So I find IFS, Focusing, IDC, and some aspects of TMI-style meditation to basically have blended together into one big hybrid technique for me; they all feel like different aspects of what’s essentially the same skill of “listening to what your subagents want and bringing their desires into alignment with each other”; IFS has been the thing that gave me the biggest recent boost, but it’s not clear to me that I’m always doing “entirely pure IFS”, even though I think there’s nearly always a substantial IFS component. (Probably most important has been the part about getting into Self, which wasn’t a concept I explicitly had before this.)
That said, a few examples. I already mentioned a few in an earlier post:
My experience is that usually if I have an unpleasant emotion, I will try to do one of two things: either reject it entirely and push it out of my mind, or buy into the story that it’s telling and act accordingly. Once I learned the techniques for getting into Self, I got the ability to sort of… just hang out with the emotion, neither believing it to be absolutely true nor needing to show it to be false. And then if I e.g. had feelings of social anxiety, I could keep those feelings around and go into a social situation anyway, making a kind of mental move that I might describe as “yes, it’s possible that these people all secretly hate me; I’m going to accept that as a possibility without trying to add any caveats, but also without doing anything else than accepting its possibility”.
The consequence has been that this seems to make the parts of my mind with beliefs like “doing this perfectly innocuous thing will make other people upset” actually update their beliefs. I do the thing, the parts with this belief get to hang around and observe what happens, notice that nobody seems upset at me, and then they are somewhat less likely to bring up similar concerns in the future.
In terms of global workspace theory, my model here is that there’s a part of the mind that’s bringing up a concern that should be taken into account in decision-making. The concern may or may not be justified, so the correct thing to do is to consider its possibility, but not necessarily give it too much weight. Going into Self and letting the message stay in consciousness this way seems to make it available for decision-making, and often the module that’s bringing it up is happy to just have its message received and evaluated; you don’t have to do anything more than that, if it’s just holding it up as a tentative consideration to be evaluated.
If I had to name one single biggest object-level benefit from IFS, it would be this one: a gradual reduction of my remaining unfounded social anxieties, which is still ongoing but seems to be pretty well on track to eliminating all of them.
This ties into the more meta-level thing that there’s less and less of a feeling that negative emotions are something that I need to avoid, or that I would need to fight against my own mind. Now I don’t claim to be entirely Zen at all times, and there’s still stuff like stress or exhaustion that can make me feel miserable, but at least assuming relatively “normal” conditions… there’s increasingly the feeling that if I find myself experiencing procrastination, or feeling bad about something, then that involves some subagents not being in agreement about what to do, and I can just fix that. (Again, this is not to say that this process would cause me to only feel positive emotions at all times: sometimes feeling a negative emotion is the mind-system’s endorsed response to a situation. But then when the system as a whole agrees with it, it doesn’t feel bad in the same way.)
There are a bunch of examples of minor fixes along the lines of the example from the same post:
E.g. a while back I was having a sense of loneliness as I laid down for a nap. I stepped into the part’s perspective to experience it for a while, then unblended; now I felt it as a black ice hockey puck levitating around my lower back. I didn’t really do anything other than let it be there, and maintained a connection with it. Gradually it started generating a pleasant warmth, and then the visualization transformed into a happy napping cartoon fox, curled up inside a fireball that it was using as its blanket. And then I was no longer feeling lonely.
This has gotten to the slightly annoying point that I often find myself “no longer being able” to say things like “I have a mental block/emotional aversion against doing X” or “I feel bad because Y”, because if I have a good enough handle on the situation to be able to describe it in such detail, then I can often just fix it right away, without needing to talk about it to someone else. Recent fixes in this category include:
Recognizing that I should get more exercise and getting a subscription to the nearby gym, after living within a five minute walk of it for almost a year and never getting around visiting it before.
Managing to actually write my previous post in this sequence, which felt like a relatively boring thing to do since I was just summarizing someone else’s work; several blocks came up in the process of doing that, which I then dealt with one at a time, until I could just finish it relatively painlessly.
