Healing From Addiction Through IFS ft. Cece Sykes
Healing From Addiction Through IFS ft. Cece Sykes
In this episode of "Going Inside" with host John Clarke is joined by Cece Sykes, an experienced therapist and Internal Family Systems (IFS) practitioner. Cece shares insights into addiction, recovery, and the role of IFS in understanding and healing addictive patterns. The conversation delves into the stigma around mental health and addiction, the importance of compassion in therapy, and the impact of agenda in the therapeutic process.
Key Topics Discussed:
1. About Internal Family Systems (IFS) Approach:
- Cece Sykes introduces the IFS model, discussing how it provides a unique perspective on addiction by recognizing the various parts within an individual and understanding their roles.
2. Compassionate Therapy:
- We the significance of compassion in therapy, emphasizing how a compassionate approach fosters trust and openness in clients, particularly those dealing with addictive behaviors.
3. The Importance of an Agenda:
- Cece and John delve into the concept of agenda in therapy, acknowledging the therapist's goals while respecting the autonomy of the client. They discuss the impact of agenda on addiction treatment.
4. Understanding Stigma and Shame:
- The conversation addresses the stigma associated with addiction, both in society and within the therapeutic space. Cece emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the legitimacy of clients' struggles.
5. Hope and Healing:
- The episode concludes with a message of hope for those struggling with addiction, highlighting the potential for healing and transformation through understanding one's internal system.
Learn more about Cece: https://www.cecesykeslcsw.com/
Interview transcript:
[00:00:00] John: This is going inside healing trauma from the inside out hosted by me, licensed trauma therapist, John Clark going inside as a weekly podcast on a mission to help you heal from trauma and connect with your authentic self. Tune in for enlightening guests, interviews, immersive solo, deep dives, real life therapy sessions, and soothing guided meditations.
[00:00:21] John: Follow me on socials at John Clark therapy on Instagram. TikTok, and YouTube and apply to work with me one on one at Johnclarketherapy. com. Thanks for being here. Let's dive in. Cece Sykes, LCSW, ACSW has over 40 years of clinical experience treating recovery from trauma and addiction. A consultant, author, and senior trainer, she has been educating therapists around the world on how to apply the IFS therapy model to addictive processes.
[00:00:51] John: Her recent book, IFS Therapy for Addictions, Trauma Informed Compassion Based Interventions for Substance Use, Eating, [00:01:00] Gambling, and More was released March 2023. Cece, thank you so much for doing this. And Yeah. How are you doing this morning?
[00:01:08] Cece: I'm good, John. It's good to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
[00:01:12] Cece: Yeah,
[00:01:12] John: My pleasure. I've, I've done a bit of research on you and heard some of your other interviews. And. But also just want to acknowledge you've been part of the IFS community for a very long time since the late nineties, your website said. And so I'm so curious, first of all, how you came to it and even just from your perspective, kind of a state of the union with IFS now, as it seems to be in a kind of exploding.
[00:01:40] John: And what's that been like for you?
[00:01:42] Cece: Right. Well, that's great. And thanks for asking me to tell a little bit of history because I have IFS history and my personal history and they kind of intertwine. But back in the late 70s, early 80s, I'm in Chicago. Dick Schwartz is from Chicago. He taught in Chicago for many, many years.
[00:01:58] Cece: He's initially trained as [00:02:00] a family therapist. That's his PhD is in family systems and was teaching family systems to therapists. And I was in the family therapy community and knew him then in the 80s. So one day we all heard Dick has a new idea. So we drove downtown to hear Dick's new idea, thinking that it'll be something about, I don't know, interventions for family systems.
[00:02:24] Cece: And he's standing there with a blackboard, you know, with a pie chart on it. in front of that and saying, well, I'm doing something different. And he was working actually with what I will call people with a certain type of addictive processes, people with different disordered eating parts, parts of them were engaging in binging, purging, bulimic kind of strategies, those kinds of things.
[00:02:43] Cece: And he was struggling with them and he's in the middle of a research project and he wants to do better and he's doing family systems work, which we did, which I did was is very, very helpful. But he felt like there needed to be more. And he started asking people [00:03:00] who applied systemic principles and said, well, okay, why don't you just talk to the part of you that likes to eat a lot and then just have the critic, the one who hates that just stand over here and just really.
[00:03:13] Cece: And realizing amazing things happened, and this is way before mindfulness under the second lexicon at all, so it was very, very radical. And at the time, I thought this is a little complicated. All these parts. But I was intrigued. He then went on. It took him from that time, which is early eighties. He didn't publish his first book.
[00:03:35] Cece: He wrote articles, but no book about it to the mid nineties and use that entire period of time. To just consult with other therapists about how to apply this. So he spent a lot of time before he put it out there. And I think that's one of the reasons it's trustworthy. Yeah, but I didn't get involved at the time.
[00:03:55] Cece: I was doing a lot of work with survivors of sexual abuse at the time. Men and women and [00:04:00] working with families, working with couples, doing group work. And I thought it was interesting. And I listened, you know, one of my parts listened to people talking about it. I have someone on my staff who's getting consultation from him and she'd bring up parts of the staff meeting.
[00:04:15] Cece: I'm like, Oh my God, party wants to do this. A party wants to do that. Really? Well, how you order pizza, you know, it's made me a little crazy, but. What I would read that he would do and what she actually was doing with her clients Was very very interesting to me and she was working with some family members to engage in sexually abusive behavior another sort of addictive process Right?
[00:04:38] Cece: It's extreme and addictive and harming. And she was doing some really good work. So eventually I, many years later, I ran into Dick again and I took a workshop with him and I thought, Oh, okay. As I like to say, the model had improved. So I liked it.
[00:04:55] John: It's more than just a drawing on a blackboard.
[00:04:59] Cece: Yeah, It [00:05:00] had, but I also too had done some internal work.
