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Emily Cox: Hi, this is Emily Cox and I'm an editor here at Audible. Today, I'm so excited to be speaking with Jessica Tomich Sorci about her new release, When Good Moms Feel Bad. She's a pioneer in maternal mental health and an expert who specializes in Internal Family Systems. In her new book, she applies this therapeutic approach and her many learnings over her years in the field to address the unique challenges faced by mothers. Welcome, Jessica.
Jessica Tomich Sorci: Hi, Emily. Thanks for having me.
EC: Thank you for coming. I've been really looking forward to this conversation. As I've been listening to your book, I've been bending the ears of my colleagues, and I've realized that most of them are really not super familiar, or familiar at all, with Internal Family Systems. I'd only recently heard about it from my own therapist. She mentioned she thought it might be a helpful approach to me, and she's interested in getting trained. So, I've been sort of intrigued by it. When I learned about your book, I knew I had to listen to it. But because it's so new to so many folks, I would love to ask if you could just give a TL;DR on what IFS is for listeners who really aren't familiar.
JTS: Yes. I think a good starting place is often that movie Inside Out, because so many people have seen it. That's kind of a soft, friendly representation of this concept that IFS embraces, that we've got lots of different parts inside of us. That at different moments in our lives, we'll have a surge of something move forward that kind of handles whatever's going on. It might be really unfamiliar to us, like if it's a big angry part, we might just suddenly find ourselves kind of taken over with volume and intensity and a physical kind of vigor. Sometimes it's a much more familiar part that we really identify with. Like, right now, you and I are in a little bit more professional, managerial mode, and so we've got parts of us up that are organized and trying to be articulate and trying to stay in the lines.
In that movie, Inside Out, we saw that little girl character, all the inner workings of her mind kind of represented in these separate, fun little creatures. In human beings, it's the case that we aren't just one singular self. We've got lots of different functional aspects of ourselves that show up with different strategies at different times because our system determines that we need them. We sometimes consciously bring those parts of ourselves online. Other times, again, they just sort of take us over, especially if we're feeling threatened.
"What IFS introduces that's so powerful and unique is the idea that we have also a self, a core internal strength and resource that's undamageable. There is not one single person who doesn't have this."
There are different kinds of parts. IFS looks at us as having protectors and exiles, and protectors are exactly what their name implies. They're here to help us get through tough moments. They're here to help us produce and show up. So, some of those parts are managers. They're on top of stuff, like the ones that you and I are leaning into right now. And others are called firefighters. They're called firefighters because, like first responders, they show up when the shit hits the fan: “The house is on fire emotionally and we gotta get these flames out, and I don't care what kind of damage we do. We're going to knock the door down. We're going to blast through the house with water to get the flames out.” And those types of parts are less desirable. They're not the forward-facing ones that we introduce to our neighbors and friends.
We usually lead with our managers that are more composed and more interested in things like control and presentation. But the firefighters, they're part of all of our systems and they show up when we reach a breaking point or something really intense has happened, where inside of us, there's a determination that if we don't do something drastic right now, we'll die or we'll be humiliated or in really, really dire straits.
So, those are the two kinds of protectors that we have on board, and they are both here on behalf of our exiles, and our exiles are really tender, vulnerable parts of ourselves that have been hurt, that are burdened with wounds and injuries and beliefs, usually from childhood, that our protectors are trying to push out of awareness and keep under the rug. They both show up, managers and firefighters alike, to keep those exiles quiet and off the scene, because when our exiles come up, understandably, we feel all those feelings. I know every human who's listening to this can relate. Exiles have familiarity with shame and humiliation and a sense of not being good, being bad, not being worthy, maybe being disgusting. Whatever those worst impressions that we took on as little vulnerable creatures, our exiles really hold on to that.
So, you can imagine how our system is holding those three sorts of energies inside, and all of that's useful in terms of just being able to understand what's happening inside of us, because we're complicated, and big things happen. Oftentimes, especially if we haven't been in therapy or we have parents who aren't particularly informed in this way, we're just going to be awash in whatever's happening, and sometimes feeling at the mercy of it. That can lead to lots of feelings, symptoms, and even diagnoses of depression or anxiety, or panic, rumination, obsession, things like that.