Emotional issues relating to things like being too sensitive to the pain of others, to the point of being frequently upset about various specific things in the world which are horrible, and having difficulties setting my own boundaries if it felt like I could sacrifice some of my well-being in order to make someone else better off.
Some exceptions to the “I can just fix it when I’m feeling bad” thing include:
if the issue is actually caused by someone else, e.g. someone else is acting in a way which is preventing me from achieving my needs
the problem is caused by a physical issue that I have, such as being hungry, low on sleep, or having such a low level of physical arousal that I get stuck on low-activation energy behaviors
there’s something else in the external environment that causes an actual concrete problem that I don’t have e.g. the skills to deal with myself, so can’t just institute an internal fix
Also, I used to think that I’d lost out because when I had the chance to experience some things, I failed to realize that chance and didn’t get them and now it’s too late. For instance, a chance to focus on my studies free of stress, or experiencing a happy and lasting relationship when young and growing up together with a close partner.
But after doing some IFS and TMI work around those things, I’ve sometimes been spontaneously experiencing the same kinds of Self-like emotional sensations (“felt senses”, to use the Focusing term) that I previously thought that I would only have had if I’d gotten those things.
So I suspect that my “I had the chance to experience X, but lost it because of life circumstance Y” better translates to “I previously had access to a certain aspect of being in Self, which frequently happened in the context of X, but had that access blocked after Y”. Examples:
1) A chance to focus on my studies free of stress. When I graduated high school, I was really into learning and studying, and excited about the possibility of spending several years in university doing just that. And for a while it was like that and I really enjoyed it. But then I got a burnout and the rest of it was just desperately trying to catch up on my studies and there was a lot of stress, and I have never again had that opportunity to just focus on nothing but studying and being free to think about nothing else.
Except about a month ago I started reading a textbook, with that study time being squarely sandwiched between a dozen other things I should be doing, and… that felt sense of being able to just focus on studies and nothing else, was there again. Apparently it didn’t require the freedom to spend a years at a time just studying, just being able to time-box a few hours from a day was enough. But of course, I hadn’t previously re-gotten that feeling from just a few hours. Now it felt more like just enjoying learning, in a way which I hadn’t remembered for a long time.
So apparently there was something like, previously being able to just focus on the pleasure of learning had been one way to get myself into Self, but afterwards there had been a priority override which had been left active and blocked that access. After I did things to address that override, I could get into Self that way again, and it turned out that feeling this way wasn’t a unique opportunity specific to one part of my life which I had now forever lost.
2) The relationship thing is harder to explain, but there’s something analogous to the study thing in that… I recalled experiencing a feeling of openness and optimism towards another person, specifically in the context of my first crushes and with my first girlfriend, which I had never quite experienced the same way afterwards. And the way I interpreted that was something like, that was the experience you get when you consider potential or actual partners with the unique openness of being young, when I was still quite naive about things but also not particularly cynical or jaded.
And there was an implicit notion of… I didn’t dissect this so explicitly until recently, but I think that a part of me was making the assumption that if I’d ended up in a lasting relationship with someone back then, then that relationship would somehow have preserved that felt sense of openness, which I didn’t experience as surviving into my later relationships. Of course, I didn’t explicitly think that it would have preserved that felt sense. Rather it was more that the memory of that felt sense was associated with my memory of how I experienced romance back then, and the combination of those memories was associated with a sense of loss of what could have been.
Until about a month ago, when that felt sense of openness and optimism towards a person suddenly popped when I was talking with 1) my housemate about random stuff for 15 minutes and 2) an old acquaintance in the bus for 5 minutes. And also lingering generally around in a milder form when I wasn’t even in anyone’s company, just doing stuff by myself.
So I think that, my mind had recalled that there was a really nice felt sense associated with my teenage crushes, and made the assumption that if I’d had managed to get into a lasting relationship back then, that would have preserved the felt sense in question. But actually 1) the relationship itself wasn’t the point, the nice felt sense was 2) the felt sense wasn’t solely about romantic relationships in the first place, it was about having a particular quality of Self which had since then gotten blocked due to some ongoing override.
