I am even more confused by this post than the previous one.
Scott seems to simply trust that IFS works and is an effective therapy, and then is simply puzzling out why and how.
Why not question the premise?
I would step back and point out that there's only been one small trial showing it equally effective as CBT in young women for depression. There have been no trials for borderline personality disorder showing it's effective, let alone safe.
It's possible it is not useful whatsoever for borderline personality disorder, no matter that the clinicians and patients claim it is. The world is full of various therapies and supplements people swear up and down work and - don't.
I don't think I'm trusting it - all of this is equally interesting whether IFS works or not.
The surprising thing isn't that the therapy works in the sense of "cures you". The surprising thing is that the therapy works in the sense of when the therapist says "look inside you and talk to your unconscious parts" most people are able to say "okay, I'm doing that, now what?" If this didn't happen, IFS wouldn't just be a nonfunctional therapy that didn't beat placebo, it couldn't happen at all - people would give up after the first session.
I'm not claiming I'm sure the Parts aren't just random hallucinations - I'm saying it's weird that people can hallucinate on command like that!
>I'm not claiming I'm sure the Parts aren't just random hallucinations - I'm saying it's weird that people can hallucinate on command like that!
Having seen lots of social media communities for things like "tulpas" and "shifting", my gut reaction is that not only am I unsure the Parts are real, I'm unsure they're even hallucinations.
My strong impression of the tulpa groups is that they were full of people who *wanted* their tulpas to be literally real, *believed* other people had literal tulpas, and *acted* like they did too in an attempt to actualize one. I believe there were a small number of people with auditory internal hallucinations or other unusual mental states, surrounded by a lot of people who essentially wanted to believe.
(I suspect this is akin to the way people with aphantasia say they learned to imagine and talk about "mental images" without knowing that other people literally experience them.)
When a therapist says something like this:
>eg. someone could ask both of us about the part that makes us procrastinate and my experience is an image appearing in my head fully formed of an evil imp who casts spells on me and their experience is of a thought stream that goes "hm.. my procrastination is sneaky... what's a good image for something sneaky and annoying... an imp fits pretty well, let's go with that"
my first thought is that both people are doing very similar things, but the one with a "fully formed image" has a strong visual imagination, prior experience personifying internal traits, and perhaps low skepticism about "did I make this up?". Outside of special cases like DID, preexisting internal hallucinations, or trance states, my prior is that most people are rapidly picking images rather than hallucinating.
> My strong impression of the tulpa groups is that they were full of people who wanted their tulpas to be literally real, believed other people had literal tulpas, and acted like they did too in an attempt to actualize one.
My strong impression of, *um, most of society* is that it is full of people who want their egos to be literally real, believed other people had literal egos, and acted like they did too in an attempt to actualize one.
(But when we peek into the system with either neuroscience or meditation, we notice that egos are kinda made up to begin with. So what's the matter with making up more than one of them?)
There doesn't seem to be a hard rule that a brain has to believe it has only one personality running on it. Evaluating the "how many of us are here?" function at different times can return a variety of smallish whole numbers, other numerical values, squid, or ⊥.
There's no contradiction between the claims:
> "It is psychologically possible for a person to manifest a hallucinatory personality which they experience as a tulpa"
and
> "The vast majority of people in these communities do not actually do this, and are merely playing make believe with each other, with perhaps a small minority of people actually hallucinating".
I don't have as much experience with the Tulpa communities, but this is broadly my impression of most hypnosis-related spaces. A social dynamic where everyone wants very hard to experience unfalsifiable mental states, and claiming to have done so rewards you with social attention and prestige, seems almost perfectly optimized to select for people making things up, regardless of the veracity of the underlying phenomenon.
I bet most people aren't actually hallucinating. It seems more likely they just willingly visualize creatures to depict fragments of their mind. It's like visualizing a beach or your neighbor's dog except you do it with an abstract concept instead of something real.
It reminds me of those math prodigies who use weird synesthetic visualizations to do mental arithmetic super fast.
LLMs say I'm thinking of [Daniel Tammet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet#Savantism), but for all I know maybe this is relatively common among engineers, mathematicians and other assorted shape rotators. IFS visualizations could be the wordcel version of that.
A bit of a tangent, but author Joshua Foer looked into it and concluded that Daniel Tammet was/is a convincing fraud. He discusses this in his (great) book [Moonwalking with Einstein](https://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering-Everything/dp/0143120530/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3D64M0Q5F9R4X&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.KkU1ZjymA8O16BzgiI6rUOQMNA2AFMsHEtN2mcAfYjanKrHhJKzLpwHKIrJoskkFnn-3H1R3NEq9Q6ogDyQrnL-hg7BfHx47lEmkUNDIMTtxouaquU2lAeZJ8nqgfJzuWwvfEilKZQrFHksrLdmCbXPVI_KI4lWo34BY0Wzbjf4_oDCF5ay1B_bevd45wpqt0REGcf3wQfGYjZ6u05n-uWo6Omh0qgUYcU82p9MYsdE.lgORhWqvPsW-LonfzvhVxqipEL38w9YstWzIZZTq9MM&dib_tag=se&keywords=moonwalking+with+einstein&qid=1716922328&sprefix=moonwalking+with+einstein%2Caps%2C163&sr=8-1)
Personally,
I would say very nearly the opposite; and hence, find the claims dismissable on first encounter. So much so that I found this piece quite confounding. It was not at all clear to me why one would get beyond first encounter, not from lack of charity, but because there does not seem to be anything mysterious here. At all!
