A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
We're talking a lot this month about managing stress from politics to climate, to personal challenges. Today, we're focusing on one strategy that may help you get to the root of your stress and understand yourself a lot better. NPR's Allison Aubrey joins us. All right, so understanding ourselves better sounds very, very good. So how do you get to the root of stress?
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Yes. Well, you know, sometimes the source of stress seems like it's right on the surface, especially when you're going through a tough situation. Now, that was the case for Seth Kopald. He lives in Michigan, and about 15 years ago, he was going through a divorce.
MARTÍNEZ: All right, let's hear from Seth.
SETH KOPALD: For me, the most challenging thing about the divorce was thinking about what will happen to my kids, how much time will I have with them and what will happen to them when they find out? I started to get very anxious and actually started having panic attacks.
AUBREY: He remembers this one night. He was driving home, A, and he had to pull over suddenly. He was short of breath. It was then that his therapist actually recommended an approach that he had never heard of. It's called Internal Family Systems - or IFS for short. And he says it led him to kind of a powerful new way to cope.
KOPALD: And I remember this moment when it really hit me that the anxiety I've been feeling, the intensity, was one aspect of me, but not all of me. And in that moment, I felt this calm come over me.
MARTÍNEZ: All right, I'm hooked. Internal Family Systems - IFS. What is it? What do you do?
AUBREY: So IFS is a type of therapy. It's based on the idea that we all have multiple parts within, and the goal is to get to know all these parts or voices. So let me ask you, A, have you ever felt torn, say, like, amid a big decision or a tough situation, you think, oh, part of me thinks I should go this direction, but part of me says, no, you know, hold back?
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah, today. At least three or four times to three or four different decisions, yeah.
AUBREY: Yeah, it turns out this is normal. I mean, many of us have this part-of-me language in our everyday life. So the basic premise here of IFS is that we have these parts, some of them competing, and that's what Seth Kopald realized.
KOPALD: So I had a worrier part, a critic part. And they're all kind of, like, teaming up. And I think partially that's why, like, the panic attack often would happen, because this gets so loud.
AUBREY: Now, IFS has been around about 40 years and there are some studies to show it can be effective, though the field is calling for more research in part because it's become very popular. I spoke to the founder, a psychologist named Richard Schwartz. He told me Seth Kopald's story is very relatable.
RICHARD SCHWARTZ: When we're rejected or somehow a relationship gets broken, the parts of us that are most hurt by that we tend to want to get away from because we don't want to feel that pain.
AUBREY: We just want to forget about it, you know, just move on.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. If I don't think about it - right? - it can't hurt me.
AUBREY: (Laughter) Right.
MARTÍNEZ: I mean, so that's not the right thing to do here?
AUBREY: Well, with IFS, people are told to actually lean into this pain. And this can be very intense at first. When Seth Kopald started the process, he recalls a kind of nervousness throughout his body and anxiety-provoking images.
KOPALD: So I had parts showing me, like, old movies about divorce and showing me, like, horrible situations that could happen. And I had other parts that would, like, criticize me for anything I contributed to make this divorce happen.
AUBREY: Now, in IFS, the rule is that none of our parts are bad. Each of them can give us kind of useful information. And Seth Kopald, who is now actually trained as an IFS practitioner or coach, came to see that his worrier parts had become too dominant.
KOPALD: And it wasn't until I could ask them to give me enough space that I could actually problem-solve and I could figure out, well, how can we do this so our kids are OK?
AUBREY: And when he asked that worrier part to step aside, he said he realized that he had other parts within that could step up.
KOPALD: They're all chiming in, going, yeah, we could, like, do this with the kids. And we could make sure they're feeling safe this way.
AUBREY: So he started to feel like he was in control, he told me, like he was the conductor of all of his parts.
MARTÍNEZ: Allison, there are a lot of people in my life that would love it if the worrier part went away...
AUBREY: Right? Yes.
MARTÍNEZ: Because I'm a warrior. I over-worry. I worry about everything. But a lot of this to me right off the bat sounds like multiple personalities.
AUBREY: Yeah.
MARTÍNEZ: I mean, is that really the premise that we're talking about here?
AUBREY: Well, this is the question that Dick Schwartz gets a lot. And he got a lot of pushback when he first proposed that we all have multiple voices or little personalities within. But what he's shown over four decades is that when people do this parts work, as it's called, many people can get to the root of the pain they carry around, he says. So he experienced this firsthand and talks about his complicated relationship with his father, who was a prominent doctor and researcher.
SCHWARTZ: The oldest of six boys. And I think I had undiagnosed ADD at the time, and I just wasn't a good student, and that drove him crazy. And so he piled on a lot of shame. And so I had parts that were stuck back in those scenes where he would say, Dicky, you're good for nothing.
AUBREY: He said the fear and the shame were kind of buried in those parts of him for years.
SCHWARTZ: So it wasn't until I actually invited those parts to really let me feel how bad it was that I got how bad it was. And then I could actually enter that scene and be with the boy in the way he needed.
AUBREY: So, A, this is really about getting in touch with parts of ourselves that may be forgotten or buried. And as for Seth Kopald, he told me that IFS helped him understand the root of his anxiety, parts of him from childhood that harbored fears of being unloved.
KOPALD: There's a big difference between, like, I am the anxiety, I am the worry, I am the fear versus I'm here with the fear. I'm here with the anxiety. And in that separation, there's more of my natural state, which is confidence, courage, compassion, perspective.
AUBREY: And he's remarried now and says he has very loving relationships with his children.
MARTÍNEZ: Well, at least it worked out for him. That's NPR's Allison Aubrey. And if you want more ways of managing stress, you can sign up for our stress less newsletter. Go to npr.org\stressless. Allison, thank you.
AUBREY: Thanks. Great to be here, A.
(SOUNDBITE OF TELEMAKUS, CARRTOONS, DAVID JAMES AND TED TAFORO'S "YOU READY (REPRISE)")
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