All Parts Welcome - Richard Schwartz, PhD + Dr. Becky Kennedy: Parenting & Internal Family Systems

Hello friends welcome welcome everyone to this special conversation series with the founder of internal family systems ifs Dr Richard Schwartz in this episode It's called All Parts welcome and this particular episode is welcoming all of our parts and our children's Parts exploring parenting and IFS joining Dick Schwartz is Dr Becky Kennedy let me tell you a little bit about Dr Becky named by Time Magazine the millennial parenting Whisperer She's a clinical psychologist a mother of three she's the author of The New York Times bestseller good inside a Guide to Becoming the parent you want to be in Reading good inside I saw how she helps parents focus on connection instead of consequences for behavior and how tremendously powerful this is she's the CEO founder of the good inside educational platform helping parents feel sturdier and more equipped to manage the challenges of parenting Dr Becky dick welcome I I just need someone to help me start my here we go start my video hi thank you I mean always great to be with you and YouTube Dr Becky you too dick good to see you it's obvious Dr Becky that ifs for anyone who's familiar with your good inside work and the good inside community that has gathered around you in your work that ifs is a really important theoretical model that you incorporate in your work that informs your work and here at the beginning I want to turn it over to Dick the founder of ISS to share with us how you can introduce to people who are perhaps new to the model the most important things for they can understand that will help them as parents well okay it's a big question here to start but you can do it dick I think so so the model basically uh what I discovered and this is the 40-year anniversary of that discovery uh 40 years ago is that people have what I call Parts but other systems call sub personalities and that that's a really good thing that they're all valuable and we're born with them and they if they're not heard or burdened what I call burdens they have all kinds of wonderful qualities to help us in our lives but they do get burdened by traumas and attachment injuries that force them out of their naturally valuable States into roles that can be damaging and particularly can be hurtful to our parents I mean to our parenting and our kids and so I was just hearing all that from science they were talking about these parts which I had no clue about what they were talking about in the early days and just got intrigued and I'm my background's as a family therapist so I was trying to make sense of this not just individual Parts but how they operated as a system and found that there are some parts that before they got hurt would be these precious in her children who give us lots of joy and playfulness and and know how to relate to our kids in a in a playful loving way but once they do get hurt or terrified or shamed so they feel worthless they have the power to overwhelm us with those feelings because they get stuck with those feelings those are what I call burdens and they also get frozen in the time of the trauma so they they live as if you're still five and you're still in a lot of danger and don't even know how old you are and so when we have a lot of when we have those kinds of Parts these young parts that get hurt or terrified or shaved we have a natural impulse to lock them away so that we don't have to be pulled back into those scenes or feel any of that anymore and so they become what I call the Exiles in your system and most all of us come out of childhood with a bunch of Exiles and when you have a bunch of Exiles you feel more delicate the world seems more dangerous because so many things could trigger them and if they get triggered it is like these flames of emotion are going to consume you and pull you down Pull you back into those scenes so other parts are recruited to become what we call protectors some of them are protecting by managing our life so that we don't get triggered so they might try to manage our appearance so don't get rejected manage our performance so counter the worthlessness and manage everything around us including our kids so a lot of times if you have a lot of Exiles as a parent you're going to have a lot of managers who are going to try and keep your kids from triggering you all the time and sometimes that can be quite coercive to your kids because uh they have a way of triggering us and uh but if you do get triggered and these Exiles flames burst out it's scary it's a big emergency so there's another set of parts that go into action immediately to try and deal with that emergency either by uh attacking the source of the trigger or by dissociating you from your feelings or some people go get high to get away from it or somehow get distracted so and that those what we call firefighter Parts they're fighting the fire of these Exiles emotions also get involved in the parenting and uh can lash out at the kids in a angry way in a way that creates more shame inside of them and so if you are that's the map to this inner territory but I also found that as all as I was working in there and it got certain parts to separate it was like this other person came out who knew how to relate to these parts in a healing way and carried these what we call the 8C qualities of what we call self-leadership with a capital s so I might be having somebody work with their critic and if I could access that place what I call Self suddenly they they wouldn't be angry at the critic they'd suddenly be curious about it and they'd be calm and confident relative to it and even have compassion for it even though it was screwing up their life we're attacking them and in that state the critic would relate in a softer way and would start to share its story about how it got forced into that role and ultimately what I'm calling the self would take over and actually help that part calm down and heal actually or change transform and so that's the big centerpiece of ifs and so what I love about Dr Becky's work is she knows about that she knows that there is this good parent inside of people and knows how to help them access that and not only does it know how to relate to our parts in a human way but it knows how to relate to our kids and a very helpful way and not just in a compassionate way but also can be very firm and clear and uh courageous in setting boundaries with kids and so there is this good parent inside of us and um so I'm very grateful to you because my two kids who have kids are big fans and you really influence their parenting and so anyway let me leave it there for now and Dr Becky can you share with us a bit how you use the ifs model and help us in the application the practicality of what dick has just laid out yeah thank you so yes to me you know one of the basic ideas that I lead with that I think is very in line with you know everything dick talks about with ifs is you know we're doing the best we can with the resources we have available and there's you know I always think like there's no symptom in adulthood that wasn't at some point an adaptation right and I think the way we look at adults you know and look at parents who are yelling or who are rageful or who are not showing up in the way they want to be it's so judgmental and I always picture I don't know Jacob I've said this to you but I always picture like those parts in us being like you're being critical to me like you're welcome like I've helped you for a long time like have you noticed you know and instead even in a psychological world we use the word pathology and we blame people for the things that were critical to their survival I feel like that's like at best a cruel joke you know and again that doesn't mean you know I think we conflate things often that doesn't mean everything's okay oh so at some point it was adaptive this part of me that now yells at my kid and so it's okay of course it's not okay it's a matter of it happened are we gonna move forward in a way that's productive and actually has a chance of helping us change or are we going to look at moments where we're not at our best um you know and just layer on additional guilt and shame which only make those moments more likely to happen right and you use the word practical like thinking practical and efficient like that's just a big part of my personality and so what I love about so much of ifs is this like taking a kind of compassionate curiosity approach toward our tough moments where you know let's say I yelled at my kid right and this doesn't have to be theoretical like I yell at my kids it's not like I don't do that just because I'm like Dr Becky right so you know and I I actually use this example I started on my TED talk with this real example in my house my son said you know like oh chicken for dinner again like disgusting and you know that could be triggering in and of itself but I had a really rough day probably a rough week and and I just launched at him you know what is wrong with you and you know and if I think about how I look at that after right and I can say to myself I'm such a bad mama oh my goodness if someone knew Dr Becky yelled at her kids like this whole thing is a farce and what's wrong with me and I know better right versus looking at it from the perspective of some part of me yeah moved from Pat I would think either like move from passenger seat to driver's seat or I often picture like a CEO table and like I'm the CEO I always call it you know sell for I always call it like the sturdy leader like I'm the sturdy leader and there's a part of me that feels you know angry or has needs that aren't seen and you know that part of me is important and deserves a seat at the board table it has important information for me the CEO the problem is that part of me is not my CEO and in that moment with my son it kind of took over right and then that's where we generally act in a way that's not fully in accordance with like our values and I think helping more and more parents look at moments that from the perspective of not what is wrong with me but maybe that was my Crescendo moment after probably many many moments of ignoring my anger or my unmet needs what would happen if I paid attention to that part before it had to scream out to get my attention what would that actually look like right and usually when those things happen I know for me or other parents I'll look at my week and I say all those like small workouts that I do just to like help my body feel good I had skipped them I had asked my partner to come home and help with bedtime and you know they didn't like there's a million things that add up to getting me to the place where I no longer have any space for any distress and it screams out but we can't get to that place of moving from what's wrong with me to what might I need to actually change if we're not curious and come that explode out of us in those moments now Dr Becca you use this interesting word that I don't hear people use that much sturdy the idea of being sturdy as a parent and and I wonder how that relates to being with ourself as the CEO at the table versus a part taking over and running the show I think probably like when I you know the way I think about sturdiness the way I've defined it and I've had to do this because I use it so much people are like what does that mean and I'm like oh I should like come up with a definition because like so I've had to recently I think it's our ability to at once be connected to yourself and connected to someone else that we're no longer we're not so fragile that we have to do this to everyone but we're not so porous that we lose access to who we are and when I think about Dick's concept of self and all the Seas you know like I think it's it's it's a lot of that that compassion having Clarity to me as a parent that's one of those important scenes I think we all think we have hard moments with our kids or in hard stages because of our kids Behavior I think it's generally because we lack Clarity on our role and what's really going on right so Clarity is a big part of sturdiness exerting this is our ability to want to say I'm aware of what I need and I can respect myself and my boundaries I can simultaneously be aware of waving what my child might needs and see what's happening for them their truth doesn't eviscerate my truth my truth also doesn't eviscerate their truth kind of the ability to like see those two things at once which of course is is very challenging when you're you know being yelled at for having a nasty dinner or you know when you're triggered when you see somebody in your kid that you know is unacceptable in your own childhood or all the things you have to deal with as a parent [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Sounds True

Views: 8,502

Keywords: sounds true livestream, sounds true live, richard schwartz, internal family systems, becky kennedy, dr becky kennedy

Id: UVFOSRju6GQ

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2023