Meet Tamala Floyd, whose deep commitment to healing spans over 25 years. In our conversation, Tamala shares her journey from traditional social work and teaching to pioneering accessible paths for emotional healing, particularly for women navigating trauma, mothering, and relationship challenges.
We began our conversation by discussing Tamala’s latest book, Listening When Parts Speak, and explored the philosophy behind her work. Drawing from Internal Family Systems (IFS), a therapeutic model that views the mind as made up of distinct “parts” or sub-personalities, Tamala reveals how healing begins not by silencing these parts, but by approaching them with compassion and curiosity. Through IFS, individuals learn to relate to these inner voices from a place of calm, clarity, and connection, led by the unbroken “capital S” Self within.
Our discussion touches on profound ideas about how healing does not require a therapist’s office, how ancestral legacies can both shape and burden us, and how true transformation often begins when we listen with openness to the wounded protectors within. Tamala also speaks candidly about her own life, mothering five children, including three adopted, and making bold moves to create a life filled with purpose, adventure, and international travel.
Beyond personal healing, Tamala emphasizes the power of community and shared experience, especially when confronting inherited wounds. Her retreats and new audio program, Healing the Wounded Mother, create spaces where women can unburden the past and reclaim joy for future generations.
Throughout our conversation, Tamala invites us to reflect on what parts of ourselves still need to be heard, what legacies we are ready to release, and how our healing might ripple outward to our families, our ancestors, and the world.
We know you will leave this episode feeling inspired, softened, and deeply hopeful about your own capacity for transformation.
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Listen to the podcast here
Listening When Parts Speak: Healing From Within With Tamala Floyd
Everybody, welcome. I have with us, Tamala Floyd, a licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, IFS lead trainer, consultant, author, and speaker with over 25 years of experience. She received a master’s degree in social work from the University of Southern California and an undergraduate degree in psychology from California State University, Long Beach. She has taught at the University of Phoenix and the University of Southern California in Human Services and Social Work. Her work focuses on women’s trauma, mothering, and relationship issues, helping women identify and heal emotional wounds that impede their success and coaching them in achieving fulfilling life goals.
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Welcome, Tamala. How are you doing?
I’m doing really good, Bonnie.
Unveiling IFS: Your Internal Family System Explained
I’m going to ask in a minute where you’re coming from because that’s a big part, but let’s start with your book. I want to hear some more, I’m going to give the short version. It’s Listening When Parts Speak. I want to hear more about these parts. Can you talk about that just a little bit?
Parts are the way in which the mind is composed. At one time, it was believed that the psyche was just one thing, one personality. What we understand now is that there are sub-personalities that make up the mind. In IFS, we call those sub-personalities parts.
You just lobbed a phrase out there, IFS, back us up because not all of our readers are going to know what that is. Can you talk about that?
IFS stands for Internal Family Systems. I really love the connection between the name internal family and our external family. What IFS is, us seeing our parts, those sub-personalities as family members that live within inside of us. It’s our internal family that we’re working with as opposed to your external family, the family you were born into.
Let me understand this because you started by talking about these sub-personalities, let’s say, and now this internal family, are we talking about belief systems we picked up from the family that we put on like a coat and decided to wear for a little while?
Yes, but it is the parts that are holding those values and beliefs from the family. Different parts are going to hold the beliefs differently.
Got it. Can you give us an example of the parts and how this works? How do I discover them? I feel like I want to draw them and just have them start interacting and talking to each other.
It’s so funny that you would say that because that is one of the ways we work with our parts, which is that you can draw your parts, see them there on the paper, and come into relationship with them. Another way to think about our parts is sometimes we’ll say to ourselves that “I’m depressed, or I’m sad, or I’m a person who gets excited easily.” Often, those are the behaviors of our parts.
We have parts that might be excited, parts that get angry, parts that cause us to withdraw when we’re in spaces with a lot of people. Maybe if we’re one-on-one, we can show our personality in a fuller way. These are the behaviors of our parts and how they might show up. When we think about our emotions, our thoughts, our values, perspectives, and opinions, these are all ways in which our parts show themselves to us.
You also talk a bit about the self. I’m going to give it a capital S. I give it a capital S, and I talk about a capital T true self. Is that behind the parts, we’re working our way through the parts to get to this capital S self?
I love that picture. Yes. What happens is we always have this self. The self is us minus our parts. When we are separate from our parts, what’s under that is the self, and the self has not been harmed by any of the traumas we may have experienced. It’s whole, it’s connected, it’s compassionate. The self is the healing resource. When we come into connection with self, we can heal those pains, those wounds, and traumas that we may carry.
