The Validation Lounge, All Parts Are Welcome with Sasha Jenkin
Sasha Jenkin, Internal Family Systems Therapist, discusses various themes in the self help, psychology and therapy arena through an Internal Family Systems lens. She is joined by fellow IFS practitioners and advocates.
If you would like to be in touch with Sasha please email her at contact@sashajenkin.com
The Validation Lounge, All Parts Are Welcome with Sasha Jenkin
The Validation Lounge, All Parts Are Welcome, Episode 14 with Jeanine Connor discussing psychodynamic and IFS therapy
In this episode I chat with Jeanine Connor about the differences and overlaps between IFS and psychodynamic therapy.
Jeanine Connor MBACP, MSc, MEd, BSc (Hons) is a psychodynamic psychotherapist and clinical supervisor in private practice, and a presenter and workshop facilitator with 25+ years’ therapeutic experience. She is the author of around 250 publications, including three books influenced by her work as a psychotherapist: You’re Not My F*cking Mother and other things Gen Z say in therapy; Stop F*cking Nodding and other things 16 year olds say in therapy; and Reflective Practice in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy; plus scores of articles, columns, blogs, reviews and resources. Jeanine is also the Editor of BACP Children, Young People & Families journal and Reviews Editor for BACP Therapy Today.
https://ifs-institute.com/resources/research/ifs-glossary-terms
The above link is a glossary of common terms used in Internal Family Systems Therapy from the IFS Institute.
More info on my fabulous guests can be found on the podcast website:
https://thevalidationloungeallpartsarewelcome.buzzsprout.com
Sasha Jenkin website for any feedback please:
https://sashajenkin.com/
I'm Sasha Jenkin. I've always been really fascinated by people and what makes them tick and I've been lucky enough to pursue this interest in my work as a therapist for over 20 years. In 2019 I discovered internal family systems therapy which has been life-changing for me both personally and professionally. In this podcast I'll be chatting to other internal family systems therapy colleagues and practitioners about how this model has impacted them and then in each episode we will also focus on a particular piece of psychology or self-help or therapy theory and we'll look at this through an IFS lens. So why not join us in the Validation Lounge? What we bring will be personal reflections from our own experience. This doesn't mean that your parts will manifest in the same way as ours. However, I do hope these discussions will be thought-provoking and an interesting introduction to IFS, a setting where all parts are welcome. Welcome to the Validation Lounge, all parts are welcome. Today I have with me Janine Connor who's a psychodynamic psychotherapist and clinical supervisor and we're going to have a look at some of the overlaps around psychodynamic therapy and IFS therapy, just have a discussion about that. Welcome Janine. Thank you very much Sasha. Thank you for coming on, I really appreciate it and perhaps you could just give us some information about what you're up to, your areas of interest and expertise and maybe where you are and that kind of thing? Yeah, so I offer individual psychotherapy and supervision. Mostly my clients are older adolescents and young adults and I work with supervisors from all different modalities. Some are counsellors and psychotherapists with lots of practice, lots of experience and Others are in training. Some are not counsellors and psychotherapists at all. They might work in schools, working with young people. So that's quite varied. And alongside my clinical practice, I also write. I'm the author of very many publications, including some books, two of which are I think you're aware of with the sweary titles and I am the editor of the BACP Children, Young People and Families Journal. Yeah, yeah and I was thinking about that before this because I'm just reading your book but how do you say it without, I don't know if we're allowed to swear. Well I swear but people who are uncomfortable with swearing, we've started referring to the books as nodding and mothers. One of them is called stop asterix nodding and the other one is called you're not my asterix mother. You're not my asterix mother. Or we just call them nodding and mothers. I love it yeah and yeah and you used to be my supervisor. I did. As you say we were working together my background was more integrative and more person-centered but I just you know found you so helpful. And I would say in IFS terms that you have a lot of self-energy, which I've always experienced you as very real and authentic. Thank you. That's really nice to hear. And nice to be working with you in a different way as well. Yeah, no, it's nice to see you. Yeah, I think it can be interesting to have supervision with somebody whose core training is a different modality to our own because... I mean, it's nice to have a shared language. But I think if I only speak with people who see things the same way as me, there's going to be a limit to what I can learn from them. And I find it quite helpful for my own learning to talk to somebody who has different training experiences to my own, because that challenges how I think about things and might give me a new perspective. Not everybody feels that way, but I think it can be helpful and so perhaps you might have that kind of um being kind of coming from a place of like always learning yeah yeah my own supervisor is um a systemic family therapist
