The first time I really did IFS was a mindfuck in the best possible way. https://twitter.com/liminal_warmth/status/1336160715116171264

I used to do a lot of IFS with other people, and I haven’t nearly as much the last couple years.

I think I just figured out part of why...

I think I have a lot to offer walking people through it a few times, and beyond that, me just talking to the person is probably better.

K, I think I should do a thread of random things about IFS... I’m probably overdue to write more up about it.

So, lots of people have never really been in something like “Self”, at least that they can remember, and often within and hour or so I can show them it’s a thing.

And then they know , “k, so there’s a state where you can look at stuff with pretty much compassion, curiosity, etc”

The guy who came up with IFS also discovered it pretty organically just by taking what his clients said seriously.

I should find a good link, but I’m feeling lazy. https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1336166794302730242

I used to be super into the idea of lucid dreaming, mostly because I had gotten the idea that it would be a way to reliably introspect.

Now... I can just ask myself stuff and get answers. Or if not I trust bc there’s a reason not to know right now.

Plenty of people already know that random images, thoughts, etc. are richly contentedly, but I basically didn’t until I did IFS.

I (had a part that) very strongly dismissed...almost everything in my mind as untrustworthy and irrelevant.

Also the stuff about respecting protectors is no joke lol. Once I accidentally didn’t and I was like mad and sad and frustrated and couldn’t talk, and fell asleep.

Ultimately, it’s just good Formalism. Chunks of your cognition have about as much power as they have, and things go more smoothly when I treat them accordingly.

Yeah, it’s funny because lots of people dismiss their answers even when they get them.

Which is why the IFS books suggests stuff like “okay, but if there were an answer, what would it be”, which is sort of hilariously transparently hack-y. https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1336168968059498496

The precise degree of “I have transposed my entire reaction from this childhood memory to my current situation” is most people is very high.

I think it’s hard to believe it without seeing it.

Exact phrases and stuff that are about now but also when you were 5 or w/e.

On the other hand, I think there’s a thing I want to specifically recommend against, which is framing stuff that you do something now because of what happened in the past.

I think it’s much more true that people do things because they make sense in their *current* situation.

Which may sound like it doesn’t square at all with the previous thing. Maybe I’ll be annoying and leave that as a koan for now and try to circle back to it.

Another one of those things I couldn’t unsee was people switching parts in real-time as they were talking to me.

It used to really upset me to see this and see the person not seeing it, and viscerally realizing I sometimes wasn’t talking to the sort of part that could update.

And now I’m basically over that, and I don’t focus on it in the same way. I don’t think I was really wrong about any of the stuff that used to freak me out though.

I was doing other stuff that at that helped too, but doing IFS helped me get better at reading people.

Sooo much stuff is not just (at least partially) psych-mediated, but IMO glaringly obviously that way. And sometimes it’s too awkward to bring that up when people are talking like it’s not because acknowledging it is brings legit harmful baggage.

But yeah, IFS. I think the most of the books are good, and the appendix from self therapy is really good because I, at least, could mostly just do the process with someone pretty formulaically and it worked.

I couldn’t do it on myself until after I worked with an IFS therapist.

In my case that was mostly because at the time one of my main firefighters was a part that helped me get distracted when I got overwhelmed.

Also having only one person’s worth of working memory is just harder.

As you might expect, I worked largely with extremely analytical people.

Some of whom had basically never had the analytical part step aside.

That was always super fun if it did eventually step aside.

One of my spiels was that by default people tend to do a lot of breadth first cognition where they tried to get info from each part they had something to say about a situation, and that according to me a pretty high leverage thing to do with an hour was to do deep with one part.

Oh, and I always tried to be clear that while IFS frequently turns up real biographical memories that people haven’t thought of in years, it also produces plenty of symbolic stuff too.

And that my focus was on whatever the relevant mental representation was today.

I think some people have their minds set up so they can tell which memories are real and which aren’t. And IME some people don’t really.

A thing I was also kinda superstitious about was that I tried not to put much stock in anything that happened during a session as feedback about what was working.

I tried to always say, get back to me in a week and tell me if it’s going differently.

At a certain point with myself I got to the point where it felt like the IFS that needed/wanted to happen in me was mostly on autopilot. I had experiences being borderline asleep and having some of my most intense psych stuff unravel pretty much on its own :-).

One of the most subtle parts of doing IFS IMO is that the person leading the process isn’t supposed to have “an agenda”... expect that doing IFS is kinda its own agenda.

And I think it’s both true that a pretty unsophisticated chat bot could do IFS pretty well, AND the main job of a human doing it is to manage their own parts and stay in “Self” as much as possible.

Maybe I can try to summarize what IFS even is. Plenty of explanations are out there already, but why not add another.

1. People already often think of themselves as having parts. One way to tell is that they talk that way: “part of me wants x and part of me wants y”

2. Cool stuff happens if you run with the metaphor. “What does that part think about this? What is trying to accomplish here?” etc.

3. One of the most interesting moves is to change which part is currently active, and you can do that just by asking yourself stuff.

“Would the x part be willing to step aside so we can get to know the y part from a more open place?”

“You’ll know if it worked because the when you check how you feel towards part y you’ll get a different answer. It’s also fine if it doesn’t want to step aside.”

4. Eventually, when some “parts” have stepped aside, people tend to report being in a different place that feels more like themselves.

5. Once you’re in that state, which IFS calls “Self”, extra cool stuff starts to happen. Parts tend to trust you more and give honest answers, or if they don’t they can often at least tell you why they don’t trust you and often you can address their concerns.

6. There tends to be a structure where some parts hold some of our cognition/aliveness at bay bc accessing it would require encountering pain which the system has so far deemed unacceptable to encounter.

Those parts are called protectors: managers, which are proactive about setting up our lives to avoid stuff, and firefighters, which come out once we are feeling too much.

A manager might be a part that steers away from conflict. A firefighter might put me to sleep when angry.

7. IFS calls the alive parts we “aren’t allowed” to access “exiles”, and often when you do come in contact with them you feel pain and have memories come up.

Ultimately, it’s often possible to “unburden” and integrate these parts.

8. There are a lot of pretty scripted IFS questions, and after the ones about how parts feel about other parts and asking them to step aside, I think the core question is “do you think I understand just how bad/important, etc. this really is/was”.

Setting aside “what is IFS” for now, back to random stuff.

Lots of physiological things can be IFSed anyway.

Like “tired” parts. People really do need sleep, but the extent to which people are focused on that in a given moment is psych-mediated.

In IFS confusion is treated like a part, and IME this works really well.

There’s something funny about it to me still. “Ask your confused part if if would be willing to step aside. Okay, cool so now you aren’t confused anymore”

Sometimes it is that simple!

I spent a lot of time talking to my “cold part”. It’s true that I was often physically cold, but I got plenty of psych answers anyway.

And if I’m “tired” is it that:
-I want to sleep but I’m not bc social obligation
-I’m afraid what I might do if I had more energy...
-I don’t want to sleep now but to flag for later to plan to get more sleep
-someone is telling me a low-key info hazard better not to listen
-etc

I am going to be gone for tonight soon I think but one last thing.

Getting better at stuff like introspection and changing your own patterns is it’s own new interpersonal thing to navigate.

Like “oh maybe I can change myself so that this relationship will work better”

“Maybe I will tell you exactly why I did that bc you asked, person I don’t know well”

Yeah, maybe! Depends what you’re doing and why, and ultimately people can develop discernment and it can be .