Bob Falconer on IFS, Spirituality, and Trauma
Bob Falconer on IFS, Spirituality, and Trauma
In this soul-stirring conversation, IFS pioneer Bob Falconer returns to explore the intersection of Internal Family Systems (IFS), spirituality, and trauma healing. We discuss how trauma creates separation, the necessity of spiritual connection in deep healing, and how curiosity can be a transformative force. Bob shares insight from his upcoming books and over 50 years of clinical experience, emphasizing the porous nature of the mind and the healing power of respectful engagement with all parts of the self—both personal and transpersonal. This episode is a heartfelt invitation to open your inner world with compassion and wonder.
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3 Key Takeaways:
🌱A surprising reason why many trauma survivors don’t fully heal—and what might be missing.
🌱The two types of curiosity—and why only one leads to transformation.
🌱What Bob means when he says “the mind isn’t just multiple... it’s porous.”
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👤 Guest: Robert Falconer
Robert Falconer is a dedicated therapist, teacher, and global educator of the IFS model. Author of The Others Within Us, Bob brings over five decades of experience to his work exploring the porous nature of the mind, particularly in the context of trauma and spiritual experiences. His latest books, Opening the Inner World and Spirit Speaks, delve into the intersection of IFS, mysticism, and healing.
Get your copy of Opening the Inner World and Spirit Speaks: https://swedenborg.com/product/opening-the-inner-world/
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TRANSCRIPT
Bob Falconer: [00:00:00] And McGilchrist makes this wonderful point, which at first really pissed me off, but usually when there's a radical new idea, it pisses me off at first because it takes me out of my comfort zone. He says, how we pay attention is a moral act, and I think how we pay attention is a choice like that, that determines the nature of the world we live in.
John Clarke: 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.
Bob Falconer is the author of the others Within Us as a [00:01:00] pioneering IFS therapist and global educator, drawing on five decades of clinical expertise in helping others heal. Uh, Bob, you're a fan favorite of this show and, uh, welcome back.
Bob Falconer: Great to be back.
John Clarke: Um, we were chatting a little bit before the show about the many projects you have.
Swirling around your world, it seems you're as busy as ever, so I'm wondering,
Bob Falconer: busier, busier, and more busier
than ever at the age of 77.
John Clarke: You know, one time, um, uh, when I was, uh, finishing college, they had a speaker come. His name was Donald Miller. He's an author and now like a marketing guy. But he gave this keynote speak speech on how people should aim to peak when they're, uh, like 65, 70 years old.
So if that's the case, then you're nailing it.
Bob Falconer: Yeah. Uh, Confucius said, , humans don't reach their full potential until they're 70.
John Clarke: That gives me some, some relief. [00:02:00] That's why I'm just, you know, edging into my, my work. Uh, you know, I don't wanna be too successful too soon, you know?
Bob Falconer: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I.
John Clarke: , So we are gonna talk about a few things.
One is a workshop that, when this goes out, we'll have started a couple days ago on, um, uh, spirit Trauma and Healing. And then the other is yet another book you have coming out called Spirit Speaks. So, , yeah, maybe just catch us up on, on what you're up to with these projects.
Bob Falconer: Well, , I already, uh, I have a book coming out in three days.
Called opening the inner world about Swedenborg and IFS with a couple other people, uh, swedenborg experts. And then I will have this other book called Spirit Speaks, which is a summary of over 3000 pages of written dialogues I've done with Spirit , over maybe [00:03:00] 10 years now. And I think this will blow away the last tatters of respectability that might cling to me.
Perfect. I'll a secondary objective of yours, right? Yeah. I'll be officially weird, uh, when this comes out.
John Clarke: Yeah. You get your certificate in the mail.
Bob Falconer: Yeah. Yeah. I'm proud of it too. I've, you know, I'm sort of kidding, but I've always identified as being part of the counterculture and , I still feel that way.
And like it. Yeah. I don't really want to be respectable.
So, so there's those things and then this project, that the workshop, which will already have started by the time this comes out, the first. Day of it will be over , is on spirit trauma and healing. And I'm, that I think will be my next, next major book on the scale of, the others within us in yeah, I've been [00:04:00] researching this and focusing on this for a long, long time, and I'm struggling to rake all these ideas together in one place so they're usable and basically.
The idea is we don't heal from major trauma without some form of spiritual connection. That's sort of exiled from polite discourse. You know, it's funny, you can talk about any sexual thing you want, you know? Oh, that's totally welcome. But you start talking about spirit and they go, oh, no, no, no. Get that outta here.
So how, how we can help people access this in, in a materialistic society that has done everything it can to exile and denigrate these kind of experiences, label them, pathologize them, and label them as mental illness.
John Clarke: So it, it makes me [00:05:00] think about, you know, what are the bounds of being a therapist?
And some things that I was thinking about last week and talking to a, a therapist friend about is , you know, I, I see therapists who are making, um, you know, Instagram videos about politics or doing groups that are political groups, um, and taking very clear political stances, you know, and I'm, I wonder about that in terms of, um, a therapist's ability to then work with anyone of different values.
Right? Therapy's not supposed to be values driven, and yet some therapists are stepping out and saying. Here's where I stand politically. There's also therapists that, you know, post a video of them and their partner having brunch on a Saturday. And it's like there's, you know, this kind of like , unveiling of sorts.
