I don’t know what you mean by this at all. Can you give (or maybe point to) an example?
So, let’s take the example of my mother stressing over deadlines. Until I reconsolidated that belief structure… or hell, since UTEB seems to call it a “schema”, let’s just call it that. I had a schema that said I needed to be stressed out if the goal was serious. I wasn’t aware of that, though: it just seemed like “serious projects are super stressful and I never know what to do”, except wail and grind my teeth (figuratively speaking) until stuff gets done.
Now, I was aware I was stressed, and knew this wasn’t helpful, so I did all sorts of things to calm down. People (like my wife) would tell me everything was fine, I was doing great, go easier/don’t be so hard on yourself, etc. I would try practicing self-compassion, but it didn’t do anything, except maybe momentarily, because structurally, being not-stressed was incompatible with my schema.
In fact, a rather weird thing happened: the more I managed to let go of judgments I had about how well I was doing, and the better I got at being self-compassionate, the worse I felt. It wasn’t the same kind of stress, but it was actually worse, despite being differently flavored. It was like, “you’re not taking this seriously enough” (and implicitly, “you’re an awful person”).
As it happened, the reason I got better at self-compassion was not because I was practicing it as a mode of operation, but because I used my own mindhacking methods to remove the reasons I had for self-judgment. In truth, over the last decade or two I have tried a ridiculous number of self-help and/or therapist-designed exercises intended to send love or compassion to parts or past selves or inner children etc., and what they all had in common was that they almost never clicked for me… and the few times they did, I ended up developing alternative techniques to produce the same kind of result without trying to fake the love, compassion, or care that almost never felt real to me.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the reason those particular things clicked is that in trying to understand the perspective from which the exercise(s) were written, I stumbled on contradictions to my existing schema, and thus fixed another way in which I was judging myself (and thus unable to have self-compassion).
Anyway, my point is that most counteractive interventions (to use the term from UTEB) involve a therapist modeling (and coaching the client to enact) helpful carer behavior. If the client’s problem is merely that they aren’t familiar with that type of behavior, then this is merely adding a new skill to their repertoire, and might work nicely.
But, if the person comes from a background where they not only didn’t receive proper care, but were actively taught say, that they were not worth being cared for, that they were bad or selfish for having normal human needs, etc., then this type of training will be counterproductive, because it goes against the client’s schemas, where being good and safe means repressing needs, judging themselves, etc.
As a result, their schema creates either negative reinforcement or neutralizing strategies. They don’t do their assignments, they stop coming to therapy. Or they develop ways to neutralize the contradiction between the schema and the new experience, e.g. by defining it as “unreal”, “you’re being nice because that’s your job”, etc.
Or, there’s the neutralizing strategy I used for many years, which was to frame things in my head as, “okay, so I’m going to be nice to my weak self so that it can shape up and do what it’s supposed to now”. (This one has been popular with some of my clients, too, as it allows you to keep punishing and diminishing yourself in the way you’re used to, while technically still completing the exercises you’re supposed to!)
So these are things that traditional therapists call all sorts of things, like transference and resistance and so on. But these are basically ways to say in effect, “the therapy is working but the client isn’t”.
This is fascinating. When I read your stressing out example, my thought was basically “wow. It seems crazy-difficult to surface the core underlying assumptions”.
But you think that this is harder, in the IFS framework. That is amazing, and I want to know more.
In practice, how do you go about eliciting the rules and then emotionally significant instances?
Maybe in the context of this example, how do you get from “I seem to be overly stressed about stuff” to the memory of your mother yelling at you?
The overall framework I call “Collect, Connect, Correct”, and it’s surprisingly similar to the “ABC123V” framework described in UTEB. (Actually, I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising, since the results they describe from their framework are quite similar to the kind I get.)
In the first stage, I collect information about the when/where/how of the problem, and attempt to pin down a repeatable emotional response, i.e. think about X, get emotional reaction Y. If it’s not repeatable, it’s not testable, which makes things a lot harder.
In the case of being stressed, the way that I got there was that I was laying down one afternoon, trying to take a nap and not being able to relax. When I’d think of trying to let go and actually sleep, I kept thinking something along the lines of, “I should be doing something, not relaxing”.
