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[0:05] Bobby Steggert: I'm Bobby Steggert, and this is The Quiet Part Out Loud.

[0:15] Bobby Steggert: To work is built into our DNA. It's who we are. Just like colonies of ants, we have built and maintained societies through cooperation and productivity. Add to that our particular culture's obsession with a Protestant work ethic. It is also at the very roots of our history. The workaholic is a celebrated member of society in the ultra-consumerist culture that we're now steeped. And in fact, it is the only addictive process that is openly accepted and even encouraged. One of the biggest surprises for me early on as a therapist was to learn how many people would come to therapy struggling with boundaries around work. And furthermore, how few of them were actually able or even willing to create those boundaries.

I often wondered, well, then why are we here? People find themselves stuck in the golden handcuff circumstance of certain jobs, and further they find themselves choosing privilege and material wealth over happiness and balance. And of course, there's a wide spectrum of the ways in which we work. On top of working to make money and to achieve status, we also work to keep our relationships together, to maintain health, to avoid reality, to garner attention, to prove our worth both to ourselves and to others. The whole notion behind this entire podcast is that all of our parts in their individual and unique ways are working very hard to protect us. They are working at the deepest level to help us survive in a thorny and complicated world.

My guest today is Lisa Gajda, and I hope you will indulge us in this conversation, which is between two Broadway performers, both turned therapists, and who both very much center their work around the model of IFS, which is the inspiration for all these conversations about our many parts. The benefit here, among many, is that Lisa is an expert at describing and articulating the complexity of her inner system of parts in a way that is so illuminating and specific and honest and filled with fascinating contradictions as well as humor and warmth. Lisa had a fantastic career as a dancer on Broadway, performing in the original companies of Fosse and Movin' Out, as well as over a dozen more. And I deeply relate to the way that she describes her worker parts, making sure through hell or high water that she succeeds.

And how unfortunately this drive to work was both core to who she is, as well as a drive that wraps around early trauma. As she says, it's always both. Even more, I entirely relate today to the complicated and extremely mixed feelings she has about that drive to perform as a way to prove worth that was not truly authentic to the inner self. The entire spectrum from pride to embarrassment. I loved getting to speak a common language with Lisa, and as for you, I guarantee that some of you will want her as your therapist after listening to this conversation, an idea I highly endorse. She's a living example of how a therapist can also be funny, irreverent, and utterly relatable in her own evolving process.

[3:38] Bobby Steggert: Lisa, we have so much to talk about. We are both performers who are now therapists. And so the obvious first question for me is, well, because I'm no longer performing, I find it oddly strange to open up because in our jobs we're just absorbing all the time. So what is it like to be in this space where actually the story is yours again?

[4:02] Lisa Gajda: It definitely is different. Everything I say that could be remotely public is now something that I wonder how it would land with a client. I wonder what it would be like for them to hear that from me. So I am in some ways more—I was not careful at all as a performer. So I'm more careful now. It also depends on what your philosophy as a therapist is. Are you someone who doesn't want your clients to know much about you in general? I utilize two models, IFS and AEDP. And AEDP allows the therapist to use themselves in the work as long as it's for the client, as long as it's clean. So I open up in ways that I think are useful to my client, but I'm careful about it. Like I have a lot of fail-safes in place to make sure that I'm not indulging myself.

[4:51] Bobby Steggert: Yes.

[4:52] Lisa Gajda: Yeah. That's an awful feeling in therapy where you—I've taken the risk of sharing something and you realize it wasn't right to do.

[4:59] Bobby Steggert: Oh, yeah.

[4:59] Lisa Gajda: Or you realize it was for you.

[5:01] Bobby Steggert: Yes.

[5:01] Lisa Gajda: Yeah. You just feel like an asshole.

[5:04] Bobby Steggert: Okay. Well, anyways, the part you want to share. Just introduce this part to us.

[5:09] Lisa Gajda: So I'm calling this my overworking part. And my overworking part plays out in a lot of different ways and kind of collaborates with other parts of my system. So for instance, overworking can be connected to a sense of not being enough. So I'll overwork in relationships sometimes. As a dancer, you do not want to see video of that. So I would talk about, oh, but I was very much an overworker because I didn't understand that it just had to be that I was enough, whether I liked it or not.

