All of rosehadshar's Comments + Replies

Could you say a bit more about the way ICF is a special case of IFS? I think I disagree, but also think that it would be interesting to have this view spelled out.

4Kaj_Sotala7mo
Everything that I read in the post looked like pretty standard IFS, in fact I'm pretty sure that there are several IFS sessions that I've facilitated that followed these steps exactly. When the post has this: Then coming from IFS, my perspective is kind of the converse: "conversations other than therapy might be useful to have, but sometimes therapy is useful too". In other words, this post reads to me the way you'd describe IFS if you described everything else but the explicitly therapeutic moves and only stayed on the level of facilitating a conversation between parts or between parts and Self. And sometimes IFS stays on that level too, if that's enough for resolving whatever issue the client is having, or if there isn't any particular goal other than just improved self-understanding. So I see this as a special case in the sense that "IFS can be just the steps you've outlined, or IFS can be this + more explicitly therapeutic moves that aren't well-described by just 'facilitating conversation' anymore" while ICF is described as always being just these steps. The other difference to IFS that you mention is And I agree, but I think that that pattern is more of a pedagogical simplification in IFS in any case. I would expect that any IFS practitioner with any significant amount of experience will unavoidably realize that there are vast differences in how different people's internal systems are organized and that often this pattern will match only approximately at best. And it doesn't matter that much anyway - off-hand, I don't recall any IFS materials that would tell you to diagnose whether a part is a firefighter or a manager. Rather they just tell people to ask much more open-ended questions like "what is this part trying to do", "what's the part afraid would happen if it didn't do what it's doing", or "how old is this part" that have you get to know each part as an individual rather than trying to force it into a category. (Jay Earley's commonly-recommended boo

Thanks for spotting these; I've made the changes!

My take on the question

I’m worried this misses nuance, but I basically look at all of this in the following way:

  • Turns out the world might be really weird
  • This means you want people to do weird things with their brains too
  • You teach them skills to do weird stuff with their brains
  • When people are playing around with these skills, they sometimes do unintended weird stuff which is very bad for them

And then the question is, what are the safety rails here/are there differential ways of teaching people to do weird stuff with their brains.

Some of my experienc... (read more)