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The Magic of Healing Your Inner Child: Part Two
118 Plays1 year ago
The conversation continues from last week in Part 2! This week we focus on taking what we've learned about our parts to find the areas where our younger selves need healing, and that's where the magic happens!
About this week's guest:
Chris Dorsey, MBA, LCSW, spent twenty years in various leadership roles within the accounting and finance divisions of real estate and technology firms before becoming a licensed clinical social worker. With experience in palliative care and medical social work as well as his own father’s journey with dementia, Chris utilizes a broad and unique set of skills to whole-heartedly guide clients through the most challenging of circumstances. Chris values a humanistic approach to social work and therapy where the dignity and self-worth of the individual is protected at all times. Chris applies integrative approaches to grief and loss treatment focused on navigating the client through a difficult life transition while also opening up their system to safely explore their feelings and emotions to the loss. In addition to grief and loss, Chris has extensive training in Internal Family Systems (IFS), Dignity Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
Get in touch with Chris:
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Transcript
Introduction to Season 2
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to season two of Outside of Session. I'm your host, licensed clinical social worker, and therapist BFF, Julie Hilton. This season, I'm interviewing some incredible guests who also happen to be experts in their fields. Mental health, motherhood, spirituality, and so much more, I can't wait for their stories to be told. These are all the conversations I'm having outside of session.
Healing the Inner Child with IFS
00:00:47
Speaker
Hey everyone and welcome back to outside of session. This week's episode is going to be part two of the magic of healing your inner child. And we're continuing the conversation with Chris Dorsey about how we use internal family systems in therapy to help clients do this work.
00:01:03
Speaker
Last week we talked more about learning and understanding your different parts that show up day to day. But this week we really get into how doing that work helps us to know how to heal our younger selves. And I personally feel like that's where the magic really happens.
00:01:19
Speaker
Make sure you check out last week's episode first if you haven't already so that you have kind of like a point of reference for where we're starting today. And also make sure you check out the show notes for Chris's contact information if you have any questions for him or if you want to get in touch with him. So I hope you enjoy listening to today's episode as much as I enjoyed recording it.
00:01:41
Speaker
Okay.
Addressing Exiles and Unburdening
00:01:42
Speaker
So we've talked so much about parts in the present, how we get to know them and how, and we're an hour into this. I knew this was going to happen. Probably going to split this up into two parts, right? Like part one. I'm enjoying watching you talk. It's like you're teaching me. It's great.
00:01:59
Speaker
So this is all how we recognize what's going on in the present, but we really want to get to the part of healing our inner child. So let's start talking about how do we work with exiles? How do we help them heal? How do we go through that unburdening process and what that looks like in therapy? Oh, wow. That's a loaded question. That's a loaded one. That's really an area that we don't always get to. Like I have to say that like sometimes clients
00:02:30
Speaker
don't really give us permission to go that far. But when we do, like for yesterday, for example, um, we've worked back to a feeling with a client.
Core Feelings and Safety in Therapy
00:02:39
Speaker
So I think real life examples are helpful kind of people listening. So someone has come in with something happening and we've traced everything over the last couple of weeks. And we've really gotten to the point of like the exile is I'm not good enough, right? Just that feeling of just, and
00:02:57
Speaker
right now it feels unsafe. Like he feels as though wherever he goes, that feeling is not protected given work challenges, home challenges. And so when, when we met it yesterday, so to speak, you know, we made sure how to, um, make it feel safe, make it, you know, talk to it, but it was really like, once you get there and because
00:03:22
Speaker
I think the path to get there just takes time. And, but when you get there, it's really the soft place of saying, okay, now how can we meet this exile so that it feels safe enough to now talk more, right? Like how can we talk and share more about it? And I think the path for me and how I look at that is like, we just go on and sort of tell me more about where you remember your earliest memories around sort of not being good enough, you know, and sort of exploring going into that.