SPEAKER_01:and
SPEAKER_00:we do have the shared psychodynamic language vocabulary but she looks at everything from us through a systemic lens and which is incredibly helpful. And she's been my supervisor for a very, very long time. So I think I've internalised quite a lot of that way of working as well. Yeah, and that was coming across, actually, I think, in your book, which I just started reading, it felt, talking about the group process. But in one of your examples, and that's also interesting because Dick Schwartz, who founded Internal Family Systems Therapy, was... initially a very well-known systemic family therapist, very well-known in his field and written books and stuff on it. It was then him taking that modality and applying it internally to systems inside us. So there's kind of maybe an overlap there. What was it about the psychodynamic model that really appealed to you or appeals to you? When I first started, came across psychodynamic theory when I did my first degree in psychology and at that point I think everything that I read appealed to me you know whatever whatever I was learning about was like yes this is it this is the way this is what I believe and then I'd read the next thing and go no no no it wasn't that it was this one and it was it was when I got to the psychodynamic model that I don't know, there was something about it that really appealed to me and really stuck with me, made more sense to me than the others. And my initial therapeutic training was with The Place to Be. I did their child counselling training, which is a play therapy model, again, couched in psychoanalytic theory. So the theoretical part of it was was psychodynamic and we were reading a lot of Bowlby attachment theory and Winnicott things about babies and infants and relationships and attachment and it just all made such a lot of sense to me and then after that I then did a master's in psychodynamic psychotherapy which was you know full-on the Freud and Klein and and more in-depth psychodynamic theory and it's yeah I've stayed with it it's it is my core training and it is the core running through all of the different types of work that I do and my writing still to this day. Do you think you're able to say what it is about it that felt right? I think the emphasis on early experiences is probably the main thing I think I believe we can't not be influenced by everything that we've experienced. And I think going all the way back to childhood, infancy, babyhood, even in utero, there's a lot of evidence now about even unborn babies are still in relationship with the mum and still picking up signals about what's going on in the environment, the mother's environment. And I think time and time again, when I meet clients in therapy, the clues to their presenting issues that have brought them into the therapy room now, here and now, can often be found when I hear about their earlier story, earlier history in their family or previous relationships, the way that they were brought up, the way that they were loved and nurtured or not, if that was missing in their early experiences. And so I suppose I've built over 25 years in practice, my own anecdotal evidence to support the theories that I was learning about all those years ago. And it just makes sense to me. It fits them. That's great really as well, isn't it? It's great that like, I'm sort of got this image of like a backbone, like a structure that it's like that everything that you're going, that it's always going back to that. And the longer that you work in that, like I can hear that you're interested in hearing other ways of working, but that you can go back to that structure that feels right. Yeah, that's really nice symbolism, the backbone of it. And the more I learn, the more I believe in it. You know, I haven't moved away from it. I've held on to it even more. And also, I think the other main strand, I mean, I'm simplifying a very huge, complex theory to two main strands. Early experiences is one. And I think the other one is about unconscious processes. And again, that just makes sense to me that a lot of what we do and think and the ways that we behave and the choices that we make, the relationships that we find ourselves in, the situations that get repeated for a lot of people, why there must be some kind of drive within us that that draws us to those things and and again the theories from that model explain that for me in a way that makes sense yeah yeah yeah you're primarily working your books are about um was it late adolescence to early what kind of age group are you working with mainly and um I mostly do work now with with older adolescents and young adults.