Good Vibes Eps 3: Parts, Pain, and Showing Up as Your Best Self

[music] Welcome to Good Vibes, [music] the podcast that brings the timeless beauty of Asia Kyle into the rhythm of real life. Each week, we unpack one puzzle, not as a shear, [music] but as a spark for honest conversations, refreshing insights, and a little to light you [music] can carry with you. Because meeting shouldn't feel heavy. and connection doesn't have to wait for quiet. This is good vibes [music] for the Jewish woman who's doing a lot and still reaching deeper. Hello everyone and welcome back to the Good Vibes podcast. This is our third episode and today we're going to focus on a very interesting and almost popular methodology in today's day and age. I just want to preface that I did this interview at a different time when I had almost totally lost my voice. So I'm just recording this when I got my voice back. So please bear with me when you hear my voice sound very scratchy. Let's just put it at that. Okay. So this puk is she bestows good and not bad on her husband all the days of her life. Okay. So let's jump in. We mentioned good and not bad. This is a double lashon. We say it twice and then the puss ends off with saying that all the days of her life. This is almost seemingly another layer showing us her good is like like always. It's not only a double lone and then at the end of the puzz it mentions again, oh by the way, she always does good and not bad all of her life. So the mafaram actually give us a really deep and clear understanding to what this means. I want to focus on the matsid as I think many of us will find this advice super applicable. So the mats on the words all the days of her life says this means that she is good to her husband all of her days. When he is giving and kind she reciprocates but also when she feels he isn't. She is still good to him and shows up as the best wife. She gives him unconditionally regardless of his behavior. She gives good as much as she can. So through the matida we see that the goal is giving good regardless of what is received. Now I just want to put out a disclaimer. No, this does not mean that you should not stand up for yourself. No, this does not mean that if you are being emotionally abused, you should not stand up for yourself. Every situation, of course, is different. But for the general, we're saying, we're learning from this puk that even when someone treats you not good, quote unquote, it is still the right thing to take the high road and to reciprocate with good. So, we're going to delve into practically what this means, but just as a preface, it does not mean to be abused or disrespected. We're going to go into what does the word good mean in depth. But for now, I would like to define good as showing up as your best self. Okay? So, in the course of this episode, we're going to interview someone and we're going to discuss what the word good or tove actually means. But just for the time being, let's define it as being good is showing up as your best self. Meaning showing up as your best self for yourself and for your husband, for your children. As the mitsuda stubbid says, the asyle is good. I.e. shows up as her best self. Regardless of her surrounding, regardless of the internal or external factors, regardless of the way she is being treated, we still show up to the best person we can be, the best wife, the best mother. The word unconditional comes to mind. They're even more so acting, not reacting. So, I'm going to add in my two cents here and say that in today's day and age, that is a long-term goal. Something that we in 2025 are aiming for, but have to work on ourselves internally to get there, right? Like this doesn't happen overnight. To always be my best self, always show up, always act like my best self. And the work to get there is truly our VOD. The work that we need to do internally and externally to get to this place, that is our Voda that we're talking about today. So today we have on Shar Frer here with us. She is a psychotherapist with a private practice in Jerusalem. She counsels parents, couples, and individual women. She specializes in relational trauma and interpersonal conflict. She has completed all three levels of the IFS certification and works as a program assistant on IFS international training. She also runs her own IFS mini workshops for personal development and growth. Shar is passionate about making IFS language feel natural, organic, fluent, and seamlessly intertwined in our lives. Shar has also recently put out a book, Heart and Soul, about IFS and how it affects, relates, and assists our lives. So, we're going to discuss how this idea of showing up as your best self, this good quote unquote, how it relates with IFS, and Shar is going to explain that to us. So, welcome Shira. >> Thank you. Welcome. Okay. So init Shira is going to shed some light the idea of giving good and showing up as yourself. So we said that the long-term goal is showing up as yourself. And again we're going to discuss what that really means. Long-term goal is being good always and showing up as yourself. But what gets in our way? So Sher is going to help us understand what the long-term goal is, what this version of good quote unquote is. and how we work on ourselves through IFS to get to this goal. Shar's going to explain what IFS is and more on this topic. So Sher, please maybe you can begin with what IFS is and how it relates to this topic. >> Sure. Okay. So I'll try to give a brief overview of what IFS is. IFS stands for internal family systems is a model founded by Dr. Richard Schwarz. And essentially, it's all about our own internal family. Human beings are really not straightforward and simple, even though we wish they were, but we're really all made up of a complex set of tons and tons of parts of ourselves. You know, we all have different dimensions, different attributes, different behaviors, different assets, all different parts of ourselves. And parts are really about our own internal family. Essentially, kind of like our internal children. Just like everybody has an external family, we also have our own internal family. At an IFS, we really think about parts that are extreme. We're looking and we're focusing and we're invited to explore the