One of the deepest questions any of us can ask ourselves is who am I? When I hear that question
the science loving part of me says, "well, my true self is the mind that emerges when my
brain is integrated." At the same time, the poetry loving part of myself says,
"my true self is the mind that emerges when my brain is free."
Those are actually the same way of answering the question who am I and I hope by the end
of this video both the science of that and the beauty of it will feel very clear to you.
So I just made the statement that my true self is the mind that emerges when my brain is free,
but let's backtrack because if we are going to talk about a brain that is free, we first
have to acknowledge the fact that our brains or minds are very often not so free.
There are many places and ways we can become stuck or constricted, where our consciousness
is really narrowed because our brain is only allowing us to be aware of certain things or to
open certain information channels to flow. There are many ways to talk about those trapped places.
I know in some other videos I talk about schemas or self-states but for this video I would like
to use as our framework, a form of therapy called Internal Family Systems or IFS. That is because IFS
deeply studies these places where we can get stuck and narrowed and how in working with these places
and finding our way past these places, we have a chance to bump into a type of flow where our brain
is more freed up, creating an inner larger space, where more complexity and aliveness can unfold.
A place that I would like to propose we think of as our true self. Now when Dick Schwartz who
invented IFS was developing this way of working in therapy his mission was not to discover any
kind of freer or truer self. In fact, he was first really solely putting his attention on these more
narrow or stickier aspects of our personality or in this case the personality of his clients.
He, like many other therapists, took to calling these stuck patterned ways of being "our parts."
As in, a part of me is very confident, maybe even overconfident at times, like in my role as a boss
at work. But then a part of me is really insecure and that part comes out at home when I'm really
clingy with my partner and needing them to, you know, validate me all the time. It is in fact not
uncommon to have very opposite parts like that. He also discovered that underneath these parts of
our personality, is something more intact, something more whole, something more essential, which he began
to call the self. So we are going to sort of follow his path. We will start with the concept of parts
and in the same way that Schwartz and his study of parts sort of stumbled upon, "well, here's a part
that's not a part. Here's the actual self." We too will eventually answer the question of what the
true self is, by first identifying what it is not. So in the previous video of this series, I took us
through a fairly deep dive of the science of parts. So I recommend that you watch that video first.
But in case you don't, I'll give just the summary now of what a part is. There are really two basic
types of parts, but in the last video I really focus on what is called a protector part,
whose main job it is, surprise surprise, to protect us. Turns out we humans need lots of protection
but we aren't pre-wired at birth with how to do that, how to move through the world in
a safe way. There's a lot to learn around how to avoid dangers, how to get our needs met and
perhaps most importantly, for our survival, how to make sure we are loved and accepted by the group.
And it just so happens that that learning does not take place in our conscious mind, mainly,
but in what is called implicit memory. The most famous kind of implicit memory that
most people know about is muscle memory. So in the first video I was really explaining how
most of our psychology is set up as sort of these sets of self-protective movements, whether the
reflexive movement is to be really pleasing, or be really dominating, or to self-attack, or whatever.
These psychological movements exist in what I think of as psychological muscle memory. These are
learned ways of being, designed to protect us, that when they get triggered can really hijack our mind
and body a bit just in the same way if you were falling over, your muscles will brace like that,
whether you want to or not. When these psychological movements, or you could say
parts of us, take over, they can override what our logical mind says and drive our thoughts feelings
and behaviors. So that even when we have the best of intentions to be self-compassionate, or to stay
non-defensive with our partner, or whatever, we find ourselves suddenly flipping back to that
reflexive way of behaving, or thinking, or feeling, or perceiving things, just as suddenly is when our
arms come up and it's hard to control. Additionally, there is not just one way we learn to adapt,
we adapt differently to different dangers. Like maybe in one type of stressful situation, we're
very pleasing and submissive and then some other kind of danger comes along and BAM we are raging.
And in that moment it's like we've become a different person, in a way. Like "hey, I'm usually a
pretty nice guy but then sometimes I'm not and it really freaks me out and I feel crazy and ashamed."
You can see in that example how we have multiple parts and when they take the
lead, we can feel confused as to why we're suddenly acting like a different person.
I know I just gave an interpersonal example, but it also could be how we relate to ourself,
and what parts of our inner world we're threatened by, whether an emotion or a need, and therefore
maybe we learn to intellectualize around all the time. Some parts like our intellectualizing part
might be running most all the time, others might be called or triggered into action, that's what people
mean when they say they were "triggered" and that process of having these parts take over command
it can be very frustrating and disempowering. In IFS they call that moment when parts are in the
lead being blended with the part, and the first thing you learn to do in IFS is to unblend. The
fact that it is possible to unblend is really good news. We truly can step back from our parts,
but that first requires that we are aware of them so we can get a little observing distance.
The moment we can slow down, become a bit more intentional and pivot into curiosity about
what part has taken over, and a real desire not to fight with it, but to understand it,
in that moment we have unblended. It's movement from being the part, to observing the part.
I mean sometimes there is more than one part that we need to unblend from and it's a bit
like peeling back the layers of an onion, like, "okay, well at first I'm speaking from this part
that reflexively blames my husband but when I step back and I'm freed up from that headspace,
man, I'm suddenly aware of another part that's mad at me for blaming my husband,
and calling me names about it, etc." And that is not so helpful either. So then I have to
unblend from that. We will talk more about the unblending process in the next video, but the
point here is more about what Dick Schwartz learned in developing the unblending process.
