#164 Introduction to IFS with Anna Katherine Malone Gartshore

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Melissa Parsons

Hello, my friends, and welcome to this week's episode of Your Favorite You. I am very excited because we are in for a huge treat today. We are joined by one of the incredible people who has helped me to learn how to help you and all of my clients in a new and exciting way. So Anna Gartshore is here. She is an amazing psychotherapist and a lead trainer at the Internal Family Systems Institute. And she was just absolutely brilliant in helping me and about 50 therapists, social workers, and counselors complete our level one IFS training this past summer. Anna is an IFS ninja, and it is such an honor to have you here on Your Favorite You, Anna. Thank you so much for agreeing to be here.

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Anna Gartshore

Oh, thank you so much, Melissa. I'm giggling over here. I've never heard that before.

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Melissa Parsons

Well, I know that Shiloh and Kathy, two other participants, are definitely going to be listening to this podcast episode. And this is how you're referred to in our group of three. So just so you know, we all think the world of you. So I'm going to ask you to introduce yourself to my loyal listeners by telling us about your favorite version of you, Anna.

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Anna Gartshore

All right. Well, yeah, so my name is Anna. Anna Katherine is my name, actually, and Gartshore is my last name, but I always like to remember my mum's side of the family, which are the Malone's as well. So maybe someday I'll actually put that on my ID. So I usually start by just introducing where I'm speaking from, because I'm speaking from the the lands of the Anishinaabe, the Metis, the Ojibwe, Oji Cree in Northern Ontario. So I live in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, which is also known as Bawating. And yeah, that's really important to me because it's a real centerpiece of the work that I do. My ancestors settled here about six generations ago. And in my lifetime, I've been leaning hard into responding to the calls to action through Canada's Truth and Reconciliation process with our Indigenous peoples. So First Nation, Inuit and Metis, the first thing I like to say and just to honor the First Peoples of these lands.

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Melissa Parsons

Yeah. And it's interesting, my listeners won't know this, but we are recording this on Indigenous People's Day here in the United States. So amazing. Amazing. So all right. So if you wouldn't mind kind of giving us the semantics, like how long have you been a therapist? How long do you love about using IFS with your clients?

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Anna Gartshore

So let's see. So I, it was about 20 years ago that I shifted from a life in experimental theater into, well, I started off in play therapy. So I was trained in a method from Europe, comes from this, the look is called the coke school, but I studied with somebody by the name of Philip Collier. And that theater method is grounded in the pleasure to play. So you're always you, you don't lose your sense of who you are, but you know, in the pleasure to play, we have a marvelous time playing on, taking on different characters. So that could be really dark sinister characters, or that could be just, you know, really fun or interesting characters. So I was trained in that method. And the first month of that training is, goes back to childhood games. We just play and play and play for the first full month. So when I got back to Canada, I was teaching theater. And I was using that method and lo and behold, people's now I understand exiled parts. So their childhood wounds were opening up in my workshops. And people would break down crying and or have to leave. And there was a wonderful psychologist taking those workshops. He was a founder of an expressive arts therapy school. And he was a play therapy supervisor. And he started teaching me. And so gradually, I found myself learning play therapy. And he was giving me guidance on how to hold the emotion that was showing up with care and safety. And that just kind of put me on a path to, you know, learning to be a psychotherapist and getting a master's and taking all those psychology credits that I needed. And then yeah, so I trained in play therapy and expressive arts. And then gradually, I moved more and more into mainstream hospital based mental health work. So I always lean towards more of the experiential psychotherapies, but also had to learn those kind of evidence based kind of here in Canada, we have publicly funded health care. So I was required to learn things like CBT and DBT and family based therapy for eating disorders and all of those modalities as well. But my heart has always been with experiential psychotherapies.

