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Have you ever found yourself asking, “Why do I keep doing this?” or “How do I finally feel safe inside?” If so, this episode is for you.

I’m sharing three powerful conversations with the leading voices in trauma healing and personal growth: Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Nicole LePera, and Dr. Richard Schwartz.

Each of them has profoundly shaped my understanding of healing, particularly regarding why we often repeat the same patterns in our lives.

You’ll learn:

  • Why we often repeat the same patterns in our lives
  • Profound insights into the deeper reasons behind our struggles—and the compassionate responses we can adopt
  • How to truly heal addiction, codependency, anxiety, or disconnection from yourself

As someone who has navigated my own healing journey through trauma and recovery, these conversations resonate deeply with me. Tune in to explore how we can break free from cycles and cultivate a more nurturing relationship with ourselves.

get more gabby

  • Order my new book, Self Help: This Is Your Chance to Change Your Life and get 3 free audio practices. Order Self Help.
  • For all current Gabby Coaching Members the recommended practice is in the Self Help section of your app. My Chapter 7 Anxious Parts check-in offers a compassionate way for you to ease anxiety. Not a member? Try out the gabby coaching app for free here.
  • If you feel you need additional support, please consult this list of safety, recovery and mental health resources.
disclaimer

This podcast is intended to educate, inspire, and support you on your personal journey towards inner peace. I am not a psychologist or a medical doctor and do not offer any professional health or medical advice. If you are suffering from any psychological or medical conditions, please seek help from a qualified health professional.

dear gabby #259 Apr 28, 2025 emotional wellbeing

why you keep repeating old patterns (and how to finally break free)

[00:00:00] The following podcast is a dear media production.

Hey there. Welcome to Dear Gabby. I'm your host Gabby Bernstein, and if you landed here, it is absolutely no accident. It means that you're ready to feel good and manifest a life beyond your wildest dreams. Let's get started.

Hello, my friends. Welcome back to Dear Gabby. This is a great episode today. If you've ever found yourself asking why do I keep doing this, and this is an episode for you, this is an episode that is packed with so much wisdom. I am interviewing my heroes. These are my heroes. It's my heroes mashup today.

This is a really, really incredible conversation with three luminaries in the space of personal development, trauma recovery. I've got Dr. G Mate, Dr. Nicole De Perra, and Dr. Richard Schwartz, all here [00:01:00] in this mashup today where we're gonna really help the part of you that feels stuck, part of you, that's staying in the same patterns.

Each of these trauma experts has shaped the way that I understand healing, and they've really taught me how I have these patterns that I keep repeating and that those patterns are young and they need my attention. And it could be addictive patterns, it could be patterns of codependency, anxiety, the ways that we disconnect from ourselves, the ways that we numb out, the ways that we run, the ways that we fight the fight, flight, freeze responses.

They keep us so, so stuck in patterns we don't wanna have anymore. And I gotta tell you, these doctors, they have healed me. They've served me, they have supported me. And today they're going to completely transform you with the messages that you're gonna hear. So before we go into the episode, do you hear me?

I'm shuffling the deck. I'm pulling a card for you. See what this card has to say for us today. Let's [00:02:00] see. Wow. What a perfect card for us today. As soon as I choose to see the light in the dark corners, I redirect my power toward what I want. Woo. Good card for everybody. Okay, so this is actually perfect for today's episode.

If you start to take some time to see. The light in the dark corners, the difficult times, the difficult stories from our past. If you choose to see the light in those stories, we can redirect our focus onto our power and that focus on our inner power and our inner resilience and our inner safety. And our inner strength is what will give us the vision forward and will help us be in alignment with the energy of what we bring forth.

And so my friends, let this card be your message today. As soon as I choose to see the light in the dark corners, I redirect my power toward what I want. Giving yourself that permission to really listen to this episode fully. That would be one step towards seeing the light in the dark corners, [00:03:00] to listen all the way through to the end, to take in the messages inside this episode.

