Bill: Well, hello, everyone. Welcome to Not Your Typical Leadership Coaching Podcast. We have to be back together. It is. It's been a couple of weeks, hasn't it? We have a special guest today, Laurie Chancey. Laurie and I know each other through the Internal Family Systems Model. I have been doing a free a pro bono practice group for the internal family systems model since the beginning of 2021.and as of this recording, that means that I've been doing it for almost 3 full years and it has grown. So much that I've needed help and Laurie is a volunteer as a practice assistant in parts for practice and she and I have had several conversations, but one in particular that I remember where we realized that we are siblings from a different from different mothers that we have a lot in common. Yes, so we invited Laurie to the podcast to have a conversation with us about choice and true self and what that means to her. And, this will be a three way conversation. Marty just met Laurie like a moment before we turn hit record. And before we jump in how is it, Laurie? I know we've already asked you this question, but I want to ask you again. Now, let's reset. How is it for you right now? As, as we begin this episode to be here,

Laurie: yeah, there's a little like, nervous, bubbly energy in my stomach of ah. It's recording. There's no turning back and noting some prep I did based on the questions, all of that seems to have left my brain at the moment. So who knows what I'm going to say. Yeah, but there's excited parts to of. Yeah it's, it was exciting and it is exciting to be invited on a podcast.

Laurie: Thank you both very much. And it's great to meet Marty and it's been a pleasure working and volunteering with Bill for these months and benefiting from parts work practice for long before I started volunteering as well. And so I'm excited to see where this goes.

Bill: I'm so glad that you're here. And maybe once we get started here, we can talk a little bit about what parts work practice is for those that maybe don't know much about IFS or anything about internal family systems yet.

Bill: Marty, how is it for you coming into this conversation with a new person in the room?

Marty: It's great. I'm excited. And especially this topic seems to me like everybody wants to be their true self and to make wise choices. How is it what gets in the way, and how do we get better at being our true self?

Marty: So I think it's a topic that anybody in the world would probably be interested in. Great.

Bill: Shall we start by getting to know Laurie A. Little bit? Let's, do you have some questions in front of you or, I know I do. I do. Yeah.

Marty: So what is it actually that you do? We, Bill and I have told our listeners, about our coaching practices quite a bit. What do you, what is it that you do? All right.

Laurie: I am an IFS practitioner and I have been only for this past year. I did my IFS Institute level 1 training and I finished in January 23.

Laurie: and I was lucky enough to do the level 2 training in November and as well as doing a ketamine enhanced IFS training. And so this past year has been. my entrance into professional IFS practice. Huh. Yeah. So it's a new thing for me and it's really exciting. It's the coolest thing that I've done yet.

Marty: What is, someone that was listening, to IFS practitioner, all these, you've got your certifications and all. Why, what's, what is, why this path?

Laurie: What is it? Yeah. Why or what?

Marty: A little bit of both. A little bit of both. Yeah.

Laurie: I stumbled upon IFS or internal family systems by accident.

Laurie: I was looking for a therapist in the year 2020 and happened upon someone who practiced internal family systems and. Within six months of doing the model, I was living a better life, making better decisions, having better connections with myself and with people. And the context was I was in a,

Laurie: Internal family systems piece views our inner world as an internal family. So I have family dynamics within me. thEre's somebody who is the head of the family or who's the leader. There's somebody who's the troublemaker and the screw up. There's somebody who follows the rules and so all of those parts of me can be brought into harmony with my internal core self through the practices of internal family systems.

Laurie: They all have different needs. They all have positive intentions. This appealed to me because part of my professional context was I'm coming into this as a sociology professor at a community college. So for the past, 13 years I've been teaching college students about the dynamics of social systems, institution of the family, the institution of education, religion, media, school, criminal justice.

Laurie: Medicine, all of that. So I'm teaching people how these social systems interact and then when I found IFS, I realized, oh, we have all of those social systems inside each of us. Fascinating. Yeah. So it was a natural transition for me in terms of the way of thinking. And yeah.

Laurie: So I found, I really enjoyed teaching and I still enjoy the process of teaching because it allows me to be. In the live moment of assisting somebody's discovery of something new. And that's also what I'm doing now as an IFS practitioner is being in the moment with an individual as they discover something new about themselves and doing so in a way that helps them heal their own trauma.

Laurie: And so when I started straddling both worlds of IFS versus. Being a sociology professor, I had a part who pointed this out to me, I was like, all right, I could spend this hour teaching you about social theorists who have been dead for 200 years, valuable and great, or I could spend this hour helping you heal this much of your trauma.