But what IFS introduces that's so powerful and unique is the idea that we have also a self, a core internal strength and resource that's undamageable. There is not one single person who doesn't have this. That's very unique, from a therapist's perspective, because any client that sits in front of us, we can assume and know there is health at the center, there's a resource in them regardless of how they're presenting, or their symptoms, or how big or scary or triggering it might be even to us as therapists. In IFS, the approach is really, how do we get all of those parts, those exiles, firefighters, and managers, to relax, to start to feel safe in some way, so that our self-energy can come through, so that we can lead from a really different, self-led place.
Self is described as being one of the 8 C's. There are 8 C's of self: compassion, curiosity, connectedness, calm, creativity, courage, clarity, [confidence]. Those sorts of qualities are descriptive of self-energy. And when we are really sitting in that, in that sort of energy, I'm just kind of tapping into mine right now, we can work with all the struggles and the pain and the triggering moments in life from a really different space than if we're sitting in exile energy that's full of shame, or firefighter energy that wants to react and do stuff, or even manager energy that's trying so hard to control everything and exerting so much adrenaline or cortisol. I feel like it's really connected to autoimmune stuff. So, that's the goal of IFS. How do we get all the parts to relax back and start to feel the presence of like an inner mom, a guiding force that's really trustworthy. Self-energy, in the words of IFS.
EC: It's so interesting that you say that that's unique in the field of therapy, because I guess we all think about Freud and you think about the different parts of the personality, but this is very different. It's like there's a central being. That's so interesting. How is your self distinct from the inner child, or the inner baby, that you also talk about?
JTS: I did a sort of simplification of IFS because I work with moms who have very little time and bandwidth. Sometimes they haven't slept well, they might not have the resources to come to therapy every week. They might be nursing a kid at the same time that they're doing therapy. So, I try to make bite-size, digestible concepts. And what I did was I took this idea of exiles and I simplified it and I said, "We're going to call it your inner baby. It's the part of you that's vulnerable."
"If we can help moms find that energy that they give to their kids and locate it inside themselves, that patience or presence, and give it back to themselves, that's really where we hit the lottery."
I break it down. It's scared, sad, or wanting. That's just really easy. Now we're not having this broad category of all the things that have ever hurt you in your whole life, that are full of tons of nuance. If we stick with sad, scared, and wanting, and self-energy. I talk about that as an inner mom because mothers have tons of experience digging deep for extra patience. Moms are incredible in terms of the exercise, the musculature, around being able to pause a reactive process. Our kids infuriate us and frustrate us continually, and most of the time, we don't react. Most of the time, we stay open or present or even kind and loving. I try to harvest that skill set and pull it in and call that the inner mom. And it is self-energy.
It might also have tinges of manager parts that are like, "Hold on a second here. I want to do this better." A little bit of cortisol and adrenaline helping marshal mom's presence back. The reason I talk about it that way is because if we can help moms find that energy that they give to their kids and locate it inside themselves, that patience or presence, and give it back to themselves, that's really where we hit the lottery.
EC: So, can you tell me how did you first get into tailoring this practice to mothers, or were you working with moms and then you discovered IFS? Can you talk to me a little bit about that?
JTS: Yeah, that's exactly it. I'd been working with moms for a long time, and I then discovered IFS and I was blown away. I went and saw Dick Schwartz, the creator of IFS, speak in a really small workshop. And just the way he was so convicted that at the core, we are all built the same way, we can trust and count on our parts, even the wacky, scary, crazy ones, being well-intentioned. When he said that, I felt this huge load slide off my shoulders. I realized, if this is something I can embrace, I can come back and work with these mom clients of mine who are some of them experiencing suicidal ideation or feeling like they're just terrible moms, or tons of depression or panic. I can come back with this new sort of access to conviction that there's nothing wrong with them. He won me over in like a three-hour workshop. I got it. I was like, "This is really different and I want to bring this back to moms who are so depleted."