That's a good one. Perfect card for the perfect episode. I love how that always happens. All right. My hope is that you'll take these principles to the next level, and so much of what we're talking about today is really rooted in the foundations of my newest book, Self-Help. This is your chance to change your life, and I can't believe it's been out now for four months.

And this book is really all about helping you become your own inner healer. It's gonna give you the next level of the conversation you're gonna hear today on the show. One of my readers, Catherine said, it's helping me change my whole life and perception, and also to be kind towards myself and what I really need deep down.

And Susan said, thank you, Gabby, for this book. My therapist is buying it and we are going to use it in my trauma healing. Thank you for being a blueprint for coming back from the real hard stuff. I mean, I really can't even. Believe these comments. I love it so much. So if you're in this journey of choosing to see the light in the dark corners and you're ready to start to open your [00:04:00] heart to what's possible, then definitely listen all the way through to the end and grab your copy of Self-Help.

Self-Help is based on the principles of Internal Family Systems Therapy, which is Dr. Richard Schwartz's work, and you're gonna hear from Dick Schwartz Today I took the model of IFS and I transformed this model into a self-help practice with Dick's permission. It is a four step check-in self-help practice based on the world renowned trauma therapy that has healed millions and millions of people's lives.

And it's IFS therapy. Now you can use it on yourself in a safe self-help way through the practices inside my book, Self-Help. This is your chance to change your life. So again, go to dear gabby.com/ self-help or go wherever you get your books. You can listen. You can read it inside My Gabby Coaching membership.

You'll also have access to the self-help section guys, if you're in the Gabby membership or if you wanna try it, you can try it for free Deargabby.com/app. And there's all these beautiful meditations where I guide you through the four step [00:05:00] self-help check-in. There's also trauma healing practices and there's.

Methods for soothing your nervous system. And so a lot of what we're gonna talk about in this episode can be taken to the next level. Inside self-help the book and inside my Gabby coaching membership app. So go to the Gabby app, it's dear gabby.com/app and I'll be your coach in your pocket. And we are gonna hear some really beautiful things in this episode.

It's gonna be an episode that's gonna help you start to know a bit more about how you are in your life and why you are the way you are. You're about to hear from someone who has radically shaped how I view addiction, someone who's really served me in many, many ways. His work has really helped me perceive my own addiction through the lens of compassion and love and connection. Dr. Gober mate's work has been a huge part of my healing. Very, very big part of my healing, and some of his words that he shared with me privately in a impromptu [00:06:00] counseling session literally redirected my life.

And I know that his words are gonna deeply resonate with you. I'm a sober woman of 17 years, and I wanna say thank you. Thank you, thank you. For the commitment that you've made to addicts in helping us recognize that, as you say, the source of addiction is not to be found in the genes, but in early childhood environment. And I wanna let you just riff on that because it's been very helpful for me as a recovering addict and also having respect for my addiction and my journey and that those out there need to from you.

My recent addiction emerged over the years, both in dealing with my own addictive behaviors and also working with the highly addictive population. What emerged from me is two things that addiction is not, it's not a culpable choice anybody makes. Nobody [00:07:00] decides to be an addict. People may decide to use the drug, but whether they get addicted or not, they don't choose that.

I remember anybody who woke up one morning and said, I wanna be a drug addict. You know? Mm-hmm. Who would choose it? People may choose the temporary relief that the addiction gives, but they don't choose the addiction as such, number one. Number two, it's not an inherited disease. In fact, it's not a disease at all.

And so I really resist the medical mantra and the treatment industry matter. This is a disease. It can behave like a disease in the sense that it has causes physical and mental harm. It has relapses and remissions. That doesn't make it a disease. And what it actually is, is if I give you my core definition of addiction, then addiction is manifested in any behavior in which a person finds temporary pleasure or relief, and therefore craves then suffers negative consequences and is trouble giving up despite the negative consequences.