parts of ourselves that feel extreme and act extreme and behave in ways that are not always in our best interest. Sometimes we could logically know that we want to be doing something and yet do something that might feel counterintuitive or not really what we wanted to do. And that we'd refer to as an extreme part. The basic premise in IFS is that all parts are here to help and serve you somehow and there are no bad parts. And really all of our parts, no matter how they might look like they're not good or often we don't like them, somehow they do have some positive intention for you and they're here somehow to control and to make you feel good. So IFS really is a pain prevention model. It's all about not feeling pain and not feeling vulnerability. And what you'll come to learn is that your extreme parts are really here to protect you from something that you don't want to feel. And in this way, our parts really serve us. We want to think about them as what their intention is for us and what they're trying to do for us and how they're trying to be helpful for us. Because when we do something over and over again, it's here to help us somehow. And we want to really uncover that intention to see really how they're serving us and how they're helping us. And in that way we can begin to concretize change. The center of the model is really the self. And I think that's what you've been referring to is that you know being the best version of ourselves which Dick Schwarz has coined self with a capital S. And that's really our core and our center. And it's from there that in IFS we learn to really lead our parts and to make better and wiser decisions going forward. That's like a brief overview of what IFS is. Can you tell us a little bit more about the other parts meaning you mentioned the self the capital S but what are some of the other parts and maybe you can give us some examples to make it practical for us. >> Sure. So there's really three groups to IFS. There's two parts that protect us, right, from what we don't want to feel. Those are the managers and the firefighters. Those of you are familiar, I'm sure, have heard, managers and firefighters. And then there are the parts that were protecting and those are the exiles. So the managers and the firefighters are the parts that keep us from feeling the pain. Those are the extreme parts that really help us not feel the pain, which is the exiles. The exiles are the parts that developed first. They are very young. They are young wounds, our young children that really were initially wounded. And after that, the managers come at that time to protect the person from not feeling that pain. And then we grow with those managers and they get older and older. But really they developed young and they started young from the exiles, from the pain, from the initial trauma, the initial wounds, the initial attachment injuries. And the managers are there to make sure we don't feel those things ever again. It's the never again motto. The firefighters are there as a reactive measure that we don't feel our exiles. So the managers are the way that we behave on a day-to-day basis, proactively, strategically, making sure we don't feel that pain. And the firefighters come as a reactive measure. When the pain leaks out and the world does cause us pain, we need another mechanism to make sure we don't feel that pain. And those are our firefighters. They are very impulsive. They create a lot of regret. Um those are all our addictions. In terms of examples, an example of a manager would be a perfectionistic manager. You know where there's perfectionism. And the perfectionistic manager is extreme. It feels urgent. It feels like something you have to do. It feels like you have no choice but to be perfect. And the goal and the intention of the perfectionism is really to make sure that if I'm perfect, everybody will love me. Everybody will be happy with me. Nobody will give me any risky feedback. And therefore I won't feel any pain because you won't leave me. You won't reject me. So that's the perfectionism is therefore the manager that is going to help protects me from the exile of rejection. And everybody has their own way that they are able to prevent pain. Everyone listening could have a perfectionistic manager. Each person's perfectionism is different than the others because everyone has its own story, its own history, its own memory of how it created that manager. and the pain it's trying to avoid. So a firefighter would be like binge eating or screaming or raging something that we do very fast. So you know let's say you're you know going about your you know your day and all of a sudden the kid starts being you know a teenager starts being very to you. Next thing you know you're raging or you run to the fridge and you know you're downing some cheesecake and you're not even sure why you're just running and doing it. likelihood is you're hosing out some pain that in that moment there was something you didn't want to feel and you didn't have control because the world will just cause us pain. So you might have a manager, let's say perfectionistic parenting manager that's always making sure to keep your kids really happy so they'll always like you that you're the best mommy and it's a really extreme manager because we all know that's not possible. And all of a sudden, teenage boy is mean and it's not working. The manager, it's not keeping him nice to you. It's not keeping you from feeling inadequate or like a failure. And that's triggered. That pain is triggered and you rush to hose that out. Like I said, you could run and binge. You could rage at the teenager. You could go to bed. Just go to bed. Go to sleep because you can't handle the pain that has just been brought up in that moment. And you run to do something else. And often the manager and the firefighter actually play a little ping pong because the more extreme our managers are, we need the firefighters then to hose out because the managers need to relax. Our managers get very tired. Think about those parts of you that you feel like you just always have to be that and you could fill in the blank. I always have to be funny. I always have to be the giver. I always have to be the caretaker. And we do these things in a way that