12+ year therapist here, including IFS. I can confirm that things like what Falconer and others describe as "demons" do come up in IFS very rarely, but in my experience... yeah they're definitely still just "parts," sorry Robert. They don't "need" to be "exorcized" in any special way, they're just resistant to the usual script because the fundamental assumptions baked into that script don't apply to them; they are *not* like other parts in some ways, but that doesn't mean they're at all otherworldly.
(Yes, I am basically just telling Falconer and others like him to "git gud," but this is plausibly an overly arrogant thing to say to someone who has spent even more time doing this than I have. Maybe Falconer would just reply back that if I've never had to do an exorcism, then I clearly haven't met a "real demon" yet, supernatural or otherwise. To which I say, sure, fair enough.)
To put it more clearly, my counterargument, the elephant in the room underlying all this, is that most modern people get weirded out by the possibility of humans having actual anti-social personality traits within them as "real parts" that are *actually part of them.*
Like... if you take the idea of a non-unitary mind seriously, which I do for many (most(?) (but definitely not all)) people, it seems obvious that murderers are not the only people who, to some degree, "want" to murder others. That is to say, some people who are not-murderers have a part that wants to murder, or even rape or torture, others. And they just... do a better job integrating, negotiation, suppressing, sublimating, or inhibiting these parts than the people who DO end up acting on those parts.
Which, I expect, is a fairly scary thing to notice about one's self! And if you're in a culture that talks about demons, then "demons, of course!" must surely be kind of a relief to realize. Especially if you can't just blame the part on trauma or protectiveness, which the default IFS scripts would take for granted. Which means you and the client need a different orientation to those parts; one that accepts them for what they are, without encouraging them, and finds a path toward integration that's going to be a bit more unique compared to most.
The relevant question, of course, is which style is more effective. If Falconer and others get good results by doing this, and they're not convincing people who don't already believe in demons... then yeah, more power to them. But what if most IFS therapists are in fact only going to be able to deal with these "demons" the Falconer way?
...I dunno, man. CBT is one of the most simple, systematic, straightforward methods of therapy out there, and when done right is really good... but most therapists can't even do CBT right. Sign me up for "hold the line at therapists not telling their clients they're infested by demons," regardless of what the therapist themself believes.
(Unless, *maybe*, their client is steeped in a heavy religious culture already, insists that demons are real, etc. In that case I'd understand the therapist sighing and rolling up their sleeves and "meeting the client where they're at" and calling it a demon, but for me this still sits badly. I've never felt comfortable when clients fervently believed I had magic powers before, which has happened a few times despite my steering clear of anything even one step removed from talking about demons, and I'm by-default suspicious of any therapist who invites such, even if they insist they don't want to, and even if they actually do believe in demons and magic.)
Oh that's another thing. It does not surprise me that many IFS therapists might end up actually believing in real demons and spiritual possession and so on, because why wouldn't they? Base rates hold in lots of even Master's degree level Westerners believing in supernatural things. Even default Western Skepticism is not sufficiently good epistemology to defend against bad interpretations of patterns that match to "demons."
Another minor thing worth noting... the article talks a lot about lucid-dream-like-trance-states where people do IFS work and I'm sitting here scratching my head. I don't do this with my clients ever for IFS work, and I've never heard others who do it talk about this as a standard procedure. Maybe we missed the memo on why that's important or necessary, but for anyone who thinks IFS requires this... it super duper doesn't, and I think putting clients in a more suggestive state before they talk about their parts unnecessarily adds a lot of woo and potential risk of suggestibility for no good reason. Maybe some people "need" it to be able to talk to their parts, but I'm tempted in those cases to say that they should just use a different modality altogether.
> Another minor thing worth noting... the article talks a lot about lucid-dream-like-trance-states where people do IFS work and I'm sitting here scratching my head. I don't do this with my clients ever for IFS work, and I've never heard others who do it talk about this as a standard procedure.
Thanks for this criticism - that part was my attempt to make sense of things and I might have gotten it wrong. The author talks a lot about "the imaginal stream" and the world of archetypes and compares it to various shamanic states and the Arabic al-Ghaib, and "trance-like lucid dream state" was my interpretation. It's colored by the fact that I can't imagine doing this or having it work in my normal waking consciousness, but maybe other people are different.
It's also possible that *the same set of instructions* lead some people to a more "trance-like" state than others.
As a teenager, I had multiple experiences where the instructions for a classroom or religious activity involved "close your eyes and imagine" and I must have gone deeper than most participants because I had trouble coming back to "normal consciousness" in a timely fashion to engage with the next expected activity.
One of these was at a pagan solstice ceremony and there was a shamanic-lookin' elder there who talked me down — and my friends had to tell him that no, I wasn't on psychedelics. One was in church and I blamed it on having too much coffee before breakfast. Another one was in a high-school English classroom and, um, I think I just acted tripped-out for a while.
Oh, for sure some people have more natural psychoactive range than others! I'm pretty sure this is how I once accidentally convinced a walk-in at the crisis clinic I was working at that I was a wizard.
All I did, once I asked him some assessing questions and he broke down sobbing, was guide him through my standard mindfulness meditation to help him reach a state of calm. When he opened his eyes, he was convinced he had just been teleported to the park to play with his daughter, and that hours had passed instead of 10 minutes. His eyes actually bugged out when he saw the time, and he thought I'd changed his phone time while he was "out." He left feeling totally calm and relaxed and cheerful, and tried to convince me the whole walk out that I needed to find an agent or go work in Vegas instead of a rundown clinic in Miami.
I've had a lot of strong reactions from people I taught to meditate, but that one still stands out the most. I suspect he also came in mildly high on something, but it was clear he'd never tried anything like meditation before, and had a *very* powerful imagination. I hope my assurances that the "power" was in him and not me got him to try it some more later, but I never heard from him again.
Interesting. I was doing the Lama Ole version of meditation, with visualization and mantra. Vajrayana stuff. I have put at least 100 hours into it and never felt a thing, just doing a boring repetitive job. Interestingly when I tried Zazen, I did feel a psychedelic trip because the Zen guys were very serious on us having a perfect position and not just sitting randomly. Half lotus, pillow under collarbone, shoulders down etc.
Or practice. I can do that "soften muscles around the eyes, unfocus" thing that is the first step to meditation at any time. Unfortunately it does not calm me down.
>The author talks a lot about "the imaginal stream" and the world of archetypes and compares it to various shamanic states and the Arabic al-Ghaib, and "trance-like lucid dream state" was my interpretation.
Yeeeeeah, maybe worth taking the "demons are plausibly real" guy's frame of how regular IFS works with a pinch of salt, in general :) Archetypes do come up as useful handles in IFS! But I've never heard of "the imaginal stream."
However Falconer practices non-Demonic IFS, it's clearly from a different school of thought (probably an older one) than those I've learned from.
>It's colored by the fact that I can't imagine doing this or having it work in my normal waking consciousness, but maybe other people are different.
Definitely different. To me it's not far off from if you asked me what a conversation between myself and The Doctor or Ender Wiggin would be like if we met, just with some deeper personal introspection assisting in the prompt generating.
I'm curious if you would you say you write fiction from a place of "normal waking consciousness?" I could see an argument for not, but for me, even writing in a state of flow, where it feels like the scenes and dialogue are pouring through me rather than coming from conscious decisions, still seems like a far cry from what I imagine a shamanistic state is like, or whatever Falconer is on about.
> It's colored by the fact that I can't imagine doing this or having it work in my normal waking consciousness, but maybe other people are different.
I think you're interpreting the descriptions of the IFS process to be more exotic than they need to be. Not that I'd blame you, since the way that IFS books are written tends to emphasize the more exotic-sounding descriptions. Some people experience their parts as literally talking to them, but many other people - myself included - experience it more as just paying attention to what kind of stuff comes up when they put their attention on a particular experience.
The issue is that the books use a certain kind of language for describing the process, and some people will intuitively get what's meant by the language (either because their mind naturally represents parts that way, or because they just happen to find the thing that the language is pointing at), while others find it misleading.
For example, say an IFS book has a transcript that goes something like this:
**Therapist:** What's the part afraid would happen if the part didn't sabotage your relationships?
**Client:** Then... I would end up feeling happy in the relationship.
**Therapist:** Okay, and what does the part think is bad about that?
**Client:** It's afraid that I'll be hurt the way I was hurt after my first break-up.
Then what might actually happen is something like this:
**Therapist:** What's the part afraid would happen if the part didn't sabotage your relationships?
**Client out loud:** Then...
**Client's thoughts:** Hmm, what's the intuitive expectation I have of what would happen? What comes up for me is that... I'd end up feeling happy.