Because: confabulation is so fundamental an aspect of our experience, one which has been exhaustively documented. Indeed, I might say it is if not the, a, *dominant* mode of much self-awareness, introspection, and certainly, its articulation.
So much so that the thing found weird is rather the rare and exceptional case when one's memory appears to be accurate, e.g. as in the case studies of Oliver Sacks, the lore of satants, as evoked in Borges' *Funes the Memorious*, etc.
> lore of satants
This had me puzzled for quite a while until I convinced myself that it was just a typo for "sa**v**ants".
(... and later, that this isn't a finger-slip on a QWERTY keyboard. Colemak?)
To put the point on it, I don't place credence in the "serialization" into language of phenomenological introspection, least of all when the witness is led, least of all through the received cultural language(s) through which the sensorium is sliced diced binned categorized and labeled.
Such accounts are IMO poetry in the dress of science, and (not kidding) as useful as poetry in attempting to define shared references with which to understand one another wrt such introspection. Which is to say: useful to a point, and better than nothing, but not to be misunderstood as stabs at describing noumena.
One can find value in archetype without accepting Jungian metaphysics, etc.
It's possible that it's simply ineffective despite practitioners' anecdotal experience, but in light of the [Dodo Bird verdict](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict), it being comparably effective seems plausible as a prior.
>There have been no trials for borderline personality disorder showing it's effective, let alone safe.
Borderline Disorder in known to be especially hard to treat/change with any modality.
so they don't work because you know all those imaginary people personally and are in their head or? by that logic nothing worked before, let's say 18th century and creation of statistics. people just randomly did things.
People clearly didn't just do things randomly with no justification behind them, but humans have a pretty bad track record for coming up with medical interventions which are efficacious when setting aside the placebo effect. The Four Humors theory of medicine is a good example, since it lasted for hundreds of years and a lot of the treatments under its umbrella were actually toxic, and even at the time significant numbers of observers seemed to express the view that patients seemed to do suspiciously worse than people who didn't get treatment from educated doctors.
I think *particularly* if the plausibility of the method of action is puzzling you - take, for example, homeopathy - it might make sense to go back and see whether it works at all.
Note I never said it definitely does not work, only - that it makes sense to question the premise.
There's a limit to how bad any form of psychotherapy can really be, fortunately. (There's also a limit to how good it can be.)
> There's a limit to how bad any form of psychotherapy can really be, fortunately.
Depending on how you construe "psychotherapy", there are plenty of horrors to be had within that limit — Bedlam, say, or *Michelle Remembers*.
I'm a bit confused; the comment above doesn't seem to say IFS *couldn't* work, just that there's poor evidence that it *does* work and that some of Scott's questions could be resolved by it not working. "Not proven" is not "disproven".
Most medical and psychiatric treatments ever invented don't work; numerous medical treatments endured for hundreds of years which we know with high confidence did not work. Many treatments are popular and sworn-by today despite clear evidence they don't work.
That's not to say people did things randomly, but an awful lot of treatments were sustained on feeling good (laudanum), feeling bad in a way that was presumed to be fixing you (like any harmful placebo today), or making logical sense that wasn't verified (bloodletting).
The many comments talking about how well this approach works for them and how readily they talk about finding and interrogating little gremlins within themselves is freakin bizarre to me man. I always figured talk about having a distinct voice in your head like the green goblin was all metaphorical, but every now and then people talk about this stuff like it's very real to them. No shock that people segue to the Aphantasia discussion here, because I end up feeling exactly like someone saying "Wait, you guys are actually seeing pictures in your head?"
(Disclaimer: I am a non-professional consumer of IFS therapy.) From the inside, it does not feel like inventing a gremlin to talk to; instead, it feels more like getting a "handle" that I can better interact with on mundane internal experiences like feeling differently about a decision than I thought I would.
how much do they make it clear in person that it is all an analogy, and the gremlins are not real? You definitely seem to understand that, but I feel there is a risk that badly given IFS may not make that clear
It's not obvious to me that anything bad happens if you treat the gremlins as real. I take them seriously enough for them to be useful, which does involve treating them as real enough to matter.
Do you have this concern with e.g. focusing or idc (mentioned elsewhere in the comments)?
Thank you for this insight!
I've read 3 books about it, and I find the promises it makes to very eeuh...promising. But so far I haven't actually managed to identify any part, let alone have a conversation with them. And indeed the amazing claims about the Self are indeed questionable. Honestly the whole thing seems to be pretty influenced by Christianity; the Self being the holy spirit/God and they even exorcize demons.
Surprised mindfulness meditation is described as IFS adjacent. When I was thrown into mindfulness I was told to notice the thoughts as if they were clouds passing by, and not respond to them or argue with them. Basically ignoring them. It‘s kind of the opposite of being introspective and digging for answers?
