Transform Your Self by Steve Andreas is good for working on self-concepts. Kaj worked with it a while with personal improvements that were visible to coworkers and then we (some rationalists in Berlin) had a reading group for it.
To give you one example of what it did for me personally, in 1-2 hours I adopted the self belief of “I’m attractive” that I previously didn’t hold.
Yeah, the self-concept work was really useful earlier on. But it’s worth noting that the self-concept work was still anchored in a paradigm of “my sense of emotional security is dependent on what probability I assign to other people liking me”; you can see this in my original writeup, where I said:
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:
Feeling bad because you think you’re an intrinsically bad person
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)
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)
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.
#1 and #2 seem to indeed have disappeared; however, I’ve still continued to experience insecurities which have taken the forms of what seems like excessive worries of #3 and #4 (thinking that I’ve displeased someone in a way which will make them like me less, as well as worrying that someone might have felt upset over something that they in all likelihood won’t even remember). These seem to be the kinds of issues that can’t be fixed by internal work alone, since they are about the external world: in order to evaluate how justified these are, I need to actually test the extent to which something e.g. makes other people dislike me.
Self-concept work was basically about assembling evidence for me having some particular trait, such as “I’m likeable”. But there was a sense in which that approach, while helpful in many ways, was still buying into a deeper insecure emotional schema of “I need to accumulate enough evidence for people in any given interaction actively liking me”, rather than seeing the possibility that it’s possible to achieve deeper changes where the whole question becomes less important.
Reading your other post it seems like IPF is for solving the issues causing problems that are learned before the second birthday and self-concept issues are problems that arrise later then that.
I would expect that for many people both kind of issues are important to resolve.
Yeah, though I should probably add to my other comment (I’ll go edit it in) that I’m not totally bought into the precise claims about what age range IPF covers. It seems plausible to me that while it’s more capable of tapping into very early life experiences better than other therapies, it does also affect insecure conditioning developed somewhat later in childhood.
But I agree with your general point that self-concept work and IPF seem complementary. (I’ve actually also been going back to self-concept work a bit more in the very last week, since it feels like the possibility of having more strongly positive self-concepts has gotten more “unlocked” after IPF/IFS/Coherence Therapy work.)
Transform Your Self by Steve Andreas is good for working on self-concepts. Kaj worked with it a while with personal improvements that were visible to coworkers and then we (some rationalists in Berlin) had a reading group for it.
To give you one example of what it did for me personally, in 1-2 hours I adopted the self belief of “I’m attractive” that I previously didn’t hold.
I hadn’t heard of that (that I recall), happy to hear that. :)
Yeah, the self-concept work was really useful earlier on. But it’s worth noting that the self-concept work was still anchored in a paradigm of “my sense of emotional security is dependent on what probability I assign to other people liking me”; you can see this in my original writeup, where I said:
And then, in my later follow-up to the work, I wrote:
Self-concept work was basically about assembling evidence for me having some particular trait, such as “I’m likeable”. But there was a sense in which that approach, while helpful in many ways, was still buying into a deeper insecure emotional schema of “I need to accumulate enough evidence for people in any given interaction actively liking me”, rather than seeing the possibility that it’s possible to achieve deeper changes where the whole question becomes less important.
Reading your other post it seems like IPF is for solving the issues causing problems that are learned before the second birthday and self-concept issues are problems that arrise later then that.
I would expect that for many people both kind of issues are important to resolve.
Yeah, though I should probably add to my other comment (I’ll go edit it in) that I’m not totally bought into the precise claims about what age range IPF covers. It seems plausible to me that while it’s more capable of tapping into very early life experiences better than other therapies, it does also affect insecure conditioning developed somewhat later in childhood.
But I agree with your general point that self-concept work and IPF seem complementary. (I’ve actually also been going back to self-concept work a bit more in the very last week, since it feels like the possibility of having more strongly positive self-concepts has gotten more “unlocked” after IPF/IFS/Coherence Therapy work.)