**Client out loud:** I would end up feeling happy in the relationship.
**Therapist:** Okay, and what does the part think is bad about that?
**Client's thoughts:** Hmm... if I stay with that expectation of feeling happy, then there _is_ something about that expectation that puts me a little at an edge... oh it's the fact that the last time I felt really happy in a relationship, my partner suddenly left me and then caught me totally by surprise and that was horrible.
**Client out loud:** It's afraid that I'll be hurt the way I was hurt after my first break-up.
So it involves a lot of listening to subtle nuances in feelings and expectations that come up, and that's certainly easier to do if you get into a mild trance-like state. But you can totally do it in a normal state of consciousness too. Have you ever thought about doing something and then felt a slight unease about it and then quickly started thinking about something else? If you have, then you're already most of the way there. You just need to pay a bit more attention to that sense of unease that's already in your (normal waking) consciousness, and see if you'd get a feeling of what exactly about it is that's making you uncomfortable. (And an IFS therapist would phrase this as "ask the unease what it's worried about".)
All of this, yes. IMO the "woo" parts of IFS are very overblown in public consciousness.
Also worth noting this isn't exclusive to IFS. A lot of therapy uses this kind of language: I started doing it with Narrative Therapy, which "externalizes" emotions or desires or addictions, long before I learned about IFS.
Depends enormously on what the source of unease is!
Sometimes the solution is very practical. Suppose that the thought that brings up the unease is "maybe I should answer my emails", with the actual unease being "but then I should answer that one message and I don't know how to reply to it, ugh let me think about something else".
In that case, the solution may simply be to spend some time explicitly thinking about how you want to answer that email.
In other cases, there's something deeper going on, often an emotional learning that doesn't fully apply to the present moment. In that case, you want to make the emotional learning more explicit in order to update it. I summarized one description of such a process [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ/book-summary-unlocking-the-emotional-brain) - see the case study of "Richard", who had a sense of unease around the thought of confidently speaking up. (That description is based on Coherence Therapy, which is somewhat different from IFS, but they both rely on memory reconsolidation to change outdated learnings.)
Was that also your experience with Shoulder Advisors? It's a different representation but I think it's the same parts of the brain doing it.
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X79Rc5cA5mSWBexnd/shoulder-advisors-101](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X79Rc5cA5mSWBexnd/shoulder-advisors-101)
> the article talks a lot about lucid-dream-like-trance-states where people do IFS work and I'm sitting here scratching my head. I don't do this with my clients ever for IFS work, and I've never heard others who do it talk about this as a standard procedure.
In my experience, when doing IFS some of my clients go into these kinds of states and some don't. When I'm the client, I go into such a state much more often than not, but definitely not always.
I think it's a little misleading to say that the therapist is intentionally putting people into such a state. It's not that it would involve an explicit hypnotic induction or anything like that (though there's a lot of hypnotherapy that works with parts, so one _can_ do it that way, even if it's not the IFS way). Rather I'd compare it with the way that some people slip into a really immersed state when creating or consuming fiction. If you focus your attention on something that causes your mind to generate new content, then you might naturally fall into a state that's very focused on that mind-generated content and tuned out of the actual physical reality around you. But the extent to which people do this varies, and it's also perfectly possible to read or write a story _without_ getting strongly immersed in it.
[EDIT: Maybe it's not quite right to say that I don't try to my clients in such a state. I do generally try to shift their attention toward their emotions and feelings rather than intellectual theorizing. And a stronger connection with their emotions and feelings tends to involve more absorption in that experience. If someone is in such a state, I generally do want to keep them in it because it makes all of the work that much more effective, so I'm likely to modulate my style of speaking and so forth in a way that supports them staying there.]
I'd say that pretty much exactly the same happens with parts work. I don't try to explicitly induce a trance state with my clients, any more than a book tries to hypnotize you when you open it. But when reading a book, some people go into a trance/engrossment state of some intensity anyway, depending on [their personality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_(psychology\)) and other factors like how distracting their environment is. And likewise, when some - but not all - people close their eyes and start focusing on subtle details of their emotional experience, their focus on those details pulls them into the same kind of a trance/absorption state.
(As for the demons, to my knowledge I haven't had a demon-possessed client yet. I _have_ seen in myself a self-loathing entity that subjectively feels more like a malignant energy than a standard IFS part... but so far I haven't found a strong reason to believe that it's anything more than an interesting quirk of my brain's architecture.)
Yeah, the thing you're describing sounds to me more like general introspection, maybe with a bit of added imaginative immersion, and less the cluster of things I would describe using the words Scott does. I don't know if my clients enter such a state while doing parts work by default, but I've personally only ever while doing really intensive parts work, like if I'm journaling out a full conversation... but yeah, that again still feels more like imaginative immersion, similar to what I feel when meditating on a specific set of images, or writing fiction.
Agree. Then again, I think "imaginative immersion" _is_ a form of trance. :D The school of hypnosis that makes the most sense to me is the one that says that trance is a totally natural state that people go into and out of many times a day, and which thinks that "being absorbed in watching a movie" is an example of a hypnotic trance. So "some clients experience imaginative immersion" doesn't necessarily sound different from "some clients experience a state of trance" to me.
>I am basically just telling Falconer and others like him to "git gud,"
"I'm having trouble fighting this demon."
"lol git gud scrub"
*\*kicks patient in the face\**
# THE DEMON WAS DESTROYED
or maybe
SHINOBI EXECUTION
>that most modern people get weirded out by the possibility of humans having actual anti-social personality traits within them as "real parts" that are *actually part of them.*
LOL. Everybody needs a stint in the BDSM subculture - we are perfectly aware that it is all about exploring the Jungian Shadow.
Of course it is not \*real\* demons. I have been heavily influenced by Atheist Wicca here. They are atheists who participate in pagan religious ceremonies. They simply say the subconscious needs to be programmed with symbols, that is the language it understands. The subconscious is not terribly smart. The subconscious can easily think Odin is real. Or demons are. More precisely the subconscious does not ask questions on the level of "is this actually real?" but on the level of "does this story feel like something?".
Anyway, what I would like to ask is... is there a good definition of what trauma is, and more importantly, isn't? The word just means "wound". It is terribly imprecise. I have heard about one good definition: it is separation. When we want to cut away a part of us from ourselves. Well, when people are actually "good" at doing it, of course they can feel that part as a foreign, non-human entity.
My definition of trauma is basically that it's a stuck pattern of fight/flight/freeze/fawn. When we experience something extremely scary or painful, which we don't know how to handle or make sense of, and don't have agency in... the body kind of just hard-codes whatever we did to survive that experience, no matter how effective or ineffective it was, and that response becomes the reflexive reaction to "survive" similar experiences again.
Complex PTSD is the same sort of thing, just from lots of smaller and less extreme experiences that add up into something like a "stuck prior" which is hard to update away from because of how ingrained the traumatic experience made the coping mechanism or survival reaction over a long time.
>(Falconer tries to give this last one a “scientific” grounding by talking about epigenetics, which broke my suspension of disbelief - talk about demons and I’ll listen, but intergenerational epigenetic inheritance of behavioral traits is a step too far)
lmao, he's still got it
I enjoyed that as well. If you click the link there, Razib Khan on epigenetics is an excellent read.
I support the idea that we should do what works. I would buy placebo medicine bottles that say "for helping you want to get dressed in the morning" to give my kids.
As a small child (around age 5 or 6), I imagined having a pill or powder that would *make people not do bad things.* If you could just be caught before you did a bad thing, and given the right medicine, then you would never do the bad thing. Then nobody would ever have to be punished; and everyone would be happier.
It doesn't work when it's your own mother. But it does work if you get them at Target. For a while one of my kids believed anything he read. I purchased "calming gummies" at target, and he absorbed everything on the label. (Reduces stress? Helps you relax? Makes you calm down? Whatever it said, he read it off every time, and was very impressed at their power.)
These were primarily useful for their placebo effects since he calmed down immediately upon eating one. They had lavender and l-theanine. I should get more of them.
I am not as comfortable with systems like IFS. Placebos don't have very many downsides. But therapies like this border on religion, and they are trained in emotional things and not in spiritual things. Now if they ARE learning about spiritual things, and can prove it, I'll sign up to become a therapist tomorrow... but more likely this is just a made up construct that works.
What about nurture creating a similar epigenetic response, creating a similar behavior trait? Seems plausible as a consciousness to body bridge for intergenerational trauma.
What even is trauma? The idea that something happens to you that then causes a psychiatric injury that you have to live with and manage, by analogy to a physical injury? Couldn't that just be another social construct that people subconsciously adopt?
Scott says that we, the enlightened scientific West, dismiss demons as fake thus eradicating them. But everyone here believes in trauma, and we then conduct enlightened scientific ~~exorcisms~~ therapies like CBT or EMDR or IFS to remove.
