Oh. I’m sorry that turning this into a post made you feel uncomfortable and like I was singling you out for public criticism. It wasn’t intended as either, but now that you pointed it out, it’s kinda obvious that I should have realized that you might and that I should have asked you first.
This post was intended as a compliment in spirit: that I thought your points were important enough that I wanted to highlight them in a more public manner.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever told you, but I have both high respect for your work in general, and gratitude for your contributions personally. First, you’ve been talking in a lot of detail about mind hacking theory which has only become obvious to me many years later; probably a lot of what I’m currently slowly puzzling together is stuff that’s already obvious to you.
Second, because you mentioned Core Transformation on LW a long time ago, I bought the book at the time; then I didn’t get around reading it for a really long time, until I happened to have hit a personal bottom. At that point I finally read it and got a lot of help from it. That then started a chain of events which caused me to find more of the Andreases work, which in turn helped me finally fix the cause of a decades-old depression. None of that might have happened without those old comments of yours, so I’m very grateful for them.
So a part of the motivation for making this post was that I felt that you’d made a lot of good comments and criticisms, and you certainly know what you are talking about, so I wanted to highlight some of those points.
To try to trace back the exact chain of thought that led me to make this post:
I started writing a response, and noticed it was getting pretty long, an article’s worth on its own
I thought something like “pjeby has made several good points on reductionism here; I agree with them, but from the fact that he seems to think I don’t, I guess that’s not obvious. In case it’s just illusion of transparency speaking, I should take these criticisms and more publicly indicate where I agree with them, so that it won’t just be buried in the comments of an old post.”
and “the part about the pragmatic benefits of IFS seems to be getting into a lot of detail about what I think is going on with IFS, as well as new details about how it connects with e.g. the UtEB model; those new details might be interesting to share more widely as well”.
“and since I just included my summary of what I think to be his core points, and he mostly endorsed them, this would be an easy opportunity to create a distillation of our conversation.”
So I made this into its own article (which, as the others noted, I did feel a little uncertain about frontpaging), since that seemed like a nice opportunity to 1) continue our discussion 2) signal-boost and indicate agreement with the points of yours that I thought were important and correct 3) communicate some of my updated thoughts on IFS to a broader audience 4) generally indicate respect for you, in that I’d found your responses important enough to distill and promote.
But I realize now that you found this uncomfortable, and I’m again sorry for not having asked you about it first.
I also didn’t realize that you had been trying to explicitly avoid ascribing positions. You had previously discussed your own methods on several occasions, and I assumed that you were contrasting the IFS approach with whatever system you thought was best—and that this would be your own system, since why would you use a system which you didn’t think was the best. :-) I’m sorry for misreading and mischaracterizing you; I’ve now edited the post remove terms such as “pjebyan”. If you want me to edit something else in the post, or even take it down entirely, please just let me know.
Thank you for the consideration, and I appreciate the edits. This was just an unfortunate confluence of events and I’m not holding any grudges.
I have to admit that one of my faults is a healthy dose of the illusion of transparency. I tend to assume that other people can reach the same conclusions I have when they have access to the same information my conclusions are based on… even though there’s a distinction between say, reading UtEB and grokking what it means about “legacy” approaches to therapy.
So some of the things you said in this article seemed to me like excessively belaboring points I thought were already made quite explicitly in the text of UtEB, so I interpreted it as you trying to argue in favor of IFS, not that you were just now realizing how IFS fit within UtEB’s model.
The fact you posted an article about UtEB before made me assume that you understood it at least as well as I did (since in effect, you introduced me to it!), so I didn’t see why you would only be now discovering those points… especially since I thought they’d been covered by our previous discussion and your restatement of my position.
Regarding Core Transformation, I’m glad you found it useful. Back at the time I mentioned it, it was one of the better techniques available to me, despite the tendency to sometimes get bogged down in “is that really a part or am I imagining things” or parts getting in circular arguments about things. But I later found that there were simpler ways to address the same things, because what CT calls “core states” are also accessible by simply not activating the parts of the brain that shut off those states. (e.g. by telling us we don’t deserve love)
So if, for example, we don’t see ourselves as worthless, then experiencing ourselves as “being” or love or okayness is a natural, automatic consequence. Thus I ended up pursing methods that let us switch off the negatives and deal directly with what CT and IFS represent as objecting parts, since these objections are the constraint on us accessing CT’s “core states” or IFS’s self-leadership and self-compassion.