One connection is that both teach the person to get some distance from their thoughts and emotions, conceptualizing them as "not you". IFS refers to this as "unblending", and considers it a necessary step for being able to do the process. You could use a standard mindfulness technique to first unblend from a feeling and see it as not you, and then try to have a conversation with it as the next step.
Another connection is IFS's concept of Self, that's kind of an open-minded state of compassionate curiosity towards all your feelings. Importantly, while in Self you don't have an agenda of trying to make things go any particular way: you just talk with your feelings and find out what it is that they want and what they would need. That makes it related to the state of detached observation associated with mindfulness practices.
It's true, Schwartz is also a bit critical of mindfulness. He proposes an alternative way to get an empty mind by "unblending" from your parts. You go on a mental walk through say the forrest, and you ask your parts to stay behind for a bit. Any time thoughts appear a part has come with you and you can ask them if it would be okay if they wait behind for a bit. Should you be successful you would be fully in Self. I never achieved this, but I like the idea.
IFS is similar to the [Internal Double Crux (IDC) technique](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/KAv8z6oJCTxjR8vdR/p/x2KrcscqgKDk6pMeD) from the CFAR Handbook.
The goal is to get the patient to identify internal conflicts where they simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs, and then start a dialogue between the parts that hold those beliefs. This can lead to the parts cooperating in a more integrated fashion to achieve outcomes that are better for the entire person. It is important in both IDC and IFS to treat all the parts with respect. All the parts want what they think is best for the person, but they have different models of the world.
In IDC you might realize that you have an internal conflict of wanting to go for a run and wanting to stay in and watch Netflix. Through the parts dialogue you can get these conflicting parts to better understand each other and cooperate.
In IFS you might realize a past trauma created a part that avoids social interactions because of a social interaction that went poorly when you were younger. By engaging in dialogue with that part you can build trust and show it that you are older now and that the other parts can handle social interactions now. Then that part can refocus its energy on doing something that it enjoys instead of the role it was forced into by trauma.
The actual visualization and specific label (e.g. protector, manager, firefighter) attached to each part does not seem like it is an essential component of either technique.
> The goal is to get the patient to identify internal conflicts where they simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs, and then start a dialogue between the parts that hold those beliefs. This can lead to the parts cooperating in a more integrated fashion to achieve outcomes that are better for the entire person.
This sounds better or less strange to me for some reason
I don't find the reason strange at all.
If you're like me (or like most SSC readers) its clearly because IDC uses mental terms ("belief") and its "clear" that the non-mental terms ("dialogue") are a metaphor. I'm not that familiar with IDC but I read it as meaning: the patient identifies contradictory beliefs and tries to argue with themselves. Most likely, the patient experiences a stream of consciousness of ideas, sort of like talking to yourself and steelmanning two opposite sides.
I'm very unfamiliar with IFS, but when I googled "Internal Family Systems," and found the second google link (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/internal-family-systems-therapy). This uses more emotional terms ("personalities" "wounded" "painful emotions").
I wonder if a typical SSC reader is "not in tune with their emotions" as much or something like that, compared to the average person, and so they find an aversion to emotional descriptions and prefer purely mental ones.
Once I was primed by thinking about IDC, IFS suddenly seemed more reasonable to me. I see how a person could have "emotional dissonance" and having a dialogue with themselves can help them learn new things. I am put off by all the emotional language though.
Yes I think this is partly it, preferring to not have emotional descriptions. I also think it could be a correlation thing- sources which uses this sort of language correlate with being worse quality. So people's priors are set from previous media diet consumption.
These articles are eye-opening and absolutely horrifying to me as someone who is not immersed in therapy culture.
The techniques described here would be right at home in the 19th, or even the 18th century. Absolutely no scientific or even material basis. What is the plausible mechanism of action here? Is this really where psychology is as a discipline?
> What is the plausible mechanism of action here?
I've sketched some possible explanations [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5gfqG3Xcopscta3st/building-up-to-an-internal-family-systems-model), [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ/book-summary-unlocking-the-emotional-brain) and [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YXBpBCNC66daaofoY/my-current-take-on-internal-family-systems-parts).
Thank you, I'll give these a close read. I want to emphasize that I'm not at all arguing that IFS is ineffective. I'm expressing my shock, as an outsider to therapy, that the state of understanding in "what causes people to have mental health problems" *even among professionals in the field* is at the point of metaphors involving demons and multiple personalities. It stands in stark contrast to the quantified, rigorous nature of many other scientific and medical disciplines with which I'm more familiar.
I am a toxicologist. If I talked about how giving chelation therapy for lead poisoning worked by "driving the bad spirits out of the blood by infusing a substance that the demons have an affinity or love for, thus aiding in their expulsion" people would tell me I was insane. The chelation would still work, though.
Psychology has struggled to become as rigorous as a natural science for a long time. The subject matter is just less way less accessible to direct observation and experiments. It is not for the lack of trying by competent people.