(I still haven’t permanently addressed this override; it seems like it came back since then, and those specific sensations of Self have again been missing. But I expect to eventually be able to figure out how to integrate the specific managers and exiles which are behind those sensations being blocked.)
A somewhat different framing of this would be in terms of emotional unclogging. Something like: as a teenager there were some aspects of me that were less clogged, though I still needed the context of a romantic relationship to unclog them enough to access those aspects. Afterwards access to those aspects of me got more clogged, so that I couldn’t access them even in the context of a relationship anymore, so I thought that I’d lost my chance of ever experiencing those feelings again. And then I did some more unclogging work with IFS and related techniques, and suddenly I started having access to those feelings even when talking with somewhat random people.
As background there are some activities that are general purpose feeling obliterators and thus are commonly used by firefighters: binge-eating, drinking alcohol, drugs, sex, TV, video games…
I have been fighting with my weight for many (26!) years. I did lose a lot of weight but still at BMI 26 and could not get off that last 7kg. Using the IFS process I identified the firefighters which used eating to make various feelings go away:
Social stress, anxiety about food being available (from when I was young = “Jimmi”), feelings of emotional deprivation (childhood situation), feelings of frustration when I could not understand something, feeling tired, feeling frightened (childhood situation)
Once I connected with these protectors and made friends with them, connected (with their permission) with the original exiles, and established that the problems have solutions, I have been able to stick to my diet for 50 days straight and lose 2.5kg in less than two months. This takes me almost half way to my target.
As an example how much has changed I have had a packet of chocolate biscuits in my refrigerator for the last few weeks with no drama at all about being tempted to eat them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Tam).
Why do I have a packet of tim-tams in the fridge?
This is a possibly interesting aspect of the IFS process. Having satisfied all the exiles that their problem is solved you are supposed to check in with them every day for a week. You should also check in with the protectors every day, that they are happy also and that they are liking the new roles they have chosen for themselves.
Well the character Jimmi above on the second check-in said that he bought in theory that nowadays I can always get the food I need but he wanted actual proof. So we went and bought various foods that 8 year old Jimmi liked. Thus the tim-tams. This then satisfied him. But I ate them as part of my diet e.g. this morning I had two tim-tams as my carb/fat portion of breakfast. They were delicious!
I give this as an example of where thinking of the parts as characters can sometimes help. How you rationalize them is less important.
LWers can get too hung up on the theory of things. “I know it works in practice but does it work in theory” as one economist said.
All models are wrong but some are useful. I find this one useful.
As OP pointed out, IFS is very useful for understanding other people. Additionally if you model someone’s bad behavior as a part flaring up, it can help you to be more compassionate.
Could you give some examples of where you’ve been applying IFS and how it’s been helpful in those situations?
So I find IFS, Focusing, IDC, and some aspects of TMI-style meditation to basically have blended together into one big hybrid technique for me; they all feel like different aspects of what’s essentially the same skill of “listening to what your subagents want and bringing their desires into alignment with each other”; IFS has been the thing that gave me the biggest recent boost, but it’s not clear to me that I’m always doing “entirely pure IFS”, even though I think there’s nearly always a substantial IFS component. (Probably most important has been the part about getting into Self, which wasn’t a concept I explicitly had before this.)
That said, a few examples. I already mentioned a few in an earlier post:
If I had to name one single biggest object-level benefit from IFS, it would be this one: a gradual reduction of my remaining unfounded social anxieties, which is still ongoing but seems to be pretty well on track to eliminating all of them.
