My Family Just Moved In Upstairs

Summary

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Podcast Summary

The Dream – “My Family Just Moved In Upstairs”

Host: Jane Marie
Guest: Aaron Barrow (Veteran, Peer Specialist)
Date: October 3, 2025
Main Theme:
The episode explores the reimagined format of The Dream, focusing on the intersection of recovery, therapy fads, and the complicated “American Dream.” In this episode, Jane Marie interviews Aaron Barrow, a peer specialist working with veterans, about the controversial rise of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy in addiction and trauma recovery communities.

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1. Setting the Stage: The Reboot of The Dream (01:51)

• Jane Marie announces the podcast’s new weekly, looser format but reiterates the ongoing focus: “the American Dream and all the assholes that make it infinitely harder to achieve.”
• Invites audience participation—stories, weird ideas, or just to say “hi.”
• Introduces guest Aaron Barrow, whose message raised concerns about IFS therapy infiltrating recovery spaces.

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2. Aaron’s Role and Background (02:27)

• Aaron Barrow: Veteran, recovery peer specialist, mental health advocate, psychology degree holder.
• Works closely with the Veterans Mental Health Advocacy Council.
• Peer specialists provide support based on their own lived experiences in recovery.
• Description of peer roles - “prison peers,” “substance peers,” “mental health peers” (04:51).

Memorable Metaphor:

“If I'm building a fence, I'm definitely going to want to find someone who's built a fence before... A lot of the time... you go to someone who's read a lot about fences in a book and is going to help them... but actually hasn't ever built their own fence.”
—Aaron Barrow (06:55)

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3. Peer Support vs. Traditional Therapy (06:15 – 10:00)

• Peer specialists often form deeper, more vulnerable connections with clients than traditional therapists.
• The role requires authenticity and openness: “If I'm not vulnerable... then it doesn't work.” (Aaron, 07:40)
• Traditional therapy enforces separation: “There's an us, and then there's a them.” (Aaron, 09:24)
• Peer support: “We’re on this journey together.” (Aaron, 09:29)

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4. Aaron’s Journey through Addiction and Military Life (10:09 – 15:14)

• Grew up in a chaotic, blended family; joined the military to escape instability.
• Military culture: heavy drinking was normalized, but marijuana became his drug of choice post-service.
• Marijuana addiction is often minimized or stigmatized differently than other substances.

Notable Quote:

“Weed is kind of still widely accepted... Not widely. Well, that’s Cali sober.”
—Jane Marie (14:44)

• Aaron affirms that while some can use weed without issues, that was not his case.

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5. Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy Defined (18:50 – 27:45)

• IFS originates with Dr. Richard Schwartz; now a trend in recovery/trauma therapy.
• Concepts:
  • Everyone has a “core self” and numerous “parts.”
  • “Exiles” (suppressed parts), “Managers” (protective parts), “Firefighters” (emergency protectors).
  • Therapy’s goal: nurture and integrate parts rather than suppress them.
• Jane’s skepticism: “No, stop naming things stupidly, Dr. Schwartz.” (Jane, 21:49)
• IFS proposes that all personalities—even those causing distress—are “good” and “protective.”
  • “No Bad Parts” is Schwartz’s mantra.

Key Quote:

"But the premise is that there’s no part of you that's bad. It's all good. It's all there to help you. It's all there to protect you."
—Aaron Barrow (25:55)

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6. IFS in Addiction and Trauma Therapy (29:03 – 36:51)

• Aaron explains how IFS is entering the recovery field and the dangers of superficial adoption.
• Concerns about “us vs. them” dynamic in therapy—IFS can reinforce or challenge this depending on practitioner.
• Issue: Rapid, inadequate dissemination of IFS led to undertrained practitioners using complex therapy on vulnerable populations.

Revealing Fact:

• IFS practitioner certification increased from ~$200 to $4,000 for Level 1 (Jane & Aaron, 33:47–33:59).
• “For money, you can learn to be this internal family systems instructor or therapist.” (Aaron, 34:07)

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7. Dangerous Experimentation & The Problem with Fads (32:45 – 46:36)

• Aaron’s personal experience: pressured to participate and “perform” IFS with colleagues as an example for others.
  • “I was performing it for the group to satisfy this colleague.” (Aaron, 38:28)
• Underqualified facilitators teaching IFS (sometimes without even reading the full book).
  • “She hadn't even watched more than two videos and she was teaching it as an expert. And that's what broke me.” (Aaron, 43:16)
• Potential harm: Unsupervised, shallow use can exacerbate mental health issues, provoke relapse, or cause confusion in vulnerable clients.

Notable Critique:

"You’re supposed to pull all these really wounded, hard to face parts out in front of everybody in the group...with someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing."
— Aaron Barrow (44:53)

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8. Broader Critique of Wellness, Therapy Fads, and MLM Parallels (46:03 – 48:45)

• Jane notes parallels between the IFS training model and multi-level marketing (MLM): expensive courses, superficial credentialing, and “gurus.”
• Aaron observes dubious claims by Schwartz, including using IFS “to cure racism.”
  • “He makes some pretty wild claims in the book, too. Like, one claim is he'd—you can use this to cure racism.” (Aaron, 47:28)
  • Jane: “I don't want to get to know my racist exiles. Or my racist uncle.” (Jane, 48:24)

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9. Final Thoughts & Takeaways

• IFS can be helpful if practiced one-on-one with a highly trained practitioner—but can be harmful or confusing if applied superficially by unqualified people.
• Real danger in faddish, mass-market therapy approaches in recovery settings.
• Jane and Aaron both express exhaustion and wariness with the layer of jargon and self-referential “healing” culture.