[5:40] Bobby Steggert: What do you mean as a dancer? I wouldn't want to see that.

[5:43] Lisa Gajda: I was trying to solve a lot of problems through dance. And one of them was I was trying to matter. And I don't want to be overly hard on that part of myself, but it's not the best entertainment.

[5:54] Bobby Steggert: Yeah. What do you mean in terms of what your memory of dancing is?

[5:59] Lisa Gajda: I'm thinking of like Fosse. I think every time I went out on stage, the parts of self, like the parts of me that became a dancer were like really wounded. And so dancing was always very closely connected to like survival and pain. And I have a couple of big T traumas in my history. So they're really attached to those, like my dancing parts. So the parts that danced were just like suffering and wanted to be seen and validated. And so it wasn't really—I was not the most present. It wasn't really serving the piece necessarily.

[6:35] Bobby Steggert: Did that fuel your dance in any way that was actually exciting?

[6:39] Lisa Gajda: That's something I'm still doing the work of trying to figure out how my trauma, for lack of a better word, helped because there's—I have a lot of fuel, and I think that it's rooted in some of that. In terms of exciting, I think in terms of my enjoyment of the work, it really was, I think I can say with confidence, exclusively a buzzkill. Because it was like I was never really there for it in a way that was—it was really just—I don't know if you notice this as a therapist or think about this as a therapist. I was trying to fix something every single time, and that doesn't feel good because it never gets fixed.

[7:17] Bobby Steggert: Since that feeling of not being satisfied, yeah, like longing, yearning, fraught. What was the story about how it would fix something?

[7:26] Lisa Gajda: If I could be the best one, it would mean that I—alright, so this is gonna be—I've listened to your podcast, it's pretty exposed. But I think that I feared that I was innately—this is gonna be such a strong word—but like innately, well, let's just say unlovable. And I thought that if I could be the best one, it would mean that I'm lovable, and that my fear that I am like innately not to be loved, that would be solved or proven wrong on some level.

[7:55] Bobby Steggert: And so, in terms of performance, was it about ultra commitment both on and off the stage?

[8:03] Lisa Gajda: I was ultra committed, yes. And that's in some ways, that's the way the trauma—I mean, my capacity and drive, unreal. And I do think it's a big part of my success in anything that I do. I have enormous capacity, I have enormous drive. And those things are—and this is something I'll just be untangling for a while, if not always, which is okay. But I always think that like a person's superpower is something that's core to them, that they sort of like hyperdrive to survive. So you look inside, you're like, what have I got here? I have a lot of energy, I have a lot of capacity, and so I took what was natural to myself, and the trauma like wrapped itself around that, and they became one in a way, and so it's hard for me to tell what's what.

[8:51] Bobby Steggert: I really relate to much of what you're saying in the sense that I responded to a great deal of isolation with achievement as a kid. And so I—I don't run depressed. My system doesn't understand depression.

[9:05] Lisa Gajda: Yeah.

[9:06] Bobby Steggert: Is that something that you relate to as well?

[9:08] Lisa Gajda: I'm an anxiety body.

[9:10] Bobby Steggert: Yeah, I'm an anxiety. I'm a sympathetic nervous system, baby. And yeah, I have—thank God I have known a little tiny micro drop of depression, which is so important. So when I have a client who has depression, I not that I understand what it's like for them, but I can just think of that time in the 90s that I could not lift my hands. And it really—that the humbling nature of like really not being able to move in a way is helpful. But yeah, I really tend toward anxiety. That's what my body—and that tracks throughout my family. That's what my body does to survive. It doesn't shut down.

[9:46] Bobby Steggert: What do you feel comfortable sharing in terms of early years and if not the trauma itself, how you responded to it relationally?