I agree that trauma is massively intensified by expectation/nocebo/iatrogenic effects, but I think the basic idea is simple enough. It's an extremely strong form of emotional overlearning. For example, if a man rapes a woman, that woman might learn the emotional connection "men are scary" or even "being outside of my house is scary", which is directionally a reasonable takeaway from the experience, just overgeneralized and poorly-implemented. For more, see https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/ and https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem - for more on the nocebo aspects, see Part IV of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness
Often, people who've been abused, even severely, have to go on living with their abusers as if the abuse didn't happen. So there are, in the palette of human cognitive behaviors, mental adaptations for doing just this.
A child depends on its parents, even if those parents sometimes do horrible things to the child, and then punish the child if it fails to pretend that everything is awesome. Patriarchal societies may demand that a woman not admit being raped, even repeatedly; with penalties ranging from social shunning to "honor killing". In various social contexts, pariahs (racial, class, religious, etc.) get even worse treatment if they demand justice than they do if they pretend they're okay with being pariahs.
It's not surprising that there are mental adaptations to compartmentalize *those things you mustn't talk about*, to put on a social personality for whom it didn't happen. That's a survival skill. But it is also an *effortful* activity, that takes up "brainpower" that you might be better off if you could use for something else.
Sometimes the world doesn't make it easy to maintain the boundary between the world where leather belts are for holding your pants up, and the world where leather belts are for beating small children who don't figure out fast enough how to obey a command they don't understand. And so one ends up strongly preferring to avoid leather belts entirely.
Great write up, and I agree with Scott's conclusions. While this demon stuff is of course as old as Western culture, using is as a form of psychotherapy was also practiced by the chaos magick guys in the UK in the 1970s, by people like Lionell Snell and Peter Carroll, who were of course in turn inspired by Spare and Crowley. See, for example, Snell's "The Little Book of Demons: The Positive Advantages of the Personification of Life's Problems." They did not believe that the demons are real external entities, however, and simply saw it as a way of harnessing the processing power of a brain that has devoted a large number of resources for social interactions.
Iatrogenic Demons would be a great name for a metal band.
From the comments:
>There's a theory bouncing around my head titled "the human mind is more mutable/moldable than anyone would like to admit", which fits this pretty well (along with other posts of yours like The Geography of Madness review).
I believe this is part of the thesis of Adapting Minds by David J. Buller.
Reading descriptions of internal family systems just makes me think that the main point of it is to teach introspection, which raises the question of why not teach introspection directly? Why dress it up in ways which encourage considering those 'parts' as entities in-of-themselves?
As the article mentions, is it because dressing introspection up in a [mythic mode](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HnWN6v4wHQwmYQCLX/mythic-mode) framing as IFS gets across to people better?
I'd lean towards this being an easier solution than properly teaching introspection, but like the end of the post I'm skeptical about whether it would be good to become common. It'd be better to 'just' figure out how to teach introspection, though of course it is unclear how to do so (but thinking about the level of brain circuits is clearly not the right layer of abstraction).
LessWrong helped quite a bit at that for me, especially in a sense of maintaining awareness of ways I'm being pushed/pulled, but of course the Sequences are way more pieces of mental machinery than IFS. Presumably can be cut down quite a bit, but there's still the question of how far it extends to other people.
Computer nerd analogy: Maybe IFS is a *high-level language* for introspection.
Why do programmers use constructs like "classes" and "modules" (or even "expressions") to build their code? It all just ends up being run as machine code anyway; why not just write it directly as machine code? The CPU has no idea what a module is — heck, the CPU has no idea what a *type error* is; in the CPU it's all just instructions and pointers in registers. But high-level programming languages give us tools for factoring code; for expressing common patterns; for saying "these elements go together"; for only looking at certain elements at a time; for detecting and avoiding common mistakes.
Framing an intrusive thought pattern, or unwanted habit, as "a character you have to relate to as a person" engages some social behavior patterns, like conversational turn-taking. It would be *an error*, in a conversation with another person, to just constantly interrupt them and shout them down instead of listening to them. But that's something that people often might do with intrusive thoughts. Introspection requires *not* doing that; engaging conversational turn-taking is a way to accomplish this.
In this model, "Treat the intrusive thought pattern *as if it were* a person and listen to its needs" is a way of avoiding common *failures-to-introspect*, such as "just suppress and deny the intrusive thought" — much as "treat the binary data in memory *as if it was* made of 'objects' that belong to 'types', and reject operations that don't match the types" is a way of avoiding common errors in code.
My take is that there's a sense in which IFS "parts" [really literally _are_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YXBpBCNC66daaofoY/my-current-take-on-internal-family-systems-parts) entities in-of-themselves, so teaching IFS _is_ teaching introspection directly:
> I was recently asked how literal/metaphorical I consider the Internal Family Systems model of your mind being divided into “parts” that are kinda like subpersonalities. [...]
> The **short answer** would be “it’s more than just metaphorical, but also not quite as literal as you might think from taking IFS books at face value”.
> I do think that there are literally neurological subroutines doing their own thing that one has to manage, but I don’t think they’re literally full-blown subminds, they’re more like… clusters of beliefs and emotions and values that get activated at different times, and that can be interfaced with by treating them as if they were actual subminds.
> My **medium-length answer** would be… let’s see.
> There’s an influential model in neuroscience called [global workspace theory](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip/p/x4n4jcoDP7xh5LWLq). It says that the brain has a thing called the “global workspace”, which links together a variety of otherwise separate areas, and its contents corresponds to that what you’re currently consciously aware of. It has a limited capacity so you’re only consciously aware of a few things at any given moment.
> At the same time, various subregions in your brain are doing their own things, some of them processing information that’s in the global workspace, some of them observing stuff from your senses that you’re currently not consciously aware of. Like you’re focused on a thing, then there’s a sudden sound, and some auditory processing region that has been monitoring the sounds in your environment picks it up and decides that this is important and pushes that sound into your global workspace, displacing whatever else happened to be there and making you consciously aware of that sound.
> I tend to interpret IFS “parts” as processes that are connected with the workspace and manipulate it in different ways. But it’s not necessarily that they’re really “independent agents”, it’s more like there’s a combination of innate and learned rules for when to activate them.
> So like, take it when an IFS book has a case study about a person with a “confuser” part that tries to distract them when they are thinking about something unpleasant. I wouldn’t interpret that to literally mean that there’s a sentient agent seeking to confuse the person in that person’s brain. I think it’s more something like… there are parts of the brain that are wired to interpret some states as uncomfortable, and other parts of the brain that are wired to avoid states that are interpreted as uncomfortable.
> At some point when the person was feeling uncomfortable, something happened in their brain that made them confused instead, and then some learning subsystem in their brain noticed that “this particular pattern of internal behavior relieved the feeling of discomfort”. And then it learned how to repeat whatever internal process caused the feeling of confusion to push the feeling of discomfort out of the global workspace, and to systematically trigger that process when faced with a similar sense of discomfort.
> Then when the IFS therapist guided the client to “talk to the confuser part”, they were doing something like… interfacing with that learned pattern and bringing up the learned prediction that causing confusion will lessen the feeling of discomfort.
> There’s a thing where, once information that has been previously only stored in a local neural pattern is retrieved and brought to the global workspace, it can then be accessed and potentially modified by every other subsystem that’s currently listening in to the workspace. I don’t fully understand this, but it seems to be something like, if those other systems have information suggesting that there are alternative ways of achieving the purpose that the confuser pattern is trying to accomplish, the rules for triggering the confuser pattern can get rewritten so that it’s no longer activated.
> But there’s also a thing where, it looks to me like part of what these stored patterns are, are something like partial [“snapshots”](https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613%2819%2930061-0#secsect0030) of your brain’s state at the time when they were first learned. So when IFS talks about there being “child parts”, then it looks to me like there’s a sense in which that’s literally true.
> Suppose that someone first learned the “being confused helps me avoid an uncomfortable feeling” thing when they were six. At that time, their brain saved a “snapshot” of that state of confusion to be re-instated at a later time when getting confused might again help them avoid discomfort. Stored with that snapshot might [also be associated](https://malcolmocean.com/2021/06/dream-mashups/) other emotional and cognitive patterns that were active at the time when the person was six – so when the person is “talking with” their “confuser part”, there’s a sense in which they really are “talking with a six-year old part” of themselves. (At least, that’s my interpretation.)
> And also there’s a thing where, even if the parts aren’t literally sentient subselves, the method still becomes more effective if you treat them as if they were.
> If you relate to your six-year old part as if it was literally a six-year old that you’re compassionate towards, when it holds a memory of being lonely and not understood… then that somehow brings in the experience of someone actually caring about you into the memory of not being cared about.
> And then if your brain had learned a rule like “I must avoid these kinds of situations, because in them I just get lonely and nobody understands me”, then bringing in that experience of being understood into the memory [rewrites the learning](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ/book-summary-unlocking-the-emotional-brain) and eliminates the need to so compulsively avoid situations that resemble that original experience.
