Mind Surfer MD

Healing Parts Work: Internal Family Systems Coach Terry Baranski

• Liz Treynor, MD • Season 3 • Episode 2

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Ever struggled to make a decision and felt pulled by multiple selves, each with its own desires, beliefs, and temperaments?  

Terry Baranski is my Internal Family Systems (IFS) coach, and together we explore the benefits of parts work and some of the insights that can be gained from this meditative and unique form of therapy.  

https://www.healingtheself.net/

We also touch on Interfusion Festival (IF), an annual event in DC over MLK weekend, where he will be speaking in January 2024.  IF is five days of learning, healing, dance, acroyoga, Thai massage, breath work, play and connection.  

https://interfusionfestival.com/
January 11 – 15, 2024
Arlington, VA




Please join the discussion at Mind Surfer MD on Facebook!

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Mindsurfer MD. I'm your host, dr Liz Trainor, and my mission is to normalize discussions about mental health and provide resources to those of us who are riding the waves. So let's dive in.

Speaker 2:

Hey, the recording is working. Everybody, let's go. Hi, welcome again to Mindsurfer MD. I'm so delighted to have my IFS coach, terry Boranski, joining me this morning. I have been working with him for the last three, four months and boy, I wanted to quit so many times, but he did trust the process. Trust the process, and my friend Debbie Blaney shout out to you. Debbie, who recommended him, also said just trust the process, keep at it. But welcome, terry, thank you so much for being here today. I am so delighted to introduce you to my listeners.

Speaker 3:

Thank you, liz, such a pleasure.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So how did you find IFS? What is IFS, and tell us about your journey.

Speaker 3:

Yes, maybe I can start with a little IFS overview, if that makes sense, sure oh sure?

Speaker 2:

Well, I think I want to hear about who you are first, because I think stories are really interesting, instead of starting to the data, because that puts people to sleep. But who are you? How did you get into this?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, so I ought to be enough.

Speaker 3:

I worked in IT for the longest time and loved it for a little while and then, you know, slowly the passion started to wane over the years.

Speaker 3:

So it ended up being about 15 years, which was a good run and you know, but very left-brained type of activity which was all me at the time, so it was perfect. But then it, maybe five years or so ago, I just kind of fell into developmental trauma and developmental psychology and how the mind works, and it just came out of nowhere. It wasn't I wasn't looking to get into it, but it just, it, just it found me and I just became fascinated with, because it just explains so much that otherwise it's very hard to explain in terms of the way the world is going and the way people behave, and so it really resonated on that level, just in terms of making sense and in providing explanations for things. And then I found IFS shortly thereafter, which is a, you know, a specific way of looking at the mind that we'll get into in a healing approach as well, and it just and it stands for internal family systems right.

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

Internal family systems. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, but yeah, keep going. This is good stuff.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so it just resonated with me so well it's. It was one of those things where as soon as you see something, it just lands like so perfectly with you and then I, so I ended up trying it myself as a, as a client, and then at some point in there it finally occurred to me it was a calling for a new career which I hadn't seen coming at all. And then I started, you know, the training and all kinds of courses and reading and and stuff like that, and then slowly transitioned over, which was just beautiful, to have that flexibility, to not like have to be in a rush and have to make all this stuff happen. Now I was able to take my time and just kind of slowly move at a pace that that made sense. And yeah, now here I am and it's it's so rewarding.

Speaker 3:

Like it's it's great to have passion for work again and every day. Just learning new stuff and seeing you know the amazing results of it is just so, so powerful.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so cool. Yeah, as as physicians, I feel that we are so blessed to be doing something that is intrinsically valuable and intrinsically, you know, just feeds our souls. And I think doing this work, you know, as a practitioner, probably scratches that edge. And yeah, and Debbie said that she used to be one of your free clients Sorry, I'm chatting about Debbie again, but but but she's like, yeah, it was worth it.

Speaker 2:

I started hanging in when you went pro so but yeah, so I had never heard of IFS, ifs until this year and then I started hearing it from multiple different sources and I'm in a women physicians coaching group where one of the coaches is IFS and trauma informed also. And you know, I never thought of myself as trauma, trauma. It's like I don't have big T trauma but just, you know, just the, you know the kind of intellectual parents who weren't there, emotional connection, little T trauma kind of thing. But. But even for a little T trauma I've been finding it very, very helpful. But, like I said, it took months because it's such a different way of kind of doing therapy, because it's more meditative and you have this great late night DJ voice that's so relaxing. And for the several months where I was like this is a waste of money, this is not my thing. I realized at one of the sessions that the value of just intrinsically relaxing while you were guiding me on meditations, that had value in itself.