In effect, you could think of the approaches I’ve been pursuing since then as shortcutting the process of CT by jumping as directly as possible to our objections to experiencing ourselves as lovable, okay, etc., and working backwards from there.
To put it in context of your changes using Transforming The Self, the shadow qualities (or “negative qualities” as TTS calls them), are the things I target first, since around 2012 or so.
That’s because practical experience had shown by then that almost anything I tried to change in myself or others using other methods would often return in a few weeks, unless said negative qualities were somehow addressed. So, strategically, going hunting for them first makes things a lot more efficient, as you then don’t have to worry about all the tactical-level behaviors and beliefs being regenerated from the persistent, strategic-level, negative self-image.
Interestingly, now that you’ve mentioned TTS (indirectly, by linking to your posts referencing it), it reminds me that TTS actually includes something rather like a reconsolidation-oriented approach to quality changes. It might be interesting now to go back and re-read it with our newer knowledge of reconsolidation in mind, to see if I can either improve on his technique, or use something from it to improve on mine.
Thank you, I’m happy to hear that there are no more bad feelings. :)
So if, for example, we don’t see ourselves as worthless, then experiencing ourselves as “being” or love or okayness is a natural, automatic consequence.
Cool, I’ve been having basically the same model for a while. (Related: my hypothesis is that all the talk about people having difficulty “finding meaning” these days seems somewhat misplaced; if things seem meaningless, it’s because someone is suffering from objections to their sense of meaning. If those objections would be dealt with, then they would pretty quickly naturally gravitate towards things that felt naturally meaningful.)
Interestingly, now that you’ve mentioned TTS (indirectly, by linking to your posts referencing it), it reminds me that TTS actually includes something rather like a reconsolidation-oriented approach to quality changes.
Yeah, I don’t remember TTS in detail either, but upon reading UtEB it felt like “oh, TTS was a special case of explicitly targeted reconsolidation”.
Oh. I’m sorry that turning this into a post made you feel uncomfortable and like I was singling you out for public criticism. It wasn’t intended as either, but now that you pointed it out, it’s kinda obvious that I should have realized that you might and that I should have asked you first.
This post was intended as a compliment in spirit: that I thought your points were important enough that I wanted to highlight them in a more public manner.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever told you, but I have both high respect for your work in general, and gratitude for your contributions personally. First, you’ve been talking in a lot of detail about mind hacking theory which has only become obvious to me many years later; probably a lot of what I’m currently slowly puzzling together is stuff that’s already obvious to you.
Second, because you mentioned Core Transformation on LW a long time ago, I bought the book at the time; then I didn’t get around reading it for a really long time, until I happened to have hit a personal bottom. At that point I finally read it and got a lot of help from it. That then started a chain of events which caused me to find more of the Andreases work, which in turn helped me finally fix the cause of a decades-old depression. None of that might have happened without those old comments of yours, so I’m very grateful for them.
So a part of the motivation for making this post was that I felt that you’d made a lot of good comments and criticisms, and you certainly know what you are talking about, so I wanted to highlight some of those points.
To try to trace back the exact chain of thought that led me to make this post:
I started writing a response, and noticed it was getting pretty long, an article’s worth on its own
I thought something like “pjeby has made several good points on reductionism here; I agree with them, but from the fact that he seems to think I don’t, I guess that’s not obvious. In case it’s just illusion of transparency speaking, I should take these criticisms and more publicly indicate where I agree with them, so that it won’t just be buried in the comments of an old post.”
and “the part about the pragmatic benefits of IFS seems to be getting into a lot of detail about what I think is going on with IFS, as well as new details about how it connects with e.g. the UtEB model; those new details might be interesting to share more widely as well”.
“and since I just included my summary of what I think to be his core points, and he mostly endorsed them, this would be an easy opportunity to create a distillation of our conversation.”