A side note: my description of this isn’t going to be terribly reliable, due to the phenomenon I call “change amnesia” (which UTEB alludes to in case studies, but doesn’t give a name, at least in the chapters I’ve read so far). Change amnesia is something that happens when you alter a schema. The meanings that you used to ascribe to things stop making sense, and as a result it’s hard to get your mind into the same mindset you used to have, even if it was something you were thinking just minutes before making the change!
So, despite the fact I still remember lying there and trying to go to sleep (as the UTEB authors note, autobiographical memory of events isn’t affected, just the meanings associated with them), I am having trouble reconstructing the mindset I was in, because once I changed the underlying schema, that mindset became alien to me.
Anyway, what I do remember was that I had identified a surface level idea. It was probably something like, “I should be doing something”, but because those words don’t make me feel the sense of urgency they did before, it’s hard to know if I am correctly recalling the exact statement.
But I do remember that the statement was sufficiently well-formed to use The Work on. The Work is a simple process for actually performing reconsolidation, the “123” part of UTEB’s ABC123V framework, or the “Correct” in my Collect-Connect-Correct framework.
But when I got to question 4 of the Work, there was an objection raised in my mind. I was imagining not thinking I should be doing something (or whatever the exact statement was), and got a bad feeling or perhaps a feeling that it wasn’t realistic, something of that sort. A reservation or hesitation in this step of the work corresponds to what UTEB describes as an objection from another schema, and as with their method, so too does mine call for switching to eliciting the newly-discovered schema, instead of continuing with the current one.
So at either that level, or the next level up of “attempt reconsolidation, spot objection, switch”, I had the image or idea come up of my mother being upset with me for not being stressed, and I switched from The Work to my SAMMSA model.
SAMMSA stands for “Surface, Attitude, Model, Mirror, Shadow, Assumptions”, and it is a tool I developed to identify and correct implicit beliefs encoded as part of an emotionally significant memory. It’s especially useful in matters relating to self-image and self-esteem, because AFAICT we learn these things almost entirely through our brain’s interpretation of other people’s behavior towards us.
In the specific instance, the “surface” is what my mother said and did. The Attitude was impatience and anger. The Model was, “when there is something important to be done, the right thing to do is be stressed”. The Mirror was, “if I don’t get you to do this, then you will never learn to take things seriously; you’ll grow up to be careless”. The Shadow (injected to my self image) was the idea that: “you’re irresponsible/uncaring”. And the Assumptions (of my mother) were ideas like “I’m helpless/can’t do anything to make this work”, “somebody needs to do something”, and “it’s a serious emergency for things to not be geting done, or for there to be any problems in the doing”.
The key with a stack like this is to fix the Shadow first, unless the Assumptions get in the way. Shadow beliefs are things that say what a person is not, and by implication never will be. They tend to lock into place all the linked beliefs, behaviors, and assumptions, like a lynchpin to the schema that formed around them.
The contradiction, then, is to 1) remember and realize that I did care, as a matter of actual fact, and was not intentionally being irresponsible or “bad”. I wanted to get the thing done, and just didn’t know how to go about it. Then, I imagined “how would my mother have acted if she knew that for a fact?” At which point I then imagine growing up with her acting that way… which I was surprised to realize could be as simple as telling me to work on it daily and checking my progress. (I did initially have to work through an objection that she couldn’t just leave me to it, and couldn’t just tell me to work on it and not follow-up, but these were pretty straightforward to work out.)
I think I also had some trouble during parts of this due to some of the Assumptions, so I had to deal with a couple of those via The Work. I may also be misremembering the order I did these bits in. (Order isn’t super important as long as you test things to make sure that none of the beliefs seem “real” any more, so you can clean up any that still do.)
Notice, here, the difference between how traditional therapy (IFS included) treats the idea of compassion or loving but firm caregivers, etc., vs the approach I took here. I do not try to act out being compassionate to my younger self or to my self now. I don’t try to construct in my mind some idealized parental figure. Instead, what I did was identify what was broken in (my mental model of) my mother’s beliefs and behavior, and correct that in my mental model of my mother, which is where my previous behavior came from.
This discovery was the result of studying a metric f**k-ton of books on developmental psychology, self-compassion, inner child stuff, shadow psychology, and even IFS. :) I had discovered that sometimes I could change things by remaigining parental behavior more in-line with the concepts from those books, but not always. Trying to divine the difference, I finally noticed that the issue was that sometimes I simply could not, no matter how hard I tried, make a particular visualization of caring behavior feel real, and thus trigger a memory mismatch to induce reconsolidation.