[9:55] Lisa Gajda: So, like just a little bit about it. Let's just say—I did not feel and was not safe in my home. So some CPTSD around like physical safety, and then also an outside the house sexual trauma as a child. How it affected me relationally is that—how do I talk about it in a way? I think that my instinct was to handle everything alone. And that contributes a little bit to the overworking part, right? I was like seven and I was like, I'm gonna—I—it just didn't occur to me not to handle it alone. And so that's where some overworking definitely began because probably a seven-year-old who experiences really big trauma like that could have used some support.

[10:41] Bobby Steggert: So there wasn't a belief that you could turn for the support, and then all of the work had to feel internal to you.

[10:50] Lisa Gajda: Yeah, I just think I got the message somehow somewhere. And this is not to—like I listened to the Michael Wortella interview, and it was—he was so generous. And I also feel generous with my people at this point, but for whatever reason, there was a lot of good stuff that also went on with some people in that home. But ultimately, yeah, that kid obviously got the message that it was on her. Otherwise, I think it would have been natural to tell somebody. Right. Or to show that she was struggling. And that's the thing I remember like hunkering down, like to not show it.

[11:23] Bobby Steggert: It's so often I observe in client lives. If there was childhood trauma and there were siblings, one of the ways in which some siblings had to work is to become parents. And were you also caretaking in any way?

[11:40] Lisa Gajda: I did a little bit of caretaking, but I was mostly awful to my sibling. I think I was acting out a lot of stuff that I was experiencing, so I was really mean. I was really mean. And I did some care—it was a little bit of both, but some caretaking.

[11:55] Bobby Steggert: And then tell me how more concrete external examples of work came into the picture for you.

[12:02] Lisa Gajda: Okay, so there's just the work of a child kind of figuring stuff out on their own. And also, too, when I was around seven, I also started failing school and failed school my whole—like till I graduated, managed that alone, overworking, overworking, and then kind of figured out how to become a dancer.

[12:20] Bobby Steggert: What does that mean?

[12:23] Lisa Gajda: I just figured it out. Like I'm a Generation X. Like we just—I don't know. I was 18, I failed—I graduated last of my high school class, and I was like, I'm going. I just—I started going to Steps in the city with my friend Carol, and I just started figuring out how to be a dancer, which really was the norm at the time. There was no like path. There was no pipeline, like there seems to be now. So you show up in New York, you take a lot of classes, and you start figuring stuff out. So that's what I did. And I worked—I literally did—I found myself. And in doing that, I took three classes a day, seven days a week—overworking.

[12:57] Bobby Steggert: So yeah, work in terms of being an academic student did not appeal to you. Was there something that you didn't align with in terms of that kind of work?

[13:07] Lisa Gajda: I think it really was PTSD. I think I had trouble sleeping at night. I had trouble concentrating. I just—and like once you fall behind in school, and I went to really great public school, but they weren't used to kids like me. So I just fell through the cracks.

[13:34] Lisa Gajda: That's a part of myself that's like really life-giving. And part of what made me successful as a dancer, I think, is that I love to learn. So it's always again like that's a core thing, and then a little anxiety wrapped around it and made it a little crazy.

[13:47] Bobby Steggert: Sure.

[13:47] Lisa Gajda: But I got better because I studied all the time.

[13:50] Bobby Steggert: Were you also inherently physical?

[13:53] Lisa Gajda: I am an embodied and physical being. That's how I survive. Everything I do to help and take care of almost, maybe that's an overstatement, but really, like maybe everything I do to attend to myself and care for myself is to be embodied, to move, to feel.

[14:11] Bobby Steggert: How do you believe you managed to stay embodied in response to trauma?

[14:17] Lisa Gajda: Like this is the complexity of families and of life is that I was born to a mom who was like the most physically loving. Like I was, especially as a little baby, like you can see the videos, born and wanted. Born and loved, born and on a body. You know what I mean? And so I think that was really like a resource for getting through. And I really found it to be.

[14:55] Lisa Gajda: So yeah. And then I guess I also I think for a long time I experienced being a dancer as like reclaiming because I always a rebellious part of me was another life-saving quality. So it was to claim what felt good in a body that had been hurt a lot. My version of that was reclaiming emotion, getting to be emotive on stage when I felt like I couldn't do that in my childhood.

