I’m confused by your understanding of Focusing. How familiar are you with it in practice?
Or I’m confused about what you’re calling a ‘model of a monkey’.
I can check with the monkey whether my felt sense label is correct. That’s the whole deal of Focusing. The more correct my label is, the more I get a feeling of ‘ahh yes that’ vs ‘ehhh’.
And when I get better at it, I can reach the point where my monkey offers its own labels. Which feels different from when my rider offers labels.
AND, furthermore, I can actually pass my monkey the voicebox. It’s called ‘blending’ in IFS and is actually a common occurrence in humans. When you’re really, really mad, you are blended with a monkey and are speaking from it.
Or when I’m really, really scared, my body will start shaking, and I’ll start repeating the same phrase over and over, “I don’t want to die.” This is also an example of the monkey having the voicebox.
The improv thing is another version, but you’re not necessarily blended with an emotional part.
Double cruxing is hardly sophisticated logical reasoning. It can be more like, “What are you afraid of?” “No rest.” “OK, and what are you afraid of?” “Future pain.” “What is the other one missing?” [sends a felt sense that is what ‘no rest’ feels like accompanied by an inner simulation] The image depicts a specific scenario. Other side [passes a different image that contains a potential alternative] Etc. Etc.
I am not familiar with focusing in practice, and it would be extremely unsurprising if my understanding of it were wrong, and extremely surprising if my understanding of it were not incomplete.
When I called double-cruxing “relatively sophisticated”, the word “relatively” was there precisely because of course it isn’t sophisticated by comparison with, say, proving difficult mathematical theorems—but it seems like it does involve explicit reasoning of the sort that Elephants are not generally supposed to be good at. What you describe seems (though of course this may just be misunderstanding on my part) to be missing something that’s an essential part of double cruxing as distinguished from other forms of dialogue, namely the search for something that if wrong would change your position on the original issue. Are your monkeys sophisticated enough to identify what things have that property?
So does IDC depend on having achieved a certain degree of skill in focusing and IFS? Or does it have its own way of giving voice to (and passing information to) the relevant internal subsystems?
Anyway, let’s return to the original elephant/rider problem we were discussing, which when it happens to me presents to me in these terms: “I” (meaning, so far as is immediately apparent to me, all the bits of me that are consciously present and capable of language; that is, roughly, my Rider) want to go to bed and get some damn sleep for a change, but despite my (apparently, superficially) forming the intention to stand up, turn off the computer, and go to bed, this fails to happen because some other bits of me (roughly, so it would seem, my Elephant) have other preferences. That seems to match well with how you described it.
The IFS model seems to be somewhat different from the rider/elephant model, with a bunch of different subselves that are (in some contexts at least) capable of speech and reasoning and so forth, which seems to make them non-Elephantine. But maybe I’m misunderstanding, and the idea is that they are parts of the Elephant that can, in the right circumstances, steer the rider around and influence its speech and reasoning and whatnot?
A description of what you actually do in the situation you describe where “you” want to go to bed but it Just Doesn’t Happen would, I think, be both interesting and illuminating.
I’m confused by your understanding of Focusing. How familiar are you with it in practice?
Or I’m confused about what you’re calling a ‘model of a monkey’.
I can check with the monkey whether my felt sense label is correct. That’s the whole deal of Focusing. The more correct my label is, the more I get a feeling of ‘ahh yes that’ vs ‘ehhh’.
And when I get better at it, I can reach the point where my monkey offers its own labels. Which feels different from when my rider offers labels.
AND, furthermore, I can actually pass my monkey the voicebox. It’s called ‘blending’ in IFS and is actually a common occurrence in humans. When you’re really, really mad, you are blended with a monkey and are speaking from it.
Or when I’m really, really scared, my body will start shaking, and I’ll start repeating the same phrase over and over, “I don’t want to die.” This is also an example of the monkey having the voicebox.
The improv thing is another version, but you’re not necessarily blended with an emotional part.
Double cruxing is hardly sophisticated logical reasoning. It can be more like, “What are you afraid of?” “No rest.” “OK, and what are you afraid of?” “Future pain.” “What is the other one missing?” [sends a felt sense that is what ‘no rest’ feels like accompanied by an inner simulation] The image depicts a specific scenario. Other side [passes a different image that contains a potential alternative] Etc. Etc.
I am not familiar with focusing in practice, and it would be extremely unsurprising if my understanding of it were wrong, and extremely surprising if my understanding of it were not incomplete.
When I called double-cruxing “relatively sophisticated”, the word “relatively” was there precisely because of course it isn’t sophisticated by comparison with, say, proving difficult mathematical theorems—but it seems like it does involve explicit reasoning of the sort that Elephants are not generally supposed to be good at. What you describe seems (though of course this may just be misunderstanding on my part) to be missing something that’s an essential part of double cruxing as distinguished from other forms of dialogue, namely the search for something that if wrong would change your position on the original issue. Are your monkeys sophisticated enough to identify what things have that property?
So does IDC depend on having achieved a certain degree of skill in focusing and IFS? Or does it have its own way of giving voice to (and passing information to) the relevant internal subsystems?
Anyway, let’s return to the original elephant/rider problem we were discussing, which when it happens to me presents to me in these terms: “I” (meaning, so far as is immediately apparent to me, all the bits of me that are consciously present and capable of language; that is, roughly, my Rider) want to go to bed and get some damn sleep for a change, but despite my (apparently, superficially) forming the intention to stand up, turn off the computer, and go to bed, this fails to happen because some other bits of me (roughly, so it would seem, my Elephant) have other preferences. That seems to match well with how you described it.
The IFS model seems to be somewhat different from the rider/elephant model, with a bunch of different subselves that are (in some contexts at least) capable of speech and reasoning and so forth, which seems to make them non-Elephantine. But maybe I’m misunderstanding, and the idea is that they are parts of the Elephant that can, in the right circumstances, steer the rider around and influence its speech and reasoning and whatnot?
A description of what you actually do in the situation you describe where “you” want to go to bed but it Just Doesn’t Happen would, I think, be both interesting and illuminating.