Um, and this makes me feel old, but even younger generations like Gen Z therapists that are kind of , more open with their personal lives and stuff like that. And I, it's interesting for me because I was trained so [00:06:00] Psychodynamically and, this kind of iteration of. The therapist being, uh, the, a, a blank slate.
Um, but really playing it more conservatively in terms of our transference until it plays out, and then being able to use that, really being able to invite any type of transference that needs to come out, right. Whereas, , in, in this case, some of these more like personal expressions from therapists seems to, um, probably sway that.
But , depending on how you work and the frameworks you're using, maybe that's not a problem. Who, who am I to say. Talking about spirituality is a big no no. That was the point I was trying to make.
Bob Falconer: Yeah, it is a problem. I think you're right. This is a problem, but I probably, usually, I have a very minority view. I think, I think allowing politics to get into the therapy room is a big mistake. And in the supervision groups I do, I do not allow political discussion. I, I, I get a fair amount of resentment and pushback on that. [00:07:00]
John Clarke: Yeah.
Bob Falconer: Uh, the, the atmosphere has become so it's all hate, fear, and self-righteousness. If you get down in either side of the.
From both sides, everybody's guilty. I don't wanna be in a world of hate, fear, and self-righteousness. You know, Martin Luther King said a long time ago, hatred is never healed by hatred. It is only healed by love. And, uh, you know, you say you start, when I start saying things like that, people on both sides hate me.
What? Yeah, so it's, and the, the IFS Institute itself has really positioned itself as, um, you know, on, on the Democrat side or left side Sure. Or whatever you want to call it. And I think that's a big mistake. Because early on, a lot of the people who were very interested in IFS were [00:08:00] evangelical Christians.
Boy, could IFS be a wonderful, wonderful thing for the evangelicals.
John Clarke: Well, we, so we just had you and the, your co-authors of the Swedenborg book on, and, that was interesting too to, to see, the world that Sweden board came from in being, uh, basically what you say, Christian philosopher of sorts, or, um,
Bob Falconer: well, I wouldn't call him a philosopher, but
John Clarke: Okay. What, yeah, what, what was he.
Bob Falconer: Yeah. I mean he went into his inner world and he saw things and had these profound experiences and then just wrote like a descriptive geography. 'cause he was a scientist. He didn't create, he didn't create cognitive scaffolding and he didn't create all these you shoulds. He just described the depths of his inner world.
Yeah. And he was, he was able to explore his inner world in incredible depth. And he, he [00:09:00] un he used the language of his time, which was highly Christian, but still, I, I don't, you know, I, I know some people call him a philosopher and that sort of, I, we start talking words like visionary and everybody cringes and runs for the exes and wants another word.
John Clarke: Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's interesting, a lot of what he talked about was his exploration of his inner world through the lens of what we would call parts and spirit and spirit guides, and to your point, framing a lot of that through Christian language and the language that he had and knew at that time.
Yeah. Hmm. But really a willingness to go inside and see what's there. Right? Which is, I a, a big piece of your work, right?
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Bob Falconer: Huge. Huge. I, I've, this is an exaggeration, but I think real curiosity is a panacea. In the inner world. Uh, a panacea, it cures just about everything, but there's [00:11:00] two kinds of curiosity.
There's Sherlock Holmes. Let's nail this thing down. Curiosity. Yeah. Yeah. And then there's wide open heart-centered curiosity. At the start of any inquiry, they look the same. But as you go down them, that Sherlock Holmes kind of attitude, it gets really narrow and really focused and really laser-like and very precise and much of the world disappears and it's a, and when that kind of curiosity is satisfied or complete.
The issue is over dead, done solved, QED, done. You know?
John Clarke: Yeah.
Bob Falconer: But the heart-centered curiosity, as you start going down that path, some, instead of narrowing down the focus widens. Wider and wider and becomes 360 degrees. And instead of moving towards certainty and an answer, it moves towards wonder and awe.
And then as you move [00:12:00] even further, it moves toward love and ecstasy and euphoria and communion. And now I think obviously in terms of other people and ourselves, we want that other kind of curiosity. Now, Ian McGilchrist discusses this in terms of right brain and left brain, and I think that the example he gives, which I think is very revealing, he says, imagine that you're a bird standing on some gravel pecking for seeds in the gravel.
You have your Sherlock curiosity. Yeah, focused on the gravel, picking out the seeds. Your heart-centered curiosity is scanning the entire rest of the universe. It is primarily interested in surprise, the new, the anomalous, what doesn't fit, and two of its major focuses are potential mates and predators. [00:13:00] So.
And, and McGilchrist makes this wonderful point, which at first really pissed me off. But usually when there's a radical new idea, it pisses me off at first. Yeah. Yeah. Because it takes me out of my comfort zone. Yeah. He says How we pay attention is a moral act. And I think how we pay attention is a choice like that, that determines the nature of the world we live in.
To, to a large extent. So if we can live in this right brain, um, heart-centered curiosity, I think it solves a, a incredible number of problems. And if we can bring that attitude, that moral choice to use McGilchrist word, uh, to our inner work and to other people, including the ones you hate politically , our lives will go much, much, much better.
