that both of us feel really good about but in that moment where I'm feeling overwhelmed MH and they're feeling overwhelmed MH what's going on there we're both adults so overwhelmed with anger at each other or

frustration frustration yeah frustration like that um previous conversations I felt I hadn't um I was saying things uh they were saying things but I feel like there was so much underlying tension based on a history of poor communication nested on top of a of a of the kind of an intensity of emotion that we both tend to carry um and somehow we just like couldn't parse things from that state yeah and uh so I sat in my chair and I just told myself okay I'm going to not say anything yeah for five minutes because I

know myself right it's not that I thought I would say something really barbed wire but I just thought this is not going to work like I'm I'm slamming my head against a wall they're not hearing me I'm clearly not hearing them and I the thing that helped me through that was just because it was what was taught to me I just decided to surrender MH and the word surrender used to mean to me letting go of Truth yeah and it feel really scary because when you say surrender it's almost like saying one context is surrender

means you're right no matter and you're right I was just going to say that's right but I've come to realize that surrender to me is just a it surrender in the moment yeah so that I can get um better Optics yeah uh internal and external Optics so to me the the the thing of embracing surrender in those types of moments very uncomfortable uh but I now I've learned it's it's a great um a great way to get perspective um but even as I describe it the the whole situation was so heavy I came out of

that call even though it ended well and was like yeah like uh that was that was like i' never run a marathon but I'd rather run a marathon than do two of those a week totally agree and yeah I had one of those with my wife a few days ago okay all right well and yeah very similar just uh caught that part and said okay let's just let it go for now and we'll talk later so I could give you my take on what happened but if you wanted to we could just go in and

do a little exploring sure yeah yeah sure okay should we start with the frustrated angry part sure all right you ready I believe so yeah okay so remember that uh feeling and then focus on it and find it in your body or around your body okay where do you find it somewh between the middle of my midsection and up like right be my forehead like there's pressure it's great both places it's great you have such clarity about it so as you focus there how do you feel toward this part of you oh no it's very

unpleasant so you don't like it no I don't like it yeah which makes sense because it does you know sometimes escalate things with your friend and uh doesn't leave you feeling good so I understand why you don't like it but we're going to ask the parts that don't like it to give us the space to just get curious about it and see if that's possible okay um okay so how do you feel toward it now feel a little bit of relaxation in the in the the head part of it um yeah it's it's it's funny

how when you ask me to localize it it's so clear it's like this thing inside me it's like this about the size of like a teddy bear that's just like but it's not a it's not a good thing it's like pushed up there but then when you said to get curious about it um feels like it kind of drops down a little bit and kind of kind of Moves In A little maybe softens a little bit so you do feel curious toward it yeah all right so go ahead and ask it what it wants you

to know about itself silently up to you either way whichever more comfortable well since this is a podcast and none of this is comfortable anyway for me to do in public uh to if I'm quite honest um yeah just ask ins sry sure um no I'll I'll do it out loud um okay so what do you want me to know about you yeah and just wait for the answer don't think I know you got a big cognitive part so we're going to ask them when to relax and just whatever comes in terms of the answer

just wait for it well my answer is based on the feeling that occurred immediately after asking it which was the answer was um I I can dissipate and then I kind of felt it dissipate okay so it feels like an energy that when condensed sucks MH but when I look at it softened a little bit and then asked the question you asked and then it feels like it just kind of went into the rest of my body but not poisoning the rest of my body just kind of um mixing in with you know of course

we're speaking in complet you know in in mystical terms here but um right so it it relaxed it may not have dissipated in the way we think about that it might have just relaxed more MH but just keep asking it what's it afraid would happen if in that context it didn't try to take over in the way that it did just ask that question that if it if it didn't try to take over yeah what's it afraid would happen if it hadn't tried to take over oh just wait for the answer yeah that's a good

question okay so what would happen if you didn't take over my system that way condense from my St from my stomach to to my head when I'm feeling that way yeah um don't think yeah oh the answers are coming really quick um that I wouldn't be able to discern the truth okay so the truth is really important to this part of you yeah yeah because it tends to surface when I'm hearing something that I that you know wrong that I believe to be fundamentally untrue typically about my thoughts or feelings right I've come maybe with

age I've come to the conclusion that two people can look at the same interaction or same thing and have two very different versions of it I'm okay with that the part that I'm very very sensitive to people in my life know this is when someone else tells me how I feel right what my motives are or how I feel that to me is like like that that's a kind of a hard um fast way to engage this thing okay so just stay with this thing just stay with it okay and let it know you get

that that having people misinterpret your motives is really really hard for it and ask him more about that just again don't think but ask why that's so hard why does that bother it so much and what's it afraid would happen if it let that go yeah so what why are you afraid to why do you have to step in yeah when that happens my answer is not going to be very satisfying for the listeners but or for me um but it it's saying because if you can't hold on to your truth then nothing will make

sense so there's something about making sense or not nothing making sense that it's really scared to is that right yeah I mean uh I I decided to become a a biologist um and to try and understand the meat inside our heads and body that is the nervous system because I felt and I still feel that it uh it can reveal some fundamental facts or truths as um you know understanding reality as it were is really important to me because I feel like humans including myself of course um are so prone to misinterpretation so like the

truth as a thing out there I'm willing to let go of completely right like completely right the truth as it exists for knowing for certain what my motivations were or what did or didn't happen but typically it's about motivation what did or didn't happen you usually can parse with somebody yeah um that's that's something I feel I need to protect at all cost yeah so speaking of protect and so this is a protector part right ask it if it's protecting other parts of you that are vulnerable and get hurt when someone Miss Miss attunes to

what your motive is just ask that question don't think that's an easy that's a fast one not easy but it's a fast one yeah the part of me that that that feels injured Yeah by that is the fact that I believe that I at least at the beginning and throughout most of a relationship and even if a relationship ends for whatever reason that my I know it's my nature to try and imagine as much goodness in the intent of the other person as possible so if I were to let go of this response the keep

call in my mind I'm calling like this like it's like a titanium teddy bear shaped thing but it doesn't it's not feel like a it's like a titanium block there um I would um potentially move into a mode of judgment mhm um of them it's interesting because I there are many people from my past and maybe even a few from my present that people close to me who are pretty well qualified tell me like I should dislike them or cut them out of my life and um I don't there are a few maybe one or

two instances of people I've cut out of my life but it's my inclination always to just try and see what can what can exist yeah so that and that part feels important to me I don't know why it's important now that come to think about it like um well we can ask but yeah so I'm what I'm hearing is this guy this titanium guyh is keeping it bury another part that can be very judgmental of the other person yeah I don't like feeling that yeah it it feels energetically wasteful yeah and it feels more than

that it feels incredibly sad yeah it's sort of like I think to to accept that part of myself is to kind of give up on some fantasy Y which is probably an unrealistic fantasy which is why I'm calling it a fantasy I realize yeah yeah like this um because I I look at and I always have since I was a kid I look at people as we are among the animals we the curators of the Earth because we're good at technology development but aside from that and our were like just like you wouldn't I can't

imagine that a raccoon you know looks at another raccoon and it's was like that's a bad raccoon it's just a ra rabid right you know and they just um i i s yearn for the same the same sensitivity to our own species I get that yeah like I don't hate anybody well there might be parts of you that do but I hate behaviors okay I hate um things that people have said or done not certainly mostly to other people not to me but I yeah being like really being angry at someone in a in a

pervasive way not just in the moment yeah is is something that's very difficult for me but what I'm hearing what the what we heard from this part it's afraid if it doesn't do this it a part that judges the other probably in a you know not so nice way would be released does that sound right yeah so there is that part in there it's just that you've been able to kind of Exile it yes okay yeah I'm comfortable with the idea that you take the appropriate amount of distance could be zero or could be near

infinite but that I should take the appropriate amount of distance from things and people so that I can be in the most loving stance toward them or that yeah I'm not trying to sound technical here with all the parallel constructions but I've thought this through a lot like there's some people that I um that there's no limit to the extent to which I I want to interact with them you know we have other things to do we're not g to spend all our time together and then there are other people that I love them but