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Melissa Parsons

Mm-hmm. That explains why you're such a ninja. That's amazing. So I've only briefly touched on what IFS is and kind of parts work, you know, a little bit on the podcast. So I think we should assume that most of our listeners might be hearing about IFS for the first time. So would it be possible for you to explain IFS in simple terms to someone who maybe has never heard about it before?

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Anna Gartshore

Yeah, sure. So the unique thing about IFS is that we embrace something we call the multiplicity of mind. So in most modalities, or you know, we kind of go around kind of considering ourselves to be one person. So there's this kind of notion of the unitary self. I am me. This is me, right? But in IFS, what we look at is like all the different kind of roles that we shift into and kind of take on as we move through the day and into the evening. And so in that view of the multiplicity of mind, we kind of understand that we have different subpersonalities that we can shift into depending on what we're doing, or what we're needing at the time. And so we have these parts of ourselves, we refer to them as parts of ourselves. And some of those parts help us function, they help us learn, plan, do the things, remember to pay the bills and get things at the grocery store, and, you know, pick up the kids, you know, those parts. So we call those our manager parts.

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Melissa Parsons

Mm hmm.

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Anna Gartshore

And on the other side, we have these parts of ourselves that help us remember to rest, relax, have fun, recuperate. And in IFS, they're called firefighters, which I can explain later. But the idea is that some are kind of getting ahead of problems and staying on top of things and others kind of help us decompress or numb out. Underneath all of that, we have these vulnerable parts that hold emotions. And they hold painful beliefs from the past and hope and they can be stuck holding painful, burdened emotions from past things that happened to us, especially when we're young. So those are sort of the three kind of categories of parts that we see in IFS. And then at the very core, the core assumption of IFS is that every human being has everything they need within to heal and that there's a source or an energy within us that leads us to that. So we call that self-energy in IFS. And when we lead from there, things tend to go a lot better.

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Melissa Parsons

Yes. Instead of the five to six-year-old part of us being in charge and driving the bus, for me, it's the 52-year-old woman who has a lot of experience and resources and has done a lot of work for healing herself. That's so interesting. As you're talking, I'm thinking, you know, so many times people, my clients, myself will notice that when we go back to our family of origin, that we immediately fall into this old role. Yeah. You know, that made sense, you know, maybe when we were kids to be in, but really doesn't make sense anymore. And I can't believe I'm like coming to this realization after I've already finished my level one training. But I'm like, oh, that that's what it is. It's these old roles and rules and things that we had to live by in order to survive and to thrive, you know, in some cases in our in our family, childhood homes and that type of thing. So it makes sense that even as a 52-year-old every Christmas, I'm like, why am I doing this? You know, it's like-

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Anna Gartshore

That's right. Family gives us a great opportunity to notice those parts of ourselves.

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Melissa Parsons

Yeah, very good. Big, big mirror, a big mirror to put up. So, okay. So for my people who've never heard of this before, can you differentiate parts of ourselves versus just having different moods or different feelings, that type of thing? Because I think some of my skeptics would be like, you know, I'm not multiple. You know, sometimes I'm just angry and I'm not multiple. Sometimes I'm just sad to be alone, you know, that type of thing.

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Anna Gartshore

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, we can have more generalized states where in IFS, we might say, like, different parts are sharing in the experience of us a generalized state. But when there's a sense that there's a little kind of a sub personality, what you know, we can notice, oh, I'm not always angry. I'm not always in that, that reactive mode. Let's just say it's, you know, getting a little, you know, you know, when we're stuck in something, like we're stuck in anger, or we're stuck in fear, or we're that that we can feel more reactive and more impulsive. And it's kind of it's got a hold of us. When we can relate to that as a part. In other words, the part is holding the anger, it is a part of me, but it's not my whole identity.

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Melissa Parsons

Mm-hmm.