John Clarke: Well, my sense is if we could do more of that, it would [00:14:00] literally save the world.
Bob Falconer: Yeah. Oh, McGilchrist says one other thing if I can. He says the, the real way to change the, because he is very distressed about the state of the world. He says, uh. Will change. The what will change this is a change in consciousness.
Yeah. And he says the good news is it, I don't know where he got this number, but he says if 3% of the people on the planet can change their consciousness, that's probably enough to tip the bounds. So that makes me very, very optimistic in sort of an underground way. If I and you and others like us, keep helping people heal and get more and more deep inner awareness and more and more come from the heart-centered curiosity, that could be what changes the whole planet instead of going out and screaming, hatred, fear, shame, nasty messages.
John Clarke: Well, you know, the more I do this show and talk to people like you, I come back to [00:15:00] this central question of like, what is trauma and how do we heal from it? What does real healing look like? And a lot of therapy, well intending comes from a place of figuring stuff out or insight, not the IFS inside of going inside, but insight of if I can just figure out why I am this way.
I'll be able to heal from it. Right? Yeah. And what I tell my clients, and I work with very smart people. I've been here in Silicon Valley my whole career, right? And people with MBAs and Ivy League degrees and all this stuff is, if it was a matter of just outsmarting your trauma, you would've done it by now.
You don't need my help with that, right? Yeah. And you can draw the dot between. My mom was horrible to me and now I seek out partners that are horrible to me, even though another part of me knows better. Right. Great. You got that. Now what? Yeah. You still have to heal. Right? So to me, like IFS is relational.
It's a way of relating to these part parts of you that hold the pain, parts of you that protect the pain. And IFS has a texture [00:16:00] to it that I would really call love. I think that's essentially what the model is. But even again, as a therapist, there's a, there's a part of me that's like, don't say don't say love.
You're gonna get Yeah. Really, you're gonna get can, you're gonna lose your license. Right? Yeah. Like, even that is too mushy or, uh, you know, abstract or. Spiritual or whatever it is, but that's really what it is. And there's a texture of that. There's also a lot of IFS therapists, especially when we're starting out, that have these figuring out parts of, I wanna know how many parts are here and what to call 'em.
Is this a protector? Is this a newbie, whatever? Yeah. And in reality. It doesn't really matter if the work is safe, if the quality and the texture of the session is safe, if there's safety in the client system and in the therapist system, right. That's when really magical things just naturally happen and the healing happens naturally.
Oh, and what a relief that the therapist doesn't have to be micromanaging every part of that.
Bob Falconer: Yeah. Definitely, I think, you know, yeah, I think the word love is really the key to it all, but we can't say that.
John Clarke: Right? Yeah. I'll bleep that part out when I edit this.
Bob Falconer: No, don't, don't. Please don't. It's really important you [00:17:00] said it.
Um, so I use the word respect a lot and I know that doesn't start with the C, so it's not jcs, but I think that's the, A core. A core value of IFS is we respect the person's system and we respect all the parts, the suicidal part, the drinking part, the obnoxious part. We respect them all. And, uh, this connects to what you were saying because p Melody used to say often, respect is the minimum of love.
I love that phrase and respect is respectable. You can talk about it there. By the way, Tia Melody died last week. I think one of the greatest.
John Clarke: I didn't know that.
Bob Falconer: One of the greatest addictions treatment people, uh, ever. Uh, and I was lucky to get to work with her a lot. No kidding. 82.
John Clarke: She has a lot of, [00:18:00] um, had a lot of impact on, um, the Meadows, which is a treatment facility that's out here not far from you and I here near San Jose.
Um, and they have locations everywhere, but they have a lot of her stuff built into their curriculum. Yep. They have a lot of dick's stuff too, but yeah, and even in the realm of nonviolent communication, you see a lot of her stuff. So, um, yeah. Massive contributions.
Bob Falconer: So you, you're ready for some weird stuff or do we have to
John Clarke: I'm, I'm ready for it. This is exactly what I'm wanting.
Bob Falconer: You know, the others within us was primarily focused on unattached burdens. 'cause that's what yeah, that's what came up and got right in my face and said, you pay attention to me, Bob. And so I did.
And, um, working with unattached burdens implies that our minds are porous. And I think Dick has done a superb job of following out the implications of the idea that mind is [00:19:00] multiple, and just that idea that mind is multiple revolutionizes psychotherapy. I mean, many of the old values are turned on their head, and it makes it incredibly more effective.
I think this idea that mind is porous is similar to that and we have not yet, uh, explored the implications of really accepting this idea.
John Clarke: Yeah,
Bob Falconer: little bit. I mean, there's legacy burdens, unattached burdens, guides, all that, all that kind of stuff. So there is some recognition to it, but I think a lot, a lot more work can be done here.
And. A couple things I wanna say first, I think in exploring this, the porosity of mind, the things that are not part of us or our personal history, or even our family legacy. The weird stuff that's deep in, deep in the weeds. When, when you, when you start [00:20:00] exploring deeply in your mind, because I was coming from a therapist's point of view, I saw the painful stuff first.
