PODCAST-E76 - Self-Trust, Parts Work, and the STAIR Model with Mallory Burggraf

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Most people who come to this kind of work arrive with a version of the same question: how do you fix me? It is a reasonable question, and it comes from years of moving through systems — medical, educational, institutional — where the professional in the room holds the answers and the person in the chair waits to receive them. On this episode of the Red Beard Embodiment Podcast, Alex Greene and his colleague Mallory Burggraf take that question apart.

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Mallory is a somatic coach based in Denver with a background in social work and training in Somatic Experiencing, Internal Family Systems, and Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning experience. Her most recent training is in a model called STAIR — Self-Trust and Integrated Resilience — developed by Jules Taylor Shore. What follows is a conversation about how those approaches braid together, and about what changes when the goal of therapy stops being repair and starts being self-trust.

1. STAIR is a frame, not a new set of techniques

STAIR stands for Self-Trust and Integrated Resilience, and Mallory describes its aim as helping clients build three things: self-trust, natural resiliency, and brain integration capacity. Every tool and invitation inside the model points back toward one of those three. It is not a replacement for the somatic, parts, and attachment work she was already doing — in her words, it holds those trainings together in a beautiful bow.

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What drew her in was the teaching. Interpersonal neurobiology and neuroscience had always felt slightly over her head, an area where she could not quite find her footing. Jules, who worked as a mechanic before entering the therapy world and brought a mechanic's question with her — how does it actually work? — breaks the material down in a way Mallory found approachable rather than intimidating. That accessibility is part of what makes the model usable in a live session rather than something that stays in the training manual.

2. Parts are wisdom keepers, not problems to solve

The reframe Mallory returns to most often is this one: when a part shows up in session, it is carrying information. The instinct — for clients and sometimes for practitioners — is to treat an intruding part as an obstacle. Anxiety arrives in the middle of a tender conversation and the client gets frustrated, wants it gone, wants to push through. STAIR asks a different question: what does this part know?

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Mallory gives a concrete example. A client is exploring a relationship and anxiety comes in. Rather than treating it as interference, they get curious, and more often than not the answer is something like: this is bringing up grief, and I am afraid of being with the grief. That single piece of information changes the pacing and the care of everything that follows. As Mallory puts it, thanks, anxiety — thanks for letting us know. The part was never in the way; it was reporting on what was underneath.

3. Unblending is what makes relating possible

Mallory borrows Jules's sequence: differentiate, then link. When a person is blended with a part, that part is the whole pie — the whole perspective, the ultimate authority, the glasses through which everything is seen. From inside that, there is no room to move. It feels trapped and stuck because, functionally, it is.

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Unblending creates just enough distance to see the part as one piece of the pie rather than the whole of it. And that distance is not the goal — it is the precondition. Once there is space, relationship becomes possible: caring for the part, tending to it, tuning in to what it needs. Differentiation first, connection second. Mallory notes this maps onto the neurobiology too — when we can separate from something, we can relate to it.

4. Witnessing mind offers a reparative experience

Witnessing mind is the skill that fills the space unblending opens. Many of the parts that show up in this work, especially with clients carrying developmental or relational trauma, held their experience entirely alone for a very long time. They did what they could to get the person through. To witness such a part — to turn toward it, get curious about it, understand what it has been holding — is to end that isolation.

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Mallory describes a layered quality to this. As the client witnesses the part, she is there witnessing the client witnessing the part. Alex connects it to Dan Siegel's language about wanting to feel felt: not simply seen, not merely known about, but felt. That, he suggests, may be where the nourishment actually lives. Mallory agrees — for people who handled difficult things by themselves, being met this way is a large portion of the work.

5. Power with, instead of power over

Mallory is direct about the fact that a practitioner sits in a position of power, and that the answer is not to minimize or ignore it. The answer is to move, consciously and explicitly, toward power with. In practice that looks like transparency, a great deal of choice, and consent-oriented interventions — offering a suggestion and then genuinely asking how it lands, creating repeated opportunities for a person to be in touch with their yes and their no, and honoring both.

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Underneath the technique is a stance: the client knows themselves best and is the authority on their own experience. Mallory's role, as she describes it, is to offer perspectives, tools, and curiosity that guide a person back to their own inner knowing. Many people have spent a long time in systems built on power over and power under. An hour built on power with is not a small thing.

6. The somatic layer sets the pace

Asked how the somatic component weaves through parts work, Mallory points to titration and pendulation. Unblending from a part and then relating to it has a pendulation built into it — moving away, moving toward, away again. And because any experiential work moves a brain in and out of more and less integrated states, titration is what keeps the pacing honest. When something starts to feel like a lot, the move is to pause, do a little less, and add nothing further.

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This is also where Alex brings in memory consolidation. When a memory complex is accessed — narrative, embodied, and implicit together — the brain enters a temporarily more plastic state. If that activation can be met inside a well-regulated container and answered differently than it was historically, a disconfirming experience becomes possible, and something new can be laid down. Mallory adds the clinical nuance: some clients arrive already highly activated, and the work begins by bringing regulation, not accessing more.

Conclusion

What emerges across the hour is a picture of this work as something other than repair. The parts that show up — the inner critic, the anxiety, the overwhelm — are not defects to be removed but members of a team, each carrying information about what a person needs. The work is learning to turn toward them.

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Mallory names the milestones she watches for, and they are quiet ones: curiosity showing up where judgment used to be, self-doubt shifting toward self-trust, a person developing a reliable way of being with whatever arises. She works most often with helpers and givers whose own needs sit on the back burner, and with people carrying developmental trauma, relational trauma, and C-PTSD, over a course that typically runs six months to two years. The phrase from the STAIR model that stays with her is Jules's: undo aloneness. Becoming, for the parts that needed one, the adult who was never there.

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Listen to the Full Episode

Hear the whole conversation between Alex Greene and Mallory Burggraaf on Episode 76 of the Red Beard Embodiment Podcast — available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Ready to experience somatic work for yourself? Book a session with the Red Beard team or work with Mallory online. Questions first? Reach out here.

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