Speaker 2:

But then the real transformations happened months later, where I, you know, because the concept with the IFS is that there are all these different parts within us, right, and I should stop talking and let you explain it. But finding these little parts, because for me it was like, okay, I got this depressed part which I feel like swallows me, but then there's the angry part. That's angry that I spend half of my life depressed. And then there's the questioning part that's like, well, it's just neurochemistry, this IFS stuff is bullshit and you know. So that part kept coming in and you would remind me to like, okay, let's let that part go back and just like, explore this other part. So, anyway, so talk more about how IFS works. And yeah, yeah, too much.

Speaker 3:

No, it's beautiful to hear your experience and it's so important, so I'll do a little elevator speech and stop me if it doesn't make sense or anything. But when we think about the mind, we typically think of it as one thing, right, we say I, we say me, as if we're referring to a single thing. That is, that is us. But we also know on some level that we often hold contradictory thoughts on things and opinions on things. If we're weighing a big decision, we're often wavering back and forth on it. Moments, a moment like second to second In a lot of cases, like we'll just have these completely different perspectives, like come swooping in and swooping out. We also know that we'll often say one thing quite sincerely and then do another Right, and we see this with ourselves, with everybody. Like that, we will genuinely say I'm going to do X and then we'll do Y, and so clearly there are conflicting processes at work here in the mind when that happens. Other times will be even more explicit and we'll say, oh, part of me wants to do this, but a part of me wants to do that, and this is common language that people use and there's an implicit recognition there of what we're talking about when it comes to parts.

Speaker 3:

So the contention is that all of these things are reflective of something very fundamental about how the mind actually works. That's just not necessarily explicitly obvious day to day, especially in this culture. Where we're kind of ingrained in this culture is what we call mono mind viewpoint, which is the mind is one thing. So it takes a lot for, I think, us to question that a lot of times, because it's just an assumption of this is this is how the mind works. So when we say the mind is made of parts, so quick 101 on parts. So what do we mean by parts? Right? Well, the place I like to start is that the body is made of parts. They are, you know, we have shoulders and arms and they are separate from each other, but they're part of a larger system and the sum is greater than the parts. So we have this amazing body that can do amazing things. So that's one good way of thinking about it up front. Another analogy is an orchestra, which I love.

Speaker 3:

So you have everyone in the orchestra who has a role, so to speak, and again the sum of what's produced is far, far greater than the individual instruments being played. So a couple keys here. So parts of the mind are completely normal. Number one we're born with them and that's a good thing in this approach. So they're not created by trauma, as is often believed in parts of psychology, like with multiple personality disorder. The belief is that most of us are one mind, but then some people are so traumatized that they end up with these parts. And that's not how we look at it. We all the evidence suggests that we're born that way and multiple personality disorders just a more extreme manifestation as a result of extreme trauma. But our parts are impacted by trauma, often substantially, so they often get stuck in the past, we find at young ages. So there's this notion of an inner child that's pretty popular these days. That refers to that. Like we have this inner child. But in IFS we have inner children because there's always more than one, so we don't stop with just the one. There's always.

Speaker 3:

Again, depending on our history and all of this, there's some number of them in there. It is finite, but it's not. There's no specific number, it just varies for each person and these parts can get pretty intense when they're traumatized again, depending on a person's history. Another point is that they're all individual sub-personalities, so they're more than just emotions, even though we'll often refer to them that way. Up front we'll say, oh, I have a sad part, I have an angry one. But what we find is that they really are sub-personalities in there and they have their own ways of thinking and their own ways of seeing the world, which is just so, so fascinating.

Speaker 3:

The more and more I started digging into this. Like they really get, they are intricate in there and we have to account for that when we're working with them. The final point is that they interact with each other too. So it's a system. So some of them cooperate with each other, others fight each other when they disagree on what's best for the person. So there's this whole interactive system at work in there and it, you know, as IFS, was being discovered organically in the 80s by Richard Schwartz, the more he learned about it, the more intricate it got. You know, it was just so fascinating how he came to that which we can get into perhaps, but and this also goes back over a century this, this notion of the mind, psychology literature. So this, this is nothing new, it just other than certain niches in those two fields it's not not very well known at all. So that's a little bit of the backdrop of it and I'll pause there and maybe I can give just an example of this from the reflect on.