I didn't see the benevolent. Stuff very much. 'cause people don't come in complaining about that or, you know,
John Clarke: well that's, that's the therapist bias to begin with. We, we go in looking for the hurt, right. Looking for the pissed off part, looking for the, like, the troublemaker part, you know,
Bob Falconer: and it's why people come to us, so why not?
John Clarke: Yeah,
Bob Falconer: of course. In, in reviewing the anthropological literature, and I do have an undergraduate degree and a little bit of graduate work in anthropology in talking about spirit possession. Which is completely acceptable thing, respectable thing to talk about in anthropology, but it's not okay in psychotherapy, in reviewing the anthropological data, which is too vast for anybody to really grasp on spirit possession.
But [00:21:00] the va, I believe the vast majority of these kinds of contacts are positive and sought after. In many, many traditions, people do all kinds of stuff to elicit these kinds of contact and to explain, expand and explore the poorest porosity of their mind and the the antipodes of their minds. These far territories that we can go into when, when we really explore our inner worlds.
So I think I, I'm paying more and more attention to the positive experiences people have. And I realize, you know, most DMT containing psychedelics, people report meeting age agentic conscious beings.
John Clarke: Yeah.
Bob Falconer: Which is a nice way of saying entities or spirits. And in Roland Griffith studies, 80, 90% said these were positive.
Yeah, [00:22:00] ayahuasca, it's very, which is A DMT containing psychedelic, but also most people meet Mother Ayahuasca or other, other guide energies. There are of course nasty ones around. So I think people get so scared of the inner world and, and we tend to ignore the fact that there are all these wonderful resources there.
Yeah, so that's, that's one the first point I wanted to make about. This other world. And the, the second, and this is, this is we need spirit to heal. We need this kind of contact. 'cause if all we're seeing is the nasty stuff, we're still frightened at the depths of our own minds.
John Clarke: Yeah.
Bob Falconer: Not good, not good. Hard, hard to enjoy life when you're, you know, constantly frightened of yourself.
Yep. The other thing I, I'm trying to. Just as Swedenborg did in his way, he created a geography of this inner world. [00:23:00] I'm exploring that idea too, and I think, well, I think it's a continuum, but there is subject and objective. Do not divide. It is not a bifurcation like that. I believe it's a continuum, but many, many traditions have said there are three, not two, and I think.
A lot of people blame poor old Descartes for a lot of stuff, you know, the Cartesian dualism and all of that. But I think they're right that his dividing the world up into raise cajetan's thinking stuff and raise extension, extensia stuff that has takes up space. That's a big problem. There's actually a third.
Realm in between that Luis, Eduardo Luna, the Ayahuasquero from Brazil, who's my age seventies and probably done six, 700 Ayahuasca journeys. Calls this [00:24:00] middle realm the Rays fantastica because it's inhabited by the imaginal realm imagery. But I want, I've discovered that the Sufis had a very, very similar idea, Barza, and they.
They say that we humans are in between beings. We are like an isus of land between the divine, the continent of the divine, and the continent of the material things. And we are an isus of, of. Contact an in-between, between the interior subjective and e external world. And they have many other things they say and they say, this is not, this is actually wonderful and it's who we are.
And EI Abi who was, uh, one of the greatest, A lot of people think the greatest, uh, Islamic philosopher. He even said, recognizing that our nature is to be a barza is the beginning of [00:25:00] wisdom. And the West totally denies this idea, so, so we don't get to, we don't get to even start on the staircase to wisdom.
Winnicott had a very, very similar idea. He said that children learned by playing and playing is a fusion of imagination. And he used the word illusion. With reality. He said this kind of play creates an intermediate realm between the person's mind, subjectivity and objectivity. And he even said, all human creativity and culture come from this intermediate realm.
Realm. And one of his commentators or followers, acolytes. Um, whose name I'm spacing out right now called this The Psychological Continent, but they saw this as being foundational for all of human culture. [00:26:00] Uh, one more, if I'm not going too far here, John. He talks about the subjective realm, the objective realm, and he also says there's a realm he calls the trans injective.
The example he gives is from that evolutionary, uh, uh, uh, psychologist Gibson affordances. You know, the idea that what we perceive in the world, we don't perceive things. When you see a coffee cup with a handle, what your body perceives is the ability to pick that thing up. It's a good thing to grab.
So it affords us the possibility of grabbing it. And there is some laboratory evidence that, you know, like when we see a staircase, we see, it gives us the possibility of going up and down. These affordances are neither subjective or objective. They're trans subjective. They're, [00:27:00] they're, they come from the interaction of these other two realms and.
You can go even further with this. Just like the Sufis say, this is key, and Wincott says this is key. This is where human meaning comes from. This is where we actually live our lives in this realm. And I'm going, what? We live our lives in a realm we've been trained in the West to believe does not exist at all. It's like, oh my God, how foolish we are.
John Clarke: Hey, if you're a therapist, I want to help you deepen your client work, help them get better results without burning yourself out. You can do all this by learning to harness the power of IFS. So I want to tell you, we've got a free IFS resource library that you can download. Now, this is full of resources like my Quickstart Guide to IFS.
The full IFS protocol, a bunch of demos of me doing IFS with real people and extra self-care [00:28:00] practices for therapists. You can get all this for free in the link in the description, and I hope you enjoy.