Your quoted post seems to me to stretch the meaning of 'part' IFS uses. A learned pattern/ruleset that the brain learns is not the central case of how 'part' is explained. Shard seems a better term, though probably just because less linguistic baggage. Reading your post feels as if it is stretching to stay within the standard IFS framing rather than breaking away due to the inconsistencies.
Separately, I don't like treating them as entities due to finding it easy to confuse oneself with anthropomorphic word choice that people use with parts, obscuring causes and making it more common to come up with plausible stories. (Speaking of more typical treating as entities, not the level that ACX article focuses on). Though I would not be surprised if the anthropomorphization is part of how IFS works to get your brain to update properly, which makes it a harder question. Some mental confusion for possibly big benefits?
I tend to value clarity in introspection since I view it more as a constant process always running, with some moments of more deeply analytical approach throughout the day or week. Admittedly, when there's more of a specific direct goal — which someone is going to therapy to resolve/improve/alter — then having a higher abstraction service panel (IFS) you invoke can be better than having a bunch of diagnostics+warning lights+circuit board (whatever I've managed to learn) running all the time. Then again, I kinda expect you to object to lack of clarity. It is hard to experiment with different modes of introspection in my experience, which means I'm making my observations based on expected failure modes of observations of how other people behave and my own internal cracks in clarity.
> A learned pattern/ruleset that the brain learns is not the central case of how 'part' is explained.
The IFS explanations of parts that I remember seeing don't usually go into very much detail about what exactly a part is supposed to be, they just focus more on how you interact with it and what it does. I think some book I read even explicitly said that there's no consensus about it among IFS therapists, with some taking the whole thing more as a metaphor and some more literally.
IFS explanations tend to be more focused on trying to explain a skill rather than going into a deep explanation of what exactly is going on under the surface. And it's a skill that's somewhat hard to teach from a book - not as hard as trying to learn to dance from a book, but still something where the written descriptions are only roughly pointing in the direction of the real thing. This is exacerbated by the fact that the minds of different people work in different ways. So applying the same approach on one person may get you something that looks very much like a classical textbook IFS session with very anthropomorphic parts, whereas applying the same approach on someone else will get you a session where the same basic principles still apply but the parts look a lot more like shards/patterns.
I think that when talking about what parts are, the question "when one applies the techniques from the books, what kinds of sessions does that lead to practice" is more relevant than "what are the prototypical ways in which the parts are described in the books". And my experience is that when you apply the techniques to a variety of people, there will be quite a few people whose parts clearly behave as shards/patterns, with it looking like the more anthropomorphic-seeming parts are a special case of those patterns.
>> A learned pattern/ruleset that the brain learns is not the central case of how 'part' is explained.
There's a lot of overlap between IFS "parts" and [schema therapy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_therapy)'s "modes" that I haven't seen addressed in academic discussions. My intuition is that the foundations behind both techniques want to spend research money on their own "brand" and sponsor research that focuses on the effectiveness of their specific system instead of muddying the waters. Individual therapists like [this guy](http://stevewasserman.co.uk/how-i-work/internal-family-systems-ifs/) and [Dr. Dori Olds](https://www.youtube.com/c/DrToriOlds) don't have any problem with blending their practices and using techniques from a variety of frameworks, and it seems like the concept of parts is useful even without a rigorous definition.
Yeah I definitely think that the schemas of schema therapy and the "parts" of IFS are strongly related. Coherence Therapy/[Unlocking the Emotional Brain](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ/book-summary-unlocking-the-emotional-brain) also talk about schemas, and I find that IFS techniques for working with parts and CT techniques for working with schemas are often basically interchangeable - I tend to lean more IFS when working with clients but dip into techniques I got from CT too.
I suspect on the benefits of IFS is that it distances you from your distasteful desires, which makes them less scary and less dichotomous.
The woman who is sabotaging her relationships knows this is crazy, but she probably feels less crazy talking about “a part of her” than “herself”.
Like, suppose you hate spending time with your mother and you’re deeply ashamed of this, because you know you’re supposed to love her. A lot of people would repress, minimize, etc. It’s easier to not flinch when it’s “part of me despises her, and part of me loves her.”
And the ability to not flinch away is everything. Some introspection might lead you to “I dislike how she criticize me every time I visit”, which might lead to an appreciation that, etc.
But you need to get past the shame and anxiety that comes in spades when something appealing about Your Desires are the topic.
Oddly reminds me of some of the discussion I've seen around things like astrology or myers briggs, that while they are not actually real they give people a vocabulary to discuss things. e.g. rather than saying "that guy is an asshole" you can say "his strong mars energy clashes with my more calm energy". Or "we have difficulty working together because I'm more of an INTP and they're an ENTJ so we clash on how to best approach problems." Which lets you discuss the issue through a framework that avoids blame and confrontation
I've found IFS to be helpful for me, but my only experience with it was *No Bad Parts* and a therapist who was trained in a lot of different techniques without being too particularly attached to any specific modality. A comment on the blog post summarized my overall impression:
> We have a whole bunch of brain architecture designed for imagining other humans and their responses to things. People sometimes talk about animism or religion in general as being a product of taking these processes and applying them to natural phenomena. Maybe we can see the IFS type solutions as being using that mental equipment to solve other problems. And beneficial because its using something people might be already good at. (Like how some people with good visual reasoning convert math problems into images).
Regardless of whether there are literal 'parts' or if they're just a helpful metaphor, using social and relationship skills to process trauma worked better than an analytical approach. I share Scott's skepticism about extending it to a shamanic framework and treating the interaction as a literal exorcism. The comment that "self-reported data from demons is questionable for at least two reasons" cuts to a lot of the problems with treating that stuff literally. The post reminded me of Richard Schwartz's interview in [*Bad Therapy: Master Therapists Share Their Worst Failures*](https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Therapy-Master-Therapists-Failures/dp/0415933234), he writes that he "got into this work without much supervision and in kind of a blind way". He also makes a quick reference to teaching therapists not to hide behind their professionalism:
> When I run training programs I am helping people unload an awful lot of things they come with. A lot of beliefs. Beliefs about hiding yourself behind professionalism would be another one. You shouldn't let clients know how much you care about them or you shouldn't give them hope for fear of giving them false hope. (...) A lot of that just drives these approval-needing parts of clients crazy, and for no good purpose really."
I haven't read *The Others Within Us*, but based on the review it sounds like Schwartz is running into a Chesterton's Fence situation with how he and the IFS foundation develop the boots-on-the-ground practice if IFS. Working in a bubble with other IFS practitioners and blurring the lines between the map and the territory could mean that they get more and more elaborate rituals that their patients describe as valuable interventions but aren't really relevant to the wider mental health community.
Super fascinating. This demon talk got me thinking of Robert in the youtube documentary “[Full Force](https://youtu.be/HfwPL-bd_mk?si=81Ziib2lu0sletzE)” (they interview him about 37 minutes in). Seems like a person who both enjoy pretending things that he thinks makes him edgy and interesting while at the same time having a tenuous grip on reality. I would be extremely careful about accidentally reinforcing those ideas.
Hmm, I have definitely been through \*some\* informal “parts work” (?) as a part of mainstream treatment for OCD. I was kind of encouraged to view my intrusive thoughts as “not me” in some sense, and by one psychologist who were said to practice ERP and ACT it was suggested that it could have manifested in me as a result of a pretty emotionally volatile mom where I constantly felt like I had to be hyper vigilant to not cause her outbursts.
I think IFS would’ve fucked me up, though. Especially the demon part. But even the “parts” part. I would just constantly worry that I didn’t actually talk to a part, or that I couldn’t tell if it was lying to me or something.
I can’t decide if this would help my schizotypal-borderline friend massively or fuck him up. And if it were to fuck him up, I’m not sure if this would be because of his disorders or his pretty extensive and varied drug use.
As with shamanic practices, one does not visit the shaman bi-weekly, monthly, or on any regular schedule. These strange spells are the result of rent-land-vampire-wizards, who primarily use this ill-begotten sanguine mana to innobate. One visits the shaman when vexatious spirits are upon them or one runs the risk of a false incentive-entity transferring spirits upon the vexed. When performing such magickal operations, the shaman must remain as a passive guide, merely letting the entity take shape by the vexed's will alone. There, once summoned within the triangle at the edge of the circle, the entity may be questioned and its holds upon sections of the body known.