The maternal mental health landscape felt pretty hopeless to me. That's maybe a little dramatic, but it's kind of like we're either going to hand you some antidepressants or maybe commiserate. There's just not a lot to do. Antidepressants can be helpful for people, but they aren't for everyone. They have other side effects that are really rough, too. I felt like things were pretty limited in terms of how we were approaching postpartum depression, but maternal mental health in the larger sense, too. No matter how we looked at it, it always felt like we were saying there's something wrong with that mom. Like, she's got a disorder, she's broken in some way. Let's try to help her. And that just didn't sit right with me. Bringing IFS in was like a very fresh new take on it where I could confidently have some backup as I said, "There's nothing wrong with you. We can work with this."
EC: I have to say, what you described about you felt this relief flood through you, I felt that listening to this. Because suddenly the idea that even my worst feelings, actually, they had my back in their own way, was really so interesting. You're right, it sort of reframes. I mean, even though you do refer to bad-mom parts and good-mom parts, they are all there for the right reasons, just in different ways.
JTS: I love that you shared that. Thank you, Emily.
EC: You do talk a lot, and I really appreciate this, in your work, you talk a lot about the conditions in which we're asked to mother and try to be our best selves, and that certainly in America we're not set up for success. How is the world letting mothers down, and what do you most wish could change for our landscape for mothering?
JTS: I think that policymakers and people who are in the world of changing policy could speak to that topic really much better than I can, because they know the ins and outs of all the ways moms are robbed of status at work and financially just not rewarded in the same ways that non-moms are. And the daycare piece, that there's just nowhere to send your kid that's affordable that feels safe. Those sorts of things are a big deal, but that's really out of my scope. That's not my area.
The place that I focus is, relationally, I think that if we as a culture understood motherhood differently, where we understood that, first off, it's such a massive donation of a woman's nervous system over the stretch of almost her life. I mean, it's intensive for five years for every kid, like full throttle. And then it starts to give a little bit more space if your child is healthy and developing in a way that allows that, which isn't the case for every mom and child. But I think if we understood that as long as a mom is doing intensive mothering, she is depleted. She doesn't get to have her nervous system for herself. We need to create a culture where she's not the only one doing the mothering, so it isn't so intensive, but as long as it is—I'm really trying to work, with this book, within the realities of the context we live in—and I'm saying, in this context, what we can do is start to understand that ourselves and have a lot more compassion for ourselves and within the mom community.
Mom-on-mom stuff, it could just be really a lot softer. I think there's so much one-upping each other and harshness and competitiveness. I think if we were able to embrace this idea of motherhood, really bringing forth lots of parts, lots of reactivity, because we're depleted, because we're under-cared for, not because we're bad, not because we don't have the capacity to love or to be great moms, but because we're not well-fed, then it just changes the whole perspective to one of compassion and care and resonance with each other and not the other stuff.
EC: It's really interesting that you mentioned your children borrow, steal, whatever, your nervous system. It’s given over to them in many ways. This is a good segue to this other question I wanted to ask you. My teenage daughter and I were talking the other day about how we both have this desire to people please and to not be burdensome, and after listening to your book, I feel like this is an aspect of my anxious part, or related in some way. But I've always been able to pinpoint the element of my childhood that kind of made me this way. To my knowledge, at least, my daughter hasn't had that experience, and yet she somehow seems to believe that she inherited this from me. So, I wanted to know, how does IFS think about generational trauma? If I live through something and my daughter doesn't, how have I passed it on to her? I would love you to talk about that a little bit.
JTS: Oh, it's one of my favorite topics. So, your daughter is living in the same patriarchal culture that you live in and that I live in, and so she's getting the messaging from everywhere that women are, females are, expected to be friendly and kind and accommodating and people-pleasing, and that anger doesn't look good on a woman, that harsh boundaries are considered bitchy. She's steeped in that same stuff, and even if she didn't get it from you, she'd be getting that.
"It's really impossible not to communicate our own injuries to our children, even when we feel like we've handled it or we're not visiting it on them."