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Anna Gartshore

I'm not only an angry human, just, you know, walking around the world in explosive anger all the time. But there's a part that holds that charge and can be impulsive. But with self to part, so when in self-energy, I can get curious and get to know that and just start to explore everything there is to kind of get to know about, about the angle. Like, so maybe it's got fist clenched and it says a lot of things and it goes hot and fast. And, but I'm here noticing that it's, it's not my whole self. It's a part of me that might have a very valid reaction. It's not that, you know, it's just that it's going to flow better with more relationship to self-energy. My 15-year-old, I got a little hot-headed 15-year-old part. And I say 15-year-old because that's when that part really came on board.

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Melissa Parsons

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

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Anna Gartshore

And if, and so she has the kind of imprint of that time, kind of like I feel 15 when she, we say blends with me, like when she's in the driver's seat and, um, things don't tend to go so well when I'm leading from my 15-year-old.

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Melissa Parsons

That's so interesting. I think I know for sure I definitely have a 16-year-old part who is, I think of her kind of as my social justice warrior, because I was in I grew up Catholic and I was in mass and I don't remember the priest I won't disparage him just some priest at my parish. And he was talking about how divorced people did not deserve to take the sacrament of Holy Communion. And I was like, this makes no sense. And because I have an aunt who, you know, is one of my favorite people who was divorced, and I'm like, she's no less holy than the rest of us. And why should she, you know, be excluded from this sacrament, when I should be able to receive. And I remember like standing up in church and saying to my parents, like, give me the keys. I'm not staying here to listen to this. And, you know, took the keys and went out and sat in the car and waited for them to to finish and like, I'm so proud of that part of me. And, you know, sometimes when she's in the driver's seat now when I'm 52, you're right, it doesn't go so well.

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Anna Gartshore

Right. And yet she has such an important role, right? She sees justice and is going to take a stand.

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Melissa Parsons

Oh, yeah. Yeah. She's definitely been with me at all the protests that we've gone to this year. And she will be with me on the 18th when we go and protest again. So, yeah, so interesting. And I think that, you know, for me personally, talking with my husband about my parts, like a part of me just got really hurt when you said that thing that you don't even realize was hurtful to this younger part of me and helping him make sense and me make sense of why I would get so upset about some seemingly innocuous thing that wouldn't hurt my 52-year-old self, but does, you know, hurt or touch on this younger part of me. So, and I think it's helped him too, to know, like, it's not all of me that is upset with you and that thinks you're a jackass or jerk. Like, it's just this one little part of me. And the other parts of me, like, luckily, like, love you and think you're amazing. So, like, let me tend to this little part of me that, you know, that got hurt and, you know, we're going to be okay.

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Anna Gartshore

Yeah. And that's such a good, you know, a good point that when we can speak for these parts rather than from them, it's easier to actually for others to hear us. Because it doesn't feel like it's just that huge energy coming at us in attack or whatever.

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Melissa Parsons

Right as an assault. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. Okay. So you talked a little bit about self, but can you kind of give us even more of a picture of what self-leadership looks like leading from self, you know, that type of thing?

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Anna Gartshore

Yeah. I mean, there are all kinds of ways that we can describe this. I guess the first thing I'll say is that it's more of a felt sense. Feel it in our bodies more that than a concept. But of course, we need concepts to be able to describe it. So yeah, and understand. But in an embodied way, it's where we feel more of a sense of open-heartedness. There's less constriction in our muscles. Different people have different kinds of experiences, but there's a sense of feeling aligned. There's a clarity, like, you know, so I know when I'm getting a little blended with a thinker or part of me, a part that thinks a lot, like I furrow my brow. Yes. Right. But when there's a little more self-energy, my face is more relaxed. So you'll notice it in prosody, you'll notice it in deep breathing, the sense of being able to feel your feet on the ground, a steady heartbeat. If I don't know if you have polyvagal people out there, you know, it would be what we would imagine a polyvagal theory to be like more ventral vagal. But there's a sense of calm. So we have these words, many people will use to describe the feeling. And some of those in IFS are called the eight C's of self-energy. So this calm clarity, confidence can be part of that. Compassion. I'm drawing a blank. No, that's okay. Curiosity is a big one. Creativity. Exactly. A sense of connectedness. Yeah. Yeah.