So I made this into its own article (which, as the others noted, I did feel a little uncertain about frontpaging), since that seemed like a nice opportunity to 1) continue our discussion 2) signal-boost and indicate agreement with the points of yours that I thought were important and correct 3) communicate some of my updated thoughts on IFS to a broader audience 4) generally indicate respect for you, in that I’d found your responses important enough to distill and promote.
But I realize now that you found this uncomfortable, and I’m again sorry for not having asked you about it first.
I also didn’t realize that you had been trying to explicitly avoid ascribing positions. You had previously discussed your own methods on several occasions, and I assumed that you were contrasting the IFS approach with whatever system you thought was best—and that this would be your own system, since why would you use a system which you didn’t think was the best. :-) I’m sorry for misreading and mischaracterizing you; I’ve now edited the post remove terms such as “pjebyan”. If you want me to edit something else in the post, or even take it down entirely, please just let me know.
Thank you for the consideration, and I appreciate the edits. This was just an unfortunate confluence of events and I’m not holding any grudges.
I have to admit that one of my faults is a healthy dose of the illusion of transparency. I tend to assume that other people can reach the same conclusions I have when they have access to the same information my conclusions are based on… even though there’s a distinction between say, reading UtEB and grokking what it means about “legacy” approaches to therapy.
So some of the things you said in this article seemed to me like excessively belaboring points I thought were already made quite explicitly in the text of UtEB, so I interpreted it as you trying to argue in favor of IFS, not that you were just now realizing how IFS fit within UtEB’s model.
The fact you posted an article about UtEB before made me assume that you understood it at least as well as I did (since in effect, you introduced me to it!), so I didn’t see why you would only be now discovering those points… especially since I thought they’d been covered by our previous discussion and your restatement of my position.
Regarding Core Transformation, I’m glad you found it useful. Back at the time I mentioned it, it was one of the better techniques available to me, despite the tendency to sometimes get bogged down in “is that really a part or am I imagining things” or parts getting in circular arguments about things. But I later found that there were simpler ways to address the same things, because what CT calls “core states” are also accessible by simply not activating the parts of the brain that shut off those states. (e.g. by telling us we don’t deserve love)
So if, for example, we don’t see ourselves as worthless, then experiencing ourselves as “being” or love or okayness is a natural, automatic consequence. Thus I ended up pursing methods that let us switch off the negatives and deal directly with what CT and IFS represent as objecting parts, since these objections are the constraint on us accessing CT’s “core states” or IFS’s self-leadership and self-compassion.
In effect, you could think of the approaches I’ve been pursuing since then as shortcutting the process of CT by jumping as directly as possible to our objections to experiencing ourselves as lovable, okay, etc., and working backwards from there.
To put it in context of your changes using Transforming The Self, the shadow qualities (or “negative qualities” as TTS calls them), are the things I target first, since around 2012 or so.
That’s because practical experience had shown by then that almost anything I tried to change in myself or others using other methods would often return in a few weeks, unless said negative qualities were somehow addressed. So, strategically, going hunting for them first makes things a lot more efficient, as you then don’t have to worry about all the tactical-level behaviors and beliefs being regenerated from the persistent, strategic-level, negative self-image.
Interestingly, now that you’ve mentioned TTS (indirectly, by linking to your posts referencing it), it reminds me that TTS actually includes something rather like a reconsolidation-oriented approach to quality changes. It might be interesting now to go back and re-read it with our newer knowledge of reconsolidation in mind, to see if I can either improve on his technique, or use something from it to improve on mine.
Thank you, I’m happy to hear that there are no more bad feelings. :)
Cool, I’ve been having basically the same model for a while. (Related: my hypothesis is that all the talk about people having difficulty “finding meaning” these days seems somewhat misplaced; if things seem meaningless, it’s because someone is suffering from objections to their sense of meaning. If those objections would be dealt with, then they would pretty quickly naturally gravitate towards things that felt naturally meaningful.)
Yeah, I don’t remember TTS in detail either, but upon reading UtEB it felt like “oh, TTS was a special case of explicitly targeted reconsolidation”.