I I know that I have to keep a certain amount of distance in order to continue to love them this is the same thing so in that moment it's almost like but it's coming up without my conscious thing it's not like saying listen that's the kind of person I can you know talk to like once once a month or something and I'll just add you know in professional settings not now but in the distant past when I was in a very hierarchical structure of I'm still in Academia still teach but not um running research anymore

um formally you know like I had a couple um senior colleagues that I really loved and respected but that they um they would say or do things that I thought were frankly unethical to other people and to me that I felt them as kind of abrasive so I might like the physical manifestation of this is I would make it a point to to like walk past their office door quickly so that they didn't say Hey cuz I don't want to interact but I I don't I'm not familiar with cutting people out of my life right

I'm just not familiar with doing that I don't I sort of don't believe in it as a value let's pause for a second I'll give you a little overview where we areh so we started with this guy who came up with your friend and is trying to protect that relationship because if you continue to be Mis understood in terms of your motives it would have an impact does that sound right yeah the only thing I as a family member um yeah that not that matters but close family member got it yeah and in exploring this

part asking what it's afraid would happen if it didn't do that so there's this other part that might come out that would be very judgmental of that family member and really might have a bad influence on your relationship with that person does that sound right that's correct okay so we have these two well we have you who's noticing all this which we should talk more about and then we have these two parts that are sort of polarized but uh one the judgmental one you really don't like and so you really go to lengths to keep

it Bay and you're you kind of admire this guy uh and and but you also know that he can get in the way at times too does all that sound right yeah that's right because I'm describing a recent situation where the presence of this like titanium teddy bear S I don't know why that's amusing to me to say that um the shape of a teddy bear I'm not seeing a teddy bear in there but the rough roughly that size and shape um it creates a protection but a pressure internally that's super uncomfortable it's actually taking

me a couple days to dissipate this yeah um and I do think somewhat counter to the way I'm describing it it doesn't prevent me from saying something it actually if it's if it's too much it's almost like that's when words start coming out and they're not kind right so it's not a real protector in the sense like it's preventing me from a course of action I don't want to take right it's more like feels like it's kind of extruding all this stuff and obviously I'm responsible for my words and actions I know that but it

does feel like it it creates kind of Tak it takes over yeah that that's the way to put it so let's let's um go through that again so uh first of all I'm so grateful that you're willing to be this vulnerable and expose these parts uh so this guy actually they're both probably what we call Firefighters and very reactive there's may be some other very vulnerable part that is involved here we haven't heard about but uh if I were to be continue if we continue to work together I would work to get permission to go

to the judgmental guy too and what you would find is he's a protector too he's not just a bunch of negative thoughts about people and as I was hearing earlier you spent a lot of time in your life um trying to be fair to people and to not judge them and to see them what they do is just their behaviors and not who they are which is great but in the process of doing that sometimes we wind up having to push away the parts that want to judge and want to hate and so on and

what I find is if we can go there and get to know them they're just protectors too and they're young and they uh when they are able to unload the the hate they might carry the Judgment they'll transform so this is a model of transformation in that sense and it's there are no bad parts you go to everybody in there regardless of how you think they how bad they are and you get curious about them and you learn how they're trying to protect and then we help them out of their protective roles and help them

trust there's a you who you talked about with Martha who can run things that they don't have to do it because most of them are young and get them to trust this you to handle your family member rather than they have to take over or try to take over in the way they did does this make any sense yeah it makes total sense I you know what you said at the beginning uh permission to go to the um judgmental part I was just um you my mind um flits when I hear that flits to um

you know two possibilities one's a novel possibility one's a familiar possibility The Familiar possibility is if I were to really feel the disappointment that I'm feeling when this p in the in the other person shows up again because at least seems to I'm very familiar with the pattern right then um uh it would fundamentally like change the way that I feel about them that's right like I'm trying to hold on to the goodness relationship that's right but of course I I I want to be very clear not just for anyone listening but for myself too

that um clearly the the um the protecting uh role of this Tian tanium teddy bear um it's created something where what the times when things have broken through from my side they're not kind right and or they're spoken in a way that just is not constructive right right um so yeah and then the the second possibility is that I had considered this possibility but the the second possibility is that uh where I to let myself feel that disappointment that maybe the relationship could persist MH um like I've been looking at those things as mutually exclusive

exclusive yeah um and as I say all this um I also realize that well the the the honest disclaimer is like I don't want to give the impression that I don't judge people I'm human and I certainly do I'm just saying that when there's a relationship that I wish to Main contain I'll go to Great Lengths to push aside knowledge of of my own experience Andor just judgment I've made this um I've engaged in this pattern in ways that were ended up being extremely destructive to me by completely like putting the blinders onto things that

were right in front of me and that's what I'm talking consciously that's what I'm talking because I adored uh the person so much in other dimensions like that you know and you know it's not a lack of a better word a holistic way to approach things but I also will say that in contrast to those types of relationships the the relationships where this is where the the titanium generator is not required feel to me so like by comparison but also in the absolute scale feel to me like the best possible relationships one could have they're

like pinch me type of relationships like my friendship some of my relationships to family like my co-workers and and there are others too I've certainly had romantic relationships like that relationships my relationship to my dog as trivial as people might think that seems the the contrast of that like where there's no need for this protector part it's like the best thing because it feels completely safe and uninhibited yeah I never have to worry that I'm going to be taken over from the inside yeah nor do I ever worry that I'm going to like really screw

up yeah and I hope that if I do screw up they'll tell me but like it's uh it's the complete absence of fear so let me check can and just see how this has been to discuss and and focus and so on what's it been like to do this process um it's a lot in the sense that um I don't like feeling that titanium thing ted bear teddy bear um it's very it's been very informative so it's balanced by that um and maybe that's why I I went into a little riff about the pleasant relationships

and how um how outsized positive they are for me they're they're like a they're like a salv and an Elixir for me um that uh so maybe I give myself a little like washover with that because it it's pretty uncomfortable yeah um but it's been It's really informative um and it also tells me that the internal family systems worked idea of someone else was uh an attempt at this but so very different which makes sense because this is uh your Art and Science so so I'm grateful yeah so yeah it feels good what I was

saying earlier is if we were to pursue it we could get to the point where the teddy bear guy could unload the feelings he carries that makes it so uncomfortable and he would transform how would I how would we go about doing that just so you you would focus on him again M we would explore more of what he's protecting either we would go to the guy he's trying to keep it Bay that would ruin a relationship or often these parts are protecting something much V vulnerable from your past some young part that's stuck somewhere

in the past it has a big issue about being misunderstood in terms of motives or something yeah it's it not that I need uh Clarity on this right now but it's more that it protects the possibility of a relationship at all yeah like I think the fear is like if I were to look through my lens of Truth what's happened or is happening in the moment if I were a quote unquote better boundaried person it' be done yesterday yeah but so it's sort of like a desire to live out a fantasy got it I mean

if I'm honest so so that would be the part that we would go to that it protects that has this fantasy of what a relationship should be or could be who might be stuck somewhere in the past and we would learn we would witness you know you talked with Martha about compassionate witness we would witness where he stuck and what was happening back then and then I would have you go in and get him out of that time period then we' have him unload the desire for that fantasy that uh keeps you getting hurt and

then I would have you have the teddy bear see it doesn't have to protect him anymore and then we would help the teddy bear unload the feelings he carries and then he could relax and they would all start to trust you which we should talk about a little bit now who is you who's separate from these others yeah and for the record I never owned a teddy bear as a kid I had I had a stuffed frog I had a teddy bear I had a well I'm not embarrassed I had a stuffed frog that I

love is Frid the Frog yeah and um uh but so I don't know where the teddy bear thing came up but it was the the shape is so very clear um but let me let me just uh elaborate on what I was just saying because when you separated from him and you found him here and I asked you how you felt toward him and you had an attitude about him at first remember and we got that to relax and got curious about him then you started to access more of what I call yourself with the

capital less so it comes through curiosity comes well start often starts with curiosity MH and just to backtrack a little bit so when I would have uh these clients in the early days starting to work with these parts like the critic and so on uh and I once I got hip to the fact they weren't what they seemed and they deserve to be listened to rather than fought with so I would I would help the parts that hated step out and clients could do that pretty readily so and and when then I was say now

how do you feel toward this critic and spontaneously people would say I'm just curious about why it calls me names all day or even would say I feel sorry for it that it has to do this I'm going to help it and when they were in that state and I would ask what part of you is that that's great let's keep that around they'd say that's not a part like these others that's me that's my essence or that's my self so I came to call that the self with a capital S 40 years later thousands