So pleasure, relief in the short term and difficulty up in the, [00:08:00] and so then if an identified former. You've had addictions to substances, but also to behaviors. Any one of them, I don't care. Which one or what did they do for you in the short term? What did you like about them? They gave me relief. They Relief from relief from terror.

And who needs to be numb, by the way? I mean, when do we need to be numb? Oh, when we're in pain. There you go. No relief from terror and pain relief. Or the good things or bad things. In themselves. In themselves. They're good things. Yeah. Yeah. So that's my point. The addiction wasn't your primary problem. It wasn't any kind of a disease.

It was an attempt to solve a problem. Yeah, it was a doomed attempt to solve a problem or problem, emotional pain. And so hence my mantra, which I lay out in this book, the Myth of Normal. It's in my previous book on addiction. [00:09:00] Don't ask why the addiction Ask, why the pain? I don't care what addiction you're talking about, anybody's talking about whether it's cocaine, crystal, meth, heroin, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, sex, gambling, pornography, eating, shopping, self cutting, internet gaming, I don't care what they're always in attempts to solve a problem of emotional distress.

So again, the mantra is don't ask why the addiction Ask, why the pain? And if you don't understand why the pain go back to the person's childhood. That's where the pain was incurred. Just it was incurred in my case, just it was incurred in your case. Sometimes the memories are available, sometimes they're repressed, sometimes they're a bit confusing and that nothing really terrible happened, but terrible things don't need to happen like you were sexually abused and I was a Jewish infant separated from my mother under the Nazis in Second World.[00:10:00] 

It doesn't have to be that bad. Right? It can be a sensitive child not having their needs met and suffering emotional pain and being alone with it. Yeah. Yeah. Because even in your case, this terrible thing happened to you that was bad enough, but you didn't talk to anybody about it. And of course, do you have a four-year-old if I asked you if anybody even looked at your child the wrong way.

Who do you want 'em to talk to about it? You would say me right away to the fact that you didn't talk to your parents. All means that there was trauma there even before. Totally. That disconnection, that separation. I'm not blaming your parents. They did their best, whatever that happened to be given their own limitations and traumas and so on.

But that being cut off from our own feelings so that we don't even ask for help. That's the trauma. Yeah. And abuse happens on. That emotional pain is always there, and that's the problem that the addiction tries to solve. Right? And so treating it like a [00:11:00] disease or as a choice just misses the mark completely in a sense you'd consider it a trauma response. It's a trauma response.

And Dick Schwartz or mutual friend calls it a firefighter. When the pain gets too much, you just douse the fire. Mm-hmm. And the firefighters, when they come to your house to put up the fire, they'll destroy your house if they have to because they're just trying to put out the fire or make sure that neighborhood doesn't catch on fire. So they'll break your windows, your doors, and if necessary, they'll break down your walls. And addiction does that. So addiction does a lot of harm, but it's trying to dust the fire of pain that's burning inside you and has been sheltered.

So in that sense, they cannot see it very much the same. You just use different language. Absolutely. See, one of the problems with addiction is there's a deep shame addicted. Deep shame, but just to find out this isn't your fault. It may be your responsibility to deal with it, but it's not your fault that it happened, and you're not a miserable, faulty, unworthy individual.

You're just a human being [00:12:00] who was in so much pain that you tried to escape from it. The only way you knew how. That's what happened. That makes you very normal. So that understanding alone is transformative for people. Even like we said earlier, seeing the addiction as a firefighter, just trying to put out the fire.

That shift in perception of seeing it as some part of us is trying to protect us. That's right. That gives you such a deep level of compassion and connection to that addiction and the myth of normal. I make this case repeatedly that in medicine, in psychiatry. In psychology and education and society in general, there's a real lack of awareness of trauma, and that lack of awareness of trauma really hobbles our capacity to help people or to help ourselves and even take the word recovery.

So what does it mean to recover? It specifically means to find something. Now if you ask people when you recovered, what did you find? What would you say, Gabby? What would you say? What did you find? I [00:13:00] found me. Exactly. Okay, so you find yourself, that means that the true self was never destroyed. It never ever is.