Laurie: The choice became clear.

Marty: I'm curious how those two inform each other are there things that sociologists. Have to teach IFS practitioners about the way our internal family relates, or is it all IFS, telling us what's going on in the, in that group and do they teach each other?

Laurie: I discovered 1 lovely overlap that made a little easier for me. So there's this, the social theory called structural functionalism that every element of society, even if it seems really terrible, has a positive intention. And so I would ask my students something like what is. Positive intention is an IFS term, so it's like a positive function and sociology.

Laurie: So be like, what is the positive function of murder? Great about murder and student and students would be like what I'm part of me really enjoys being edgy. But that also is also a standard thing in sociology stuff. And murder, it keeps the criminal justice system running, right? If we didn't have any crime, no one in criminal justice would have a job.

Laurie: I see. And that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but you see where I'm going with that. So it's even if something, even even not like something that causes a bunch of deaths, like the bubonic plague. It was a lot easier to find jobs after that. And so that is a little bit tongue in cheek, but it's but in sociology, we're used to looking at.

Laurie: Things that seem just terrible and looking at the silver lining and then you take that and move that to IFS what is the positive intention or the positive function of my part that likes to that likes to abuse substances or does risky driving or any of the other extreme behaviors that people come to IFS practice for the positive intention of that as well.

Laurie: It makes me excited. It gives me a shot of adrenaline and it helps. Protect a younger part somehow. So this idea that things that are bad have a good side was really useful that I was already used to that

Marty: from. I see, and so now, is it too early to start relating this to our topic for the day

Bill: Bill? I don't think so.

Bill: Let's jump

Marty: in. I am I'm just going to assume that part of what you're going to you guys want to assert is that all those parts are welcome. I know I've heard that phrase before so that. To know the true self, your true self is to know the dark, the light, the gray, all of those. And why does that really naive question?

Marty: So why would I want to know all of that about me? wOuldn't I rather just focus on, the socially acceptable and positive and, quote unquote, good

Laurie: stuff. Sure. You can, but the bad stuff's going to bubble up. If you lock it in the basement, it's going to start screaming for food eventually, I found for me that it was actually more difficult to embrace my conformist parts. Because I grew up very nonconformist. I grew up. Unschooled no curriculum, no formal education until college and specifically, so I wouldn't be a conformist. And so my system was used to, oh, let's do the weird thing.

Laurie: Let's do the unique thing. Let's do the individual thing. Let's be a rebel. And when I met my conformist part through an IFS practice I got a visual image of her as. Someone dressed in a garbage bag under a bridge. And my poor conformist part was begging me that to please make her the other part, stop throwing rocks at her.

Laurie: So that's how central doing the normal thing has been in my system, not very much.

Marty: My goodness, that sounds like a game changer right there, that one piece. And I'm sure there have been many other self discoveries, but that's huge. That's really huge.

Bill: What a unique path. I just want to acknowledge what a unique path you bring with you to, to this particular destination today in this conversation, and I'll I'll be putting a link to the article that you shared with us, Laurie, about your non education childhood.

Bill: For anybody else that's interested in learning more about that. So it was so fascinating too. And I know that this kind of goes back into let's learn a little bit more about Laurie, but I've been wanting to ask this question since I read that article.

Bill: So no education all the way to becoming a college professor. How did that happen?

Laurie: When you rebel from the rebellion and you rebel from the rebellion and you rebel from the rebellion, eventually you become super conformist. I see. Now really the themes of this conversation, embracing your true self and choice, that's what I was marinated in.

Laurie: I was told to make my own choices and embrace my true self by my parents. And to whether it's to the detriment of society or not, but 1 of the curious things about that, some where a lot of my small T trauma comes from is not being a part of society, everybody who was. Who grew up any sort of outcast in school kind of things that they relate to me and they may on some level, but in my view, school was something that happened on the other side of the galaxy.

Laurie: For me, there's some laboratory over there where other kids are getting socialized. I have no idea what's going on in there. And so when I got into when I turned 18 and started thinking about, all right, what now? First, I didn't think college was an option. I didn't have enough math knowledge to get a GED, and I was going to night education classes to try to get my GED, and the classes were terrible, and they didn't help me, and, but I felt this sense of hopelessness I have to do this.

Laurie: And then I remember coming home from that one night and kind of distraught and my dad said, if these classes aren't doing what you need, stop going. And I was like, really dad?

Laurie: My dad's quit. And I, it felt really hopeful but at the same time, hopeless, because what do I do then? And then eventually I found out I don't have to get a GED to go to college. I can just take the ACT scores and get in. So there was another path that I hadn't yet seen. And so that was an important lesson to quit.