00:03:52
Speaker
and letting the client kind of take you on that path around where it first started getting all that info and then, um, working to kind of introduce, I know this is, you know, and then that path will eventually take you towards, um, healing it and bringing that, that inner child that feels not good enough. Sort of back to the prep, introducing it into the present to say, Hey, you know, letting that child know that this person here today,
00:04:20
Speaker
is 28 years old and we were no longer in that place where no one, everyone around you judged you and made you feel that everything you did was just second place, right? Never really. And that the person where you are today and who's in your environment today, they're not the same people sometimes. And that process is just sort of literally taking that child and letting it meet.
00:04:48
Speaker
the part that they are today, who's in the room. And really, it's called implicit direct access. So we would be accessing that exile, sort of closing, almost like closing eyes and talking to that part that does not feel good enough. And really going through what we described earlier around the fears, the focus, like all of those types of kind of letting it kind of talk to me, you know, meeting a child version of it. And that path is
00:05:17
Speaker
It's amazing. It just takes a bit of time usually. And then slowly bringing that child towards the adult that's in the client and the two of them meeting each other and sort of
00:05:33
Speaker
kind of healing so that that child doesn't feel so close in that way in the here and the now. Does that make sense? I hope that makes some sense. It does. And what are some of those questions like when you finally get self
00:05:50
Speaker
to be able to be kind of like in the room with younger you, what are the, how do you help encourage the healing process? Like what are some of the things that you do in that moment to get the, the exile? We just go on like an exploration and then I sort of ask that child, would it be willing to sort of come forward or would you be willing to move towards that and have the two of you meet? That's sort of what,
00:06:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly what I do. So let me give an example of when that actually happened last week
Naming Parts and Their Roles
00:06:26
Speaker
with a client. So when she presented in my office, she was just exhausted. And I've known her for a while, but one of the things that we've talked about is that she's just exhausted. And one of the parts that she blends with a lot now is this part that just takes on everything. It's just a very responsible part, but she's responsible for everybody in her family. Like she just
00:06:51
Speaker
does and takes on more than the average person would ever be able to juggle, right? And so she was having a hard time saying no, like that was one of her presenting things when she came into therapy. So we really identified this part. And once we really started to look at it and personify it a little bit, she started to call it her soldier.
00:07:10
Speaker
Because she was like, I just soldier through whatever I have to do. Like, I don't have a choice. I just have to get it done. So we started to see it. Like, that's what she named. Sometimes clients want to kind of like name their parts. So she calls it her soldier. And so when we started working with it, I would say, Like, How long has your soldier been with you? Like, How long have you noticed this part? And she was like, Gosh, it's been around forever. So when we started to work back through
00:07:36
Speaker
Why did she develop this part? And I started to ask, we started to ask that part, What are you afraid will happen if, if you don't just step up and be the one to do everything? So that part actually ended up trusting her really quickly. And I think it's because this part was so exhausted. She was like, Thank God Self is here and is finally at a place of
00:07:58
Speaker
being able to hear some of the struggles that I've had for a really long time. And like you said, that does not always happen very easily. This is one of those that the trust happened pretty quickly. So we ended up learning from this part that she developed, the soldier developed when her parents divorced.
00:08:20
Speaker
And she stayed living with her mom, but her mom also had to take another job to provide so she was gone working and like even out of town trips and she was about 12 or 13 years old so her mom would be gone for like the entire week and dad was completely out of the picture.
00:08:35
Speaker
And so all of a sudden, her home was just, her home life was completely uprooted, right? And so she was having to take care of everything. She had to get herself on the bus. She had to pack her lunch. She had to put herself to bed. She had to do all of her homework by herself. She had to do laundry. She had to take care of the dogs. Like, all of a sudden, all the responsibilities were on her. And
00:08:55
Speaker
And every week she would get so much praise from her mom for being her little adult. She would always say, like, you're such a little adult. You're so responsible. So she was getting a knee met, which was like,
00:09:11
Speaker
praise and adoration and affirmation from being this responsible part. And so the soldier learned, that's how you'll get this need met is if you take on everything around you. And soldier just kept on soldiering for the rest of her life, because that's how she had learned to, um,
00:09:30
Speaker
everything from acceptance to love. Like that's who she had to be to please her mom. And so the soldier was able to point us in that direction to say, I'm so exhausted because I've been doing this since you were 12. And so what we did was we said, would you be okay to the soldier? We said, would you be okay if self went to try to help that younger part, that 12 year old? And that can take a little bit of work too, because again, the soldier had been protecting her for so long that that's like
00:10:01
Speaker
her job, you know. So we have to do a little bit of work for her to be able to say, like, yes, Self can go talk with her.