of people doing this all over the world turns out that that self is in everybody just beneath the surface of these parts so that when they open space you can access it quickly and has all these great qualities what I call the eight C's so curious but also calm confident compassionate courageous clear creative and connected and that person knows how to heal these parts so once I get somebody in a lot of what call Self I'll just say okay what do you want to say to this part and how does how does it react and

now what do you want to do with the part I can kind of get out of the way and one of the Hallmarks of ifs as opposed to a lot of other therapies is that it's not so much about me becoming that you know good attachment figure to these hurting parts of you these inner children you become that you become the good attachment figure yourself or the good inner parent or the good internal leader for these parts and they come to trust you as a leader and then you get into it with your family member

and you just remind the part now I can handle this just let me let me stay and now when that happens with my wife sometimes not on a good day I can stay in the seaword qualities and have a totally different conversation with her than if that protector took over I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor ag1 ag1 is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink with adaptogens I've been taking ag1 daily since 2012 so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast the reason I started taking ag1 and the reason I still

take ag1 is because it is the highest quality and most complete foundational nutritional supplement what that means is that ag1 ensures that you're getting all the necessary vitamins minerals and other micronutrients to form a strong foundation for your daily Health ag1 also has probiotics and prebiotics that support a healthy gut microbiome your gut microbiome consists of trillions of microorganisms that line your digestive tract and impact things such as your immune system status your metabolic Health your hormone health and much more so I've consistently found that when I take ag1 daily my digestion is improved my

immune system is more robust and my mood and mental focus are at their best in fact if I could take Just One supplement that supplement would be ag1 if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 with your order of ag1 again go to drink a1.com huberman to claim this special offer today's episode is also brought To Us by wealthfront I've been using wealthfront for my savings and my investing for nearly a

decade and I absolutely love it at the start of every year I set new goals and one of my goals for 2025 is to focus on saving money since I have wealthfront I'll keep that Savings in my wealthfront cash account where I'm able to earn 4% annual percentage yield on my deposits and you can as well with wealth front you can earn 4% apy on your cash from partner Banks until you're ready to either spend that money or invest it with wealth front you also get free instant withdrawal to eligible accounts every day even on

weekends and holidays the 4% apy is not a promotional rate and there's no limit to what you can deposit and earn and you can even get protection for up to $8 million through FDIC Insurance provided through wealth front's partner Banks wealthfront gives you free instant withdrawals where it takes just minutes to transfer your money to eligible external accounts it also takes just minutes to transfer your cash from the cash account to any of wealth Run's automated investment accounts when you're ready to invest there are already a million people using wealth front to save more earn

more and build long-term wealth earn 4% apy on your cash today if you'd like to try wealth front go to wealthfront.com huberman to receive a free $50 bonus with a $500 deposit into your first cash account that's wealthfront.com huberman to get started now this has been a PID testimonial of wealthfront wealthfront brokerage isn't a bank the apy is subject to change for more information see the episode description I'm struck by a couple of things that I think people will be um if I may wise to think about uh one is yeah in the classic psychodynamic

or CBT model of therapy right the it's clear that the the client or patient sometimes it's called right patient um therapist relationship is one where it it takes on certain um components that exist in the outside world with other people and it's always um slightly really bothered me um slash concerned me that that's the structure and as you said in uh ifs internal family systems you become your own kind of therapist if if you will for lack of a better way to put it I like that because um uh there's so much discussion nowadays about

you know parenting yourself and this kind of thing and um learning to Mother yourself and father and I actually think there's Great Value in that I mean I learned by living alone you know how to cook for myself and clean for myself these are I'm mapping to stereotypes here but um but also to protect myself and to you know organize myself and be very very disciplined and um actually running a laboratory was a great um teaching there because you're basically a single academic parent to to all these these people so you have to you you

quickly realize where you lack maternal instincts and where you may lack or over uh overemphasize have hypertrophied paternal instincts you you so that was a good for to to see my weaknesses um and hopefully some strengths too so I like this idea that that one can play those roles for oneself um how is ifs typically done if somebody doesn't have access to a therapist who's expert in it or is that really the only proper Gateway into it no so because I'm sitting here with the master the the founder and um and I'm very grateful by

the way for the work we just did so thank you feels good I I it was a privilege yeah thank you yeah likewise um but most people won't have direct one-on-one access to you so um it's very experiential um I imagine in books and courses people can learn how to do this and by the way this isn't this was not preconceived as a as a pitch for books and courses but I'm wondering like if can somebody do this on their own the very first time that that's what I want to know yeah yeah so for

a long time I resisted trying to take this directly to the public because I learned the hard way that some systems particularly people with huge amounts of trauma are quite delicate and if you start going to these you know the part we talked about that's vulnerable inside that has this view of relationships this kind of idealized view of of relationships of yours uh would be what I call an exile that if we were to go to it and you know we won't today because it's requires a lot of vulnerability but if we were to a

lot of EX extreme protectors might come out and then people start to get scared so uh so it took a long time to figure out how we might bring it to the public and safer way and so we just put out a a workbook for people and it doesn't involve necessarily going to those places but there's a huge amount you can do just by working the way we started to with these protectors and getting to know them and know that they're not you they're just a part trying their and know it's not anything negative that

judgmental part you've got such an attitude about or fear of uh if you were get just to begin getting curious about it and getting to know it a bit you'd find out that it's very valuable part that has a lot of discernment like you said you know and wanted wants desperately to keep you from getting in these relationships where you get hurt and get so judgmental because you don't listen to it do you follow what I'm saying I do I do I in fact something pops to mind maybe I could just ask you about it

I um my mind's right on what you're saying but you know something something occurred to me as you said it which is uh if I were to for instance really feel the feeling of like hey that's really screwed up or like that's not like actually feel the disappointment or judgment that this titanium teddy bear is trying to protect against um I realize it leads to a lot of role confusion and identity confusion that's right and I'll just be very blunt uh it's probably not the best thing to do on a podcast but I'm going to

do it anyway which is is you know this is how I feel about modern politics I see things on the left that make sense to me and things that are to me just absolutely ludicrous inappropriate offensive and like just badly wrong I see things on the right that make a ton of sense to me and also things that are inappropriate offensive and wrong and as a consequence I'm trying to see the best the the goodness in both sides right and just kind of create this kind of uh swiss cheese model of of the world talking

about politics because it's just simpler to do and I people at least know the groups we're talking about and but then it it leaves me in a place of no affiliation and I'm then between one of two stances one of just kind of standing there being like yeah well there's no real position in the middle that is an official position in the middle but it also makes me just want to put up the middle finger to both and say I'm a double hater but of course I'm going a adult and a citizen who cares about

people in the country and so I feel like to being an adult I can't opt out but there's like I feel unaffiliated I feel like there's no option for me and and this Maps pretty well to I think the identity and role confusion that I feel when I um place my my again understanding the truth is a is a complicated thing but my judgment on things and people it's like well then what is my role as a son what is my role as a as a partner what is my role if this thing is true

and so it's a way I'm realizing of of protecting the Simplicity of a role that's right and I did grow up in a home where like the roles were like you know you're son you do certain things like you know you do you know and um uh so but I also have a rebellious side to me so the the the role confusion is something that I imagine a lot of people are familiar with with yeah um and when one and I also believe that when you just really say well they did something bad therefore all

bad therefore I'm part of the opposite team right that to me is an unlived life yeah it's like it's like it's a a but I see a lot of people do it and actually sometimes I'm envious of people that have that ability because they seem so they seem so unconflicted right um so it's a tough thing to be a thinking feeling person at the level of nuance it kind of sucks sometimes yeah I'd rather do that than than um be a double hater or um just cleanly opt in yeah does that make sense totally makes

sense and what I'm hearing is that when you're looking at a person or a political party or issue in the world you'll hear from these conflicted Parts they each have perspective just like our country now hears from these conflicted parts and but there you don't have a lot of access to what I'm calling self in those context because see one of the seword is Clarity so again as I was listening to you and Martha you were talking about how there are times where you you just have the sense in your body of what's right or

what's true that's what I'm calling self self has that Clarity uh and self sees Injustice and self some of those seword are um courage confidence and Clarity so there's a impulse also to act to correct imbalance to correct Injustice too so self isn't a kind of passive witness as it is in a lot of spiritual traditions in ifs it's an act of inner leader it's an AC of external leader and too often our actions are driven by these protective parts and that's true in our politics now too um so one of my goals is to

try to bring more self- leadership to the world to to these conflicts uh but to do that people have to unburden they have to release these extreme beliefs and emotions they got from their traumas in the past we have a concept we call Legacy burdens so many people have inherited these extreme beliefs in emotions that came down through their ancestors and drive their their parts Drive their extremes and many conflicts in the world are driven by these Legacy burdens and we've gotten good at helping people unload these these things yeah we've seen this in the

