Why is your therapy Internal Family Systems?
Have you ever suffered any trauma?
Right now I don't know how to tell...
Nobody likes to be associated with the word trauma... See? I detected disgust and surprise in her tone when she heard it. And yet, we all suffer trauma. Hasn't his father, his mother, his grandfather died...?
Wasn't it inevitable to see them die?
This statement tries to avoid precisely the pain caused by the deaths of someone he loved. Other times the trauma is suffering abuse from other children or adults; perhaps a serious injustice at work...
Aren't they also inevitable and shouldn't we face them, overcome them and mature?
Yes, but we have evolved to avoid suffering and the immediate mechanism for avoiding the pain of trauma is to suppress the memory of it or keep it as far away, as you are doing now, as we can.
Is our psyche that simple?
That is its mechanism and it is as essential as it is complex to unravel it in each case, because we develop behaviors and habits, of which we are not aware, so as not to relive the pain of the trauma and thus we can cause more pain to ourselves, and also to others.
For example?
When you drink a lot, when you work so many hours that you don't generate value or when... How many cups of coffee do you have today?
Too many, yes.
They are all simple ways to protect ourselves from pain, and there are other more sophisticated ones, such as the obsession with always having everything under control by not tolerating uncertainty or not tolerating the slightest criticism and being dependent on what others say about you.
How do you treat these patients?
I help them discover for themselves that they act this way to protect themselves from pain. And that therapy is for everyone and not just for those who have suffered a war or a crime or a rape. We all suffer traumas and we all have the capacity to overcome them.
And by becoming aware of the ultimate reason for our behavior, do we rectify it?
By becoming aware of the ultimate origin of this extreme behavior that harms us, we can find alternatives to gradually overcome the trauma.
How to accept that they raped you, that your mother died and you were a child, that...?
We have to learn to feel pain in a kind way...
Kind pain? Isn't it contradictory?
Accepting pain to feel it kindly is loving ourselves with our pain without adding more reproaches or guilt. And that is the first step to healing.
Love the pain?
Learn to interpret your traumatic experience without hatred, without self-hatred; without guilt... And thus dismantling the automatic mechanism that makes you fall into undesirable behaviors just to postpone the pain that the trauma still causes you.
Do we inherit traumas and guilt from our parents, grandparents, cultures...?
Before Freud and Jung tried to unravel those guilts and traumas that you cite, humans were already working on their personal and collective traumas with narratives, archetypes, symbolisms... Which were nothing more than ways of assuming pain in a kind way and without hatred.
Is that why Freud insists on our Judeo-Christian guilt complex?
And that is why our therapy is family-oriented. We have not created anything new: we just tried to explain it in a way that is understandable, ergo, useful and healing for the majority.
What do you hope to achieve by spreading it?
That by understanding these mechanisms we discover that we are not condemned to live with pain and trauma, but that we can overcome them and free ourselves from pain.
Do you involve the patient's entire family in therapy?
Because Dr. Dick Schwartz, my professor in psychiatry at Harvard, was a family therapist and, when treating youth anorexias and addictions, he discovered that he had to cure them with the family because the origin of the trauma was family. And he took the whole family to the consultation.
Can it be cured with words or pastillas?
I help patients heal with all the resources: pharmacological and with words, of course, starting with those necessary to achieve lucidity and self-knowledge.
Does reliving the trauma help you overcome it?
We want people to discover the energy within them and use it to reset their psyche with words... And sometimes, medication. But neuroscience shows that they will never overcome trauma from anger, hatred or frustration, but from love and acceptance.