What I discovered was that for such visualizations, my brain was subtly twisting the visualizations in such a way as to match a deeper schema—like the idea that I was incompetent or uncaring or unlovable! -- so that even though the imagined parent was superficially acting different, the underlying schema remained unchanged. It was like they were thinking, “well, I guess I’m supposed to be nice like this in order to be a good parent to this loser”. (I’m being flippant here since change amnesia has long since wiped most of the specifics of these scenarios from easy recollection.)
I dubbed this phenomenon “false belief change”, and found my clients did it, too. I initially had a more intuitive and less systematic way of figuring out how to get past it, but in order to teach other people to do it I gradually worked out the SAMMSA mnemonic and framework for pulling out all the relevant bits, and later still came to realize that there are only three fundamental failures of trust that define Shadows, which helps a lot in rapidly pinning them down.
That’s why, this huge wall of text I’ve described for changing how I feel about important, “serious” projects is something that took maybe 20-30 minutes, including the sobbing and shaking afterward.
(Yeah, that’s a thing that happens, usually when I’m realizing all the sh** I’ve gone through in my life that was completely unnecessary. I assume it’s a sort of “accelerated grief” happening when you notice stuff like, “oh hey, I’ve spent months and years stressing out when I could’ve just worked on it each day and checked on my progress… so much pain and missed opportunities and damaged relationships and...” yeah. It can be intense to do something like that, if it’s been something that affected your life a lot.
As I said above, I did also have to tackle some of the Assumptions, like not being able to do anything and needing somebody else to do it, that any problem equals an emergency, and so on. These didn’t take very long though, with the schema’s core anchor having been taken out. I think I did one assumption before the shadow, and the rest after, but it’s been a while. Most of the time, Assumptions don’t really show up until you’ve at least started work on fixing the shadow, either blocking it directly, or showing up when you try to imagine what it would’ve been like to grow up with the differently-thinking parent.
When I work with clients, the actual SAMMSA process and reconsolidation is similarly something that can be done in 20-30 minutes, but it may take a couple hours to get up to that point, as the earlier Collect and Connect phases can take a while, getting up to the point where you can surface a relevant memory. I was lucky with the “going to sleep” problem because it was something I had immediate access to: a problem that was actually manifesting in practice. In contrast, with clients it usually takes some time to even pin down the equivalent of “I was trying to get to sleep and kept thinking I should be doing something”, especially since most of the time the original presenting problem is something quite general and abstract.
I also find that individuals vary considerably in how easy it is for them to get to emotionally relevant memories; recently I’ve had a couple of LessWrong readers take up my free session offer, and have been quite surprised at how quickly they were able to surface things. (As it turned out, they both had prior experience with Focusing, which helps a whole heck of a lot!)
The UTEB book describes some things that sound similar to what I do to stimulate access to such memories, e.g. their phrase of “symptom deprivation” describes something kind of similar in function and intent to some of my favorie “what if?” questions to ask. And I will admit that there is some degree of art and intuition to it that I have not put into a formal framework (at least yet). But since I tend to develop frameworks in response to trying to teach things, it hasn’t really come up. Example and osmosis has generally sufficed for getting people to get the hang of doing this kind of inward access, once their meta-issue with it (if any) gets pinned down.
What are the “examples”? Instances that are counter to the rule / schema of some part? (e.g. some part of me believes that if I ever change my mind about something important, then no one will love me, so I come up with an example of when this isn’t or wasn’t true?)
I think I’ve answered this above, but in case I haven’t: IFS has the therapist and/or client act out examples of caring behavior, compassion, “self-leadership”, etc. They do this by paying attention, taking parts’ needs seriously, and so on. My prediction is that for some people, some of the time, this would produce results similar to those produced by reconsolidation. Specifically, in the cases where someone doesn’t have a schema silently twisting everything into a “false belief change”, but the behavior they’re shown or taught does contradict one of their problematic schema.
But if the person is internally reframing everything to, “this is just the stupid stuff I have to do to take care of these stupid needy parts”, then no real belief change is taking place, and there will be almost no lasting benefit past the immediate reconciliation of the current conflict being worked on, if it’s even successfully resolved in the first place.
