Could you say what exactly is the position that you are arguing for, in this conversation?
My inner pjeby is arguing for something like this:
“IFS is a specific model that has some similarities and connections to the best available view, but also clear failures that the best available view doesn’t have. But giving IFS this much airtime only makes sense to the reader if you think IFS is the best available view! So you should either justify the implicit respect you’re giving to IFS, or explicitly acknowledge the source of that respect (like by pointing out that IFS isn’t the best available view, but you like it).”
Consider also my comment elsewhere; my sense is that the post is ambiguating between “IFS is of historical interest” and “IFS is how someone should begin to understand this topic” in a way that misses pjeby’s meta-level criticisms of the message sent by giving IFS so much attention / not directly agreeing with criticisms. I came away thinking that you think pjeby is right but some part of IFS is worth salvaging, and when I put my pjeby hat on, I can’t figure out which part you think is worth salvaging. There are some hypotheses, like that you have gratitude towards IFS, or you think enough rationalists are familiar with IFS that presenting new models like UtEB as diffs from IFS can help them understand both better, or the label for ‘theory of modeling psychology’ in your mind is ‘IFS’ instead of something broader, but the actual motivation is unclear from the post.
I came away thinking that you think pjeby is right but some part of IFS is worth salvaging, and when I put my pjeby hat on, I can’t figure out which part you think is worth salvaging.
Thank you, yes. That is basically my position as well, though it is also wrapped in a shell of “WTF am I being named in the title and throughout the body of this post when it’s actually about Kaj’s position and appears only tangentially related to what we talked about before, because although I did answer some questions people asked about what I do, when I was speaking to Kaj I was mainly talking about the distinctions available between IFS and UtEB, not distinctions between IFS and what I, personally, do with clients.” So this not only feels like a weird and confusing post on the level you explain, it also feels like an attack on a strawman version of what I do, because Kaj appears in some places to have confused my generic discussion of “deliberate vs. accidental reconsolidation” with me saying something about my own, personal methodology.
Thank you to you and Vaniver for clarifying. I’m sorry for misunderstanding and -representing your position (and for everything else); from now on, I will explicitly interpret all of your UtEB-flavored statements as referencing a generic UtEB-style system, rather than any personal system of yours.
So to answer this. I wouldn’t say that any any of the three points in your earlier characterization of my position (meta-schema existing, IFS being able to arrive at the same place as other models, or IFS’ frame of positive intention) quite capture the reason why I’m arguing in favor of IFS.
Rather, I do think that IFS provides the best package of applications… of the ones that I personally have encountered so far. I’m not claiming that it would be impossible for a system to be better or that there would be any in principle reason that would make IFS (or parts-based systems in general) intrinsically superior than any others. I’m sure that for every thing that IFS does, there’s a way to do it some other way.
Still, of the ones that I have tried, I have found IFS to have the best combination of flexibility, power, and ease-of-learning so far. Maybe I’m just totally ignorant about this, and you tell me of a better one, and then I look into that and start promoting it instead. (I would be very grateful if you did!)
But to compare it with other systems that I’ve tried / looked into:
More mainstream therapies, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Read a few books on these and definitely found them valuable, but they felt mostly counteractive so limited in their usefulness.
Focusing. Useful, but it was often unclear what exactly I should do with the results that came up, and I didn’t always get clear answers. Felt relatively laborious.
Core Transformation. The first mindhacking technique that I thought *really* worked, and I kept using it for a long time, but some serious issues it seemed to just completely fail with. Also felt like I had to keep repeating uses of it, or the results would fade.
Steve Andreas’s self-concept editing. Very transformative on a specific set of issues that made me feel like there was something fundamentally wrong with me. However, didn’t seem to work on other kinds of issues, such as putting excessive probability on other people thinking bad things of me and deciding to shun me as a result.