Middle East recently totally and we you know we're doing a lot we're doing a lot of work in the Middle East so we have training programs there we have and one of my Visions is to have large scale Legacy unburdening where large groups of people come together and we help them unload the Holocaust Legacy burdens on the one side and the you know the 1941 Legacy burdens on the Palestinian side and have more self accessible to each side and when like when we do couples therapy or we do other kinds of negotiated conflict if People's

Parts start getting into it we'll just say timeout you sort of did this on your own with your family member just say time out want both of you to go inside find the parts that have been doing the speaking don't come back until you can speak for them but not from them and come back in in these seword qualities in that state of self if we can hold people in that it's really easy to get out of the conflict if if their protectors are going at it all the time conflicts never change so do you

think that people who have the reflex or the ability to um kind of somaticize a bit like I obvious I I don't think of myself as somebody who's like psychosomatic I don't have stomach aches and headaches and stuff unless I caught a virus you know but but I can feel where certain things are in my body pretty quickly and always have um do you think that ifs lends itself better to people who you know feel things somatically versus people that are like really cognitive and in their head because I have that component too I can

actually feel the switch yeah like I do it through I'll go into like a narrative and then I start to see the structure like up here yeah and um yeah that happened several times when we were were working together like I would have you stay with something and then the narrator part would kick in yeah and and then I would try to refocus you but you know I lived in Boston for 10 years so I worked with lots of cognitive people who didn't know their bodies who had you know just were in that rat race

to try and get tenure and so on been there yes me too yeah tenure is nice but um one should tend to their emotional selves while while they're while they're pursuing it but just to answer your question they can do it but we first have to start with that thinking part and get it on board and get it to step out and to to stay out long enough that they can feel their bodies so yeah you know it lends itself to anybody but with people like that it takes a while for that thinking part to

trust that it's safe to let them in their into their bodies so if we were to just step back for a moment and um do sort of a top Contour summary of the process um someone brings forward a uh a memory of recent or distant memory of some thing that made them feel not good and you try and localize some sensation in the body get a sense of its location PA there I'll tell you why yeah because if they find it in their body they're and they direct the question there and they wait for the

answer to come from there they're less likely to be in their head so it sort of short circuits that thinking part and so many people come to therapy and that thinking part thinks it's supposed to do the therapy it's you know CBT or whatever even a lot of the more exper not experiential but a lot of the more psychodynamic therapies the thinking part is really trying to explain why they feel stuff right so this is getting them out of that and getting them to actually listen inside into what they think is their body but it's

really these parts that live down there that they haven't had access to because the thinking part is running things so much got it and then one places some attention from The Stance of curiosity they were like what's there what's it what's it trying to say exactly so um and then you start to reveal the the underlying layers of what's it protecting what are the what are those things that are protective trying to say yeah it's not even you're trying to reveal it's just that you're asking these questions and the answers start coming I see oh

I love this because I'm a big believer in seeding the unconscious mind and then letting things surface either in sleep or in meditative States or um has internal family systems been combined with some of the therapies that are now getting tested um still in clinical trial stage uh around um psychedelics yeah in fact two days ago we just completed a uh ifs and ketamine Retreat oh wow so we have and we're doing it more and more like I said I'm trying to bring this more out of the Psychotherapy world so we invited 32 leaders to

come of various kinds and had uh three days where they would do camine and then do if the nice thing about psychedelics is it puts those manager parts to sleep somehow a lot of the time yeah I I've been open about the fact and I always have to provide the disclaimer I I I don't just say this for to protect me I say this to protect listeners that I do think um young people should avoid psychedelics the brain is already in a psychedelic State it's it's the the amount of plasticity and this is is really

tremendous and this is coming from somebody who regrets it but I did psychedelics recreationally as a kid me too um and I regret it I returned to them later a clinical setting um and and derived a lot of benefit I think from them uh namely high do psilocybin and MDMA but both of those are still very much illegal uh you can get into a lot of trouble for taking them and or certainly for selling them so um that's the cautionary note there and the clinical trials are really impressive in my opinion spectacularly impressive especially for

MDMA and for the treatment of PTSD but the FDA this uh last year um did not approve MDMA uh as a treatment for PTSD I think going forward in the new Administration it's likely that it will get approved but who knows there uh who knows so anyway that's a bunch of um pseudo legales jargon but but it's it's sincere if I were an 18 or 19y old person or 30-year-old person listening to a conversation about psychedelics and how they can be helpful I would want to also know that there are instances where people take them

and they don't have the appropriate guidance in and through it and out of it and it leads to serious problems so is a real real thing that we're talking about that's why these caman clinics where they just hand them the drugs and yeah medicine and just leave them on their own scary to me um I'm proud to say that ifs has been adopted as one of the primary models for psychedelics now great because it's a really nice pit and as I was saying earlier that what I see happening often not always is these manager Parts

go offline and that releases a lot of self so you start to uh to just feel those c-word qualities emerging and that's a big in uh invitation to all these Exile parts to come and get attention and so as people come out of the ketamine experience I can work with them for 15 minutes and do something would take maybe five sessions because they can get access to parts that they couldn't get or it would take a long time to convince their protectors to let us go to and we can unburden those Exiles and then bring

back their protectors and so I love it I I you know and camine is the legal one so that's why we do it and uh and the other nice thing and I don't know as a scientist how much you you would go with this but um ketamine again because it opens the door with these protectors you can also taste what I call the big self you taste this what they call nonu state that can be quite Blissful and uh some people go God and then as you come back you have this sense of I'm much

more than this little body and this little ego that there is some much bigger and that's why they're using it with end of life and why it it and sosyan has such a big impact on depression and because it sort of lifts you out of this little box your protectors have you in to know that there's something much more so interesting I've never tried ketamine um a few years ago I um and I've talked about this publicly as well I I um started um developing a a pretty deep relationship to to spirituality and God and

most mostly through the path of of non of giving up control I mean there're just break breaking news folks you can't control everything you know and um uh you can control certain things but um most things know and um the way you describe ketamine is very interesting because as a dissociative anesthetic it works in such a fundamentally different way than say MDMA which is um an empathogen which makes people feel so much more I mean I I sort of half joke that that the aside from the the safety legality stuff the the the concern I

have about MDMA is that if one is not in the eye mask if you don't have somebody guiding you through it and taking some notes you know if you listen to a piece of jazz or classical music or your favorite rock and roll album or you're there with yourg or cat or plants I mean you can spend the entire four hours bonding with the plant right you're not going to run off and get married to a plant you're not going to try and fornicate with a plant but um one hopes um but it's a very

um precious but very labile situation totally agree because you're it's such a strong empathogen that whatever you direct your attention to internal or external is going to hypertrophy MH so just have to be really careful totally agree you know and given that the neurotoxicity issues seem worked out in that if it's actually MDMA and isn't other things by the way that the big study that showed neurotoxicity of MDMA in Prime non-human primates turned out they were injecting methampetamine what yeah that paper was retracted it was published in science we'll provide a link to the paper

and the retraction that the retraction was not as publicized wow methylene dioxy methamphetamine MD ma um has not been shown to be neurotoxic provided that's what people are taking wow um and not taking some combination of other things yeah it's a real tragedy the way that um retractions don't get nearly the kind of popular press coverage that the that initial studies do uh regardless of whether or not the initial study was positive or negative um in any case I do believe there are other routes to um calming down the forbrain in the context of doing

this kind of work that just like your thoughts on sure uh when I first wake up in the morning MH I'm in kind of a Lial state but the thing that I don't want to think about comes to my bra I can't avoid it it's like the the uh protectors are are not available they're still asleep so that seems valuable I've tried recently to keep my eyes closed sometimes I'll get up and use the bathroom but keep my eyes closed stay in that still State and explore the Contours of that thing um uh provided it's