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Melissa Parsons

Courage is a big one. I think we said them all.

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Anna Gartshore

Yeah, did we get them? I think so. I think so. So words like that. I mean, there are other words as well, like open heartedness, some people describe feeling a sense of love or love and kindness. So it's from here that things flow differently. Yeah. And, you know, there's even some good research on from the field of social neuroscience, Tanya Singer from the Max Planck Institute, if you've gotten into that stuff on the difference between compassion circuitry and empathy circuitry. And in compassion circuitry, we have more oxytocin flowing. And we're not taking on the pain of other people, but we're mobilized to act and do something. And in that empathy circuitry, in IFS, we say we're blended with we're getting blended with caretaking parts that are actually riding in our threat circuitry. And we can get burned out, we can we can really start to get depleted.

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Melissa Parsons

That mama bear energy is kind of what I think of. It's real easy to get burned out from that.

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Anna Gartshore

If we don't have any other options and we're always driving from there. So self-energy is really, really helpful to come into more and more awareness with. And as we have more noticing of parts, we also notice more of what it feels like to be in self-leadership. And so from there we have more resilience. We can really have a lot more stamina.

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Melissa Parsons

And my favorite word recently is just like a sense of equanimity.

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Anna Gartshore

Yes, yeah, beautiful word. Yeah.

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Melissa Parsons

Yeah, it's one of my favorites right now. OK. You touched a little bit on our protectors. So can you, again, define those and tell us why we developed them? And could you give us maybe some common examples that people might recognize, oh, I probably have that part?

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Anna Gartshore

Yeah, okay, great. Yeah, so we have these protector parts that step in when we're little to help us learn and do. And so one thing I wanna just mention before we go too far is that all protectors have a positive intention. Yes. They want to help us. And they wanna help us succeed at doing the things and they wanna help us have fun and rest and relax. So there's always a spirit of positive intention in these protector parts. Like I said earlier, there are these manager parts and then there are these parts that are more fast and reactive. So you could think of it this way that there's proactive protectors and reactive protectors are a little more impulsive or spontaneous.

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Melissa Parsons

Okay, I gotcha.

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Anna Gartshore

So a good example would be, well, when I lecture on IFS, I think I show this little video from Sesame Street. If you're of a certain age, you remember this little vignette from Sesame Street where this little girl, her mother, gives her a task to go off and pick up a few things from the store. She has to remember to get a loaf of bread, a carton of milk and a stick of butter. Yes, three things she's got to remember. And she's got to kind of just be very courageous and step out onto the street and go all the way to the store and remember the three things, ask for them and bring them all the way back home.

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Melissa Parsons

Mm-hmm

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Anna Gartshore

And it's just this adorable little vignette and to me that's a really great example of a manager part.

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Melissa Parsons

Yeah.

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Anna Gartshore

You know, just at that age where working memory is coming online, you've got to hold something in your mind in order to be able to complete a task. And so those protector parts that help us manage and plan and do and learn are involved in that task. And because it's a systems theory in IFS, we know that there's this counterbalancing side. So to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So let's imagine this little this little kid comes back, comes home and gets all the things and there's this upregulation of pride and it's all gone well. But that's a lot for a little child. Then they've got to kind of shake it all off and they might just go off and be silly and play or maybe, you know, just crash and have a little nap. But there's just something, you know, kind of that counterbalances all that effort.

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Melissa Parsons

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

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Anna Gartshore

So those are our protectors that help us on either side of that.

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Melissa Parsons

Mm-hmm. So you're saying that for us moms who have worked all day and taken care of the family and gotten everybody to bed and like it's like we plop down and want to watch Netflix and eat a bowl of ice cream, like this is the counterbalance.

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Anna Gartshore

That's right. It needs a new time, you know, just some time to decompress.

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Melissa Parsons

Right, right, right. Okay. Yeah. And I mean, that's been, I think, I don't know, so villainized in culture, right? It's like, I hate, I don't know, at least where I come from. It's like, oh, why do you have to take that time? It's selfish or, you know, so just knowing that that is a part of you that's trying to protect you and trying to make it so that you can get up the next day and do it all again.

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Anna Gartshore

Exactly. Yeah, that decompression time. And you bring up such a good point that those parts of ourselves that can just, okay, crash on the couch and, you know, watch some TV or do something enjoyable, you know, they, they, they take a lot of heat, a lot of judgment, but exactly in our society. So we, it is really important for us to really notice that there's a spirit of positive intention there.

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Melissa Parsons

That's what I think drew me to this work so much was like knowing that, you know, there are no bad parts and that they all do want to help us in some way. And, you know, sometimes they get led astray about the ways to help us and they think that they need to help us from our five to six-year-old selves, but we can help them to find a different way and a new job and that type of thing. As we try to help people, he also so can do. Okay, awesome.

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Anna Gartshore

Yeah. Well, the last thing I'll say about that is just that, you know, on that, on that counterbalancing side of rest, relaxation and recuperation is that they don't tend, that side doesn't tend to think of long-term consequences. So they tend to just grab, you know, what's available and feels good now. So sometimes they just need help in choosing things that are going to actually have a long-term benefit rather than a long-term harm.

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Melissa Parsons

Right. Right. Yeah. Long-term nourishment instead of a long-term harm. So interesting. Okay. Okay. And then underneath you said all the protector parts are these exiled parts. Can you say a little bit more about those? Do you mind?

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Anna Gartshore

Yeah. So those parts are really different than the protectors. If you think that protectors have jobs, but these exiles, they're called exiles because we live in a society that really has not allowed us to just be free with our emotions. So if you think of how it's gone over the, I don't know how it was before the 20th century, but I know in my own family memory, you know, with two world wars and a lot of hardship, there's a way that we're not friendly towards children's outward expressions of emotions.

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Melissa Parsons

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

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Anna Gartshore

We don't have time for that. We don't have time for that. So I grew up in this Northern Ontario steel town, really tough. People would say, suck it up, suck it up buttercup. Those kinds of things are messages all over the place and don't be such a wuss or don't cry. Be tough is basically be strong, independent, be tough, stiff upper lip, all those things, those things. Yeah. So in different cultures, you'll hear the phrases in different ways, but there's this message that your feelings aren't welcome here. Your vulnerable expressions are not tolerated here. So what we now understand with children is that when we leave them alone with their emotional pain, they don't regulate. Children need co-regulation. And so what happens is it all has to get squashed down somehow in order to be acceptable to the adults or the older children. So kids start to learn to repress, to suppress, to depress, to hide all that. But then all those feelings get stuck inside our bodies. And if we look at the alarming rates of adverse childhood experiences, we know there's also just really high trauma in society. So kids are going through really, really intense experiences without much guidance through the emotional tempest of just being a kid and then a kid going through a hardship. So the point here is kids need help. They need guidance through their powerful feelings. Without that help from a kinder, wiser, stronger adult, it goes underground. It gets exiled. So those parts called exiles are the ones holding the burdens from past painful experiences. And those could be burdens of shame, of profound loneliness, the feelings of lonely abandonment or unprocessed grief or terror or all these really big feelings that just are too scary for little ones to metabolize. So the protectors try to keep that all out of conscious awareness.

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Melissa Parsons

Mm-hmm.

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Anna Gartshore

And exiles are trying to get heard. So they'll come up to the top with big feelings and then this can set off a whole cycle from protectors to exiles. So yeah.

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Melissa Parsons

And then I'm just thinking about all the parents who have not had the opportunity to work with their exiled parts, trying to hold the big emotions of themselves as their child is feeling their big emotions and it can become a big perfect storm of just people not knowing how to deal with sadness, grief, loneliness, anger, all those things.

