Often what I say that really gets people's attention is I say, remember all the addict part is doing is putting whiskey in the baby bottle to sedate all your little wounded parts. And then people go, well I would never put whiskey in a baby bottle. And I say, yes, but your addict part does on a regular basis. How do you think they feel? Do you think they feel safer or less safe? And you know, most addicts say, well I guess they feel less safe. Yeah. And if they feel less safe, guess what? Your addict part has to put more whiskey in the baby bottle to get them to shut up. And we feel that we failed when we feel shame. It's a very unpleasant emotional state. And for people with addictions, uncomfortable emotional states mean have another drink. You need a few more pills. Shame doesn't help any of us. Maybe we think that when someone's ashamed they're taking responsibility. But they're not because responsibility is higher level thinking. It's something that's easier to do if you've been curious. Yeah, for curious it's easier to take that responsibility. When we feel shame, I don't want to take responsibility. So I always get people to first look at how is this substance helping? Because usually when they start to be curious about how the substance is helping them, they pretty quickly realize, well, it's kind of sort of helping. It's actually not.

You can't just go to a part and say stop doing it. Stop making him drink all the time. You have to learn about how it's trying to protect other parts or is polarized with some other critic in there and start to work all of that. In learning all that, what came to me at some point was, yeah, there are no bad parts. They're all valuable inner beings with these wonderful qualities to help us in our lives. And when we don't suffer traumas or attachment injuries and so on, they just help us all our life. They give us advice or they give us joy or they all kinds of things. But they're forced out of their naturally valuable states by trauma and attachment injury. And they take on these extreme beliefs and emotions I call burdens. And they get frozen in the past. They get frozen in time. And they think you're still five years old and they have to protect you in the way they did back that. Guys I'm trying to have these two parts talk. Maybe a third one is interfering, making one angry. So I began asking clients to see if they could find the one who's interfering. And to my amazement, they would say, okay, yeah, I got it to move. And when they did, it was almost like this other person would pop up. And it would be curious in a pure way and calm and would have confidence and even compassion often for the target part. And when I would do the same process with other clients, it was like the same person would pop out spontaneously simply by getting other parts that had been polarized to open space. If I were to ask you, okay, what part of you is that? It's likely you'd say some version of that's not a part like these others. That's me. That's myself. So I came to call that thus self with a capital S. And now 40 years later, thousands of people using this all over the world, we can safely say that that self isn't everybody, can't be damaged, knows how to heal. And it's just beneath the surface of these parts such that when they open space, it pops out spontaneously. So I had an argument with my wife this morning and the part that she commonly triggers just totally took over. And then I reacted to her from that place, which of course only triggers her protectors more too. And we've gotten very good at catching ourselves when it's protector wars. And one of us saying, okay, time out, let's get a little space and I'll go and I'll get that protector to pull its energy out. And I'll say, okay, look, I know you've got this attitude about her, but you know, she's suffering right now with things she's worried about. So I can come back and apologize for letting that part take over and she can. We have more of a self to self connection conversation. So that's a lot of what we're shooting for. It's not like when you've healed your parts, you never have an argument, but it's more like when you do, you catch yourself and you get a little separation and you come

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