Laurie: dOn't be afraid to quit. There will be another path and that's a

Bill: unique message. Don't that's not the message I got growing up.

Laurie: Yeah, you don't like it quit. There's going to be another way. And he was right. And that's risky to follow, but it worked. Thanks dad. But so I did find a way to go to college because I realized I didn't want to work in the video rental store forever.

Laurie: No, that was a cool job. But when I got there, I found out like, Oh my God, you guys, I've been outside of society my whole life. And there is an academic discipline that teaches you how to society works. Yeah. Became a sociology major. That's how it happened. And then I was so continuously fascinated with it and enjoyed teaching.

Laurie: It gave me a voice. It gave me a connection. It let me really immerse in the topic. And so it seemed just really natural.

Laurie: Yeah.

Bill: I'm just having a hard time letting go of your story. And I, one of the I don't want to let go of it, but I know that there's other things we want to talk about. So in that article. I think that you were quoted as quoting Summerhill or referring to Summerhill. Can you say a little bit about what Summerhill was?

Bill: I don't think Summerhill still is, but at some point Summerhill was.

Laurie: Yeah Summerhill was an alternative school in England where, it was a school, but it was entirely based on the child's choice. And so it was a live in school and kids would go to class or not go to class. And it would be about any topic that they wanted.

Laurie: And so there was a free spirit attitude to that. And that was my mom read that book when she was pregnant with me and was also inspired by John Holtz works about homeschooling. And My mom was very much okay, if there's an alternative way to raise my kid, I'm going to do that.

Laurie: She's not going to have to obey any external authority or have her individuality squished. And we're going to do what we can to. To do that. And so my mom was really inspired by that. And clearly my dad has had a lot of input as well. This is also more of his philosophy than that old article suggests.

Bill: You know how it is. So I read Summer Hill probably 20 years ago. After my kids were all, all either finished with or very well committed to the traditional schooling methods. And I remember just being so impressed with the idea that a child is going to learn best what they're most interested in.

Bill: And they may be willing to learn things that not, they're not as interested in if learning them helps them with what they are interested in. Like for example, I'll learn math if I need to know math to understand society. So on and so forth. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I think I got that out of my system.

Bill: Now let's,

Laurie: I found that to be true. I have continued to do that. I've continued to learn what I needed to in order to do what I wanted, but I also believe that there is a place for adults to say with their greater experience and knowledge that now you really need to do this and listen if there are protests, but there's a place for more structure than what I had.

Laurie: Although I can't say I regret

Bill: any of it. Sounds, sounds really like it really worked well for you, very well. There is one other part of your story that's still sticking in me and that is that, and it's more current and less about your story, but something you said about who you are and what you do. You just finished a ketamine assisted IFS training.

Bill: I don't know how many people know about ketamine. Maybe. And I'm wondering if there's a way that you can answer this and talk about, this is a real challenge, but I'm sure you're up to talk about true self choice and ketamine and IFS and how they all come together.

Marty: iT has been laid.

Laurie: Yeah, no easy conversations on these podcasts you guys. Your true self, so an IFS conceptualizes that there's a self with a capital S. That's the core of the system. That's the true me. That's my compassionate wise self and. Then there are also all of these parts of me that serve different functions and I need all of them.

Laurie: My true self is to ascended to learn how to drive. When I need to drive, I need to engage my driving part. When I need to write a paper, I need to engage my writing part. So I've got a team working for me and my lowercase self is those self and parts. That's me. That's my authentic self.

Laurie: So to embrace my true self, lowercase self, lowercase s, I need to talk to all my parts to get opinions. If you're running a company and you don't ever talk to anybody lower than you to understand where the problems are. Like you won't know if there's a problem over in Billing if you don't talk to the people in Billing.

Laurie: So if I'm going to make a true decision, if I'm going to have choice, if I'm going to make choices in my life that reflect my entire authentic, true self, I need to have conversations with all of the opinions within me and meet them from that core. , so that's, in the few years I've been doing IFS, I've managed to make much better decisions based on talking to all parts of me.

Laurie: Now, here's where I'm going to introduce ketamine into this. So ketamine is a drug that is legal. It's an use in hospitals every single day as an anesthetic. And at lower doses, it is a weird little psychedelic that allows us to drop a little more deeply into our inner world and visit our parts where they live.

Laurie: So in regular IFS practice, I might there's this thing where you go inside. Okay. Close my eyes. Where am I feeling that inner around my body? So it takes a little focus to drop in. Ketamine allows like facilitates that drop inward. So I'm riding the elevator down. I'm visiting Billing.