Well being, being in control of your mind and of your life is like the ultimate goal.
Bob Falconer: Yeah. It does. For most people, the illusion of being in,
John Clarke: and this is all antithetical, the illusion of it, right? Yeah. And the thing is, it's like you, you can't be in fear and in curiosity at the same time and sometimes even in a given session, right?
Um, we're kind of swaying in between the two. And what the therapist is really trying to do is help. Access, curiosity in their own system and help the client do the same. Because when we do that, the work is safer and hey, every now and then, healing just tends to happen, right? Trauma is about unsafety and a loss of agency, right?
And, and what you're talking about is like. Having frameworks and words to what has happened to you or what might happen in a session or what might be happening right now helps create safety, right? [00:29:00] It's also the same reason why a lot of folks when they're, they're. Doing psychedelic work. A way to keep it safe is creating some scaffolding around like what could happen in their experience and then helping them integrate that experience, right?
It can be unsafe when people go in and have really traumatic experiences and their systems get blown out, and then they don't have a way to integrate what happened, right? So yeah. So much of it is about, yeah, safety, curiosity, um, having a way to explain things. Because humans, we, we like to explain what happened to us, right?
We build a story around what happened to us immediately, right? Or someone that comes into my office and they've had a story around something that happened to them. And they're looking to really just get that story confirmed right? When they, they come to me again. It's like my mom was mean to me, and now I seek out mean partners and.
That's why I drink. It's like,
Bob Falconer: great. If they come to me for that, they came to the wrong guy. But I think you're right. I think you, you, you are talking about something that's super important and a lot of people don't like this idea. [00:30:00] We live inside of a story, all of us, including the hyper-rational, alleged scientist.
John Clarke: Yeah.
Bob Falconer: That person has a story about the nature of the world and what's morally right and wrong, and they just wanna pretend it's not a story that, yeah, it's a story just like anyone else's. And I think of stories as prisons. We choose to live inside. Uh, most often that's how they function, and I think we need to get into a story, explore it, and then get out of it.
Climb on top of that box and see where you can go next. Yeah, I think the, the stories are really pernicious. I think the idea of predictive coding or predictive processing is super important. Your story tells you what's relevant, what has value, what matters in your life. That's a big, big function of having a story.
What, what [00:31:00] is relevant to you on a deep level, what matters. What you value will determine the world you perceive. It will actually determine the world you live in and this predictive coding model. It shows us how that happens. And it all happens pre subconsciously. You know, you, you get raw sensory data down here somewhere, and there's lots of it less than, you know, only maybe a few, two, 3% of that gets up into your brain and there seem to be all these gates and the raw sensory data is coming up and there are these grids that determine value.
Relevance or whatever you want to call it that come down. And if the grid says, nah, you're not relevant to my story. You never get to experience that in any way. And some of these models have like six grids and some have 10 who know? I don't know. Who knows? But. This means that what we value deeply, not what we say [00:32:00] we value, that hardly matters at all.
What, what our behaviors ma determines the world we perceive in the world we live in. Yeah. So these things are super, super important.
John Clarke: Well, a a lot of this comes down to how do we receive information, right? And, uh, bringing it back to. I, I, I bring a lot of this back to like IFS basics around helping a client experience insight and how that's different.
If not only you're aware of this critical part that tells you that you suck, but, um, you can become more aware of him and, uh, when you open yourself to him and, uh, you know, speak curiously toward him or whatever and wait, and just wait and don't think, and just wait. He might talk back to you, right? Let you know more about his story and why he does what he does or whatever.
Right? So like that, that's a really weird thing to do. It's really weird to get information that way. Again, when so much of our culture is around, like, I am this person who has thoughts and I can [00:33:00] control thoughts, right? Or from a CBT lens, right? It's like my thoughts are just distorted and I just need to undistort them, you know, untwist them and I'll feel better.
Which to an extent is truer from a parts perspective. It's like there's a part of you that. Offers that distortion of like, you suck. Or really, what if you suck? Or really, I'm afraid of you sucking. 'cause that would mean disconnection, right? Loss of love. Right. So that's what I'm trying to help you do.
It's like, oh, well that makes sense. So it's like parts hold these core beliefs, parts hold these fears, these wounds. Right? But that's a different way of getting information is like hearing from a part. And then in the realm of love of your work, hearing from, uh. These other elements in the system, whether it's spirit or spirit guide, ancestral guide, right?
Uh, something that is uh, not native to your system is like the next level of kind of experiencing a different way of getting information, right?
Bob Falconer: Yeah. And I think, I think IFS provides, uh, totally necess even [00:34:00] necessary groundwork or foundation for this other work. 'cause in IFS it becomes super clear that.
We're made up of parts. These parts are fully formed people, they're not a drive or you know, some, some two dimensional thing and we can and should form relationships with them, their whole persons. I'm a big fan of Martin Buber. I know Dick is not a big fan of Martin Buer, but this whole issue of personhood.
A personal relationship is very, very important. And these, these people can hijack you. They can, you know, they can take you over and, oh, some. I don't do it so much anymore, but used to be if somebody would cut me off on the three-way. There was a tantruming three-year-old driving my car all of a sudden.
John Clarke: Oh yeah,
I've got one of those.