You lose sight of it. You lose touch with it. That disconnection from the true self is the fundamental trauma. Right. As I point out, it underlies. Virtually all mental illness and a lot of chronic physical illness as well. Doctors don't get a single lecture on trauma, on the relationship between trauma and physical illness, which is amazing.

Given all the research study three years ago, four years ago now, showed that women with severe PTSD have doubled the risk of ovarian cancer. Mm-hmm. Women who are sexually abused in childhood have increased risk of irritable bowel syndrome, endometriosis. Raising my hand. Mm-hmm. Breast cancer, all this kind of stuff.

The relationship between stress and trauma. Multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, women in general have much higher rates of autoimmune disease than men do. Why? 'cause women take on the stress of looking at [00:14:00] everybody else. So what I'm saying is that this trauma awareness and the impacts of trauma on physical and mental health are completely ignored in medical education.

And not to mention the law, not to mention in the schools. So in the schools, you have a lot of kids who are traumatized, who can't pay attention or who are acting out. They're seen as behavior problems. Yep. Rather than, oh, this child is demonstrating and crying out for help. And so that lack of awareness just blinds us.

It's why I believe your book, the Myth of Normal is having such extraordinary recognition because you're speaking for. Those psychosomatic effects that the root cause condition of trauma causes. And you're also speaking about the why. Yeah. We got here because no one cared for that psychosomatic. Just to clarify, sometimes when I use the word psychosomatic, people think we're just saying that, just imagining it's all in their heads, [00:15:00] but the word that you used it, and as I employ it, a very specific scientific, everything is psychosomatic in that.

Our emotional lives, lives and the soma, our bodies are inseparable that one unit, so that most chronic illnesses are truly psychosomatic. Not that in the sense that we imagine it, but in the sense that our emotions and our bodies, our psychology and our physiology and our relationships with each other are inseparable.

So that if somebody has an illness, they're not just looking at pathology in a particular organ. We're actually looking at a person's history in relationship to their families of origin, their multi-generational families of origin, their culture, their internal psychological life as it's affected by their relationship and the impact of all that on the immune system, on the nervous system, on their physiology, on their hormones, on their guts.

And it's [00:16:00] also simple conceptually and also scientifically not controversial. And there's so much research, not to mention traditional wisdom behind it, and yet we ignore it. And you go to the average doctor with any kind of a physical problem, they'll never ask you about stress. I never asked you about trauma in your life.

I never asked you about how you doing with your spouse, how you feel about your work, how you feel about yourself as a human being. And all those questions are so prudent to why people get sick.
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After hearing Gabor's insight into the roots of addiction and pain, I wanted to bring in someone [00:21:00] who bridges that understanding with action. And these small daily practices that help us rewire how we live and how we feel and how we relate to others. And that's my friend Nicole Lapper. And she is known as the holistic psychologist on Instagram.

Very, very widely loved. And she's one of the clearest voices on what it means to heal, not just mentally, but physically and energetically. Here's our conversation on breaking habits, honoring our shame, and regulating the nervous system. Having been on both sides of the couch, having been in my own therapy, trying to address my longstanding anxiety, and then of course opening up my practice and logging hour after hour with clients week after week.

Very insightful. Humans, we were aware a lot of the times where our habits came from. Yet what I kept finding in the word I kept hearing time and time again is. I'm still so stuck. I can't break my habits. I have a new plan of action, and for whatever reason, I get swept away in my emotion. I became completely dysregulated [00:22:00] and I'm doing the same things I always do.

Why? So for me, it was really curiosity and disempowerment, seeing that same pattern, Gabby, in my own life, having so much awareness, knowledge, and not being able to cross that bridge into action, and that's when I, mm-hmm. Began to understand that we do need to incorporate a whole body approach. We do need to start embodying new choices every day, or we will continue to repeat those habits and patterns that live in that autopilot that's alive in all of our subconscious minds, right?

