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I was thinking lately about how there are some different classes of models of psychological change, and I thought I would outline them and see where that leads me.
It turns out it led me into a question about where and when Parts-based vs. Association-based models are applicable.
Some examples:
This is the frame that I make the most use of, in my personal practice. It assumes that all behavior is the result of some goal directed subprocess in you (or parts), that is serving one of your needs. Sometimes parts adopt strategies that are globally harmful or cause problems, but those strategies are always solving or mitigating (if only barely) some problem of yours.
Some parts based approaches are pretty adamant about the goal directed-ness of all behavior.
For instance, I think (though I’m not interested in trying to find the quote right now), Self therapy, a book on IFS, states that all behavior is adaptive in this way. Nothing is due to habit. And the original Connection Theory document says the same.
Sometimes these parts can conflict with each other, or get in each other’s way, and you might engage in behavior that is far from optimal, different parts encat different behaviors (for instance, procrastination typically involves a part that is concerned about some impending state of the world, while another part of you, anticipating the psychological pain of consciously facing up to that bad possibility,
Furthermore, these parts are reasonably intelligent, and can update. If you can provide them a solution to the problem that they are solving, that is superior (by the standards of the part) than its current strategy, then it will immediately adopt that new strategy instead. This is markedly different from a model under which unwanted behaviors are “bad habits” that are mindfully retrained.
Examples:
In contrast there is another simple model of the mind, that mostly operates with an ontology of simple (learned) association, instead of intelligent strategies. That is, it thinks of your behavior, including your emotional responses, mostly as habits, or stimulus response patterns, that can be trained or untrained.
For instance, say you have a problem of road rage. In the “parts” frame, you might deal with anger by dialoguing with with the anger, finding out what the anger is protecting, own or ally with that goal, and then find an alternative strategy that meets that goal without the anger. In the association frame, you might gradually retrain the anger response, by mindfully noticing as it arises, and then letting it go. Overtime, you’ll gradually train a different emotional reaction to the formerly rage-inducing stimulus.
Or, if you don’t want to wait that long, you might use some NLP trick to rapidly associate a new emotional pattern to a given stimulus, so that instead of feeling anger, you feel calm. (Or instead of feeling anxious jealousy, you feel loving abundant gratitude.)
This association process can sometimes be pretty dumb, such a skilled manipulater might cause you to associate a mental state like guilt or gratitude with tap on the shoulder, so that everytime you are tapped on the shoulder you return to the mental state. That phenomenon does not seem consistent with a naive form of the parts-based model.
And notably, an association model predicts that merely offering an alternative strategy (or frame) to a part doesn’t immediately or permanently change the behavior: you expect to have some “hold over” from the previous strategy because those associations will still fire. You have to clear them out somehow.
And this is my experience some of the time: sometimes, particularly with situations that have had a lot of emotional weight for me, I will immediately fall into old emotional patterns, even when I (or at least part part of me) has updated away from the beliefs that made that reaction relevant. For instance, I fall in love with a person because I have some story / CT path about how we are uniquely compatible, I gradually learn that this isn’t true, but I still have a strong emotional reaction when they walk into the room. What’s going on here? Some part of me isn’t updating, for some reason? It sure seems like some stimuli are activating old patterns even if those patterns aren’t adaptive and don’t even make sense in context. But this seems to suggest less intelligence on the part of my parts, it seems more like stimulus response machinery.
And on the other side, what’s happening when Tony Robins is splashing water in people’s faces to shake them out of their patterns? From a parts-based perspective, that doesn’t make any sense. Is the sub agent in question being permanently disrupted? (Or maybe you only have to disrupt it for a bit, to give space for a new association / strategy to take hold? And then after that the new strategy outcompetes the old one?)
[Big Question: how does the parts-based model interact with the associations-based model?
Is it just that human minds do both? What governs when which phenomenon applies?
When should I use which kind of technique?]
Examples:
A third category of psychological intervention are those that are based around narrative: you find, and “put on” a new way of interpreting, or making sense of, your experience, such that it has a different meaning that provides you different affordances. Generally you find a new narrative that is more useful for you.
The classic example is a simple reframe, where you feel frustrated that people keep mooching off of you, but you reframe this so that you instead feel magnanimous, emphasizing your generosity, and how great it is to have an opportunity to give back to people. Same circumstances, different story about them.
This class of interventions feels like it can slide easily into either the parts based frame or the association based frame. In the parts based frame, a narrative can be thought of as just another strategy that a part might adopt so long as that is the best way that the part can solve its problem (and so long as other parts don’t conflict).
But I think this fits even more naturally into the association frame, where you find a new way to conceptualize your situation and you do some work to reassociate that new conceptualization with the stimulus that previously activated your old narrative (this is exactly what Phil of Philosophical Counseling’s process does: you find a new narrative / belief structure and set up a regime under which you noticed when the old one arises, let it go, and feel into the new one.)
[Other classes of intervention that I am distinctly missing?]
I saw the post more as giving me a framework that was helping for sorting various psych models, and the fact that you had one question about it didn't actually feel too central for my own reading. (Separately, I think it's basically fine for posts to be framed as questions rather than definitive statements/arguments after you've finished your thinking)
I'm mostly going to use this to crosspost links to my blog for less polished thoughts, Musings and Rough Drafts.