Internal Double Crux. Found this very useful for dealing with internal conflicts, but it couldn’t seem to deal with conflicts involving what IFS would call extreme parts; trying to deal with them produced odd stuff which IDC didn’t tell me how to address. This made me look into IFS, which did.
Meditation. Seems useful at spontaneously bringing up and healing some issues, but not good for targeted investigation and healing of any particular one.
Coherence Therapy. So far I’ve only read UtEB, which was more focused on giving examples of it than really documenting the system. I’ve ordered an actual manual, but what I mostly got from UtEB (besides an improved theoretical understanding) was a few extra tools, which generally didn’t enable me to do that much new. Coherence Therapy also seems harder to apply, because it requires figuring out what would count as counterevidence for a particular schema, whereas IFS seems to reliably achieve reconsolidation without needing to understand this on an equally explicit level.
So for each of these systems, either they have relatively narrow applicability, or require a lot of experience to use effectively.
In comparison, IFS feel has felt like it has broad applicability and like it is relatively easy to learn. Of course, I had the benefit of having worked with several similar systems before, which no doubt made it faster and quicker for me to figure it out. But a lot of people do seem to take to IFS intuitively. And it feels like IFS is unusually versatile in at least two respects.
First, it’s broad in what kinds of situations it can be used for. It gives you a set of skills that lets you
1) Dig into the core of schemas which are based on an incorrect generalization from the original evidence (solving a “problem” which isn’t actually a problem in the first place), the way that e.g. Coherence Therapy does
2) Take schemas which are responding to a correct problem with a counterproductive strategy, and update their strategy on the fly (either before going to a situation that would trigger them, or right after they’ve triggered)
3) Take schemas whose information may or may not be correct, and unblend from them enough that any new information in the situation allows their information to reconsolidate.
4) Mediate internal conflicts arising from schemas which are both correct but contradictory until you reconcile them, the way Internal Double Crux does
Having a collection of four entirely different contexts in which essentially the same skills can be used, seems to make it a lot more flexible than the other, more specialized systems.
Second, my experience is that if you manage to access the original memories behind a schema and do it from a place of Self (two criteria which can admittedly be frequently tricky to get right), then reconsolidation will basically always happen. Like I suggested in the OP, my model is that IFS does this by essentially hacking how extreme reactions are neurally encoded and exploiting the fact that the problem in any schema bottoms out at “and then I would feel so horrible as for it to be totally unbearable”, allowing you to reconsolidate that by witnessing it from Self.
This means that IFS works on pretty much any issue where you manage to get that far. IME, something like (say) self-concept editing works on things that make you feel like a horrible person, but not on (say) things where you are afraid of being left alone through no intrinsic fault of your own. But if you have an extreme fear of either one, it’s because your brain has a schema which predicts that one of them happening or being the case will cause unbearable suffering. IFS lets you reconsolidate that prediction regardless of what the exact flavor of the problem is. This also seems to be in contrast to say Coherence Therapy, which AFAICT targets the belief one step earlier in the chain. That is, it targets “being a horrible” person or “being left alone”, rather than the “and that would cause unbearable suffering” which follows from that. As a result, Coherence Therapy requires figuring out the exact nature of the counterevidence needed, whereas in IFS just witnessing the schema’s prediction from Self acts as a universal counterevidence to the prediction of unbearable suffering.
(Probably obvious to you, but just to make it explicit for the other readers; this is not the same as wireheading. You can heal the extreme fear of being left alone, while still strongly preferring not to be left alone and working towards preventing that. What does get fixed is having such a strong fear that you can’t reason about it rationally, and extreme reaction patterns which at worst contribute to the very problem they are trying to prevent.)
Of course, none of this means that IFS would be perfect or that I would have managed to fix all of my issues with it alone… but even granting the weaknesses which we’ve discussed so far, the combination of it being versatile, powerful, and relatively easy to learn makes it the best overall system that I’ve found. It’s also the one which seems to deliver the most “bang for the buck”, in case I was forced to choose just one system to teach to other people.