In a way, I’m seeing this all visually, and in full disclosure, I do work with dreams, and dreams are showing us different parts of the self. I use a different language and method, but I see some similarities. Could I, working with you, would that be there’s a moment where my capitalist self is going to bump into a part where the part is restricting me and the capitalist self wants to move forward and expand? Is that how I’m understanding correctly?
It’s a great way to conceptualize. I’m just going to tweak it just a little bit. In IFS, you have the self and you have the parts, but instead of the self trying to push through, what we call it is unblending. The self will ask the parts to move out of the way. The self cannot force itself through. It has to ask the part to unblend, to separate. What the point is for healing to happen, we have to have two things present. If I’m in my angry part, there’s no access to self. I’m in that part, that part in the seat of consciousness, and that’s how I’m interacting with other people.
I, as the therapist, or if a person has just a little bit of access to self, self can ask that angry part to give it some space so that it self can come into relationship with it. That’s the beginning of the healing. When we can separate, now self can hear from the angry part. “What exactly is causing you to be so angry? What is it about what Bonnie said that upset you? That makes sense. Tell me some more about that.” Self is there to hear and come into relationship with any of our parts, but in this case, one of our angry parts.
Navigating The Inner Cocktail Party: Self Vs. Parts Dynamics
That is so beautiful. The image I have right now is being in some noisy cocktail party with all these different parts, all these emotional parts, trying to say their thing. This is quite a little self, just moving through and hoping there’s going to be some opening. It’s really beautiful.
It is beautiful. Self-natural qualities are things like compassion, connection, clarity, and curiosity. That’s a big one is just to be curious about the part. Self doesn’t hold any preconceived notion about any of our parts. It’s really there to understand the part in this particular situation where the part got activated or triggered.
Now, here’s the real clincher for the work you do, because we were chatting before we hit record and you talked about how that, and you give examples of how to get to this place in your book, means that we all have within us a way to do our own healing, even if we cannot have access to a coach like you. Can you talk about that a little more?
Thank you, Bonnie. This is the absolute motivation behind writing, listening when parts speak. Internal family systems is such a powerful modality for healing that I wanted to come up with a way that more folks could have access to this healing because one, everybody doesn’t want to go to therapy, maybe cannot afford therapy, and want to heal in other ways. There are many other ways to heal outside of a therapist’s office. That’s what this book is about.
Moving through the book allows one to come into, first of all, understand what parts are, understand their own parts as far as what parts. We call them our main players. What parts are the main players in your system? Often, these are the ones that have taken on the role to protect us from future harm based on harm we’ve experienced in the past. That right there is a big chunk, and that’s what we learned at the beginning of the book. It’s like, just what does an IFS, we call it your system, because IFS is based on systems theory. How these parts work together, which parts are my main players, and how I come into a relationship with them. I’m going to pause there and see if you have questions, because I know that was a lot.
When we think about our emotions, our thoughts, our values, perspectives, and opinions, these are all ways in which our parts show themselves to us.
It’s so perfect. When we start to come in contact with these characters, if I’m hearing correctly, just making that contact, things start to soften around that.
Yes, absolutely. One thing within our system is, if anyone who’s reading just thinks back to early harms that they experienced. That our parts took on roles to protect us. If someone has a part that’s angry and raging, it’s angry and raging for a good reason. There’s something that’s happened in the past that helps protect the person from more harm. Coming into a relationship with these parts, they’re thinking, “I just have to do what I’m doing because this is how I protect the person.”
They have no idea, in a lot of cases, that there is a self that wants to be in relationship with them. They also don’t believe they have a choice around what they’re doing. I rage because this is the way I keep people back. This is the way I keep the person protected. I have to do this because there’s nothing else. There’s no one else to protect this person until they meet.
It’s like Don Quixote. It was put on during the war, but then, when the war was over, there was no need to keep fighting.
Those are the exact words that I use when I’m talking to clients. Also in the book is that the parts take on strategies that one, made sense at the time, and two, they weren’t until they didn’t. Often when people are looking for healing, it’s because these strategies that they have created that worked and made sense no longer work. They’re falling apart. They’re causing marriages to fall apart. They’re causing them to have ineffective relationships with their children, or they’re getting fired from their jobs. One time, it made sense until it no longer works for the person.
Compassionate Parts: Recognizing The Good In Every Emotion
This is such a compassionate view, a compassion for the self view instead of being super judgy about these parts of really recognizing that they had a role to play, as you’re saying, and relaxing around it.
One of the assumptions in IFS is, I must say two of them, one, there are no bad parts regardless of how our parts behave, and all parts have a positive intention. Sometimes that can be hard to wrap our mind around because if we have parts that are putting the hand grenade in our life, so to speak, it’s like, how could they possibly have positive intention? The positive intention is around protection, around keeping us safe.
That makes total sense. You put another little twist to it where you bring in the ancestors. Those are outside the family. Is that what we’re seeing out here?
Yes. Our family has passed on. I define family very broadly. I’m not speaking just of blood-related family. We have our blood family. We also have our chosen family. There are folks that are important to us that we’ve chosen to call family. My best friend, for instance, who I’ve been best friends with before I had children, she’s an auntie to my children.
We have our birth family, chosen family. I also am a mom with three adopted children. There’s your adopted family. However, family is defined as those are our ancestors. Those are people who love us and are looking out for us. Those connections, those family members that have gone on many generations past have wisdom that we can access. They also desire our healing. I often invite ancestors, and in the book, I teach folks how to invite their ancestors into the work.
The main place that ancestors are most impactful is when we work with what we call in IFS Legacy Burdens. A legacy burden is a burden that has been handed down the ancestral line. We no longer have a connection to the original pain, but our ancestors have come to behave in a way around that original pain, and it’s just passed down. Those legacy burdens are ancestors are particularly helpful in unburdening those.
That is so interesting. By inviting them into the room, there’s now an interplay. The cocktail party just got more interesting.
It did, yes.
Inviting them into the room, it’s recognizing those also as a part, or how it’s echoing with our inner parts?
Yes, so the ancestors, they too would have their parts too, but they’re coming in as themselves. One of the things that is different is who we’re asking to come in to help with the healing is a well ancestor. There may be a burden that’s been passed down through our ancestral line. For instance, in my ancestral line, there’s a burden of perfection that has been handed down the line. This would be a well ancestor that no longer has that burden and understands what’s needed to help release that burden from the family line.
It’s not just releasing the burden from the person who’s doing the work, but from other ancestors that also hold that burden and still are unhealed from it. By healing, by being the change maker in our ancestral line, we also keep that burden from moving forward. We’re ourselves. We’re healing the ancestors that came before us that still hold that. By changing and no longer passing that burden forward, we’re also healing future generations. It’s a very powerful medicine.
It is so powerful. What I’m reflecting on in this moment, we were talking before we started recording and you were talking about a big life change you made for your children, and you mentioned the three adopted ones, but you have five total, right?
Five total, yes.
That’s a big family.
It’s a very big family.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
I have two bonus children when I got married to my husband, and then the two of us have three adopted children and made a decision to leave big bustling California and ended up raising our three youngest children in Louisiana. We raised our children, we got through that part of life, and my husband and I, probably five years before our youngest would have reached eighteen. We made the decision that we wanted to travel the world once our children were all launched. For the last three years, I’ve been living internationally, traveling the world with my husband.
In a lot of cases, there is a self that wants to be in relationship with us.
That’s so wonderful. Just to go back to parenting for a moment, because you have a few talks that you give on mothering, around mothers and daughters. Do you want to say anything about that?
I do have another program that’s going to be released. That’s an audio program, and it’s called Healing the Wounded Mother. What that is about is how we mother when we have not addressed our own wounds and traumas. I use a lot of my own life because I, too, was a wounded mother. I mothered before working through much of the trauma that I was carrying. The audio is really about healing her.
There’s so much already out there about healing the children that the wounded mother impacted, but there’s not a lot out there about her story. That’s what this audio is about. What it’s like to mother before we’ve healed, how to heal, and how to mend, repair those relationships with our children that were impacted by us not being healed. What it means is that we were mothering from our parts. We’re mothering from those parts that were protecting us from the harm that we had experienced earlier.
If you think about it, I think about my own mother, for example, the beginning of having children happened at such a young age in comparison to generations today. I don’t think they could help but mother from their parts. I’m enough to discover anything.
Young mothers. That’s a really big one because whatever they had experience in mothering, they receive, which there’s actually a chapter that I have on, how the mothering we receive impacts how we mother, and becoming a young mother, what that means. There are young mothers in my family, too. My mother was a young mother before adulthood. My grandmother was a young mother.
It’s amazing to think about that. To loop back to your traveling the world, you’re actually in Costa Rica, and you’re about to have a great workshop.
Journey To Healing: Retreats, Community, And Legacy Burdens
I’m really excited about this. One of the things that has been birthed through listening when parts speak is these retreats that I’m now putting on for women to work through their legacy burdens. Legacy burdens are something that they’re just near and dear to my heart. I love working with that material because they’re burdens that we’re living with, but they’re not ours. They’re not personal. It didn’t come from my trauma or my upbringing.
It’s just been handed down. Sometimes our connection to our legacy burdens is also our connection to our family members, because if it’s a legacy burden, probably I have it, my mother, my grandmother. Sometimes these burdens are ways in which we define ourselves and connect to one another, even though they may not be healthy. This retreat allows women to work through them with other women. Healing and community are really important. Healing in community, that synergy helps us to heal more deeply and more completely.
I’m glad you said that because I did write that sentence and underlined it, that you talk about the need to heal as a group in community. I think that is so important, especially these days, because we’re all humans. I think sometimes we think only I am dealing with this, but we’re all dealing with this in one way.
I love that feeling alone in something heavy and difficult is so isolating. There’s the feeling that I’m the only one. The other thing that’s powerful about group healing and community healing is being witnessed. My pain and my healing are being held and witnessed by other people versus just one-on-one with maybe the therapist, and if they are the coach, having a group of people be there for you, and the various ways, which I cannot script. The ways in which people get out of their chair and go and hug another woman or put their hand on her or sit at her feet and let her look at her in her face, and say that we’re here for you. Those are the things I cannot script that add to the deepening of the healing for the person, the people who are there.
Years ago, we all were more than for each other. It’s our modern malaise that has us so much more separated in this way. Now, in your book, looping back to that, you give practices in each chapter. Is that right for people to learn this and work with this a bit for themselves?
I do. I’m so glad you came back to the practices because another thing that I wanted to speak about the ancestors sharing about my ancestors is every chapter has a meditation and how this book came to be is that I was asked to create a meditation on legacy burdens for a three-day summit and I had no idea what I was going to do at the time I was doing my own ancestral healing work with a practitioner. Connecting with my own ancestors.
Three days before I was going to do this meditation, my ancestors gifted me with the meditation that’s in the book in the Legacy Burden Chapter called Cabin with the Ancestor. When they gifted me, it’s interesting that you do dream work because they came to me in a dream and vividly showed me this meditation and took me through a healing exercise, which became the Cabin With The Ancestor Meditation. They said to me that this meditation will be one of several that we will continue to gift you with, that will become a book. I just trusted them.
Every time they came to me and gave me a new meditation, it was IFS-inspired. I thought, I remember saying to my practitioner, “How do they even know about IFS?” He said that “Our ancestors know about everything that’s important to us.” I’m glad that you circle back around. Every chapter has a meditation to deepen the learning. It’s followed by various different exercises to also help you connect with your parts and deepen the relationship with your parts, and also the learning of that chapter.
Connect Within: A Guided Practice For Self-Discovery
That’s fantastic. I’m sure everybody reading is going to get this book. I’m super excited to get it. Do you want to leave with any small practice that our readers can try?
Sure. Absolutely. That’s beautiful. Thank you. I would like to take your readers through a practice just to notice their main players. What I would like them to do is, wherever they are, hopefully they’re seated. They can lay down if that works. I’d like them to close their eyes if that feels comfortable or soften their gaze. As they breathe in, I just want them to notice what’s happening within their body.
There may be thoughts, bodily sensations, emotions, and images. Whatever you’re noticing, these are the ways in which our parts communicate with that. I’d like you to take one of those to focus on, whether it’s tightness in your stomach, warmness of warmth in your heart, or thoughts. Just focus on one. As you focus, just see what that part of you wants you to know. Why is it showing up in this moment in this way? Just going to be quiet for a while for you to connect and see what this part wants you to know.
As you’re learning more about this part, ask the part what it needs from you. You can allow this interaction, hearing from the part, finding out what the part needs from you to be the beginning of a connection with this part of yourself, and perhaps set an intention with this part to come back and spend more time with it, getting to know it even more. When that feels complete, you can thank the part for what it shared with you and let it know that you will reconnect soon. You can open your eyes and return to this moment and space.
Lovely.
Thank you for the invitation to share in that way.
It’s beautiful. Thank you for being with us, and thank you for sharing that practice.
My pleasure, Bonnie. Thank you for having me.
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About Tamala Floyd
Tamala Floyd, LCSW, is a psychotherapist, IFS lead trainer, consultant, author, and speaker with over 25 years of experience. She received a master’s degree in social work from the University of Southern California and an undergraduate degree in psychology from California State University–Long Beach.
She has taught at the University of Phoenix and the University of Southern California in human services and social work. Her work focuses on women’s trauma, mothering, and relationship issues, helping women identify and heal emotional wounds that impede their success and coaching them in achieving fulfilling life goals.