That fix has continued to work for fixing the specific issues described in that post (specifically, shame and anxiety stemming from feelings of being a horrible person). I basically haven’t felt like a horrible person since implementing those fixes. That’s a distinct issue from e.g. the kinds of social insecurities I’m discussing in this post, where a part of my mind is nervous that even though I don’t think that I’m a horrible person, others might.
I actually touch upon this distinction in the post that you linked to:
Suppose that you have an unstable self-concept around “being a good person”, and you commit some kind of a faux pas. Or even if you haven’t actually committed one, you might just be generally unsure of whether others are getting a bad impression of you or not. Now, there are four levels on which you might feel bad about the real or imagined mistake:
1. Feeling bad because you think you’re an intrinsically bad person
2. Feeling bad because you suspect others think bad of you and that this is intrinsically bad (if other people think bad of you, that’s terrible, for its own sake)
3. Feeling bad because you suspect others think bad of you and that this is instrumentally bad (other people thinking bad of you can be bad for various social reasons)
4. Feeling bad because you might have hurt or upset someone, and you care about what others feel
Out of these, #3 and #4 are reasonable, #1 and #2 less so. When I fixed my self-concept, reaction #1 mostly vanished. But interestingly, reaction #2 stuck around for a while… or at least, a fear of #2 stuck around for a while.
The kind of thing (among others) that IFS seems to help for, is updating the parts of my mind that have incorrect assumptions relating to #3 and #4, which is an issue that I never said the self-concept work affected.
Of course, you are correct that at the time of writing that post, issues #1 and #2 had been so dominant in my mind that I had not been aware of #3 and #4 also including a dimension that would need to be addressed. I expect that likewise, addressing the issues that I can address with IFS, will bring up even more issues which will require some other tool to address. But going from issues #1 and #2 to the milder issues of incorrect beliefs relating to #3 and #4 was still a substantial improvement to my life; likewise, I expect that going from here to some new subtle issue that’s previously been overshadowed by the more serious ones, will also be an improvement even if it doesn’t fix literally everything.
I don’t expect there to be such a thing as achieving a state where absolutely everything has been fixed, since that would imply that my mind is completely optimal and there’s absolutely nothing about it that can be improved. That doesn’t seem like a state that anyone could ever reach.
Note also the caveat that I had in my self-concept post:
[EDITED TO ADD: A few people have asked whether I can be confident that this has really been sufficient to cure my depression, so I should clarify: I believe that this taken care of the original reason why I had feelings of insecurity, insufficiency etc., feelings which then drove me to do various things that led to burnout and depression. Whether the original cause of those behaviors and feelings has been dealt with, is a distinct question from whether the depressionthat they caused has been dealt with. After all, depression can cause various changes to the brain that linger long after the original cause is gone. I don’t know whether the depression will come back or not, but I do expect that many of the factors that originally caused it and maintained it have now been fixed; still, there may be others.]
I should also add that although IFS is originally a psychotherapy thing, I don’t really view the-thing-I-described-in-this-post as a “how to fix something that’s broken” thing (although it does do that too). I rather view it as “how to more optimally incorporate all parts of your brain in your decision-making”, i.e. as an instrumental rationality technique.
That fix has continued to work for fixing the specific issues described in that post (specifically, shame and anxiety stemming from feelings of being a horrible person). I basically haven’t felt like a horrible person since implementing those fixes. That’s a distinct issue from e.g. the kinds of social insecurities I’m discussing in this post, where a part of my mind is nervous that even though I don’t think that I’m a horrible person, others might.
I actually touch upon this distinction in the post that you linked to:
The kind of thing (among others) that IFS seems to help for, is updating the parts of my mind that have incorrect assumptions relating to #3 and #4, which is an issue that I never said the self-concept work affected.
Of course, you are correct that at the time of writing that post, issues #1 and #2 had been so dominant in my mind that I had not been aware of #3 and #4 also including a dimension that would need to be addressed. I expect that likewise, addressing the issues that I can address with IFS, will bring up even more issues which will require some other tool to address. But going from issues #1 and #2 to the milder issues of incorrect beliefs relating to #3 and #4 was still a substantial improvement to my life; likewise, I expect that going from here to some new subtle issue that’s previously been overshadowed by the more serious ones, will also be an improvement even if it doesn’t fix literally everything.
I don’t expect there to be such a thing as achieving a state where absolutely everything has been fixed, since that would imply that my mind is completely optimal and there’s absolutely nothing about it that can be improved. That doesn’t seem like a state that anyone could ever reach.
Note also the caveat that I had in my self-concept post:
Thanks for the response! I’m happy to hear that.
Thanks!
I should also add that although IFS is originally a psychotherapy thing, I don’t really view the-thing-I-described-in-this-post as a “how to fix something that’s broken” thing (although it does do that too). I rather view it as “how to more optimally incorporate all parts of your brain in your decision-making”, i.e. as an instrumental rationality technique.