IFS would look at ancestral gifts and burdens. It's really impossible not to communicate our own injuries to our children, even when we feel like we've handled it or we're not visiting it on them. Maybe we were abused and we're not being abusive to our kids. High-fives, that's amazing and what a big shift that is in your family line, but that abuse that happened to you does still live inside you. And depending on how you've related with it or healed it, you're still in relationship with it. You're still probably reacting to it in ways and maybe compensating for it and referencing it as you parent your child. So, they are still part of that same lineage that mom carried. They're still getting handed some sort of reverberation of it, even if they're not getting the exact same teaching or experience.
EC: Right. That's interesting. I only found out semi-recently that one of my own mother's core memories, she told me, is an adult in her life telling her that she was selfish, and she doesn't want to ever be seen as selfish now. So, yeah, I don't know, it's really gone down the line.
JTS: We are all so steeped in it, Emily, and it's a definite passion of mine. Some of the book is divided into this idea of, are we selfish or selfless? It feels like those are the two choices we're given as women and mothers. If we're in it for ourselves in any way, then we're selfish. If we want to be a good mom, we need to be selfless. We need to always prioritize our kids and put our own stuff on the back burner, which leads to fury, resentment. There's no way to ignore and neglect the fact that you have your own being here that needs care and tending. So, how do we work with selfish and selfless in a way that's updated and less patriarchal? I think it starts by just really speaking to that, that we feel like we've been handed a split, a binary choice, and it's one or the other, and it's not. You get to tend to both.
EC: I thought your chapter about Team Kid and Team—is it Team Mom? Team Self?
JTS: What About Mom.
EC: Team What About Mom. I thought that was so helpful because it's like, “Oh, it feels like a binary inside, but maybe it's not. It's much more nuanced than that.”
JTS: Yeah. It's both, right? Thank you for bringing that up. The Team Kid parts, which are like the managers and the “good mom” parts—good moms in quotes because that's through our culture's eyes, that a good mom is all Team Kid, is really here to make sure the kid is well-fed and excelling in school and polite and goes to the right college or whatever it is. And then we've got this other group of parts, Team What About Mom. Because those are the parts that are here with hands-on hips, like, “What the hell? We've been on the back burner for, it's not like a week, it's like 10 years now. We're hurting and we're depleted and we actually can't take it anymore. So, we're going to have a big uprising over here if you don't do something differently.” It feels like we're so pulled between the two.
EC: So, you did mention the world mothers are in now is hyper-competitive. You touch on how triggering social media can be, given this impossible drive for perfection. How do you advise your patients to engage with, or not, when it comes to social media?
JTS: I don't give advice on that, and I think not just social media these days, it's just the news in general is so triggering for people. Working with the parts of you that get triggered, so what comes up when you encounter a post like that on Instagram or that kind of stuff in the news? What's coming up for you? And starting to be able to name the inner babies that are here, the sad, scared, wanting parts, and noticing how we then get these protectors that try to help those vulnerable parts not feel quite so terrified or alone or maybe help them get out of our awareness entirely.
I think just having the awareness of what parts of yours are getting activated and what stories they're telling you, and then, again, helping the parts relax. IFS talks about that as “unblending.” Parts that kind of adhered to us like grease on a pan and if we can notice the grease, notice the part, start to name it and start to differentiate it from our own surface a little bit, and there are ways to do that in the book. One of them, just naming the part, really helps us see it clearly. We unblend from it. We help it get a little bit of space from us, or we get a little bit of space from it. And when that happens, we automatically feel clearer and more connected and confident and compassionate and curious, some version of that.
Then we can start to understand why those parts are here. What are they believing? Why, when they see that post in social media, do they get a big wave of anger or self-doubt? What are they telling you? What are they afraid of? What are they hoping for? How are they trying to influence you? And when you can hear that the same way you would listen to another person, you can start to have a relationship with that part of you and negotiate with it or offer it things that help it relax and let you lead, you as the inner mom or the self, rather than it.
EC: So, I wanted to talk about the making of the book. This was a co-authored work. How did you and your co-writer collaborate?
JTS: It was an interesting experience. Rebecca [Geshuri] was a huge part of getting the book deal and pulling the proposal together. And then once we pressed go, it was really my book. This stuff is the stuff that I've been working on the last 15 years or so. I was able to pull all that into the outline of the book, and then she was available for reading and commenting and contributing in that way.