It's about those subtle shifts. If you're in the commitment to the daily subtle shifts, that's when you can have that holistic experience rather than. It can feel like a huge uphill battle if you put it into this big vision of, okay, how am I gonna get there? To your point, when we try to change our life from top to bottom, as a lot of us do, from a well-intentioned, oftentimes deep, dark hole where we can't imagine life going on the same.

So, you know, we [00:23:00] might make it an intention or a commitment to change life to start with five new habits starting tomorrow, and that because. Any new direction, any new choice is going to register to. Our subconscious mind is unfamiliar and according to our subconscious mind, in that uncertainty of the unfamiliar could be something that's threatening that's almost worse.

Mm-hmm. The habit and pattern I'm familiar with, for lack of better word. So there's value and that's a reason why then we seek to stay. So to speak to your point, it is actually through the gradual 'cause. What we're looking to do is consistently keep these new small promises, understanding that any new gesture, any, anything new we do we'll feel uncomfortable.

So of course, if we. Lay on five new discomforts starting tomorrow, then chances are we're gonna overwhelm our system and be right back in those old habits. I love exactly what you're saying because in my language as having been trained in IFS, we need to [00:24:00] honor the protector parts, the habits mm-hmm. That have been really, really, really repeated and built up for decades and decades for what they are in the moment.

Right. So it's like. If you have a controlling pattern and you just immediately stop controlling, you're gonna relapse, you're an alcoholic, and you just decide to white knuckle it, you're gonna relapse because that pattern actually is a form of protection. And this actually brings me to such a, a big topic, which is the topic of shame.

And in your book, you have such a beautiful analysis of shame and you write. Feeling shamed is a threatening, fearful experience without realizing it. Every time we experience shame, it sends the message that I am not safe to the nervous system. That threat ignites a sympathetic charge that can be more than our nervous system can tolerate.

At this point, the parasympathetic nervous system tries to contain the charge. This can present like a freeze response, but underneath that [00:25:00] freeze resides a tremendous amount of emotional energy in the form of fear, vulnerability, defensiveness, and sadness. What I love about this, just to unpack it, is that we have this shame that's so impermissible.

And then we have this nervous system response, right? That threat ignites a sympathetic charge, and it can be more than our nervous system can handle. So we're charging, and it's almost like we truncate the charge, right? We push it down. The parasympathetic nervous system is trying to contain it, and that can put us into a frozen place, frozen also, in these forms of protection, right?

Frozen is a form of protection or all the ways that we try to numb that charge. Absolutely. I think what you're hitting on here, and what this is really illustrating is the reality that we all, regardless of how connected we are or not to. As energy in an energetic [00:26:00] body. Mm-hmm. And to really simplify what emotions are.

You know, of course they complicate our life. For many of us though, emotions, if we really boil them down in their simplest form, emotions are sensations that happen in our body. And they're actually in incredibly valuable sensations because there are bodies energy interacting with our environment and the sensations that we then feel at this point of interaction give us information.

Namely around, is this a safe environment for me that I can proceed, expand, you know, settle into, receive? Or is there a possible threat, in which case I need to, you know, divert my action and deal with the threat for survival purposes. And the large majority of us in childhood have the same emotions available to us, yet we are in a complete state of dependency.

Our nervous system is always seeking to co-regulate with our environment around us and in infancy. When we are incredibly overwhelmed and [00:27:00] dependent, we become dysregulated, overwhelmed. And then we need someone to help us. And the large majority of us who didn't have an attuned caregiver, right, who didn't have someone to show up when we were distressed, crying out, and to identify or explore with us what need we were having.

Are we hungry? Are we tired or we upset or distressed? Having an agitated emotion and then help us bring us back into safety when that didn't happen consistently. We go into a survival mode, we adapt. Our nervous system finds a way to deal with that overwhelm. So for me, what that looked like as I think very similarly it did for you.

We detach from our body, we dissociate, we might numb, right through behaviors, endless achievement or substance use, or many other different things. Again, going back to the reality that our feelings, just because we're suppressing them, we're denying them, we're not tending to them, doesn't mean that they aren't right.