[15:18] Bobby Steggert: Yeah, tell me more about dance training and what it did, what it gave you, how you developed into a dancer in New York.

[15:24] Lisa Gajda: First of all, I just feel so appreciative of your emotive part. I think there's something so beautiful about when people just I don't know, insist on having something in some way, right? It's so adaptive. So with dance training, I went to a really fabulous and crazy dance studio on Long Island. I was not serious because I was struggling as a human being. I went in and out of being serious, but it was like a very good training for a local suburban dance studio. And then I just went to steps and just took class and I piecemealed together. I remember I make Twyla Tharp eat with me once a year. I did a couple of shows with her.

[16:00] Bobby Steggert: And you force her to dine with you.

[16:02] Lisa Gajda: Yeah, I don't think she wants to dine with me.

[16:05] Bobby Steggert: What if she does?

[16:06] Lisa Gajda: I bet she does actually.

[16:07] Bobby Steggert: I don't think she wants to dine with me.

[16:09] Lisa Gajda: I can tell. But we dine. Okay. We do a short dining. And when we dine, she one time she said, "You were never a dancer, Gajda." Which is fine, because that's how she rolls. Now I said, "Can you explain that?" And she was basically like you piecemealed something together. And that's actually really accurate. I piecemealed something together. I have no, and I did a good job. I only have so much talent. That's another thing. That overworking part took only so much talent and created so much from it.

[16:41] Bobby Steggert: Are you sure you're not being self-deprecating right now?

[16:44] Lisa Gajda: I think I'm sure. I just, it's not like I was untalented, but I don't think that it was a natural, it was natural for me to be in motion, but it wasn't natural for my body to be beautiful in motion. There are just people that are born who move in a way that one wants to watch. And I don't think I had that. And in a way, now that I'm done with it, it was very painful throughout my career to never be good enough for myself in that way. And I look back on it and I'm like, damn, like I'm really proud. Like I worked with what I had, and I took a lot of bad stuff and I let it help me. I turned it into there's a little bit of alchemy, and made that into a life, a big life.

[17:26] Bobby Steggert: And so you see it as a force of will that you cobbled together enough skill to have a career.

[17:35] Lisa Gajda: 100% a force of will. And that's that can feel like I might be insulting myself, but I really, as every minute goes by in my life, I feel more and more appreciative of the chutzpah of anyone. I was so disappointed that I wasn't Shannon Lewis.

[17:50] Bobby Steggert: I don't know who Shannon Lewis is.

[17:53] Lisa Gajda: Just look at her. You'll know what I mean. She's just gorgeous. I mean, she was just like made for, born for, not to take away from her extraordinarily hard, talk about hardworking. She's also hardworking. But she just had like more stuff to work with. And I was disappointed in that when I was dancing. But again, you get a lot of goodies, like on the other side of a dance of a performing career, really. And I got a lot of goodies from having to make shit work and figure shit out and be creative and exploit what was there. It's very I see my career as like scrappy.

[18:26] Bobby Steggert: Scrappy, did that keep you from having certain expectations, or was the overworking part looking ahead and expecting a lot from you?

[18:35] Lisa Gajda: Kind of two answers that conflict with each other. I blessedly have always Brian Spatonic giggles at my self-deprecating part, and she's powerful. And she might be part of something that helps me, which is that I think she goes too far as parts will. But I've always had the gift of knowing my limits in a way, right? So I never wanted to be a principal. I knew what good singing sounded like. I knew what good acting was. So it didn't expect me to do more. I had reasonable expectations within the big picture, but when it came to dancing, I do think there was a part of me that always wished I just could have been more talented.

[19:14] Bobby Steggert: Do you believe if you were 18 today and you should have been in New York, you would make it?

[19:19] Lisa Gajda: I know that I fucking would have made that happen.

[19:21] Bobby Steggert: Wow. That's exciting.

[19:23] Lisa Gajda: To whatever degree the industry would allow. So I understand very clearly that it wouldn't be entirely up to me, but that's, I think, a little bit of a strength of this type of system is I'll just take the spaces you give me and I'll make what I can in there. And that would have been enough for me.

[19:47] Bobby Steggert: So Fosse was the example you brought up. What did it mean for you to be in that show in that environment at that level and to be overworking?

[19:55] Lisa Gajda: Oh my God. First of all, I had like crazy trap. Because the way we made Fosse is like we went to Canada and we learned like 12,000 numbers. And then they all got cut in a really, we started whittling away at what we learned in a very what seemed random way. Certainly they weren't thinking about how many dances any particular person was doing. And I was just like in every single number in Fosse, like dancing in the wing and overworking. What it felt like was, or what it meant was I was, we were all. That's the thing. The thing about overworking is sometimes, first of all, it's a privilege to choose whether or not you're gonna overwork. So that's fortunate. I live a life where I try not to overwork and I have some say over that. Fosse was an example of you're gonna be overworking, and I was overworking inside the overworking. And so what it meant was I got a fatigue disease. I got Epstein Bar, and I'll have the pleasure of having Epstein bar forever.

[20:50] Bobby Steggert: That's a virus, correct?

[20:52] Lisa Gajda: Yeah, it's mono reimagined. And I don't know much about it, but are you saying that overworking and stress contributed to it?

[21:01] Lisa Gajda: Oh, yeah. I just treated my body like such a little bitch. I ate cookies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I just confused. Or I'll tell you another little sad story about myself. So when I was little, I had a hard time sleeping, as you know. And I remember reframing being tired as persevering as a child. So it took me a really long time. So, like I was persevering. So when the shit hits the fan, I quadrupled down. So I was like taking like Taibo class, like these insane kickboxing classes, and then doing two shows a day, not fueling myself, not sleeping. So I am more inclined to do more when more is being asked of me. So the overworking part would see things like rest or nutrition as a sign of weakness.

The overworking part had no interest in rest or nutrition because surviving meant to go and go more. I wasn't slowing down to think about food or sleep. The brain becomes a doing machine. And I granted, I don't live like this anymore. This was really at the peak.

[22:11] Bobby Steggert: So you said that overworking has also showed up in relationships. Before we get to therapist world, how has overworking showed up for you in terms of dynamics?

[22:21] Lisa Gajda: Well, in the past, so there was a way of being in relationship until I met my husband. And it's not that I don't overwork a little bit in my own way, it's really different. Until I met Brian, and it took literally, I can thank psychotherapy for picking my husband because it's so different from anything I've ever done. Until I met him though, I remember I went to couples therapy with a boyfriend, and the therapist said, "Does she do this?" to my boyfriend at the time. And he said, "What?" And the therapist said, "Do all the work." So, like, I analyzed stuff for both of us. I should I configured myself in whatever way I needed to. And all of this, by the way, was subconscious. I didn't even know I was doing that until the therapist said it.

[23:06] Bobby Steggert: So, whatever space was not taken up in the dynamic, you found a way to fill it.

[23:12] Lisa Gajda: I found a way to fill it in. I found a way to like, if we needed intimacy, I found a way to do it for me and him a little bit. I just found whatever somebody else isn't doing, I will sometimes unconsciously do. Of course, this has gotten better since then. I've been married to Brian for like 14 years or so, been together for like 16 years. So it is really truly different in this relationship. And I don't know, this is often the case, maybe not with you, but but maybe.

[24:07] Bobby Steggert: Oh man, as a therapist, one of my earlier challenges was leaning too far into my clients' work. And I think that was because of a history of people pleasing and wanting to be liked and wanting to be effective. And I guess I'm wondering if that's a lesson you have or are learning.

[24:24] Lisa Gajda: It's a lesson I have and am learning. One of the things that I've been learning really slowly, and it's a slow lesson to learn for me. Parenting, I was a choreographer for a minute. I was a dance teacher for a minute, and now a therapist. In every one of those categories, I have learned that everyone benefits from people doing the proper amount of work in a relationship. And I think like you really sounds familiar to me. I think I've always framed it as I'm again, it's like the dancer saying, I can't fail. And honestly, I understand very clearly that is not for the client, that is not about the client, it's a part of myself that's not great for therapy. But actually, a little bit of my hard working is because when I'm sitting with somebody and nothing's happening, that little something inside of me that's like I really want something to happen here. Can we make something happen here? Just a tiny drop is great.

[25:20] Bobby Steggert: Sure.

[25:20] Lisa Gajda: Yeah, because I'm like, oh no, some fucking work's about to like you're not leaving this place. And then again, it can sometimes it can out of proportion, it's not great.

[25:28] Bobby Steggert: So, how do you find this part showing up as a therapist?

[25:33] Lisa Gajda: When it has shown up, and this has gotten better over time, not that I've been doing this forever, but when it has shown up, I can put it this way like when therapy is working really well, I'm sitting back in my chair, I'm in self enough, I feel grounded, I am in trust, right? And I am receiving and responding. And so on a day where I haven't taken great care of myself, right? Rushed into a session, I get anxious to help. And that's just bullshit, garbage. It's like just a pretty tricky thing to undo. Once you enter a session, like you're dying to help, you're already not in self. That's a part. And so in that way, it shows up.

[26:15] Bobby Steggert: Yeah.

[26:17] Lisa Gajda: I have benefited so much from learning that I really can't fix anyone. I can only be a partner in someone's growth, and that has been an enormous benefit to the work. I also notice that because it takes such presence and active listening, my body will just hit a wall, and I just can't work beyond a certain capacity.

[26:39] Bobby Steggert: So what happens to you when you hit that wall and then the overdrive thing happens?

[26:45] Lisa Gajda: When I hit the wall and the overdrive thing happens, I'm like, so you were saying that you have a little bit of a shutdown in that moment. I have a ramp up and I talk.

[26:56] Lisa Gajda: I occupy more than my fair share of space when I hit a wall. One of the things that's really cool is that honestly, I don't know what this is like for you. I'd be curious. What I do now that I know a little bit about this is I slow the fuck down. I just slow myself down and I breathe on purpose, like once or twice, and I sit back in my chair. There's something about it just reminds me to receive and to give the person space to meet me. So yeah, I guess when I'm in overdrive, I just lean in, I just get eager and it's well intended, but it's just not the part of self that is most productive for the work.

[27:42] Bobby Steggert: We'll be right back. But you're also a parent, and that anytime anyone's a parent and has a job, my brain explodes. So I guess the general question I have for you is my assumption would be that sometimes you have to overwork. There is no choice but to overwork.

[28:00] Lisa Gajda: Absolutely. Look, it's a gift, it's a gift. I don't know how you think about parts or work with parts because sometimes I'm a little casual and not like absolutely down the line. Um so I love engaging a part where it's needed in the way that it likes to move. And I allow or I help clients if that feels right for them. Maybe that part is like where we're gonna go right now, and that's really helpful. Has a lot of skill in this department. And I guess it's really just a matter in like real IFS terms, like who's leading, self-leading or am I getting dragged around by the part? And so to decide to use a part is one thing. And in work and parenting, I'm just trying to see like which way it is. Am I being dragged around? I am like pretty decently self-led. I'm like closest to being in self around my kids. I'm relaxed around them, I'm present around them. So I actually I think I'm a little bit closer to self-led around the balance of kids to work.

[28:56] Bobby Steggert: What is it about parenthood and your kids that you think makes that most possible?

[29:00] Lisa Gajda: I like for me. Look, I had kids when I was like 72, quite ready. I was quite ready. And I was like the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang before that. Like I fucking hated them. I didn't want anything to do with kids. It was all about my childhood. I was like, children, I've like a lot of distance. So I had no expectations. I've got some weird impulse. My husband always wanted kids. I got a weird impulse to do it, really like an impulse. Like out of nowhere, literally, I saw my nephew Leo getting bathed, and it switched something on inside of me that I didn't know was there. I was in my mid-40s, and I just like literally looked up at my husband. I was like, you want to have a baby? And we used uh enormous amounts of science to do so.