Speaker 2:

Right and I think the the way it was, you know, revealed in the 80s. I think you were telling me that he was working with bipolar patients. Is that right? Or bulimic patients patients right, where it's like a part of me wants to or eat and disappear and part of me is like this is really stupid, I shouldn't do this right, or something like that. So I found that really interesting and I had heard that IFS was supposed to be particularly helpful with people who have bipolar brains like mine. So that was another reason I was like, ok, I got to give this stuff a try and there were some exercises in particular that you did with me that I found very, very helpful. And you alluded to one of one of them where you know when somebody's, when we're making a decision and we can't decide, you know, like I was really struggling with whether to sell my parents' house or not Like we had this round table exercise. Can you talk about how that works? That was really powerful.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so that's we refer to as a polarization, when, when parts disagree on something, either what to do or what not to do, and so one of the things and sometimes there's one part on each side of the argument, and sometimes there's multiple, and for you it was multiple, you know that's often the case, and so what would help? So much is just like you would do with humans, and this is what I mean by. They are sub personalities, it's OK. What would you do with a big group of people who are split on an issue? And we know people, people just want to be heard. Well, we invite them to a conference table internally, and the self with a capital S, which we'll talk about, sits at the head of the table and moderates a discussion. And all the parts you know, and a lot of times we'll do it, ok, the parts who want to do this and on this side of the table, the parts who disagree, sit on the other side.

Speaker 3:

And is bizarre as that may sound, you know, to someone who's never done this before right, when the parts hear each other and when they know they're being listened to, and listened to by the self, like everything shifts, because what had normally been going on.

Speaker 3:

Before that was just fighting and yelling, and it's just. It's like a classroom for kids and the teacher is not there, or the teacher can't, you know, has no control over the classroom, and they can't hear each other and it just escalates, gets louder and louder and louder and the result is it's very difficult to make. You know, the self has to eventually make a decision and you can't do it because it's chaos in there, whereas as soon as we hear them, it immediately lowers the energy in there. And now not only is self hearing, all these perspectives which maybe we're getting drowned out by all the noise, but the parts themselves are recognizing that they're being heard and that lowers the consternation. And so now there's more room, just energetically, for self-eventually to make a decision, which I think is what you know, that no lines with your experience you can share, that that's normally what happens.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, and, and, and I love how you define the self as all the sees. They're all the good sees, like you know, confident and clear and creative and curious and compassionate, and Did I say courageous already, and there are a couple others but, but, but, but that's that's how I feel when I am, you know, in my Like, I like to say my happy self, my energetic self, and so that, so that, but having that, that that true self, that that is all those good, juicy things that we like to identify with, and Giving, having that perspective of kind of being above all these different arguing Factions, and listening to each one with creativity or with curiosity, rather, and and compassion, and hearing them out and honoring them Was, was very hopeful. And then there was another really powerful exercise that we did just a couple weeks ago. Can you, can you talk about that? I don't know if you know the one I'm thinking of. Okay, so it's, it's, and, and, and I don't know if I'm gonna be stealing your thunder because it was so powerful, because you had it as a surprise for me.

Speaker 2:

Okay, good, but it's where you invited me to visualize my children handing their trauma that I've inflicted on them because, right, having a bipolar parent, it's gonna be really traumatic. But imagining them handing that trauma back to me and then I get to hand the trauma that my parents gave me back to them and then they get to hand that trauma back to their parents because we all suck as parents. We do the best we can. We're all gonna cause some trauma in our kids and I know that my parents had even colder parents than I experienced as a child and to be able to Visualize. For me that was like imagining like balls of yarn just unwinding over the centuries and rolling faster and faster downhill on either side of my family tree. It was really a very powerful my image for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, what do you call that exercise?

Speaker 3:

or so that's a great aspect of this, where we there's In IFS, we have the site notion of burdens, which is the trauma baggage that our parts Are carrying, and there's essentially two types of them. There's one that, when we are traumatized directly, those are just called burdens, like standard burdens. But there's also trauma that is passed down generationally and this is, you know, epigenetics is all over the it's real like that had something going for him.

Speaker 2:

He's, you know the guy that we all like made fun of an EP buy out 30 40 years ago, but now it's like actually. Yeah yeah, the epigenetics is so fascinating.

Speaker 3:

And so we see that here, where, there, there, there's a lot of cultural stuff that is an ancestral stuff that comes down, and and when, when someone and it's hard to draw the line between the two sometimes, but when, some, when, when an entire family, for Generations and generations, is full of people pleasers, for example, there's always a component coming down generationally, and so those types of burdens which are called legacy burdens and and IFS. There's this. They're easier to deal with, not that the other stuff is hard, but it is that there's a bit more steps in the process. But with legacy burdens, because they're not yours, we pass them back. So we invite all the ancestors to come to the you know the area and inside, and you pass it to your parents, they pass it to their parents and the ancestors. This is so, so powerful.

Speaker 3:

For you know, in this culture we're so disconnected from our ancestors compared to others. You know, especially out east and Indigenous cultures like the. They do stuff like this all day right, and we're so, in the West, disconnected from it. So when it resonates, as it did for you, like it's, it's beautiful to see, because we're literally just handing stuff back and then it goes all the way back to the beginning and then they we have them give it up to one of the elements or to light, like there's a, there's a process at the end there and then we pass good stuff back down to kind of fill up all that space from all that stuff that was just pulled out of everyone in the line.

Speaker 3:

And again, unless this sound just like some imaginary exercise which when we're talking about it it's difficult to make it sound like more than that. But this is real, like this is not. You know, this is not what is just imagining something. And then it seems like it's like this stuff is so powerful and if you haven't done it I get that it may be hard to fully grasp that, but take it from me, who does it every day, and for Liz, who did it for the first time a couple weeks ago like this stuff is real and that's where the power of it is.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, it's really cool and like one of the I just wanted to mention, like a couple of the other breakthroughs, it's like every session there's usually some little insight that comes like and you know, and it's something that's that may even seem obvious, but like. The first one was when I was so profoundly depressed and you said, okay, can you just dial her back 50%? And I'm like no, it's all of me. And then I said, okay, well, maybe I can dial her back 5%, and just that 5%, if I can dial the depression back, even 5%. That's recognizing that there's this true self that's separate from that depressed self, and that for me that was that was money, that was like okay, so that was, that was very powerful. And then the other thing was just last week, when we were talking about there's no light to me as a child, and when I was banished my room. You know, as children sometimes do, we all get timeouts, but and and just realizing I'm the best mother for myself, I am the one who gets me as a little girl, and I think that's what our journeys are as adults is realizing that we become our own parent, we become our own best advocate, and so that that was also just another great, great insight for me just last week. So, anyway, so that's a little bit about IFS.

Speaker 2:

Everybody parts work and if you want to find out more healing, the self net is Terry's website, right, and and also, terry, you're going to be speaking at the Interfusion Festival, which is basically how I found you. The Interfusion Festival, guys, is so cool. It's where I learned how to do acro yoga. It's basically doing partner yoga, where you're balancing. It's like if you've ever done an airplane with your kids, that's like partner acro yoga is airplane on steroids. It's so fun. And and they also have all sorts of workshops on psychedelics and a cocoa ceremony and dance workshops that go till 5am, but I go to bed at nine, so that's not my thing, but, but Terry's going to be speaking there too about IFS and that's the Interfusion Festival. So just go to interfusioncom and you can find out more about it.

Speaker 2:

But it's over Martin Luther King weekend and it's in Washington DC and the beauty is, even though Terry's in DC, zoom obviously makes everything possible all around the world. So I met somebody at a psychedelic workshop who had has become a great friend, and she's the one who told me about Terry. So, yeah, and any anything else that we should know. Besides that, you love chocolate truffles and your daughter loves Peppa the pig, which I think is so cute. Not even know who Peppa the pig is, I have to look her up. But but yeah, is there anything else you want to add?

Speaker 3:

Terry. No, I think we've covered a lot, so thank you so much and thank you for getting the helping get the word out and introducing your audience to this. I think it's really really powerful practice and I look forward to seeing you in that Interfusion in a couple months.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I love that. Ifs is something that, yeah, I just think it's such. It's another tool in our momentarium and I am just delighted that I can help spread the word. So, love all your parts. People have a great day. Thank you so much, Terry HealingTheSelfnet is where to find them so thanks so much, Liz.

Speaker 1:

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