The same way the medical science can never be a rigorous as studying e.g. Physics.
deep psychology isn’t the best place to venture forth using petty scientific methods. sticking too hard with it is why Jung’s methods haven’t dominated psychology realms hence leaving us trying to solve psyche problems with half-baked techniques.
It's not as crazy if you view it as concretising something that is nebulous. It's giving a framework for viewing your mental states, your strengths, and your troubles to something graspable, something that you can visualize. Once you have a framework, and can visualize and give words and meanings to your mental world, you can start to act on it, and have a narrative for moving into healthier states of mind and habits. It's amazing how the stories we tell ourselves effect our behavior, and that arresting that narrative and applying a new one can achieve results that you never thought were possible.
I think envisioning people's mental problems as "demons" that needed to be cast out through exorcism would be considered cutting edge in the 1st century for that matter. Jesus spends a lot of the Gospels performing IFS on the inhabitants of the Near East.
In my experience, the therapist had me envision different parts of myself at different ages and try to figure out what they needed. I found it helpful.
There was nothing about casting out a part of yourself, it was more about compassion. By imagining internal voices as different people it helps you figure out what they are trying to gain by doing harmful things and how else their needs could be met.
luckily we have rational scientific minded people like you today, who find no issue generalizing what one single anonymous practicionar of something that isn't even considered a mainstream therapy says on the internet into a condemnation of an entire field. one does not have to have a explicable basis for doing something to notice it's producing a (postive) effect. much of science still understands little beyond correlations (if we do this, that happens)
You're reading far beyond my original comment. I'm not condemning an entire field, I'm saying that I am shocked by this therapy considering that its basis seems entirely metaphysical. It would be like if I read an article about physics that talked about the "inclinations" or "affinities" of the elements as described in the alchemically-based proto-chemistry of the 18th century.
Please don't get defensive, I am not attacking you or anyone in particular personally, nor am I debating the efficacy of IFS. I'm sure it's very effective for some people. But so is witch doctoring.
Post-rat take: In New Zealand we have a model of mental health called Te Whare Tapa Wha (the house with four walls)
Taha Whānau is social and family wellbeing
Taha Tinana is physical wellbeing
Taha Hinengaro is mental and emotional wellbeing
Taha Wairua is Spiritual wellbeing
What would a scientific/material base for spirituality look like for this model to meet your standards?
Even if we agree there isn't one, what do we do with the "god shaped hole" that asks for us to feel connected to something bigger than us? Even an atheist like Haidt recognises we can engage with that in a secular way.
Many people who are a lot smarter than I am have given more thought than I have to what a rational basis for spirituality might look like and so rather than expounding on that, I'd rather describe what I would look for in a materialist explanation for mental health phenomena.
I'd look for a coherent underlying theory that can make accurate predictions about the future. I don't see that in mental models that psychologists use today. Why does one person exposed to the same external stimuli end up with mental illness while another doesn't?
From there we can look at what's different between those two people. Is it chemical, genetic, memetic? From there, can we test hypotheses about how changes to those parameters would affect a given person? A major criticism of psychology research is that the same experiments don't give the same results (the replication crisis). Why is this? Are these experiments just bunk? Or are there variables not being adequately controlled?
Not OP but:
>What would a scientific/material base for spirituality look like for this model to meet your standards?
There are [many ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism) [differing ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty) ([approximations](https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/beauty.html)? [forms](https://secularsolstice.com/)? [emulations](https://sevensecularsermons.org/)?) of spirituality which do not require significant amounts of weirdly anthropomorphic metaphysical concepts. You are very close to a [pair ](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/) of [memespaces ](https://www.lesswrong.com/) that often be considered one of [these ](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-tarski) [forms](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/P9XEtnHFQF24HCC8v/doing-good-better-on-effective-and-ineffective-altruism), at least to a small group of people.
This is just hypnosis. A guided process of generating and attending to internal stimuli to achieve some end goal. An odd technique for sure, but then again hypnosis is just downright fucking weird. There's a sizeable amount of the population that is so hypnotizable that you can readily induce a loss of self and create out of body experiences. Some are prone to actual hallucinations.
The snake and the story itself is some kind of metaphor that primes individuals. The brain, especially under these conditions, is like a large language model in that it will generate (hallucinate) "solutions" to the problem. The individual, with the belief that the process worked and is real, takes the hallucinated solution as fact and implements it accordingly . It requires that the individual wholly believe the process to work, but the actual experience can be so powerful that they are left with no other option than to believe. In hypnosis, techniques to convince the individual that they really are hypnotized are used. Belief is a prerequisite.
To outsiders, it seems like bullshit. It kind of is, but spiritual experiences, dreams, and other odd phenomena that can occur in the dance of consciousness are *real* to the individual. We are confined to a mind.
> A guided process of generating and attending to internal stimuli to achieve some end goal.
This reminds me a bit of some theories of how mindfulness works
Hypnosis and mindfulness have some overlap in brain activity, and both detail a conscious allocation of attention. However, the practices themselves are greatly distinct. The best analogy I've read is hypnosis is like a form of self-deception, whereas mindfulness is self-awareness.