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But the first therapy book that I wrote that does not have a sweary title, Children and Adolescents, Reflective Practice in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy. Oh, sorry. Yes. Yeah. Another book. Another book. That was my first one. That was 2020. Yeah. 2020. And that book is about different themes that come up in the work. And then the book that I think you're reading now, Nodding, is specifically about working with 16 year olds. Those two books are basically books of short stories. So they're completely fictional, made up as each chapter is the story of a person who is in relationship with a therapist, exploring their stuff, thinking about what's going on for them. And then the latest book that came out last year, Mothers, is Gen Z. So at the time of writing, Gen Z were roughly 13 to late 20s. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the one that I'm reading is just great. I love the way you write. It's very accessible. I would recommend it to anyone really who's particularly a therapist or people or parents. Thank you. So what I was trying to work out is how much we need to know about the psychodynamic model. You've talked about this kind of looking at the impact of like early childhood experiences, right back to even being in the womb and also the unconscious processes. Do you feel like there's anything else? Because I think it would be helpful then to just ask how you might be working with your clients, but if there's anything else you feel that's important to say. I think they're probably the main two umbrella themes within each of those. There's lots more. The way that I work, that I apply that in practice is by, first of all, being in relationship with a person in the room and thinking about how they relate to me, how I relate to them and what that might be saying to me about their other relationships out in the world. And also looking for patterns maybe in the themes that they bring or in the way they bring them to the room, the stories that get told. looking for threads that join all those together that might be saying something about how their unconscious is at play, what might be going on there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So all the time really looking to make sense of what is going on here and now, how can I make sense of that in terms of what might have gone on there and then in the past, in a nutshell. How would you kind of... So is there quite a lot going on inside? How much of that will be being... I mean, maybe it's hard to say exactly, but how much would you be sharing of that? I think it does vary from person to person, depending on maybe how long they've been in therapy with me, what their presenting issues are. But I think I do... how to put it, kind of show my workings out. So I might think aloud and I present it as that. I go, you know, something's just come into my mind and I'm going to share it with you, see if it makes sense. Or I do a lot of wondering or noticing. I'm wondering if this relates in any way to something that you might have experienced before. Or I'm noticing that whenever you talk about somebody... I don't know, in authority, you often mention these same things. So I'm not saying this is the answer to your problems. I'm saying this is what I'm noticing. This is what I'm curious about. And I can be curious about it together and try and work out what else might be going on there. That's really interesting because curiosity is one of the... So in IFS therapy, there's a way of being, which is being in self-energy. which is as a therapist, it's where you're wanting to be as much as possible. It's not possible to always be in self, but it's helping the client find their own self energy. That's to help their own parts. But anyway, curiosity is one of the key ways of being in self energy, as well as things like compassionate, connected, confident, courageous. But curiosity is the one that often we can find is the most accessible in a way like we'd be curious about something we might get to a part that is quite challenging it might be hard to be compassionate towards it but to be curious like oh and it's very it feels yeah and I think that that's something that I might be curious about in a client as well so there might be some clients who who appear to lack curiosity even in themselves and and wonder why I would be curious in them. And for me, that speaks to perhaps their earlier experiences of have people ever been interested in them before? Why does that feel odd to them? Is it because it's unfamiliar? And if it is unfamiliar, then it might be something to be suspicious of or something to be frightened about. So it's all kind of clue gathering and information gathering, I think. Yeah. It might be that whole thing of being seen. Yes, yes. Feel exposing. Yeah, yeah. I knew this was going to happen. I've got lots of different things coming up, which is great. But I've got this part of saying, this is about IFS. But, yeah. So there's also what you were saying about patterns. I've just been on my level three IFS training, which is like the last
SPEAKER_01:one.
