AI, Exiles & Ethics in IFS: What Therapists Must Know
In this episode of Going Inside Live, John Clarke unpacks some of the most pressing questions therapists are facing today. From the ethical risks of moving too fast with exiles in IFS therapy, to how AI is already being used by clients and therapists alike, this episode offers grounded insight and practical advice. Whether you're navigating parts work or exploring how AI tools fit into your practice, John’s perspective will help you deepen your skill and awareness as a therapist.
3 Key Takeaways:
Why rushing toward exiles in IFS can backfire — and how to rebuild trust in the system when it happens.
How therapists and clients are already using AI tools to process sessions — and the ethical gray areas to consider.
A therapist's real role: Why "focusing, deepening, and relating" might be more important than fixing.
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John Clarke: There's a really good reason why the part is hesitant to give space and unblend. So in your line of questioning, you might have the client ask the part, what does it fear would happen if it gave space and unblended, right? And then you use the downward arrow technique.
Going Inside is a podcast on a mission to help people heal from trauma and reconnect with their authentic self. Join me trauma therapist John Clarke for guest interviews, real life therapy sessions, and soothing guided meditations. Whether you're navigating your own trauma, helping others heal from trauma, or simply yearning for a deeper understanding of yourself, going inside is your companion on the path to healing and self-discovery.
Download free guided meditations and apply to work with me one-on-one at johnclarketherapy.com. Thanks for being here. Let's dive in.
John Clarke: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Going Inside Live. I'm your host, John Clarke. I'm a therapist, group practice owner, a consultant [00:01:00] for therapists and um, I'm excited to be back. With you all. Uh, really quick before we jump into your questions, I'm gonna remind you that you can join us for our eight week digital detox group.
This is a group for therapists and practitioners. It's a somatic IFS group where we're gonna do somatic IFS while um. Helping you do a digital detox of your own, whatever that looks like. Whether you want to get off social media entirely, whether you want to reduce your phone time, TV time, screens of any kind, digital of any kind, um, getting email off your phone, whatever it might be.
We're gonna both take some action on those things while supporting your nervous system. And, uh, in the, in a small group. If you're interested in getting a spot before it gets totally full, go to johnclarketherapy.com/digital-detox link in the description.[00:02:00]
Okay. If you're here live, you know how it works. You can ask me your questions in the comments. I'll bring them up one by one, and I'll hang out here for a little bit until we've got, um, most, if not, hopefully all of your questions answered. I.
All right, so go ahead and ask your questions in the comments for now. I'll answer a question that was pre-submitted by Susie. The question is, please can you share how you work with self-like parts who resist giving space and unblending? Um, one small shift in that is you try to replace the word resist with hesitate or hesitation.
This idea of resistance or even defensiveness, you know, uh, or resistant client is, um, you know, I think kind of an old school way of looking at it, a Freudian way of looking at it. Um, and, and through IFS we don't see that any part is intentionally resistant or [00:03:00] difficult, but parts may be hesitant and or fearful to do things like give more space or to unblend.
So. If you're working with a part that is hesitant to give space and unblend, I first and foremost just trust that there's really good reason for that. There's a really good reason why the part is hesitant to give space and unblend. So in your line of questioning, you might have the client ask the part, what does it fear would happen if it gave space and unblended, right?
And then you use the downward arrow technique. And then what? And then what? And then what Or, and then what would that mean? So in other words, if the, the part says, well, I fear that if I unblended the client would, um, be judged by others. And then what would that mean? Well, then no one would want to be friends with the client.
And then what would that mean? Then I'd be completely [00:04:00] alone. And then what would that mean? And then what would that mean, et cetera. So you can do some questioning there. Along the lines of, um, uh, you know, questioning protectors, interviewing protectors. Ultimately though, it's, it's about time and trust, right?
These are relationships. And so what, what does any relationship need? It needs trust, and how do we get trust with time and gentleness and reliability, right? Showing up reliably and consistently. So sometimes you just have to put in the time of just being there and honoring the system and honoring the design of the system and the parts that do what they do, especially the, the kind of, uh, key player parts, the ones that are often involved in the, the, the issues of the client or the pathology, so to speak.[00:05:00]
Yeah, so really we just put in the time and you know, if I wanna help someone soften, one of the best things I can do is just to acknowledge that I see their effort and intent. And by doing that well people like hearing that. Therefore, parts like hearing that, right? I can see that you're really trying to help in this way.