[00:05:03] Cece: So I was more ready, I think, to take it to a different level myself.
[00:05:08] John: Wow, could you say a little bit more about that in terms of the internal piece that shifted for you?
[00:05:13] Cece: Well, I think that as a family therapist and family systems It was really fascinating to me to learn about family systems and I learned a lot as oldest of six kids this big Irish family Really a lot of intense a lot of chaos, but my mom was real depressed.
[00:05:28] Cece: I was caretaker for her I was parentified. My dad was kind of checked out So family systems gave me real powerful understanding of my role and basically my personality development as a parentified child is to use some of that terminology. And that was very meaningful to me, but I also then at some point had gotten involved with a lot of crises in my marriage.
[00:05:50] Cece: I got married right after college. I've been married a long time. And there was, you know, my former husband was very involved in different addictive processes, a very high functioning guy. [00:06:00] But, you know, lots of struggles with alcohol and some other issues. I knew there was trauma there and it was all, I had to do some work to face into all that and where my role is around that.
[00:06:10] Cece: So when I came to IFS, I had done that work. So when I started hearing about what IFS calls firefighters or what, you soothers, escape artists, parts that become compulsive. And their role in the system. It was, I, I really, I kind of cried. I just thought, Oh, okay. Because so many people, you know, that I knew in my extended family.
[00:06:35] Cece: just a little bit, not all of my original family, my family of origin, but extended family suffered with drugs, alcohol, gambling, sexual inappropriate behavior, suicide. It was all there. And so this gave me a real meaningful way to look at these behaviors in a very new way.
[00:06:55] John: Yeah. IFS talks a lot about the paradigm shift and then going further [00:07:00] into the world of addiction.
[00:07:02] John: It's a radical paradigm shift, right? A lot of addiction treatment focuses on managing the drinking, managing the addiction, right? Tamping down the symptoms, seeing how many days or weeks we can go without doing the thing that is making a mess in your life, right? Maybe say more about That piece, you know, I, I heard you put it as treating a system, not a symptom.
[00:07:29] John: So I'd love to hear a little bit more about what that means.
[00:07:32] Cece: Well, we think I, you know, we can say if we look at the personality or the psyche is divided into lots of different parts. It can sound kind of chaotic and overwhelming, particularly for people who have gone through a lot of You know, attachment, wounding, loss, divorce, exploitation, their childhood.
[00:07:51] Cece: And it feels like I got a Milky Way of parts in here. What are you going to do for me? This is a mess. I'm a mess. This is a mess. Well, I don't want to look at all [00:08:00] that, you know? But the, in the brilliance of the model, Dick applied systemic principles to the inner world and said, there's three big categories of parts and they each have a very particular role in the system.
[00:08:12] Cece: And so there's manager parts where he, labeled them, but the parts of us that we actually show the external world, the ones that we bring to work I'm a good person. I do my job. I show up, but also in that mixture are the, what I call the attitude managers. criticism, self criticism, self judgment, perfectionism.
[00:08:33] Cece: So those parts try to keep us in line. And, you know, it's universal that we need a balance between doing and being. We need something, we need, you know, a work life balance. We need an emotional balance between function, you know, high functioning doing. And finding other joys in life. So firefighters, when they're not extreme, help us find joy.
[00:08:55] Cece: You know, I don't know, ride your bike, race a car. You know, some people like high [00:09:00] intensity stuff. Some people just want to walk around, you know, and for, but if we, the third category of parts, you know, are the parts that hold our vulnerability. It's our shared humanity. We all have vulnerable. It's important to be vulnerable, to feel, to need to be loved, to be, to be cherished, to want to be seen.
[00:09:21] Cece: These are healthy desires and when that's been in our, you know, in our, in our relationships that's been exploited or we've been neglected, we need a way to function. How do you go to school when no one sees you, talks to you, and there's violence in your home? You develop protectors. And one of the protectors might help you escape the moment because the moment's awful.
[00:09:42] Cece: And if that becomes extreme, Then we need intense soothers that really take us out. So, and I'm, when someone comes to see me and they've been using practices and drinking, drugging, sex, whatever for years, you know I'm not treating their [00:10:00] behaviors. I need to treat what happened to them in the past.
[00:10:05] Cece: And I need to treat all the other kinds of high functioning stuff they do, but that also sometimes is filled with self contempt and loathing. So if you don't treat the fact that I, I wake up every morning hating myself, what, how, how do we, how do we not need soothing from that? You know, people tell me I do this to turn off my brain.
[00:10:25] Cece: What is your brain doing? My brain's telling me I'm a horrible person. Okay, well, how about a part of your brain is telling you that? Another part of your brain got involved in using yeah, so brain disease affects a lot of things, right? Totally veterans that have gotten Everything we do affects our brain and brain disease isn't a big enough It doesn't it only affects again a certain behavior and none of our other behaviors or inner world
[00:10:59] John: [00:11:00] Absolutely.
[00:11:02] John: You know, this show really focuses on trauma. And so I'm curious to hear more from you about how trauma impacts the system from an IFS perspective and specifically this kind of dynamic between trauma and firefighters that. Step in and are very busy doing their job for the system.
[00:11:22] Cece: Well, I tell a little story when I'm teaching and I'll give this an example and I'll be very brief.
[00:11:28] Cece: You know, I don't want to, you know, but you take a little kid who's sitting at home at the house and they're watching TV and their parents are going kind of crazy and their dad's drinking their head off and maybe their mom is too. And something bad happens. Dad shoots out the TV in America with, or if I'm in a teaching internationally, he kicks the TV.
[00:11:46] Cece: Right. But anyway, a big, there's a big eruption, you know, scenario a mom steps in, she protects the child. She calls the police or the dad's brother. He's taken away. And then she takes care of the child. How can I help you? [00:12:00] She listens. She nurtures physically. She holds you, hugs you, answers his questions.