Visualization and Re-parenting
00:10:08
Speaker
And so this is like one of, like, the magical moments too, is Self was able to visualize where she was so she could picture her old room when she was like 12 years old. And so she went and sat down with her.
00:10:20
Speaker
And she was able to very gently like, Is it okay if I come in and talk to you? And sometimes our younger parts can be very wary of us, and they don't want to make eye contact. They don't want you to sit next to them, especially if they have had a lot of trauma from adults. They're very wary of adults, period.
00:10:40
Speaker
So you really have to work to make them feel really comfortable and say, I won't come close unless you're ready for me to. If they're really young parts, you might have to do something like bring a teddy bear in with you or something like that to soften them a little bit. But with this 12-year-old, she was able to get to a place of talking with her. And the question that we always ask is, What did you need in that moment from an adult that you weren't getting that maybe I could help you with now?
00:11:07
Speaker
That's always kind of like my standard question I ask is, What did you need that you didn't get that maybe I can help you with? And that 12 year old was like, I needed somebody to explain to me what in the world was going on. Because about that middle school age, I feel like a lot of times what's happening is like their lives are changing with divorce or a move or something like that. And people aren't really like communicating to them what's going on.
00:11:30
Speaker
So she said, I needed someone to communicate with me, but I also needed help. Like I needed someone to cook for me. I needed someone to tuck me in at night and wake me up the next morning. And so as your like present self as an adult,
00:11:47
Speaker
you can be like, Yeah, I can help you with that. And so you just do this visualization of like, What do you want for dinner? I'll go cook for you. And so you visualize yourself going through this process of just like cooking her favorite meal for her and sitting down at the table and giving her some sense of normalcy in life. And that is so soothing to our younger self. So what I've noticed is like, if we're going back to an age where you're really young, like elementary,
00:12:13
Speaker
I don't know if you noticed this or not, but like our elementary parts, they usually need something like a hug. They need someone to make them feel safe. They need someone to tell them that they're okay. Like they need, because of like, developmentally, like that's what you're needing at the time. Safety pieces. Safety pieces, right. Our middle school parts need things like validation of their feelings.
00:12:34
Speaker
information, because they oftentimes feel really confused, like because they're not yet adult brain, right? But they have more of a sense of what's going on than we give them credit for. And then if we're going back to a high school age part, they usually need to find their voice and to be able to stick up for themselves. And they want you to have their back as they
00:12:56
Speaker
stick up for themselves, whether it's with a teacher, whether it's with main girls at school, whether it's with their parents, they need to be able to say, This is not okay. I needed someone to protect me. I needed someone to believe me or whatever it was. So they become a little bit more verbal. Yeah, those are pissed off teenage parts, right?
00:13:14
Speaker
And so what we ended up doing was after she was able to give her younger self kind of a bit of normalcy at home and like visualize being able to do that, you ask that part, Are you ready to leave? Like you've been stuck here for decades now. Are you ready to leave and just come be with me? And sometimes our younger parts are not ready to go. Sometimes they say things like, No, I'll get in trouble if I leave. So you have to work with them on
00:13:41
Speaker
how they can trust you that as an adult, they're not going to get in trouble for leaving. But once they get to a place of leaving, then we go through the unburdening process. Do you ever do that with your clients? It's been, it's a few times. I think that it's that place where it's, you know, we're tracking a lot, but now I think a couple of times, but I'm listening to you thinking, wow, this is, I've kind of done it maybe three or four times.