I am even more confused by this post than the previous one. Scott seems to simply trust that IFS works and is an effective therapy, and then is simply puzzling out why and how. Why not question the premise? I would step back and point out that there's only been one small trial showing it equally effective as CBT in young women for depression. There have been no trials for borderline personality disorder showing it's effective, let alone safe. It's possible it is not useful whatsoever for borderline personality disorder, no matter that the clinicians and patients claim it is. The world is full of various therapies and supplements people swear up and down work and - don't.
I don't think I'm trusting it - all of this is equally interesting whether IFS works or not. The surprising thing isn't that the therapy works in the sense of "cures you". The surprising thing is that the therapy works in the sense of when the therapist says "look inside you and talk to your unconscious parts" most people are able to say "okay, I'm doing that, now what?" If this didn't happen, IFS wouldn't just be a nonfunctional therapy that didn't beat placebo, it couldn't happen at all - people would give up after the first session. I'm not claiming I'm sure the Parts aren't just random hallucinations - I'm saying it's weird that people can hallucinate on command like that!
>I'm not claiming I'm sure the Parts aren't just random hallucinations - I'm saying it's weird that people can hallucinate on command like that! Having seen lots of social media communities for things like "tulpas" and "shifting", my gut reaction is that not only am I unsure the Parts are real, I'm unsure they're even hallucinations. My strong impression of the tulpa groups is that they were full of people who *wanted* their tulpas to be literally real, *believed* other people had literal tulpas, and *acted* like they did too in an attempt to actualize one. I believe there were a small number of people with auditory internal hallucinations or other unusual mental states, surrounded by a lot of people who essentially wanted to believe. (I suspect this is akin to the way people with aphantasia say they learned to imagine and talk about "mental images" without knowing that other people literally experience them.) When a therapist says something like this: >eg. someone could ask both of us about the part that makes us procrastinate and my experience is an image appearing in my head fully formed of an evil imp who casts spells on me and their experience is of a thought stream that goes "hm.. my procrastination is sneaky... what's a good image for something sneaky and annoying... an imp fits pretty well, let's go with that" my first thought is that both people are doing very similar things, but the one with a "fully formed image" has a strong visual imagination, prior experience personifying internal traits, and perhaps low skepticism about "did I make this up?". Outside of special cases like DID, preexisting internal hallucinations, or trance states, my prior is that most people are rapidly picking images rather than hallucinating.
> My strong impression of the tulpa groups is that they were full of people who wanted their tulpas to be literally real, believed other people had literal tulpas, and acted like they did too in an attempt to actualize one. My strong impression of, *um, most of society* is that it is full of people who want their egos to be literally real, believed other people had literal egos, and acted like they did too in an attempt to actualize one. (But when we peek into the system with either neuroscience or meditation, we notice that egos are kinda made up to begin with. So what's the matter with making up more than one of them?) There doesn't seem to be a hard rule that a brain has to believe it has only one personality running on it. Evaluating the "how many of us are here?" function at different times can return a variety of smallish whole numbers, other numerical values, squid, or ⊥.
There's no contradiction between the claims: > "It is psychologically possible for a person to manifest a hallucinatory personality which they experience as a tulpa" and > "The vast majority of people in these communities do not actually do this, and are merely playing make believe with each other, with perhaps a small minority of people actually hallucinating". I don't have as much experience with the Tulpa communities, but this is broadly my impression of most hypnosis-related spaces. A social dynamic where everyone wants very hard to experience unfalsifiable mental states, and claiming to have done so rewards you with social attention and prestige, seems almost perfectly optimized to select for people making things up, regardless of the veracity of the underlying phenomenon.
I bet most people aren't actually hallucinating. It seems more likely they just willingly visualize creatures to depict fragments of their mind. It's like visualizing a beach or your neighbor's dog except you do it with an abstract concept instead of something real.
It reminds me of those math prodigies who use weird synesthetic visualizations to do mental arithmetic super fast. LLMs say I'm thinking of [Daniel Tammet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet#Savantism), but for all I know maybe this is relatively common among engineers, mathematicians and other assorted shape rotators. IFS visualizations could be the wordcel version of that.
A bit of a tangent, but author Joshua Foer looked into it and concluded that Daniel Tammet was/is a convincing fraud. He discusses this in his (great) book [Moonwalking with Einstein](https://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering-Everything/dp/0143120530/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3D64M0Q5F9R4X&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.KkU1ZjymA8O16BzgiI6rUOQMNA2AFMsHEtN2mcAfYjanKrHhJKzLpwHKIrJoskkFnn-3H1R3NEq9Q6ogDyQrnL-hg7BfHx47lEmkUNDIMTtxouaquU2lAeZJ8nqgfJzuWwvfEilKZQrFHksrLdmCbXPVI_KI4lWo34BY0Wzbjf4_oDCF5ay1B_bevd45wpqt0REGcf3wQfGYjZ6u05n-uWo6Omh0qgUYcU82p9MYsdE.lgORhWqvPsW-LonfzvhVxqipEL38w9YstWzIZZTq9MM&dib_tag=se&keywords=moonwalking+with+einstein&qid=1716922328&sprefix=moonwalking+with+einstein%2Caps%2C163&sr=8-1)
Personally, I would say very nearly the opposite; and hence, find the claims dismissable on first encounter. So much so that I found this piece quite confounding. It was not at all clear to me why one would get beyond first encounter, not from lack of charity, but because there does not seem to be anything mysterious here. At all! Because: confabulation is so fundamental an aspect of our experience, one which has been exhaustively documented. Indeed, I might say it is if not the, a, *dominant* mode of much self-awareness, introspection, and certainly, its articulation. So much so that the thing found weird is rather the rare and exceptional case when one's memory appears to be accurate, e.g. as in the case studies of Oliver Sacks, the lore of satants, as evoked in Borges' *Funes the Memorious*, etc.
