Hello everyone. My name is Deran Young. I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and I am honored to be here again talking about compassionate therapy, with this wonderful summit slash virtual workshop that you are attending. I just want to say that I think it's really important for us, as therapists and healers, to think about compassion, starting with ourselves, to really work on how kind we are to ourselves, how we speak nicely and lovely to ourselves, hopefully. If that's something you struggle with, you're not alone. Many of us do struggle with, inner critic voice, a critical voice inside of us. And that in itself can be a legacy burden. So the topic I'm talking about today is legacy burdens. You may know this topic, similar to what we would teach on in terms of intergenerational trauma or epigenetics, these are all closely related themes to legacy burdens. So I'm going to tell you what a legacy burden is. I'm going to help define it for you. And then we'll talk about some examples of legacy burdens, which I've already mentioned could be something like an inner critic. A strong or loud inner critic could be a legacy burden. So we're going to talk about the definition. We're going to talk about examples. And then I'm going to just help you explore more of the concept, how this is relatable in therapy, how it might show up with your clients, give you some examples of what it looks like, and then we'll show video that also illustrate some legacy burdens as well and start to give you some tools and some resources about how to work with legacy burdens, both in therapy and in your real life. So I'm going to start by defining legacy burdens, my own personal definition. It's kind of my favorite. It's really easy to remember, and I needed something to remind myself on a daily basis how common legacy burdens are. So my own personal definition is, it's the trauma that's often passed down or around. So this may be something that you taken in from your family, kind of, subconsciously or covertly or overtly. It could also be things coming in from society, cultural messages, and burdens in IFS are really seen as a belief, an emotional or a thought process. So something for the for example, you know, that I always mess things up. That could be something that our inner critic tells us often. And you may start to ask yourself, how long have I been telling myself this? How long has this been something that I've struggled with? If the answer is it seems like always, or it seems like this has been around forever for me, then that points in the direction of a legacy burden. Again. My definition of legacy burdens are things, beliefs, thought process, attitudes, feelings that are either passed down from somewhere or passed around in our culture and in our society. And the technical definition of legacy burdens. I want to read that just to ground us in something very concrete. According to my IFS, I help teach IFS classes, and I'm going to read this directly from the IFS training manual. And this is by Ann Sinko, who is one of our lead trainers in the IFS community. And it says legacy burdens and cultural burdens are negative beliefs, memories, emotions and energies, very important, energies passed down through the family line and other groups within a culture. These burdens are transmitted both overtly and covertly, the exiling of anything deemed unacceptable. Or shameful at any level in past generations can create a legacy burden. Parts of us absorb these energies, emotions and beliefs from family members, the larger culture and our ethnic group. So that's just to give you kind of some concepts and some framework to wrap your brain around as we have this conversation regarding legacy burdens. And I'm going to specifically talk about collective burdens, which we also may know as collective trauma. And I've been working with the founder of IFS, Dick Schwartz. And IFS stands for Internal Family Systems. So Internal Family Systems is a model that really looks at how our environment and our family plays a role in our daily life. In our personality and the way that we navigate life and in the way we relate with others. For example, I would say that one of the bigger collective burdens or legacy burdens amongst us as therapists and healers might be that we, really identify strongly with our caregiver role. That we may over identify with taking care of others at the cost of taking care of our own self. Right? Something else, some other legacy burdens that I've noticed around the mental health field or, professionals who are mental health, you know, mental health caregivers, if you will, is that we may often have a strong, people pleasing part that we want everyone to be happy with us. We may also avoid conflict. We may be conflict avoidant. We may hold our opinions or our thoughts to ensure others are comfortable. And that's also a legacy burden that's common amongst Women of Color, for example. That we've been conditioned to believe that our voices are not as important as other, you know, other ideas or other opinions when we're with other people. And so some of these things are, again, you know, it's the way that we've been conditioned over time. And if you ask someone, how long has this been true for you in your life or in your scenario? They may say something like, it's always been that way for me. Or I can't remember a time when it wasn't this way. That's how we can start to identify if this is truly a legacy burden. Another way that you might start to identify legacy burdens in your own life or with your clients, is to ask them if anyone around them growing up also struggle with this. If we can start to see other examples of this in their external