Hope and Care for Caregivers with Risa Adams, Robin Beardsley, and Elizabeth Parsons

Today I welcome to the podcast Drs. Risa Adams, Robin Beardsley, and Elizabeth Parsons. They are family physicians turned psychotherapists who came together during the pandemic to write, find community, and speak for their parts. What they found in that process and wrote about in their new book, It Doesn't Have To Be This Way: A Physician's Guide To Radical Self Care (by three physicians who've been there), is something most caregivers, doctors, healthcare workers, therapists, parents, partners, anyone who finds their worth in being needed, will recognize.

In This Episode

• The parts that helped you survive by taking care of everyone else
• Why fear and shame rarely get spoken out loud in medicine, or anywhere caregiving happens
• What finally broke each of them, and what helped
• Writing as a way to let parts be witnessed for the first time
• Why belonging and helping got tangled together so early

Takeaways

• Helper parts learned that helping was the price of belonging
• The parts that make you good at caring for others are often the same parts driving burnout
• Burnout is a signal that the strategy has run out of space
• Being witnessed by people who get it can reach parts that have never been spoken out loud
• The culture around caregiving, in medicine and elsewhere, rewards the helper and punishes the one who needs

This episode is for anyone who has ever made themselves smaller so there would be room to help.

Links:

Book: It Doesn't Have to Be This Way: A Physician's Guide to Radical Self-Care

IFS Canadian Community Conference: A two-day online gathering for professionals using Internal Family Systems in their work, and for those exploring how IFS may support their professional practice. June 5-6, 2026, online.

About the guests:

Risa Adams, MD, CCFP, is a family physician with a focused practice in perinatal mental health and complex PTSD. She is a Certified IFS Therapist, Approved Clinical Consultant and Trainer with the IFS Institute. Through her own travels with mental health she has come to appreciate the complexity of being a human while being a physician, with a special interest in intergenerational trauma. Risa lives in Elora, Ontario, with her partner and two children, and hopes to help bring IFS to doctors, patients and her own communities.

Robin Beardsley, MD, FCFP, a Family Physician with over 35 years' experience of comprehensive family medicine practice and psychotherapy with a focus on care for the caregiver. She is a certified IFS-I Therapist, approved Clinical Consultant, with extensive training in the Satir Model and is a trained teacher of Mindful Self Compassion. She also works with learners, as a faculty member of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Ottawa, and teaches Self Compassion for Health Care Communities. These experiences of working with and healing from empathic distress in medical communities with IFS and Self-Compassion, along with her own journey of being a caregiver, personally and professionally, has given her a greater understanding of the complexity and multiplicity of our systems. She lives in Ottawa, Ontario with her husband and adult children nearby. Elizabeth Parsons, MD, FCFP, has been a physician for over 25 years, practicing psychotherapy since 2007. She is a Certified IFS therapist and an Approved Clinical Consultant with the IFS Institute. In addition to IFS, Elizabeth is trained in trauma therapy and has been facilitating psychotherapy groups since 2010. Her interest in physician well being goes back to residency, when she surveyed medical residents on their coping strategies. She has been closely involved with the Medical Psychotherapy Association Canada since 2007, launching a self-care retreat for physicians that has run annually since 2012. Elizabeth lives in Ottawa, Ontario, with her husband and 3 children. About The One Inside

I started this podcast to help spread IFS out into the world and make the model more accessible to everyone. Seven years later, that's still at the heart of all we do.

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