But again, if there’s some even better system out there, I’d be happy to be pointed to it! I just haven’t found one yet.
Also, I don’t know whether this intrinsically requires thinking in terms of parts. Probably you could do all of the same things with a more UtEB-style approach as well. For example, I’m guessing that the reason why the NLP phobia cure procedure works, is that it has that same element of “realizing that you can recall/re-experience this without it being unbearable” as witnessing something from Self does; and there you work on the level of memories rather than parts.
But at least my feeling has been that the “parts interface” gives you the kind of a natural UI from which all of these things flow relatively naturally; if you successfully teach someone the basic set of IFS skills for doing one thing, then it’s just a short step towards learning the other things as well. Whereas if you were thinking in more mechanistic terms, you would need more explicit figuring out how to implement each piece. E.g. UtEB only talked about the kind of stuff you do in conventional therapy sessions, and didn’t say anything about on-the-fly updating or using the system for decision-making, suggesting that their framework didn’t lend itself to those applications being easily invented.
But then again, maybe this is discussed in some CT manual which I haven’t read yet. And in honesty’s sake, one close friend of mine who has been using IFS for as long as I have, seems to recently have been finding the UtEB approach more effective. So it’s certainly possible that I’m wrong about all of this. And again, I would certainly like to be shown a system which was even better than IFS is. :-)
See, now this comment would have made a great article. ;-) I think it says more clearly what you mean than the article you actually wrote, and makes a much better case for your position.
Thanks! Though in all honesty, now that a few days have passed since I wrote the comment… I’ve been paying more attention to what I actually do currently, and it feels more UtEB-ish in style, so it might not have been correct to say that UtEB didn’t enable me to do that much new.
… maybe. It might also be the case that since I never experienced my parts as particularly anthropomorphic, a large part of my IFS has actually always been working directly on the level of memories. And the reason why I thought that UtEB wasn’t telling me that many new things in terms of concrete practice, was that my “IFS” had actually been more Coherence Therapy all along.
I’m just confused about what exactly I have been doing, now. :-)
My inner pjeby is arguing for something like this:
“IFS is a specific model that has some similarities and connections to the best available view, but also clear failures that the best available view doesn’t have. But giving IFS this much airtime only makes sense to the reader if you think IFS is the best available view! So you should either justify the implicit respect you’re giving to IFS, or explicitly acknowledge the source of that respect (like by pointing out that IFS isn’t the best available view, but you like it).”
Consider also my comment elsewhere; my sense is that the post is ambiguating between “IFS is of historical interest” and “IFS is how someone should begin to understand this topic” in a way that misses pjeby’s meta-level criticisms of the message sent by giving IFS so much attention / not directly agreeing with criticisms. I came away thinking that you think pjeby is right but some part of IFS is worth salvaging, and when I put my pjeby hat on, I can’t figure out which part you think is worth salvaging. There are some hypotheses, like that you have gratitude towards IFS, or you think enough rationalists are familiar with IFS that presenting new models like UtEB as diffs from IFS can help them understand both better, or the label for ‘theory of modeling psychology’ in your mind is ‘IFS’ instead of something broader, but the actual motivation is unclear from the post.
Thank you, yes. That is basically my position as well, though it is also wrapped in a shell of “WTF am I being named in the title and throughout the body of this post when it’s actually about Kaj’s position and appears only tangentially related to what we talked about before, because although I did answer some questions people asked about what I do, when I was speaking to Kaj I was mainly talking about the distinctions available between IFS and UtEB, not distinctions between IFS and what I, personally, do with clients.” So this not only feels like a weird and confusing post on the level you explain, it also feels like an attack on a strawman version of what I do, because Kaj appears in some places to have confused my generic discussion of “deliberate vs. accidental reconsolidation” with me saying something about my own, personal methodology.
Thank you to you and Vaniver for clarifying. I’m sorry for misunderstanding and -representing your position (and for everything else); from now on, I will explicitly interpret all of your UtEB-flavored statements as referencing a generic UtEB-style system, rather than any personal system of yours.
So to answer this. I wouldn’t say that any any of the three points in your earlier characterization of my position (meta-schema existing, IFS being able to arrive at the same place as other models, or IFS’ frame of positive intention) quite capture the reason why I’m arguing in favor of IFS.
Rather, I do think that IFS provides the best package of applications… of the ones that I personally have encountered so far. I’m not claiming that it would be impossible for a system to be better or that there would be any in principle reason that would make IFS (or parts-based systems in general) intrinsically superior than any others. I’m sure that for every thing that IFS does, there’s a way to do it some other way.
Still, of the ones that I have tried, I have found IFS to have the best combination of flexibility, power, and ease-of-learning so far. Maybe I’m just totally ignorant about this, and you tell me of a better one, and then I look into that and start promoting it instead. (I would be very grateful if you did!)
But to compare it with other systems that I’ve tried / looked into:
More mainstream therapies, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Read a few books on these and definitely found them valuable, but they felt mostly counteractive so limited in their usefulness.
Focusing. Useful, but it was often unclear what exactly I should do with the results that came up, and I didn’t always get clear answers. Felt relatively laborious.
Core Transformation. The first mindhacking technique that I thought *really* worked, and I kept using it for a long time, but some serious issues it seemed to just completely fail with. Also felt like I had to keep repeating uses of it, or the results would fade.
Steve Andreas’s self-concept editing. Very transformative on a specific set of issues that made me feel like there was something fundamentally wrong with me. However, didn’t seem to work on other kinds of issues, such as putting excessive probability on other people thinking bad things of me and deciding to shun me as a result.
Internal Double Crux. Found this very useful for dealing with internal conflicts, but it couldn’t seem to deal with conflicts involving what IFS would call extreme parts; trying to deal with them produced odd stuff which IDC didn’t tell me how to address. This made me look into IFS, which did.
Meditation. Seems useful at spontaneously bringing up and healing some issues, but not good for targeted investigation and healing of any particular one.
Coherence Therapy. So far I’ve only read UtEB, which was more focused on giving examples of it than really documenting the system. I’ve ordered an actual manual, but what I mostly got from UtEB (besides an improved theoretical understanding) was a few extra tools, which generally didn’t enable me to do that much new. Coherence Therapy also seems harder to apply, because it requires figuring out what would count as counterevidence for a particular schema, whereas IFS seems to reliably achieve reconsolidation without needing to understand this on an equally explicit level.
So for each of these systems, either they have relatively narrow applicability, or require a lot of experience to use effectively.
In comparison, IFS feel has felt like it has broad applicability and like it is relatively easy to learn. Of course, I had the benefit of having worked with several similar systems before, which no doubt made it faster and quicker for me to figure it out. But a lot of people do seem to take to IFS intuitively. And it feels like IFS is unusually versatile in at least two respects.
First, it’s broad in what kinds of situations it can be used for. It gives you a set of skills that lets you
1) Dig into the core of schemas which are based on an incorrect generalization from the original evidence (solving a “problem” which isn’t actually a problem in the first place), the way that e.g. Coherence Therapy does
2) Take schemas which are responding to a correct problem with a counterproductive strategy, and update their strategy on the fly (either before going to a situation that would trigger them, or right after they’ve triggered)
3) Take schemas whose information may or may not be correct, and unblend from them enough that any new information in the situation allows their information to reconsolidate.
4) Mediate internal conflicts arising from schemas which are both correct but contradictory until you reconcile them, the way Internal Double Crux does
Having a collection of four entirely different contexts in which essentially the same skills can be used, seems to make it a lot more flexible than the other, more specialized systems.
Second, my experience is that if you manage to access the original memories behind a schema and do it from a place of Self (two criteria which can admittedly be frequently tricky to get right), then reconsolidation will basically always happen. Like I suggested in the OP, my model is that IFS does this by essentially hacking how extreme reactions are neurally encoded and exploiting the fact that the problem in any schema bottoms out at “and then I would feel so horrible as for it to be totally unbearable”, allowing you to reconsolidate that by witnessing it from Self.
This means that IFS works on pretty much any issue where you manage to get that far. IME, something like (say) self-concept editing works on things that make you feel like a horrible person, but not on (say) things where you are afraid of being left alone through no intrinsic fault of your own. But if you have an extreme fear of either one, it’s because your brain has a schema which predicts that one of them happening or being the case will cause unbearable suffering. IFS lets you reconsolidate that prediction regardless of what the exact flavor of the problem is. This also seems to be in contrast to say Coherence Therapy, which AFAICT targets the belief one step earlier in the chain. That is, it targets “being a horrible” person or “being left alone”, rather than the “and that would cause unbearable suffering” which follows from that. As a result, Coherence Therapy requires figuring out the exact nature of the counterevidence needed, whereas in IFS just witnessing the schema’s prediction from Self acts as a universal counterevidence to the prediction of unbearable suffering.
(Probably obvious to you, but just to make it explicit for the other readers; this is not the same as wireheading. You can heal the extreme fear of being left alone, while still strongly preferring not to be left alone and working towards preventing that. What does get fixed is having such a strong fear that you can’t reason about it rationally, and extreme reaction patterns which at worst contribute to the very problem they are trying to prevent.)
Of course, none of this means that IFS would be perfect or that I would have managed to fix all of my issues with it alone… but even granting the weaknesses which we’ve discussed so far, the combination of it being versatile, powerful, and relatively easy to learn makes it the best overall system that I’ve found. It’s also the one which seems to deliver the most “bang for the buck”, in case I was forced to choose just one system to teach to other people.
But again, if there’s some even better system out there, I’d be happy to be pointed to it! I just haven’t found one yet.
Also, I don’t know whether this intrinsically requires thinking in terms of parts. Probably you could do all of the same things with a more UtEB-style approach as well. For example, I’m guessing that the reason why the NLP phobia cure procedure works, is that it has that same element of “realizing that you can recall/re-experience this without it being unbearable” as witnessing something from Self does; and there you work on the level of memories rather than parts.
But at least my feeling has been that the “parts interface” gives you the kind of a natural UI from which all of these things flow relatively naturally; if you successfully teach someone the basic set of IFS skills for doing one thing, then it’s just a short step towards learning the other things as well. Whereas if you were thinking in more mechanistic terms, you would need more explicit figuring out how to implement each piece. E.g. UtEB only talked about the kind of stuff you do in conventional therapy sessions, and didn’t say anything about on-the-fly updating or using the system for decision-making, suggesting that their framework didn’t lend itself to those applications being easily invented.
But then again, maybe this is discussed in some CT manual which I haven’t read yet. And in honesty’s sake, one close friend of mine who has been using IFS for as long as I have, seems to recently have been finding the UtEB approach more effective. So it’s certainly possible that I’m wrong about all of this. And again, I would certainly like to be shown a system which was even better than IFS is. :-)
See, now this comment would have made a great article. ;-) I think it says more clearly what you mean than the article you actually wrote, and makes a much better case for your position.
Thanks! Though in all honesty, now that a few days have passed since I wrote the comment… I’ve been paying more attention to what I actually do currently, and it feels more UtEB-ish in style, so it might not have been correct to say that UtEB didn’t enable me to do that much new.
… maybe. It might also be the case that since I never experienced my parts as particularly anthropomorphic, a large part of my IFS has actually always been working directly on the level of memories. And the reason why I thought that UtEB wasn’t telling me that many new things in terms of concrete practice, was that my “IFS” had actually been more Coherence Therapy all along.
I’m just confused about what exactly I have been doing, now. :-)