This ties into the more meta-level thing that there’s less and less of a feeling that negative emotions are something that I need to avoid, or that I would need to fight against my own mind. Now I don’t claim to be entirely Zen at all times, and there’s still stuff like stress or exhaustion that can make me feel miserable, but at least assuming relatively “normal” conditions… there’s increasingly the feeling that if I find myself experiencing procrastination, or feeling bad about something, then that involves some subagents not being in agreement about what to do, and I can just fix that. (Again, this is not to say that this process would cause me to only feel positive emotions at all times: sometimes feeling a negative emotion is the mind-system’s endorsed response to a situation. But then when the system as a whole agrees with it, it doesn’t feel bad in the same way.)
There are a bunch of examples of minor fixes along the lines of the example from the same post:
This has gotten to the slightly annoying point that I often find myself “no longer being able” to say things like “I have a mental block/emotional aversion against doing X” or “I feel bad because Y”, because if I have a good enough handle on the situation to be able to describe it in such detail, then I can often just fix it right away, without needing to talk about it to someone else. Recent fixes in this category include:
Recognizing that I should get more exercise and getting a subscription to the nearby gym, after living within a five minute walk of it for almost a year and never getting around visiting it before.
Managing to actually write my previous post in this sequence, which felt like a relatively boring thing to do since I was just summarizing someone else’s work; several blocks came up in the process of doing that, which I then dealt with one at a time, until I could just finish it relatively painlessly.
Emotional issues relating to things like being too sensitive to the pain of others, to the point of being frequently upset about various specific things in the world which are horrible, and having difficulties setting my own boundaries if it felt like I could sacrifice some of my well-being in order to make someone else better off.
Some exceptions to the “I can just fix it when I’m feeling bad” thing include:
if the issue is actually caused by someone else, e.g. someone else is acting in a way which is preventing me from achieving my needs
the problem is caused by a physical issue that I have, such as being hungry, low on sleep, or having such a low level of physical arousal that I get stuck on low-activation energy behaviors
there’s something else in the external environment that causes an actual concrete problem that I don’t have e.g. the skills to deal with myself, so can’t just institute an internal fix
Also, I used to think that I’d lost out because when I had the chance to experience some things, I failed to realize that chance and didn’t get them and now it’s too late. For instance, a chance to focus on my studies free of stress, or experiencing a happy and lasting relationship when young and growing up together with a close partner.
But after doing some IFS and TMI work around those things, I’ve sometimes been spontaneously experiencing the same kinds of Self-like emotional sensations (“felt senses”, to use the Focusing term) that I previously thought that I would only have had if I’d gotten those things.
So I suspect that my “I had the chance to experience X, but lost it because of life circumstance Y” better translates to “I previously had access to a certain aspect of being in Self, which frequently happened in the context of X, but had that access blocked after Y”. Examples:
1) A chance to focus on my studies free of stress. When I graduated high school, I was really into learning and studying, and excited about the possibility of spending several years in university doing just that. And for a while it was like that and I really enjoyed it. But then I got a burnout and the rest of it was just desperately trying to catch up on my studies and there was a lot of stress, and I have never again had that opportunity to just focus on nothing but studying and being free to think about nothing else.
Except about a month ago I started reading a textbook, with that study time being squarely sandwiched between a dozen other things I should be doing, and… that felt sense of being able to just focus on studies and nothing else, was there again. Apparently it didn’t require the freedom to spend a years at a time just studying, just being able to time-box a few hours from a day was enough. But of course, I hadn’t previously re-gotten that feeling from just a few hours. Now it felt more like just enjoying learning, in a way which I hadn’t remembered for a long time.
So apparently there was something like, previously being able to just focus on the pleasure of learning had been one way to get myself into Self, but afterwards there had been a priority override which had been left active and blocked that access. After I did things to address that override, I could get into Self that way again, and it turned out that feeling this way wasn’t a unique opportunity specific to one part of my life which I had now forever lost.
2) The relationship thing is harder to explain, but there’s something analogous to the study thing in that… I recalled experiencing a feeling of openness and optimism towards another person, specifically in the context of my first crushes and with my first girlfriend, which I had never quite experienced the same way afterwards. And the way I interpreted that was something like, that was the experience you get when you consider potential or actual partners with the unique openness of being young, when I was still quite naive about things but also not particularly cynical or jaded.
