Everything that I read in the post looked like pretty standard IFS, in fact I’m pretty sure that there are several IFS sessions that I’ve facilitated that followed these steps exactly.
When the post has this:
Therapy is one type of conversation it might be useful for parts to have, but not the only kind.
Then coming from IFS, my perspective is kind of the converse: “conversations other than therapy might be useful to have, but sometimes therapy is useful too”. In other words, this post reads to me the way you’d describe IFS if you described everything else but the explicitly therapeutic moves and only stayed on the level of facilitating a conversation between parts or between parts and Self. And sometimes IFS stays on that level too, if that’s enough for resolving whatever issue the client is having, or if there isn’t any particular goal other than just improved self-understanding.
So I see this as a special case in the sense that “IFS can be just the steps you’ve outlined, or IFS can be this + more explicitly therapeutic moves that aren’t well-described by just ‘facilitating conversation’ anymore” while ICF is described as always being just these steps.
The other difference to IFS that you mention is
The firefighter-exile-manager pattern is a good fit for some people in some situations, but not for all people in all situations.
And I agree, but I think that that pattern is more of a pedagogical simplification in IFS in any case. I would expect that any IFS practitioner with any significant amount of experience will unavoidably realize that there are vast differences in how different people’s internal systems are organized and that often this pattern will match only approximately at best. And it doesn’t matter that much anyway—off-hand, I don’t recall any IFS materials that would tell you to diagnose whether a part is a firefighter or a manager. Rather they just tell people to ask much more open-ended questions like “what is this part trying to do”, “what’s the part afraid would happen if it didn’t do what it’s doing”, or “how old is this part” that have you get to know each part as an individual rather than trying to force it into a category. (Jay Earley’s commonly-recommended book doesn’t even use those terms, and just groups both managers and firefighters under “protectors”.)
The protector-exile distinction is given more weight—because asking things like “am I getting access to the exile” can be a genuinely valuable move if the process feels stuck—but again I’d expect any IFS practitioner with any significant amount of experience to be very aware of the fact that often there are parts that are both at the same time, or that don’t clearly match either of those categories.
There might be a bit of a philosophical question of “what is the true IFS”. Is it the IFS that’s commonly described in the written materials and lectures, or the IFS that experienced practitioners are familiar with?
I do agree that if you define “what is IFS” through what’s been written about it, then there’s a stronger case for saying that ICF is the more general version. But if you think that any written materials in a field like therapy are always just a barebones-training wheel version of the real thing that’s learned through practice and expert supervision, and define IFS as “what do actual experienced IFS practitioners end up at”, then I think that ICF and IFS end up looking quite similar.
In my view, you are possibly conflating— ICF as a framework - described “basic ICF technique”
To me, ICF as a framework seem distinct from IFS in how it is built. As you say, introductory IFS materials take the stories about exiles and protectors as pretty real, and also often use parallels with family therapy. On the more theoretical side, my take on parts of your sequence on parts is you basically try to fit some theoretical models (e,g, RL, global workspace) to the “standard IFS prior” about types of parts.
ICF is build the opposite way: 1. assume layered agency (which is basically “put different layers of organization into the focus of intentional stance”) 2. ask: what sort of phenomenology would this lead to? how to interact with it?
In practice, I have a somewhat less positive take on the barebones-training wheel version of the real thing: I think it would be also fair to say that experienced IFS practitioners doing the real thing unlearn part of what’s in the books. And sometimes end up in similar place to e.g. experienced IDC practitioners who also end up not doing the protocol described in LW posts. From this perspective, it makes sense to have a label for the core of the approaches which works, distinct from IFS label.
I think there is a name for the core of the approaches which works, which is “parts work.”
The ICF framework seems to add some things on top of the basic parts work idea that make it similar to IFS. For instance, the process of unblending at the beginning is basically the same as what IFS calls “getting into self”. In contrast, there are many effective parts work frameworks that do the work from a blended state, such as voice dialogue. It imports the assumption from IFS that there is some “neutral self” that can be reached by continually unblending, and that this self can moderate between parts.
In addition, IFS and ICF both seem to emphasize “conversation” as a primary modality, whereas other parts work modalities (e.g. Somatic Experiencing) emphasize other modalities when working with parts, such as somatic, metaphorical, or primal. Again, there’s an assumption here about what parts are and how they should be worked with, around the primacy of particular ways of thinking and relating which is heavily (if unconsciously) influenced by the prevalance of IFS and its’ way of working.
It seems like while ICF is trying to describe a general framework, it is quite influenced by the assumptions of IFS/IDC and imports some of their quirks, even while getting rid of others.
What’s described as An ICF technique is just that, one technique among many.