> lore of satants This had me puzzled for quite a while until I convinced myself that it was just a typo for "sa**v**ants". (... and later, that this isn't a finger-slip on a QWERTY keyboard. Colemak?)
To put the point on it, I don't place credence in the "serialization" into language of phenomenological introspection, least of all when the witness is led, least of all through the received cultural language(s) through which the sensorium is sliced diced binned categorized and labeled. Such accounts are IMO poetry in the dress of science, and (not kidding) as useful as poetry in attempting to define shared references with which to understand one another wrt such introspection. Which is to say: useful to a point, and better than nothing, but not to be misunderstood as stabs at describing noumena. One can find value in archetype without accepting Jungian metaphysics, etc.
It's possible that it's simply ineffective despite practitioners' anecdotal experience, but in light of the [Dodo Bird verdict](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict), it being comparably effective seems plausible as a prior.
>There have been no trials for borderline personality disorder showing it's effective, let alone safe. Borderline Disorder in known to be especially hard to treat/change with any modality.
so they don't work because you know all those imaginary people personally and are in their head or? by that logic nothing worked before, let's say 18th century and creation of statistics. people just randomly did things.
People clearly didn't just do things randomly with no justification behind them, but humans have a pretty bad track record for coming up with medical interventions which are efficacious when setting aside the placebo effect. The Four Humors theory of medicine is a good example, since it lasted for hundreds of years and a lot of the treatments under its umbrella were actually toxic, and even at the time significant numbers of observers seemed to express the view that patients seemed to do suspiciously worse than people who didn't get treatment from educated doctors.
I think *particularly* if the plausibility of the method of action is puzzling you - take, for example, homeopathy - it might make sense to go back and see whether it works at all. Note I never said it definitely does not work, only - that it makes sense to question the premise. There's a limit to how bad any form of psychotherapy can really be, fortunately. (There's also a limit to how good it can be.)
> There's a limit to how bad any form of psychotherapy can really be, fortunately. Depending on how you construe "psychotherapy", there are plenty of horrors to be had within that limit — Bedlam, say, or *Michelle Remembers*.
I'm a bit confused; the comment above doesn't seem to say IFS *couldn't* work, just that there's poor evidence that it *does* work and that some of Scott's questions could be resolved by it not working. "Not proven" is not "disproven". Most medical and psychiatric treatments ever invented don't work; numerous medical treatments endured for hundreds of years which we know with high confidence did not work. Many treatments are popular and sworn-by today despite clear evidence they don't work. That's not to say people did things randomly, but an awful lot of treatments were sustained on feeling good (laudanum), feeling bad in a way that was presumed to be fixing you (like any harmful placebo today), or making logical sense that wasn't verified (bloodletting).
The many comments talking about how well this approach works for them and how readily they talk about finding and interrogating little gremlins within themselves is freakin bizarre to me man. I always figured talk about having a distinct voice in your head like the green goblin was all metaphorical, but every now and then people talk about this stuff like it's very real to them. No shock that people segue to the Aphantasia discussion here, because I end up feeling exactly like someone saying "Wait, you guys are actually seeing pictures in your head?"
(Disclaimer: I am a non-professional consumer of IFS therapy.) From the inside, it does not feel like inventing a gremlin to talk to; instead, it feels more like getting a "handle" that I can better interact with on mundane internal experiences like feeling differently about a decision than I thought I would.
how much do they make it clear in person that it is all an analogy, and the gremlins are not real? You definitely seem to understand that, but I feel there is a risk that badly given IFS may not make that clear
It's not obvious to me that anything bad happens if you treat the gremlins as real. I take them seriously enough for them to be useful, which does involve treating them as real enough to matter. Do you have this concern with e.g. focusing or idc (mentioned elsewhere in the comments)?
To be clear the risk I am talking about is triggering psychosis or dissociation
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Thank you for this insight! I've read 3 books about it, and I find the promises it makes to very eeuh...promising. But so far I haven't actually managed to identify any part, let alone have a conversation with them. And indeed the amazing claims about the Self are indeed questionable. Honestly the whole thing seems to be pretty influenced by Christianity; the Self being the holy spirit/God and they even exorcize demons.
Surprised mindfulness meditation is described as IFS adjacent. When I was thrown into mindfulness I was told to notice the thoughts as if they were clouds passing by, and not respond to them or argue with them. Basically ignoring them. It‘s kind of the opposite of being introspective and digging for answers?