SPEAKER_00:And that's one of the, she was originally a systemic therapist as well. And she was talking about how important patterns are. So maybe that's
SPEAKER_01:some of your
SPEAKER_00:patterns of behavior and how even just noticing those can be really helpful. So do you know anything about IFS therapy? I know very, very little about IFS therapy. So, I mean, now I'm going to have to tell you, I'm like, oh, supervisor so she's like i'm just gonna tell her supervisor i'll try and i'll try it's again it's like it's probably a bit like all modalities it's getting like a like a flavor of it that's going to give enough information it's it can be something that's quite simple but also really there's a lot of complexities but the main so as well as us having this self-energy the main um sort of theory bit of theory is that um that we're all multiple in fact some people would say that it could have any preconception that we can have burdens that have been passed down generations but we're generally born sort of our you know our best self like kind of naive and just wanting to you know coming to the world it's just in in the moment but we have experiences that mean that we have um we end up getting parts that become burdened and so There are, and so it can be experiences where mainly where our primary caregivers haven't been able to offer us what we need in the moment. There can be burdens that are passed down sort of familiarly, like in families, also in society, culturally, at school. School can be a big one. And there are two different types of burdens or protect, we call them protectors. So what happens is that when the baby or the child has to take on a burden of being a particular way in order to be accepted within the family, then what happens is the original feeling, like the sadness or the rage or the shame, becomes exiled and protected by either manager protectors, which are ones that are just day-to-day, like, do this, keep busy. I'm just really simplifying it, but constantly being a particular way so you don't go to the exiles. And then you have firefighters, which are more when they get a little flavour of a difficult feeling and then they come in. Does that make sense? It does make sense. And as you were talking, I was thinking, I was kind of translating what you were saying into psychodynamic language. I think you were doing that the other way around into IFS language. So I think we are... probably looking at the people that we're supporting in very similar ways and maybe using slightly different vocabulary to describe them. So I think if I've understood you correctly, that I would think of what you just described there as somebody presenting a false self because it hasn't been acceptable for them to be their true self and to put in maybe what psychodynamic therapists might think of as defences to protect themselves in that situation. So they're not being their true self because it hasn't been safe to be that. They haven't been able to get their needs met. So they might become compliant or withdraw or act out or act in or whatever, whatever presenting issue might come. But it's all coming from the same place of it's not safe for me to just be me. and I can't be sure that my needs will be met. Yeah, and so it could also be the parts. So the job is ultimately for a client to bring their own self-energy to their parts, but that can be hard with someone who's had a lot of trauma in their past
SPEAKER_01:because
SPEAKER_00:they've never felt like that. They may not have felt that sort of feeling inside, a feeling that everything's okay. But also the parts will bring, you know, so... it will be, they'll be developmentally appropriate and how they, so there might be some, like the ones that are pre-verbal perhaps might present in our body or might present in a, you know, a way that we hold our body or unconsciously. Yeah. So that's also how you kind of develop the relationship with the past depends on the age of it. And sometimes they're really little. Yeah, absolutely. And that would be something that I would be looking for in clients is, who I might think of it in terms of somatizing. So they might be carrying their trauma in a bodily pain or a bodily ailment or an attack on the body, perhaps. And the goal would be to mirror what you were just saying would be about bringing all the fragmented parts of themselves all together so that they become more integrated. So they don't have to pretend that they don't have needs or pretend they're not in pain. They can put all of those experiences together and be whole again. Yeah, and what we would say we say is that we're not trying to get rid of parts at all. We're trying to help them be what they were originally meant to be. but also sometimes these ways of being can be really helpful. You know, there can be, it's like on a scale, isn't it? You know,
SPEAKER_01:like