environment that may play, a key indicator in noticing that it could be a legacy burden. So, another like I said, common, legacy burden theme is collective trauma or collective legacy burdens. And this has been my particular work around exploring things that many, many, many people on the planet are struggling with. I've already mentioned certain career fields or communities. I'm retired military. I was a therapist in the military. So I started to explore some of the common themes in the military. Legacy burdens that I noticed amongst military members or veterans, if you're working with that population could be something like, poverty. A lot of us, myself included, join the military to escape poverty. And those are beliefs or attitudes or cultural thoughts that tend to stay with us for a very long time. And in fact, there's a book that really explains the legacy burden of poverty. And it's called "The Cognitive Framework for Understanding Poverty" by Ruby Payne. It's one of my go to resources for understanding how our thought processes are shaped by our experiences with poverty. And so many people in the military, many people who've experienced poverty will sometimes have a mentality of lack or scarcity. And so that's something to keep in mind. And in the book "Cognitive Framework for Understanding Poverty," the author talks a lot about how these thoughts are passed down unknowingly, that we pass these down to our children. We pass these on to people that we love in our family or in our environment. And one of the things that really was kind of surprising to me is that if your grandparents experienced poverty, if they grew up in poverty, you have a high likelihood of having these same beliefs and patterns and thoughts in your way of navigating life, even if you've never experienced poverty yourself. So these things are passed down again without us intentionally, you know, giving them on our passing them, passing them on, but just in the way that we've learned to to be and exist in the world, the way that we've kind of restrained ourselves or restricted ourselves based on what our situation was in the previous gen, or what our family's situation could have been in a previous generation. And again, when we go back to collective legacy burdens, we know that there are four main collective legacy burdens here in the United States of America. Things that most, if not all of us are carrying with us. And if we're not aware of it, we can easily pass them down and around. So those four main collective legacy burdens are racism, patriarchy, materialism, and individualism. And I really like working with that, that understanding in terms of belonging. Many of you know that I've been honored to work with Brené Brown for many years around DEI work and social justice, and she's really taught me a lot around deshaming the process of unlearning legacy burdens. As we are talking about compassion and therapy and compassion for ourselves, it's really important to think that when we're learning, learning is very vulnerable. And when we're unlearning, I like to think that that's even more vulnerable. It feels more emotionally exposing. It feels more uncertain. If this is all that we've known and we want to move towards something more liberating, something more inclusive, there's a lot of unknowns in that, right? And the whole definition of vulnerability is emotional exposure or uncertainty. Those are two of the main elements of vulnerability. So when we're asking our clients to be vulnerable, we have to also make sure that we're willing to do that ourselves. And looking at legacy burdens can be a very vulnerable process. So in terms of my own system and learning, I've really had to start with self-compassion to honor myself that the experiences I've had have shaped me. And there are things that I can learn positively from that, and things that I can pass down in a very beautiful way. And there are things that I might need to look at and update according to what's happening in my world today. For example, as a Black woman who was in the military, I can say that I've experienced all of the legacy burdens that I believe, most of us do. They're kind of like the water that we swim in, right? That the racism, the patriarchy, the materialism and the individualism, we don't even notice it because it's been so normalized, that these things are typically things we don't even have to talk about. They're just, they just are there. They just exist in our in our society. And, I was once asked a question, which did I experience more in the military, did I experience more patriarchy or sexism, or did I experience more racism? And it was almost asking, you know, would I allow myself to be a woman in the military because my race is not something that I can hide, and my gender isn't necessarily something that I can hide either. But these are things that were really tapped down. That were minimized. These identities, especially when I was navigating one, you know, a culture or an organization where those identities weren't necessarily always welcomed. Right? In the military, our physical uniform is actually to make us all blend in, to make us all appear to be one and uniformed. Right? Unified, if you will. And so the idea that the very uniform that we're wearing is typically made for men, not for my particular body type, is patriarchy. But again, I have been so normalized in that system that it was just the status quo. It was just what we did to get along, and to go along, if you will. So I very rarely talked about, you know, things that seemed overly feminine, like motherhood or breastfeeding or even your monthly period. Those are not things, those are not conversations that you typically would