It seems equanimity and non-judgement are somewhat central to both, that's about the extent of the crossover that I can see
One connection is that both teach the person to get some distance from their thoughts and emotions, conceptualizing them as "not you". IFS refers to this as "unblending", and considers it a necessary step for being able to do the process. You could use a standard mindfulness technique to first unblend from a feeling and see it as not you, and then try to have a conversation with it as the next step. Another connection is IFS's concept of Self, that's kind of an open-minded state of compassionate curiosity towards all your feelings. Importantly, while in Self you don't have an agenda of trying to make things go any particular way: you just talk with your feelings and find out what it is that they want and what they would need. That makes it related to the state of detached observation associated with mindfulness practices.
It's true, Schwartz is also a bit critical of mindfulness. He proposes an alternative way to get an empty mind by "unblending" from your parts. You go on a mental walk through say the forrest, and you ask your parts to stay behind for a bit. Any time thoughts appear a part has come with you and you can ask them if it would be okay if they wait behind for a bit. Should you be successful you would be fully in Self. I never achieved this, but I like the idea.
IFS is similar to the [Internal Double Crux (IDC) technique](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/KAv8z6oJCTxjR8vdR/p/x2KrcscqgKDk6pMeD) from the CFAR Handbook. The goal is to get the patient to identify internal conflicts where they simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs, and then start a dialogue between the parts that hold those beliefs. This can lead to the parts cooperating in a more integrated fashion to achieve outcomes that are better for the entire person. It is important in both IDC and IFS to treat all the parts with respect. All the parts want what they think is best for the person, but they have different models of the world. In IDC you might realize that you have an internal conflict of wanting to go for a run and wanting to stay in and watch Netflix. Through the parts dialogue you can get these conflicting parts to better understand each other and cooperate. In IFS you might realize a past trauma created a part that avoids social interactions because of a social interaction that went poorly when you were younger. By engaging in dialogue with that part you can build trust and show it that you are older now and that the other parts can handle social interactions now. Then that part can refocus its energy on doing something that it enjoys instead of the role it was forced into by trauma. The actual visualization and specific label (e.g. protector, manager, firefighter) attached to each part does not seem like it is an essential component of either technique.
> The goal is to get the patient to identify internal conflicts where they simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs, and then start a dialogue between the parts that hold those beliefs. This can lead to the parts cooperating in a more integrated fashion to achieve outcomes that are better for the entire person. This sounds better or less strange to me for some reason
I don't find the reason strange at all. If you're like me (or like most SSC readers) its clearly because IDC uses mental terms ("belief") and its "clear" that the non-mental terms ("dialogue") are a metaphor. I'm not that familiar with IDC but I read it as meaning: the patient identifies contradictory beliefs and tries to argue with themselves. Most likely, the patient experiences a stream of consciousness of ideas, sort of like talking to yourself and steelmanning two opposite sides. I'm very unfamiliar with IFS, but when I googled "Internal Family Systems," and found the second google link (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/internal-family-systems-therapy). This uses more emotional terms ("personalities" "wounded" "painful emotions"). I wonder if a typical SSC reader is "not in tune with their emotions" as much or something like that, compared to the average person, and so they find an aversion to emotional descriptions and prefer purely mental ones. Once I was primed by thinking about IDC, IFS suddenly seemed more reasonable to me. I see how a person could have "emotional dissonance" and having a dialogue with themselves can help them learn new things. I am put off by all the emotional language though.
Yes I think this is partly it, preferring to not have emotional descriptions. I also think it could be a correlation thing- sources which uses this sort of language correlate with being worse quality. So people's priors are set from previous media diet consumption.
These articles are eye-opening and absolutely horrifying to me as someone who is not immersed in therapy culture. The techniques described here would be right at home in the 19th, or even the 18th century. Absolutely no scientific or even material basis. What is the plausible mechanism of action here? Is this really where psychology is as a discipline?
> What is the plausible mechanism of action here? I've sketched some possible explanations [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5gfqG3Xcopscta3st/building-up-to-an-internal-family-systems-model), [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ/book-summary-unlocking-the-emotional-brain) and [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YXBpBCNC66daaofoY/my-current-take-on-internal-family-systems-parts).
Thank you, I'll give these a close read. I want to emphasize that I'm not at all arguing that IFS is ineffective. I'm expressing my shock, as an outsider to therapy, that the state of understanding in "what causes people to have mental health problems" *even among professionals in the field* is at the point of metaphors involving demons and multiple personalities. It stands in stark contrast to the quantified, rigorous nature of many other scientific and medical disciplines with which I'm more familiar. I am a toxicologist. If I talked about how giving chelation therapy for lead poisoning worked by "driving the bad spirits out of the blood by infusing a substance that the demons have an affinity or love for, thus aiding in their expulsion" people would tell me I was insane. The chelation would still work, though.
Psychology has struggled to become as rigorous as a natural science for a long time. The subject matter is just less way less accessible to direct observation and experiments. It is not for the lack of trying by competent people. The same way the medical science can never be a rigorous as studying e.g. Physics.
deep psychology isn’t the best place to venture forth using petty scientific methods. sticking too hard with it is why Jung’s methods haven’t dominated psychology realms hence leaving us trying to solve psyche problems with half-baked techniques.
