Why is your therapy Internal Family Systems?
Have you ever suffered any trauma?
I don’t know how to tell him right now…
No one likes to be associated with the word trauma… See? I detected disgust and surprise in his tone when he heard it. And yet, we all suffer from trauma. Isn’t his father, his mother, his grandfather dead…?
Wasn’t it inevitable to see them die?
This statement tries to avoid precisely the pain caused by the death of the one he loved. Other times, the trauma is being abused by other children or adults, perhaps a serious injustice at work…
Aren’t they also inevitable and shouldn’t we face them, overcome them and mature?
Yes, but we have evolved to avoid suffering and the immediate mechanism to avoid the pain of a trauma is to suppress its memory or, as you are doing now, keep it as far away as we can.
Is our psyche that simple?
This is its mechanism and it is as essential as it is complex to unravel it in each case, because we develop behaviors and habits, of which we are not aware, in order not to relive the pain of the trauma and thus we can cause more pain to ourselves, and also to others .
For example?
When you drink a lot, when you work so many hours that you don’t generate value or when… How many cups of coffee have you had today?
Too much, yes.
They are all simple ways to protect ourselves from pain, and there are others that are more sophisticated, such as the obsession with always having everything under control because we cannot stand uncertainty or not being able to stand the slightest criticism and being dependent on what others say about you.
How do you treat these patients?
I help them discover for themselves that they are acting this way to protect themselves from pain. And this therapy is for everyone and not just for those who have suffered war or crime or rape. We all experience trauma and we all have the ability to overcome it.
And when we are aware of the ultimate reason for our behavior do we correct it?
By becoming aware of the ultimate origin of this extreme behavior that harms us, we can find alternatives to gradually overcome the trauma.
How to accept that you were raped, that your mother died and you were a child, that…?
We must learn to feel pain in a kind way…
Gentle pain? Isn’t it contradictory?
Accepting pain to feel it kindly is loving ourselves with our pain without adding more blame or guilt to it. And this is the first step towards healing.
Estimate the pain?
Learning to interpret your traumatic experience without hatred, without hatred, without guilt… And thus disarming the automatic mechanism that makes you fall into undesirable behaviors just to postpone the pain that the trauma still causes you.
We inherit traumas and guilt from our parents, grandparents, cultures…?
Before Freud and Jung tried to unravel these guilts and traumas that you mention, humans were already working on their personal and collective traumas with narratives, archetypes, symbolisms… Which were nothing more than ways of accepting the pain in a friendly and without hate
Is this why Freud insists on our Judeo-Christian guilt complex?
And that’s why our therapy is family. We have not created anything new: we are just trying to explain it in a way that is understandable, ergo, useful and healing for the majority.
What do they hope to achieve by spreading it?
That when we understand these mechanisms we discover that we are not condemned to live with pain and trauma, but that we can overcome them and free ourselves from pain.
Do they involve the family in therapy?
Because Dr. Dick Schwartz, my master of psychiatry at Harvard, was a family therapist, and when he was treating youth anorexia and addiction, he found that he had to heal them with the family because the origin of the trauma was family. And he brought the whole family to the consultation.
Do they heal with words or with pills?
I help patients heal with all the resources: pharmacological and with words, of course, starting with those necessary to achieve lucidity and self-knowledge.
Does reliving the trauma help overcome it?
We want people to discover the energy within themselves and use it to reset their psyche with words… And sometimes medication. But neuroscience shows that they will never overcome trauma from anger, hatred or frustration, but from love and acceptance.