Laurie: I'm not inviting Billing up to the conference table, right? I'm riding the elevator down. I'm visiting them where they live. And they're like, Oh, you're here with us. We're going to share with you more directly. And so I view ketamine as popping the hood on the psyche and seeing what's going on under there without forcing it to come up to the top.

Laurie: tO tie all of that together, now that I'm a ketamine client, when I do have a difficult choice to make in my life, um, my practice is to get a session with my IFS practitioner holding space for me and get unblend and get everybody in their positions. And then when it feels like We've reached a stuck point.

Laurie: I made dose ketamine and then the medicine continues the work. It may result in an unburdening. It may result in a polarization relaxing. It may result in something else. And then, as I'm coming out of the medicine, a little more facilitation or writing is useful to clean that up. So it almost accelerates parts work that's

Bill: very well explained and said, Okay.

Bill: I just want to acknowledge that there are listeners to our podcast, uh, who may not understand some of the terminology that you just used. Absolutely. We've been, you've done a great job of defining what is self, capital S, and what is self, lowercase s. And we, I believe, have done a pretty good job of talking about parts as elements of the psyche.

Bill: That have specialized jobs that they do for us and they are part of the, of self. But then you mentioned unburdening and a couple of things there in just a moment. So what does all that mean? And what? Yeah, I know what that means. But for our listener, can you help to understand that a bit?

Bill: Thank you.

Laurie: An unburdening is the practice that results in the deep healing. It's the practice of healing and IFS in internal family systems. And so the idea is that, when I'm very young and I have an experience that my three year old self can't handle, or my five year old self can't handle.

Laurie: Then a very young part of me takes on a burden of a false belief. Like my mom didn't recognize that I was upset and so my three year old part takes on a belief that I don't matter and so within me there's a hurt little three year old who just stays there holding this burden of a false belief that says I don't matter.

Laurie: And then she's got other parts that protect her by making sure that she matters by making sure she's got a really important career professor,

Laurie: right,

Bill: Who just suppresses, uh, needing anything.

Laurie: Exactly. Or suppresses my needs. Exactly. So there would be a bunch of different strategies to protect the little three year old holding the burden of I don't matter. Yes. And so through the process of IFS. We work through, we work with the protectors first and, help and work with and understand the part who's trying to suppress my needs and understand the part who's trying to make sure I have a really important job.

Laurie: And once they feel super appreciated, they'll actually let capital as self go to that 3 year old with the burden and there's a process called unburdening that actually rewrites. That pathway in the brain that decided that we were gonna be traumatized forever. And so that's the IFS method that actually heals trauma.

Bill: Thank you for that, Marty. You certainly aren't an outsider to IFS you, as you stated, you haven't been trained in it. You and I have talked a lot of IFS, that explanation that Laurie just provided. How did that land for you? It made good

Marty: sense. I've had that experience of being unburdened in a session with Bill.

Marty: And the part that was frozen in time, so to speak, was a creative the part of me that just wants to create. And loves anything creative. And it got shut down and told it was irrelevant. Couldn't make a difference. It was in what's the word superfluous, superficial. All of that.

Marty: And so that has been a burden that I've carried for, I carried for a long time, but now it's funny. I even this morning when I got up, the, that part is still there, but it's completely unburdened. It's it knows it has community inside me now, um, that supports it. And it came up this morning, I, and I thought oh, because I wanted to work on my book today. I thought, Oh that's not worth it. I need to go. I need to do money making things. I need to do legitimate. And then I immediately noticed her, Oh that's, we don't have to think that way anymore. And it'll be great today.

Marty: It'll be a creative day. And so everything shifted. So I can tell that part really did get unburdened. Yeah. Yeah.

Laurie: And it's natural capacity got unlocked, right? So that's more of this process of embracing your true self, so it's not only interviewing different parts of me to see what the stakeholders need, but releasing those old traumas and unlocking the natural capacities.

Laurie: On

Marty: the one hand, it, I think. When I hear you guys talk about unburdening the self being the whole of yourself. It sounds. iT sounds amazing. It sounds freeing. I could see the potential there to be more of who you're meant to be in the world. I wonder sometimes if it's got, it's not, it's like self realization.

Marty: It's great that concept from from Eastern religion Eastern spirituality of realizing the self means becoming God becoming one with everything. Is that the same motion as IFS is out to accomplish? Or is there a difference there?

Laurie: In a way it's similar. The founder of IFS Dick Schwartz says, said that there's a corollary of self with a capital S and every world religion.