have, at work in general in our society, but especially not in a male dominated industry such as the military. Now and quite opposite of that, and I would say maybe a polarization is that I did become very masculinized. I was very much identified with the strong parts of me, with the fierce parts of me, with the quote unquote, "bad ass parts of me," for lack of a better language. And so much that, I kind of started to feel like my strongest weakness was being strong, and so that the difficulty of allowing myself to be vulnerable, allowing myself to feel compassionate towards myself, about the struggles that I had or the difficulties that I've had over the years. And so self-compassion can be a wonderful antidote to shame. I think it's very important and very powerful, especially when we talk about things that have been so normalized. One of the acronyms, I have a lot of acronyms that I borrowed from 12 steps. And one of the acronyms that I love that I borrowed from 12 steps is "DENIAL", and it stands for I "Didn't Even Notice I Am Lying." So for all of those years, if someone asked when, you know, when someone asked me, which is more profound in my experience, racism or patriarchy, it was like, well, what do you mean? You know, if I'm not allowing myself to be all of who I am, then it can be a protective mechanism to not allow the pain or the hurt inside, to kind of filter out some of the, the, marginalization, quite frankly. That was happening to me every day. So that's what legacy burns are really underneath all of it is that we have these, parts of ourselves that help us navigate the world in a way where it feels less painful. That these are protective armors, if you will, like a suit that we can put on and not be as sensitive or as influenced by the culture, if you will. And in order to, you know, keep putting one foot in front of the other. These are things that you might not even think about. It's like, why would we think about that? Now it's difficult to think about these things. So again, self-compassion is a very important tool. And any IFS work, that's one of the things that we really heavily emphasize. But especially in terms of legacy burdens. Things that have been so conditioned in our society that they aren't talked about. Racism isn't talked about often. Patriarchy. It's like, oh, it's like if you bring that up as a woman, it's as if you're you've said a bad word, for many. For many of us. Materialism. That was another one that, that was so normalized to me after joining the military and getting two master's degrees and becoming a highly educated professional. I didn't want to talk or think about how I might be benefiting from classism. Right? Of course, I feel like I earned, you know, my way up and I worked really hard to get where I am. And there are people who don't have access to the things that I have access to simply because I was born in the United States of America. I was, you know, I had learning difficulties, but I had all the resources I needed to succeed in school in order to go to college, in order to get a degree and to be where I am today. And not everyone has the same access that we have, right? Not everyone has free education. I've been to countries. I've lived in countries actually, where girls are deemed less important. And so they're not taught, to value education. And they're not given education opportunities at the same rate of the boys. And so, you know, this perspective, being able to see things and know that this is my experience, this is not the experience of everyone. I think that's another great step to be able to take and to be able to see that our eye lens has been influenced by our own identity and our own experiences. And so, when we're looking at belonging and how we can really include more of different parts of our society into our experience, I think that last legacy burden of individualism is also important to consider. That we live in a society that really pins us against each other, for lack of better words, and that we're told that everyone is kind of on their own, and you have to figure things out for yourself. For example, many of our clients and myself included, when we're diagnosed with a mental health disorder, it can often feel like something has, you know, that we failed something or something's wrong with you, that you're broken or you're damaged in some way, and that society no longer has a use for you, that you know, you're less valuable in our society if you have some type of disadvantage or a different need. So those types of individualistic ideas and concepts that you're on your own with your own problems, you have to figure it out for yourself can be really difficult for folks to unpack in therapy, right? If this is the way they've lived their most of their life, for example, myself coming out of the military with a diagnosis of PTSD and depression, I really feel, especially as a therapist, that I should know, quote unquote, "should," I should know how to fix this on my own. It was really difficult for me to ask for help. That's another common legacy burden in the military that, you know, when you're taught to be strong, how do you learn to allow yourself to be weak or vulnerable? And so these are, some of the legacy burdens that I am sharing in my life that I have been affected by. And I believe that we're all affected by the four main legacy burdens in America. Again, those are racism, patriarchy, materialism, individualism. So sometimes I'm often asked about how patriarchy shows up in our society. And it's really "cis" "het" patriarchy. So "cisgendered heterosexual patriarchy." And what that means is that we rely on resources and benefits and privileges that are tied to for