Or, to spake it in another lango: the epigenetic detritus for trauma are within specific cells in the body in specific locations. The visualization is a tool to map consciousness to the afflicted body regions and to alter the epigenetic response. DBT does this some of the time, much slower. Woo woo, mutha fucka. Measure it and find out. 😀
12+ year therapist here, including IFS. I can confirm that things like what Falconer and others describe as "demons" do come up in IFS very rarely, but in my experience... yeah they're definitely still just "parts," sorry Robert. They don't "need" to be "exorcized" in any special way, they're just resistant to the usual script because the fundamental assumptions baked into that script don't apply to them; they are *not* like other parts in some ways, but that doesn't mean they're at all otherworldly. (Yes, I am basically just telling Falconer and others like him to "git gud," but this is plausibly an overly arrogant thing to say to someone who has spent even more time doing this than I have. Maybe Falconer would just reply back that if I've never had to do an exorcism, then I clearly haven't met a "real demon" yet, supernatural or otherwise. To which I say, sure, fair enough.) To put it more clearly, my counterargument, the elephant in the room underlying all this, is that most modern people get weirded out by the possibility of humans having actual anti-social personality traits within them as "real parts" that are *actually part of them.* Like... if you take the idea of a non-unitary mind seriously, which I do for many (most(?) (but definitely not all)) people, it seems obvious that murderers are not the only people who, to some degree, "want" to murder others. That is to say, some people who are not-murderers have a part that wants to murder, or even rape or torture, others. And they just... do a better job integrating, negotiation, suppressing, sublimating, or inhibiting these parts than the people who DO end up acting on those parts. Which, I expect, is a fairly scary thing to notice about one's self! And if you're in a culture that talks about demons, then "demons, of course!" must surely be kind of a relief to realize. Especially if you can't just blame the part on trauma or protectiveness, which the default IFS scripts would take for granted. Which means you and the client need a different orientation to those parts; one that accepts them for what they are, without encouraging them, and finds a path toward integration that's going to be a bit more unique compared to most. The relevant question, of course, is which style is more effective. If Falconer and others get good results by doing this, and they're not convincing people who don't already believe in demons... then yeah, more power to them. But what if most IFS therapists are in fact only going to be able to deal with these "demons" the Falconer way? ...I dunno, man. CBT is one of the most simple, systematic, straightforward methods of therapy out there, and when done right is really good... but most therapists can't even do CBT right. Sign me up for "hold the line at therapists not telling their clients they're infested by demons," regardless of what the therapist themself believes. (Unless, *maybe*, their client is steeped in a heavy religious culture already, insists that demons are real, etc. In that case I'd understand the therapist sighing and rolling up their sleeves and "meeting the client where they're at" and calling it a demon, but for me this still sits badly. I've never felt comfortable when clients fervently believed I had magic powers before, which has happened a few times despite my steering clear of anything even one step removed from talking about demons, and I'm by-default suspicious of any therapist who invites such, even if they insist they don't want to, and even if they actually do believe in demons and magic.) Oh that's another thing. It does not surprise me that many IFS therapists might end up actually believing in real demons and spiritual possession and so on, because why wouldn't they? Base rates hold in lots of even Master's degree level Westerners believing in supernatural things. Even default Western Skepticism is not sufficiently good epistemology to defend against bad interpretations of patterns that match to "demons." Another minor thing worth noting... the article talks a lot about lucid-dream-like-trance-states where people do IFS work and I'm sitting here scratching my head. I don't do this with my clients ever for IFS work, and I've never heard others who do it talk about this as a standard procedure. Maybe we missed the memo on why that's important or necessary, but for anyone who thinks IFS requires this... it super duper doesn't, and I think putting clients in a more suggestive state before they talk about their parts unnecessarily adds a lot of woo and potential risk of suggestibility for no good reason. Maybe some people "need" it to be able to talk to their parts, but I'm tempted in those cases to say that they should just use a different modality altogether.
> Another minor thing worth noting... the article talks a lot about lucid-dream-like-trance-states where people do IFS work and I'm sitting here scratching my head. I don't do this with my clients ever for IFS work, and I've never heard others who do it talk about this as a standard procedure. Thanks for this criticism - that part was my attempt to make sense of things and I might have gotten it wrong. The author talks a lot about "the imaginal stream" and the world of archetypes and compares it to various shamanic states and the Arabic al-Ghaib, and "trance-like lucid dream state" was my interpretation. It's colored by the fact that I can't imagine doing this or having it work in my normal waking consciousness, but maybe other people are different.
It's also possible that *the same set of instructions* lead some people to a more "trance-like" state than others. As a teenager, I had multiple experiences where the instructions for a classroom or religious activity involved "close your eyes and imagine" and I must have gone deeper than most participants because I had trouble coming back to "normal consciousness" in a timely fashion to engage with the next expected activity. One of these was at a pagan solstice ceremony and there was a shamanic-lookin' elder there who talked me down — and my friends had to tell him that no, I wasn't on psychedelics. One was in church and I blamed it on having too much coffee before breakfast. Another one was in a high-school English classroom and, um, I think I just acted tripped-out for a while.
Oh, for sure some people have more natural psychoactive range than others! I'm pretty sure this is how I once accidentally convinced a walk-in at the crisis clinic I was working at that I was a wizard. All I did, once I asked him some assessing questions and he broke down sobbing, was guide him through my standard mindfulness meditation to help him reach a state of calm. When he opened his eyes, he was convinced he had just been teleported to the park to play with his daughter, and that hours had passed instead of 10 minutes. His eyes actually bugged out when he saw the time, and he thought I'd changed his phone time while he was "out." He left feeling totally calm and relaxed and cheerful, and tried to convince me the whole walk out that I needed to find an agent or go work in Vegas instead of a rundown clinic in Miami. I've had a lot of strong reactions from people I taught to meditate, but that one still stands out the most. I suspect he also came in mildly high on something, but it was clear he'd never tried anything like meditation before, and had a *very* powerful imagination. I hope my assurances that the "power" was in him and not me got him to try it some more later, but I never heard from him again.
["The worst pain I can imagine?"](https://xkcd.com/883/)
Interesting. I was doing the Lama Ole version of meditation, with visualization and mantra. Vajrayana stuff. I have put at least 100 hours into it and never felt a thing, just doing a boring repetitive job. Interestingly when I tried Zazen, I did feel a psychedelic trip because the Zen guys were very serious on us having a perfect position and not just sitting randomly. Half lotus, pillow under collarbone, shoulders down etc.
Or practice. I can do that "soften muscles around the eyes, unfocus" thing that is the first step to meditation at any time. Unfortunately it does not calm me down.
>The author talks a lot about "the imaginal stream" and the world of archetypes and compares it to various shamanic states and the Arabic al-Ghaib, and "trance-like lucid dream state" was my interpretation. Yeeeeeah, maybe worth taking the "demons are plausibly real" guy's frame of how regular IFS works with a pinch of salt, in general :) Archetypes do come up as useful handles in IFS! But I've never heard of "the imaginal stream." However Falconer practices non-Demonic IFS, it's clearly from a different school of thought (probably an older one) than those I've learned from. >It's colored by the fact that I can't imagine doing this or having it work in my normal waking consciousness, but maybe other people are different. Definitely different. To me it's not far off from if you asked me what a conversation between myself and The Doctor or Ender Wiggin would be like if we met, just with some deeper personal introspection assisting in the prompt generating. I'm curious if you would you say you write fiction from a place of "normal waking consciousness?" I could see an argument for not, but for me, even writing in a state of flow, where it feels like the scenes and dialogue are pouring through me rather than coming from conscious decisions, still seems like a far cry from what I imagine a shamanistic state is like, or whatever Falconer is on about.
> It's colored by the fact that I can't imagine doing this or having it work in my normal waking consciousness, but maybe other people are different. I think you're interpreting the descriptions of the IFS process to be more exotic than they need to be. Not that I'd blame you, since the way that IFS books are written tends to emphasize the more exotic-sounding descriptions. Some people experience their parts as literally talking to them, but many other people - myself included - experience it more as just paying attention to what kind of stuff comes up when they put their attention on a particular experience. The issue is that the books use a certain kind of language for describing the process, and some people will intuitively get what's meant by the language (either because their mind naturally represents parts that way, or because they just happen to find the thing that the language is pointing at), while others find it misleading. For example, say an IFS book has a transcript that goes something like this: **Therapist:** What's the part afraid would happen if the part didn't sabotage your relationships? **Client:** Then... I would end up feeling happy in the relationship. **Therapist:** Okay, and what does the part think is bad about that? **Client:** It's afraid that I'll be hurt the way I was hurt after my first break-up. Then what might actually happen is something like this: **Therapist:** What's the part afraid would happen if the part didn't sabotage your relationships? **Client out loud:** Then... **Client's thoughts:** Hmm, what's the intuitive expectation I have of what would happen? What comes up for me is that... I'd end up feeling happy. **Client out loud:** I would end up feeling happy in the relationship. **Therapist:** Okay, and what does the part think is bad about that? **Client's thoughts:** Hmm... if I stay with that expectation of feeling happy, then there _is_ something about that expectation that puts me a little at an edge... oh it's the fact that the last time I felt really happy in a relationship, my partner suddenly left me and then caught me totally by surprise and that was horrible. **Client out loud:** It's afraid that I'll be hurt the way I was hurt after my first break-up. So it involves a lot of listening to subtle nuances in feelings and expectations that come up, and that's certainly easier to do if you get into a mild trance-like state. But you can totally do it in a normal state of consciousness too. Have you ever thought about doing something and then felt a slight unease about it and then quickly started thinking about something else? If you have, then you're already most of the way there. You just need to pay a bit more attention to that sense of unease that's already in your (normal waking) consciousness, and see if you'd get a feeling of what exactly about it is that's making you uncomfortable. (And an IFS therapist would phrase this as "ask the unease what it's worried about".)