00:14:07
Speaker
I love it. So what we do is we let our younger selves, before they come to be with us in the present, where you kind of like look after them, we let them release everything that they've been holding on to. So I usually say with younger parts, they like to do something with nature. So I'll say that we can build a bonfire and you can throw all these burdens in and watch them burn.
00:14:29
Speaker
You can do something with water. Like you can imagine standing under a waterfall and you let it wash off of you. You can stand in a field and like throw it up into a million pieces and watch the wind like carry it away. Whatever they decide to. And it's, it's really interesting because they'll kind of like have an inclination on what would feel good.
00:14:48
Speaker
And sometimes they come up with their own creative things. Like I've had some that say, No, I want to break dishes. Or I want to imagine that I'm like throwing it out of an airplane or something like that. But you help them name what burden they ended up carrying because of these events. So it could be a negative belief about themselves, like, I'm not good enough. Or I'm responsible for everything. Or I'm, I'm going to be abandoned. I'm a problem.
00:15:13
Speaker
I'm not lovable." Or it can be a negative emotion. It can be fear. It can be anxiety. It can be, what are some of the other ones? Guilt. Ones that, again, like we're talking about, no 12-year-old should have to carry these things, right?
00:15:29
Speaker
And so you help them visualize getting out of their systems. They either throw it in the bonfire or they imagine it being like a smear on them that washes off under the waterfall or something like that. And what you notice is once your younger part is able to release that,
00:15:46
Speaker
they look different. And they feel different. Like all of a sudden, they look like a kid again. And you can, I always ask the question, like, What do you notice about them when they're not carrying this burden? And they're like, She's actually really sassy. She's actually really carefree, or she's outgoing, or she's creative. And you realize like how much of yourself you had to stifle to survive.
00:16:10
Speaker
And then you let them know, like, okay, well, now that you're coming to be with me, you're fully free to be yourself. So help me be creative. Help me be sassy. Help me be, um, whatever it is that was like naturally part of them. Right. Oh yeah. It's, it's like a whole weight's lifted and just this whole new persona comes forward. Yeah. I think that's that unburdening is, it's like, gives you goosebumps.
00:16:35
Speaker
It really does. That's the part of therapy that I always feel like people say, I didn't realize I was carrying that, but my shoulders feel so much lighter.
Integrating Healed Parts
00:16:43
Speaker
I think that's the magic. Hey everyone. I just wanted to pause for a quick moment to say thank you so much for all the love and support that you're showing outside of session.
00:17:01
Speaker
If you haven't already, do me a huge favor and hit the subscribe button. Give me a five star review and share this podcast with all of your friends. Help me take this show to another level. Now back to today's episode.
00:17:18
Speaker
It is the magic. And then I tell people like, OK, so now this younger part is yours to take care of. So she's with you. You check in on her throughout the day, if, especially with like whatever that concern was. So if, if the concern was that they weren't allowed to have a voice, you make sure she has a voice with you now. Or if, if her concern before was she didn't feel safe, you make sure she feels safe now.
00:17:44
Speaker
And so like you check on your younger part throughout the day and sometimes it can feel like you're her mom Like you're almost re-parenting that part if it's a teenage part like my teenage parts I feel more like a big sister to her something like that So you kind of like create your own little relationship with these different parts And they just like integrate into your life and that's how you yeah. Yeah, they're not stuck in the past anymore Good morning check-in is kind of how that development rather than the fear of working to protect against them is
00:18:14
Speaker
You now have them sitting right with you when you wake up each day. Yeah, which in turns is helping the soldier part because the soldier part was saying, I've got to do everything for everybody because that's the role that I've been tasked with for so long. But once that soldier sees the younger part with you, that soldier part could be like, ah, maybe I don't have to take off on this anymore because I'm not at risk of hurting that younger part anymore. She's, she's with self now.
