My experience with ideas related to this (e.g. Replacing Guilt, IFS) has been that I tend not to be able to muster compassion and understanding for whatever part of myself is putting up resistance. Rather, I just get frustrated with it for being so obviously wrong and irrational.
I think this is one of the situations where it really helps to have someone else facilitate your IFS session. What you describe often happens because you are blended with the part that wants to just “get rid” of the part creating the resistance, and it might be the anti-procrastination part which created your motivation to sit down for an IFS session in the fist place. Then you get an arguments are soldiers thing—if you were to actually listen to the procrastinating part, then it might turn out to have some good reason for procrastinating, and the anti-procrastinating part doesn’t want to hear that. It doesn’t want you to get kicked out of your PhD program, so it certainly doesn’t want to consider an argument for something that might get you kicked out!
So then you are trying to unblend from the anti-procrastinating part in order to have empathy for the procrastinating part. But the anti-procrastinating part is also the one which is trying to drive the session forward, and it can’t unblend from you while still driving the session! So the need to unblend and the desire to fix the procrastinating part get in conflict, and the process gets stuck.
Effectively, the anti-procrastination part would need to turn itself off, and it doesn’t know how to do that. But what you can do, is give control of the session to somebody else, and let them tell you what to do. Once the anti-procrastinating part no longer needs to drive the session, it becomes possible for it to move to the side, and then for you to listen to both parts with empathy.
Suppose that one day, you happen to run into a complete stranger. You don’t think very much about needing to impress them, and as a result, you come off as relaxed and charming.
The next day, you’re going on a date with someone you’re really strongly attracted to. You feel that it’s really really important for you to make a good impression, and because you keep obsessing about this thought, you can’t relax, act normal, and actually make a good impression.
Suppose that you remember all that stuff about cognitive fusion. You might (correctly) think that if you managed to defuse from the thought of this being an important encounter, then all of this would be less stressful and you might actually make a good impression.
But this brings up a particular difficulty: it can be relatively easy to defuse from a thought that you on some level believe is, or at least may be, false. But it’s a lot harder to defuse from a thought which you believe on a deep level to actually be true, but which it’s just counterproductive to think about.
After all, if you really are strongly interested in this person, but might not have an opportunity to meet with them again if you make a bad impression… then it is important for you to make a good impression on them now. Defusing from the thought of this being important, would mean that you believed less in this being important, meaning that you might do something that actually left a bad impression on them!
You can’t defuse from the content of a belief, if your motivation for wanting to defuse from it is the belief itself. In trying to reject the belief that making a good impression is important, and trying to do this with the motive of making a good impression, you just reinforce the belief that this is important. If you want to actually defuse from the belief, your motive for doing so has to come from somewhere else than the belief itself.
I think this is one of the situations where it really helps to have someone else facilitate your IFS session. What you describe often happens because you are blended with the part that wants to just “get rid” of the part creating the resistance, and it might be the anti-procrastination part which created your motivation to sit down for an IFS session in the fist place. Then you get an arguments are soldiers thing—if you were to actually listen to the procrastinating part, then it might turn out to have some good reason for procrastinating, and the anti-procrastinating part doesn’t want to hear that. It doesn’t want you to get kicked out of your PhD program, so it certainly doesn’t want to consider an argument for something that might get you kicked out!
So then you are trying to unblend from the anti-procrastinating part in order to have empathy for the procrastinating part. But the anti-procrastinating part is also the one which is trying to drive the session forward, and it can’t unblend from you while still driving the session! So the need to unblend and the desire to fix the procrastinating part get in conflict, and the process gets stuck.
Effectively, the anti-procrastination part would need to turn itself off, and it doesn’t know how to do that. But what you can do, is give control of the session to somebody else, and let them tell you what to do. Once the anti-procrastinating part no longer needs to drive the session, it becomes possible for it to move to the side, and then for you to listen to both parts with empathy.
This is a “get out of the car” problem: