I think I've just figured out the distinction between Focusing and Internal Family Systems, in a way that causes both of them to make much more sense to me (and also helps clarify why I got slightly irritated about IFS, and why)

First, a meta model: I tend to think of the mind as a collection of what I'm calling "capacities". I basically mean "The potential to be and act in the world in a particular way" here. e.g. skills, emotional reactions, etc.

Capacities aren't really discrete things - they tend to heavily overlap. There's a significant overlap between your capacities, say, programming and mathematics, or cooking and bartending, or anger and hatred. They just kinda demarcate loose regions in mind space.

Now, a capacity can be developed, in the sense of improving how effectively (on its own terms) you can do the thing the capacity is for in how wide a range of circumstances. e.g. in the context of a skill you can become more skillfull.

You can equally develop skillfullness for emotional capacities. It is possible to be more or less skilled at anger, - some people can't express it at all, some people tend to lash out uncontrollably, and some people use it as a measured capacity for protecting boundaries.

One way to develop capacities is to integrate them, by trying to deploy them at the same time, or at least by trying to identify common threads and bring them to bear in other contexts. https://twitter.com/DRMacIver/status/1326782444931076096

Exactly what this integration looks like varies a lot by the capacities involved. You're probably never going to "integrate" cooking and programming in the sense that you do both at once, because there are physical constraints.

But you might find it useful to look at cooking like a programmer (what's really going on here, can we refactor this recipe) or to look at programming like a cook (developing a sense of taste, thinking which "flavours" go well together, mise en place for your environment).

And some capacities you might well want to use together. Doing mathematical programming will likely make you a better mathematician and a better programmer, albeit in quite specific ways.

Now, to finally get around to the point: Focusing and IFS are both basically the same operation, which is to develop a capacity using another capacity (which will itself be developed in the course of it). They're basically this integrate step.

Both of them can pretty much be directed at any capacity (though both of them are more useful with a sort of core emotional capacity. You certainly can do Focusing on your ability to cook. Can you do IFS on your ability to cook? I guess? Maybe? Sounds interesting to try anyway).

The difference between the two of them is what the *other* capacity is, the thing you're integrating with.

Focusing it's a capacity for descriptive verbal intelligence. IFS it's a capacity for a kind of unconditional open love.

(This capacity is what IFS calls Self, and this is the thing that pissed me off. It's a label that is very much privileging a particular mode of being as The Real You, and that attitude is a reliable trigger for me, but especially when you're talking about *accepting* parts)

This unconditional love aspect of IFS seems super useful for drawing out capacities that are under-expressed, hence protector/orphan categorisation for some capacities, which highlights some particular specific skills for working with this integration of unconditional love.

This sort of distinction is useful and probably indicative of how even if IFS and Focusing are "just" the same thing with different capacities, there is still a distinct skill set around each to develop further.

An example of something which is closer to a "pure" instantiation of this sort of integration of unconditional love is the "Feeding Your Demons" approach, where you identify capacities corresponding to fears and just pour unconditional love at them.

So IFS is more than just the core operation, it's an elaboration on top of it. But I think it's still worth looking at the core primitive operation of IFS as turning "Self" on your other capacities, and contrasting this with the Focusing operation of turning description on them.

Both seem to involve a particular inward turning attitude for bringing one capacity to bear on another. They involve activating both but holding a separation between them, so you can take a good look at it.

The skill of doing that is of course itself a capacity to develop.

A lot of people I know seem to respond much more positively to IFS than Focusing (I think it was @xuenay who said "IFS is like supercharged Focusing"?) and I suspect there are a couple big reasons for this:

1. They're people who have already well integrated their verbal intelligence.
2. In general most people are short of being on the receiving end of unconditional love, so haven't had the opportunity to develop capacities in the light of it.
3. They're better at the core skill now.

Anyway, why is all this useful?

Well one reason for me is that I never really got into IFS because I find most of its metaphors almost nonsensical. I'm sure they work very well for other people but I don't get on well with visualising and personifying capacities.

Another reason is that it suggests some more interesting directions to go in. If you get two different therapeutic tools as elaborations of instantiations of basically the same mode, what else is available this way?

I have some thoughts but this thread is long enough and this thought process is new enough for me that I think I'll stop here.