I can see that you. Have this fear for this reason, a very good reason, and that makes sense to me.
So yeah, if you think of parts like people and you think, well, how do I help? You know, how do I make a relationship with a person who's got really strong ideas? You know, there's your answer. You probably already know how to do that. Yeah, so a lot of times we get fixated on like, what's the IFS answer? Like, what do you do from an IFS perspective [00:06:00] if blah, blah, blah, when in reality it's like you, you're already relationship experts.
So go back to the relationship and think, how do I relate to this client? How do I relate to this part? How do I relate to this issue?
Or to add to that, you know, how could I improve my relationship with X, Y, and Z?
Yeah, hopefully that's helpful. Okay. Let me know your questions in the comments and we'll start knocking those out. As I mentioned at the top of the show. Our digital detox program is open now, closing again soon, there's a limited number of slots in the program. So if you know you wanna jump into the program, then uh, now is definitely the time. To jump in.
Um, if that program is not the one for you, the alternative is Pathways to [00:07:00] Self. That's basically my weekly consultation group. We had nine people on the call this morning of therapists and practitioners. Um, and I do a 10 or 15 minute exercise. This morning we did a johnclarketherapy.com/pathways I'll do a demo.
Sometimes I'll just teach. Sometimes we'll check in and share wins and build community. And then we do two hot seats per group where people can come and bring anything, a case, a question, whatever it is. And I give them consultation and supervision, um, in that group setting. So it's a really rich learning environment.
It's a great community of practitioners. You can join at any time. You can end at any time. So, uh, if you're interested in pathways to self, highly recommend giving it a try. Not much to lose. Yeah.
johnclarketherapy.com/pathways if you're interested. [00:08:00] Yeah. This morning in the group, we're talking a lot about what is the role of the therapist, and this is a question that I would encourage you all to think about. In other words, if I saw you doing a good job as a therapist, what would you be doing?
And what are you helping the client to do? Are you helping them figure stuff out? Are you helping them fix stuff? Are you helping them find a solution to something? Are you helping them feel their feelings? Three elements of the therapist role that I added this morning are focusing, deepening and relating.
The question that a therapist had was how to help, how to interrupt clients. And I gave this, uh, metaphor that I often give to clients. So in therapy, it's like you and I are walking on the beach with a metal detector. Sometimes that metal detector goes off, and I might notice that in the shift in your [00:09:00] language, something you said, the shift in your body, right?
Your posture. Your complexion, your eye contact, your breathing, your eyes change. It's often in the eyes, and I might comment on that. So, hey, as you talked about your, as you mentioned, your mom, something changed in your eyes just now. Are you able to focus in on that? Would it be okay to focus in on that? So that's the deepening, and have them tune in and see where that takes you.
So focusing, deepening, relating. You help them focus in on something, you help them to deepen a little bit with it. And then you focus on the relating piece, which is um, which is how do you relate to this grief? How do you relate to this feeling? How do you relate to this anger, right? Or this part that is angry or [00:10:00] whatever.
That's just a little something for you to chew on. All right, we've got a question from Jenny. Jenny, thanks for asking a question here. Uh, Jenny says, do you have thoughts on clients doing integration on their own, maybe in between sessions, for example? Um, I think it's great. I think it's pretty safe, you know, for the most part.
And I think for the most part it can only help the therapy and support the therapy. A lot of times integration just happens naturally because clients, you know, three days later they have a realization or light bulb moment or something just clicks, or they've been trying to take a pause whenever they have, uh, a conflict with their partner and they have a conflict with their partner and they pause and they go, oh my gosh, I paused that thing we've been talking about or working on.
We've been working on Unblending in session and I just did it. Oh my gosh. So, or there's more intentional integration like journaling or in, in the case of [00:11:00] a lot of my clients, it's using AI to talk through their sessions. That's a whole can of worms that we'll definitely talk about more as, as time goes on.
But, um, in general, like I, I think just writing about what happened in the session is really helpful. Journaling, taking a walk and thinking about what happened, meditating on the session or on your parts or whatever. Doing some parts mapping is great. Yeah. The really the, like, my opinion doesn't matter what all that matters is.
You know, if a client says like, what, what do you think about me doing some integration on my own? Or What do you think about me journaling in between sessions? It's kind of like, um. It's kind of like, uh, you know, did they find it helpful? Yeah.[00:12:00]
It's also possible that it wasn't helpful, you know, or possible that they are struggling to integrate on their own and struggle to connect with their parts on their own. It could be counterproductive. So you want them to then just do the work in session with you for now. Okay. Jenny is asking, is saying, definitely interested in that AI can of worms.