That doesn't just happen now at 43 when we started. But I think I had no expectation, I never had like any fantasies that needed to be ruined by the reality. And I think it feels like for me, something inside that fellow really close to nature was enlivened or awakened. This is not the case for everybody. This is just what happened in my body. I just feel it feels so good. It just feels good in my body. There's like love feels good. And don't get me wrong, I am a parent who will say that she can hate her own children. I can feel so much frustration with them and whatever. But yeah, they're just satisfying to me. Love is satisfying. And it's embodied, it's an embodied experience.

[30:22] Bobby Steggert: Are you seeing any in the contrast between nature and nurture, any of the nature in your kids in terms of a sort of faster tempo or need to work and to overwork?

[30:32] Lisa Gajda: Both my kids are sort of my husband has like a nervous system that should be bottled and sold. And like my think my kid, and honestly, there's parts of that are again like every way of being has strengths and things that need blows and grows. And there are ways in which my kids, particularly my son, are like really mellow that are so delightful. And then also, too, I'm like, how are you gonna make it in this world? You're so chill. So no, I do worry because my overworking parts are in process, like I'm working on that, and a lot of my overworking happens because it's a survival experience, happens before I know it's happening. I like the apparatus is underway long before I notice. And that's why you've used the term that it's dissociative to you. There's no consciousness as to having hit the wall already.

[31:28] Bobby Steggert: There is no conscious, like when I had my hip replaced, I got my hip replaced. So this is recent, so I've come a long way. I'm not like the disaster that I described from Fossey, but like I got my hip replaced a year ago, and I got it replaced on Friday. I worked Sunday night. I hope it was online. It was online. What the fuck? No. Hot no. And I also was like so worried that my kids would feel dropped by me that I was like up. I wanted them to see that I was up and about. Sometimes, like hearing stuff from clients about like parents who had a hard time showing up, it gets in my head. And then my own therapist said, once in a rare while it's not the same thing as like a pattern of not being able to show up, which as little like obvious as that sounds, that's the thing about parts.

They don't take in all the information. They take in the information that confirms their narrative. This is such a classic IFS question. But what is your overworking part afraid of what would happen or who you would be if they didn't overwork?

[32:33] Lisa Gajda: That's a great, that is actually really a great question. And who you would be is I don't know that one. Let's start with who you would be, because I think that as a teenager, as a rebellious teenager and as a youth, I was not thriving. And it looked like I was gonna go down the drain. And I think that the overworking parts are worried that if I don't show up times 40 billion, then I'll be like a goth teenager that's gonna go down the drain. And then what they're afraid will happen is that everything will just fall apart. I think that this part is a leader and thinks that if she doesn't do it, it won't get done.

[33:14] Bobby Steggert: Not only would you go down the drain, would you be lazy? Would you be a bad parent? Would you be a bad therapist?

[33:21] Lisa Gajda: Yeah. And then I would lose, you know, it's dramatic, but parts are dramatic. Like that I would lose everything. Really, I think this part associates overworking, and like this sort of like innate not enoughness. Like this part is really rooted in like something that's fundamentally not good enough. So I have to work 80. I sound like such a sad person, but it's really just this part. But we have to work 80 billion times harder than a regular person to compensate for some sort of sense that like just 100% is not nearly enough. Like you need to do 400%. One thing that has always really helped me is to give parts of me that are um extreme and extreme roles jobs that they like to do but that aren't harmful to me.

My overanalyzer part loves crossword puzzles, literally crossword puzzles. And so when I give that part of myself the chance to do something like crossword puzzle, it's happy. It doesn't terrorize me as much. Do you have versions of that? Something you can give your overworking part that's not damaging to you?

[34:24] Lisa Gajda: I think the closest thing I get is being in motion. That really feeds me, and it is absolutely caretaking of me. And I do think that I am like innately loaded with actual non-trauma-based energy. So it really is something that's core to me to be in motion, to be outside. So just to give the overworking part to run a Jack Russell. I just need to run her out. It is pleasureful. It is core to me. I will go to my grave glad about all the times I was walking by the river. That's time well spent. Yeah, so being in motion. Can you convince that part of you that it's work?