Closing Quote:

"This IFS shit is like, how many more hamster wheels can I create?...And let’s just hang out with these guys all the time and talk about them all the time..."
—Jane Marie & Aaron Barrow (47:22–47:28)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “Peer support at its very essence…is to help other people figure out where they want to go and then help them realize how to get to that point.”
  – Aaron Barrow (06:21)
• “Traditional therapy...there’s an us, and then there’s a them.”
  – Aaron Barrow (09:24)
• “Ifs, in a way, is really beneficial because it...takes the parts of you that are scary...and helps you to form a relationship and show that part compassion.”
  – Aaron Barrow (28:46)
• “I was performing it for the group to satisfy this colleague.”
  – Aaron Barrow (38:28)
• “She hadn't even watched more than two videos and she was teaching it as an expert. And that's what broke me.”
  – Aaron Barrow (43:16)
• “He makes some pretty wild claims in the book, too. Like, one claim is you can use this to cure racism.”
  – Aaron Barrow (47:28)

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Key Timestamps

| Time | Segment/Topic | |-----------|---------------| | 01:51 | Show intro, new format, guest intro | | 02:27 | Aaron’s background, role as peer specialist | | 06:15 | What peer specialists do, comparison with traditional therapy | | 10:09 | Aaron’s personal journey: family, military, addiction | | 18:50 | Introduction to Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy | | 25:55 | “No Bad Parts” philosophy explained | | 32:45 | IFS adoption in Aaron’s work setting, certification and cost | | 36:51 | Real-world problems: underqualified facilitators, group harm | | 44:53 | Specific examples of harm, IFS as a recovery fad | | 47:28 | Overblown claims, “curing racism” via IFS | | 48:45 | Podcast outro |

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Tone and Style

The tone is candid, irreverent, and critical—true to The Dream’s trademark style. Both Jane and Aaron inject dark humor and healthy skepticism, especially regarding therapy fads and the dangers of credentialing without real-world experience.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode provides a raw, insiders’ look at how therapy trends like IFS can sweep through mental health and addiction spaces, bringing both hope and risk. The conversation is a call for more grounded, experience-driven approaches, and a warning against the “wildly experimental” adoption of new modalities without proper oversight.

For those considering or witnessing the rise of IFS or similar methods in treatment settings, this episode is essential listening.

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Transcript

[Jane Marie]

Hey dream listeners. There's now an ad free version of the Dream that you can subscribe to the Dream Plus@thedream supercast.com Five bucks a month gets you every single episode of this show with zero ads, which you love and I love. And we're hoping that this will help us pay the bills and the main goal being that we can keep making this show. Go to thedream.supercast.com and subscribe. To make it Easy, we have put the link in the show description. Just look down underneath this episode. It says thedream.supercast.com and just click on that. Easy peasy. You're gonna get a lot of extra stuff too. We're working on all that. Another thing you need to do. Please subscribe to our Instagram it's the Dream X the letter X. Jane Marie. See you over there.

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[Jane Marie]

I'm Jane Marie and this is the dream. Do you have a fun story for us? Or even like a not fun story or just like a weird story? Or do you just want to say hi? You can call us at 323-248-1488 or email us at helloittleeverywhere.com like today's guest did. He contacted us about a rather new form of therapy that's infiltrated the recovery world. It's called internal family systems, or ifs. And he's concerned.

[Aaron Barrow]

My name is Aaron Barrow. I'm a peer specialist. I'm a veteran who's in recovery who's dually diagnosed I've been in the field for 14 years. Before that, I got a degree in psychology, partially because I watched Frasier and I thought it would be a glamorous thing to do. And partially I think what I discovered as I was getting my education was it was more to try and figure out what was going on out here, you know, and less about what was going on out there. I'm the liaison to the Veterans Mental Health Advocacy Council. And it was a council created by a Bush era initiative like a million years ago to gather the voice of veterans who receive mental health care or people that work with veterans and then provide the feedback to leadership. But for a while, we didn't know if we could exist after the kind of crackdown on public communication started. So I'm still able to meet with the group and bring that feedback back to the mental health leadership, but it's been pretty tenuous.

[Jane Marie]

How long ago was that? Just.

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah, I want to say a year ago. It was pretty quick. As soon as the new administration took office, the crackdown started really fast and it was pretty terrifying. For a while I didn't know if I'd have a job anymore. Most people didn't, you know, so it's.

[Jane Marie]

Funny, Dan and I were just talking about all of these people that are supporting the administration wanting to get raptured this week.

[Aaron Barrow]

I didn't hear about that. Seriously?

[Jane Marie]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was supposed to happen on Tuesday on Rosh Hashanah. It didn't happen.

[Aaron Barrow]

Crazy.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah. So they really wanted that. And I'm like, how did you want everything that's happening right now, all this horrible stuff, but then you also want to get the hell out of here, like so badly.

[Aaron Barrow]

It's always funny because I grew up as a Star wars kid. I'm sure you guys did too. And when you watch Star wars now, I'm like, okay, now if we're going to take an objective perspective here, who's the evil empire and who's the plucky rebels? If we looked at the federal government.

[Jane Marie]

I want to get a little lay of the land of what you actually do day to day. And then I want to talk about this ifs stuff. So start with just let me know kind of what do your days look like?

[Aaron Barrow]

So I'm a peer specialist.

[Jane Marie]

Nobody knows what that means. Yeah, I know what it means because one of my best friends. Yeah, I'd love to helps train them.