Bob Falconer: That's not good news. It's 70 miles an hour. This is not good news. But [00:35:00] anyway, once you get this way of interacting with other people of the subjective realm and. As fully formed people and having respectful relationships with them, it's much easier to start relating to spirits or whatever we're gonna call them in that way too.
And I find this idea of personhood, it gets the most pushback and the most contemptuous. Sneering from, from people who don't like what I do.
John Clarke: What, what is the idea of personhood? What does that mean?
Bob Falconer: Well, I'll go back to Bubert 'cause I think he's the, the father of this. Well, no he is not. I mean, it goes back thousands of years.
He says there's two possible, he calls 'em words, but they're actually word pairs. I thou or I it. And you can relate to everything either way. And he says, he says specifically, you can relate to a stone in Anile [00:36:00] way. And then he says, if you see the full dimensions and you know, there's respect involved and, and he also says early, he seemed to say that all evil comes out of i, it relating after the Holocaust.
I think. I think his opinion of evil changed Yeah. As it did for many people. But, martin Luther King was a personalist. He, he thought, uh, and it was the basis of his entire civil rights work, and he had a great way of saying it. He said, we have to respect everybody because everybody has somebody this.
There's this unique essence of them that will never be repeated. And you know that, that requires respect when we recognize that in people.
John Clarke: Yeah.
Bob Falconer: Yeah. And you, most of psychology treats our internal parts as it, [00:37:00] I mean, Freud, you know, Freud never used the word ego, super ego, or Id. He just used the simple German pronouns I it and over I.
So he thought everything that wasn't your ego wasn't the, I was an, it was a thing. And he tried to relate to the rest of the mind that way. And I think that accounts for many of the, what's a nice way to say this? Less than helpful aspects of psychoanalysis.
John Clarke: Well, again, it's kind of like. What is compassion And going back to this piece around like, uh, therapist making political posts, um, uh, and I to your point, really agree we shouldn't be doing that.
If, if you can think of someone you really don't like and hold them as a collection of parts that are well-meaning, and for some people, like very , intricately designed protective systems. That [00:38:00] are doing what they believe they should do for survival, then you start to soften toward the person a little bit.
And some people have parts that fear that that means I'm gonna condone someone if I have compassion for them. Right. You know, and I, I find that really weird. And I don't think that's like at risk, like there's a difference between condoning someone or the behavior versus like, what's the real risk of cultivating compassion?
In your system toward, toward that person. Right. It's actually like the ultimate hack. It's like the ultimate way to actually, uh, find like love in, in your heart, right? Yep. Um, and actually would be a way to be able to work with this person or have a conversation with this person, right? Or talk politics with this person if you're gonna do it right from even a 1% more self-led way, right?
Yeah. Where people have their protective systems are so up. Around people. And then it creates this loss of connection, this further divide. And it's, I think, a [00:39:00] crisis that we're right in the thick of, um, right now, and yeah.
Bob Falconer: Yeah. And Dick says, protectors almost always create what they most fear in the external world.
That's right. Something Dick said to me, 'cause I can be pretty snarky. I'm, I'm a lot better. No, a lot better on the sna snark meter than I used to be. But he said to me, Bob, you, you have x-ray vision for the protectors, but you often don't see the exiles behind them. And that was so painfully true.
Painfully accurate. I wanna give you an, an example of someone I consider like a Mount Everest of spirit. It was this Tibetan Buddhist, uh, monk who'd been captured by the communist Chinese and held literally for 20 years, for much of that time, literally chained to a wall. And when he got free and was out in, uh, what [00:40:00] Dharmsala and, you know, was back to health, he, he was interviewed and these Western people were interviewing him and one said.
And he said, uh, the monk said, oh, I was in grave danger. I was in grave danger there. And one of the western reporters said, oh, did you think you were gonna die? And the monk said, laughed. And he said, no, no, no, no, no. I was afraid I might lose compassion for the Chinese
and I lose.
What would that
mean if you, for someone who
disagrees with me politically, oh my Lord. Yeah, yeah.
John Clarke: Yeah. We're all trying, you know, and something, so I actually had one of your buddies on the show, , uh, Tim, talking about, um, his work in education. Great episode. I think that that's actually coming out today, May 19th, and then this will be out a, a week from today.
And, you know, he, part of his framework is this loss of connection, right. Or the threat of loss [00:41:00] of connection in the classroom and like that. That really is. The heart of all of it, right? In the heart of really what our parts are trying to do is help us to, create and maintain and preserve and not lose connection.
And then yet, to your point, a lot of times , we end up doing the very thing that we're trying to prevent. Right? But it really is, about that.
Bob Falconer: Yeah. And when we're doing that stuff, it usually creates isolation, which is Yeah. You know, elk and keeps saying, irony, the driving force of the universe. I was, I'll be talking about them in the, in the.
Conference I'm doing on spirit and healing, but also I'm gonna do a book on this. All these people's different definition of what the real core of trauma is. And a lot of people it, separation was the big theme. Yeah. As as you've been saying, separation from who you really are, your real self separation from any contact with the divine.
All these other ideas, [00:42:00] numbing, which creates a universal separation. Yeah. Uh, one woman said not having anyone to talk to about the trauma afterwards, which is another flavor of separation. Yeah. I think this idea of numbing that trauma, creating this numbing is super important. The, uh, path work, which is a, I don't know, a spiritual or emotional healing.
