Bonus conversation from the root of the tree that is this Twitter thread:
Eliezer Yudkowsky: Your annual reminder that you don’t need to resolve your issues, you don’t need to deal with your emotional baggage, you don’t need to process your trauma, you don’t need to confront your past, you don’t need to figure yourself out, you can just go ahead and do the thing.
Benquo: By revealed preferences almost no one wants to just go ahead and do the thing, even if they expect that things would go better for them if they did. Seems reasonable to try to figure out why that’s the case and how to change it, starting with oneself.
Benquo: Most of this trying will be fake or counterproductive, for the same reasons people aren’t doing the sensible object-level thing, but we don’t get to assume or pretend our way out of a problem, we just get to investigate and think about it and try out various promising solutions.
I usually explain my process these days to clients with the acronym LIFE
Learn New Tools
Integrate Resistance
Forge an Identity
Express Yourself
Learn New Tools is cognitive-emotional strategies, of which TYCS is an example. Fwiw a some of TYCS is actually deliberate practice to discover cognitive strategies ( as compared to something like CFAR which extracts and teaches them directly), but the result is the same.
The important thing is to just have a clear tool, give people something they know they can use in certain situations, that works immediately to solve their problems.
But the thing is, people don’t use them, because they have resistance. That’s where parts work and other resistance integration tools come into play.
Even when thata done, there’s still the issue that you don’t automatically use the techniques. This is where forge an Identity comes in, where you use identity change techniques to make the way you see yourself be in alignment with a way of being that the technique brings out. (This is one thing TYCS gets wrong in my opinion, trying to directly reinforce the cognitive strategies instead of creating an identity and reinforcing the strategies as affirming that identity.)
Finally that identity needs to propogate to every area of your life, so there’s not situations where you fail to use the technique and way of being. This is just a process of looking at each area, seeing where it’s not in alignment with the identity, then deliberately taking an action to bring it to that area.
IME all of these pieces are needed to make a life change from a technique, although it’s rarely as linear as I describe it.
Bonus conversation from the root of the tree that is this Twitter thread:
Given my experiences with both TYCS-like methods and parts-work methods (which is what Benquo is likely proposing one invest in, instead), I’d recommend people invest more in learning and using parts-work techniques first, before they learn and try to use TYCS-like techniques.
The way I do this with my clients is that we train cognitive tools first, then find the resistance to those habits and work on it using parts work
Say more?
I usually explain my process these days to clients with the acronym LIFE
Learn New Tools Integrate Resistance Forge an Identity Express Yourself
Learn New Tools is cognitive-emotional strategies, of which TYCS is an example. Fwiw a some of TYCS is actually deliberate practice to discover cognitive strategies ( as compared to something like CFAR which extracts and teaches them directly), but the result is the same.
The important thing is to just have a clear tool, give people something they know they can use in certain situations, that works immediately to solve their problems.
But the thing is, people don’t use them, because they have resistance. That’s where parts work and other resistance integration tools come into play.
Even when thata done, there’s still the issue that you don’t automatically use the techniques. This is where forge an Identity comes in, where you use identity change techniques to make the way you see yourself be in alignment with a way of being that the technique brings out. (This is one thing TYCS gets wrong in my opinion, trying to directly reinforce the cognitive strategies instead of creating an identity and reinforcing the strategies as affirming that identity.)
Finally that identity needs to propogate to every area of your life, so there’s not situations where you fail to use the technique and way of being. This is just a process of looking at each area, seeing where it’s not in alignment with the identity, then deliberately taking an action to bring it to that area.
IME all of these pieces are needed to make a life change from a technique, although it’s rarely as linear as I describe it.