Huh. This does not resonate with my experience, but I will henceforth be on the lookout for this.
To be fair, I doubt that my sample size of such individuals is statistically significant. But since in the few times a client has brought up IFS and either enthusiastically extolled it or seemed to be wanting me to validate it as something they should try, it seemed to me to be related to either the person’s schema of helplessness (i.e., these parts are doing this to me), or of denial (i.e., I would be successful if I could just fix all these broken parts!), which IMO are both treating the parts metaphor as a way to support and sustain the very dysfunctions that were causing their problems in the first place.
In general, I suspect people are naturally attracted to the worst possible modes of therapy for fixing their problems, at least if they know anything about the therapy in question!
(And I include myself in that, since I’ve avoided therapy generally since a bad experience with it in college, and for a long time avoided any self-help modality that involved actually being self-compassionate or anything other than supporting my “fix my broken stuff so I can get on with life” attitude. It’s possible that with the right approach and therapist I could potentially have changed faster, once you count all the time I spent researching and developing my methods, all the failures and blind alleys. But I’m happy with the outcome, since more people are being helped than just me, and getting people out of the kinds of pain I suffered is rewarding in its own way.)
Huh. This does not resonate with my experience, but I will henceforth be on the lookout for this.
To be fair, I doubt that my sample size of such individuals is statistically significant. But since in the few times a client has brought up IFS and either enthusiastically extolled it or seemed to be wanting me to validate it as something they should try, it seemed to me to be related to either the person’s schema of helplessness (i.e., these parts are doing this to me), or of denial (i.e., I would be successful if I could just fix all these broken parts!), which IMO are both treating the parts metaphor as a way to support and sustain the very dysfunctions that were causing their problems in the first place.
In general, I suspect people are naturally attracted to the worst possible modes of therapy for fixing their problems, at least if they know anything about the therapy in question!
(And I include myself in that, since I’ve avoided therapy generally since a bad experience with it in college, and for a long time avoided any self-help modality that involved actually being self-compassionate or anything other than supporting my “fix my broken stuff so I can get on with life” attitude. It’s possible that with the right approach and therapist I could potentially have changed faster, once you count all the time I spent researching and developing my methods, all the failures and blind alleys. But I’m happy with the outcome, since more people are being helped than just me, and getting people out of the kinds of pain I suffered is rewarding in its own way.)