So, I understand that this isn’t what all IFS sources say they are doing. I’m just saying that, whatever you call the process of enacting these attitudes and behaviors in IFS, the only way I would expect it to ever produce any long-term effects is as the result of it being an example that triggers a contradiction in the client’s mental model, and therefore reconsolidation. (And thereby producing “transformative” change, as the UTEB authors call it, as opposed to “counteractive” change, where somebody has to intentionally maintain the counteracting behavior over time in order to sustain the effect.)
Given that, doesn’t it make sense to break down the different parts of a RL policy into parts? If different parts of a policy are acting at cross purposes, it seems like it is useful to say “part 1 is doing X-action, and part 2 is doing Y-action.”
...But you would say that it is even better to say “this system, as a whole is doing both X-action, and Y-action”?
I don’t know what you mean by “parts” here. But I do focus on the smallest possible things, because it helps to keep an investigation empirically grounded. The only reason I can go from “not wanting to go to sleep” to “my mother thinks I’m irresponsible” with confidence I’m not moving randomly or making things up, is because each step is locally verifiable and reproducible.
It’s true that there are common cycles and patterns of these smaller elements, but I stick as much as possible to dealing in repeatable stimulus-response pairs, i.e., “think about X, get feeling or impression Y”. Or “adjust the phrasing of this idea until it reaches maximum emotional salience/best match with inner feeling”. All of these are empirical, locally-verifiable, and theory-free phenomena.
In contrast, “parts” are something I’ve struggled to work with in a way that allows that kind of definitiveness. In particular, I never found my “parts” to have repeatable behavior, let alone verifiable answers to questions. I could never tell if what I seemed to be getting was real, or was just me imagining/making stuff up. In contrast, the modality of “state an idea or imagine an action, then notice how I feel” was eminently repeatable and verifiable. I was able to quickly learn the difference betwen “having a reaction” and “wondering if I’m reacting”, and was then able to test different change techniques to see what they did. If something couldn’t change the way I automatically responded, I considered it a dud, because I wanted to change me on the inside, not just how I act on the outside. I wanted to feel differently, and once I settled on using this “test-driven” approach, I began to be able to, for the first time in my life.
So if psychology is alchemy, testing automatic emotional responses is my stab at atomic theory, and I’m working on sketches of parts of the periodic table. (With the caveat that given myself as the primary audience, and my client list being subject to major selection effects, it is entirely possible that the scope of applicability of my work is just smart-but-maybe-too-sensitive, systematically-thinking people with certain types of inferiority complexes. But that worry is considerably reduced by the stuff I’ve read so far in UTEB, whose authors work’s audience does not appear as limited, and whose approach seems fairly congruent with my own.)
So, let’s take the example of my mother stressing over deadlines. Until I reconsolidated that belief structure… or hell, since UTEB seems to call it a “schema”, let’s just call it that. I had a schema that said I needed to be stressed out if the goal was serious. I wasn’t aware of that, though: it just seemed like “serious projects are super stressful and I never know what to do”, except wail and grind my teeth (figuratively speaking) until stuff gets done.
Now, I was aware I was stressed, and knew this wasn’t helpful, so I did all sorts of things to calm down. People (like my wife) would tell me everything was fine, I was doing great, go easier/don’t be so hard on yourself, etc. I would try practicing self-compassion, but it didn’t do anything, except maybe momentarily, because structurally, being not-stressed was incompatible with my schema.
In fact, a rather weird thing happened: the more I managed to let go of judgments I had about how well I was doing, and the better I got at being self-compassionate, the worse I felt. It wasn’t the same kind of stress, but it was actually worse, despite being differently flavored. It was like, “you’re not taking this seriously enough” (and implicitly, “you’re an awful person”).
As it happened, the reason I got better at self-compassion was not because I was practicing it as a mode of operation, but because I used my own mindhacking methods to remove the reasons I had for self-judgment. In truth, over the last decade or two I have tried a ridiculous number of self-help and/or therapist-designed exercises intended to send love or compassion to parts or past selves or inner children etc., and what they all had in common was that they almost never clicked for me… and the few times they did, I ended up developing alternative techniques to produce the same kind of result without trying to fake the love, compassion, or care that almost never felt real to me.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the reason those particular things clicked is that in trying to understand the perspective from which the exercise(s) were written, I stumbled on contradictions to my existing schema, and thus fixed another way in which I was judging myself (and thus unable to have self-compassion).