[00:12:04] Cece: Is daddy mad at me? Is that why he was yelling? Is he ever coming back? Is he okay? Are we going to be okay? You know, you do all the emotional and physical nurturing, you let them sleep near mom in a safe way for a while, tell the people at school, my, our family's going through something, create, so creating a safe container for the child, and then creating an emotional containment for all the stuff that's going to come up from that.
[00:12:26] Cece: So, they would experience a traumatic event, and we're not traumatized. Scenario B, same situation, TV's blown out, mom and dad keep fighting, there's more violence. Mom's using two. Child goes to hide and wakes up the next morning and comes out. And mom's sitting smoking her cigarettes at the table. Dad's passed out.
[00:12:46] Cece: Son tries to ask a question. What does mom say? Nothing. What is available to dad, from dad? Nothing. So how does that child leave the house? What parts develop in them [00:13:00] in order to walk out of the house and go to school? So maybe they become perfectionistic and try to get attention from their teachers and get A's Or maybe they're good in sports and they try to develop stuff there And maybe they need soothing They are they getting fights with kids or they start smoking cigarettes and stealing beers out of the neighbor's refrigerator You know, what happens how do they cope as they get?
[00:13:24] Cece: get older. And when that situation continues and they go home that same night and the same thing happens. We, we need a lot of protection. They have experienced a trauma and are getting continually re-traumatized, neglected, exploited, abandoned. So we develop protectors. So some of our protectors help us function and some of our professor protectors help us relax and, and get a break.
[00:13:50] John: Yeah, it's. A very powerful illustration of how this all comes to be kind of the origin story of how our parts take on these roles. And [00:14:00] then 30 years later, you know, client shows up in your office and goes, my X, Y and Z is a problem. My anxiety, my perfectionism, my drinking, I work too much, whatever it is, right?
[00:14:10] John: I punched a hole in the drywall and, You know, my partner said go to therapy. That's why I'm here.
[00:14:15] Cece: Yeah. And for a more female oriented, if you will, I don't want to be too gender a story who started maybe dieting at age five and trying to build their body at age five or six. And getting into food issues and then gets in, maybe finds relationships with people who need her to take care of them because we're so many women and women identify people are socialized to be caretakers, but that becomes almost an obsession, right?
[00:14:40] Cece: Right. It becomes an addiction in a certain way. Certain people, their caretakers are on the addictive side of the, of the system. So for IFS, what we do with that person is help them connect. You know, tell their story to us. Of course, there's always a foundation of clinical relationship, but we say, what would it be like to get to [00:15:00] know that six year old?
[00:15:01] Cece: What would it be like to get to know that 14 year old started smoking and hanging with boys or hanging with girls? How do you feel toward them? And I'll find people are 55 years old and they see their 12 year old hanging on the corner selling, selling dope and not going to school. And I say, he's a little jerk.
[00:15:15] Cece: Yeah, still in there. The negativity towards a child. Yeah. Who's been abandoned and exploited and is making do so and I have asked we work with both sides You were but the part to make do with higher with harming activities or extreme activities We make we befriend the parts that try to control them with what is culturally supported Which is get in charge of that and criticize it.
[00:15:45] Cece: Shame it
[00:15:48] John: polarizations Right, big part of the work. Yeah. And helping relieve the system. Yeah, hearing from different perspectives, right? The part, the part that's holding the [00:16:00] pain, the shame the part that's judging that, the part that wants to do something about it, right? And there's discord happening.
[00:16:07] John: Or an IFS, you know, if you bring all those parts to the conference table, you know, comment. And hearing from them, you hear very different perspectives. Just like if you were sitting in a conference room with a bunch of people on a team who are actually all trying to get to the same destination, right? But have very different ideas about how to do that.
[00:16:27] Cece: You got it. And the ability to sort of take. Our experiences and sort of start looking at our patterns and what could be more patterned than a compulsive behavior. Yeah. So what is my pattern? I feel lonely when I feel lonely or I feel shamed or I feel dismissed. Then what am I? I tend to try to do better or other parts.
[00:16:51] Cece: We try to take me out or I try to do better until I'm not seen anymore. And then I feel lonely again and then I have to go soothe. So to help clients [00:17:00] rather than see part, part, part. which feels kind of chaotic and overwhelming. We help them see patterns, how their parts participate in patterns and are all trying to help.
[00:17:12] Cece: And what if there's a new way to help that vulnerability?
[00:17:16] John: Yeah. And again, so a lot of kind of traditional addiction treatment, if I can call it that focuses on triggers for instance, right? Or helping people understand, okay you know, write down a list of your triggers. These are some of the things that happen right before you drink.
[00:17:33] John: So when you feel those triggers, don't drink, right? Let's again, let's try that for a week or whatever. But really what they're saying is these are situations or moments where part of you gets activated.
[00:17:45] Cece: That's right. And your pattern, you have some patterns and rather than avoid those patterns or try to extinguish those patterns.
[00:17:52] Cece: We do the the paradigm shift, which is so counterintuitive. And I have asked is we welcome those parts to the table. [00:18:00] How are you trying to help me? What are you afraid will happen to me if I don't drink right now? What are you afraid will happen to me if I don't restrict my food right now? You're going to have no relief or you'll never get away or you'll feel like a bad person.
[00:18:13] Cece: And you see the wisdom of these parts. They, they see, they look around the table and they go, this part's causing you problems and this is causing you problems. They know what they're soothing and what they're trying to help the person escape from.
[00:18:28] John: Yeah, and you're already kind of talking you've been kind of talking around it here But the word that I wrote in big bold letters on my paper is shame The more I do this work and even before I came to IFS I work primarily with trauma I work with a lot of men right or even people that come to me for anger management Again, that example just count to 10.