myself, being cisgendered, heterosexual, and being identified as the same gender that I was born as. Right? For people who don't identify as the same gender they were born as, they are typically met with more barriers, more difficulties in navigating our society. For example, if you're born as a woman and you identify as a woman and you're heterosexual and you want to get married, for most of society you could there were no legal ramifications around, you know, whether or not you can get married as a cisgendered, heterosexual woman. And those are things that I have benefited from. So for the hundreds and hundreds of years that that privilege has existed, it's made it normal in my life for me to be seen as, you know, someone who could get married and hold a license, a marriage license in a court of law. And because it's so normalized, I may not think about all of the people who don't fit into that category, who are not having that same privilege or the same power and authority legally that I carry just because of how I was born and how I identify. So these are some of the things that, again, I want us to get curious about also. So we do have a concept in IFS called the "Eight C's." I'm only gonna share three of those with you today, because we don't have a whole lot of time. But the three main Eight C's that I think are important when we're looking at legacy burdens are "compassion," of course, the compassion therapy, compassion therapy series. So of course we're going to talk about compassion. Number two would be "curiosity." We want to be curious about these concepts from a place of open heartedness. Hopefully we can get to a place of non-judgment and especially with your clients when they're sharing these sensitive parts with you. You want to really lean in with the open hearted, idea of what's possible, that anything might be possible, that we want to just learn and explore, without the limitations of judgment. So that's curiosity. And then three, "connectedness," really understanding that what happens to me has a ripple effect. And it's related and connected to what happens to other people in our same system. It is a systems theory. IFS, Internal Family Systems. It looks at how our family and our environment growing up lives inside of us. Our society included, but also how we are connected to an external system within our environment as well. Whether you look at that from a cultural perspective, societal perspective or even being connected to this whole planet. That's, the more that I do this work, the more I'm able to see that every action that I take is, is an action that has an impact on the planet. And often I, I hear a lot of people say, oh, well, I have good intentions. What about intentions? You know, in terms, racism or patriarchy or materialism, and individualism. As a middle class, educated woman, I can have great intentions for, you know, giving back to folks who are, less resourced. Or I can have great intentions for wanting to pay it forward to help with climate change and things of that nature. But I have to also consider the actual impact that I'm having. And so that's what made me want to get curious about these parts of me that I have based on either my identity or based on just how I navigate the world. And so as we've been talking about legacy burdens, I've been giving you a few examples. I also want to share how this might look for your clients, in therapy. And so one of the legacy burdens that I really struggle with, coming from my own family, was that, being a Black woman, a darker skinned Black woman with low self-esteem. And again, these are common themes that I've noticed in our community. It could also be a lot of folks having shame around growing up in poverty, coming from a marginalized community, coming from a community of poverty. These are things that I struggled with myself in therapy, and because it was so shameful, it could be almost really, almost impossible to begin to speak about these things, which is why we really need an open hearted space. We need the lack of judgment. We need the connectedness. We need to feel the empathy in order for those things to start to rise to the surface. And as a therapist, you can only meet your clients as deeply as you've met yourself. Is what I always say. So if you have these parts of yourself that are needing attention from you and are wanting to be witnessed, wanting to be heard and seen, needing some space to be seen and heard, then maybe that might be an idea for you to maybe engage in your own work around your own legacy burdens. And so, as you start to hear me talking about this, or even we're going to play a video here shortly. When you see the video, get really curious. There's another "c word," right? Get really curious about how these parts are activated inside of you. Because we know with legacy burdens there's a connection between all of us. If one part of the system is suffering, it's really difficult for another part of the system to truly feel liberated. And we're all in the same system together, whether we, you know, are able to see that or not. I know for me, there was a part of me because of all my legacy burdens initially that couldn't see, didn't want to see how connected I was to other people, especially not people who held the privileges and the power that I yearned for so much. And so you're going to see that in the video that we're going to show. You're going to see how these legacy burdens are impacting children, regardless of race, that, yes, it has a detrimental impact to the Children of Color. But it's also you're going to see a very detrimental impact to the White Children as well. And what I say about that is because we're all connected, right? If