ICF does not make the IFS assumption that there is some “neutral self”. It makes a prediction that when you unblend few parts from the whole, there is still a lot of power in “the whole”. It also makes the claim that in typical internal conflicts and tensions, there just a few parts which are really activated (and not, e.g., 20). Both seems experimentally verifiable (at least in phenomenological sense) - and true.
In my view there is a subtle difference between the “self” frame and “the whole”/”council” frame. The IFS way of talking about “self” seems to lead some IFS practitioners to assume that there is some “self” agent living basically at the same layer of agency as parts.
ICF also makes some normative claims, which make it different from “any type of parts work”: the normative claims are about kindness, cooperation and fairness. If you wish, I can easily describe/invent some partswork protocols which would be un-ICF and in my view risky / flawed from ICF perspective. For example, I’ve somewhat negative prior on techniques trying to do some sort of verbal dialogue in blended state, or techniques doing basically internal blackmail.
In addition, IFS and ICF both seem to emphasize “conversation” as a primary modality, whereas other parts work modalities (e.g. Somatic Experiencing) emphasize other modalities when working with parts, such as somatic, metaphorical, or primal. Again, there’s an assumption here about what parts are and how they should be worked with, around the primacy of particular ways of thinking and relating which is heavily (if unconsciously) influenced by the prevalance of IFS and its’ way of working.
Not really—the post mentions basically all these directions of variance among ICF techniques:
There are several general axes along which ICF techniques can vary, depending on the person and the circumstance:
Structuredness
More: you follow formal idealised steps
Less: you just sit and stuff happens, with no reference to any steps
Goal-directedness
More: you intend to make a decision or resolve a conflict, and you do
Less: you just want to spend some time with yourself
Legibility
More: you make your experience explicit to yourself (and the facilitator if there is one), and have a clear story when you close about what happened
Less: you’re mostly in direct physical experience, or metaphor, or visualisation; you don’t make any of this very explicit to yourself (or a facilitator); you don’t have much of a story about what happened when you close
...
There are many, many different possible ICF techniques (most of which are presumably undiscovered and could be found via experimentation). To give some examples:
Different media: drawing, writing, speaking, movement, staying silent…
Maybe the confusion is because just one technique was described explicitly in the post.
Ah yeah probably, I only know ICF from the description in this post. So when I said ICF, I basically meant “the technique described here”.
ICF is build the opposite way:
assume layered agency (which is basically “put different layers of organization into the focus of intentional stance”)
ask: what sort of phenomenology would this lead to? how to interact with it?
I see, that’s a definite difference then. I read the article’s claim that ICF tries to “generalise from a class of therapy schools and introspection techniques working with parts of the mind” as meaning that the model takes existing therapy schools as its starting point to derive its assumptions from them and their empirical observations, as opposed to deriving things from layered agency in a more first-principles manner.
I think it would be also fair to say that experienced IFS practitioners doing the real thing unlearn part of what’s in the books. And sometimes end up in similar place to e.g. experienced IDC practitioners who also end up not doing the protocol described in LW posts. From this perspective, it makes sense to have a label for the core of the approaches which works, distinct from IFS label.
I guess that makes sense—but then is ICF sufficiently general for that either? E.g. if we’re talking about IFS ideas that one might want to unlearn, I think that sometimes it’s useful to abandon the assumption of the parts being discrete units, and at least this article made it sound like ICF would still assume that. But maybe I’d need to know more about the general framework to know what assumptions it makes, in order to have this discussion.
In practice, I have a somewhat less positive take on the barebones-training wheel version of the real thing: I think it would be also fair to say that experienced IFS practitioners doing the real thing unlearn part of what’s in the books. And sometimes end up in similar place to e.g. experienced IDC practitioners who also end up not doing the protocol described in LW posts. From this perspective, it makes sense to have a label for the core of the approaches which works, distinct from IFS label.
What bothers me about this framing is that experienced practitioners for many different skills end up unlearning some of the advice that’s useful for beginners. It’s just the nature of much knowledge that you need to explain it in a simplified kind-of-false form first, before you have hope of conveying the complete form.
The term “lie to children” should not be taken to imply that it is exclusively used in childhood education. Educators in secondary and post-secondary schools employ increasingly accurate yet still “untrue” models as a means of explicating complex topics.
A typical example of this is found in physics, where the Bohr model of atomic electron shells is still often used to introduce atomic structure before moving on to more complex models based on matrix mechanics; and in chemistry, where the Arrhenius definitions of acids and bases are often introduced, followed (in a manner similar to the historical development of the model) by the Brønsted–Lowry definitions and then the Lewis definitions.
But we don’t say that we should have a separate label for the core of physics or chemistry that works; we just call it all “physics” and “chemistry”.