[00:18:50] John: Yeah, exactly. Just count to 10, snap a rubber band on your wrist. Something happened going back to, let's say my guy who punched the hole in the wall where he was having, [00:19:00] this is a real example, having a dispute with his partner and she said, you're never there for me. And he punched the hole in the wall that was the end of the fight, and then he withdrew.
[00:19:11] John: Right? And now he's on my couch or he withdrew and then he drank for the rest of the night or had six or seven drinks to get through the night. And that makes a lot of sense. Right? And if you ask that firefighter, what would happen if you didn't drink? Well, the shame would overwhelm the system, right? It would be too much or I'd kill myself or whatever it might be.
[00:19:32] John: Right? So like you said, Very good reason for why these parts do what they do because a lot of times they don't trust that the system can handle the shame or if the person is can access enough self in that moment, you know, when their partner says you're not there for me and having this reaction, right?
[00:19:51] John: This chaotic reaction inside versus being able to hear that or stay open to it and say I'm hearing that you feel like I'm not there for you. Maybe I've been working [00:20:00] a lot lately. And so, cool. You know, can I, can I hear that feedback? Can I take that without it overwhelming the system that might be like, in my mind kind of a goal in a way of, of some therapy or in this, in a client like this.
[00:20:14] John: 'cause these moments are gonna happen. Same thing. This client might be at work and his boss says I need to talk to you about something. Right? Mm-Hmm. . Or, Hey, you missed the mark on this project. And maybe in the moment the client kind of takes it or can kind of fake it and go, yeah, I'll work on that.
[00:20:27] John: And then again, goes home and has seven or eight or nine drinks or, you know, just whatever they're going to do.
[00:20:33] Cece: That's right. And so, you know, whatever devastation it feels like to have, let's say your partner who you think will, they're the one person who does love me, you know, and they are so angry with me or so disgusted with me.
[00:20:49] Cece: And the, the parts of us, it feels so not love. See, I'm not lovable. That proves, you know, when we've been grown up and we've never been mirrored properly, and we've never been mirrored with [00:21:00] kindness or well, or very erratically mirrored in that way. What we do in IFS is we say it's never too late. If you remember it now, it's not the best.
[00:21:10] Cece: So, you know, it's too late. So we can go in and go in and find that part that says I'm not lovable. See. And we connect to that, we sort of connect in that mindful, kind way to the part that's, and learn about that and give that, create new connections. And sometimes we almost, we help with a sort of a letting go of old beliefs.
[00:21:32] Cece: They were true then. It was true then that no one loved you well, or no one understood you, or you were too much for the people who raised you. Because they were in parts all the time. So we helped them sort of let go of those old beliefs and create new ones. When we focus internally, I'm very specific relational connections.
[00:21:52] Cece: Cause you're, you're right. That is exactly what happens. Those are vulnerabilities underneath all that drinking and all that [00:22:00] trying to be good at work. Yeah, there's anything wrong with it. But when it becomes extreme or when we're devastated when it doesn't work out, we can't hear feedback that we weren't perfect.
[00:22:10] Cece: We know there's vulnerability under there.
[00:22:13] John: Yes, absolutely. We're talking a lot about kind of what we could categorize as relational. Trauma of all the different types of trauma is piece around what happened in our relationships, either what we, what happened to us or what didn't happen to us, right?
[00:22:31] John: What we didn't get when we needed it. I want to kind of offer this to you and see what you think about it. So part of my story is I was a first responder for many years. I was an EMT. And so like a literal firefighter running into fires and Scary situations and yeah, something that taught me about my own, my own experience of trauma is out of the thousands of calls that I ran that were objectively maybe more difficult or [00:23:00] even gory or whatever.
[00:23:01] John: There was really one call. That stuck with me and was the most traumatizing. And it was when I didn't have enough help. So the call was really difficult, but things went wrong. And I ended up in this house alone. And people were not showing up like they were supposed to for the call. Some people police officers were there and they didn't want to come in and help because it was.
[00:23:24] John: such a messy scene. So I'm just kind of offering that. Yeah. As you know, it's something I've done and going through EMDR for it. Haven't done a lot of parts work around that, but I can remember so vividly. A loss of agency and this word agency for me comes up a lot in trauma like agency was lacking that moment versus all the other columns where I was prepared.
[00:23:45] John: I had a team behind me. I was in uniform. I knew I was going to be facing difficult things today, but I also had tools and people to help me deal with it. Right? But this call was so different. So I'm curious, like, from an IFS perspective, how you see a trauma [00:24:00] like that.
[00:24:01] Cece: That's such a good example. And what I would say is, again, that things, traumatic things happen to us at any time of our life.
[00:24:08] Cece: It's not just about when we're young, right? Although that gives us some ideas, but in this situation, if you were my client and I will be, for instance, we'd say, can you almost see that guy alone in that apartment with nobody around in this person in front of you or whatever was happening? Can you see him?
[00:24:24] Cece: Sure. I can see him. How do you feel toward him? And then you just check to say, I'm open to him. I want to, I want to help him. You might say, I really want to help him. So then I might say, I know that sounds crazy, but invite your helper, your rescuer to step back, because if a rescuer is going in scoop and we take away someone's voice, so we want to hear from him.
[00:24:46] Cece: So invite the rescuing to step back. See if you can just show up around him and ask him, tell me what it was like for you to be alone in that place. And he'll say, I felt no one was coming. And I might say. Has it ever? Have you ever had that feeling [00:25:00] before? No one's coming or I'm on my own or I have to do it all myself and I don't have what it takes.
[00:25:05] Cece: So there will be the sense in that moment, which was true. And then also there could be a route may or may not, but there could be a route to other times in your life when you were put in situations and the people who are supposed to be there for you didn't show emotionally or physically. So if there's that, we will go to that later too.