And there was an implicit notion of… I didn’t dissect this so explicitly until recently, but I think that a part of me was making the assumption that if I’d ended up in a lasting relationship with someone back then, then that relationship would somehow have preserved that felt sense of openness, which I didn’t experience as surviving into my later relationships. Of course, I didn’t explicitly think that it would have preserved that felt sense. Rather it was more that the memory of that felt sense was associated with my memory of how I experienced romance back then, and the combination of those memories was associated with a sense of loss of what could have been.
Until about a month ago, when that felt sense of openness and optimism towards a person suddenly popped when I was talking with 1) my housemate about random stuff for 15 minutes and 2) an old acquaintance in the bus for 5 minutes. And also lingering generally around in a milder form when I wasn’t even in anyone’s company, just doing stuff by myself.
So I think that, my mind had recalled that there was a really nice felt sense associated with my teenage crushes, and made the assumption that if I’d had managed to get into a lasting relationship back then, that would have preserved the felt sense in question. But actually 1) the relationship itself wasn’t the point, the nice felt sense was 2) the felt sense wasn’t solely about romantic relationships in the first place, it was about having a particular quality of Self which had since then gotten blocked due to some ongoing override.
(I still haven’t permanently addressed this override; it seems like it came back since then, and those specific sensations of Self have again been missing. But I expect to eventually be able to figure out how to integrate the specific managers and exiles which are behind those sensations being blocked.)
A somewhat different framing of this would be in terms of emotional unclogging. Something like: as a teenager there were some aspects of me that were less clogged, though I still needed the context of a romantic relationship to unclog them enough to access those aspects. Afterwards access to those aspects of me got more clogged, so that I couldn’t access them even in the context of a relationship anymore, so I thought that I’d lost my chance of ever experiencing those feelings again. And then I did some more unclogging work with IFS and related techniques, and suddenly I started having access to those feelings even when talking with somewhat random people.
I am not OP but I can give an example.
As background there are some activities that are general purpose feeling obliterators and thus are commonly used by firefighters: binge-eating, drinking alcohol, drugs, sex, TV, video games…
I have been fighting with my weight for many (26!) years. I did lose a lot of weight but still at BMI 26 and could not get off that last 7kg. Using the IFS process I identified the firefighters which used eating to make various feelings go away:
Social stress, anxiety about food being available (from when I was young = “Jimmi”), feelings of emotional deprivation (childhood situation), feelings of frustration when I could not understand something, feeling tired, feeling frightened (childhood situation)
Once I connected with these protectors and made friends with them, connected (with their permission) with the original exiles, and established that the problems have solutions, I have been able to stick to my diet for 50 days straight and lose 2.5kg in less than two months. This takes me almost half way to my target.
As an example how much has changed I have had a packet of chocolate biscuits in my refrigerator for the last few weeks with no drama at all about being tempted to eat them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Tam).
Why do I have a packet of tim-tams in the fridge?
This is a possibly interesting aspect of the IFS process. Having satisfied all the exiles that their problem is solved you are supposed to check in with them every day for a week. You should also check in with the protectors every day, that they are happy also and that they are liking the new roles they have chosen for themselves.
Well the character Jimmi above on the second check-in said that he bought in theory that nowadays I can always get the food I need but he wanted actual proof. So we went and bought various foods that 8 year old Jimmi liked. Thus the tim-tams. This then satisfied him. But I ate them as part of my diet e.g. this morning I had two tim-tams as my carb/fat portion of breakfast. They were delicious!
I give this as an example of where thinking of the parts as characters can sometimes help. How you rationalize them is less important.
LWers can get too hung up on the theory of things. “I know it works in practice but does it work in theory” as one economist said.
All models are wrong but some are useful. I find this one useful.
As OP pointed out, IFS is very useful for understanding other people. Additionally if you model someone’s bad behavior as a part flaring up, it can help you to be more compassionate.