done safely and not anywhere near water um cyclic hyperventilation breath work done for a few minutes or Cycles you know you know we think can change the brain activity so the forbrain kind of comes off line a bit so all these things just put managers to sleep put managers to sleep like when you go to sleep your managers go to sleep and then you have these weird dreams and that's cuz your Exiles have access to your mind now and they're giving they're trying to give you signals about what they want the other thing I say

about psychedelics and the breathing too is that as your your managers go to sleep and your Exile start coming in it can seem really terrifying because these parts are stuck in horrible places often with a lot of Terror and so what's called bad trips is them trying to get attention so they'll come in and they'll totally take over and you look like you're having a panic attack but what we've learned and you know this happened a few times last week is instead of thinking of it as a panic attack or a bad trip to welcome

it here's a part that needs a lot of attention it's taken over entirely but if I were to say okay Andrew I see you're really scared but how do you you feel toward this really scared part that's here now and I could get you to say I feel sorry for it then I would have you start to get to know it and work with it and comfort it rather than have a panic attack you would access calm and those c-words and then it becomes a hugely useful uh healing of something that's in you that's in

a stuck in a terrified place I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors function last year I became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing function provides over 100 Advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily Health this snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health Hormone Health immune functioning nutrient levels and much more they've also recently added tests for toxins such as BPA exposure from harmful Plastics and tests for P fases or forever chemicals function not only provides

testing of over a 100 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from Top Doctors who are expert in the relevant areas for example in one of my first tests with function I learned that I had elevated levels of mercury in my blood function not only helped me detect that but offered insights into how best to reduce my mercury levels which included limiting my tuna consumption I've been eating a lot of tuna while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with Knack and

acetyl cysteine both of which can support glut the thione production and detoxification and I should say by taking a second function test that approach worked comprehensive blood testing is vitally important there's so many things related to your mental and physical health that can only be detected in a blood test the problem is blood testing has always been very expensive and complicated in contrast I've been super impressed by function Simplicity and at the level of cost it is very affordable as a consequence I decided to join their scientific Advisory Board and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring

the podcast if you'd like to try function you can go to function health.com huberman function currently has a weight list of over 250,000 people but they're offering Early Access to huberman podcast listeners again that's function health.com huberman to get early access to function what is so striking to me is that you know and Martha taught me this practice of you know when we think about the things that um create shame for ourselves if we're able to go up and really look at those and own them not from the perspective of I'm proud of them but

own them as in us and not of us you know um uh that it's incredibly freeing yeah and indeed it is so freeing right it's like the if this if there were like a secret to life like uh it would at least include that yeah um because let me rip up rip up that for a second because just as an example like I do uh I done workshops where I have people work with their racism you speaking of something very shameful and a lot of people say I don't I'm not a racist I don't have

any racism but if I really convince them to look inside and check they'll find there's a little part in there that does spout racist things when they meet somebody of a different skin color has these white supremacy beliefs and they're they're really ashamed of it so if I were to have you focus on that racist voice in there we would have to get a lot of the parts that are ashamed of it to step out and then I would have you get curious about it rather than ashamed of it and ask it about where it

picked up this these beliefs and it could tell you and then I would ask do you like having to carry This Racist stuff usually they say no if it's it's unloaded we can just unload it so one of the key things to know is these parts are not the burdens they carry they're all good the little guy who's got the racist rant is a part that got stuck with this beliefs but when he releases those beliefs he transforms into being a good and the mistake our culture makes the mistake that that uh most psychotherapies make

is to assume assume that he is that racist rant and to try to Exile him but it's a different way of understanding even very seemingly evil people that they're dominated by these protectors and they're so afraid of their Exiles and they relate inside in the same way they relate outside so if they hate Parts themselves they'll hate people who resemble those parts of them they'll try to dominate those people do you follow what I'm saying yeah and I'd like to really go into this a bit because we hear all the time that when we're upset

about something it's something in ourselves that we're really upset about um and for me that isn't always true but that's sometimes true yeah so if I'm upset about the intolerance of um good ideas from people in opposite groups of each other's good ideas um this logic would say that I'm really just disapproving of that aspect of myself that is like black and white judgmental which we already established got me then again you're the therapist so um right so is this always true not always okay but a lot of the time so if you can come

to have compassion for that judgmental part of you and not being in battled with it and actually see it as desperately trying to help you be more Discerning and help it unburden and get out of this role that it's in because in the role that it's in it can be destructive we're not trying to minimize that or say you know when I say all parts are there are no bad parts they're no bad parts but they can get into very destructive roles and they can carry these burdens from the past that can drive them to

be harmful but part of my work is to help that all that change and uh so if you were to start a new relationship with that judgmental part of you then you would see past the judgmental parts of other people and you could see the Exiles that drive those protectors and you would you would have compassion for them it wouldn't mean you wouldn't stop them or stand up to them but you would do it with compassion right rather than from these hateful protectors uh I think it's important that people hear that namely that if we

get in touch with these parts of ourselves that are protectors um that it makes us less vulnerable not more vulnerable totally both to quote unquote attack um but that also I guess put simply that in understanding of ourselves and compassion for ourselves one develops understanding and compassion for others but that doesn't mean that you're um opening yourself up for harm that's right qu and the opposite is actually true the opposite is actually true because these protectors will generate often what they fear so by being so protective they'll create protectors in the other that will attack

whereas if they could stay in self self can be very protective with those seword qual ities very forceful sometimes Pierce this idea of uh I'm definitely following that that we will sometimes create in others um you know what we uh fear because it allows us to engage in this unhealthy Dynamic it seem it seems so counterintuitive right uh maybe we take a kind of classic set of examples that I think are pretty common um a person who's codependent with somebody who's a substance abuse addict um or somebody who's very timid and always wants to pacify

and somebody who's very dominant when I zoom out from the second case it actually kind of makes me chuckle how how crazy that that is because if you think about it a person who is uh very dominant uh doesn't need somebody very timate in order to feel dominant right they could they could probably uh feel whatever power it is they they need to feel with somebody who is less timid and maybe the relationship would be healthier but that's not how people tend to um other select it's kind of interesting like so it raises a perhaps

a bigger question why do people select people that are fundamentally um bad for them okay so I did a book called You're the one you've been waiting for and in it I talked about this whole issue and so for a lot of people you get hurt by your parent and there are parts that want to protect you from your parent but there other parts who are desperate who took on the worthlessness from being rejected by your parent and are desperate for Redemption do you follow this and so uh as you leave and you're looking for

a partner that part from a subconscious place can influence your decision to find somebody who resembles that parent in their effort to be redeemed again yeah is this anything like the uh sort of repetition compulsion yeah exactly that we that we tend to repeat a a pattern over and over again as an attempt to resolve not just a manifestation of like dysfunction that's a version of what I'm talking about and so you find somebody who does resemble that person that parent and unfortunately they do resemble that parent and so they'll hurt you in the same

way mhm and then your protectors go into one of four modes they'll say I've got to change that person back into who they're supposed to be so they'll try to change the person's Behavior or they'll say I've got to change myself so they'll be who they're supposed to be or they'll say oh this wasn't the Redeemer after all and they'll go looking for the real redeemer is still out there it's always inside and yeah that's what I try to do is to help them see that that redeemer is inside of them itself and if if

they if we can go to that Exile who's got this thing for this parent-like person and help it connect to self and help it unburden that whole repetition compulsion disappears because now they can take care of themselves they they trust self to do it they don't need that from some other person like that and so when we're working with couples and you always find some version of that in couples we can get each of them to become their own good attachment figure good caretaker inside that frees up the partner because when this Exile is leading

the relationship your partner feels a lot of um sort of Demands or feels a lot like your partner has to take care of that young part of you and can't can't fully do it so there's always this this uh sense of oh a burden you know what I'm saying yeah yeah it's so interesting how romantic relationships are where these patterns get repeated and at the same time I I numerous examples in my life of healthy relationships is that usually the case because people have done the work before or because they had a minimum of trauma

in their upbringing both yeah yeah what percentage of um kids adults as well um do you think had a minimum of trauma uh are just because of the way they're wired and the way the stuff is organized within them that they naturally attach to a a good partner and are pretty healthy is it like 25% 30% does it I really can't say because I my sample is very skewed I'm working with Psychotherapy patients who always have a lot of trauma so I really can't say I mean I I I'm very biased well half of marriages