Anyway, my point is that most counteractive interventions (to use the term from UTEB) involve a therapist modeling (and coaching the client to enact) helpful carer behavior. If the client’s problem is merely that they aren’t familiar with that type of behavior, then this is merely adding a new skill to their repertoire, and might work nicely.
But, if the person comes from a background where they not only didn’t receive proper care, but were actively taught say, that they were not worth being cared for, that they were bad or selfish for having normal human needs, etc., then this type of training will be counterproductive, because it goes against the client’s schemas, where being good and safe means repressing needs, judging themselves, etc.
As a result, their schema creates either negative reinforcement or neutralizing strategies. They don’t do their assignments, they stop coming to therapy. Or they develop ways to neutralize the contradiction between the schema and the new experience, e.g. by defining it as “unreal”, “you’re being nice because that’s your job”, etc.
Or, there’s the neutralizing strategy I used for many years, which was to frame things in my head as, “okay, so I’m going to be nice to my weak self so that it can shape up and do what it’s supposed to now”. (This one has been popular with some of my clients, too, as it allows you to keep punishing and diminishing yourself in the way you’re used to, while technically still completing the exercises you’re supposed to!)
So these are things that traditional therapists call all sorts of things, like transference and resistance and so on. But these are basically ways to say in effect, “the therapy is working but the client isn’t”.
The overall framework I call “Collect, Connect, Correct”, and it’s surprisingly similar to the “ABC123V” framework described in UTEB. (Actually, I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising, since the results they describe from their framework are quite similar to the kind I get.)
In the first stage, I collect information about the when/where/how of the problem, and attempt to pin down a repeatable emotional response, i.e. think about X, get emotional reaction Y. If it’s not repeatable, it’s not testable, which makes things a lot harder.
In the case of being stressed, the way that I got there was that I was laying down one afternoon, trying to take a nap and not being able to relax. When I’d think of trying to let go and actually sleep, I kept thinking something along the lines of, “I should be doing something, not relaxing”.
A side note: my description of this isn’t going to be terribly reliable, due to the phenomenon I call “change amnesia” (which UTEB alludes to in case studies, but doesn’t give a name, at least in the chapters I’ve read so far). Change amnesia is something that happens when you alter a schema. The meanings that you used to ascribe to things stop making sense, and as a result it’s hard to get your mind into the same mindset you used to have, even if it was something you were thinking just minutes before making the change!
So, despite the fact I still remember lying there and trying to go to sleep (as the UTEB authors note, autobiographical memory of events isn’t affected, just the meanings associated with them), I am having trouble reconstructing the mindset I was in, because once I changed the underlying schema, that mindset became alien to me.
Anyway, what I do remember was that I had identified a surface level idea. It was probably something like, “I should be doing something”, but because those words don’t make me feel the sense of urgency they did before, it’s hard to know if I am correctly recalling the exact statement.
But I do remember that the statement was sufficiently well-formed to use The Work on. The Work is a simple process for actually performing reconsolidation, the “123” part of UTEB’s ABC123V framework, or the “Correct” in my Collect-Connect-Correct framework.
But when I got to question 4 of the Work, there was an objection raised in my mind. I was imagining not thinking I should be doing something (or whatever the exact statement was), and got a bad feeling or perhaps a feeling that it wasn’t realistic, something of that sort. A reservation or hesitation in this step of the work corresponds to what UTEB describes as an objection from another schema, and as with their method, so too does mine call for switching to eliciting the newly-discovered schema, instead of continuing with the current one.
So at either that level, or the next level up of “attempt reconsolidation, spot objection, switch”, I had the image or idea come up of my mother being upset with me for not being stressed, and I switched from The Work to my SAMMSA model.
SAMMSA stands for “Surface, Attitude, Model, Mirror, Shadow, Assumptions”, and it is a tool I developed to identify and correct implicit beliefs encoded as part of an emotionally significant memory. It’s especially useful in matters relating to self-image and self-esteem, because AFAICT we learn these things almost entirely through our brain’s interpretation of other people’s behavior towards us.