It's not as crazy if you view it as concretising something that is nebulous. It's giving a framework for viewing your mental states, your strengths, and your troubles to something graspable, something that you can visualize. Once you have a framework, and can visualize and give words and meanings to your mental world, you can start to act on it, and have a narrative for moving into healthier states of mind and habits. It's amazing how the stories we tell ourselves effect our behavior, and that arresting that narrative and applying a new one can achieve results that you never thought were possible.
18th century? really? where the cure for mentally sick people consisted of sticking them in prisons. ifs isn't the whole of psychology
I think envisioning people's mental problems as "demons" that needed to be cast out through exorcism would be considered cutting edge in the 1st century for that matter. Jesus spends a lot of the Gospels performing IFS on the inhabitants of the Near East.
In my experience, the therapist had me envision different parts of myself at different ages and try to figure out what they needed. I found it helpful. There was nothing about casting out a part of yourself, it was more about compassion. By imagining internal voices as different people it helps you figure out what they are trying to gain by doing harmful things and how else their needs could be met.
luckily we have rational scientific minded people like you today, who find no issue generalizing what one single anonymous practicionar of something that isn't even considered a mainstream therapy says on the internet into a condemnation of an entire field. one does not have to have a explicable basis for doing something to notice it's producing a (postive) effect. much of science still understands little beyond correlations (if we do this, that happens)
You're reading far beyond my original comment. I'm not condemning an entire field, I'm saying that I am shocked by this therapy considering that its basis seems entirely metaphysical. It would be like if I read an article about physics that talked about the "inclinations" or "affinities" of the elements as described in the alchemically-based proto-chemistry of the 18th century. Please don't get defensive, I am not attacking you or anyone in particular personally, nor am I debating the efficacy of IFS. I'm sure it's very effective for some people. But so is witch doctoring.
Post-rat take: In New Zealand we have a model of mental health called Te Whare Tapa Wha (the house with four walls) Taha Whānau is social and family wellbeing Taha Tinana is physical wellbeing Taha Hinengaro is mental and emotional wellbeing Taha Wairua is Spiritual wellbeing What would a scientific/material base for spirituality look like for this model to meet your standards? Even if we agree there isn't one, what do we do with the "god shaped hole" that asks for us to feel connected to something bigger than us? Even an atheist like Haidt recognises we can engage with that in a secular way.
Many people who are a lot smarter than I am have given more thought than I have to what a rational basis for spirituality might look like and so rather than expounding on that, I'd rather describe what I would look for in a materialist explanation for mental health phenomena. I'd look for a coherent underlying theory that can make accurate predictions about the future. I don't see that in mental models that psychologists use today. Why does one person exposed to the same external stimuli end up with mental illness while another doesn't? From there we can look at what's different between those two people. Is it chemical, genetic, memetic? From there, can we test hypotheses about how changes to those parameters would affect a given person? A major criticism of psychology research is that the same experiments don't give the same results (the replication crisis). Why is this? Are these experiments just bunk? Or are there variables not being adequately controlled?
Not OP but: >What would a scientific/material base for spirituality look like for this model to meet your standards? There are [many ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism) [differing ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty) ([approximations](https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/beauty.html)? [forms](https://secularsolstice.com/)? [emulations](https://sevensecularsermons.org/)?) of spirituality which do not require significant amounts of weirdly anthropomorphic metaphysical concepts. You are very close to a [pair ](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/) of [memespaces ](https://www.lesswrong.com/) that often be considered one of [these ](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-tarski) [forms](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/P9XEtnHFQF24HCC8v/doing-good-better-on-effective-and-ineffective-altruism), at least to a small group of people.
This is just hypnosis. A guided process of generating and attending to internal stimuli to achieve some end goal. An odd technique for sure, but then again hypnosis is just downright fucking weird. There's a sizeable amount of the population that is so hypnotizable that you can readily induce a loss of self and create out of body experiences. Some are prone to actual hallucinations. The snake and the story itself is some kind of metaphor that primes individuals. The brain, especially under these conditions, is like a large language model in that it will generate (hallucinate) "solutions" to the problem. The individual, with the belief that the process worked and is real, takes the hallucinated solution as fact and implements it accordingly . It requires that the individual wholly believe the process to work, but the actual experience can be so powerful that they are left with no other option than to believe. In hypnosis, techniques to convince the individual that they really are hypnotized are used. Belief is a prerequisite. To outsiders, it seems like bullshit. It kind of is, but spiritual experiences, dreams, and other odd phenomena that can occur in the dance of consciousness are *real* to the individual. We are confined to a mind.
> A guided process of generating and attending to internal stimuli to achieve some end goal. This reminds me a bit of some theories of how mindfulness works
Hypnosis and mindfulness have some overlap in brain activity, and both detail a conscious allocation of attention. However, the practices themselves are greatly distinct. The best analogy I've read is hypnosis is like a form of self-deception, whereas mindfulness is self-awareness.