So feelings and emotions get constricted in us, and sometimes that [00:28:00] constriction is our best attempt at keeping ourselves safe if we can minimize the emotional impact or the felt emotional impact, right? Because I'm away on my spaceship now, I feel a bit safer to proceed again. Doesn't mean that that emotional charge.

Still isn't present, and it is present for a lot of us when we're having a trigger or an emotion, right? When we're saying we're triggered, usually we're having an emotion. We feel, you know, whatever it is, we feel some version of upset that that emotion, just like I described them, right? They're based in our body.

They belong to us, right? The emotion we're having. Yes. It's in connection to an event that's happening. Something someone said did or didn't do though. When the emotion's happening in our body and when we're activated, that's actually information for us that indicates that there is something deeper.

That's going on. There is a feeling, a similar experience, right? That resulted in a deeper feeling that we've revisited time and time again, and typically then the way we react from the trigger [00:29:00] becomes very habitual as well. We tend to do the same sort of thing. Yeah. So follow the behavioral pattern. When I'm yelling and screaming when I'm dissociating, that's the time to kind of come to the awareness that, oh.

I've been triggered. Something's happening. So the first thing that I wanna offer listeners is the suggestion to become curious around our triggers as overwhelming as they might be. Again, they contain valuable information. They are indicating some degree of how we're experiencing our environment, and typically when we're triggered, they're indicating that we're experiencing or we're perceiving something as unsafe.

Now again, that that can allow us to explore for ourselves, what is it? What are we feeling, what's feeling unsafe? However, there's another important suggestion that I wanna offer outside of the curiosity, which is beginning to embody a new choice to do something different in that moment. And the, the most foundational new choice is creating a new habit of.

Finding safety in [00:30:00] that moment. So for some of us that might be through tuning into our breath, learning how to breathe really deeply and calmly and evenly from your belly will help activate that parasympathetic nervous system. For others, it might be really tuning into our senses, right? Naming things in the environment, focusing on what can I touch, what can I taste?

Maybe we even have an object that helps us feel safe, or maybe it's our pet pets can be incredibly regulating. And I say that's foundational because without that safety, without that ability to be in that parasympathetic state, we can't think of new things. We have no access. We're actually in an emotional part of our brain that is so hard wired that this is why back to those clients that I would see week after week coming in with like, oh, I did it again.

Because when you did it again, you had no access to that conscious part of your brain to remind you that you have this very beautiful tool to create [00:31:00] safety. So we really need to practice, this is my, my diatribe of getting to the final suggestion. So we have curiosity, we have learning how to regulate our body, and then we have the suggestion that I make that everyone loves to hate.

Practicing so consistently, yes, outside of those moments when you really need it so that when that moment happens, you can help yourself. You can help yourself. Remember this beautiful new tool you have, and I'm speaking to all of us who like myself, right? We don't have the consistent habit of maybe.

Breath work or of conscious grounding through our senses so that we're doing ourself a disservice. We're asking ourself to remember something in a very emotional, dysregulated time that's going to be near impossible. Mm-hmm. So the more we practice, the more confident we then get. So that little by little we can learn how to regulate ourself before the cap blows off.

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Now that we've explored the roots of our pain and the daily work that we need to change, it's time to talk about how we can really befriend our inner world and all the parts of ourselves that can get really activated. And this is really the principles of my latest book, Self-Help, and based on the work of Dr.
Richard Schwartz, the founder and creator of Internal Family Systems Therapy. Dick Schwartz is one of my dear friends. I love him deeply. I am so in awe of his work.

I've been trained in IFS. It's something that I really, really love to be able to share with my audience. This is also work that has radically changed my life and it's helped me see my addictive parts and my anxious parts, and even my perfectionist parts is not a problem, but as protection mechanisms and these parts of us that might feel like they've been around forever actually really trying to protect us.