[Aaron Barrow]

Well, as a person who's in recovery, to be a peer specialist, you need to be someone who's been in active recovery in most states, the laws kind of vary depending on where you're at, but for at least two years and then you have to get a certification. It's like one to two weeks certification. And your on the job training, your college training, so to speak, is your life experience as someone who's in recovery. If you look in the community, there's like different types of peers. There's prison peers, people who have been to the penal institutions and go back to help other people adjust to life on the outside when they get out, or they go into the institutions themselves and work with them while they're there. There's substance peers. I work in that field. So you work with people who have substance abuse addictions. You're someone who has actually worked through your own or are working through your own addictions. If we're going to follow the recovery model and helping them on their journey, there's mental health peers, say someone who's diagnosed with bipolar disorder or maybe has a schizophrenic diagnosis, and they go into the mental health world to help other people who are trying to navigate mental health treatment. It just. There's a mirror. And when I started where I work, I was one of like the first 40 people hired. A little over a thousand now. And in my opinion that is way short of what we should be.

[Jane Marie]

Well, let's talk about what the peer specialists like, essentially counselors.

[Aaron Barrow]

So our job is to help someone figure out where they want to go. And we do that in part by telling a little bit of our story and sharing a little bit of where we've been. But peer support at its very essence. And of course, people do it different ways and it's been reconstructed in a million different ways. In its essence is to help other people figure out where they want to go and then help them realize how to get to that point, like how to set goals, how to get to those goals.

[Jane Marie]

With the thinking being that it's easier to hear it from someone who's gone through the same stuff.

[Aaron Barrow]

The metaphor I always use on the job is if I'm building a fence, I'm definitely going to want to find someone who's built a fence before or who built several fences to help me build a fence. A lot of the time when people are in mental health treatment or addictions treatment, they go to someone who's read a lot about fences in a book and is going to help them figuring out the fence building process, but actually hasn't ever built their own fence. Or if they have, it's been different type of fence, you know, maybe it's like a little French fence versus like a big, you know, backyard fence or.

[Jane Marie]

Right.

[Aaron Barrow]

Some of the amazing thing about a peer specialist is I can be hearing someone's story and I can say, oh, my gosh, I remember that, or I remember when I had something similar happen to me, you know, and I can tell a little tidbit of my own story, and it just creates this, like, instant bond, you know?

[Jane Marie]

Yeah.

[Aaron Barrow]

There's a level of vulnerability and a level of honesty that I have to be able to hold onto to make it work, though. If I'm not vulnerable, if I'm not willing to talk about the stuff that hurts me and only, like, the hero stories, then it doesn't work, you know?

[Jane Marie]

Well, for people who haven't spent a lot of time in the rooms, which I have, there is a very common experience with addiction. Like, it's so weird how similar the patterns are and the experiences that you go through. It's remarkable that the stories. When people share at aa how similar everyone's stories are.

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah. As I'm thinking about this topic, I was thinking it's more about the permission structure, I think, when it comes to addiction treatment than it is about the therapeutic approach. I was going to be talking about today. But it's the idea that working with people in recovery is really hard. It's devastating at times. I've lost. Sorry. I don't.

[Jane Marie]

It's okay. Yeah, it's okay.

[Aaron Barrow]

I've lost so many people.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah.

[Aaron Barrow]

And it's a little different being a peer because you form more of a personal connection. One of the keystone rules of. And I learned this in college, and I've also. I know this from working with therapists and social workers, is that when you're doing traditional therapy work, there's a separation. There's an us, and then there's a them. And they're the ones you work with, and they're the ones with the problems. And I'm the us. And we don't blend the two.

[Jane Marie]

Like, I'm the expert, and they're the people with issues. Okay.

[Aaron Barrow]

But when you're a peer, we're on this journey together, you know?

[Jane Marie]

Right.

[Aaron Barrow]

We're walking side by side. We're taking the same road, and it's hard on everybody. I've probably worked with 2000 people now and lost hundreds to suicide or to, oh, my God, heroin overdoses, fentanyl overdoses. One of my favorite clients, I've worked with her for years and years, graduated last year. And I found out about a week later that she had gone into a fentanyl overdose. And it's devastating. And so I think this kind of creates a permission structure where you can experiment. It's. It's. You can feel free as a practitioner.

[Jane Marie]

To connect with people differently.

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah, I grew up in a blended family, so my parents, My dad was. He has some mental health stuff that he wrestles with too, but his fix was Christianity. He was a very erratic, just super angry, intense person. You never knew from one second to the next when that switch would flip, that little, like, crease of the eye or a little pucker of the chin, and, you know, kind of a nightmare was headed your way.

[Jane Marie]

Don't trigger me and Dan while you're saying this. We both have angry dads.

[Aaron Barrow]

Well, that's, that's the story of addiction right there. I ended up with a couple dads and then a bonus mom and then bonus siblings. And there's always a lot of moving around and a lot of chaos and not a lot of money. And I was working a minimum wage job full time while I was going to school, mostly to get away from myself. Plus I was playing sports and I had a girlfriend. I was super overwhelmed. And I remember this really clearly one night when my mom and my stepdad came to me and they said, hey, we're not trying to kick you out of the house, but we think you should leave. And I really think it'd be a good idea for you to talk to a recruiter. And I never thought I'd join the military. I was always kind of like this countercultural, don't like being around people, kind of like doing my own thing kind of guy. But I ended up following their advice and talking to an Air Force recruiter. And the recruiter's like, hey, we're going to give you three squares a day. We're going to cover all your needs. Medical, dental, housing, plus you'll get $860 a month. And I was like, sign me up, I'm sold. I'll put me on the next plane. In fact, I was so excited, I. I ran to my counselor the next day and I asked her if I could graduate early because I was like, in the beginning of my junior year. And she's like, well, okay.

[Jane Marie]

Out of college or high school or.

[Aaron Barrow]

Out of high school. Yeah. Wow. So she's like, well, we can get you out about middle of next year. And I said, no, I went out this year. So we scraped together some credits. I took a bunch of night classes, did Some college coursework and I graduated that year. And on the day after my 17th birthday, I was on a plane to Germany in the Air force.

[Jane Marie]

So you liked it?

[Aaron Barrow]

Oh, I loved it. It was definitely isolating. At times it was hard being neurodiverse. And in that community, I got in a lot of trouble. Also, one of the upsides of being annoying is that the shop constantly wants to get rid of you. So I shoveled coal for a month in German housing. I was sent to Korea for two months to do electrical work for the joint games over there.

[Jane Marie]

So you're in the military? You. I don't know what it's called. You graduate from the military and just tell me how you. How you fell into addiction or was that already happening?

[Aaron Barrow]

From my view of addiction, this is something I've learned over the years. You're working really hard, or I was to escape from my mind and my body. I didn't want to be here. You know, there's a lot of alcohol and it's widely accepted. As an 18 year old, I'd go to these big going away parties every Friday because, you know, it's a big squadron. There's always someone leaving or coming back.

[Jane Marie]

Also in Germany, like, there's no rules about drinking right where you were. Like, it's not the same as here.

[Aaron Barrow]

As soon as you can reach the bar in Germany. But it wasn't until I got out, really, that I found my first love. And that was always weed for me. It had the least amount of repercussions and it's a painkiller, which is nice. So I kind of started a long term love affair that it took a long, long time to come to terms with. And one of that reasons too is it's more societally acceptable than most drugs of choice.

[Jane Marie]

You know, it's not a story you hear very often.

[Aaron Barrow]

It isn't.

[Jane Marie]

Why is that?

[Aaron Barrow]

Because.

[Jane Marie]

Because it is societally acceptable.

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah.

[Jane Marie]

So is alcohol. And you hear about those stories a lot, but you don't hear a lot of stories. Why do you think we don't consider it like a problem?

[Aaron Barrow]

Well, it's not stigmatized like meth is stigmatized. It's not deeply stigmatized like opiate addiction is stigmatized.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah.

[Aaron Barrow]

It doesn't carry that same level of stigma in the recovery community. So if you go to an NA meeting and you talk about being addicted to weed, you usually get some pretty funny looks and probably more manufactured in my head than you actually get in real life. But sure, I guess everyone's seen that scene from Half baked where Dave Chappelle is in this meeting for addicts and he's talking about using weed. And then some guy from the audience is like, weed's not a drug. Also, weed is kind of still widely accepted in the AA community. Not widely.

[Jane Marie]

Well, that's Cali sober. Right? Like that's what we call it here.

[Aaron Barrow]

California sober. Yeah.

[Jane Marie]

Where you don't drink, you don't do other drugs. But weed's fine.

[Aaron Barrow]

And my comeback for that is alcohol has been considered a miracle medicine for like 100,000 years.

[Jane Marie]

You know, Jesus made it.

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah, yeah. And it also, it's good for pain, it's good for. It's an antibiotic, antiseptic. If you're trying to heal wounds, it's.

[Jane Marie]

But it can totally ruin your life.

[Aaron Barrow]

100%.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah, yeah.

[Aaron Barrow]

There's some people that can use it and I use it on a regular basis and it doesn't cause a lot of problems and it's, it does good things for them and that's cool. I just don't happen to be one of those people, you know.

[Jane Marie]

Foreign.

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[Jane Marie]

Well, when did ifs become a thing and how did it your life?

[Aaron Barrow]

So it is the creation of one Dr. Richard Swartz and he works a lot in the trauma community. He was working with folks with serious trauma after effects cutting diagnosis of multiple personality disorder. And the way it works is you have what's called yourself. It's your core you. And then you have all these other people that are living in your, in your psyche and they, they claim there's a lot of neurobiology that goes into this. So you've got your core you.

[Jane Marie]

How is this different from Freud with the ID and the ego and stuff like is it.

[Aaron Barrow]

It's really similar. It's. It's similar to a lot of different things.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah.

[Aaron Barrow]

That's sort of what makes it kind of dangerous and wonky. Yes. You have all these different personalities that live in your head.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah.

[Aaron Barrow]

And they're not personalities that you create to do the therapy, it's personalities that live inside of you. So you have your core, you, and then you have all these other personalities in you.

[Jane Marie]

One of them is your dad and one of them is your. Is that.

[Aaron Barrow]

Am I. No, no. Oh, sort of, yeah. But when you're a kid, say there's a part of you that expresses itself, like your genuine curiosity and you get into some sort of trauma based situation and one of your caregivers doesn't like this or is having a bad day and they yell at you, you better cut that out. Or, you know, it like gives you a really violent reaction. You're like, oh, my, I better lock up this part of myself because it puts me in danger. And people that grew up with a lot of abuse or neglect have a lot of these parts of their personality that are creative or excited or curious get locked away into psychic cages within your psyche.

[Jane Marie]

So you're suppressing these vibes within you?

[Aaron Barrow]

Yes, essentially, yeah. As you're suppressing these guys and they're called exiles and they're these people living in you.

[Jane Marie]

I don't like it.

[Aaron Barrow]

I know, right? But then you have these other people. So you have these people called managers, because the managers come in to take over. Because essentially, when you're little and you're in trauma, you can't take care of yourself. And so the managers come in to help you cope with this dangerous world by keeping the exiles under lockdown and keeping you out of your body, out of this horrible stuff that's happening. And they're still there and they grow up with you and they live in your psyche, and they're called managers, by the way. Dr. Schwartz was a family therapist. And so when he was creating this, that's where the family system came up with. Because he started to see all the things living in people's psyche, like the family structures that he was working with in his therapeutic practice.

[Jane Marie]

I have so many thoughts about this, but let's keep going for now. But this is. All right. Fascinating. What?

[Aaron Barrow]

Some of your managers have a really special role. They're called firefighters.

[Jane Marie]

No, stop naming things stupidly, Dr. Schwartz. But anyway, I know.

[Aaron Barrow]

So when you're extremely triggered by something that reminds you of a horrible thing that happened in your past, and one of your exiles wants to come out and talk about it. The firefighter's like, no. And they ring out, the lights are going off and they say, oh, we got to stop this. So they either get you out of your body somehow out of your mind, they get you to do substances, they get you to cut. They get you to whatever it is that's going to take you out of yourself so you don't actually have to interact with these exiles. They're going to get you out of here. He connects us with a lot of traumatic reactions, like disassociation.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah.

[Aaron Barrow]

So disassociation is a firefighter tool, you know, to get you out of here.

[Jane Marie]

Okay. So these. So this creates like a thing where you are cutting off from part of yourself, essentially.

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah, yeah. These firefighters are coming up and being like, you can't experience this. And so they do drugs or watch cartoons or do porn or do anything that makes it so that you don't have to feel or think or be a part of this experience.

[Jane Marie]

Right.

[Aaron Barrow]

And he goes as far to say that people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia have just like a heightened version of what everyone has in these. All these personalities that live inside of you.

[Jane Marie]

That seems ridiculous.

[Aaron Barrow]

We could talk about that a lot because I've worked with a lot of people with this diagnosis and I've worked in the peer community. The general approach to multiple personality disorder is to shut it down. And so they will give people who have this diagnosis, like some really heavy duty medication that just. It's meant to just shut all the voices off. The voices are the enemy. So here, take all of this medication that makes you flat and numb and causes a bunch of physical reactions. I was working with one guy who was court ordered to have a Risperdone shot, slow release every month. But it was making his ankles swell up to like these giant balloons. But he couldn't not take it because the mental health board at court ordered that he has a shot every month. Oh, to shut the voices off. So what usually happens is someone who experiences schizophrenia, the voices scare him or they do things that are troubling or they. For him, he would got really paranoid because he was isolated and cut off from people. And he ended up scaring one of the apartments maintenance guys where he lived. And that's what got him arrested and got him in the mental health court. And as a condition of his getting out of the penal system, he had to have these regular injections, you know.

[Jane Marie]

Yikes.

[Aaron Barrow]

And it's also how I ended up working with him because the other condition was he had to go to a treatment program. That's how he ended up in our program.

[Jane Marie]

Well, thank God that's the one he got sent to. Right.

[Aaron Barrow]

Oh, he's such a sweetheart. He said he'd been hearing the voices since he was a little kid. They whisper to him from the vents. He found him very comforting, something he used to use to help get to sleep at night. And, yeah, he always sticks out to me. You had this guy on that was talking about this word association therapy that he does. And what stuck out to me about that interview is it has a lot in common with cognitive psychology and cognitive psychology. And one of the reasons I liked it much when I was in college, it has one of the highest effectiveness rates when it comes to helping people with depression get better without taking a bunch of meds. And the way cognitive psychology works is you examine the things you say to yourself for all these negative interactions, and then you challenge those negative interactions. You flip the script, start speaking in a positive manner to yourself, and you start feeling better, less depressed. And so when you were talking to him, it was like, oh, well, that's just cognitive psychology kind of repackaged.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah, that's cbt, right? Cognitive Behavioral therapy, essentially.

[Aaron Barrow]

Not just cbt, but all of cognitive psychology is based on that premise that the things we tell ourselves affect our mood and affect our reality.

[Jane Marie]

And that's also a very popular thing right now is like the daily journaling or make a vision board or, you know, like affirmations, those sorts of things. Right.

[Aaron Barrow]

100%.

[Jane Marie]

Okay.

[Aaron Barrow]

Well, that's where Dr. Schwartz, I think, gets it right, is that. But the premise is that there's no part of you that's bad. It's all good. It's all there to help you. It's all there to protect you. It's there for a reason. His book is called no Bad Parts, and that's sort of his underlying premise is like, that exile is a good part of you. It needs to be let out and understood and shown compassion. That part of you that hurts you, to distract you or disassociate you. Is that how you say it? Dissociate. Dissociate you. There. Good. They're good.

[Jane Marie]

They're protective.

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah.

[Aaron Barrow]

And so instead of fighting these things, you get to know them and you nurture them, and you say, oh, protector, I, I, you know, you bring me. You taking care of me, and I want you to be in my life. I just need you to do something a little different because you're causing problems.

[Jane Marie]

I just want to clarify for the listener, this is not what people mean by multiple identities or something.

[Aaron Barrow]

Multiple personality disorder.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah.

[Aaron Barrow]

Well, I mean, this is where it goes off the rails for me, because I think it's really helpful. But the stance of the IFS community is that everyone has basically multiple personalities that live within them. And so it's not different because people with multiple personality disorder just have an exaggerated version of what everyone has naturally, and it's okay, and all those parts are okay and acceptable and good. It's just you need to learn to work with them, understand them, and then parent them from your true self. So there's the self that's the actual core you, and then there's all these other personalities living in you. And so the job of ifs is to help you nurture and get to know your different people so that yourself can be like the head of your family, so to speak, in a way that's healing.

[Jane Marie]

Oh, my God, I'm exhausted even listening to you describe that. I feel so tired all of a sudden. I just feel really tired.

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah, that's where it got exhausting. I did this other therapy with one of the practitioners where you personify things about yourself that you don't like. For instance, I have this thing that I do when I'm hurting and kind of scared where I throw up a big wall and then I start lobbing grenades over the wall. And so I personified that part of my personality as this guy called the mustache. He's like. Like one of those old comedy versions of a German soldier with a big bushy mustache and the pointy helmet. He's there to protect me, and he puts the wall up, and you know what I mean? And this was really helpful and healing for me because then I could work with him and I could be like, all right, buddy.