[00:25:24] Cece: But in the moment we will yeah. The other way, the way IFS does regulation, there's two things here. There's regulation and there's attachment, regulation, attachment, and sort of the redo. So there's regulation. When we feel that when you feel that story, you might feel some of that old anxiety coming back or that old dread.
[00:25:45] Cece: Yeah. Well, we go, when you say in self toward. You can get some separation from the activation. So we work with regulation that way. It feels more okay. When I asked that part to step back, you feel calmer a little bit like, okay, I'm a little more present. [00:26:00] Then we do attachment. How do you feel toward that guy?
[00:26:03] Cece: He was okay. You know, you attach, you connect the way that person needed someone to it too. You do attunement. I see you tell me more. I'm available. I'm not leaving. Right. So we do attachment. And then the third thing, what did you need that you didn't have, you know, and it might be both emotionally and physically.
[00:26:25] Cece: Sometimes we do a redo and sometimes if we find there's an old burden, there's another part that says, you know what, when it comes right down to it, nobody's there for me. I'm always on my own. Or when it comes right down to it, you know you know, I have to depend upon myself or, you know, those kinds of beliefs.
[00:26:41] Cece: We also check for, so those ingrained beliefs that are true in certain circumstances, but if we don't examine them, we apply them everywhere. No one's coming for me. I have to do it myself. I'm actually not that lovable. You know, that, does that make sense, John? Yeah. So we look at those core [00:27:00] beliefs, which we would call as an emotional burden we took on.
[00:27:03] Cece: And you might've got one from that event, and it might even relate to an earlier emotional burden. Not always, but if it does, we'll find out from that part. It'll say, when we say, does that ever happen to you before, they go, oh yeah, right? So, you know, that's how we would work with that over time. Does that make sense?
[00:27:22] John: It makes a lot of sense. And I have parts going Oh, my gosh, this sounds great. We need to do this work, making a note of it. Yeah, my personal work with Tammy Sullenberger. And at the time, I, you know, I was really confused as to why that one stuck with me so much. Right. Whereas objectively, other calls were just so much more.
[00:27:46] John: Intense on on paper, right? But I remember a lot of the time. Gosh, I also studied first responders for a while in grad school and some of the main coping skills around dealing with kind of what we [00:28:00] see are, of course, substance use, distracting, using humor, kind of like dark humor to deal with it.
[00:28:06] John: But there's a lot of really not dealing with it and going from extreme nervous system states to the thrill of a call or being on an ambulance, going 80 miles an hour or whatever, rushing into, you know, an extreme situation and then going home and just sitting there. And trying to go to sleep and you wonder why, again, people have six or seven or eight drinks to go to sleep or to not think about that call or whatever it might be.
[00:28:33] John: I also worked alongside a lot of veterans too, but there's a great deal of, I guess I would call it generally avoidance, right? That happens around kind of what we. What we take on and that type of role and also a lot of what brings people to it. Right? I have parts that want to run into that burning building and are drawn to those type, that type of chaos, right?
[00:28:53] John: Which is a part of me. And I'm still learning about that part,
[00:28:58] Cece: But it's a high functioning part. [00:29:00] And I'm just thinking about the work you're doing so that first responders our military people who are, there's enormous amount of competence. and courage and people willing to step into high risk situations, willing to fight on behalf of others.
[00:29:15] Cece: So we want to honor those parts. But, you know, I did not a Tom, but I did a little bit of work with the VA here in Chicago here and there, and they were asking me to do some live demos, which I did. And I thought I'd be seen having them tell me about military stuff and it was stuff about assault or, you know, other kinds of betrayals.
[00:29:33] Cece: You know, so you're talking about sort of abandonment or not being, you know, and, and then others were about betrayals. So it's just, I'm not saying those other things didn't impact people or you, but we really have to notice what happens in our, what, what hurts our system to be betrayed by a leader or for instance, or to not be equipped when we thought we were doing it.
[00:29:59] Cece: And also [00:30:00] the other thing is when we're stuck in the trauma, we also can't appreciate the parts of us, the managers, if you will, that did good. We can't take that in either. So we're not taking in how good, well we've done and what we have done for our country, our community the person in front of us. We can't take that in either when we're burdened with un You know, unintegrated trauma and attachment wounds.
[00:30:29] Cece: I would say it's, it's traumatic events and it's also just attachment wounds abandonment and loss and grief, unprocessed grief, who we've lost and, you know, relationships or persons we've lost, positions we've lost and also just alienation for some people you grow up in a family where you don't feel like you fit for anybody in the LGBTQ community.
[00:30:51] Cece: in any way or identifies queer in any way. There's, there's family, there's community, there's church, there's sports teams, there's gym teachers, and then there's their institutional work. [00:31:00] If you grow up BIPOC, BIPOC in America, Black, Brown, Middle Eastern, Asian, you know, there's so many ways in which we are burdened in our families and our communities are burdened institutionally, chronically.
[00:31:14] Cece: In addition to What happened to us in school, in addition to what happened or did or didn't happen in family. So, in IFS, you know, we know there's different ways that we get burdened. And when we listen to the story, any, the layers of story that any of our parts are holding, that attunement is healing.
[00:31:36] Cece: And we can listen very, with sort of a laser focus. types of burdens. And that is what, for me, for, you know, we believe that's what relieves relapse, if you will. Right. We relapse because we ran out of coping that, that day.
[00:31:55] John: Yeah. I'd love to talk more about that word because it's another [00:32:00] big one in the addiction world.
[00:32:02] John: Right. And there's also Some scary statistics around people who relapse, right? Are people who are kind of white knuckling and just getting by and again, trying to string together days or weeks of sobriety and then a relapse that is very dangerous or even life ending. I mean, there's been celebrities, this is, this has happened too.
[00:32:24] John: So I'm curious, like, and I also have. You know, some, some you know, parts up around some of this stuff. And but, but thinking about that thing about a relapse, I guess, from a parts perspective, how would you. How would you see that and help us understand that?
[00:32:40] Cece: What I would say is that, you know, we use the word relapse because it's so common, but it's also sort of so stigmatized.
[00:32:47] Cece: Yeah, you f 'd up.
[00:32:50] John: That's what you did. So much shame that comes with it. Yep, the relapse.
[00:32:53] Cece: Call it for what it is. You know, that kind of talk is typical. And so what I would say that's that this is what I want [00:33:00] to bring as a clinician is I want to bring curiosity and open heartedness.
[00:33:03] Cece: Heartedness to my client and help them step back from their self-criticism around it and get curious and say, we know those part, your parts know the answer. They know why they did what they did. They know why they drank again. They know why they hit somebody again or acted out. They know why they did what they did.
[00:33:19] Cece: We gotta go listen to them for an open heart. What we would find is that there's some sort of, vulnerability that has occurred in some sort of way than we needed to cope, and it could be a buildup of particular things, you know, and that, you know, if you're working with first responders, a buildup of stress of loss.
[00:33:37] Cece: Of betrayals and and now it was just too much. But when we go in with IFS, we can just listen. So I want to say to people that, you know, people are going, they're dealing with food issues. Of course, they shame themselves when they eat meat, but we don't have a heart attack because someone went back to eating sweets, you know, but we are very, very afraid if people go back to using [00:34:00] substances.
[00:34:00] Cece: And I understand why, and in particular around opioids, when you've been off for a while and you go back, It's a very high risk situation. And in addition, I'm sick of the word overdose in a certain kind of way because so much of this is we have, in order to use drugs in this, in our world, you have to be both be a criminal and engage with criminals because they're illegal other than weed and cannabis, you know, and in various places.
[00:34:28] Cece: So people engage in criminal behavior in order to get there, what they need and the criminals that are providing opioids and other kinds of drugs. Yeah, you know, people are poisoned. They were, you know, manslaughter, not an overdose. So there's a lot of ways in which we judge, you know, like someone's a fiend and they just shut their arms all up as opposed to someone did what they always did.
[00:34:54] Cece: And there's, and it's manslaughter by what was put into the drugs that they have, and they have no way to test it. [00:35:00] So relapses and reusing, to me, are just someone who's in the process. It's scary. I don't want to be ruled by my fear, and I don't want my client to be ruled by their fear. I want to say, we can figure out.
[00:35:17] Cece: What was going on for you? We can track it. We can see what pattern happened again for you. And when and sit with those parts again, you can move the ball forward again. They're a point of curiosity and learning. And you never are back at square one. Never.
[00:35:33] John: Oh yeah, that's great. I've never heard it put that way.
[00:35:37] Cece: Yeah, you're never back at square one. We're at square 40, but okay.
[00:35:41] John: Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the hopelessness though, around relapsing, right. And coming back and having to tell your therapist or tell your 12 step group or whatever. And again, the shame that gets activated around all this, that then a firefighter goes, well, here we are more, we, the firefighters, we are back at, [00:36:00] you know.
[00:36:02] Cece: Even in hopelessness and despair as powerful as they are.
[00:36:06] Cece: are parts of the person. So I always say to someone to ask the hopeless part to tell you, how did it first get hopeless? Well, they grew up with people who never changed. They grew up with situations that never changed. Well, hopelessness is an appropriate reaction to that. Hopelessness means don't change.
[00:36:24] Cece: Well, they didn't. However, we don't want that bird of belief to be applied to everything going forward. You've already changed. I might say to my client. So show the partners, the hopeless part, how you've changed. You know, but they didn't. So we really honor the story that Hopeless Part is holding, but at the same time we, the difference between then and now, true then, look at what you're doing now.
[00:36:48] Cece: So we listen to Hopeless Parts, we help them release some of their old, honor their old beliefs and where they got them. Yeah. But you can unblend from that. But I don't know anybody in recovery from [00:37:00] anything that doesn't have Hopeless Parts because they've tried to fail. Fix themselves so many times and feel like that.
[00:37:05] John: That's right.
[00:37:06] Cece: But we welcome hopelessness is a part of the solution you let me know when you're feeling hopeless.
[00:37:12] Cece: But if we befriend that part rather than try not to feel it or ignore it. It's included in again. We include all the parts. This is all. This is my story. This is my story. So these parts of us get to be here. They're part of what can the hopeless parts see the new parts of your story. Okay.
[00:37:37] John: All of this is why and how I fell in love with the model. And, you know, one word again, a word that I just put on my piece of paper and a word that I keep coming back to the more I learn about IFS, the more I use it or talk with people like you is compassion. Right. And just returning to that and thinking if we can access that as [00:38:00] therapists, right, So if a client comes in and if I can access compassion toward their drinking part or whatever That's a tremendous.
[00:38:09] John: Again, paradigm shift and that session feels very different than I'm here to tamp down. their drinking
[00:38:18] John: there's, yeah, there's something also about I think therapists, some therapists have fear around if I'm too compassionate or empathic toward And I don't use this word, the addict, but a lot of therapists too, then that's going to somehow like enable them.
[00:38:36] John: And there's another buzzword, but that's going to kind of get them to drink more. If it's like, yeah, maybe you can have a few drinks tonight. Maybe you can learn moderation. What would it be like to learn moderation that were somehow like contributing to their addictive processes. So I think like some therapists and again, some traditional addiction therapists have more of a stern way of being of like, you have to kind of wrangle the [00:39:00] addict and kind of keep them contained or else.
[00:39:03] John: Right, and right. Yeah, you know what I'm talking
[00:39:06] Cece: about. Well, it's such a good point. There's so much in what you're saying I want to say first just just to say something around 12 step. The 12 steps were developed in the 1930s. There was very little Psychotherapy available to anyone for any reason at any time yeah, so the the idea the black and white thinking just don't do it, you know and To the support of presence, there was no way to work with early term.
[00:39:29] Cece: Bill W was a world war one veteran. His father had died when he was young, a lot of abandonment, emotional wounds, attachment wounds. There's a lot going on there. So, you know, but there's nowhere to go with that for a long time. And many people today, today in both rural and urban situations have nowhere to turn with, with whatever has happened to them.
[00:39:51] Cece: So I want to just name that. And so, and to say that. People have them, you know, different. If you know someone who got [00:40:00] better with 12 steps, you say the 12 steps works. And if you know someone who didn't get better with 12 steps, you say the 12 steps don't work, you know? And what I want to, so everyone has a feeling and an opinion about it, usually personally based.
[00:40:11] Cece: And I want to say that they've been available for many, many years and have helped many, many, many people. And now we have psychotherapy so we can, we do integrate it. There's some 12 steps that are IFS informed that have been written a few different versions of them that are powerful. So around that and idea of how to view ourselves, how the clinical world looks at people with different kinds of addictive.
[00:40:34] Cece: There's enormous stigma in mental. You probably know this in the medical profession, right? You know, going being a first responder with somebody who's just shot up is a real different than someone who got shot. Right. So, you know, people hold stigma. So a lot of when I'm training, I'm in IFS, we do a lot of inviting for therapists to work with our own systems.
[00:40:57] Cece: None of us, none of us [00:41:00] does IFS without working on our own systems and noticing it's culturally approved of to be controlling and judgmental. And you know critical. Yeah. Someone who's out of control with anything, food, money, drugs. So we have to have all of that step back and then we can have compassion.
[00:41:22] Cece: And I like to think of it as sort of effective compassion. It's compassion, but we have boundaries. Yeah, and we might speak for our parts. I might say a part of me is noticing I want to speak for my parts around I'm noticing think the stakes are getting higher right now And I just and I'm getting a little scared for you.
[00:41:42] Cece: I have parts getting scared for you How does it land on you when I say that to you? So inviting that collaboration and at the same time speaking for my observations what I see, but with heart led, but not just [00:42:00] gushing love, if you will, we have to also use our skill. Yeah. Yeah, we want to use, we're using our skill and our awareness.
[00:42:13] Cece: But if I'm in judgment, what creates change? When does change occur? The change in a regulated welcoming system. In fact, Miller, who I believe was the guy who's the motivational interviewing, I think did this piece of research. They researched a whole bunch of people who are working with people who are drinking.
[00:42:32] Cece: Around, you know, what work all these different interventions and they found out that the people who drank the least After it were the people who like their therapists the most
[00:42:44] John: I've got thoughts about that. You know one of my first roles. I was a college counselor and they said guess what? There's this new Basics program is what it was called, but it was a motivational interviewing program for students that had gotten like one [00:43:00] strike and alcohol related offense. They had to come to see me and I had to do this.
[00:43:03] John: Am I type thing around basically building discrepancy? Like, Hey, you're saying you want to graduate and get good grades, but you know, you're black and out. Every Tuesday, help me make, help me understand that. Right. And this idea around building discrepancy was a big part of it and getting them to start thinking about their drinking, but really to build discrepancy or dissonance around, Oh my gosh, I do want to be a good student and I also keep blacking out right or whatever it is.
[00:43:33] John: It feels so long ago, you know, to, to me in a way of. Being in this role or, or, you know, people saying, okay, basics and M. I. Is now an evidence based program. So we're going to bring it to college campuses at the time. I genuinely, I couldn't say whether it was helping or not right for some, some clients or students who came to me who were really ready to work with the pain they were in or wanted help changing their drinking or whatever that [00:44:00] looked very different than those that came in.
[00:44:01] John: They're like. Dude, I'm just here because the dean of students told me to be right and I'm pissed off and I don't want to talk to you, right? I don't want to talk about it. I'm probably not going to drink less. And yet I'm sitting here and I still have to ask these questions, right? That are probably activating something inside, you know, but that was the approach at the time was this one size fits all
[00:44:22] Cece: right. That's right. But yes, it's one size fits all. And it works for a person who is just maybe at a point where they're saying they're scared themselves and they want, you know, they're, they have more self energy in this moment and they're, they're open to feedback.
[00:44:36] Cece: They're open to getting resourced by you and other resources because nobody does it alone and whatever we're doing. But that person who's defending there's, you know, what if we got curious about why there's an problem. What are you afraid would happen if you did make a change, right? That's where IFS can come in to welcome the parts to say I don't give a shit.
[00:44:55] Cece: You know, you can't make me give a shit. And I'd say, you're right, I [00:45:00] can't, I can't, but I'm curious about it. Tell me more about, about why it's important to you. Tell me more about what it gives you. Tell me more about what you think your life would look like if you didn't have it.
[00:45:11] John: Yeah. You know. Another word that has been really meaningful for my IFS journey and learning it is agenda and having an agenda.
[00:45:21] John: Or again, in this case, for me to do a good job in the eyes of the dean of students or my boss, right, I needed to get students to drink less, right? Or this person that had two strikes. My agenda is to, Help them prevent them from getting a third strike, right? That's an agenda, even if there's just a tiny, tiny, tiny part of me with one of my clients today, where that goes, I really hope they stop drinking, right?
[00:45:45] John: I really hope they don't drink this weekend or whatever it is like, that's, that's an agenda, right? And it's a bit, it's. Antithetical to IFS. In a way. So again, going back to that piece around IFS. What
[00:45:58] Cece: does a person, [00:46:00] what it's, it's, it's a disconnect. It's dissonance for the therapist to say, I just want to help you, but to not acknowledge, I want to control you.
[00:46:08] Cece: I want you to do what I control you. And there's a dissonance and it lands on the client in a certain kind of way. So in IFS, we'd say, let's speak for it. I have a job to do and this is my job and I want to speak for that and I need to do that and I'm, I'm going to speak honestly to you that I have to do this, take this history from you and ask you all these questions, but at the same time, I want to say that there's some wisdom in your system that I just don't understand.
[00:46:33] Cece: And I, what if we could discover what that is? So it's might speak for that agenda because you're right, we can't escape agenda, but at the same time we want to honestly honor what is the agenda in this moment and speak for it so that the client doesn't receive dissonance. It's, it's disingenuous to say, I'm just here to help you.
[00:46:55] Cece: Yeah. As I would say, a firefighter can recognize a [00:47:00] manager at 50 paces. Yeah, yeah. I know it's up here. And so there's no trust. So why should I trust you? Cause you're not trustworthy.
[00:47:11] John: I tell my clients, you know when I see their parts doing this guilting and shaming their parts about the drinking, whatever that no one ever shamed their way to healing, right?
[00:47:22] John: It's also why, you know, these organizations with millions of dollars stopped running, you know, like smoking kills. Ads, right? Just makes people want to do it more, right? And again, it's another form of kind of controlling or they see, you know, a billboard that says smoking kills and there's parts that are activated around that, right?
[00:47:42] John: There's more tension or again, I would call it dissonance in a way or the G psych one on one term around dissonance, but really it's back to this polarization with, with, with parts. And You know, I often ask my clients, if you were trying to help a friend go to the gym more, how would you do it?
[00:47:58] John: Right. Would you do it with. by [00:48:00] guilting and shaming them. And most of the time they say no. So again, then we're edging into this concept of self or self energy, compassion around their parts.
[00:48:09] Cece: And you're edging into the idea of what helps people make new decisions. What environment do they need to be in in order to make a new choice?
[00:48:18] Cece: I always say, we talk about the eight C's in IFS. I say ninth is, the ninth C is choice. We want people to feel a sense of choice. And I love what you're talking about, about how, We would say how we present something is so important. What, what state we're in when we're in the helping position, which is always a position of power and people, we all, it's part of the human condition to want autonomy.
[00:48:48] Cece: And so I want to respect their autonomy and acknowledge that I don't have control. And at the same time, you are sitting in front of me. So you must, somebody in there wants something, [00:49:00] let's just find out who it is and what they want. You know,
[00:49:03] John: they
[00:49:05] Cece: want to talk about their girlfriend, talk about their girlfriend, because eventually we'll get to the vulnerability anyway.
[00:49:10] John: Yeah. Often it's a manager part that brought them to therapy or brought them to 12 step and said, Hey, we need, you know, some guardrails. We need accountability. Right. Even if other parts are not quite. I'm not yet ready to let go of the drinking or the whatever
[00:49:24] Cece: you got it. I always say to the clinician, you don't have to be the manager in the room.
[00:49:29] Cece: Your client has their own parts telling them I shouldn't actually have shown up high to my session. I say, let's just, should I make some rules? I go, sure. But why don't you just ask them? Do you have a part of you that thinks you probably shouldn't have shown up high today? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. All right, then.
[00:49:46] Cece: Yeah,
[00:49:49] John: let's start. What a relief to not have to be our clients manager that that might result in more addiction, more therapists that are working willing to work with addictive processes just by hearing that. [00:50:00] Maybe I will try this. Yeah. Well, I've, I've already kept you over time. Part of me wants to keep you for another hour.
[00:50:07] John: But for now I'll just ask anything that you just wanted to say to kind of wrap up or make sure people take from this. And then of course, how can people learn more about you and your work and what you're offering right now?
[00:50:20] Cece: Thanks for the interview and for the time, John. And I think what I just want to say to anybody out there who's struggling with different kinds of practices.
[00:50:27] Cece: Food, substances, whatever is that there's just there's hope and that you're doing this for a reason and the reason is legitimate. It's legitimate. So when you sit down with someone like us who works with the different parts of your system, you can recognize that this is a strategy that no longer works, but that it started with very legitimate reasons.
[00:50:47] Cece: And I really want to honor that in everyone who struggles that way. And I guess I'll give you my information. I have the link to my book and I have a website so you can see the different kinds of workshops and trainings that I'm offering. So you can go to my website for [00:51:00] that and you can go to the IFSI website.
[00:51:02] Cece: to learn about the IFS Institute and what's available there, both online and in, in person training. So there's a lot of stuff available there. So and I'll just say about my book that there's a 12 step, there's a 12 step consortium of all the different, you know, AA, NA, That's centered in Berlin, but it's international.
[00:51:23] Cece: And they have chosen my book for their book club, their book study this year. And they're from the, you know, the 12 step position. So they're both 12 step and in various, you know, and in recovery it's not the therapists and the, so I'm very proud of that. I'm excited about that. And I just want to say to people that there's just some good stuff.
[00:51:42] Cece: to just be with. It's the idea of of the book, which is based on our thinking, is that we have what we need to heal and that everything that we do, we do for a legitimate [00:52:00] Intention and and there's, and there's so much hope about moving
[00:52:07] John: forward. Beautifully said we'll be sure to put links to all that stuff in the description.
[00:52:13] John: And so you all can follow along, can check out the book and other offerings there. So C's, thank you again so much for doing this. It means a lot to me.
[00:52:23] Cece: And it's been a delight to get to know you a little bit.
[00:52:26] John: Yeah. Likewise. We'll have you back anytime. So thank you again. Thanks for listening to another episode of Going Inside.
[00:52:36] John: If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching and share your favorite episode with a friend. You can follow me on Instagram, at JohnClarkeTherapy and apply to work with me one on one at JohnClarkeTherapy. com. See you next time.
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