I don't even know what to call it. Found out by Eva Parus a long time ago. They had a wonderful theory of the origin of evil, and I think it's right. They say evil begins in numbing to our own pain because once you've numbed to your own pain, in order to maintain that numbing, you have to numb to everybody else's pain.
And then to maintain that numbing and numb to everybody else's pain, you have to start sort of poking at them to keep them away from you so that they don't trigger any of [00:43:00] your stuff. Once you've started doing that, you're on, you're, you're rolling down the hill toward cruelty, and it just, every little bit further you go, the, the meaner and meaner and meaner you get.
So the origin to evil is numbing to our own pain. That's what trauma often causes. So I think this is how trauma propagates itself. I've been, I've been wondering, you know, there's all this trauma and evil in the world. It's, it seems to be running the show here, frankly. How does it propagate? How does it reproduce?
I think that's a very interesting question, and I think this is one of those ways.
John Clarke: Well, I, I would love to take a peek into our, you know, the, the therapy profession 30 years ago. And part of how I got started on this work is , upon. Finishing graduate school wasn't, wasn't 30 years ago, but , we, the mention of trauma was virtually non-existent.
[00:44:00] Non-existent, you know, we talked about like crisis intervention, like what to do when someone's actively in crisis or there's a mass, you know, casualty or something like that. But. We had virtually no training on trauma. And so like many therapists, you get into the field and you're sure comfortable with clients talking about these horrific things that happen to them, but then you don't really know what to do with it all.
Right? And unintentionally you might put them right back in their trauma and then you go, oh, I'm sorry, your time's up. See you in a week. Good luck. You know, surviving for the next week. And they go and are numbing and dissociating and, and all these things, right? Having explosive fights with. You know, everyone, someone on the freeway or every, there's partner, their friends who, whomever, right?
Yeah. You know, I'm, uh, I'm also on the getting trained in somatic experiencing the Peter Peter Levine stuff, and he talks a lot about the trauma vortex and the healing vortex, and he's got these images for it. And I actually. It helps me frame up , what you're talking about, right? In terms of the trauma vortex and being [00:45:00] in that hurt and in that pain and in that numbing and in that cycle.
And some people, when they come to my office, they've been in that trauma vortex for a decade or decades or whatever it is, right? And the good news is just spinning time in the healing vortex. Is healing in itself. Right. And I think, again, a lot of that is getting into that compassion, that love, like a lot of things that IFS can help us access.
That just being in that is healing in itself. The work isn't always necessarily about, like going back there, quote unquote, and reliving every excruciating detail. Of your actual trauma, the traumatic events, right? It's like mm-hmm. You already know what happened, right? It's like your, your, your parts were there and have every vi vivid detail already, but there's also, again, this split among therapists of like, to what degree do you need to relive all this crap to, in order to heal, right?
So the EMDR folks would say like, yeah, we gotta go back there and we gotta hold that memory mine and start the bilateral simulation and whatnot. And one [00:46:00] thing I love about IFS is. We don't necessarily have to go back there. The parts will show us the way, and primarily it's like the, if the parts need to be witnessed, you know, in that painful moment and then brought into the present and brought into the loving leadership of self, that's a much, you know, gentler path I in, in my experience.
But
Bob Falconer: yeah, that's a key, key difference. Between IFS and the rest of the world. Yeah. Catharsis versus witnessing the rest of the trauma world was catharsis. You have to pump all this stuff out. Get it out.
John Clarke: Yeah.
Bob Falconer: No, it's what the part needs.
John Clarke: Yeah.
Bob Falconer: What does the part need you to know and see so that it doesn't feel left alone with that stuff anymore?
Yep, and it's the parts in control. That that's a, they sound quite similar, but I think in practice they're very, very different processes. Yep. There's something else I wanna say about this. Mm-hmm. History of trauma. You know, [00:47:00] I'm old enough so that I can remember when therapists alleged that child sexual abuse almost never happened.
There was the, the major textbook of psychiatry in America in the late sixties and early seventies, said father-daughter, incest happens less than one in a million times. It's vanishingly rare, and when it does happen, it's often good for the child. That was what was being taught. Psychiatrists.
John Clarke: Yeah.
Bob Falconer: And uh, the whole movement, the survivor's movement was a grassroots movement.
With some therapists and more therapists joining and the therapy schools and the quote experts we're all against it and did everything they could to crush it, which is a dismal, dismal fact, and the recognition of trauma and PTSD that did not come from these fancy institutions that are now claiming to be the big trauma experts.
It came from the Vietnam Veterans rap [00:48:00] groups. They knew that PTSD existed 'cause they all had it. And uh, they were organized by one guy, the psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Lifton, and they went and they didn't go to the schools. The schools were hopeless. They went to Washington, DC and then Washington. Because they, you can't say no to a veteran in Washington.
The Washington put pressure on, on the therapists associations. Yeah. And that's how, uh, PTSD got in the DSM. Yeah. It's a pretty ugly and distressing story. Uh, you know, so we've come a long ways just in my lifetime.