SPEAKER_00:having a glass of wine at the end of the day could be fine just to chill out, but then if you're drinking two bottles of wine, you know, or drinking it all the time. So there's always, it's not, it's very kind of fluid. And what we're trying to say is that all parts, all parts are welcome, even the ones that are, you know, might bring really, really difficult behaviours that other parts don't like because we have our own system, our own system of parts within us. So they're all actually, they think they're helping us. They learned at some point along the way that if they did this thing and it might be like, they might tell us, might say really horrible things to us, they might be really critical, but they learned at some point that this is what we need to do to, you know, sometimes to keep us alive, you know. Yeah, and that resonates for me as well, Sasha. I think, yeah, You know, sometimes people have a sense that therapists can fix, and I'm doing that in inverted commas, fix something that is seen as unhealthy, like, I don't know, disordered eating or self-injury or, like you said, drinking or, you know, any other kind of substance abuse or misuse. But all of those things, people aren't silly. Whatever they're doing, they've been doing for a reason and it's been a way to cope and manage. some other modalities don't fit for me as well. I don't see it as let me fix that behaviour and stop me from doing it. I see it as let's try and work out why you're doing that behaviour, what purpose it's serving and whether it is still serving that purpose now. Because I think just because it used to work way back when you were at risk or in danger or not having your needs met, Do you still need to rely on that now? Or is there something else that you could be doing that would serve you better? Is it time to let that go? And as I'm talking, I'm thinking as well about what people might think of as attachment disorders. And I have a, you know, that really makes me cringe because I don't think attachment disorders are disorders. They're strategies. They're attachment strategies. I need to do this in order to keep myself safe, in order to survive. Or I did when I was, you know, when these things were getting implemented when I was an infant. Now, as a grown up, do I still need to do that? Perhaps not. Can I change the way that I form relationships and not have to be so clingy or so withdrawn or isolated? Perhaps. Yes. And that's, Okay to say that and I'm not meaning to patronize you this at all but we might be we might become blended with the part that's much younger that has that belief in particular situations so you know we might have parts of us that know that we shouldn't do it shouldn't that it's not helpful but actually we can have like particularly in relationships where something happens and I don't know we think our partner's going to abandon us just because that they've left the room in a in a stroll. And we can become blended with the ones that are two or younger. And that's that kind of, yeah, so it's kind of, yeah, does that make sense? Yeah. And for me, that would be about where we were talking before about noticing patterns. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So becoming aware of when my partner leaves the room, I really go into a panic. They're never going to come back. Noticing that and then trying to understand why. why I react in that way, what that might be about. And I think for both of us, whichever perspective we're coming from, we're saying it's about something that isn't to do with the partner. It's to do with something that's happened before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that, I think, can be really helpful, I think, just to remind ourselves that we might feel like I can apply it to myself as well. I might be having this really strong response.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:but actually it's nothing to do with that person. Well, they might be having a really strong response to me, but it's actually to do with something that happened to them maybe over and over when they were much younger. Yeah, so I wanted to just talk to you, if it's okay, about transference and counter-transference, because I always think of that as being like a classic psychodynamic working. Is that true to say? Yeah. I think it is certainly a big part of the psychodynamic model. And I think what we've kind of started to talk about there, really, because in some of the books and in some of the theories, transference sounds so complicated and so kind of out there. But the way that I understand it is a transference relationship is an as-if relationship. So it's where one person says, responds to another person as if they were someone from their past. So to take the example that you just gave of the person who panics when their partner leaves the room, they're behaving as if that partner is somebody who's abandoned them in the past. It's not about the partner at all. It's an as-if relationship. And transference is an unconscious relationship that can happen between any two people. I mean, it's theoretically happening between the therapist and the client in psychodynamic terms, but it can happen between any two people in the world, in any scenario, in any context. And it's when somebody triggers something in us that is about something other than those two people. And I guess in the therapeutic relationship, it's when something that happens within that, where there's a in the relationship between the client and the therapist, where the therapist might do something or something happens and then the client has a strong response. Is that right or not? Well, it doesn't necessarily start with the therapist. It's where the client behaves towards the therapist as if they were someone else. So that we might think about maternal or a paternal transference. So the client would be relating to the therapist as if they were their mother or their father. So they would be expecting the same kind of response from them that they'd had from their mother or their father. Now that might be a lovely, nurturing, warm response. They expect that because that's what they've known. Or if they've had a very withholding or abusive experience with a partner, with a sorry, parent, then they would be expecting that from the therapist. They're kind of set up to expect the same thing again. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to think about how to say that. I suppose I'd probably say something like, actually, I can think of actually something that happened with my, ironically, my supervisor, who would look at me in a way that was very sort of stern and And I had parts of me that were like, I feel a bit, he might be saying something really not at all threatening, but I had parts of me that saw that look and felt really like,
SPEAKER_01:yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And it was helpful because I pointed out to him and he was great. It's like, oh gosh, I had no idea I was doing that. So it was, and yeah, Does that feel like a kind of a transferential? Well, I suppose what I'm saying is he might not have been looking at you like that, but you might have been to think that he was. Yes. You were projecting onto him something from your own experience. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. He was. There was nothing behind that look at all that was meaning to get across to me in any way that was threatening at all. But actually, there was something, some ancient part of mine that had a transferential response, probably paternal, just from that kind of look. Yeah. And then countertransference is... So can you say what that is? Yeah, so the countertransference is then the other way around. So the countertransference is the therapist's reaction to whatever the client is putting onto them. So their response to the transference. So if you respond to me as if I was your punitive father, and then I start being really punitive towards you, then I've been pulled in to act out. the countertransference. If I just notice in myself, oh, Sasha's kind of relating to me in a suspicious way or a worried-looking, anxious-looking way, maybe she's relating to me as if I was going to punish her for something, and I get ahead of that, then my countertransference can be really informative because it's telling me something about your experience and your expectations. So the danger is when people get pulled into acting that out rather than noticing it and then exploring it. Yeah. But it could also be those kind of ruptures can be such, you know, like the real kind of meat and gravy of therapy, can't they? Because that can be to have that kind of rupture and then be able to kind of work through it from a place of safety. Yeah. can be so helpful but so in this I think might be a different and I might be wrong I might be making assumptions so we would I know I was trying to think about something I could use an example so if if something came up with a client of mine and they were talking about something where I had a response to what they were saying I would also check if it wasn't something that was happening for me that I had a part that might be you know that might be feeling like you know for example I'd I had lots of experience of horrible cliques at school. So if someone brought, was bringing, talking about a part, a teenage part of theirs that, you know, and then I might, I'd have to just check myself sometimes maybe and say to them, I'm just, I just have to check. I'm having a big response to this. I need to check whether this is a part of mine here or whether it's, you know, what you're bringing. So we would do that quite overtly. So it's almost kind of modeling, kind of communicating with our parts. Yeah, I think that's really important. And I think it's important to do both. I speak to supervisors sometimes, particularly people who are maybe in training or early in their careers, who think countertransference is bad and I can't get pulled into it. And, you know, if I realize that something's about me, I have to keep that separate. I'm about bringing things together and being aware of it awareness is really important so in your example if I got triggered by something and then I thought oh my god you know that's reminding me of something that happened to me so that's about me it's not about them well actually it might also be about the client it might be both and so it can be really helpful to say That's made me think about this and it's made me feel this way. Is that resonating for you as well? Because our countertransference can be really informative. And if we just go, oh, no, that's my stuff. I'm going to keep it to myself. Yes. It can be quite withholding. Yeah. And that, again, might be colluding with. Yeah. what they're expecting from us and that's making me think about how kids can tell like because I always think of like young parts because often with parts what we do have adult parts we do have adults that might be in that have um protective and exotic um ways of being from maybe a difficult you know single event trauma or difficult relationships but generally they're they're little ones they're much younger and teenagers and and then what happens to them as adults it's like a reenactment in the flavor of the protector pattern yeah so I've gone off on a tangent but I was thinking if you're sitting there and there's something going on for you that might be really important around what's going on whether it's your stuff you know in IFS terms whether it's your parts or my or the client's part it's highly likely that our client is going to notice