in this country and in divorce um and presumably of the ones that don't I'm guessing somewhere between a half and a quarter of those um people are really unhappy sounds so pessimistic but if you just look at the numbers and and I'm an optimist I already acknowledge that I don't like to think about bad stuff and I you know so um yeah I'm guessing that a lot of people um repeat these patterns but it seemed as if maybe 20 30 years ago because these ideas weren't um discussed really so so many fewer people were in

any kind of analysis or or personal exploration work that as a society we defaulted to just sort of roll execution um you're a father and a husband so you do certain things and you don't do certain things you're a you're a wife and a mother so you do certain things and you don't do certain and so on um and I think nowadays there's a lot of discussion about you know is is there Resurgence of um organized religion because we've drifted so far from this kind of core structures I mean love your thoughts on that and

also what you think doing this kind of internal work on oneself without requiring any input or participation from another uh what the value of that is it sounds like there's tremendous value um to just doing this work for oneself maybe with someone trained in ifs yeah I mean um there's like I was saying there's a lot you can do with working with your protectors and helping them get to know self like we didn't do it but had I had you asked that Teddy that t titanium teddy bear how old it thought you were and just

really waited for the answer most people will get a single digit it still thinks you're very young and it still thinks it has to protect you the way it did when you were very young and just even updating it creates a huge amount of relief with these protectors so there's a lot that can be done just by working with protectors introducing them to self helping them see they don't have to keep doing this all the time some protectors it's very hard for them to totally drop their weapons until what they protect has been healed so

that's where the therapist comes in so uh you know there are coaches doing this work for example they'll work with some executive and they'll do great and then they'll get to an exile and then they'll have the person see a ifs therapist for a couple sessions to heal the Exile and then come back because um you know coaches aren't trained as therapists and right so yeah there's still need for therapists but um yeah but you can do a a lot on your own I'm struck by how experiential it is as opposed to um just conceptual

I mean obviously the concepts are important but I think uh in internal family systems was described for me previously kind of mapped out for me on paper I got a sense of it actually with some objects placed out and these um and it was helpful but it it um I think just having done a little bit of it today the only by actually feeling the sensations in the body associated with it does it actually really make sense to me I mean it made sense cognitively but that's so very different it's very removed yeah it's like

me telling people you know get out and get line your eyes in the morning and set your circadian rhythm like you can know that you can know the underlying mechanisms the neurons the pathways the hormones Etc but at some level until you experience what that's like for two or three days in a row it's you might as well be reading about um I don't know um Titanium teddy bears you know yeah exactly and that's why I'm so grateful to you that you're willing to try it and because it's true as I describe it to people

they don't really get it until they actually feel it experience it and it it is very different from many other therapies which are much more cognitively based because we're we're trying to bypass that and actually get to this raw stuff in here in order to be deliberately repetitive I wonder if it would be useful um to the listeners to would it be possible to just pose the questions sure um to them yeah as an exercise that they could do in real time totally yeah thank you so much um I think that would be tremendously valuable

so I'm going to have to erase myself here uh for once I'm going to be quiet for a little while folks and you are the um the lucky patient uh that gets to talk to um Dr Schwarz here and he's going to pose a series of questions and we'll allow some moments of break or silence for you to be able to tap into the answers to these in real time that way you don't have to create a a parallel construction of what we did earlier yeah and and let me lead by saying um please don't

do this if you have fear about doing it uh but if you if you're uh interested in some inner exploration then I'll I'll lead you through some of the steps so as you've been listening to our conversation I'm speaking to listeners uh you may be thinking about some of your own Parts particularly your own protectors and if you can't think of any most people have a kind of critic inside or part that makes them work too hard or a part that uh uh takes care of too many people so I'm going to invite you to

pick a protective part to try to get to know for a few minutes and just notice that in her voice or that emotion that thought pattern that sensation just focus on it exclusively for a second and as you do that notice where it seems to be located in your body or around your body just take a second with that and some people don't find the location some people they still sense it but it's not clear where it seems be located but if you do find it inner around your body then just focus on it there

and as you focus on it notice how you feel toward it and by that I mean do you dislike it and why get rid of it are you afraid of it do you resent how it dominates do you depend on it so you have a relationship with this part of you and if you feel any anything except a kind of openness or curiosity or willingness to get to know it then that's coming from other parts that have been trying to deal with it and we're just going to ask those other parts of you to relax

back for just a few minutes so you can get to know it we're not going to have it take over more we're just going to get to know it better so see if they're willing to let you open your mind to it and if they're not then we're not going to pursue this and you can just get to know their fear about letting you get to know this target part but if you do get to that point of just being curious about it without an agenda then ask it what it wants you to know about

itself just a kind of nice open-ended question and don't think of the answer just wait and see what comes from that place in your body and don't judge what comes just whatever comes we'll go with it what does it want you to know about itself and what's it afraid would happen if it didn't do this inside of you and if you got an answer to that question about the fear then it was telling you something about how it's been trying to protect you and if that's true then extend some appreciation to it for at least

trying to keep you safe even if it backfires or doesn't work let it know you appreciate that it's trying to protect you and see how it reacts to your appreciation and then ask if you could go to what it protects and heal or change that so it didn't need to protect you so much what might it like to do instead inside of you if it was released from this role and I'll repeat that if you could go to what it protects and heal or change that so it was liberated from this protector role what might

it like to do instead inside of you and then ask it this kind of odd question how old does this part think you are not how old is it but how old does it think you are and again don't think just wait and see what comes and if it got your age wrong then go ahead and update it and see how it reacts and the last question for this part is what does it need from you going forward what does it need from you and again just wait for the answer and when the time feels

right thank your parts for whatever they let you do in this and then begin to shift your focus back outside and maybe take some deep breaths as you do that thank you for that that was awesome I also was able to get some I think good work done in the is that true yeah yeah totally different totally different location totally different set of Dynamics um even though uh what you just took us through is very experiential uh what if any value do you think there is to writing down sort of key takeaways okay yeah so

um it's great to do the work you know session or you know this exercise but ideally it's the beginning of a new relationship with this part so and that takes work on your own so what I advise people is as you get that ball rolling in that good direction it'll reverse if you don't stay with it for a while so every day like you were saying you wake up rather than what am I going to do today or what problems do I have in my life how's that part of me doing that I've been starting

to work with what what does it need for me today what does it want me to know is it still feeling better uh do I still have compassion for it so or appreciation for it so this like I said earlier this kind of becomes a life practice so I do that every morning every morning not well not not well you're very familiar with these parts and And to clarify for people um when Dr Schwarz is saying Parts he's saying these these parts these um personalities within us not necessarily the body part where it manifests but

maybe that that provides a physical anchor to to look too exactly right so uh so yeah I'll I'll check in not with all my parts because I've met many many but the ones I've been working with just to see how they're doing and as I go through the day I'll notice am I in those seword qualities is my heart open is my mind curious do I have a big agenda anything any departures from that is a protector usually and I'll just have a little internal board meeting and say I get you feel like like in

preparing to come and be on this podcast I had to work with the parts who were nervous and you know I have my father was a big scientist big uh Endocrinology researcher oh cool great field great field my brother is a big shot Endocrinology researcher uh so I have some some issues that way I hope I didn't reinforce the negative ones well I was that was my part's worries coming in and so I I worked on it and and said okay just but just I get it I get your scare I could feel them in

my hands when I was taking a drink earlier interesting um but I just kept okay I get that I get your scare but just trust me just step back just relax and then I I feel this shift a literal shift MH and then I feel those c-words flooding and then we have a much different kind of conversation so it's it's a life practice in that sense love that thanks for sharing that I didn't detect any anxiety whatsoever um neither pre-recording nor um during this this uh this discussion if you don't mind could you describe or

maybe even just list off some of the other uh labels of parts that people might encounter if they do this kind of work so you describe them as protectors that manage and then the Exiles which are the parts of us that the protectors and managers are protecting yeah correct okay those are two different things right yes so yeah the big distinction is between parts that by Dent of Simply being heard hurt or terrified or made to feel shamed and worthless uh and usually those are our most sensitive parts they're the young inner children they get

stuck with those burdens of worthlessness Terror and emotional pain and then we don't want anything to do with them because they can overwhelm us and so we lock them away and everybody tells us to do that so those are the Exiles and when you have a lot of Exiles you have to these other parts are forced to become protectors so there are two classes of protectors one of the managers we've been talking about and the other are the firefighters so you know we mentioned a number of manager common roles but there's just lots and lots