you if you really, truly believe that we're connected in our humanity, that we're also connected in our healing. And so also what that means is, you know, when something's happening in our system and our, our parts have to choose a side, a polarized part of the system that says you have to identify this or you have to identify it this way, that there's typically no middle ground when it comes to a polarization. And all of these things that I've listed as legacy burdens are polarizations. Racism is a polarization that about White body supremacy over People of Color. Patriarchy is a polarization of men being more important. Men identified cisgendered, heterosexual men being most important, more important than anyone else, whether that's women, people who identify as non-binary or someone who does not identify as heterosexual. So that's a polarization, for example, and not being able to identify and acknowledge all of the things that happen in the middle. Right? Materialism is a polarization between poverty and the wealthy. And again, the folks in the middle are also impacted because they aren't seen and they aren't acknowledged. Individualism is really about us being all secluded on our own and not wanting to involve others, versus everyone being completely together, having the same amount of resources and having no privacy. So somewhere in the middle of these legacy burdens is where we want to find ourselves. And naturally, because our society splits us into two different categories of extremes, we can have a tendency to be on one side or the other. And so for another example of a polarization is that I grew up believing that kind of Black people were all on their own. We had to figure out all of our own problems that, the White people in our city didn't really care about the suffering of Black people or poor people. That was what I honestly believed in my system, that I carry this this belief around folks having, you know, a lack of empathy, and not being maybe impacted by the suffering of others. And what I've known to be true over and over again is when I bring these up, of course, as human beings, we do feel something when someone's suffering, whether or not we acknowledge that feeling is where the legacy burden, the shaming [pushing hands down] and the exiling, the pushing away of our true natural human emotions. That's really what legacy burdens does to all of us. And so you're going to see an example of that in this video. And we're going to go ahead and play the video now. There are lots of different colors for skin. I have questions for you about these pictures of different children. After I read the question, I want you to point to the picture that fits the story. Are children colorblind in America? Show me the smart child. Show me the mean child. Can you show me the dumb child? Show me the nice child. Is bias measurable even at an early age? Why is she the bad child? Because she's Black. Black. And why is he the ugly child? Cause he's people like me. White. Why is he the dumb child? Because she has dark Brown skin. Why is she the bad child? Because she makes fun of everybody else's skin color. How much do kids learn from what they see and hear from adults? Show me the child who has the skin color most adults like. And show me the child who has a skin color most adults don't like. These are questions that we, along with CNN's Soledad O'Brien and a team of psychologists hired by CNN, spent months investigating through tests, interviews with children and their parents. They are questions that have been asked for decades. The first doll study ignited controversy in the 1940s, when psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark pioneered studies in the effects of segregation in schools by asking African-American kids to choose between black and white dolls. The so-called doll test found black kids overwhelmingly preferred white over black. Those results were at the center of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown versus the Board of Education that desegregated American schools. Now, with the first African-American president, and nearly 60 years after segregation was overturned, we wondered, where are we today? How do kids see differences in race? What we discovered might shock you. But first, how we got there. Skin color, child skin color. Okay. Yeah. We asked renowned child psychologist and University of Chicago researcher Doctor Margaret Beale Spencer to design a pilot study for CNN and analyze the results. Our children are always near us, you know, because we are society and what we put out there, kids report back. You ask the question, they'll give you the answer. Spencer's team tested more than 130 kids in eight schools with very different racial and economic demographics. Half of the schools were in the north, half in the south. Oh. Nicely done. While the country is much more diverse today than in the 1940s, the children in this project are from two age groups and two races, White and Black. To better allow comparison to the original doll study. Four and five year old children were asked a series of questions about these images. Nine and ten year old children were asked questions about the same images as well as this color bar chart. The test led us to three major findings. First, White children as a whole responded with a high rate of what researchers call White bias, identifying the color of their own skin with positive attributes and darker skin with negative attributes. Show me the dumb child. Dumb child. Okay. Why is she the dumb child? Because she has Black skin. Show me the mean child. Why is he the mean child? Cause he's Brown. Show me the bad child. Why is he the bad child? Because he is