[Jane Marie]

It helps you see something as it's happening, right? And identify it as like, this is a thing. I don't want to be like, yeah.

[Aaron Barrow]

Ifs, in a way, is really beneficial because it does something really similar.

[Jane Marie]

Right.

[Aaron Barrow]

You know, it takes the parts of you that are scary or that you don't like or don't understand or trauma related. And it helps you to form a relationship and show that part compassion. And when you show that compassion, then you can reintegrate that part of yourself into a helpful mode versus a hurtful mode.

[Jane Marie]

So internal family systems. How does it enter the addiction recovery world? And then tell me how it shows up in that world.

[Aaron Barrow]

I. Well, working with people who are actively trying to hurt themselves because the addiction drives them to do horrible things to themselves and to the world around them. And watching people that you really get to care about go out into the world and just beat themselves up, and they come back and they're torn up and messed up, and they come in and you work with them and you help them to patch up their life and clean up and get healthy again. And then they graduate and they go out in the world and they do it all over again. It can be really painful and really maddening. And so I think that's why there's such a big push sometimes to create an us versus them kind of structure. In addiction treatment. It's me the person and you the person with problems, and I'm going to fix the person with problems. And that gives us permission to be wildly experimental in our approach. And we have to micromanage your life because if we don't, you are going to go out and kill yourself.

[Jane Marie]

You know what that sounds like? That sounds like Internal Family Systems 100.

[Aaron Barrow]

It really does.

[Jane Marie]

Coming up, Erin's experience as an IFS guinea pig. And don't forget, for commercial free episodes, go to thedream.supercast.com and sign up for the Dream Plus. Not only will you get commercial free episodes, but we're going to be able to reduce the number of ads everyone hears, so you're doing a good thing for your fellow listeners.

[Aaron Barrow]

Foreign.

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[Jane Marie]

But. And what's the problem?

[Aaron Barrow]

Well, Dr. Schwartz put this whole therapeutic thing together over like 40 years. And he's a doctor and he's got a lot of background, but I think where it goes off the rails is when you start to teach other people to do it.

[Jane Marie]

When you say teach other people to do it, you don't mean teach your clients, you mean teach practitioners.

[Aaron Barrow]

Sorry. Okay. This is just going to be my own experience. And this is why it's been hard to think about this and experience it and to go back to it, because it was really.

[Jane Marie]

I'm holding your hand as we do it.

[Aaron Barrow]

Okay, thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. So about five or six years ago, one of my colleagues brought this thing and he said, oh, I bought a subscription to the internal family systems training program. And it's like 200 and something bucks back then. Nope, it's six to eight weeks. It's a series of video based lectures that teach. Right.

[Jane Marie]

Can I tell you how much it is?

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah, please.

[Jane Marie]

It's $4,000 now.

[Aaron Barrow]

What? Get the F out of here. $4,000.

[Jane Marie]

Whoa.

[Aaron Barrow]

I was thinking it was like for the Level 1.

[Jane Marie]

That's just for the first level.

[Aaron Barrow]

Wow. Just for the first level.

[Jane Marie]

Just for the first level. That's level one.

[Aaron Barrow]

Oh, my God. Whoa.

[Jane Marie]

That's just one of the programs, but that's the program.

[Aaron Barrow]

So for money you can learn to be this internal family systems, either instructor or therapist. And so for a while, a couple of my colleagues were getting together at lunch and we were watching these videos about internal family systems.

[Dr. Richard Schwartz]

One way we do that is called unburdening. So the concept of parts carrying burdens, as defined as extreme beliefs and emotions that came into your system from the outside world through a trauma, through an attachment injury, something like that. And graft onto and attached to these parts is a key concept in ifs.

[Aaron Barrow]

So we start watching this series of videos and it's interesting because when Dr. Schwartz in the videos talks about addiction and IFS, I'm bringing it into my own experience with addiction. But I never felt like it hit the mark with my colleagues who aren't in recovery. It was pretty clear to me pretty quickly that they don't get it. They haven't sat through a thousand support groups. They haven't done this deep level work. They haven't had to rebuild their life. They haven't hurt the people that they love in that way. And so they don't get it, you know, And I'm not saying that as a negative. It's just they never built a fence, so they don't know what the hammer does. Really.

[Jane Marie]

Yeah.

[Aaron Barrow]

Some of them are in social work. Some of them are in the chaplain field. Some of them are just nurses that don't have any therapeutic training at all. And that's where it kind of goes off the rails for me. And there's one person I work with who takes a lot of alternative approaches to recovery. And the one where I was describing personifying the parts of yourself that you don't like, that's one of them. But. But she decided, okay, well, we're going to do this. I'm going to start teaching this. And so she has a class she's already running that she turns into an IFS class. So she has a large group of veterans who are in recovery, males and females, trauma histories, serious PTSD from being stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, like, really hardcore deep level trauma. So she's like, I'm just going to use IFS and all these veterans to fix them, and you, as a peer specialist, are going to join me. So I was there to set up the camera and set up the room and sit there in the corner and be quiet. And they made that very clear to me. And I was supposed to do ifs work in the room on myself as an example to the other veterans in the room on how to do it and what it looks like when it's done. And so not only am I doing this thing that's very intrusive, kind of bizarre, but I'm doing it on show to the other people in the room who are trying to recover from trauma.

[Jane Marie]

By using this tool, are you genuinely giving it a go in this moment?

[Aaron Barrow]

Oh, yeah, yeah. I created a whole pantheon of internal people that I was working with.