Or for a different domain where the understanding is built up more from the learner’s own experience and pattern-recognition ability than learning increasingly sophisticated scientific theories, here’s Josh Waitzkin on how chessmasters end up unlearning previous things they knew about the value of individual chess pieces:
So let’s say that [...] we begin on an empty board with just a king and a pawn against a king. These are relatively simple pieces. I learn how they both move, and then I play around with them for a while until I feel comfortable. Then, over time, I learn about bishops in isolation, then knights, rooks, and queens. Soon enough, the movements and values of the chess pieces are natural to me. I don’t have to think about them consciously, but see their potential simultaneously with the figurine itself. Chess pieces stop being hunks of wood or plastic, and begin to take on an energetic dimension. Where the piece currently sits on a chessboard pales in comparison to the countless vectors of potential flying off in the mind. I see how each piece affects those around it. Because the basic movements are natural to me, I can take in more information and have a broader perspective of the board. Now when I look at a chess position, I can see all the pieces at once. The network is coming together.
Next I have to learn the principles of coordinating the pieces. I learn how to place my arsenal most efficiently on the chessboard and I learn to read the road signs that determine how to maximize a given soldier’s effectiveness in a particular setting. These road signs are principles. Just as I initially had to think about each chess piece individually, now I have to plod through the principles in my brain to figure out which apply to the current position and how. Over time, that process becomes increasingly natural to me, until I eventually see the pieces and the appropriate principles in a blink. While an intermediate player will learn how a bishop’s strength in the middlegame depends on the central pawn structure, a slightly more advanced player will just flash his or her mind across the board and take in the bishop and the critical structural components. The structure and the bishop are one. Neither has any intrinsic value outside of its relation to the other, and they are chunked together in the mind.
This new integration of knowledge has a peculiar effect, because I begin to realize that the initial maxims of piece value are far from ironclad. The pieces gradually lose absolute identity. I learn that rooks and bishops work more efficiently together than rooks and knights, but queens and knights tend to have an edge over queens and bishops. Each piece’s power is purely relational, depending upon such variables as pawn structure and surrounding forces. So now when you look at a knight, you see its potential in the context of the bishop a few squares away. Over time each chess principle loses rigidity, and you get better and better at reading the subtle signs of qualitative relativity. Soon enough, learning becomes unlearning. The stronger chess player is often the one who is less attached to a dogmatic interpretation of the principles. This leads to a whole new layer of principles—those that consist of the exceptions to the initial principles. Of course the next step is for those counterintuitive signs to become internalized just as the initial movements of the pieces were. The network of my chess knowledge now involves principles, patterns, and chunks of information, accessed through a whole new set of navigational principles, patterns, and chunks of information, which are soon followed by another set of principles and chunks designed to assist in the interpretation of the last. Learning chess at this level becomes sitting with paradox, being at peace with and navigating the tension of competing truths, letting go of any notion of solidity.
Everything that I read in the post looked like pretty standard IFS, in fact I’m pretty sure that there are several IFS sessions that I’ve facilitated that followed these steps exactly.
When the post has this:
Then coming from IFS, my perspective is kind of the converse: “conversations other than therapy might be useful to have, but sometimes therapy is useful too”. In other words, this post reads to me the way you’d describe IFS if you described everything else but the explicitly therapeutic moves and only stayed on the level of facilitating a conversation between parts or between parts and Self. And sometimes IFS stays on that level too, if that’s enough for resolving whatever issue the client is having, or if there isn’t any particular goal other than just improved self-understanding.
So I see this as a special case in the sense that “IFS can be just the steps you’ve outlined, or IFS can be this + more explicitly therapeutic moves that aren’t well-described by just ‘facilitating conversation’ anymore” while ICF is described as always being just these steps.
The other difference to IFS that you mention is
And I agree, but I think that that pattern is more of a pedagogical simplification in IFS in any case. I would expect that any IFS practitioner with any significant amount of experience will unavoidably realize that there are vast differences in how different people’s internal systems are organized and that often this pattern will match only approximately at best. And it doesn’t matter that much anyway—off-hand, I don’t recall any IFS materials that would tell you to diagnose whether a part is a firefighter or a manager. Rather they just tell people to ask much more open-ended questions like “what is this part trying to do”, “what’s the part afraid would happen if it didn’t do what it’s doing”, or “how old is this part” that have you get to know each part as an individual rather than trying to force it into a category. (Jay Earley’s commonly-recommended book doesn’t even use those terms, and just groups both managers and firefighters under “protectors”.)
The protector-exile distinction is given more weight—because asking things like “am I getting access to the exile” can be a genuinely valuable move if the process feels stuck—but again I’d expect any IFS practitioner with any significant amount of experience to be very aware of the fact that often there are parts that are both at the same time, or that don’t clearly match either of those categories.
There might be a bit of a philosophical question of “what is the true IFS”. Is it the IFS that’s commonly described in the written materials and lectures, or the IFS that experienced practitioners are familiar with?