He found that after a few layers, when he would ask them, the person he's working with, okay
so what part do you find next? And again and again, the client would say, without prompting,
"Well, what I'm with now, it isn't a part, it's just myself. And Schwartz began calling that self, that
part that isn't a part, he began to call it "the big S self" like a self with a capital S.
We also might call it our "true self" or our "deepest self" or "higher self." Some therapies call it the
"adult self" or "wise mind," but whatever you call it, the underlying point here is that
it is always there and it is always amazing. It is always there and it is always amazing.
This is really profound so I want to slow down here. When we step back from our habitual mindsets,
or unblend from our parts, a deeper part of us, which isn't actually part, it's ourself, just
naturally comes forward. And that's an amazing moment. You see, while each of ourselves may be
unique in some ways, there are some qualities or capacities that we've discovered the big
S self possesses universally and those were sort of catalogued and summarized as the eight C's.
There's nothing sacred about this list, but it does capture what the true self is all about.
So here it is and listen to this list because whether you believe it or not your deeper self
is: compassionate, connected, calm, creative, clear, curious, confident, and courageous. You can begin
to see that there is a spiritual feel to this and I know a lot of people are taking IFS as part of
their spiritual growth work, bringing it to their christian journey or their Buddhism. It somehow
manages to access this brain state or this mental state that one would think would require 30 years
of meditation to achieve, and yet what we are finding is, there it is. Compassionate, connected,
calm, creative, clear, curious, confident and courageous. I have seen this again and again in my
work. This is not a trick. This is not just me being inspirational with something that
sounds good. At our core we all have tremendous goodness and capacity. That's just the nature
of the human mind. We are innately curious. We're innately compassionate. We are innately creative.
The reason we don't always have access to those qualities is because we've overridden our natural
state with conditioned ways of being. We've basically been trained not to live from our true
self. Our child self had to figure out other ways of being that maybe didn't include being curious,
or connected, or whatever, and if we learn that shutting down our curiosity, or compassion,
or whatever, was necessary to protect ourselves, we will keep doing it.
Like a job almost. It's a job of our protector parts to make sure we keep doing that thing.
It's like a soldier doesn't leave its post. But we want our inner soldiers to finally be able to
leave their post, not because they're bad, in fact, really often they saved our lives at some point
and really should be treated like these little heroes, but when they come online they do narrow us.
Remember in the last video we talked about how parts are associated with a particular
neural firing pattern because they're based on memory and that's how memory works.
It's an encoding of a pattern. When that happens, I must do that. They call that a "neural net." But
do you see how that's kind of simple? When it's running we only have the information
that is inside that net. It does not bring to bear everything the brain knows, so when we are blended
with a part, we aren't using our full cognitive and emotional intelligence. Using our full intelligence
looks like using everything we've learned, not just what that one part learned,
but everything we've learned. It would look like taking in all the information from the outside,
not just focusing on what that part tells us is important, or we need to focus, or we're only
seeing through its sort of biased perspective, but looking at things in a way that's fresh. You know,
allowing our whole brain to come online, to fully process the information. That means using our
full logical, rational, you know intelligence, as well as our emotions and intuitions,
so that we can be creative and flexible and deep. The science word for that is neural integration.
But that is a brain that is working, like full throttle. It's a brain that is integrated and
in that moment of integration, it is also a brain that is free. Free to be its true self.
Picture a wild stallion trapped in a barn and then you open the gates and finally it can run
at full speed, that's the freedom we're talking about. And in the same way the stallion will use
all four of its legs and its back and its neck and its lungs and eyes, when our brain can use
everything it knows, and all ways of knowing from thoughts to feelings, because nothing is off limits,
and all that information streams in an integrated way to create a much more complex understanding
and response, there is a power to that. Remember earlier I said that our true capacity emerges
when we are both integrated, allowed to bring everything we have to bear and free, and that
those are really the same thing. And I think that integrated brain and all the potential of that,
it's only fair to think of that as our true self. It's kind of like if you want to know what that
stallion is truly all about, you've got to let it out of the barn. When we are hemmed in by a part,
we aren't integrated. All that information isn't flowing. We are just stuck with what that part
knows or is, which is like a smaller psychological space. So it's when we can unblend from our parts, that
we find they can be free. Before we end this video, I just want to make one final point.
The mission to uncover our true self could sound frivolous. Like, "oh, I'm such a snowflake and I just
want to be the real me," but the truth is there is nothing frivolous about this work. It is actually
essential for our survival as a human race. Yes, in our sort of distant past, it might have made
sense for us humans to rely on parts, that means using less glucose, sending less glucose to our
brain, and food was scarce and that kind of thing, and it was enough to rely on memory. In
other words finding our highest potential wasn't the top priority for survival a million years ago.
But now it is. You see the problems we are facing today are so complex, to face today's challenges, we
must have our full brains online. In other words, we must all find a way to access our full potential,
our actual true self or big S self. In my mind, that's what it means to be an adult. But we don't
need child parts pretending to be, or trying to be, adults. What the world needs are deeply wise, loving
adults, who can see the world as complex, rather than black and white, and who can face it with
some equanimity, creativity, and gentle strength. In other words, we need to access our true selves.
So in the next video, we will more deeply explore how to unblend from our protector
parts so that our true self can emerge. So I hope you'll join me. Thank you for watching.
I hope you found this video helpful, and if you did, you can help me out by liking and subscribing, or
if you're a therapist who would like to train with me while earning CEUs you can visit my website at
toriolds.com