In the specific instance, the “surface” is what my mother said and did. The Attitude was impatience and anger. The Model was, “when there is something important to be done, the right thing to do is be stressed”. The Mirror was, “if I don’t get you to do this, then you will never learn to take things seriously; you’ll grow up to be careless”. The Shadow (injected to my self image) was the idea that: “you’re irresponsible/uncaring”. And the Assumptions (of my mother) were ideas like “I’m helpless/can’t do anything to make this work”, “somebody needs to do something”, and “it’s a serious emergency for things to not be geting done, or for there to be any problems in the doing”.
The key with a stack like this is to fix the Shadow first, unless the Assumptions get in the way. Shadow beliefs are things that say what a person is not, and by implication never will be. They tend to lock into place all the linked beliefs, behaviors, and assumptions, like a lynchpin to the schema that formed around them.
The contradiction, then, is to 1) remember and realize that I did care, as a matter of actual fact, and was not intentionally being irresponsible or “bad”. I wanted to get the thing done, and just didn’t know how to go about it. Then, I imagined “how would my mother have acted if she knew that for a fact?” At which point I then imagine growing up with her acting that way… which I was surprised to realize could be as simple as telling me to work on it daily and checking my progress. (I did initially have to work through an objection that she couldn’t just leave me to it, and couldn’t just tell me to work on it and not follow-up, but these were pretty straightforward to work out.)
I think I also had some trouble during parts of this due to some of the Assumptions, so I had to deal with a couple of those via The Work. I may also be misremembering the order I did these bits in. (Order isn’t super important as long as you test things to make sure that none of the beliefs seem “real” any more, so you can clean up any that still do.)
Notice, here, the difference between how traditional therapy (IFS included) treats the idea of compassion or loving but firm caregivers, etc., vs the approach I took here. I do not try to act out being compassionate to my younger self or to my self now. I don’t try to construct in my mind some idealized parental figure. Instead, what I did was identify what was broken in (my mental model of) my mother’s beliefs and behavior, and correct that in my mental model of my mother, which is where my previous behavior came from.
This discovery was the result of studying a metric f**k-ton of books on developmental psychology, self-compassion, inner child stuff, shadow psychology, and even IFS. :) I had discovered that sometimes I could change things by remaigining parental behavior more in-line with the concepts from those books, but not always. Trying to divine the difference, I finally noticed that the issue was that sometimes I simply could not, no matter how hard I tried, make a particular visualization of caring behavior feel real, and thus trigger a memory mismatch to induce reconsolidation.
What I discovered was that for such visualizations, my brain was subtly twisting the visualizations in such a way as to match a deeper schema—like the idea that I was incompetent or uncaring or unlovable! -- so that even though the imagined parent was superficially acting different, the underlying schema remained unchanged. It was like they were thinking, “well, I guess I’m supposed to be nice like this in order to be a good parent to this loser”. (I’m being flippant here since change amnesia has long since wiped most of the specifics of these scenarios from easy recollection.)
I dubbed this phenomenon “false belief change”, and found my clients did it, too. I initially had a more intuitive and less systematic way of figuring out how to get past it, but in order to teach other people to do it I gradually worked out the SAMMSA mnemonic and framework for pulling out all the relevant bits, and later still came to realize that there are only three fundamental failures of trust that define Shadows, which helps a lot in rapidly pinning them down.
That’s why, this huge wall of text I’ve described for changing how I feel about important, “serious” projects is something that took maybe 20-30 minutes, including the sobbing and shaking afterward.
(Yeah, that’s a thing that happens, usually when I’m realizing all the sh** I’ve gone through in my life that was completely unnecessary. I assume it’s a sort of “accelerated grief” happening when you notice stuff like, “oh hey, I’ve spent months and years stressing out when I could’ve just worked on it each day and checked on my progress… so much pain and missed opportunities and damaged relationships and...” yeah. It can be intense to do something like that, if it’s been something that affected your life a lot.
As I said above, I did also have to tackle some of the Assumptions, like not being able to do anything and needing somebody else to do it, that any problem equals an emergency, and so on. These didn’t take very long though, with the schema’s core anchor having been taken out. I think I did one assumption before the shadow, and the rest after, but it’s been a while. Most of the time, Assumptions don’t really show up until you’ve at least started work on fixing the shadow, either blocking it directly, or showing up when you try to imagine what it would’ve been like to grow up with the differently-thinking parent.
