Interesting diagram. I don’t really understand it, though, because to me it looks like Focusing is on the wrong side, since Focusing deals in a unified “felt sense” rather than disparate parts—at least to my understanding of it.
Actually, I’m generally confused because without the mental state used by Focusing, Core Transformation, the Work, and Sedona don’t work properly, if at all. So I don’t understand how it could be separate. Similarly, I can see how CBT could be considered dissociated, but not Focusing.
Anyway, when I referred to “dissociating”, above, I meant it in the casual sense of people wanting to dis-associate, as in, “I’m not with him...” Not the technical sense of a dissociative experience or D.I.D., though one can also have the desire to detach or disconnect from one’s experience in a dissociative way.
In general, I was using the term to suggest something like, “the spectrum of ways people try to make an experience unreal or to deny its significance”, which includes a variety of strategies including disavowal, denial, and deflection, as well as actual dissociation in the technical sense.
Focusing focuses on a single “felt sense”, rather than an integrated system of felt senses that aren’t viewed as seperate.
In general I think you’re quite confused about how most people use the parts terminology if you think felt senses aren’t referring to parts, which typically represent a “belief cluster” and visual, kinesthetic, or auditory representation of that belief cluster, often that’s anthropomorphized. Note that parts can be different sizes, and you can have a “felt sense” related to a single belief, or clusters of beliefs.
Actually, I’m generally confused because without the mental state used by Focusing, Core Transformation, the Work, and Sedona don’t work properly, if at all. So I don’t understand how it could be separate. Similarly, I can see how CBT could be considered dissociated, but not Focusing.
You’re confusing dissociation and integration here again, so I’ll just address the dissociation part. Note that all the things I’m saying here are ORTHOGONAL to the issue of “parts”.
Yes, focusing is in one sense embodied and experiential as opposed to something like CBT. However, this stuff exists on a gradient, and in focusing the embodiment is explicitly dissociated from and viewed as other. Here’s copypasta from twitter:
Here’s a quote from http://focusing.org that points towards a dissociative stance: ” When some concern comes, DO NOT GO INSIDE IT. Stand back, say “Yes, that’s there. I can feel that, there.” Let there be a little space between you and that.”
I’ve heard an acquaintance describe a session with Anne Weiser-Cornell where they kept trying to say “this is my feeling” and she kept correcting to “this feeling in my body”, which again is more of a dissociative stance.
Now, is focusing looking to CAUSE dissociation? No, it’s using dissociation as a tool because oftentimes people get so caught up in the trees they can’t see the forest. For those people, that small bit of dissociation is useful.
Similarly, tools that are associated are often useful for people who tend to view themselves as “other”. If people tend to dissociate, it can be useful to realize that this is “me”.
> Anyway, when I referred to “dissociating”, above, I meant it in the casual sense of people wanting to dis-associate, as in, “I’m not with him...” Not the technical sense of a dissociative experience .
Me as well. I still maintain that viewing things as parts rather than a whole is orthogonal to whether you view yourself as associated (Core Transformation) or dissociated (Focusing) from a part, or associated or dissociated (CT Charting, DID) from a whole.
I’ve heard an acquaintance describe a session with Anne Weiser-Cornell where they kept trying to say “this is my feeling” and she kept correcting to “this feeling in my body”, which again is more of a dissociative stance.
I was under the impression that IFS calls that “unblending”, just as ACT calls it “de-fusing”. I personally view it more as a stance of detachment or curiosity neutral observation. But I don’t object to someone saying “I feel X”, because that’s already one step removed from “X”!
If somebody says, “everything is awful” they’re blended or fused or whatever you want to call it. They’re taking the map as equivalent to the territory. Saying, “It feels like everything is awful” or “I feel awful” is already one level of detachment, and an okay place to start from.
In common psychotherapy, I believe the term “dissociation” is usually associated with much greater levels of detachment than this, unless you’re talking about NLP. The difference in degree is probably why ACT and IFS and others have specialized terms like “unblending” to distinguish between this lesser level of detachment, and the type of dissociative experience that comes with say, trauma, where people experience themselves as not even being in their body.
Honestly, if somebody is so “in their head” that they don’t experience their feelings, I have to go the opposite route of making them more associated and less detached, and I have plenty of tools for provoking feelings in order to access them. I don’t want complete dissociation from feelings, nor complete blending with them, and ISTM that almost everything on your chart is actually targeted at that same sweet spot or “zone” of detached-but-not-too-detached. In touch with your experience, but neither absorbed by it nor turning your back on it.
Anyway, I think maybe I understand the terms you’re using now, and hopefully you understand the ones I’m using. Within your model I still don’t know what you’d call what I’m doing, since my “Collect” and “Connect” phases would seem to be in the quadrant with Focusing, while my “Correct” phase explicitly uses The Work and variations on it. And my model doesn’t have a notion of parts outside of mental muscles or a metaphorical description of the emergent properties of rules and schemas, such that I sort-of deny the existence of parts or an integrated whole!
