I suspect maybe the difference is that in IFS they make a huge deal about honoring the ‘parts’ including exiles. In your terms this would be the unhelpful beliefs. You need ideally to fully accept that they are there for a reason and have good intentions. In IFS it is a common rookie mistake to try to shove ‘bad’ “parts” (in IFS terms) away prematurely and tell them to stop doing or believing that thing right away. If you do this they will often resist vehemently in open or in covert ways. Once you do get to know them, appreciate them, acknowledge their good intentions, they are then often very willing to form the intention to change, and in this case they will not resist.
So my suggestion would be to try to get to know the ‘false’ belief better and to acknowledge why it is there, the good it did, the good intention behind it—and with associated beliefs—there can be quite a complex structure of chained beliefs and practices. Only then do you ask it, are you happy with the current set-up? Would you like to change anything? Ask if you do really want to change the belief in every bone of your body. Usually at this point it is pretty easy to change and you are done.
This agrees with my experience.
So when everything else did not succeed entirely I tried the “nuclear option”—rewriting history. I implanted a belief that the very first time she exhibited her toxic behavior a group of parents stormed into the classroom, beat her up, threw her out of the school, and warned her never to set foot in a school again, which she never did (in the rewritten history). We reverted back to our previous teacher who was lovely. This worked, even though—at some level—I know it is false.
My model of “rewriting history” is that it still requires something that your mind believes could in principle have happened, and is a way of integrating those true beliefs in the form of an experience which an emotional part can believe in. Part of what’s going on in such a memory is a fear that if this were to happen again, there would be no way to escape the situation, and you would be totally helpless. A parental intervention is something that could in principle have happened even back in that situation (even if its imagined concrete manifestation was a bit over-the-top), so once the “stuck” part of the mind has updated on it being at least possible to get out of the situation, it can relax a little and allow other relevant information to be updated.
I think that the feeling of total helplessness, in particular, is a big factor in trauma memories—the therapeutic literature seems to argue it, and it also makes sense in theoretical terms. If you get into a state where absolutely nothing you do can make any difference to the negative situation that you are in, that could get almost unboundedly bad. From that perspective, it’s not surprising that upon detecting the potential for such a situation, some parts of the brain would become obsessed with bringing up the possibility of that situation, until a way had been found to avoid it.
There was a related excerpt in Unlocking the Emotional Brain, which talked imaginary re-enactment; taking some bad situation that you were in, and imagining how you yourself had gone about it differently. This would update your belief that there was nothing that you could have done in that situation, and make the memory less traumatic. But it notes that the therapist should ensure that an alternate way of acting would in fact have been possible:
As understood in terms of the therapeutic reconsolidation process, enacting the natural, self-protective response is de-traumatizing because the experience of the empowered response creates new knowings that disconfirm and dissolve the model and the feeling of being powerless that had formed in the original traumatic learning experience.
It is important to note that the re-enactment technique is appropriate only if the original situation in fact gave the client early signs of danger or trouble, so that in re-enacting, the client can respond sooner and more assertively and self-protectively, and in that way can experience the ability to avoid harm. An example of a trauma that is inappropriate for re-enactment is the experience of a bomb exploding. In that case there is no way to respond more self-protectively, so re-enactment would only be re-traumatizing. In such cases, different techniques of traumatic memory transformation are needed.
Given that quote, it is interesting that “someone else could have come in and helped me” re-enactment sometimes works. It is not entirely clear to me why and when it does (it doesn’t always seem to help me), but one belief that people sometimes internalize from e.g. being terrorized by an authority figure is that they are worthless and deserved the terrorizing. If you know that parents generally would not accept this kind of a behavior from a teacher, then that belief contains the generalized belief of “no child deserves this kind of a treatment”; which, when applied to the original memory, may be a way of turning that abstract belief concrete and removing the belief that nobody would care about that happening to your childhood self. (Just wildly speculating here.)
This agrees with my experience.
My model of “rewriting history” is that it still requires something that your mind believes could in principle have happened, and is a way of integrating those true beliefs in the form of an experience which an emotional part can believe in. Part of what’s going on in such a memory is a fear that if this were to happen again, there would be no way to escape the situation, and you would be totally helpless. A parental intervention is something that could in principle have happened even back in that situation (even if its imagined concrete manifestation was a bit over-the-top), so once the “stuck” part of the mind has updated on it being at least possible to get out of the situation, it can relax a little and allow other relevant information to be updated.
I think that the feeling of total helplessness, in particular, is a big factor in trauma memories—the therapeutic literature seems to argue it, and it also makes sense in theoretical terms. If you get into a state where absolutely nothing you do can make any difference to the negative situation that you are in, that could get almost unboundedly bad. From that perspective, it’s not surprising that upon detecting the potential for such a situation, some parts of the brain would become obsessed with bringing up the possibility of that situation, until a way had been found to avoid it.
There was a related excerpt in Unlocking the Emotional Brain, which talked imaginary re-enactment; taking some bad situation that you were in, and imagining how you yourself had gone about it differently. This would update your belief that there was nothing that you could have done in that situation, and make the memory less traumatic. But it notes that the therapist should ensure that an alternate way of acting would in fact have been possible:
Given that quote, it is interesting that “someone else could have come in and helped me” re-enactment sometimes works. It is not entirely clear to me why and when it does (it doesn’t always seem to help me), but one belief that people sometimes internalize from e.g. being terrorized by an authority figure is that they are worthless and deserved the terrorizing. If you know that parents generally would not accept this kind of a behavior from a teacher, then that belief contains the generalized belief of “no child deserves this kind of a treatment”; which, when applied to the original memory, may be a way of turning that abstract belief concrete and removing the belief that nobody would care about that happening to your childhood self. (Just wildly speculating here.)