Black. Okay, show me the ugly child. Why is he the ugly child? Because he's Brown, Black. Show me the child who has the skin color most adults like. And show me the child who has the skin color most adults don't like. Show me the child who is the skin color most children like. Show me the child who has the skin color most children don't like. Show me the child who has the skin color most girls want. Show me the child who has the skin color most girls don't want. The questions that got overwhelmingly White biased answers. Show me the dumb child. About 76% of the younger White children pointed to the two darker skin tones. Show me the mean child. About 66% of the younger White children pointed to the two darkest skin tones. Show me the child who has the skin color most children don't like. Again, about 66% of the younger White children pointed to the two darkest skin tones. Show me the bad child. More than 59% of the older White children pointed to the two darkest skin tones, but some White children did have more race neutral responses. So could you show me the good looking child? So what are you thinking? I know you pointed to them all, but tell me what you're thinking. I'm thinking that I do not care if they are Black or White, Mixed or any kind of race. I think that it matters who they really are. So as you saw on the video, one of the examples of how often race bias enters children at very young ages. One of the the prime examples was 66% of the children chose the darker skinned doll to identify the mean child. And so whether or not we want to acknowledge or own that, that is a part of our society. That is a real part of our legacy burden that's in this country. It shows up in many different ways. For example, it shows up in police brutality. It shows up in messaging around stereotype. It shows up in who's acceptable and who we embrace as our friends or our neighbors. Often we have a lot of, curiosity is naturally about people who are different, but we're often taught to to shame ourselves for those, those curiosities or often told to just forget about that, to not embrace those, those natural curiosity that children have. And when we're not talking about things, I recently had a friend of mine who said, why can't we just not talk about racism? Can we just, if we don't talk about it, won't it go away? And I thought that was really interesting. Because I know that nothing I've ever worked on has ever just stopped happening because I didn't talk about it. But it leads me to a concept that, is very important in terms of legacy burdens that we actually see what we see, instead of a natural belonging that we have and that we're wired for as human beings because we're wired for connection. What we see is this dishonest harmony that we want folks to get along for the sake of getting along, even if how we feel inside is not the actual external, reaction to that. If we're not truly honoring what's inside of our hearts and what we're carrying around with us, then what you see in the world, if we are playing out, you know, this scenario of dishonest harmony is as if we are telling ourselves that the things that have happened never happened. It's that denial concept again. So when we don't talk about things, there typically is a shame that builds up around it because we're not being able to say all that we we need to say, the pain that we feel is not witnessed or acknowledged, and it causes problems for the whole entire system. So hopefully that's what you saw in the video, and you were able to start to get curious about the parts of you that might have thoughts or beliefs around what you saw in that video. And, so I also want to give you another tool to identify the parts of you that might be struggling with legacy burdens, or the parts of your clients that are showing up, and you might start to see them really wanting to work on these things and needing some tools to help them navigate that process. So I'm going to show you what we call in the IFS world, we call it the "Six F's." And I love this website. This is an IFS therapist who does a lot of education, online and in social media to kind of help folks start to work with their parts, whether they have an IFS therapist or not. This is something that I believe even a non-IFS therapist can really utilize to help their clients begin to identify some of these part that have been covered up or pushed down or pushed aside for many, many years, maybe even for generations. So we call it the "Six F's," and it's how we work with these protective parts of us that navigate the world that aren't really our true selves. We tend to have these, adaptive, childlike parts of us that are doing an adult job, but not quite equipped or prepared to do an adult job. What I tell folks is to think about the first 10 to 12 years of life and how your environment may have shaped you, and your environment includes your family of origin. So there are two types of parts, but we won't get into the details of that today. What we really want to talk about is the "Six F's." And so as you start to explore your system and something, anything that doesn't feel like it's coming from a place of compassion or curiosity or from a place of connectedness, it may be a part that we need to build a relationship with. And so the "Six F's" I'm going to say, what they are is "Find", "Focus", "Flesh out", "Feel toward", and "Befriend", and last but not least, "Fear." A lot of parts hold fears. And what we want to ideally do at the end of the day is get in touch with those fears to see what needs to be heard, what needs to be seen, and what needs to be witnessed. And many of us grew up in families where our parents used shame as a learning tool. So I know in my