To the extent that people have denial or disidentification of certain aspects of themselves, I consider that itself to be a behavior. It can be modeled as a simple conditioned response to the idea of the thing, as seen through a relevant predict/evaluate model. In Core Transformation and IFS, the approach is to treat that as if there is actually a part that has been exiled, but in my view it makes more sense to focus on the schema driving the rejection, than to act as if either metaphorical “part” actually exists.
The difference between my approach and most psychological models outside of NLP, is that I don’t even view people as agents, let alone any of their parts as such! I teach them to look at the actuality of what their brain is doing (or at least what parts we are able to observe), and it is much more like rooting a cellphone or hacking a website or debugging a program you didn’t write (and whose source code you don’t have!), than anything involving interaction between agents. The only “conversation” is one of probing the system and seeing what responses you get, and for me that applies to techniques found in both your “embodied self” and “dissociated parts” quadrants.
Which is why I find the diagram confusing. Because if I understand your model, The Work and Sedona should be in the “dissociated parts” model, if you consider Focusing to be that. Or conversely, Focusing should be in the “embodied self” quadrant. Or alternately, the thing that I’m doing with people and calling Focusing isn’t what you mean by Focusing, because all three of those techniques, AFAICT in practice, require precisely the same amount of detachment from one’s feelings in order to operate, and none of the three require either the assumption or rejection of the idea of a part existing as a persistent entity, vs. simply responding to present experience, regardless of whether you treat that experience as a metaphorical “part”.
I mean, even Sedona requires you to at least have the amount of detachment to say things like, “And could I judge that a little less?” You can’t do that if you’re fused with the thing. Same for The Work, as you can’t consider whether a belief is true, without first defusing enough to consider it to be a “belief” rather than simply “how things are”.
I suppose that’s probably where our communication is breaking down, because the divisions on your diagram seem kind of academic, in that they don’t tell me anything useful about actually doing those techniques successfully. Detachment is effectively required by all of the techniques on the diagram, at least to the extent of not being fused with one’s experience. It’s necessary to observe the experience as a thing other than the observer or “reality” in order to even conceive of performing some sort of operation upon it, if that makes sense.
So, technically, doesn’t that make everything on that chart dissociative, in your use of the term? I mean, the unit I work with is in size and shape a lot like CBT and similar therapies’ notion of ANTs, except I deal with them on an emotional/embodied basis rather than analyzing the logical content, and in practical terms I use methods from Focusing and The Work, so I don’t see where my approach actually belongs on your diagram, other than “everywhere”. ;-)
Interesting diagram. I don’t really understand it, though, because to me it looks like Focusing is on the wrong side, since Focusing deals in a unified “felt sense” rather than disparate parts—at least to my understanding of it.
Actually, I’m generally confused because without the mental state used by Focusing, Core Transformation, the Work, and Sedona don’t work properly, if at all. So I don’t understand how it could be separate. Similarly, I can see how CBT could be considered dissociated, but not Focusing.
Anyway, when I referred to “dissociating”, above, I meant it in the casual sense of people wanting to dis-associate, as in, “I’m not with him...” Not the technical sense of a dissociative experience or D.I.D., though one can also have the desire to detach or disconnect from one’s experience in a dissociative way.
In general, I was using the term to suggest something like, “the spectrum of ways people try to make an experience unreal or to deny its significance”, which includes a variety of strategies including disavowal, denial, and deflection, as well as actual dissociation in the technical sense.
In general I think you’re quite confused about how most people use the parts terminology if you think felt senses aren’t referring to parts, which typically represent a “belief cluster” and visual, kinesthetic, or auditory representation of that belief cluster, often that’s anthropomorphized. Note that parts can be different sizes, and you can have a “felt sense” related to a single belief, or clusters of beliefs.
You’re confusing dissociation and integration here again, so I’ll just address the dissociation part. Note that all the things I’m saying here are ORTHOGONAL to the issue of “parts”.
Yes, focusing is in one sense embodied and experiential as opposed to something like CBT. However, this stuff exists on a gradient, and in focusing the embodiment is explicitly dissociated from and viewed as other. Here’s copypasta from twitter:
Here’s a quote from http://focusing.org that points towards a dissociative stance: ” When some concern comes, DO NOT GO INSIDE IT. Stand back, say “Yes, that’s there. I can feel that, there.” Let there be a little space between you and that.”
I’ve heard an acquaintance describe a session with Anne Weiser-Cornell where they kept trying to say “this is my feeling” and she kept correcting to “this feeling in my body”, which again is more of a dissociative stance.
Now, is focusing looking to CAUSE dissociation? No, it’s using dissociation as a tool because oftentimes people get so caught up in the trees they can’t see the forest. For those people, that small bit of dissociation is useful.