[35:05] Bobby Steggert: Oh, I love that.

[35:08] Lisa Gajda: I never knew that I could do that. I just think about how sometimes a part will be satisfied if you can convince it that it's still doing its job. I really think I can convince it that it's work. I'm really thinking about this. Um yeah, it feels like a really joyful conversation. Because it's like the right work, it's good work.

[35:30] Bobby Steggert: Yeah.

[35:30] Lisa Gajda: Yeah, I think it's true that it's work. And I think it's true that it's letting the part do what it wants to do. It's just not like my kids and being in motion. Not really just my kids, my family, my husband and my kids, and being in motion is something that really I always describe it as it's like a green, lush, tropical, like it's so alive and green and full of like chlorophyll and like lushness. They feed me, and so it's work that that's one of my kids. The work that I do for my kids, again, like I can totally be overwhelmed by them and not like a moment, but working with them is giving while it takes, so is being in motion. It's nutritious as opposed to the cookies that refueling Fosse.

[36:15] Bobby Steggert: That's right.

[36:16] Lisa Gajda: It's a green juice. Call be green juice. Tell me about whether or not you miss dancing.

[36:25] Bobby Steggert: You know what? For a long time, the answer would have been like a really toxic and aggressive no, like a really poisonous no. I don't miss it. I do not miss or long for being a performer. But my dad recently died, he died in late August. So, like I have a lot of emotion and a lot of processing to do. I love him, and he died. And then there's all of life that's also still here. So things are very overwhelming. And in my own therapy as a client, I'm like, I need to move this. So I don't miss dancing as a profession because I think partly I had the great good fortune to experience it over and over at through various stages of my life in various ways. It was like not the performing was like terrorizing to me.

I didn't like the performing. I loved the life, I loved the people, I loved being in motion for a living. I liked how that felt like to be embodied for a living, to sing and dance and laugh for a living. I loved all of that, but performing was not freedom for me. Like it might have been for you, a place for you to feel. It was, but I also over identified with the identity of actor. And so what I freed myself of was this kind of rigid shape of the kind of person I was supposed to be. So there's more freedom on the other side of it, actually.

[37:47] Bobby Steggert: So the freedom from performing, but I think the being in motion. I took a dance class. The last dance class I took, I was like grown woman. It was my friend Doug Caldwell died, and my other friend, Susie Taylor, gave a Doug Caldwell memorial dance class, and I tried to take it to honor him and to be a part of that. And the parts of self that became a dancer are children, and they're wounded children, and they go to dance class to finally be good enough. And I don't like that feeling. And those parts came right back to the surface. Like a 50 year old woman. Like, I was like, what is happening? I didn't really, I think I just moved to the side and watched the beautiful young dancers and just took them in because it was not nourishing for me to do that.

So I think like I do need to move my body, and I would love to move my body to music. And I do think that there may be a way for me to dance in some way, whether it's apparently there are these like groups of people that like dance down the streets of New York like hippies.

[38:48] Lisa Gajda: Oh that could be fucking cool.

[38:51] Bobby Steggert: You mean like the silent discos?

[38:53] Lisa Gajda: Silent discos? Yeah, what the float is a great organization that does that. I think that's my people. I don't want a goddamn mirror, and I don't want to be good or bad. I need like literally one of the things I said in my last therapy session as a client is like Western culture is just like its separation from the body is so tragic because there's so much healing just by listening to it and moving it. I just feel like so much of this grief and integration that needs to happen and stuff that's pent up and confused. We often try to work that out intellectually, but I think it's an experience like that I don't even honestly have to understand. I need to honor it and be present to it. So for me, I was saying to my therapist, like you think about all the cultures that movement is crucial to.

And it's just so crazy. We don't have that generally in this culture. It's always structured and it's always like, am I good at salsa or am I bad at solstice? And it's like, what about moving as the animal that you are? So anyway, I want to move like an animal now. I don't want to move like somebody who can point their foot.