feel like we have no choice. And usually it's because it comes from a very young age. Plus, it's here to hose out pain and we're so afraid not to do that. But sometimes that part gets really tired. And that's why people can go from really healthy eating to binging or hosting guests for 8 weeks and then totally taking off from any hosting, you know, for a month or needing a major vacation because we get very tired from our managers, but we can't feel pain. So we run to our firefighters. >> Wow, that's so interesting. I guess maybe let's bring it back to the sort of stuff to our puk and relating it back to being the best wife you could be showing up as good. And again, we're going to kind of define good as the self with a capital S. So what is so hard for us to show up as ourselves? Maybe you can like what gets in the way? what disrupts us from showing up as our self, which we're defining as good, quote unquote. >> So maybe I'll take a minute just to define a little more at length what the self is. According to IFS, our self is really our center, our core. It's really that grounded and regulated place. I like to think of it as a nishama because it's really our divine piece of ourselves. It's the divine place in ourselves and essentially we want to really lead our lives and make our decisions from this place from this centered space of self. We don't want to make decisions and have behaviors based on autopilot just doing what we do. We want to do it from a place of choice and that why am I doing this? Do I want to be doing this? Right? self is that concept of really having that pause and having spaciousness to then really be able to actualize what we want to be and self and IFS is actually defined by the eight Cwords compassion calm curiosity clarity creativity connectedness courage and confidence and just for the purposes is now I think that what you we could focus on are curiosity and compassion. Curiosity is essentially really the easiest C word to move to and I think in general we're very judgmental. Most people just either judge themselves or judge other people. And IFS gives us this opportunity to really invite in curiosity in the space of judgmentalness and criticism. Our best self, right? Our naturally valuable state, how we were born is to be curious. Think about a baby. They're so curious, right? We want to come at ourselves and at others, especially our spouses, from a place of curiosity as well as compassion. And IFS defines compassion as seeing fear behind our actions. That when we're doing something that's so extreme, not being the best version of ourselves, it's because we are fear driven. Because we really feel forced to do that, because if we didn't do that, we'd be afraid of something. And by now it's probably clear to you what are we afraid of. We're afraid of that pain. We're very very afraid of pain. And that's not we're not in this world just to do all make our decisions based on not feeling pain. So many of us organize our lives based on not feeling pain. And from that we end up doing a lot of automatic pilot decisions and we have a lot of reactivity. So the hope with IFS is to really lead and make our decisions and our actions from this place of self. Self is like the benevolent parent that we could see the perfectionistic part. We could see our extreme parts and be able to pause from self and create a self-led perfectionism or a self-led decision where I am here and myself is now going to lead this part and decide how much we want it, how much we don't want it, if it's necessary, if it's not necessary from this place of self. So I think that in what you know we're talking about here is really looking at marriage and really seeing that so often things get in our way of doing this especially in a marriage where we're so close and we could be so vulnerable right that really things that are happening touch us in a very sensitive space and therefore we're not able to act in the way we really want to in the way that we logically thought we would or logically think that you know we quote unquote should. So, let's say, you know, your husband forgot to take out the garbage. It's so classic. I know it's such a classic one, but let's just say you forgot to take out the garbage, you know, and think about what part you go into when that happens, right? Do you go into the part of criticizing him and telling him he's the worst husband and you can't believe it and you're critical of him and you're bashing him and you're, you know, just berating him for that? Or maybe you actually go into passive aggressive part where you know you just start making these really sly comments when he comes home or you don't really heat his supper up for him just because you know you didn't have time to heat up his supper but really we know you know you were taking it back because he didn't take out the garbage. Or maybe you just shut down. Maybe you go into a shutdown part where you just become very busy when he comes home and you just you happen to be on a phone call. You're leaving the house. You got to go to the gym. Right? Right. So, we all have our ways that we're going to deal with something our husband's doing that we don't like. >> And those parts are managers and firefighters. >> Exactly. And those are managers and firefighters. Because in that moment, you actually felt something when you saw the garbage bag sitting there or put in whatever happens in your life. You know, he leaves the coffee cup out, he forgets to do something for you, he may he leaves a mess, he dresses your kid in a way that you didn't like, he gives your kid treats and you're so upset because they're going to get cavities. Whatever it is that didn't go into your control, we all have a space where we had a feeling. And because we're often afraid of that feeling and we don't want to be vulnerable, we go to action or to behavior to avoid the feeling because it's too uncomfortable. But I want to say something really important here. We say in IFS, if it's intense, it's yours. If something is very intense for you, so it's generally touching your stuff because the same scenario could happen in two different homes or five different homes or a husband forgets to take out the garbage, right? Or does something that the wife doesn't