Um, gosh. Okay. I'll, I'll open that can for a minute and then we'll go to Ashley's question. Um, in my experience, clients are already using it. Therapists are already using it. Clients are coming in with these AI like summaries of their entire mental health history and their therapy history and whatnot. Um, sometimes it's helpful, sometimes it's crap.
So you have to be discerning, you have to be really careful. Um, AI is really good at sounding good and really good at summarizing large amounts of data. So if you were to feed it like, uh, 15 pages of therapy [00:13:00] notes, it's gonna do a really good job at looking for themes and drawing conclusions. That's a lot of what therapists do, right?
Looking for themes and patterns, et cetera. Um, so it's really good at that. Um, and it can be a really good consultant for therapists too, and talking to it about your clients or difficult clients or, uh, whatever, using these apps that will take notes for you and then give you summaries and insights about your work.
Um, it it, that, that's already happening all over the place and it's just gonna keep happening. So, my vision for AI and therapy, my hope is that it can be positioned like a co-pilot or a consultant. For both therapists and client. Like I said, the thing that it's really good at is summarizing crazy amounts of data and, uh, you know, finding themes and patterns, drawing conclusions from those, drawing insights from those, which is a lot of what therapists [00:14:00] do.
So I think if it can help therapists and client do that, it can really support the work. It, it can support the process, you know, um, but we just have to figure out how to really integrate it. There's a ton of apps out there already for stuff like that. There's like uphill, there's berries, uh, there's a million apps like that.
A lot of your EHRs already have like an ai, um, you know, tool that'll record your sessions and do your notes for you and whatnot. That's gonna be normal soon if it's not already.
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Ashley says, you mentioned, um, AI to talk to or process in between sessions. Do you recommend an app specifically? Um, no. I mean the, the, the big ones are chat, GPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Out of those three, I would recommend Claude for this. If you're gonna talk to AI about your sessions and you don't care about it being confidential. 'cause it's not, it's not HIPAA compliant. Um, I'm sure there are other apps and there certainly are AI IFS apps. That is really just chat, GPT and a wrapper as they call it.
So you could use those as well. I know there's one A [00:16:00] IFS AI app that's already out there. IFS guide or something, I don't know. But if they all use chat GPT anyway, it doesn't really matter. You might as well use chat GPT and just train, train it to, you know. Talk to you about your therapy. So, yeah. Um, Ashley's asking, how long are your sessions with clients?
So my standard is 45 minutes rather than 50, and there's reasons for that. And then people can do prorated sessions, which are either 60 or 90 minutes, or we could do intensive work from there. Yeah.
Um, I find 45 is a better length, uh, therapists that do 50, it ends up being 55 and you have three minutes to go to the bathroom, which is terrible. Um, and I, I, I generally just find that, um, you know, um, and with 45 clients condense on their [00:17:00] own and they make everything fit. And then you have a true 15 minute break.
Yeah, I, I recommend it. And giving clients a five minute warning when the session's almost over. Um, Laura is, uh, asking, I get confused when I hear that IFS should only be used when with a level one trained therapist, but I also know that no bad parts was written for general population to use, even outside of therapy.
Um, well, no bad parts was written to equip people with the ideas in the model itself, not necessarily to kind of like do IFS therapy on yourself. There's IFS, which is a framework for understanding psychology and a lens and no bad parts give you, you that framework and that lens and gets you, gets you your feet wet with getting to know your parts and unblending and stuff like that.
And working with protectors Now, um, the main thing is yes, if you want to work with your [00:18:00] protectors and work with your exiles. Then you should work with a level one trained therapist. That is, that is true. And I do believe that because you can do damage and I'm about to show you how you can do damage.
Question we got from an email, uh, from Joseph. I think I moved too fast toward an exile and the system kind of collapsed. How do you repair that? Yeah. This is answering Laura's question. You know, and the other can of worms of like, um, should therapists not trained by the institute still be able to use the model or work with exiles or whatever.
Um, for whatever reason, this IFS model is really powerful and you can do damage with it more so than I think you can do damage with like CBT out of the box or a CT out of the box or DBT out of the box or whatever. So. You know, exiles are quite fragile and the protectors around them are very intelligently [00:19:00] designed to protect them.