EC: Great. Is she also an IFS practitioner?
JTS: She is.
EC: In terms of the audio, were you guys involved at all in the casting process? What do you think your goal for the audiobook was specifically? Like, how do you advise people to listen to it differently than they might engage with the book reading?
JTS: Ooh, I haven't thought about that. We all got to listen—Rebecca and me and our agent and our editor all listened to a bunch of the submissions for the audiobook, and we all agreed on the same one, replied back like, "Oh, my gosh." Christine Lakin, we loved her, her voice, and her way of holding the book. I've only gotten to listen to a little bit of it so far, so your question about how to approach that, I don't know. I know that when I listen to audiobooks, I love that I can walk. I live near the forest, and I love walking through the forest, and listening and having the opportunity to move my body while listening gives me a really different way of assimilating it, that I feel like it's deeper and I just digest it differently. So, I love having that option.
EC: Yeah, and I suspect that a lot of moms will listen to this over reading it just because it is a multitasking helper. Like, I do most of my book consumption through listening. But I have been thinking that with this one, now that I've listened to it, I need to go back and go through it again with a journal. And I guess that was my other question. I know that the advice would probably always be that every mom who's seeking this kind of help work with a therapist. But do you think that this book and a journal and using this as a guide, can that make a big difference? Or do you really think that you need a partner to help you through these conversations and finding out about your parts?
JTS: I would say both. I think, yes, I picture a mom who's never been to therapy or maybe has no budget for it or finds it to be stigmatized and wouldn't go, picking up the book and getting maybe the main message that, yeah, you may not be able to change what's going on outside of you, like the fact that you don't have a partner or your partner is not showing up for you, or that you don't have a good socioeconomic situation, or that your kid is autistic or has health problems, or that you have health problems. There might be things you can't change, but you have so much influence over how you feel inside, when it comes to how you talk to yourself and how you relate to your parts. So, that's the big message here. Take this book and see if you can start to make some shifts in how you talk to yourself and how you greet the parts of you that you don't like.
"I know that the suffering of moms who determine themselves to be failures as mothers is probably beyond any suffering that anyone has on earth...I think that kind of burden is something I'm really working to tease apart."
Could it be possible that there's more compassion for your quote-unquote "bad mom" parts inside of you? You get to change the field inside. I do believe that a mom alone with this book in a room with no therapist can totally start making headway on that. And then there are tons of different offerings online now, through my work and then the people that I've been training, where you can join a one-hour group called a Mom Parts Salon. All the moms in that group are responding to the same prompt and working through their parts and then doing some sharing at the end. So, that's a very affordable way—the meetings are usually somewhere between free and $30—to not be alone in the work and to see how other people are doing it and get some sense of witnessing.
EC: That's great. Do you have any future writerly projects in the works, or what is your focus now that this book is out in the world?
JTS: I'm definitely interested in helping this book get everywhere it needs to go. And yes, I'm working on something right now that I'm so excited about. It's about the maternal line, kind of that question you asked about how things get handed down. It's from a perspective of my own maternal line. I think all of our maternal lines are very fascinating, compelling, and rich. In my case, I'm looking at my family where my grandmother was a psychic medium and my mother was really struggling with addiction and was more of a kind of archetypal "bad mom." And then how that landed in me and gave me so much interest and passion for understanding motherhood.
I really am wanting to explore in a larger sense what is happening with moms who are quote-unquote "bad moms." I know that the suffering of moms who determine themselves to be failures as mothers is probably beyond any suffering that anyone has on earth. It's like one of the most unforgivable things. I think that kind of burden is something I'm really working to tease apart and understand the dynamics of that within a mom, and then what does it take to heal that, both in this life and on the other side.
EC: I can't wait for that. That sounds really interesting.
JTS: Yeah, it's fun. It's fun to write.
EC: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I really feel like I could talk to you forever about this. It's really so fascinating, so thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation.
JTS: Me too. It's been a joy. Thanks for your good questions.
EC: Thank you. And listeners, you can pick up When Good Moms Feel Bad at Audible now. Thank you.