I do agree that if you define “what is IFS” through what’s been written about it, then there’s a stronger case for saying that ICF is the more general version. But if you think that any written materials in a field like therapy are always just a barebones-training wheel version of the real thing that’s learned through practice and expert supervision, and define IFS as “what do actual experienced IFS practitioners end up at”, then I think that ICF and IFS end up looking quite similar.
In my view, you are possibly conflating—
ICF as a framework
- described “basic ICF technique”
To me, ICF as a framework seem distinct from IFS in how it is built. As you say, introductory IFS materials take the stories about exiles and protectors as pretty real, and also often use parallels with family therapy. On the more theoretical side, my take on parts of your sequence on parts is you basically try to fit some theoretical models (e,g, RL, global workspace) to the “standard IFS prior” about types of parts.
ICF is build the opposite way:
1. assume layered agency (which is basically “put different layers of organization into the focus of intentional stance”)
2. ask: what sort of phenomenology would this lead to? how to interact with it?
In practice, I have a somewhat less positive take on the barebones-training wheel version of the real thing: I think it would be also fair to say that experienced IFS practitioners doing the real thing unlearn part of what’s in the books. And sometimes end up in similar place to e.g. experienced IDC practitioners who also end up not doing the protocol described in LW posts. From this perspective, it makes sense to have a label for the core of the approaches which works, distinct from IFS label.
I think there is a name for the core of the approaches which works, which is “parts work.”
The ICF framework seems to add some things on top of the basic parts work idea that make it similar to IFS. For instance, the process of unblending at the beginning is basically the same as what IFS calls “getting into self”. In contrast, there are many effective parts work frameworks that do the work from a blended state, such as voice dialogue. It imports the assumption from IFS that there is some “neutral self” that can be reached by continually unblending, and that this self can moderate between parts.
In addition, IFS and ICF both seem to emphasize “conversation” as a primary modality, whereas other parts work modalities (e.g. Somatic Experiencing) emphasize other modalities when working with parts, such as somatic, metaphorical, or primal. Again, there’s an assumption here about what parts are and how they should be worked with, around the primacy of particular ways of thinking and relating which is heavily (if unconsciously) influenced by the prevalance of IFS and its’ way of working.
It seems like while ICF is trying to describe a general framework, it is quite influenced by the assumptions of IFS/IDC and imports some of their quirks, even while getting rid of others.
What’s described as An ICF technique is just that, one technique among many.
ICF does not make the IFS assumption that there is some “neutral self”. It makes a prediction that when you unblend few parts from the whole, there is still a lot of power in “the whole”. It also makes the claim that in typical internal conflicts and tensions, there just a few parts which are really activated (and not, e.g., 20). Both seems experimentally verifiable (at least in phenomenological sense) - and true.
In my view there is a subtle difference between the “self” frame and “the whole”/”council” frame. The IFS way of talking about “self” seems to lead some IFS practitioners to assume that there is some “self” agent living basically at the same layer of agency as parts.
ICF also makes some normative claims, which make it different from “any type of parts work”: the normative claims are about kindness, cooperation and fairness. If you wish, I can easily describe/invent some partswork protocols which would be un-ICF and in my view risky / flawed from ICF perspective. For example, I’ve somewhat negative prior on techniques trying to do some sort of verbal dialogue in blended state, or techniques doing basically internal blackmail.
Not really—the post mentions basically all these directions of variance among ICF techniques:
Maybe the confusion is because just one technique was described explicitly in the post.
Ah yeah probably, I only know ICF from the description in this post. So when I said ICF, I basically meant “the technique described here”.
I see, that’s a definite difference then. I read the article’s claim that ICF tries to “generalise from a class of therapy schools and introspection techniques working with parts of the mind” as meaning that the model takes existing therapy schools as its starting point to derive its assumptions from them and their empirical observations, as opposed to deriving things from layered agency in a more first-principles manner.
I guess that makes sense—but then is ICF sufficiently general for that either? E.g. if we’re talking about IFS ideas that one might want to unlearn, I think that sometimes it’s useful to abandon the assumption of the parts being discrete units, and at least this article made it sound like ICF would still assume that. But maybe I’d need to know more about the general framework to know what assumptions it makes, in order to have this discussion.
What bothers me about this framing is that experienced practitioners for many different skills end up unlearning some of the advice that’s useful for beginners. It’s just the nature of much knowledge that you need to explain it in a simplified kind-of-false form first, before you have hope of conveying the complete form.
But we don’t say that we should have a separate label for the core of physics or chemistry that works; we just call it all “physics” and “chemistry”.
Or for a different domain where the understanding is built up more from the learner’s own experience and pattern-recognition ability than learning increasingly sophisticated scientific theories, here’s Josh Waitzkin on how chessmasters end up unlearning previous things they knew about the value of individual chess pieces: