Shaming and Shamed: a Talk with Martha Sweezy

Full Transcription

Today on IFS Talks, we have the pleasure of welcoming back Martha Sweezy. Martha Sweezy grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She's an Assistant Professor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a consultant at Cambridge Health Alliance and a psychotherapist in private practice in North Hampton, mass. After using psychodynamics, DBT and EMDR with severely traumatized individuals in community mental health for more than 18 years, Martha discovered Internal Family Systems therapy. She became fascinated with the response of clients not to mention with her own experience. When she'd gone through all of the levels of training on offer, she began to write about her clinical experiences and published two articles on IFS in peer reviewed journals.

Then with Ellen Ziskind, she invited some master IFS clinicians to articulate their applications of the model and published two co-edited volumes. Martha also teamed up with Toni Herbine-Blank and Donna Kerpelman to write a book on IFS couples’ therapy, entitled Intimacy from the Inside Out: Courage and Compassion in Couple Therapy. More recently, she coauthored a manual on IFS with Frank Anderson and Richard Schwartz and coauthored the second edition of Dick Schwartz's first book on IFS Internal Family Systems therapy, second edition, which includes over 70% of new material. Martha remains as impressed and charmed by IFS today as she was when she first saw a video of Dr. Schwartz in 2006. Thank you so much, Martha, for joining us again on IFS Talks.

Martha Sweezy: You're welcome. It's a pleasure

Aníbal Henriques: Martha, welcome back. Last time we met was November 2019, one year ago, and the pandemic strikes, meanwhile, and we are just finishing one of the most difficult years in our lives. How have you been those pandemic days?

Martha: Well, it hasn't been the most difficult year of my life. It's actually been easy, but I'm extremely lucky because I live in a place that I like, and I can work from home and I don't have any food insecurity or housing insecurity or anything like that. So, it's actually, and also, I had several book contracts, which I was rash enough to sign up for all at once. So, I was in for sitting around writing a lot anyway, so, not socializing. So...

Aníbal: It's helping you.

Martha: Yeah, it wasn't bad for my work ethic, let's put it that way.

Tisha: So, we met with you a year ago and it sounds like you've been busy since then.

Martha: Yeah.

Tisha: What are you working on?

Martha: Well, Toni Herbine-Blank and I just finished a manual on Intimacy from the inside Out, the IFS couple therapy approach, which is being published by PESI, should be out in the spring. It's in press now.

Aníbal: Beautiful. Congratulations.

Martha: Thank you. And so, we're excited about that and I'm working on another manual for PESI with Cece Sykes on IFS and Addictions, how to treat addictions using IFS or and just compulsive behavior in general. And I'm working on another book with Dick on IFS for lay people. And I'm working on my own book, by myself on the topic of shame

Aníbal: On the topic of shame. Yes. So, you keep your particular interest in how shame and guilt affect our lives?

Martha: It's my central interest, I think. Because for me, everything keeps boiling down to that over and over again with my clients, as I sort of feel, I mean, it was my interest at the beginning of my career and then I circled back around to it because it's basically what I kept hearing over and over again over the years from the people I work with. And particularly when you're doing IFS and you get to exiles, what you get to is some kind of shame-based belief that a part who's been injured has about itself.

Aníbal: Martha, I've been browsing on this topic on shame and we can find so many interesting titles and works on this pervasive, somehow pervasive, topic of shame throughout or across psychopathology.

Martha: There's a big literature. A lot has been published on the topic of shame.

Aníbal: I found two titles really, really very interesting. One, I guess you know both of them, the first one, the one from John Bradshaw.

Martha: Yes. John Bradshaw Healing the Shame that Binds You. Yeah.

Aníbal: Very early on the 1980s. And later on, the one from Patricia DeYoung, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame.

Martha: Yeah. I reviewed that book actually for her publisher, yeah.

Aníbal: But how so while browsing this sea of publications on shame and guilt, I found this title called Step by Step Guide on How to Overcome Shame and Guilt for Good...

Martha: How about that? Getting rid of it for good. Yeah. Okay.

Aníbal: So, can we get rid for good of shame?

Martha: Not in my opinion, no. Shame and guilt... I mean, I don't know what the person meant by that title, what the author meant. So, I'm not speaking to that, but in my, you know, this is a hard-wired emotion that starts very young, younger than guilt, according to researchers. So, in my view, you don't get rid of it. You always have the capacity to feel ashamed. If someone shames you, you're going to, you know, it's going to be painful, especially if it hits near the mark of something that you already find sensitive or vulnerable about yourself. I mean, if it's meaningless to you, you're not going to feel shamed, but often embarrassing situations that actually means that it's sort of hit close to home for you. And the question for me is not should we never feel shamed by or embarrassed in situations, but how do we treat ourselves after that happens? And that's where the real problems develop. It's not so much a problem to, you know, we have the capacity to feel shame because it cues us up to be socially...Well, it can be a problem at times, but it cues us up to be socially conformist. It tells us how to belong to a group and that, as we know, has pluses and minuses, right? But, it's not something we want to do without people who have no access to feelings of shame or sociopaths. And I don't happen to think it's because they have no shame. I think it's because they have too much and they have parts who are blocking them from accessing their ability to connect with it and with other people.

Aníbal: You mean the sociopaths.

Martha: Yeah. Sociopaths. So, but so I don't, you know, it's just, it's something we need. All our emotions are hardwired, you know, an information system that we need. The question is, once I feel ashamed in a situation, what happens inside of me and how do I go forward from there? And IFS tells us a lot about that process that I think is fairly obscure if you don't understand, or it's more obscure, if you don't understand and think in terms of parts. Once you think in terms of parts, the process that gets going with the internal cycle that is launched by feeling shamed is something that you can unpack in a very useful way for clients. And it makes sense to them.

You know, you have one part who felt shameful and then you have other parts of step in to protect that part in various ways. And they tend to kind of become extreme over time, particularly for folks who are coming in for therapy, you'll see that we all have this, but people were seeking help for it, have gotten into a more extreme place where they have a proactive part, a so-called manager part, who's doing a lot of shaming internally, and then they have...We can just think in terms of inhibition, that part has an overall goal of inhibiting the shamefulness of the person from being visible to others in, you know, inhibiting the part who got injured and shamed. And then ultimately that's unbearable, you know, inhibition there's only so much one can tolerate of that, or any system can tolerate of that. And it actually ramps up the feeling of shamefulness. So, some other protectors step in on the polar opposite end of things, with disinhibition and distraction, and they actually cause more trouble, because I don't really care about consequences. So, they behave shamelessly.

And then you have this cycle that just keeps going with the parts who are trying to manage and contain and control and keep the shamefulness invisible ramping up their tactics of inhibition. And you stay over this big cycle of inhibition and disinhibition with the vulnerable part, just actually being ignored. So, the injury, the part who actually needs help for all this protection that's going on is getting into a worse and worse place because it's not getting help. It's getting handled by parts who were often barely older than it is and who can't help it, weren't equipped to help it. So that's where the, you know, in IFS, the Self comes in as the resource that can step into this closed cycle and change what's going on by addressing the initial problem of shamefulness. It's a relation, you know, it's an attachment issue, basically.

Tisha: What are some of the consequences of shame remaining obscure? Of not unpacking it in this way, where you understand how the managers and firefighters work? What happens?

Martha: Well, I mean, it depends on your level of suffering let's put it that way, suffering is the consequence, but we all have different, you know, suffering is on a continuum, right? And you can be perfectly functional in your life and not end up in therapy and having to be suffering a lot and have various ways of coping with it. You know, you can spend all your time working, or, and then when you get home, while your time on the computer, and then, you know, taking pills to get some sleep at night, and, you know, so there's all kinds of ways of, of coping with the suffering that's going on internally. But if it gets, if you have the wherewithal to get therapy. If someone urges you to get therapy, if you're desperately in a crisis and you have to get therapy, then you have the opportunity to go inside and begin to take a look at the ways in which you're abandoning your most vulnerable parts in this effort to survive and cope with injury.

Aníbal: Martha, are you saying that somehow shame plays a role in the violent behaviors of perpetrators?

Martha: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Aníbal: Like James Gilligan suggests...

Martha: Yeah. That's a brilliant book. James Gilligan's book called Violence.

Aníbal: So, the need to avoid the experience of shame can get you into crime and violence.

Martha: It's disinhibition. I mean, you know, at its extreme, right? You have the extreme inhibition, and that's one of the things that Gilligan points out is that these people who were supposed to be shameless, you know, and he's talking about murderers, people who were very, you know, in prison for the rest of their lives had terrible trauma histories and were very, you know, shame based in their view of themselves, and then had this extreme disinhibition and rage and a willingness to harm others. So...