family shame was a very big tool that was used for learning. And it's an ineffective tool. When we shame ourselves into one part of ourselves, we're not allowing us to be who we fully are, and it really can diminish some of our mental well-being. And so first, you want to find that part of you. As you were watching the video, maybe you want to go even go back and watch the video and start to be curious about what parts of you are coming up, what parts of you are wanting attention, what parts or energies or thoughts or beliefs feel just not clear. Things that need to be, that we need to be with. So you want to find those parts of yourself. In IFS as we often say, parts are located in or around your body. So if you can get in touch with a sensation or a somatic aspect of this part, that's really great. It's a great way to continue the work. And then as we start to focus on that part, so for example, I have a part that lives in my shoulders and I've been getting in touch. That's the strong part of me that got me through the military that, you know, was able to muster up and do whatever it took to get through grad school while deployed. I was actually, I was, in my first master's degree program while I was deployed to Iraq. And so those shoulder parts, they've been carrying a lot of weight, a lot of belief around these, this is what we must do, a lot of forcefulness. So being getting to able to focus on that part and getting a little bit more clear about the beliefs that that part holds, the energies, the emotions, the sensations that's focusing. And then that leads us into fleshing it out. To get as clear as we can about what does it, how this part shows up. Especially the energy. I'm going to keep saying energy, at the energy that it holds. It could be, you know, attention for my shoulder part, it's attention. When I went to acupuncture, I was informed that typically if we carry weight or, physical or emotional weight on our shoulders it's the weight of the world. So the outside world kind of infiltrating onto my psyche, onto my nervous system and me not necessarily knowing how to have boundaries with that. Many of us will call ourselves an empath if you're a therapist or a healer. And what I've now understood, from the IFS model, is that I have a big empathy part, have an empath part, but it's not most of who I am actually. I am a naturally loving, connected person, as I believe we all are. That's our natural essence and our natural sense. But it's also very natural. Even animals have boundaries around what they allow to come into their psyche, what they allow, how close they allow things to get to them. If it feels dangerous, they're gonna, you know, put up their protective mechanisms to defend themselves. So fleshing out what feels natural or what feels in alignment with our values, what feels like an actual core part of ourselves versus the judgments that we may have about that. I had a judgmental part about being weak. I had a judgmental part about not being empathetic. What would happen if I felt like I wasn't attuning to someone else's needs or emotions? So that leads towards how did I feel towards those things, right? If it feels forced, if it feels like there is no options or choice. That's probably a part. And it's maybe closely related to a legacy burden. So we start to notice the reactions. As you were watching that video, what reactions? What sensations? How would that part want to be expressed? What's the goal of that part? What is the true deepest desire that that part has for us? And then when we, when we start to get the feelings toward that part down, right? Once you feel curious, connected and compassionate towards that part, you may start to actually befriend that part. And what I've noticed that there tends to be parts that we shame and judge ourselves for, and often for my own example. Things that pay close attention towards, i.e. weakness. Right. Any parts of me that felt like it, it highlighted a weakness or something that, I struggled with. Because of individualism, I felt like if I had a weakness or a struggle, that something was wrong with me and I was broken. That I needed to be just like everyone else and, you know, have everything figured out. And I actually say, you know, when we're shaming ourselves, we're not befriending ourselves because we're not allowing ourselves to be fully human. And we all experience shame. Shame is a very social emotion. And my definition for shame is actually another acronym it stands for: "I Should Have Already Mastered Everything." So when we're shoulding on ourselves and we're not defending ourselves, you will notice that it is difficult to find out what that part is actually trying to do for us. In IFS we believe, it's a very strength focused model, we believe that all of our parts have good intentions, that there are no bad parts. You may have actually even, been aware of a book that was written by Dick Schwartz, who was the founder of IFS. He has a book out called "No Bad Parts," because we truly believe that all of our parts have good intentions. The impact. Right. We talked about intention versus the impact. The impact may be very detrimental, but once we start to befriend this part, we can figure out why it's trying to do what is trying to do for us and why it's going about that in that particular way. We can also find out if it feels like there are other options, are other ways of being, and start to explore that. And last but not least, the sixth F is fear. Find out what that part is afraid would happen if it didn't do what it's doing. So for me, if my part didn't work really, really hard, if my, if I didn't carry the weight of the world, if I didn't, you know, people please and