00:18:42
Speaker
Oh, I just got lighter listening to you tell that that was being, yeah, that soldier can now do what a soldier is supposed to do at this stage. Right? Like giving it its new job description, so to speak. Yeah. With the inner child part healed. Wow.
Outcomes of Addressing Childhood Issues
00:19:01
Speaker
Um, I'm curious, like with your clients, as they're doing this work and they're kind of like moving past some of this, what do you notice some of the changes are like?
00:19:12
Speaker
And I ask that because I think a lot of people are hesitant to go back and work on childhood stuff because they're like, that's in the past. I just want to leave it there. But when we're talking about being able to release all of this, like what, what's the, what's the purpose of it for the benefit that you get in the now? Well, one is it helps, we can see the symptoms that they've come in with. Maybe we, we still looking at those, you know, that's our job sort of to say, well, you came in,
00:19:41
Speaker
with these things going on, high anxiety, low mood, overwhelm, and then beginning to encourage them with curiosity around how to manage them. How can I protect and maintain the gain that I've made, so to speak? They get, I think, very protective. I've seen that, and very curious. I went out and
00:20:05
Speaker
You know, I was in the car, they'll say this a lot, like what would Chris, you know, thinking about what we, you know, when we've done more healing, they get very protective of like this growth that they've made. You can imagine. It's like they're taking themselves in a whole new way. It's that internal piece, like they've that environmental piece. Now they see the threats to that, that maybe they never really saw in the same way. Like they see it differently now and how can they protect against that? Cause I always tell my clients,
00:20:33
Speaker
Nobody out there is really changing. You know, they're not in the room next to you. And now you are done all this work. Look where you are. Like, you know, how can we maintain it? How can we continuously improve? And then they get very serious. It's like, this is, this is, you know, like what you just described of that unburdening really can transform them into this where they really want to be actually. Like, right. And it's, um, I think so. I would say like proactive to protecting like this. And then very curious about,
00:21:02
Speaker
themselves in a way of like, how can I keep what has happened in the past from happening again? A lot of calmness to like a scene. Yeah, they've had happen, you know, maybe something that would have ordinarily really dysregulated their system before they can now go home and hang out with their mom who used to be critical and just hear her mom's critical part that maybe the thing we unburdened kind of now in a whole new way. And they're just like, Oh, and they
00:21:31
Speaker
kind of, it doesn't come into their system. It really just is very protected from that coming back. Yeah. A hundred percent. I think, um, I think it also helps us to have a lot of compassion for ourselves because you start to realize how complicated we are and how we're all like,
00:21:51
Speaker
We're just a bundle of our entire life experience, right? And so even when I notice different parts of mine popping up, I'm able to say like, yeah, I still get anxious because of that. But you know what? I know that like, younger me went through some things around that. So I'm not going to beat myself up over it. Yeah, that self-compassion for sure. That's not a word like our society really encourages, right? Like I've had people make faces around self-compassion when I bring it up. Ooh, that sounds weak. And then to see,
00:22:21
Speaker
them taking and caring for their parts in a way, like in a compassionate way, because knowing, yeah, we're not 100%. They're still gonna pop up. But how you talk to them now with that compassion, it can really save the energy. It can say and really keep you balanced. That's the whole goal. We want to stay balanced. We want what's happening in our system, all these parts to find a place so that we can blend and unblend quick, right? We don't get too blended and too away from self.