of them fir fighter common roles include you know addictions um uh excuse me dissociating the kind of judgmental rageful Parts uh you I could go on but anything yeah that is reactive impulsive and is designed to protect those vulnerable Parts but in a impulsive way as opposed to the managers who are all about control and pleasing these firefighters are all about if I don't get you away from these feelings right now you're going to die a lot of them believe that and some of them it's true so there's often a kind of hierarchy of firefighter

activities the first one doesn't work you go to the next one if that doesn't work the top of the hierarchy for most people is suicide if things get painful enough there's this exit strategy it's actually very comforting to lots of people and here we come along and get really scared of these suicidal parts so this is again it's one of the Hallmarks of the difference FS if you were to say you've got a suicidal part say let's go get to know it I would have you find it and you know all steps and I would

have you what are you afraid would happen if you didn't kill Andrew what do you think the answer to that is most of the time that it would just feel like too much to bear yeah like it just couldn't take it anymore exactly which of course is a crazy statement because it's not like my brain would explode some these parts believe it yeah they're not they're not grounded in logic so my well my response to that part is if we could unload the pain that you're so afraid would overwhelm would you have to kill him

no and would you let us do that well fortunately I don't feel suicidal um but the answer would be yes okay so because we can prove to you that we can unload that pain and if we could do that what would you like to do instead of being the suicidal part I mean I have to imagine that if somebody forgive me for going into my head about this but if I have to imagine it's just hard for me to imagine being suicidal that's okay yeah but if I have to imagine that if somebody is feeling

suicidal in order to protect the themselves against the like enormity of the the feelings they would otherwise feel and then they are offer the opportunity to work through to be released from those feelings I think the scary part would be um like the first it's like waiting into really cold water MH you know I I always feel that way about negative feelings once you get past your your kind of waist or so yes you get you get your your shoulders under that's a good an it's a heck of a lot easier it's a really nice

analogy because you realize there's an upper limit to this stuff and you passed it a little while ago um yeah yeah so that suicidal part often transforms into part that wants to help you live actually they they're often in the role that's opposite of who they really really are so as you can hear this is a totally different approach to Suicide for example and we do the same with addictive firefighters find that part that makes you so high how do you feel to it I hate it I want to you know I want to be

in recovery I want to lock it up just get all that to step out and just get curious about ask it what it's afraid would happen if it didn't get you high all the time same answer if we could heal all that pain or that shame and would you have to get a m all the time no but I don't think you can do that would you give us a chance to prove we can totally different approach to all these problems something comes to mind for a number of years not now fortunately I I mean

I still work a lot but I worked like you know I I don't want to um well I'll I'll share the numbers but it's not a goal that no one should try and exceed this I mean there were times in graduate school where I no joke worked 80 85 hours a week slept under my desk like I lived in my office as a junior Professor wow my students can attest that brush my teeth and not every night but I you know if I had deadlines it was just all in with mind body heart everything it's

it's not healthy right right and at some point I had to take a look at it because it's not conducive to a lot of things uh it brings a lot you can get a lot done I won't lie you can get a lot done you can get a lot of uh degrees you can get a lot of knowledge and and you can accomplish a lot um but I decided to take a look at it you know like like what would happen if I I don't know published five awesome papers in a year instead of 10

or something like CRA you know I just started looking at and and it just it seems crazy now but I remember the genuine fear of of backing off that's right and I started to realize that I loved what I did um but that some of the work came from a yeah a desire to um compete out uh other other feelings it's a form of dissociation totally um and then what happened was I was able to adjust my hours really pick the projects that held the most meaning for me and then really Savor them and enjoy

them and that's how I approach the podcast and other things I'm doing so it was a tremendously useful exploration but it was terrifying I didn't have to go to 12 step for work addiction or anything I mean it wasn't at that level but um um but you're giving an example of exactly what we do we go to that workaholic Park what are you afraid would happen if you didn't do this to him yeah so what I came to it's interesting was the it was literally a fear of annihilation of Disappearing and then I thought well

then you you parsed it a little bit further disappearing to who like it's not like there was an absence of of positive feedback so it wasn't actually to avoid disappearing from the outside world cuz I'll tell you when you're working 80 85 hours we you're already gone um you know uh you just don't realize it um it was actually some way of avoiding um this thing that I've now come to really love I learned it from my Bulldog um I used to have this assumption that slow is low like to slow down is depressive I

mean now I love slowing down and I did learn that from my bulldog and a few people came into my life and they're dogs as well and I learned like um to really Savor slow and not just so that I can bounce back into work that too admittedly but but also um to just um and it came through I just would like your thoughts on this I realized right as I would go into or or come out of a meditation or what I call non-sleep deep rest this kind of yoga Nedra like deep relaxation thing

that listeners of this podcast will be familiar with hearing about that there's this really terrifying moment where I realize someday assuming I'm awake when it happens or it's not an accident or I don't get involved in an accident um I'm going to take my last breath and it's absolutely terrifying yeah that concept and I realized that the fear of Disappearing is actually a fear of death and what I was really afraid of was death and I was using work so you know it's a long way from like working you know 60 hours or 40 hours

a week instead or 30 what whatever people choose as opposed to 885 but what I realized what I was running from was the fear of my own mortality that's right and I didn't have to use any substances to realize this I just had to keep peeling back the layers of like what are you really afraid of and now I've come to the conclusion that most addiction having talked to a lot of addicts with process addictions and substance addictions Etc that deep down everyone addict or no is terrified of death it's just that some people are

in touch with that Terror and have like worked through it yeah but so well you remember what what I was saying earlier when we talked to these addict Parts what are you afraid would happen if you didn't make them high he would die so that's a really common answer and basically what you just describe is you were doing ifs without knowing it asking those questions what are you really afraid of what are you really afraid of till you get to the key answer and then I don't know how you help that part that fear death

but somehow you helped to relax more yeah I think um if I for better or worse uh if I see or experience something that scares me a lot um I have to uh explore the Contours of it that's been a dangerous part of my life and it's been a yeah oh yeah and it's been a helpful part of my life too you know the ability to suppress one's reflex to avoid fear is such a complicated thing because on the one hand it's necessary to navigate life on the other hand if people always say is it

what would you tell your younger self if you could tell your younger self anything and it would I would have said hey dude listen you know if something makes you anxious get out of there because my my reflex has always been that if something gives me anxiety like okay here's a test of myself I see I need to overcome it okay you so that that's another part protector so in any case um some people are the opposite you know um yeah i' I've tended to touch to touch the hot stove three times yeah when it

should have been one trial learning and it touched the it hurt excuse me the first time so but that's just me I mean everyone's got these things but what I'm discovering certainly through what you're telling us today but also the the exploration of these things is that so much of life is structured especially nowadays with the phone love the phone love social media but um so much of life is structured to fill all the space between activities and I do want your thoughts on have like what you see in terms of um things that are

active impediments to doing good work of the sorts of work that you're describing today self-work I would never ask a guess to be disparaging of of the world just for its own sake but I think people are now starting to develop an awareness of how um certain Technologies and lifestyle habits that are unique to the last five or 10 years are really exacerbating our problems um as they relate to ourselves not just interpersonal Dynamics you seem to be thinking about the the the big picture A lot so I'm curious what your thoughts are yeah so

you know all these little machines we have and all the ways we have of never spending any time by ourselves or alone or thinking uh just feed these protective Parts these distractors and leave in the dust more and more these exiled parts so a lot of people's fear of not having something to do is because when they don't or if they're not working in your case or then these exiled Parts start to come forward they they're not being distracted from in my case I mentioned my father I'm the oldest of six boys oh wow I

was supposed to be a physician like him and a researcher and um I was spared that fate because I had a undiagnosed add and wasn't a good student and and three of my brothers were physician research types but I was the oldest so he was really hard on me terms of lazy and worthless and so on so I came out out of my family with a lot of worthlessness and uh and actually the model wouldn't exist if I didn't have that because I had this part that had to prove him wrong and drive me not

to the extent you're talking about or sleeping in the office or anything but would drive me to find this this model and then take it in the face of a lot of attack uh to where it is now and and if I wasn't working on it if I wasn't getting the accolades then that worthlessness would crop up and then I'd have other firefighters to try and deal with that uh and you know I had not only the workaholic part but I had a part that could close my heart and make me not care what people