have uber amounts of empathy for everyone and really self-sacrifice. If I wasn't doing all of those things, then my, my, that part of me feared that I wouldn't be successful in life, that I wouldn't get my needs met, that I wouldn't be taken care of. Right? So it's doing, these parts are working really hard for our good and really hoping to bring some kind of harmony inside of our system. So that's just a tool that I would love for you all to experiment with. Maybe with your clients, maybe with yourself, your own personal work. It's been very helpful for me in my life, professionally and personally. And, just to wrap up this session today, because, I hope that I've given you something that you can take with you and continue to work on, through the video, through the Six F's a and by exploring this topic of legacy bathrooms today. Like I said, the four main legacy points that I emphasize and do work on are racism, patriarchy, and individualism and materialism because I see so many of us struggling with this. And so if you're looking for a place to start, that is a great place. Collective trauma is something that none of us want to identify with, but it is here. It is present most of the time for us. You may even start to look at your own privileges and identities around privilege and power. For example, me looking at my middle class where I am now versus growing up in poverty and seeing how I had so many parts still stuck in poverty, even though that's not where I am today. Right? I had parts for many, many years. After I purchased my home, I still had parts that feared being homeless, because those were things that the child like part of myself really struggled with. The fear of being evicted. The fear of not having our resources, such as running water, food and shelter. If you have clients who, again, if their grandparents even struggle with poverty, they may have shifted their system to navigate the lack of or the scarcity of resources. And that's important for us to, to keep in mind. And so even ourselves as therapist, often what I see is that we have parts around scarcity too, that we don't, we feel like if we have resources, then maybe, you know, we aren't deserving or that we need to sacrifice all of ourselves to be a "good person," quote unquote. And what I tell folks is that even good people have bad days, right? That I like to just normalize that we're all good people, we're all doing our best. We're all trying to navigate life in the way that we know how. And that non-judgmental place is where you can do a lot of great work with legacy burdens. Is that any of the places that you're judging yourself or shaming yourself inside, that those are the places that we really need to highlight, emphasize, and work on before we can share our full selves with other people. And so, those are some of the things that I've noticed. Like I said, I, I work a lot with therapists. And these are some of the things that I, the scarcity part is, is very common because many of us either grew up in poverty or emotional poverty, for lack of better words that, you know, for many, many generations. And on the planet, and especially in the Western world, children were to be seen and not heard. Right. And in my family, it wasn't even safe to be seen. Many of us, we, you know, got really good at hiding ourselves. And taking care of others can be a way of hiding parts of yourself, right? Being with the pain of others instead of being with our own pain can be really convenient. Can give us a lot of kudos in society as a good person, but good people are allowed to have bad days, right? And so, even if you're struggling with the idea of taking care of yourself, the idea of taking more space for yourself, or here's a real big legacy burden for a lot of therapists, making more money for yourself. [Laughing] Right? Like, if you're really struggling with the fact that you do need resources, that you deserve to have resources and you know enough, you deserve abundance for the work that we do. And that's also tied to the legacy burden of patriarchy, because emotional labor for, I would say, all of time that I, that I'm aware of, and especially women's labor has been so devalued in our society. You know, it's been undervalued through pay through time, allowing time for emotional labor. Allowing resources for emotional labor could be a legacy burden that many of us struggle with. So these are all things to just start to think about, not from a place of judgment or condemnation. But just knowing that these parts of us are really good in helping us figure out what's expected in our society. And they may just be on autopilot, that they don't know another way. But if you think about a small inner child, a child inside of us who still needs our attention, who still needs guidance and still needs softness, or maybe, you know, didn't get the nurture and the care that they really, really deserve. These are the things that we have to be with for ourselves, in our in our own time, so that they know those parts of us know that they are important and that they do matter. So in conclusion, my suggestion is just to keep doing the work, to stay in it, to maybe build community of people who can help support you along this journey. To not go at it alone. The legacy burden of individualism says that we need to do things on our own, and that it's really all on us to take care of our own problems. But I encourage you to create a community, or get with like minded professionals and people who can support you on this journey. That there is no shame in not knowing, unburdening is possible and it's real. That you know, all the work that I have done has not been in vain. And I wish the same for all of you.