If you've ever asked, why do I keep doing that thing? Or Why does a part of me get so activated? When this gets [00:36:00] triggered, you'll learn how to understand those parts of yourself with curiosity and compassion in this conversation. Enjoy when that hurt does come out because of something super triggering.

Something that's super activating. The feelings from the hurt from the childhood are so extreme that we go into firefighter parts. Often known as addictive parts. Right. Often the drug addicts, the cocaine addicts, it's funny, I would use your exact language. I've been in multiple forms of addiction throughout my life.

Mm-hmm. Cocaine addiction, alcoholism, food addiction. My first drug was love and my extreme fear of being single, a k, a being alone. I would describe it to my therapist as if I'm not in a relationship, I think I'll die. Yeah, so that was a codependent addiction. Yeah. Firefighter. Yeah. That belief that you're gonna die if you don't get that person [00:37:00] or that substance or whatever it is, is really common among these firefighters.

They really believe they're saving your life. It's sort of like real firefighters in. Destroy the house. Destroy to save it. You know, we tend to honor the addictive parts for their service and their attempts to save your life and then help them see they don't have to do that anymore because we can go to these exiles they're reacting to and heal them.

Yeah. I have to say my firsthand experience working with my hearts in general and doing IFS therapy, I can now see my cocaine addict part. My codependent part, my food addict part with not only compassion and love, but also with gratitude. Yeah, because I can see how hard those parts were working to keep me safe from, in my case, memories that had been [00:38:00] so extreme that I forgot them, that I dis from them.

That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing all that. Thank you for creating the model. Once you get to those memories and the parts that are stuck with them and heal those parts, then these firefighters can relax. Right? And I guess the message here is about safely getting to those memories. And that's where IFS comes in because in a typical IFS session, you or IFS therapist.

We'll interview the parts that are up in the moment, right, whoever's in the room, and through curiosity and through the presence of a calm connection, hopefully in a safe, therapeutic environment, these parts can start to reveal more information. Feel seen, feel heard. It's not dissimilar to how I have been lately communicating with my [00:39:00] 4-year-old.

Mm-hmm. Exactly. He's been activated by an experience that he then deflects by saying, I hate this person. And so when we're together in stillness and in a calm place, he's become curious. Mm-hmm. And my slight curiosity, he just starts spilling it, man. And I'll just say, I see you.

And when you're ready, I'm here to learn more about it. How can I support you? What might you need? But not everybody grows up with Gabby Bernstein as their mom. Right. And most of us relate to our kids when they act like our parts, the way we relate to those parts. Yes. So if our kid is angry and we don't like our own anger, or we're afraid of our own anger.

Then we're gonna try and get 'em to cut it out right away instead of staying himself like you did and getting curious and listening. So, yeah. So that's a big [00:40:00] part of the work is helping people as they go with compassion to these inner parts, they can do that to people who resemble those. Yeah, I've lived that.

I've really lived that firsthand because the more I can care for the child parts within me, the easier it is for me to just be in that self energy for my son. Which is the perfect segue into self. This is the hope moment everybody. So we talked about all this chaos that's happening inside extreme patterns, lots of fear, and we all have within us what you call self and tell us about it.

Tell us about self, what it can self do to help us. Yeah, well that was the big shocking discovery I made. So. Simply because I brought this systems family therapy framework to this inner world, and as I was trying to help parts as once I got into the fact parts aren't what they seem. I mean, they deserve to be listened to.

I [00:41:00] was trying to get people to actually have dialogues inside with these parts and respect them in the way you described with your son and trouble doing because they might suddenly get angry at the part or get afraid of it. And it reminded me of family sessions where I'm trying to have two family members talk to each other and a third member would interfere constantly. And so I began asking clients, could you find the one who's so afraid of this critic?

Or it's angry at the critic, maybe if we're working with a critic, and ask it to just give us a little space so we can get to know it. And clients would say, okay, they did. Now how do you feel toward it? And it would be completely different answer. It would be great. It would be, I'm just kind of curious about why it calls me names or even I, I feel sorry for it.