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Anna Gartshore

And how do you give your child what you never got?

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Melissa Parsons

Mm-hmm.

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Anna Gartshore

Especially when we're talking about so much of this as a bodily felt sense.

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Melissa Parsons

Mm-hmm.

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Anna Gartshore

Yeah, I used to work with families and I was an emotion-focused family therapist and yeah, it's this kind of whole emotion coaching piece that we would do. So I started working with kids and then gradually was like, it would be great if I could work with the parents. So now I work with the inner child, the inner children of the parents and the parents tend to find that everything flows more smoothly when their little ones in the internal world finally get what they always needed and didn't get at the time. So we say it's never too late.

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Melissa Parsons

Yeah, never too late. As long as you're still alive, I always say, still got time. Okay. Would you mind sharing, Anna, a story of, and obviously keeping it completely anonymous, of someone's breakthrough moment that you've helped them experience in IFS just so that people kind of can see what's possible without making any promises, obviously.

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Anna Gartshore

Yeah. Well, there's, let me see. There's so many, because it is a powerful model and there's, there's something so beautiful. So when we, when we can really get to, I'll just say that this is how the process flows and we can really get to know those protector parts of ourselves and really begin to befriend them and learn more about who they protect underneath. And when we can do that from self-energy to these protectors, these protectors start to find a sweet relief in this connection to self-energy. And that opens up a pathway for self-energy to finally move towards these young, vulnerable, exiled parts. And so I have so many examples. I'm having trouble settling on one, but the gist of it is, well, you know what, I'll just talk about my own process. So I'm, you know, in my own experience, you know, I had these little exiled parts that were just holding deep burdens of shame around having a learning disability and a visual tracking issue that was undiagnosed at the time. And so I didn't know what was wrong with me. And I just was picking up burdens of shame from the very, very harsh Stern school environment that I was in. And so in my own, which meant I, I came out of high school believing that I was stupid. It didn't make sense. I had parts that thought I'm smart, but then I didn't understand certain things and thought, well, I can't, I would never be able to be a child therapist because I'm too stupid. So that's, you hear the burden in that, right? That's a burden to believe.

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Melissa Parsons

Mm-hmm.

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Anna Gartshore

And it's connected to a burdened feeling of shame. So in my own therapy, what I was able to do was gradually get to know my protector parts from self-energy until they trusted me enough to be able to lead the way to these little exiles like seven years old, eight years old, that really picked up these huge burdens of humiliation, of being singled out in class, and then helping these little exiles to orient towards me. So it's kind of like an IFS, but sort of like we bend space and time.

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Melissa Parsons

Mm hmm.

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Anna Gartshore

In this strange way, so we drop in and move into a memory and then we start to connect with the little one within ourselves in the moment where the thing happened. So it could be a traumatic memory, it could be a really adverse childhood experience memory. And something really extraordinary begins to happen where these parts actually in the memory will start to turn towards self-energy. It's like the idol has finally arrived. Like these parts got stuck back there. They're still back there in time. So we do time traveling and we drop in and we meet these little ones and we say, I'm with you. And then we witness everything that happened and how the burden got stuck there and everything the little ones need to be witnessed. It was kind of like a do-over, we do for them what they would need at the time and never got.

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Melissa Parsons

Yeah.

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Anna Gartshore

And in that whole process, there's this natural releasing that begins to happen. And remarkably, all those kind of stuck beliefs and emotions just begin to dissolve away, they shift. And then we get out of there and get to a new, better place. And what's also extraordinary is that the body starts to feel like energized and a lot of playfulness and creativity will start to rise up once these burdens are released. So that's, I mean, it's kind of a bit of a story, but you know, it's, it happens time and time again in an IFS process. And it's very liberating. We don't have to change thoughts with other thoughts, you know, it's just, oh, when we just meet these little ones in the way they always need it, they're now finally freed up to release what they no longer need to hold.