[Jane Marie]

You said created. You created them on the spot. You were kind of performing for this person.

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah. Coming from a Pentecostal Christian background, I'm really good at this. Right. Because, like, I grew up speaking in tongues. Have you ever heard of that?

[Jane Marie]

Burying the lead, Aaron. What?

[Aaron Barrow]

Sorry. Okay. I was speaking tongues when I was a kid, and I didn't realize till later in life I was just, like, inventing words and then stringing them together. And that was this foreign language that God had given me because I'm Pentecostal, you know, so I'm good at this stuff, you know, it's like, it's part of my growing up in a highly Christian family. So. So, no, I actually came up with several figures that live within me for my family. I have the mother figure who puts a blanket over me. She's the one that gets me high because she doesn't want me to feel anything, but she does it in a way that's warm and surrounding. Then there's the orator, the guy that speaks for me. Then there's the wild child, the caged kid who wants to just get out there and have tons of energy. But I locked him up because that was really problematic. When I was little, I used to get in a lot of trouble being, you know, loud, obnoxious. I'd be yelled at, spanked, and put in punishment. And so I had to lock this kid up. He was one of my exiles. I had the wolf. I had, like, all these, like.

[Jane Marie]

But you're coming up with this to satisfy this colleague of your. Like, this isn't something that you had thought of before.

[Aaron Barrow]

I was performing it for the group to satisfy this colleague.

[Jane Marie]

Got it.

[Aaron Barrow]

But I was doing it with a genuine desire to get better. You know what I mean?

[Jane Marie]

Oh, yeah.

[Aaron Barrow]

Like, I really embraced that. Sort of like, I embraced speaking in tongues as a kid. It's like, this is happening. This is living in me. I'm fixing myself by getting to know all these people.

[Jane Marie]

It's reminding me of recovered memories. Like, yes.

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jane Marie]

Which is the same thing. Like, you're recovering the memories to get better, but they might be manufactured.

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah.

[Jane Marie]

How would we. Let's. Let's. I want to give the audience this experience somehow. Maybe I can spend $4,000 and take a class.

[Aaron Barrow]

Oh, no, just go to YouTube. There's a number of videos where he is doing this work with people, and you can hear it in real time.

[Jane Marie]

Andrew huberman actually got Dr. Schwartz to do this on his podcast, the Huberman Lab.

[Aaron Barrow]

Would it be possible to just pose the questions.

[Dr. Richard Schwartz]

Sure.

[Aaron Barrow]

To them. Yeah. As an exercise that they could do in real time.

[Dr. Richard Schwartz]

Totally.

[Aaron Barrow]

For once, I'm going to be quiet for a little while, folks. And you are the lucky patient that gets to talk to Dr. Schwartz here.

[Dr. Richard Schwartz]

Yeah. And let me lead by saying, please don't do this. If you have fear, not doing it. But if you're interested in some inner exploration, then I'll lead you through some of the steps. So as you've been listening to our conversation, I'm speaking to listeners. You may be thinking about some of your own parts, particularly your own protectors. And if you can't think of any. Most people have a kind of critic inside or part that makes them work too hard, or a part that takes care of too many people. So I'm going to invite you to pick a protective part to try to get to know for a few minutes and just notice that inner voice or that emotion, that thought pattern, that sensation. Just focus on it exclusively for a second. And as you do that, notice where it seems to be located in your body or around your body. Some people don't find a location. Some people, they still sense it, but it's not. Not clear where it seems to be located. But if you do find it in or around your body, then just focus on it there. And as you focus on it, notice how you feel toward it. And by that I mean, do you dislike it and want to get rid of it? Are you afraid of it? Do you resent how it. It dominates? Do you depend on it so you have a relationship with this part of you?

[Jane Marie]

Because I imagine from someone who really believes in this, it's more tapping into correct. Like you're finally acknowledging and recognizing this stuff. But right now, as you're talking about it, I'm feeling like I would have.

[Aaron Barrow]

To pretend, yeah, that's where I kind of got stuck, right? Because I'm like, I'm doing this work that's supposed to make me better. I'm already feeling really offended that I'm not part of the group leadership. But I'm just sitting in the corner being the example and doing this really painful stuff for other people, sort of like as a show. And then what happened was one day we were in group and this is like several groups in. And one of the people in group asked her a question. Hey, what about this? And I knew the answer because I had just read this chapter a couple days earlier. Like, oh. I was like, I know exactly what you're talking about. I just read this chapter, and then I could tell she was really puzzled and had to really, oh, gosh, I don't know. And then she came up with this really loopy answer that had nothing to do with the system or the book. And I'm like, oh, I've read more of this book than she has. Not only am I here to demonstrate how it works, but she's teaching this as an expert to a bunch of people with severe trauma. And she has no idea what she's talking about. Not only that, but she has given herself permission to teach as an expert something that she doesn't understand or really fully grasp because she's the authority, they're the broken people. So obviously the authority can just impose themselves on the broken people this way.

[Jane Marie]

She has the certificate.

[Aaron Barrow]

She didn't even have a certificate. She'd only read like three chapters of the book. Like not even like the whole frickin book. She hadn't even watched more than two videos and she was teaching it as an expert. And that's what broke me.

[Jane Marie]

What's the downside for the folks in the world you work in? Like, what's the downside to treating them with this modality? Or what worries you? Cause you had the experience yourself, but like what worries you about other people?

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah, my experience is what worries me is that the people I work with who don't really understand it fully, who've only watched a few videos, read some of the book, are handing out the book to everybody and saying, here, you can fix yourself this way, read the book. But they haven't even read the whole book. And the book isn't for. The book is to tell you what it is and how to like maybe practice it. It's not, read this book and you can fix yourself. And even in the book, he says, you know, when you're doing this work, you can really have some psychological harm. He said there's people that get suicidal because their protector will jump up and try to kill them to protect them from the exiles, you know, or they'll, they'll relapse really hard.