Similarly, tools that are associated are often useful for people who tend to view themselves as “other”. If people tend to dissociate, it can be useful to realize that this is “me”.
> Anyway, when I referred to “dissociating”, above, I meant it in the casual sense of people wanting to dis-associate, as in, “I’m not with him...” Not the technical sense of a dissociative experience .
Me as well. I still maintain that viewing things as parts rather than a whole is orthogonal to whether you view yourself as associated (Core Transformation) or dissociated (Focusing) from a part, or associated or dissociated (CT Charting, DID) from a whole.
I was under the impression that IFS calls that “unblending”, just as ACT calls it “de-fusing”. I personally view it more as a stance of detachment or curiosity neutral observation. But I don’t object to someone saying “I feel X”, because that’s already one step removed from “X”!
If somebody says, “everything is awful” they’re blended or fused or whatever you want to call it. They’re taking the map as equivalent to the territory. Saying, “It feels like everything is awful” or “I feel awful” is already one level of detachment, and an okay place to start from.
In common psychotherapy, I believe the term “dissociation” is usually associated with much greater levels of detachment than this, unless you’re talking about NLP. The difference in degree is probably why ACT and IFS and others have specialized terms like “unblending” to distinguish between this lesser level of detachment, and the type of dissociative experience that comes with say, trauma, where people experience themselves as not even being in their body.
Honestly, if somebody is so “in their head” that they don’t experience their feelings, I have to go the opposite route of making them more associated and less detached, and I have plenty of tools for provoking feelings in order to access them. I don’t want complete dissociation from feelings, nor complete blending with them, and ISTM that almost everything on your chart is actually targeted at that same sweet spot or “zone” of detached-but-not-too-detached. In touch with your experience, but neither absorbed by it nor turning your back on it.
Anyway, I think maybe I understand the terms you’re using now, and hopefully you understand the ones I’m using. Within your model I still don’t know what you’d call what I’m doing, since my “Collect” and “Connect” phases would seem to be in the quadrant with Focusing, while my “Correct” phase explicitly uses The Work and variations on it. And my model doesn’t have a notion of parts outside of mental muscles or a metaphorical description of the emergent properties of rules and schemas, such that I sort-of deny the existence of parts or an integrated whole!
To the extent that people have denial or disidentification of certain aspects of themselves, I consider that itself to be a behavior. It can be modeled as a simple conditioned response to the idea of the thing, as seen through a relevant predict/evaluate model. In Core Transformation and IFS, the approach is to treat that as if there is actually a part that has been exiled, but in my view it makes more sense to focus on the schema driving the rejection, than to act as if either metaphorical “part” actually exists.
The difference between my approach and most psychological models outside of NLP, is that I don’t even view people as agents, let alone any of their parts as such! I teach them to look at the actuality of what their brain is doing (or at least what parts we are able to observe), and it is much more like rooting a cellphone or hacking a website or debugging a program you didn’t write (and whose source code you don’t have!), than anything involving interaction between agents. The only “conversation” is one of probing the system and seeing what responses you get, and for me that applies to techniques found in both your “embodied self” and “dissociated parts” quadrants.
Which is why I find the diagram confusing. Because if I understand your model, The Work and Sedona should be in the “dissociated parts” model, if you consider Focusing to be that. Or conversely, Focusing should be in the “embodied self” quadrant. Or alternately, the thing that I’m doing with people and calling Focusing isn’t what you mean by Focusing, because all three of those techniques, AFAICT in practice, require precisely the same amount of detachment from one’s feelings in order to operate, and none of the three require either the assumption or rejection of the idea of a part existing as a persistent entity, vs. simply responding to present experience, regardless of whether you treat that experience as a metaphorical “part”.
I mean, even Sedona requires you to at least have the amount of detachment to say things like, “And could I judge that a little less?” You can’t do that if you’re fused with the thing. Same for The Work, as you can’t consider whether a belief is true, without first defusing enough to consider it to be a “belief” rather than simply “how things are”.
I suppose that’s probably where our communication is breaking down, because the divisions on your diagram seem kind of academic, in that they don’t tell me anything useful about actually doing those techniques successfully. Detachment is effectively required by all of the techniques on the diagram, at least to the extent of not being fused with one’s experience. It’s necessary to observe the experience as a thing other than the observer or “reality” in order to even conceive of performing some sort of operation upon it, if that makes sense.
So, technically, doesn’t that make everything on that chart dissociative, in your use of the term? I mean, the unit I work with is in size and shape a lot like CBT and similar therapies’ notion of ANTs, except I deal with them on an emotional/embodied basis rather than analyzing the logical content, and in practical terms I use methods from Focusing and The Work, so I don’t see where my approach actually belongs on your diagram, other than “everywhere”. ;-)
I think a proper method should be everywhere. There’s not a “correct” box, only a correct box for a given person at a given time in a given situation.