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Melissa Parsons

Yeah, my little eight to nine-year-old self who thought that her body was a problem because I was made to believe that by my gym teacher in elementary school. And when we were in Chicago, I think the first, I don't know if it was the first time we were in Chicago or the second time, but we were doing a session and I was the client. And oh my goodness, just the experience of being with her at the gym and her being stuck at the St. Pius X building with my gym teacher, Mrs. Boron, and again, like being singled out and made a spectacle of in front of my whole class and that type of thing. And, you know, figuring out that initially she said when I asked her where she wanted to go, because she didn't want to stay at the gym anymore, she said she just wanted to go out on the playground and play. And then she was like, wait, no, Mrs. Boron can still get to me here. So she's like, I want to come with you. And she now hangs out at the little park that's in our neighborhood. And I walk past there on my walks pretty much every day and I go swing with her. And she now comes with me to yoga class. And she comes with me to, you know, when I'm lifting weights and that type of thing. And like, she just can't believe what we do now with our body that is not a problem.

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Anna Gartshore

As women in bodies, we suffer a lot, because we're swimming in a culture with so much judgment about the body. Little kids pick that up, don't they? Managers get to work, never again will I be humiliated like that. And then they start controlling weight and shape.

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Melissa Parsons

Right. Oh, or just like telling you that you can't exercise, you know, because, you know, your body wasn't made for that because you could get the presidential award, like, and just like having that belief that my body wasn't made to exercise, like, you know, this poor little one inside of me was just so misguided, right? And being able to, being able to help her see like, no, we do all these amazing things now. I just love that she's got that connection to you.

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Anna Gartshore

Do you notice a difference in how your body feels?

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Melissa Parsons

I feel for the first time in my life, like my body is my body. And I mean, I have done a lot of things in this past year that I've told everybody about on the podcast, but doing yoga and starting to lift weights again and getting my steps in. And I started taking tarazepide back in February and it has really helped me to not have a lot of food noise and that type of thing. And so, I had just so many things like coalescing at the exact right time. I feel like as a 52-year-old, I'm like, okay, this is finally the body that I was always meant to be in. Wow, that's great to hear. Yeah, so anyways. All right. Can you think of anything that I haven't asked you that we should definitely be saying on this podcast, Anna?

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Anna Gartshore

Oh, good question. I mean, I think you've covered, you know, the positive and spirit of positive intention from these protector parts, the impact of adverse childhood experiences. We've talked about exiles and self-energy. So we've kind of covered the whole system very briefly. Yeah, I think we have. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Melissa Parsons

Yeah. So if someone is listening at home and they're curious about getting to know their own parts, other than working with an IFS therapist, which obviously is an option for everyone who's listening, can you give us maybe just a simple exercise where they could try to start to get to know their system? Maybe it's just having the awareness or I don't know. What are your thoughts?

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Anna Gartshore

Well, there are lots of things that people can read, or I can guide something really simple. And so, yeah, but I would definitely recommend reading No Bad Parts if people are interested in learning more. So that's by Richard Schwartz. Yes. The audio version can be nice because then you can listen to the guided practices and try them. Right. Yeah.

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Melissa Parsons

Yes, my student part needed to have both the books so that I could underline and highlight the physical copy and then I also needed the article so that I could listen to Dick guide us through all the things. So yes, I would recommend that as well.

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Anna Gartshore

Yeah, great. And then there's I think there are about five free meditations that you can try on insight timer guided by Richard Schwartz himself.

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Melissa Parsons

Okay. Awesome. Yeah. My people have all heard about Insight Timer. They know how much I love it. So they can find it very awesome.

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Anna Gartshore

Schwartz, IFS, you can look it up there. Yeah. And then it's great to have, if you're getting into it, it's great to have a parts journal. And then as you're discovering more about your parts and, you know, having more and more relationship, you can be keeping track in a journal. So over the years, I've kept one and it's been really interesting to see how the relationship has grown over time in the inner world. And so I highly recommend that.