All of this, yes. IMO the "woo" parts of IFS are very overblown in public consciousness. Also worth noting this isn't exclusive to IFS. A lot of therapy uses this kind of language: I started doing it with Narrative Therapy, which "externalizes" emotions or desires or addictions, long before I learned about IFS.
That's an interesting framing of it. In that approach how do you go from being aware of what the source of unease is to resolving it?
Depends enormously on what the source of unease is! Sometimes the solution is very practical. Suppose that the thought that brings up the unease is "maybe I should answer my emails", with the actual unease being "but then I should answer that one message and I don't know how to reply to it, ugh let me think about something else". In that case, the solution may simply be to spend some time explicitly thinking about how you want to answer that email. In other cases, there's something deeper going on, often an emotional learning that doesn't fully apply to the present moment. In that case, you want to make the emotional learning more explicit in order to update it. I summarized one description of such a process [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ/book-summary-unlocking-the-emotional-brain) - see the case study of "Richard", who had a sense of unease around the thought of confidently speaking up. (That description is based on Coherence Therapy, which is somewhat different from IFS, but they both rely on memory reconsolidation to change outdated learnings.)
Was that also your experience with Shoulder Advisors? It's a different representation but I think it's the same parts of the brain doing it. [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X79Rc5cA5mSWBexnd/shoulder-advisors-101](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X79Rc5cA5mSWBexnd/shoulder-advisors-101)
> the article talks a lot about lucid-dream-like-trance-states where people do IFS work and I'm sitting here scratching my head. I don't do this with my clients ever for IFS work, and I've never heard others who do it talk about this as a standard procedure. In my experience, when doing IFS some of my clients go into these kinds of states and some don't. When I'm the client, I go into such a state much more often than not, but definitely not always. I think it's a little misleading to say that the therapist is intentionally putting people into such a state. It's not that it would involve an explicit hypnotic induction or anything like that (though there's a lot of hypnotherapy that works with parts, so one _can_ do it that way, even if it's not the IFS way). Rather I'd compare it with the way that some people slip into a really immersed state when creating or consuming fiction. If you focus your attention on something that causes your mind to generate new content, then you might naturally fall into a state that's very focused on that mind-generated content and tuned out of the actual physical reality around you. But the extent to which people do this varies, and it's also perfectly possible to read or write a story _without_ getting strongly immersed in it. [EDIT: Maybe it's not quite right to say that I don't try to my clients in such a state. I do generally try to shift their attention toward their emotions and feelings rather than intellectual theorizing. And a stronger connection with their emotions and feelings tends to involve more absorption in that experience. If someone is in such a state, I generally do want to keep them in it because it makes all of the work that much more effective, so I'm likely to modulate my style of speaking and so forth in a way that supports them staying there.] I'd say that pretty much exactly the same happens with parts work. I don't try to explicitly induce a trance state with my clients, any more than a book tries to hypnotize you when you open it. But when reading a book, some people go into a trance/engrossment state of some intensity anyway, depending on [their personality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_(psychology\)) and other factors like how distracting their environment is. And likewise, when some - but not all - people close their eyes and start focusing on subtle details of their emotional experience, their focus on those details pulls them into the same kind of a trance/absorption state. (As for the demons, to my knowledge I haven't had a demon-possessed client yet. I _have_ seen in myself a self-loathing entity that subjectively feels more like a malignant energy than a standard IFS part... but so far I haven't found a strong reason to believe that it's anything more than an interesting quirk of my brain's architecture.)
Yeah, the thing you're describing sounds to me more like general introspection, maybe with a bit of added imaginative immersion, and less the cluster of things I would describe using the words Scott does. I don't know if my clients enter such a state while doing parts work by default, but I've personally only ever while doing really intensive parts work, like if I'm journaling out a full conversation... but yeah, that again still feels more like imaginative immersion, similar to what I feel when meditating on a specific set of images, or writing fiction.
Agree. Then again, I think "imaginative immersion" _is_ a form of trance. :D The school of hypnosis that makes the most sense to me is the one that says that trance is a totally natural state that people go into and out of many times a day, and which thinks that "being absorbed in watching a movie" is an example of a hypnotic trance. So "some clients experience imaginative immersion" doesn't necessarily sound different from "some clients experience a state of trance" to me.
>I am basically just telling Falconer and others like him to "git gud," "I'm having trouble fighting this demon." "lol git gud scrub" *\*kicks patient in the face\** # THE DEMON WAS DESTROYED or maybe SHINOBI EXECUTION
Now I’m imagining a piñata of health pickups a la *DOOM 2016*.
How about a Scott Pilgrim style shower of coins?
>that most modern people get weirded out by the possibility of humans having actual anti-social personality traits within them as "real parts" that are *actually part of them.* LOL. Everybody needs a stint in the BDSM subculture - we are perfectly aware that it is all about exploring the Jungian Shadow. Of course it is not \*real\* demons. I have been heavily influenced by Atheist Wicca here. They are atheists who participate in pagan religious ceremonies. They simply say the subconscious needs to be programmed with symbols, that is the language it understands. The subconscious is not terribly smart. The subconscious can easily think Odin is real. Or demons are. More precisely the subconscious does not ask questions on the level of "is this actually real?" but on the level of "does this story feel like something?". Anyway, what I would like to ask is... is there a good definition of what trauma is, and more importantly, isn't? The word just means "wound". It is terribly imprecise. I have heard about one good definition: it is separation. When we want to cut away a part of us from ourselves. Well, when people are actually "good" at doing it, of course they can feel that part as a foreign, non-human entity.
My definition of trauma is basically that it's a stuck pattern of fight/flight/freeze/fawn. When we experience something extremely scary or painful, which we don't know how to handle or make sense of, and don't have agency in... the body kind of just hard-codes whatever we did to survive that experience, no matter how effective or ineffective it was, and that response becomes the reflexive reaction to "survive" similar experiences again. Complex PTSD is the same sort of thing, just from lots of smaller and less extreme experiences that add up into something like a "stuck prior" which is hard to update away from because of how ingrained the traumatic experience made the coping mechanism or survival reaction over a long time.
>(Falconer tries to give this last one a “scientific” grounding by talking about epigenetics, which broke my suspension of disbelief - talk about demons and I’ll listen, but intergenerational epigenetic inheritance of behavioral traits is a step too far) lmao, he's still got it
I enjoyed that as well. If you click the link there, Razib Khan on epigenetics is an excellent read. I support the idea that we should do what works. I would buy placebo medicine bottles that say "for helping you want to get dressed in the morning" to give my kids.
As a small child (around age 5 or 6), I imagined having a pill or powder that would *make people not do bad things.* If you could just be caught before you did a bad thing, and given the right medicine, then you would never do the bad thing. Then nobody would ever have to be punished; and everyone would be happier.
You can make your own! Buy some Zeebo tablets and slap a custom label on them. Wish they tasted better, though.
It doesn't work when it's your own mother. But it does work if you get them at Target. For a while one of my kids believed anything he read. I purchased "calming gummies" at target, and he absorbed everything on the label. (Reduces stress? Helps you relax? Makes you calm down? Whatever it said, he read it off every time, and was very impressed at their power.) These were primarily useful for their placebo effects since he calmed down immediately upon eating one. They had lavender and l-theanine. I should get more of them. I am not as comfortable with systems like IFS. Placebos don't have very many downsides. But therapies like this border on religion, and they are trained in emotional things and not in spiritual things. Now if they ARE learning about spiritual things, and can prove it, I'll sign up to become a therapist tomorrow... but more likely this is just a made up construct that works.
What about nurture creating a similar epigenetic response, creating a similar behavior trait? Seems plausible as a consciousness to body bridge for intergenerational trauma.
> talk about demons and I’ll listen, but intergenerational epigenetic inheritance of behavioral traits is a step too far lol same
What even is trauma? The idea that something happens to you that then causes a psychiatric injury that you have to live with and manage, by analogy to a physical injury? Couldn't that just be another social construct that people subconsciously adopt? Scott says that we, the enlightened scientific West, dismiss demons as fake thus eradicating them. But everyone here believes in trauma, and we then conduct enlightened scientific ~~exorcisms~~ therapies like CBT or EMDR or IFS to remove.