And in that state, the critic would relax and would share its secret history [00:42:00] of how it got into that role and how it's desperate to protect you. And my client's compassion would grow and we could learn about the Farid protected and heal those. And you know, it was like. In that state. My clients sort of knew how to do all that.

Yeah, just like when you're in self, you know how to relate in a healing way to your son. Yes, and when I would do it with other clients that just that process of asking these interfering parts to give us a little room, just give us a little space, like the same person would pop out with those same C word qualities of calm and curiosity and confidence and compassion.

Then there were four others. Clarity and creativity. And connectedness. And courage. So those are what call the HCS of self-leadership. That's held up pretty well as the primary set of qualities for healing itself has. And it turns out that self is [00:43:00] in, everybody can't be damaged just beneath the surface of these people such that the parts open space and it pops out spontaneously.

Yeah. And that's a big deal about IFS when we're not blended in a part and we're not taken over by that need to manage or the extreme need to put out the fire. We're not activated in an exiled trigger. We're in self. Yes. Now, would you say that most of the time people are not in self? Yes. Most people are mostly blended with parts.

Think that that's their self. They think that's who they really are. So as we get those parts to open space, sometimes it's a big identity crisis. People are shocked to learn that that's not who they're, yeah. They think that these managers and protectors have worked so hard to maintain their control, that it's not easy [00:44:00] to unblend from them.

And that's where that curiosity and that inquiry comes in. And so I wanna really encourage the listeners, people that are still listening and touched by this conversation, to not only go out and read the books, right? Go and read. You are the one you've been waiting for, the introduction to Internal Family Systems therapy and to give yourself the privilege and the opportunity to get to know this work more, to even go further and go to the IFS Institute and seek out ans therapist yourself, but also to.

Conversation we've had here today because this is a beautiful opportunity for people to open up to a new way of thinking and a new way of living. And if there's one message that you'd leave people with, they've never heard about IFS, they're here for the first time, what can they do next? Of course, I wanted you to go read the books, but what would be one thing that they could start to do for their own inner system right now?

Yeah. [00:45:00] Start to reexamine their relationship. They've been fighting with all the time because fighting with them really backfires and if you just get curious, it's pretty simple actually. Hmm. They'll reveal their protective intention and you can start a new compassionate relationship with them. Yeah.
Check in with your parts and become curious about them and yeah. Compassionate connection can start to set in. Yeah. They're not what you've been taught that they are. They actually deserve a lot of. Appreciation and respect. These conversations are a reminder that no matter how far off course you feel healing is possible, and it begins with compassion.

Compassion for the parts of you that protect compassion for the pain you've carried. Compassion for the ways that you've coped, survived and stayed standing. A Gabber and Nicole and all share is this message, you are not broken. There's nothing wrong with you. [00:46:00] There's a wise, resourced, loving self inside you, and when you learn to lead from that place, everything begins to change.

So again, if you wanna take this work to the next level, you can join me inside the Gabby coaching app, deargabby.com/app, and use all the self-help IFS tools. And there you can use the trauma recovery tools, the somatic experiencing tools, the meditations, just to calm your nervous system and support you on your journey of just feeling really, really great.

So enjoy this episode. Enjoy this, enjoy this, enjoy this. I love you.

If you made it to the end of this episode, that means you're truly committed to miracles. I'm really proud of you. If you wanna get more Gabby, tune in every Monday for a new episode. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of the guidance or special bonus episodes. Your experience of this show means a lot to me, so I really wanna [00:47:00] welcome you to leave an honest review and you can follow me on social media at Gabby Bernstein.

And if you wanna get in on the action, sign up for a chance to be Dear Gabby, live@deargabby.com. See you next week.

Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode. Hi there, Gabby here. This podcast is intended to educate, inspire, and support you on your personal journey towards inner peace.

I'm not a psychologist or a medical doctor and do not offer any professional health or medical advice. If you are suffering from a psychological or medical condition, please seek help from a qualified health professional.