John Clarke: Yeah. And still have a long way to go, right? Oh,
Bob Falconer: yeah, yeah,
John Clarke: yeah. You, you know, part, part of my personal and professional life mission has become like, um, I would love for healing from trauma to be a no-brainer, right? Like something that is completely [00:49:00] accessible. And when you walk into a therapist's office or a whomever's office, this is a thing that we can help you heal from., And not this mysterious beast of like a, a life sentence, right?
Or like having complex PTSD being a life sentence or whatever. So. That's kind of what I'm up to here and I'm excited for this moment in time of the things we're learning, the things we can realize were not working back then. Even again, like, like Tim being in the schools and having kids take, you know, fill out the ACEs, uh, scale to start scanning for this screening for this stuff.
Right. Or a kid who can't sit still. Um, okay. He might have ADHD He also might be highly traumatized. Right. You know, it's like that's a novel idea that's just now arriving in some school systems and public systems. Right. And it's like, let's, let's keep going with that and be curious about the bigger picture.
Right? Yeah. And the many, many ripples of, of trauma. So, Bob, we got about five minutes left. So I know you mentioned you have yet another book coming out called [00:50:00] Spirit Speaks. Tell me just a little bit more about what that book's about and what people can expect from it. Okay.
Bob Falconer: About, uh, over 10 years ago now, uh, I was at a workshop, uh, assisting Kay Gardner, who I admire.
She is wonderful. All you IFS people. I believe she's gonna be coming out with a book on legacy burdens if you ever get a chance to work with her. Well, anyway, she suggested, uh, this exercise and I thought it was so stupid I wasn't gonna do it, but because it was, Kay, I did it. And the exercise was, you just think of something that you really want some guidance on, and you just start a written dialogue and you put your name and then, hi there, whatever name you wanna put in for spirit.
You ask the question, then you just put the spirit's name and write an answer. And I did this for about 10, 15 minutes and I was astounded. Answers came out of that that were [00:51:00] wiser than what I was aware of. Clearly, clearly they some something in there knew more than I did, which sort of makes sense from an IFS point of view.
So I started doing this every day for. 10, 15 years. And then I, uh, I, I, this, this voice once said, you should publish this. And I went, oh, that's gonna, you know, I'm gonna be totally the flake now. So, but then I've summarized, I've got about over 3000 pages of this stuff now, and I've summarized it, and that's what the book is gonna be about.
And it is, uh, it is clearly wiser than my conscious mind. And, uh, one thing I love is it has a great sense of humor, so .
John Clarke: Great. Well, we can't wait to check it out. And, and again, Bob, you know, you have, you have quite the following. You know, I was, I was in my level [00:52:00] one training and people were like, plugging. Resources or like institute approved resources. And then people in the chat were plugging, Bob Falconer interviews on the Going inside podcast, you know?
Yeah.
Bob Falconer: I I don't think
I'm institute approved. I might be. Yeah.
John Clarke: You're on like the
Bob Falconer: back in on the fringes though. That's Yeah. I heard rumors that they're talking nicely about. Yeah.
John Clarke: Well, even despite that people are plugging your stuff in the chat, you know, in my level one training, so
you're, you're still in, you're, you're on your own list. Uh, it's still very much appreciated by people and I've had people reach out to me and say. These chats with you are among their favorite episodes of, of this show. And I think it, you, one of the many things you do is you give people permission to be curious.
You give people permission to help their clients be curious about what else could be happening here, what else is happening in this system, right? Um, and, uh, when we go beyond just like the ordinary parts that we learned to work with, [00:53:00] what the, the magic and the phenomena that can happen, you know, in our systems.
So. Yeah. Kudos for, for giving people that permission and their rebellious, curious parts to you know, see what's beyond.
Bob Falconer: I wanna say one more thing. I know we're outta time, but one thing that gets clearer and clearer to me after 50 years, more than 50 years of studying this stuff diligently. I, I do do my homework.
I am a hard worker. The, the most brilliant, insightful and wise human beings on this planet are astoundingly ignorant. We know just about nothing. And, um, we are in preschool. The most brilliant ones of us are in preschool. Most of us are wandering around in diapers, pretending we understand the universe.
It's, um, the, the poet, William Butler Yates had a beautiful image for this. He said, imagine all human knowledge is one [00:54:00] bubble with that beautiful iridescent sheen that moves around a bubble. Well, yes, it's beautiful, isn't it? Now that bubble is one of many, many, many bubbles in a small patch of sea foam, which is on a little bit of sand in an insignificant cove.
A vast dark sea.
Yeah. So, and this helps me stay curious
John Clarke: awesome. Um, Bob, it's great to have you back and I'm excited for your new book. We'll make sure to put links to everything, that we have in the show notes and description, and, um, of course, links to your website where people can go and see a list of your books, your offerings, your workshops and, and stuff like that.
Because I know you have a, you know, an evolving list of, uh, offerings in ways that you help people. So we'll, we'll be sure to link all that stuff.
Bob Falconer: Okay, great. Good talking with you again, John. Take care.
John Clarke: Thanks, Bob. See you soon.
Bob Falconer: Bye. Bye.
John Clarke: [00:55:00] 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 John Clarke Therapy and apply to work with me one-on-one at johnclarketherapy.com.
See you next time.