[Jane Marie]

Wait, do you mean that they're handing the book out to the client?

[Aaron Barrow]

Yes.

[Jane Marie]

Oh, I thought you meant the books are being handed out to the practitioners.

[Aaron Barrow]

No, no, I'm talking about. But they bought like tons of these books and given it out to tons of clients to read themselves, which I think most of them don't because they get.

[Jane Marie]

And why are they buying tons of books?

[Aaron Barrow]

It's part of the wonky treatment system that is recovery community, you know.

[Jane Marie]

Uh huh, uh huh.

[Aaron Barrow]

But so they started giving everyone who took the class an IFS book. You're supposed to be doing it in the group, which is really painful because you're like trying to, you're supposed to like pull all these really wounded, hard to face parts out in front of everybody in the group while you're trying to learn how to do it from someone who doesn't know what they're doing. And then when I would talk to them, they'd be talking about their parts, like interacting with them, who's interacting with you. So it gets super complicated. I can't even express how maddening it can be. To know that this is really a bad idea, but knowing that there's a real harm here, but not being able to do or say anything about it was really, has been really challenging for the last several years.

[Jane Marie]

So then let's talk about how that could be dangerous for someone in recovery or in trauma therapy, or not dangerous necessarily, but unhelpful.

[Aaron Barrow]

I think it can be a helpful therapeutic modality with a trained practitioner in a one on one setting with the understanding that you're kind of manufacturing these personalities to work with this part of yourself and to find resolution. That would be like the helpful scenario, you know what I mean?

[Jane Marie]

But not necessarily sitting in a room with someone who took an online course as part of a multi level marketing life coaching scheme.

[Aaron Barrow]

100%. And not only the entire online course, but just a couple classes of the online course and part of the book. And now they're going to tell you how to do it as an expert. And you're going to try and do this work with some of the most challenging, traumatic parts of yourself, with someone who doesn't really know what they're doing in front of a group of people who are watching. And you're exposing some of the most raw, painful parts in front of a bunch of people. Ugh.

[Jane Marie]

It sounds just so absolutely difficult and stressful and like in watching this facilitator that, you know, have you seen people really, really connect to it?

[Aaron Barrow]

I have people that have talked about it a little, but I've never actually talked with someone who's been through that ifs class that's like, oh my God, it was amazing. Changed my life.

[Jane Marie]

So. No. Yeah.

[Aaron Barrow]

No. And it's funny, I always say that my brain's like a hamster wheel and when something gets stuck in there, it'll spin and spin and spin and spin and spin and spin and spin and it goes nowhere. But if I can take that thing out of my head and put it out in the world to somebody else, I can actually see it on the outside or even write it down, do some art around it and then it becomes something that I can work with. But if it's just stuck in that hamster wheel, ugh, it's not going anywhere, you know?

[Jane Marie]

Yeah. This ifs shit is like, how many more hamster wheels can I create?

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah, like a whole bunch of them. And let's just hang out with these guys all the time and talk about them all the time and talk about it with other ifs people all the time. And spend the rest of your life finding exiles and Nurturing the protectors and being your core self. He makes some pretty wild claims in the book, too. Like, one claim is he's, you can use this to cure racism.

[Jane Marie]

What?

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah, like, we live in a racist society, so the exiles are, like, built into us. Or these racist sides are built into us as kids and so we can actually work with our racist parts.

[Jane Marie]

Except for that, like, all right, well, yeah, everybody's kind of racist, but then also, like, the managers are often the racist parts.

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah, well, that's. He doesn't really go into a lot of detail. He just. He just leads you through an exercise in the audiobook where you imagine your racist part and you have a discussion with it.

[Jane Marie]

I don't want to get to know my racist exiles 100%. Or my racist uncle. Like, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to spend time with those people.

[Aaron Barrow]

Well, you'd be, like, racist part of me. Why are you exhibiting these racist qualities? Oh, I'm trying to protect you from this, this, and this.

[Jane Marie]

Well, this was great. Thank you so much.

[Aaron Barrow]

Yeah, you're welcome.

[Jane Marie]

Bye.

[Aaron Barrow]

Bye, guys.

[Jane Marie]

The dream is a production of Little Everywhere, made by me and Dan Gallucci. You can call us with your stories at 323-248-1488 or email us at helloitaleverywhere.com you can also go to thedream.supercast.com to sign up and get ad free episodes. The more of you who sign up, the fewer ads everyone hears.

[Aaron Barrow]

Love you. Bye.

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[Aaron Barrow]

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[Aaron Barrow]

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[Dr. Richard Schwartz]

Acast.com.

[Jane Marie]

Hey dream listeners. It's finally here. The dream plus where you can get every single episode of our show with no ads. It's $5 a month. It's the only tier. No commercials plus bonus content. This helps keep us independent and your contribution will help change the way every listener hears the Dream. We'll be able to take out the ads that we don't even know are getting put into this show, which is annoying to both you and us. We're also going to have an amazing discussion board. The Interface has it cataloged under AMA Ask Me Anything, but I don't love rules. So what I did is started a bunch of threads like Ask Dan and I Questions, General Chit Chat, just to make friends and stuff. And every time I've been in charge of a discussion board, I've made a tab called Women Be Shoppin and it's there and we're just gonna talk about what we bought and it'll be fun. That's thedream.s U-P-E-R C-A-S t.com super cast please, please go subscribe. It's five bucks. It's less than a latte if you live in Los Angeles. See you there.