I will note that, in my own practice, IFS and subagents are never presented as “separate from you,” but rather “parts of you.” What you’re describing sound more like what Narrative Therapy sometimes does, in externalizing and personifying the Anger or Addiction or whatever, and then working to better understand its influences on you and your ability to influence it and so on, though the framing on that can also vary greatly between one practitioner and another.
Insofar as some people use IFS to “other” their internal desires or behaviors, this feels like it’s naturally determined by the “client” more than anything. Some people just find the idea of breaking themselves down into sub-agents or “child vs teenage vs adult self” really clicks with the way they relate to their competing desires and goals, without quite giving up “responsibility” for them… but that opens up a new conversation about how important the sense of “responsibility” for our flaws actually is toward addressing them, which also probably depends a lot on how motivated the client is toward change.
I will note that, in my own practice, IFS and subagents are never presented as “separate from you,” but rather “parts of you.”
Yes, but “part of you” can still be disowning/deflection. It allows one to remain disidentified from the “part”, i.e., “oh, it’s just that part of me, it’s not really me”. It allows you to disclaim endorsement of the “part’s” values.
Some people just find the idea of breaking themselves down into sub-agents or “child vs teenage vs adult self” really clicks with the way they relate to their competing desires and goals, without quite giving up “responsibility” for them… but that opens up a new conversation about how important the sense of “responsibility” for our flaws actually is toward addressing them, which also probably depends a lot on how motivated the client is toward change.
I can see how it might work for some people. I just avoid it because the clients I work with usually have a metric ton of stuff they’re other-ing or judging themselves about or disavowing, so dealing with that issue is already on the critical path for getting done what they came to me for. (And the people who come to me talking about how wonderful IFS is, frequently seem to be the ones with the worst denial issues, so that’s probably why I get a bit passionate about explaining why, at least for them, it’s a really bad idea to keep doing that.)
But yeah, any modality can be abused by anybody in order to keep themselves from changing, and all self-help advice can be trivially weaponized for self-destruction.
After all, somebody could easily take what I’m saying about IFS and turn it into ammunition to punish themselves more, because they need to “take responsibility” for all their awful, awful parts. ;-)
That being said, I don’t say that people need to “take responsibility, just that they need to admit the truth about what they want. It’s okay to wish you didn’t want something you want, but trying to pretend you don’t want it or that it’s not you who wants it isn’t always a viable coping strategy, and in fact is often crazy-making.
That is, the brain’s decision-making system appears to be able to handle, “I want this but it’s not a good idea”, much better and more sanely than it handles “I want to not know that I want this”! The latter is just begging to end up with compulsive behaviors outside of conscious control (because if they could control the behavior, it would mean that they’re the one who’s doing the wanting).
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.)
I will note that, in my own practice, IFS and subagents are never presented as “separate from you,” but rather “parts of you.” What you’re describing sound more like what Narrative Therapy sometimes does, in externalizing and personifying the Anger or Addiction or whatever, and then working to better understand its influences on you and your ability to influence it and so on, though the framing on that can also vary greatly between one practitioner and another.
Insofar as some people use IFS to “other” their internal desires or behaviors, this feels like it’s naturally determined by the “client” more than anything. Some people just find the idea of breaking themselves down into sub-agents or “child vs teenage vs adult self” really clicks with the way they relate to their competing desires and goals, without quite giving up “responsibility” for them… but that opens up a new conversation about how important the sense of “responsibility” for our flaws actually is toward addressing them, which also probably depends a lot on how motivated the client is toward change.
Yes, but “part of you” can still be disowning/deflection. It allows one to remain disidentified from the “part”, i.e., “oh, it’s just that part of me, it’s not really me”. It allows you to disclaim endorsement of the “part’s” values.
I can see how it might work for some people. I just avoid it because the clients I work with usually have a metric ton of stuff they’re other-ing or judging themselves about or disavowing, so dealing with that issue is already on the critical path for getting done what they came to me for. (And the people who come to me talking about how wonderful IFS is, frequently seem to be the ones with the worst denial issues, so that’s probably why I get a bit passionate about explaining why, at least for them, it’s a really bad idea to keep doing that.)
But yeah, any modality can be abused by anybody in order to keep themselves from changing, and all self-help advice can be trivially weaponized for self-destruction.
After all, somebody could easily take what I’m saying about IFS and turn it into ammunition to punish themselves more, because they need to “take responsibility” for all their awful, awful parts. ;-)
That being said, I don’t say that people need to “take responsibility, just that they need to admit the truth about what they want. It’s okay to wish you didn’t want something you want, but trying to pretend you don’t want it or that it’s not you who wants it isn’t always a viable coping strategy, and in fact is often crazy-making.
That is, the brain’s decision-making system appears to be able to handle, “I want this but it’s not a good idea”, much better and more sanely than it handles “I want to not know that I want this”! The latter is just begging to end up with compulsive behaviors outside of conscious control (because if they could control the behavior, it would mean that they’re the one who’s doing the wanting).
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.)