When I work with clients, the actual SAMMSA process and reconsolidation is similarly something that can be done in 20-30 minutes, but it may take a couple hours to get up to that point, as the earlier Collect and Connect phases can take a while, getting up to the point where you can surface a relevant memory. I was lucky with the “going to sleep” problem because it was something I had immediate access to: a problem that was actually manifesting in practice. In contrast, with clients it usually takes some time to even pin down the equivalent of “I was trying to get to sleep and kept thinking I should be doing something”, especially since most of the time the original presenting problem is something quite general and abstract.
I also find that individuals vary considerably in how easy it is for them to get to emotionally relevant memories; recently I’ve had a couple of LessWrong readers take up my free session offer, and have been quite surprised at how quickly they were able to surface things. (As it turned out, they both had prior experience with Focusing, which helps a whole heck of a lot!)
The UTEB book describes some things that sound similar to what I do to stimulate access to such memories, e.g. their phrase of “symptom deprivation” describes something kind of similar in function and intent to some of my favorie “what if?” questions to ask. And I will admit that there is some degree of art and intuition to it that I have not put into a formal framework (at least yet). But since I tend to develop frameworks in response to trying to teach things, it hasn’t really come up. Example and osmosis has generally sufficed for getting people to get the hang of doing this kind of inward access, once their meta-issue with it (if any) gets pinned down.
I think I’ve answered this above, but in case I haven’t: IFS has the therapist and/or client act out examples of caring behavior, compassion, “self-leadership”, etc. They do this by paying attention, taking parts’ needs seriously, and so on. My prediction is that for some people, some of the time, this would produce results similar to those produced by reconsolidation. Specifically, in the cases where someone doesn’t have a schema silently twisting everything into a “false belief change”, but the behavior they’re shown or taught does contradict one of their problematic schema.
But if the person is internally reframing everything to, “this is just the stupid stuff I have to do to take care of these stupid needy parts”, then no real belief change is taking place, and there will be almost no lasting benefit past the immediate reconciliation of the current conflict being worked on, if it’s even successfully resolved in the first place.
So, I understand that this isn’t what all IFS sources say they are doing. I’m just saying that, whatever you call the process of enacting these attitudes and behaviors in IFS, the only way I would expect it to ever produce any long-term effects is as the result of it being an example that triggers a contradiction in the client’s mental model, and therefore reconsolidation. (And thereby producing “transformative” change, as the UTEB authors call it, as opposed to “counteractive” change, where somebody has to intentionally maintain the counteracting behavior over time in order to sustain the effect.)
I don’t know what you mean by “parts” here. But I do focus on the smallest possible things, because it helps to keep an investigation empirically grounded. The only reason I can go from “not wanting to go to sleep” to “my mother thinks I’m irresponsible” with confidence I’m not moving randomly or making things up, is because each step is locally verifiable and reproducible.
It’s true that there are common cycles and patterns of these smaller elements, but I stick as much as possible to dealing in repeatable stimulus-response pairs, i.e., “think about X, get feeling or impression Y”. Or “adjust the phrasing of this idea until it reaches maximum emotional salience/best match with inner feeling”. All of these are empirical, locally-verifiable, and theory-free phenomena.
In contrast, “parts” are something I’ve struggled to work with in a way that allows that kind of definitiveness. In particular, I never found my “parts” to have repeatable behavior, let alone verifiable answers to questions. I could never tell if what I seemed to be getting was real, or was just me imagining/making stuff up. In contrast, the modality of “state an idea or imagine an action, then notice how I feel” was eminently repeatable and verifiable. I was able to quickly learn the difference betwen “having a reaction” and “wondering if I’m reacting”, and was then able to test different change techniques to see what they did. If something couldn’t change the way I automatically responded, I considered it a dud, because I wanted to change me on the inside, not just how I act on the outside. I wanted to feel differently, and once I settled on using this “test-driven” approach, I began to be able to, for the first time in my life.
So if psychology is alchemy, testing automatic emotional responses is my stab at atomic theory, and I’m working on sketches of parts of the periodic table. (With the caveat that given myself as the primary audience, and my client list being subject to major selection effects, it is entirely possible that the scope of applicability of my work is just smart-but-maybe-too-sensitive, systematically-thinking people with certain types of inferiority complexes. But that worry is considerably reduced by the stuff I’ve read so far in UTEB, whose authors work’s audience does not appear as limited, and whose approach seems fairly congruent with my own.)