And if we bypass that accidentally, we can really screw up the system. And if we screw up the system, you can really damage your clients. You can damage their psych, their psychology, they can, uh, destabilize really quickly. You could, uh, you could lose a client. You know, like, like this stuff can be really dangerous.
So it's not to scare anyone, it's just to say that this stuff is really powerful. That being said, even if you're level three trained, you can still move too fast toward an exile and the system can collapse. We unintentionally bypass protectors. This happens. Yeah. Sometimes you don't know until it's too late.
Or there were other protectors who were kind of helping you bypass the rest of the system. So sometimes you don't know, but now you know. So if this happened, in the case of Joseph's question, how do you repair that? Well, you recruit the protectors again and you say, I screwed up. We went too fast. I need your help putting it back together [00:20:00] again.
That's like the really short answer, you know? They're the ones that were bypassed. They're the ones that know and knew how to protect the system and protect those exiles and keep everyone safe. And we went too fast. So you gotta default to the protectors now, you know, you gotta backtrack and default to the protectors and work with them and recruit them and help you reestablish safety in the system and kind of rebuild, um, the, the, the structure there.
Yeah. You might have to do, um, you know, some, some direct access if the client has no access to their parts now, or no access to protectors or exiles, you know, you might have to do, do direct access with protectors to, uh, recontract and work through that and do some kind of repair work. So, yeah, it can, um, it, it, it can be scary, [00:21:00] really scary.
But courage is one of the C words. So. You wanna, you want to hang in there, you want to, um, stay with the client, stay with the system, and help them rebuild. Yeah. I hope that's helpful. And you know, you want to think about what you learned from this, right? Again, I, I like, I, I have certainly pushed clients too, too far or too fast and learn from it.
And if you don't learn from it, then you're gonna do it again, right? I think it's only really a mistake, so to speak, if you don't learn from it. So, yeah, it's humbling, it's humbling to know that this can happen and how fast it can happen. Yeah.
Yeah. It's, it's a great question. I'm sorry you're dealing with that. Um, also like when in doubt, um, you, you know, get, uh, some consultation around it, definitely be working with a consultant of some kind, consultant, supervisor, et cetera. So, [00:22:00] yeah. That's, that's always gonna be a good idea. Yeah.
Okay. I'll do maybe one more question if there is one.
Yeah. Um, yeah, and that'd be a good question for a hot seat inside our Pathways to Self program, which is a weekly consultation group with me. So it's a good example of a question that would be good for, for that program if you're interested. johnclarketherapy.com/pathways. Uh, we've been doing these solo episodes for a bit, these q and as, and it's been really fun.
I appreciate those of you who come and ask questions. Um, I also know that it, it looks like our interview format is, seems to be more popular. I know people like this. Some people really like this nitty gritty. Q and a. I really enjoy it, but I also know a lot of people like the longer form, [00:23:00] you know, interviews where we're getting to know our guest and their, uh, expertise and, and things like that.
So, um, I'm always curious, your feedback on the podcast. If you can drop me a line or even just let me know in the comments here, which one you prefer. Are there any guests that you wanna see me interview? That'd be really helpful? Um. And then if you're enjoying the show, letting a friend know, send your favorite episode to like two or three friends, like, and subscribe wherever you are.
Leave comments. All that stuff really helps me a lot. Um, 'cause the show has grown a lot since we, since we started, but also it's kind of plateauing right now. So I wanna make sure that we can really keep growing it so that I can keep doing this, uh, for you guys and, and you know, because this is, this is part of my job now, you know, it's not just something I do for fun per se.
So, yeah, it's important that, that I can grow it and [00:24:00] grow our programs at the same time so I can, you know, make, make my living from doing this. So, yeah. I hope that makes sense.
Okay, maybe we just end it there. Short and sweet today. Hopefully that was helpful. Lots of interesting questions. If you're just tuning in, feel free to go back to the beginning to listen to the questions from the top. And um, yeah, I'll keep doing these for as long as people keep showing up. So if you're interested in, um, uh, being here again, just to tune in or to ask questions, same time, uh, next week.
And um, yeah. I look forward to, uh, the next time. Yeah. Alright. Thanks a lot everyone. See you soon.
Thanks for listening to another episode of Going Inside. 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, YouTube, and TikTok at johnclarketherapy and apply to work with me one-on-one at johnclarketherapy.com.
See you next time.