Aníbal: So, they are shameless, but that, but they are also trying to avoid shame.

Martha: Well, just like, I mean, the writ large portrait we've had in the last four years of this is a guy named Donald Trump, right? He's...I don't want to go off too much on him, but he's such a classic portrait of the connections between narcissism and sociopathy, if it gets too strong and so-called shamelessness, but somebody who was traumatized as a child and, and cannot has such a level of shame in my view that he had protectors who made him blind to it completely and caused him to be at the other end of extreme disinhibition all the time, you know, unable to stop, kind of compulsive disinhibition and distraction from himself.

Martha: That's what I saw.

Aníbal: So, Martha, you are saying, as many authors in this topic, say that shame has healthy faces and also toxically destructive faces?

Martha: Well, see...Let me clarify something, which I think is important for people to think about clinically, that I don't talk about shame per se. I try not to, I talk about shaming or shamefulness or ashamed or any of those things, because that personifies the, you know, we're dealing with, we're talking about parts who, when someone comes into my office and says, I have so much shame. I don't know if they're talking about the internal critic that is shaming them actively all the time. Or if they're telling you about the exile who feels shameful, and it's extremely clarifying for them if I say let's unpack that and find out who's doing what to whom, because people have, they get hurt and it's not, you know, it's not written in stone that if we get shamed that we're going to go on feeling shameful, right? We get shamed, we might go home to our parents and say "Wha, wha, someone was mean to me." And the parent gives you a hug and says "Okay, don't worry about it, you're great, you're fine, I love you." And the kid doesn't feel shameful anymore, right? So, if a child is held in a loving enough environment, they can often shake off. Not always, but they can often shake off the majority of shaming kinds of interactions they would have with peers or whatever. So, it's really, how does this move inside us and who's doing what to whom, and that's what I want people to start looking at when they are saying, I have shame. So, I want it to be a verb.

Aníbal: I see you totally agree with this Patricia DeYoung definition of shame. She says "Shame is an experience of one's felt sense of self disintegrating in relation to a dysregulating other." So, the dysregulating other is the shaming part.

Martha: Yes. Well, it starts off externally.

Aníbal: Exactly.

Martha: But then it becomes an identity, right? The shaming goes from an incident, "a bad thing happens to me," to "I am bad, there's something wrong with me.” So, it goes from an event to an identity.

Aníbal: Exactly.

Martha: And in therapy, we're trying to take it back to "That was an event, actually, that wasn't, that's not your identity and you don't have to own that. Someone did that to you."

Aníbal: Patricia also says that this dysregulating other is someone close to us whose emotional response leaves us feeling fragmented instead.

Martha: Right. I mean, if she looked at this from the perspective of parts, she would probably have a slightly different angle on that leaves us feeling fragmented, because what makes people feel fragmented is the conflict between parts. Now there's, we always have parts, but if they're getting along, we don't feel so fragmented, but like any system, it starts to look and feel fragmented if people are in conflict.

Aníbal: So, how does shame feel in our bodies? How do we experience it? It comes as humiliation, unworthiness, diminishing, negatively compared?

Martha: Well, diminishing is the key word there, right? People often talk about feeling small when they're shamed. And I think that's because they actually go back to the, it's like a Yertle the turtle, you know, they get back to the exile at the bottom of the pile pretty quickly, the original injury in their life or injuries. So, they feel small because they're basically doing what in IFS, what we would call blending with an exiled part, a very young part. But that's a key feature of shame in the body is to feel diminished small and smaller than the person who is shaming you. And to want to hide. I think if there's a Scandinavian derivation, actually, to the word. It's like, people try to, you know, the perp walk, people try and hide their faces or not be seen. So that's...People try not to be seen emotionally, but they also try not to be seen literally, because there's a global judgment that they are projecting basically out into that other people are now seeing them the way they now see themselves, which is as defective or unworthy or disgusting or something like that. So, it's a very body-based and kind of, and, you know, people get flushed and they heat up and they feel exposed and...

Aníbal: And do you believe it's possible to help people that have criminal perpetrator behaviors to track his own shame or is so disassociated that it's not possible at all?

Martha: Well, as with everything, a person has to have a reason to track something. And most people, if you even say the word shame, you know, they'll try and get up and leave the room. You know, it's like, it's not a popular topic because it keys up these parts so quickly. So, a person who has gotten to the point of being a perpetrator in some kind of serious transgressive way is really defending against their feelings of shame. And they're, you know, they have parts who feel they're in danger all the time and are willing to go on the attack, and that person isn't going to usually be motivated unless, and Jim Gilligan talks about this, unless they're nailed down, you know, if they get put in prison, then they often look, a sociopath will suddenly become profoundly depressed. And, because they're not, they can't, they're not on the move anymore. They can't be doing that distraction of interacting with people in this way that is so painful for other people. So, yeah, it depends.

Tisha: It sounds like it's pretty vulnerable to introduce the idea of working with shame, you know, with your parts that feel it.

Martha: You know, I don't find it is with my clients to tell you the truth. I find they're really relieved. And they're really glad that someone's willing to name it in a very like “Oh, this is something we're going to look at.” You know, this is key to what you're experiencing, because if I were scared of it, then it would be hard for them to talk about it. But I'm so not scared of it at this point. I'm like, that's where we're going. We're going there as fast as we can, because this is going to get you out of this, out of the state of mind. And don't, you know, let's not waste time. Your money and your time. So, I'm right on it. And people like it. And I also clarify it for people, if they start using the word guilt, when I think they mean shame, I will explain the difference between guilt and shame. And we'll explore. Because guilt can be an issue for people too. But I want people to be clear whether shame or guilt that they're talking about.

Tisha: What's your cue there, Martha, for noting that difference between guilt and shame?

Martha: Well, if somebody starts talking about feeling that they transgressed against somebody else, we're in the zone of guilt, right? Now, they may not have like, say someone talks about having left home when their mother was depressed and gone off to college, and they've never gotten over the guilt that they felt about that, right? That's guilt. That's true, that it's guilt. It's maladaptive guilt, because it was perfectly appropriate for them to go off to college. They didn't really transgress against the person who was depressed, but they were in that situation, they felt responsible for the caretaker, phenomenal caretaker, and they are experiencing guilt. And so that's what we would focus on in the therapy. The parts who are attached to the sense that they have this responsibility for their nominal caretaker, which would probably be a parentified part, basically in this person. And as opposed to “I can't go home because I don't like how people look at me when I'm there at Thanksgiving dinner. I can't stand to be seen in a big family party or something.” That's shame. Right? “I am bad” versus “I did wrong”. And maladaptive guilt combines the two “ did wrong, therefore, I am bad,” but we start with “I did wrong” because that's where they are.

Aníbal: Martha, you say the antidote to shame is self-compassion. Freud said self-love is a proven way to overcome the feeling of shame.

Martha: What was that? What did you say?

Aníbal: Sigmund Freud.

Martha: Oh Sigmund Freud, yes.

Aníbal: Love is the proven way to overcome the feelings of shame.

Martha: Yes. I didn't know he said that. He's a smart guy.

Aníbal: A smart guy. Patricia DeYoung says shame needs light and air.

Martha: Yes.

Aníbal: So, how does this translate to therapy?

Martha: Well, that's what I was just talking about. Shame needs light in there that you, that if you feel confident in yourself, you're not ashamed of talking about shame. You don't want to leave the room. You're the therapist. You you've helped your parts who get triggered by that. Then you have a lot of, you're able to stay in your zone of compassion, which is where you need to be as a therapist. And you have a tremendous compassion for this person who is suffering in front of you, but you don't think there's anything shameful about them. You're actually very confident that no matter what, even if they did have feet that were too big, when they were, you know, five years old or whatever it was that that's, that there was nothing wrong with them and they got hurt, but that it didn't mean something about them. So, you hold that kind of confidence about their basic okayness and that they're fine, and that they got hurt. And that what they're there for is to get help with that injury that's never been healed. And that just reassures people, you know.

Tisha: I've experienced something, that's been one of those sort of thematic moments in the past couple of weeks with a couple of different clients who have encountered that some of the shame that they felt was inherited and have...Yeah. So, they've come upon beliefs of “I'm a failure, or I make terrible decisions.” And yeah. So, I just wanted to ask you about the legacy burden aspect of shame.

Martha: I'm just writing a chapter on that actually. And it's a big, it's a great topic because it's a different experience to feel shameful yourself or to join with somebody who feels shameful, right? And the first one is something wrong with me. And the second one is I have to take care of this person who is having a problem, because then maybe they'll be able to take care of me. And also, I love them. You know, so kids get pulled into the orbit of adults who are attacking themselves, who have strong critics. It doesn't mean they won't develop their own strong critic who will go after them. Then that is another risk. And it's much more likely if they see if they see the adult doing that, but there are two different things. And if you ask someone, you know, what percentage of this energy belongs to you and what percentage belongs to your, your parents or your care, your ancestors, and don't think about it. You know, they'll very quickly come up with a number, you know, say, Oh, 70% is theirs and 30 is mine or 50 50 or whatever. And then you just deal with the legacy aspect of it first. Because if you don't, that's a matter of loyalty. And if you don't address that for parts that protect, these are protectors like parentified child parts who were pulled into the vortex of a dysfunctional parent and, and caused to take care of that parent, basically to try and meet that parent's needs, meet the needs of that parents exiles actually. So, it gets complicated.

Then you, you know, so you're trying to unpack all that for the client and show them who's taking care of who in this and you're trying to help them, the parts who are, who are stuck in that place of responsibility to see that they don't have to do it anymore, or to find out what they're worried about, what would happen just as you would with any burden, what are you worried would happen if you let go of this? And, and it may be, it can go from something as real and scary as they'll commit suicide. You know, the parents are still alive and if I don't do this, they could die, which is, then it's a real issue you have to think about too, you know, “Oh, I see that was all from the past and I don't really have to worry about it anymore. And I'm going to update this part and let it know that person is dead or that person's doing okay. And, you know, you're not responsible.” So, it depends on what is going on in the relationship as to what needs to happen for the part who feels loyal and responsible. But you've got to address that or that part will not allow any unhooking and letting go of personal burdens is definitely unhooking from dysfunctional relationships. It doesn't mean you're not going to have a relationship with a person you might, or you might not, but you're definitely not going to do it the same way and protective parts who are protecting somebody else aren't going to allow that change unless their issues, their concerns have been addressed first.

Tisha: Oh, absolutely. And it seems like a profound step, especially when there's been a legacy, like for example, like the grandfather gambles the house away or a great-grandmother has severe mental illness, or the family takes the wrong side in war. Like it all seems to somehow feed in into not look at it.

Martha: Yeah. And there are so many ways in which things can have gone wrong and did go wrong in the past that children can be left feeling, holding the bag on I don't know why I feel ashamed shamefulness, or I don't know why I feel this guilt, or I do, but it's appropriate. It's the price my family has to pay for having done that.

Tisha: Yeah. So really good to just kind of lean into that and find out how it's affected oneself more than the story energetically or in terms of those beliefs that we carry.

Martha: I mean, it's in different picture, but the way you're doing it is still the same. You're just talking to parts and you're finding out what's the attachment here and what's the willingness and why do you need to do this? You know, what's at stake here. It's all relational and it's all attachment issues.

Tisha: Yeah. So, bring in your curiosity,

Martha: Bring your curious. Yeah, exactly. And your compassion. Yeah, exactly.

Aníbal: Martha, Patricia DeYoung also talks of chronic shame. Do you agree with her on this concept of chronic shame? Some clients really carry chronic shame.

Martha: I mean, I think we all do, most of us do. So, you know, as I was saying, a lot, a lot of people are perfectly functional with their current, you know, chronic shame that they're suffering and other people, when they become really dysfunctional and show up in therapy, then we get the chance to help with it. But I think shame, because it moves inside and becomes an internal process, is a chronic problem for most people. And I've never met, I've given talks and I'll say "How many people in this room have an internal critic?" Everybody in the room raises their hands.

Aníbal: Of course.

Martha: "How many people love their internal critic?" I've only had one person raised their hand once. And he was a guy that meditated for 50 years. He said "I'm trying, I'm really trying."

Aníbal: Is there a cure for chronic shame?

Martha: The cure is compassion. Self-compassion, compassion for other people and getting into...Helping people get into relationship with their Self so that their Self can form a relationship with their shaming parts and help their, the parts who get disinhibited in response to that and cause more shame and get to the exiles and help them unburden the sense of, you know, there's something wrong with me. And so, you're trying to take it back to the...it's very simple formula in my view, you're trying to take it back from I'm bad to something bad happened to me. That's it, that's what we're doing with all this months and years and effort and school and learning and input on our, you know, the time and investment our clients making. That's what we're looking for. You know. Even people who have, you know, people who have major mental illness and issues like that have been profoundly shamed for being mentally ill, for having something go wrong with their brain. And those people have parts who are trying to manage that, that shame. It's traumatic to be sick in certain ways. And so, you can help them too.