Laurie: And so it and self energy is also connectedness as one of the qualities of self energy. So there is a sense of connectedness to other people or to society or to some greater truth than that. And so depending on your own religious or spiritual belief, you could consider it as the, a bit of the God within or the soul that's connected to some larger being it really works with any sort of belief system or non belief system, but yeah, there's similarities.

Marty: Part of the reason why I asked that is. And you can, take this apart in any way you like, but it's appears to me like we're going through a period in our society where the last thing people want is to encompass more. They want to bring it there and, be. Just be free to be this small me that has these habits.

Marty: I don't want them encroached upon. I don't want to have to merge with people of other skin colors or other religions. I just want to shrink it down and be okay to be this. And it's a different, it's a different, it's a different motivation than it. What I hear the, unburdened self with a capital S what I mean is that just what do we do with that?

Marty: Is that accurate? And what do we do with that?

Laurie: Nice question. I, 1 of the things I learned when teaching, especially teaching sociology to people who disagreed with the textbook. And that comes up when you say people don't want to associate with other skin colors because, racial integration is a big part of sociology, but I would teach people who were not interested in racial integration.

Laurie: And one of the things that I found was most essential is validating the person, the way the person believed and not trying to change them. That's also essential in IFS, like validate with the person. Part is doing and don't try to change it. Let it change from itself. And so if a human being or a human part is going to see the usefulness or the value and connecting with a human being, who's different than they need to relax their current position first.

Laurie: And they only do that by being validated. And somebody does inner soul searching and figures out. I only want to be in a small band of 20 people in a rural area off the grid, and that is my true self.

Bill: Cool.

Laurie: Where it comes in to be problematic is when it's actually harmful.

Bill: I want to acknowledge that we just have a few minutes left here.

Bill: Oh my gosh, it flew by. It flew by. Laurie, I want to give this last few minutes to you. We haven't talked a lot explicitly about choice. And I think if we were to listen to this conversation again, we'd realize that's exactly what we've been talking about the entire time. So I wonder if you can you certainly took my first challenge well, and I, and it's not a challenge.

Bill: But just a request is what is your take on so so self capital S self now emerges in the system. You and I've talked about this before that the more parts can relax and realize that there's resources in the system that they may be previously weren't aware of. Self begins to emerge and you'll often hear it said, and I've said it myself, as self emerges, so does choice.

Bill: How do you understand that?

Laurie: I would say that true choice emerges when self emerges because parts can come in and make choices all the time. A part can make a choice to take a job or quit a job. A part can make a choice to engage in risky behavior, but that's not the choice of the entire system. That's the action of one part who happened to win the argument that day.

Laurie: MY part wants to diet or my part wants, or the other part wants a snack, right? Who wins at that moment? But a choice that. Is an authentic choice incorporates. The wishes of both sides or all sides of the equation. And so all the choices I've made all the self led choices I've made since starting IFS have been ones that way, that were all the parts in me weighed in like a, it's a committee decision.

Laurie: And there were some difficult choices where only one part wanted to go one way. But everybody else wanted to go a different way. And so the leadership of self energy, looking at all of that can make a choice for the good of the whole system. So I would, to answer, I would say that there are different types of choices.

Bill: That's a conversation that could take a full episode all by itself. Just as I listened to you say that, I both agreed and had other thoughts that might take us down some different rabbit holes. Such as, for example, the parts actually choosing, or are they just automatically unconsciously doing what they do and the most dominant part wins?

Laurie: Huh. I like that. I agree with that. It's if my body were this giant robot and a part could jump into the control panel in my brain and steer the whole thing, one part. Yeah, exactly. If one part knocks another part out and manages to take the wheels for five minutes and we do whatever we do.

Laurie: Was that a choice? Or was that A, a kind of a desperate action do something for that part to do something that it needed to do to protect the system in a way I don't fully understand yet.

Bill: You ever heard the expression? I don't know why I said that. Yes. I don't know why I said that is evidence right there.

Bill: Yeah. It's true that you really don't know why you said that. It's just because you weren't aware that a part came in, hijacked you, used your voice, said that thing, and now you're stuck with the consequences.

Laurie: Or one part is saying, I don't know why that other part said that. Yeah, that's

Bill: right. That could be too.

Bill: It's fun when we start going down these rabbit holes. Ending. Laurie, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. And I'll talk to Marty about this, but I'm guessing just my sense about this is that we'd love to have you back sometime. Oh, that'd

Laurie: be great. Let's go down another couple of rabbit holes together.

Laurie: That sounds really

Bill: good. Yeah. All right. That is the end of this episode and I hope you'll all join us next time. Thanks.