like. And it's amazing that there's millions of responses to that. And some wives will be like, "Okay, he forgot. He's human, right? And some wives will feel really, really angry, right? So they'll be very reactive. Their reaction is very intense. When our reactions are so intense, it's touching our stuff. We say if it's hysterical, it's historical. When something gets you very hysterical today, it's sitting on history. And this is where I think we lose ourselves. This is where I think we no longer have the capacity to stay regulated because we don't realize. You see, we think that what's happening here in the present is really about the present. What we want to realize is it's not. When something is making us feel that intense and that hysterical, there's something inside of us that's being triggered. It's like an emotional sunburn. For those of you who have heard that concept that, you know, if you have a sunburn and someone touches you very lightly over your shirt, you're going to gasp. it's going to kill. But that's only because you have a sunburn. And for a lot of us, we have emotional sunburns. So when someone does something, especially our husbands, we feel it very strong. And we like to think of it as the today, but we really are distorting the today for the past. And this is where IS can really help is that we could take responsibility for what's happening inside of us instead of what's happening outside of us. As human beings, we are always going to the outside. It's his fault. He did it. She did it. They did it. It's their fault. And we want to do an IFS, what we call a U-turn. Can I look inside of me with my husband when I'm not being able to behave and act in the way that I thought I would, in the way that I wished I would, in the way that I dreamed I would? What is happening to me? How can I remain my best version of myself? The person that I want to be even if he's not. Can I be the person that I want to be? That's really what the Moda Star is is aiming to kind of directing. That's why when I read this pock I was so amazed that this is like IFS in the puzz about wanting to be your best self being your capital S self even when there's other scenarios going on inside you outside the external the internal and learning your part and learning how to navigate your managers. You are firefighters becoming curious and compassionate towards your exiles in order to get to a place where you can be yourself most of the time. Meaning the goal is always but every time that we show up as ourselves to capital S at the mini win and I think that's kind of like what the goal is here and what the mata is hinting to. >> Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And you know this is really a way to invite us to see our own reactivity and to see what's getting in our way from doing that. So just to give an example maybe to make it practical you know if your husband's late and you know here and there or messy here and there there are certain themes that get under each person's skin. There are certain hot topics like money that's a hot topic in marriage. So if your husband overspends or or too cheap or too, you know, thrifty or spending too much, again, depending on your reaction, you can learn about yourself from the way that you're reacting and from the way that you're responding of where is it touching you. Is it possible that it's sitting on an old wound? Is it possible that you grew up in a house where your family was really cheap or you grew up in a house where you were poor and therefore it's very sensitive for you when your husband, you know, doesn't buy you the gift that you want or only will buy something on sale. It's disproportionately reactive. You're having a disproportionate reaction to something that wasn't intending to hurt you. And like you said in the beginning, we're not talking about abuse. We're not talking about something extreme here on his end, you know, because he has parts also. And if he's in a very extreme part, that's his work. But honestly, the more that we could be regulated and not act and react intensely, the more he or she could notice what's going on for them. What happens usually is that in marriage, we get into a parts party that both people have extreme parts. But when we can come from a self-led space, that's self, our divine place, our naturally valuable state, that's not organizing around pain, that's not doing things because she doesn't want to feel pain, that can be brave enough to feel the pain and respond in a way that's self-led. Generally, you get responses in kind. You'd be surprised to see that if you could show up when something hurts you from your space of pain, which is speaking for parts and not from parts. Like when you did that, actually it touched me in this really sensitive space brought me back to like all those years when we just didn't have money in the house. And speaking for that vulnerability, you'd be surprised how differently your husband might respond. I feel like IFS kind of gives us the opportunity to learn more about ourselves. And the more you learn about yourself, then you can change your behavior and your actions for the future. And I think in every relationship, it could be helpful in a mother's child relationship, in a parent, you know, your relationship with your parents. In every relationship, there's so much that could be learned through the modell of IFS and bringing it to being the best wife you could be. Being an Asia tile, when you learn your parts and you learn why you do what you do, and you can identify, if it's a manager, if it's a firefighter, what your exile parts are, you can do the internal work to slowly but surely show up as yourself more and more frequently. And that really is showing up as good for your husband. That really is showing up as good for yourself, for your children, for your whole family, and of course for your husband. So, thank you so much for teaching us about that and teaching us the parts of IFS and how to work through it to ultimately lead from your nishama. >> Yeah. Am thank you. >> Thank you so much, Shar. >> Sure. Thank you so much for joining us. Please reach out and email us if you have any questions or thoughts. We would love to hear from you. Stay tuned for some more good vibes.