Aníbal: Let me check if you are more optimistic than Patricia DeYoung. Asking her if she believes there is a cure for chronic shame, she goes, and she says "As a psychotherapist, I'd like to say to my clients, yes, absolutely, we can beat this thing. As a person who has struggled to understand and integrate my own chronic shame, I would love to answer yes, I'm over it. To be honest, however, I have to say no, I don't think chronic shame can be cured."

Martha: Again. I think we deal in slightly...You know, I have a different angle on this, and we deal in slightly different terms. I don't think shame can be cured because it's a hard-wired emotion that we're going to feel again. But I do think the way in which we treat ourselves can be radically altered, which changes the problem and gets rid of chronic shame. We just have the ability to feel shame, but you're not spending your day, shaming yourself, your critic, isn't your most dominant part in your life, you know? And how do you, I mean, this is the question I've been thinking about as I'm working on this chapter right now is do critics ever give up, can you ever have a critic free mind?

You know, it would be interesting to ask the Dalai Lama, how he's doing on that. You know, I mean, I don't, I don't know...most of the people I work with clinically and myself, I don't have a critic free mind, but I have noticed that my critics are, they're mostly quite relaxed, but they're sort of ready to come back. They're on notice. They don't retire and give up and just go play, you know, go swimming or something entirely. So, I have been asking them "what makes you come back? You know, what, why are you so vigilant about this? " Well, the world's a dangerous place, you know, and we all have the capacity to feel shame. So, they may never not come back, but they're like the parts who are most sensitized to being shamed. But if I'm in a good relationship with them, they don't get going. You know, when something happens that’s shaming for me, I can immediately interact with them and say "you know, I get that that was scary for you and you know, I'll take care of the part who, who felt hurt by that and I can handle this." And so they go, you know, they say, okay, you know, "Okay, well, we don't need to ramp it up." And they're not waking me up in the night with, you know, with reminders of what a terrible person I am. So, it's my relationship with my parts that addresses the chronic part of this.

Tisha: So, like, the meditator who in 50 years, it's learning to love that shaming part.

Martha: Right. I mean, I think that, I think it depends on how you meditate. You know, I have a hope that meditation will... I think the two are coming closer together as meditators on IFS and IFS is more influenced by people who are into mindfulness that people will be taking the opportunity of mindfulness to actually, you know, make more room for their parts. And the more...that's what we're talking about is just, you know, welcoming all parts and being in relationship with them.

Tisha: Yeah. Who is your book on shame geared towards?

Martha: It's geared towards clinicians, but I'm hoping that it won't just be for people who already know IFS, I'd like it to be for a broader audience, although it is the IFS frame. So that's the balancing act that I'm trying to do with the help of my editor, who sort of...Who wants it to be that way too. So, so I'm hoping it'll reach a broader audience.

Aníbal: And when? Do you have an idea when?

Martha: I'm right in the middle of this one? So, I don't know how long it's going to take. This one. I mean, the others are fairly, I know the, the ones that are sort of how to apply IFS, I'm very steeped in that I know how to do what I'm working with people, with coauthors who are experts. And so that goes much faster. The shame book is really...what I get from writing something like this is I'm learning constantly as I write it, I'm articulating my ideas and see what fits and what doesn't fit and then I have to change them and I bring in clinical examples and it changes the whole thing again. And you know, so, it's a great process. I love it. But it's, I have no idea how long it's going to take.

Aníbal: I hope you can enjoy it as well.

Martha: Yeah, no, I enjoy it a lot. I learn a tremendous amount.

Tisha: We're looking forward to it. Yeah.

Martha: Thank you.

Aníbal: So again, Martha, thank you so much for all that you do. Thank you for having us.

Martha: You're welcome. Thank you.

Aníbal: Thank you for your wisdom. It was a joy to be here with you and Tisha, and we hope we can meet again and sharing this model, our work and our lives.

Martha: Thank you.

Tisha: Thank you, Martha. Take care.

Recorded 12th December 2020
Transcript Edition: Carolina Abreu