00:22:49
Speaker
think it helps us forgive ourselves too. When we think about some of our young younger parts, our teenage parts that made certain decisions that we've forever, you know, carried guilt around or something like that, when you are able to go back and realize they made those decisions because they weren't getting something that they needed. It helps us to be able to forgive them. They were just doing the best they could. It's beautiful. I'm just thinking about my
00:23:18
Speaker
middle school parts right now and just how much pain they went through around acne and social and how to fit in and then dealing with just parenting that was one style that maybe wasn't working at that age and just all the things and that critical part. It's hard not to go back there as you were describing the soldier and the unburdening there. I was going back to my sort of middle school and
00:23:46
Speaker
kind of parts and the shame, there's shame and all sorts of feelings. But now I have relationships with all that. It's not, um, I can look at that and let it sit with me and not want to push it away. And that's a good measurement when things ordinarily would have maybe come up, a client would have pushed away really hard. I don't, I don't want that. They now have space to sit near it and that can take, you know, I have one client, we've spent a year just asking for this one part to
00:24:15
Speaker
come through the door and it's come a few times, but it was not ready to come every time, but he'll let us know. And that's so much further than where he was before. And that's probably, you have to individualize everybody in a way to have a measure of them. You do. And speaking of that, that's why I encourage everybody to explore because this is not just for people who have, um,
00:24:46
Speaker
I want to say like really extreme parts, but it's not just for people who have like the firefighters, the ones that I cringe over. Like it doesn't have to be something that's causing a ton of disruption in your life. We all have parts.
00:25:03
Speaker
just like any family, they're dysfunctional at some point and in some way. And so I think that everybody can learn so much about themselves by doing this work. Um, because again, like you have this family inside of you, whether you're like paying attention to it or not. Yeah. And they don't know that family as well when they walk in, they don't even know it's a family. Right. Right. I think that piece really resonates that awareness that if anything they gain, if they may not unburden something,
00:25:31
Speaker
early on, but they gained this awareness of this family in a whole new way. And it really does change the way they think when they wake up, they get curious, it's incredible. Like the way clients come in three sessions. And I had a gentleman, grief is a really great area that IFS works well in.
Broad Applicability of IFS Therapy
00:25:48
Speaker
So that's been nice for me to utilize that. And just
00:25:53
Speaker
seeing where they were four sessions to now around how what was preexisting with him was a really strong desire to connect. We had motivation. It was just needed to, you know, push the little strong protector to the side, just open a little space so we could explore pain and suffering, right? The sadness and how to let that express itself. Cause most folks are designed to like, that's weak, not going to cry to see him
00:26:20
Speaker
Just in a short time, like the curiosity leading to like some interest in that strong protector stepping back a bit, knowing that he's safe in the room with me to explore kind of those feelings that he, around the loss that he had experienced now. And so I think, yeah, it's just, so you can kind of see it in all different ways. It doesn't always have to go to the full end of an unburdening, like it can also be, and that's the beauty of it, really. It's cross-cultural.
00:26:49
Speaker
Every demographic works for everybody. I mean, I love how you said it. We don't have to come in with extreme trauma for this to be what we can come in with just having a hard time getting out of bed, something like that. And it works there all the way to, yeah, I'm the survivor of sex trafficking. It can work with that, which I've utilized that when I worked in my internship there. Yeah, absolutely. It's magical.
00:27:16
Speaker
It is magical. That's what we call it. It's magic. Chris, thank you so much for doing this with
Chris's Contact Info and Therapy Joy
00:27:24
Speaker
me. I appreciate it so much. So how can people get in touch with you? So I can get in touch with me, Chris, at key, K-E-Y counseling, A-T-L dot com. And then 404-309-5789.
00:27:43
Speaker
Awesome. And so, um, I'll make sure to put that in the show notes too, so that everybody can connect with you, look at your website, stuff like that too, because I have a feeling people are going to reach out. It's really fun to watch you talk and see your love for it too. I have to just comment on that because I love what you're doing here, but I want the audience to know that it was just really cool to, since we're on camera, we can see each other. Yeah. Yeah. What you were able to do. It was really cool to experience from my end too. So thank you so much. Yeah, that's great.
00:28:11
Speaker
Awesome. Well, that's all we have for you guys today. If you have any other questions about parts work, IFS reach out to either one of us, but that's it for today. We'll talk to you guys next week. Bye.
00:28:28
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of outside of session. Remember, while I am a licensed therapist, this podcast is not a substitute for individual therapy. The contents of this episode are for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you are having a mental health emergency, please dial 911 for immediate assistance or dial 988 for the suicide and crisis lifeline.