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Melissa Parsons

Well, I'm not going to let you get away with saying that you would guide us through something and then not have you do it. So if you wouldn't mind doing that, that would be amazing.

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Anna Gartshore

Okay. So this one can be helpful if you have some paper in front of you and a pen or art supplies, just whatever you like. But it might be nice to just pause the podcast and get yourself set up.

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Melissa Parsons

Please don't be driving. I know how you guys all are trying to drive and meditate at the same time. Don't do that.

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Anna Gartshore

Yeah, we won't recommend that. But yeah, so I'll just and then, and then the invitation is to go within. And not everybody's system is liking that, which is just fine. So if you prefer, if it just feels like better for you not to go and close your eyes or go within, you can do this by looking at the page and keeping an outward focus. So there's first a choice around am I going to have an inward focus or an outward focus. And you just want to meet your system where it's at. Because we don't want to push anything. So if you feel anxious with closed eyes, then no problem, you'll get just as much by looking at the paper. But if you are comfortable going within, then you might close your eyes, or soften your gaze. And you can just take a moment to just notice that shift even just from eyes open to an outward focus to an inward focus, either with softened gaze or closed eyes. And then just having a moment just to notice how you're breathing down, not to do too much. It's just to kind of have this pause to settle your awareness and the experience of your breath. And it's usually not long before we also notice that something pulls us away from the focus on the breath. So if in IFS, we would be saying we notice some parts are in and around. And you might notice that they're thinking. Or you might notice that they're more somatic, maybe an energy to get up and do something.

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Melissa Parsons

Or they could be really sleepy.

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Anna Gartshore

So just having a moment to notice what's happening in and around your breath. As you focus on your breath, who's here with you? In thought, impulse or sensation, perhaps emotion, and then just see where you might be curious. And I'm going to invite you to bring your curiosity towards the part of you that you're noticing. Let's just say it's in thought. So when you have a sense of it, then the next thing I'll invite you to do is just to now look at your page and just jot some things down on the page. That could be the words that it's saying, or you could describe the impulse it's having. Maybe it's just the energy it's got, like a quality. Just have a moment to do that. And then as you look at what you've got on the page there, just kind of take a moment and then see how you're reacting to what you're noticing on the page. Do you like it? Are you curious? Or does anything else come up? And that's going to tell you if your heart's open towards getting to know this part more, or if you've got another part stepping in with a reaction towards this first one. Now, if you've got another part with a reaction, like let's say it's like, I don't like it, then I'll invite you to draw or write on the page what that part has to say. Everything it doesn't like about this first part. And then the last step will be just you can go back and forth like that, just noticing parts, you know, and then seeing how things shift. And then after you've got about five parts, you can just take a pause and just notice with this important question, how am I feeling towards these parts of me? And I'll leave you with that question. You can do this at your own time. But that question will tell you if more is possible, if you can get more and more curious and just learn more and more from these parts. They like it when there's an open-hearted curiosity, and they'll be more likely to share, and that's flowing. So that's a really quick process.

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Melissa Parsons

So beautiful. Thank you. I am just feeling so much of gratitude to you and to Paul and to all the people in our IFS group and of course to my friends who are going to be listening to this who were also in the group. Thank you so much for sharing your beautiful light with us and for coming on and helping all of my listeners kind of understand IFS and hopefully I mean I can't imagine that anyone would be totally jazzed about it after hearing you talk about it in such an amazing way so I just appreciate you so much.

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Anna Gartshore

Well, thank you so much. It's been a real delight, Melissa. I love to share the model and think for many of us when we experience the shift internally, it's just it's hard not to don't want to share it with others.

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Melissa Parsons

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My part that's like, everyone needs to know all about this, which is of course why you're here. Well, thank you so much.

Anna Gartshore

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So much gratitude always.

Melissa Parsons

All right, everybody. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode and come back next week. I'll have more for you.

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