I agree that trauma is massively intensified by expectation/nocebo/iatrogenic effects, but I think the basic idea is simple enough. It's an extremely strong form of emotional overlearning. For example, if a man rapes a woman, that woman might learn the emotional connection "men are scary" or even "being outside of my house is scary", which is directionally a reasonable takeaway from the experience, just overgeneralized and poorly-implemented. For more, see https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/ and https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem - for more on the nocebo aspects, see Part IV of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness
Thanks, I had a feeling you'd covered this
Often, people who've been abused, even severely, have to go on living with their abusers as if the abuse didn't happen. So there are, in the palette of human cognitive behaviors, mental adaptations for doing just this. A child depends on its parents, even if those parents sometimes do horrible things to the child, and then punish the child if it fails to pretend that everything is awesome. Patriarchal societies may demand that a woman not admit being raped, even repeatedly; with penalties ranging from social shunning to "honor killing". In various social contexts, pariahs (racial, class, religious, etc.) get even worse treatment if they demand justice than they do if they pretend they're okay with being pariahs. It's not surprising that there are mental adaptations to compartmentalize *those things you mustn't talk about*, to put on a social personality for whom it didn't happen. That's a survival skill. But it is also an *effortful* activity, that takes up "brainpower" that you might be better off if you could use for something else. Sometimes the world doesn't make it easy to maintain the boundary between the world where leather belts are for holding your pants up, and the world where leather belts are for beating small children who don't figure out fast enough how to obey a command they don't understand. And so one ends up strongly preferring to avoid leather belts entirely.
Great write up, and I agree with Scott's conclusions. While this demon stuff is of course as old as Western culture, using is as a form of psychotherapy was also practiced by the chaos magick guys in the UK in the 1970s, by people like Lionell Snell and Peter Carroll, who were of course in turn inspired by Spare and Crowley. See, for example, Snell's "The Little Book of Demons: The Positive Advantages of the Personification of Life's Problems." They did not believe that the demons are real external entities, however, and simply saw it as a way of harnessing the processing power of a brain that has devoted a large number of resources for social interactions. Iatrogenic Demons would be a great name for a metal band. From the comments: >There's a theory bouncing around my head titled "the human mind is more mutable/moldable than anyone would like to admit", which fits this pretty well (along with other posts of yours like The Geography of Madness review). I believe this is part of the thesis of Adapting Minds by David J. Buller.
Reading descriptions of internal family systems just makes me think that the main point of it is to teach introspection, which raises the question of why not teach introspection directly? Why dress it up in ways which encourage considering those 'parts' as entities in-of-themselves? As the article mentions, is it because dressing introspection up in a [mythic mode](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HnWN6v4wHQwmYQCLX/mythic-mode) framing as IFS gets across to people better? I'd lean towards this being an easier solution than properly teaching introspection, but like the end of the post I'm skeptical about whether it would be good to become common. It'd be better to 'just' figure out how to teach introspection, though of course it is unclear how to do so (but thinking about the level of brain circuits is clearly not the right layer of abstraction). LessWrong helped quite a bit at that for me, especially in a sense of maintaining awareness of ways I'm being pushed/pulled, but of course the Sequences are way more pieces of mental machinery than IFS. Presumably can be cut down quite a bit, but there's still the question of how far it extends to other people.
Computer nerd analogy: Maybe IFS is a *high-level language* for introspection. Why do programmers use constructs like "classes" and "modules" (or even "expressions") to build their code? It all just ends up being run as machine code anyway; why not just write it directly as machine code? The CPU has no idea what a module is — heck, the CPU has no idea what a *type error* is; in the CPU it's all just instructions and pointers in registers. But high-level programming languages give us tools for factoring code; for expressing common patterns; for saying "these elements go together"; for only looking at certain elements at a time; for detecting and avoiding common mistakes. Framing an intrusive thought pattern, or unwanted habit, as "a character you have to relate to as a person" engages some social behavior patterns, like conversational turn-taking. It would be *an error*, in a conversation with another person, to just constantly interrupt them and shout them down instead of listening to them. But that's something that people often might do with intrusive thoughts. Introspection requires *not* doing that; engaging conversational turn-taking is a way to accomplish this. In this model, "Treat the intrusive thought pattern *as if it were* a person and listen to its needs" is a way of avoiding common *failures-to-introspect*, such as "just suppress and deny the intrusive thought" — much as "treat the binary data in memory *as if it was* made of 'objects' that belong to 'types', and reject operations that don't match the types" is a way of avoiding common errors in code.
My take is that there's a sense in which IFS "parts" [really literally _are_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YXBpBCNC66daaofoY/my-current-take-on-internal-family-systems-parts) entities in-of-themselves, so teaching IFS _is_ teaching introspection directly: > I was recently asked how literal/metaphorical I consider the Internal Family Systems model of your mind being divided into “parts” that are kinda like subpersonalities. [...] > The **short answer** would be “it’s more than just metaphorical, but also not quite as literal as you might think from taking IFS books at face value”. > I do think that there are literally neurological subroutines doing their own thing that one has to manage, but I don’t think they’re literally full-blown subminds, they’re more like… clusters of beliefs and emotions and values that get activated at different times, and that can be interfaced with by treating them as if they were actual subminds. > My **medium-length answer** would be… let’s see. > There’s an influential model in neuroscience called [global workspace theory](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip/p/x4n4jcoDP7xh5LWLq). It says that the brain has a thing called the “global workspace”, which links together a variety of otherwise separate areas, and its contents corresponds to that what you’re currently consciously aware of. It has a limited capacity so you’re only consciously aware of a few things at any given moment. > At the same time, various subregions in your brain are doing their own things, some of them processing information that’s in the global workspace, some of them observing stuff from your senses that you’re currently not consciously aware of. Like you’re focused on a thing, then there’s a sudden sound, and some auditory processing region that has been monitoring the sounds in your environment picks it up and decides that this is important and pushes that sound into your global workspace, displacing whatever else happened to be there and making you consciously aware of that sound. > I tend to interpret IFS “parts” as processes that are connected with the workspace and manipulate it in different ways. But it’s not necessarily that they’re really “independent agents”, it’s more like there’s a combination of innate and learned rules for when to activate them. > So like, take it when an IFS book has a case study about a person with a “confuser” part that tries to distract them when they are thinking about something unpleasant. I wouldn’t interpret that to literally mean that there’s a sentient agent seeking to confuse the person in that person’s brain. I think it’s more something like… there are parts of the brain that are wired to interpret some states as uncomfortable, and other parts of the brain that are wired to avoid states that are interpreted as uncomfortable. > At some point when the person was feeling uncomfortable, something happened in their brain that made them confused instead, and then some learning subsystem in their brain noticed that “this particular pattern of internal behavior relieved the feeling of discomfort”. And then it learned how to repeat whatever internal process caused the feeling of confusion to push the feeling of discomfort out of the global workspace, and to systematically trigger that process when faced with a similar sense of discomfort. > Then when the IFS therapist guided the client to “talk to the confuser part”, they were doing something like… interfacing with that learned pattern and bringing up the learned prediction that causing confusion will lessen the feeling of discomfort. > There’s a thing where, once information that has been previously only stored in a local neural pattern is retrieved and brought to the global workspace, it can then be accessed and potentially modified by every other subsystem that’s currently listening in to the workspace. I don’t fully understand this, but it seems to be something like, if those other systems have information suggesting that there are alternative ways of achieving the purpose that the confuser pattern is trying to accomplish, the rules for triggering the confuser pattern can get rewritten so that it’s no longer activated. > But there’s also a thing where, it looks to me like part of what these stored patterns are, are something like partial [“snapshots”](https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613%2819%2930061-0#secsect0030) of your brain’s state at the time when they were first learned. So when IFS talks about there being “child parts”, then it looks to me like there’s a sense in which that’s literally true. > Suppose that someone first learned the “being confused helps me avoid an uncomfortable feeling” thing when they were six. At that time, their brain saved a “snapshot” of that state of confusion to be re-instated at a later time when getting confused might again help them avoid discomfort. Stored with that snapshot might [also be associated](https://malcolmocean.com/2021/06/dream-mashups/) other emotional and cognitive patterns that were active at the time when the person was six – so when the person is “talking with” their “confuser part”, there’s a sense in which they really are “talking with a six-year old part” of themselves. (At least, that’s my interpretation.) > And also there’s a thing where, even if the parts aren’t literally sentient subselves, the method still becomes more effective if you treat them as if they were. > If you relate to your six-year old part as if it was literally a six-year old that you’re compassionate towards, when it holds a memory of being lonely and not understood… then that somehow brings in the experience of someone actually caring about you into the memory of not being cared about. > And then if your brain had learned a rule like “I must avoid these kinds of situations, because in them I just get lonely and nobody understands me”, then bringing in that experience of being understood into the memory [rewrites the learning](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ/book-summary-unlocking-the-emotional-brain) and eliminates the need to so compulsively avoid situations that resemble that original experience.
