Healing your exiles...by Richard Schwartz (6 minutes)

Video Transcript

How many of you have been influenced by attachment theory in your work? Okay. Yeah, so it's had a huge influence on the field. And that's great because people are now more hip to the fact that it's not enough to just correct irrational beliefs. Instead, these young avoidantly attached or insecurely attached parts of us need to find a trusting relationship with someone trustworthy. And when that person is the therapist, the process can be very healing and it can take a long time and involve a very intense therapy relationship and lots of dependence and transference and countertransference.

What if it was possible for clients themselves to become that good attachment figure, rather than the therapist, rather than their spouse? For these exiled parts, for these insecurely avoidantly attached parts, what if clients could become the primary caretaker of these exiles which would free up their partner or their therapist to be the secondary caretaker of those parts? If that were the case, the therapist or the partner's role would shift considerably, and they might feel relieved and the client would feel less dependent and feel instead empowered, like she healed herself. And would know how to regulate herself in the future, and the therapy could be briefer.

For that to be possible, we need a model that says a couple of things first. That people have parts, some of whom are quite adult-like and competent, others are needy, lonely, ashamed. Second, a model that says that in addition to those parts, there's an essence within people that already has the qualities of a good attachment figure and can become that good internal parent to these parts. In IFS, we call that the self.

What John was talking about is getting people to separate from their parts, and they automatically will enter this what we call self, what the rest of the field is calling mindfulness state. But rather than just watch your thoughts and emotions parade by, we see those as emanating from suffering beings basically. So using compassion from self to get to know these parts and help them back to this self. While experimenting with this process, I found that as clients literally began to embrace their exiles, not only did these young parts feel better and calm down, they actually can unload the extreme beliefs and emotions that they got from traumas and attachment injuries. And when they do, they transform, often immediately, into their naturally valuable states and they return to becoming innocence or creativity or joy that they were before they were hurt.

Another piece of good news, as you'll see in the video I'm going to show a piece of the session soon, secure inner attachments happen much more quickly than secure external attachments, which can take months or years. Before we get hurt, these exiles are often the most playful, sensitive, innocent parts of us, creative parts of us. But they, because they're so sensitive, they're the ones that get hurt most in our families or in traumas. And as I mentioned before, they get stuck carrying those burdens and they're frozen in these scenes in the past. And because we don't want to feel that anymore, we find it difficult to function if we're with that, we lock them up, not even knowing we're locking up our most valuable resources.

So they're, it's insult to injury, they're hurt by the world, and then they're abandoned by us. Do these exiles need to heal? They need a new inner attachment relationship that I mentioned earlier, a critical aspect of which is for the client to really get what happened in the past when they were hurt, where the parts froze in time, where it's stuck in the past. So the clients become compassionate witnesses to their own pain, and then there's a process by which we can take those parts out of those scenes to safe places.

Earlier, I alluded to the idea that there is this good inner parent, this self. So who is that? Over 30 years ago, I stumbled onto the discovery that just beneath the surface of these parts lies an essence that can't be damaged, and once accessed, it can become that good attachment figure. All that's needed is for the client's parts to open space for it. What in Buddhism, John mentioned, is non-self, is really non-parts. It's the space that opens up when your parts relax, when they step back, and that emptiness that's so full is what I'm calling the self. And when parts will are trusting enough to open that space, self emerges spontaneously with qualities like curiosity, compassion, calm confidence, and we have four other C words I won't get into.

In addition, once accessed, the client self will kind of take over the session and begin to relate to their parts in a loving, healing way spontaneously, often without any directive from me.