SPEAKER_01:yeah
SPEAKER_00:Because kids will pick up, you know, if there's something big going on and it's not being talked about, they will pick it up. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And if it doesn't, I think it's better to mention something and share a feeling or a thought that's crossed my mind and it doesn't land with the client, then that's okay. You know, it doesn't land. Move on. But if I withhold it and it could have been really valuable, then yeah I'm doing my client a bit of a disservice by by withholding it from them I think yeah yeah I know we need to to wind up but um so thank you yeah that's it's like oh my gosh it's really similar There's a lot of overlaps there, aren't there? I think there's more. I've said this recently to somebody else. I think there is way more that unites the different modalities than divides them. I mean, at the end of the day, it's all about two people in a room, in relationship, trying to understand what's going on and bring about positive change. And, you know, that's the crux of what we're all doing. And the language... around how we talk about that might be different, but I think it's all the same. Yeah, I think you're right. And I just wanted to say before we finish, one of the things that I really like about your book is just how wonderful these young people are. You're like, yeah. Well, they're not real young people, but young people are wonderful, yeah. Yeah, how wonderful. I kind of get a feeling that they're not real, but there might be some kind of the flavour of things that may have happened without obviously giving any way confidentiality. And how important these young people parts of our own as well you know these that have had these how difficult those experiences are that we have around that age how they really and how also how vilified they can be you know our teenage parts can be really vilified yeah parts of us in our system because it's like like teens are like bloody teens you know like yeah and i and i think um i i would not use the same vocabulary that you are but working with with adult clients certainly a lot of what they're bringing is stuff that got laid down in their teens and in their adolescence
SPEAKER_01:yeah
SPEAKER_00:yeah stuff about peer relationships and who's in the in crowd and who's excluded and separations and relationships and breakups and fallings out. It's shame and embarrassment. I can remember blushing a lot. I had parts that used to blush a lot and it was like, blushing. Like just wanting to, again, really wanting to be seen, but also not wanting to be seen. And all those firsts, all those experiences of firsts that happened. that then get repeated as we go on through our lives. First kiss, first sex, first relationship, first job, first whatever. And then every time we have a new relationship or a new job or a new whatever, those things, if they haven't been thought about and processed, oh, here we are again, the same thing's happening. We're still carrying that experience with us. When it happened the first time. When it happened the first time, yeah. Yeah. The thing that I've noticed as you're talking is that you talk about parts, like they're humanised. You say, I can't remember what you said, and I thought, oh, yeah, that's the difference. They have pronouns. Your parts are human, whereas I would say a part of me is almost like it's more of a concept. Well, parts can be behaviours, thoughts. feelings and physical kind of manifest and can somatize. And they're not always, they can be an energy. Okay. I think I noticed you saying there's parts who, whereas I would say there's parts that. That's really helpful actually. Yeah. No, thank you for that. For that. Yeah. Because that's really important. It's important.
SPEAKER_01:they
SPEAKER_00:don't have to be like hearts can be yeah they're not necessarily always human okay interesting language is so important yeah and that's yeah really really like yeah thank you I was about to go off on a whole other term okay well thank you so much that was really thank you so much for inviting me it's been great to talk to you And I'll put all the information about everything that you're doing, as always, will be on the podcast notes. Thanks, Asha. Thank you for listening to The Validation Lounge. All parts are welcome. I'll attach to the podcast notes information for how to get in touch with my podcast guests and also their social media to see what they're up to. There's also a glossary of IFS terms from the IFS Institute. And please do rate and review the podcast if you can. And finally, if you'd like to get in touch with me to give me some feedback, I'd be really grateful. I'll also attach my personal website.