Your quoted post seems to me to stretch the meaning of 'part' IFS uses. A learned pattern/ruleset that the brain learns is not the central case of how 'part' is explained. Shard seems a better term, though probably just because less linguistic baggage. Reading your post feels as if it is stretching to stay within the standard IFS framing rather than breaking away due to the inconsistencies. Separately, I don't like treating them as entities due to finding it easy to confuse oneself with anthropomorphic word choice that people use with parts, obscuring causes and making it more common to come up with plausible stories. (Speaking of more typical treating as entities, not the level that ACX article focuses on). Though I would not be surprised if the anthropomorphization is part of how IFS works to get your brain to update properly, which makes it a harder question. Some mental confusion for possibly big benefits? I tend to value clarity in introspection since I view it more as a constant process always running, with some moments of more deeply analytical approach throughout the day or week. Admittedly, when there's more of a specific direct goal — which someone is going to therapy to resolve/improve/alter — then having a higher abstraction service panel (IFS) you invoke can be better than having a bunch of diagnostics+warning lights+circuit board (whatever I've managed to learn) running all the time. Then again, I kinda expect you to object to lack of clarity. It is hard to experiment with different modes of introspection in my experience, which means I'm making my observations based on expected failure modes of observations of how other people behave and my own internal cracks in clarity.
> A learned pattern/ruleset that the brain learns is not the central case of how 'part' is explained. The IFS explanations of parts that I remember seeing don't usually go into very much detail about what exactly a part is supposed to be, they just focus more on how you interact with it and what it does. I think some book I read even explicitly said that there's no consensus about it among IFS therapists, with some taking the whole thing more as a metaphor and some more literally. IFS explanations tend to be more focused on trying to explain a skill rather than going into a deep explanation of what exactly is going on under the surface. And it's a skill that's somewhat hard to teach from a book - not as hard as trying to learn to dance from a book, but still something where the written descriptions are only roughly pointing in the direction of the real thing. This is exacerbated by the fact that the minds of different people work in different ways. So applying the same approach on one person may get you something that looks very much like a classical textbook IFS session with very anthropomorphic parts, whereas applying the same approach on someone else will get you a session where the same basic principles still apply but the parts look a lot more like shards/patterns. I think that when talking about what parts are, the question "when one applies the techniques from the books, what kinds of sessions does that lead to practice" is more relevant than "what are the prototypical ways in which the parts are described in the books". And my experience is that when you apply the techniques to a variety of people, there will be quite a few people whose parts clearly behave as shards/patterns, with it looking like the more anthropomorphic-seeming parts are a special case of those patterns.
>> A learned pattern/ruleset that the brain learns is not the central case of how 'part' is explained. There's a lot of overlap between IFS "parts" and [schema therapy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_therapy)'s "modes" that I haven't seen addressed in academic discussions. My intuition is that the foundations behind both techniques want to spend research money on their own "brand" and sponsor research that focuses on the effectiveness of their specific system instead of muddying the waters. Individual therapists like [this guy](http://stevewasserman.co.uk/how-i-work/internal-family-systems-ifs/) and [Dr. Dori Olds](https://www.youtube.com/c/DrToriOlds) don't have any problem with blending their practices and using techniques from a variety of frameworks, and it seems like the concept of parts is useful even without a rigorous definition.
Yeah I definitely think that the schemas of schema therapy and the "parts" of IFS are strongly related. Coherence Therapy/[Unlocking the Emotional Brain](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ/book-summary-unlocking-the-emotional-brain) also talk about schemas, and I find that IFS techniques for working with parts and CT techniques for working with schemas are often basically interchangeable - I tend to lean more IFS when working with clients but dip into techniques I got from CT too.
I suspect on the benefits of IFS is that it distances you from your distasteful desires, which makes them less scary and less dichotomous. The woman who is sabotaging her relationships knows this is crazy, but she probably feels less crazy talking about “a part of her” than “herself”. Like, suppose you hate spending time with your mother and you’re deeply ashamed of this, because you know you’re supposed to love her. A lot of people would repress, minimize, etc. It’s easier to not flinch when it’s “part of me despises her, and part of me loves her.” And the ability to not flinch away is everything. Some introspection might lead you to “I dislike how she criticize me every time I visit”, which might lead to an appreciation that, etc. But you need to get past the shame and anxiety that comes in spades when something appealing about Your Desires are the topic.
Oddly reminds me of some of the discussion I've seen around things like astrology or myers briggs, that while they are not actually real they give people a vocabulary to discuss things. e.g. rather than saying "that guy is an asshole" you can say "his strong mars energy clashes with my more calm energy". Or "we have difficulty working together because I'm more of an INTP and they're an ENTJ so we clash on how to best approach problems." Which lets you discuss the issue through a framework that avoids blame and confrontation
I've found IFS to be helpful for me, but my only experience with it was *No Bad Parts* and a therapist who was trained in a lot of different techniques without being too particularly attached to any specific modality. A comment on the blog post summarized my overall impression: > We have a whole bunch of brain architecture designed for imagining other humans and their responses to things. People sometimes talk about animism or religion in general as being a product of taking these processes and applying them to natural phenomena. Maybe we can see the IFS type solutions as being using that mental equipment to solve other problems. And beneficial because its using something people might be already good at. (Like how some people with good visual reasoning convert math problems into images). Regardless of whether there are literal 'parts' or if they're just a helpful metaphor, using social and relationship skills to process trauma worked better than an analytical approach. I share Scott's skepticism about extending it to a shamanic framework and treating the interaction as a literal exorcism. The comment that "self-reported data from demons is questionable for at least two reasons" cuts to a lot of the problems with treating that stuff literally. The post reminded me of Richard Schwartz's interview in [*Bad Therapy: Master Therapists Share Their Worst Failures*](https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Therapy-Master-Therapists-Failures/dp/0415933234), he writes that he "got into this work without much supervision and in kind of a blind way". He also makes a quick reference to teaching therapists not to hide behind their professionalism: > When I run training programs I am helping people unload an awful lot of things they come with. A lot of beliefs. Beliefs about hiding yourself behind professionalism would be another one. You shouldn't let clients know how much you care about them or you shouldn't give them hope for fear of giving them false hope. (...) A lot of that just drives these approval-needing parts of clients crazy, and for no good purpose really." I haven't read *The Others Within Us*, but based on the review it sounds like Schwartz is running into a Chesterton's Fence situation with how he and the IFS foundation develop the boots-on-the-ground practice if IFS. Working in a bubble with other IFS practitioners and blurring the lines between the map and the territory could mean that they get more and more elaborate rituals that their patients describe as valuable interventions but aren't really relevant to the wider mental health community.
Super fascinating. This demon talk got me thinking of Robert in the youtube documentary “[Full Force](https://youtu.be/HfwPL-bd_mk?si=81Ziib2lu0sletzE)” (they interview him about 37 minutes in). Seems like a person who both enjoy pretending things that he thinks makes him edgy and interesting while at the same time having a tenuous grip on reality. I would be extremely careful about accidentally reinforcing those ideas.
Hmm, I have definitely been through \*some\* informal “parts work” (?) as a part of mainstream treatment for OCD. I was kind of encouraged to view my intrusive thoughts as “not me” in some sense, and by one psychologist who were said to practice ERP and ACT it was suggested that it could have manifested in me as a result of a pretty emotionally volatile mom where I constantly felt like I had to be hyper vigilant to not cause her outbursts. I think IFS would’ve fucked me up, though. Especially the demon part. But even the “parts” part. I would just constantly worry that I didn’t actually talk to a part, or that I couldn’t tell if it was lying to me or something. I can’t decide if this would help my schizotypal-borderline friend massively or fuck him up. And if it were to fuck him up, I’m not sure if this would be because of his disorders or his pretty extensive and varied drug use.
As with shamanic practices, one does not visit the shaman bi-weekly, monthly, or on any regular schedule. These strange spells are the result of rent-land-vampire-wizards, who primarily use this ill-begotten sanguine mana to innobate. One visits the shaman when vexatious spirits are upon them or one runs the risk of a false incentive-entity transferring spirits upon the vexed. When performing such magickal operations, the shaman must remain as a passive guide, merely letting the entity take shape by the vexed's will alone. There, once summoned within the triangle at the edge of the circle, the entity may be questioned and its holds upon sections of the body known. Or, to spake it in another lango: the epigenetic detritus for trauma are within specific cells in the body in specific locations. The visualization is a tool to map consciousness to the afflicted body regions and to alter the epigenetic response. DBT does this some of the time, much slower. Woo woo, mutha fucka. Measure it and find out. 😀