think and because I was was attacked by traditional Psychiatry and so on for for developing internal family system yeah uh I was humiliated at Grand rounds a couple times and I was in a department of Psychiatry what is with the field of Psychiatry it's a good question so point being that I was dominated as I developed this by these protectors and it got me through all that but it didn't serve me as a leader of a community and I was lucky to have some students who would confront my parts and me just say you can't

keep going on like this if you're going to be any use to us and I listened and I went and worked with that worthlessness and now I don't have it I don't have to work I don't you know it's just I feel free because I'm not so afraid of that bubbling up if I'm not distracted and and now we have more distractions than ever as we're saying right that the pain Point can potentially become the source of tremendous growth value to the world based on what you've developed um keep in mind I I learned about

your work not just through Martha Beck although Martha as well but several um incredibly talented psychologists scholars in the in the field of research psychology um and um and actually a psychiatrist as well yeah there are some Psy maybe I'll just share the uh uh so a psychiatrist that I think the world of said to me uh I won't reveal who it is but they said do you know why uh there's so many lousy psychiatrists this isn't a joke actually um even though it sounds like the setup for a joke I said no why and

they said well because you know if you're a cardiothoracic surgeon and like 30% of your patients die you're considered a pretty terrible cardiothoracic surgeon if you're a psychiatrist unless your patients kill themselves on a frequent basis you can have a pretty quote unquote successful career M it's interesting and no one ever questions whether or not you're good at your job or not yeah because the field a has a dir of tools B the kind of assumption is that a lot of things don't get better and and on and on and they listed off all these

reasons why the field of Psychiatry is so replete with u what they described as lousy psychiatrists so I do believe there are some excellent psychiatrists out there research and clinical and both um I don't know if that does anything uh it sounds like you worked through your relationship to psychiatrist on your own you don't need you don't need my statements I agree with you entirely yeah I and I'm you know I tried to stay in Psychiatry and just kept hitting the brick wall and so I went Grassroots for 30 years and now it's starting to

come around into Psychiatry so it feels good that way it's interesting how timing in a field is so important and not just an academic field but a clinical field and and the ethos um if anyone is interested in um understanding where we are in the Arc of medicine and culture I highly recommend reading uh Oliver Sax's book on the Move um he was an obviously neurologist and writer but he describes coming up through medicine and being in these various Fields um he worked on headache for a while it's pretty interesting um he wrote a book

about migraine he he worked on uh with uh kids on the autism spectrum and bunch of different fields and in every single one of those fields was vehemently attacked MH by some individual for whatever reason usually a superior kicked out of universities moved to another one now he did have his own issues he was you know was the time he was a methamphetamine addict and things like that but he got over that and um became the great Oliver sax that that he was but you know he describes these fields as having a culture at the

time of really trying to suppress new ideas and holding people down and then toward the end of his career several of the universities that essentially had fired him earlier hospitals and universities were trying to recruit him back with multiple appointments because now he was this famous guy who had written the movie or worked on the movie Awakenings and like you know and of it revealed the hypocrisy of of uh these big institutions and so it made me chuckle and also realize that for those of us who are doing public health education at at any level

and certainly on the these more um non-traditional things uh approaches that uh the time is right for for sharing them and um well the good news is nobody lives forever so you know the the old guard dies or retires you know that's true and I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that department of Psychiatry to invite me back well you I won't ask which one it was we can have an offline discussion about that they just might um couple of more questions um first of all going back to this thing about the larger

context of culture um I love the optimism that's threaded through your view like that we could get God willing uh Democrats and Republicans to come to some sort of common uh ground around the most important issues MH um that we potentially could eradicate destructive racism racism of all kinds um but given the way you described it certainly its implementation in the world is the first thing that needs to be dealt with right um certainly if people can see those parts of themselves uh and work with them that we stand a chance to do that and

given that trauma is near ubiquitous right um that people could start to address their own traumas so that they can induce fewer in other people I guess that's basically the the ultimate goal of humanity totally um and I like so many people in um lately not just by the way not just in the last year or so but like for the last 10 years have just been developing the sense like goodness like it just seems like the number of problems is just seems to be expanding exponentially how do we get our our heads around this

and you there's so much blame game going on of well it's because of this and it's because of that like that's not a solution at all so I love your um sense of optimism that it's possible and then my question is how do how do we how do we get that going to to be to be direct yeah well that's what I've been working on the last several years years and what I can say is for example I I spent 20 years like you know I I worked with bulimia like I said and I thought

okay that's really works with that population you got um people who were bulimic to to essentially not be bulimic any longer yeah wow and then uh I I thought okay well let let's see if no bad parts is really true and so I went to the toughest populations I could fine and so for 20 years I worked with did and I worked with um did sorry um dissociative identity disorder like multiple personality disorder and I I worked with um what's called borderline personality clients and yeah very common right yeah before when you talked about bulimia

bulimia is notoriously difficult to uh to treat let alone cure it's because people fight with the symptoms they try to get rid of the symptoms instead of listening to the part that's making them binge about what that's about moving from the one-on-one therapy model to a model where people can do this work on their own as well as in groups um but if I'm correct it in thinking this it seems like getting the work done with oneself is the first like real step yeah that there's no replacement for that right yeah yeah and you know

there's in the activist world there's always been a kind of uh you're wasting wasting your time time but there's been a polarization between being in the activist mindset of really trying to change things in the outside world versus sitting around and and just focusing inside and not being an activist but I'm working with a lot of the people's you would recognize terms of activists and when they came to me they were doing their act AC ISM from the sort of righteous judgmental part and if we can get that one to step back and have them

do their their activism from self they have a totally different impact people are willing to listen to them whereas when they're in that righteous Place nobody wants to listen to the shaming that does it needs to be both people need to do their work access self and then start to try to change change the outside world or not one before the other but at least simultaneously fantastic no really fantastic I um I don't think we've ever done a podcast like this where um the audience had a chance to do self-work in real time oh I'm

I'm really appreciate you give me the opportunity yeah I don't know that I've ever heard a discussion um like it to be honest um which is just a testament to you and um your bravery uh it's very clear that um your decision not to go into Endocrinology was one that we all are grateful for it wasn't a decision well my my endocrinologist friends will um will have to just accept that you know we've got a lot of good endocrinologists we needed you Dr dick Schwarz to um to find yourself uh in this business of of

um discovering and creating a truly novel approach to therapy and self-work that uh goes all the way up to the potential to change culture change the world so that's the goal yeah those those aren't just words that's uh those are um real aspirational possible uh things that could be accomplished if people do this work and in coming here today and sharing with us the structure of internal family systems and a demonstration of how it can work and offering people the opportunity to do it themselves in real time and giving us your perspective about the things

that are um around it as well as in it uh with Incredible Clarity and um just a a real um beautiful sense of of care for for people that comes through um but also the I like the concreteness of it so very much very concrete right it's it's not abstract right and I really appreciate that and I'm certain that everyone else does as well so I I want to thank you for coming here today um for sharing this we will provide links to um places where people can learn more through books and courses and um

other resources um that you've created and and also just for the work that you've done and for being you it's it's been a real pleasure and I'm um so very glad we did it me too oh my God I you know my little nervous Parts giving me a lot of trouble and but once we got going I just felt connected and I felt your appreciation and interest and so we could have this kind of self-to-self exchange which which I love I just I love spreading time and that energy yeah likewise and you know you're a

great interviewer too so yeah thank you well this this whole thing is a a labor of love and a um a freef fall through uh just um curiosity yeah so yeah it's clear yeah I I hope to continue the conversation would love to wonderful thanks so much thank you so much thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Richard Schwarz to learn more about his work and to find links to his many excellent books please see the show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube

channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics you'd like me to consider for the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast

for those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to Stress Control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book.com there

you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body if you're not already following me on social media I am hubman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter Facebook LinkedIn and threads and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the huberman Lab podcast again that's huberman

lab on all social media platforms and if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter the neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep how to optimize dopamine deliberate cold exposure we have a foundational Fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training all of that is available completely zero cost you simply go to hubman lab.com go to the menu tab in the top right corner

scroll down to newsletter and enter your email and I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Richard Schwarz and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]