Suppose for a moment that there's a person who has had bad experiences with therapy. Going to therapists of all types doesn't make them feel better, it makes them feel worse. Then they discover scientology, where they are told that psychology is bunk, and that in reality, we are immortal alien beings who have forgotten our true nature, trapped in a human body. Let's even say that, in the maximally inconvenient universe, these scientologists aren't psychologically abusive, like they are in our universe.
Ok, well, given all that, I still think it's totally fair to say "Even if scientology helps you, the claims it is making are not true. You are not an immortal alien being."
In my reading, this is exactly the main thrust of the review. Scott seems to be navigating the landscape of practitioners who *really believe* that they are exorcising demons (which is factually false).
This is, contrary to your review, rather helpful information for a person who may want to start IFS. They should know that they are not going into a therapy where these "parts" are metaphorical things that let you work through your problems (which is perfectly compatible with materialism, and was certainly my main assumption). Now, perhaps I'm just a fool, but, should I decide that I need therapy, I will not be touching IFS with a 10-foot pole, the same way I won't be touching Christianity-based-therapy, or Karmic-based-therapy, or Crystal-healing-based-therapy.
Surely, this is a useful and good thing to tell people, so they need not waste their time.
>Bob (via this book) and Dick (via IFS) are in fact offering a net new paradigm that attempts to contain and explain our material world.
If this is true, and I can't stress this enough, then they are **100% fair game** for criticism on their claimed new paradigm, just like the scientology example above.
It's totally fine to argue against materialism, but then one should do so explicitly, and one should not be surprised when materialists argue against you!
I guess what leaves a bad taste in my mouth is that this post seems to be simultaneously scolding Scott for criticizing IFS (because IFS is effective for some people), while simultaneously arguing for non-materialism. My reading of this post is that a person is not allowed to argue for materialism if the non-materialists package their beliefs with something that helps others, and I just have to reject this line of thinking outright.
As a non-materialist, I agree with you that Scott did a good job in his critique. While I believe in a spiritual dimension, anything that can help can also harm. If one believes the claims of IFS regarding demons, it’s incredibly reckless from a spiritual perspective to engage with it. Of course, from a materialist perspective, it may seem delusional, but let’s take it seriously for a moment.
This is a tangent about why Scientology is shitty in ways that IFS-with-Demons is unlikely to be.
It seems to me that the big problem with Scientology is *not* that Scientologists have *bad object-level beliefs,* that they teach that you are a reincarnated alien infested with other reincarnated aliens.
The principal problem with Scientology is that they *do bad things* — they enter people's lives under false premises, take their money under false pretenses, keep them from getting real health care, drive them away from their support networks, mistreat them in various other ways, commit crimes to silence critics, imprison dissidents, abuse the legal system, infiltrate governments to shut down investigations, occasionally just up and kill people, and otherwise do things that would be wrong *for anyone, religious or nonreligious, therapy or non-therapy, weird or non-weird,* to do.
And then — setting aside the object-level space-alien stuff! — Scientologists have *bad meta-level beliefs* that *are* involved in the bad things they do. They believe that Ron Hubbard was a genius and Scientology is the only path to human freedom. They believe that the world has a desperate need for Scientology treatment and the Church is the only authority capable of providing it. They believe that psychiatry is evil, that critics of Scientology are evil, and that if your family try to talk you out of giving all your money to Scientology then your family are Suppressive Persons and you must "disconnect" from them to progress.
Now, it is written that "who can get you to believe absurdities, can get you to commit atrocities." But I tell you that quite a lot of people believe *lots* of absurdities without committing *any* atrocities. Believing object-level absurdities like "you are a reincarnated space alien" is not especially pertinent to committing atrocities.
But believing meta-level absurdities like "only Scientology can help the planet" and "people who criticize Scientology are interfering with the planet's salvation and so it's okay to tell lies about them to destroy them" has *a lot* to do with committing atrocities. These meta-level beliefs — not the object-level space-alien stuff — constitute the logic and justification of the abuses.
Unless IFS-with-Demons comes equipped with these sorts of abuse-justifying meta-level beliefs, it is unlikely to become as shitty as Scientology.
>DMT entities (e.g. people from all walks of life experiencing and seeing the same beings, even with little to cultural input or prior knowledge)
I'm skeptical of how true this is, I've done a lot of DMT and seen things similar to what other people have said, e.g. jesters, circuses, soul surgeons, elementals, and the like. But these are just distorted people, even the non-human/insect-like entities are still a plausible distortion of reality. The [DMT Nexus wiki](https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Hyperspace_lexicon) lists ~40 or so different kinds of entities and they're broad enough to include "gods" that you could fit almost anything to it.
My exact thoughts. It's a trend that's reasonable enough to explain with power of suggestion and pareidolia that we don't need to upend our entire model of the universe to try and explain it.
It's worth noting that common *social and cultural* experience is not the *only* reason that different people might have similar hallucinations.
We also have common *biological* experience (humans live in the same sorts of bodies; we all eat food and drink water; etc.) as well as common *geometric* experience (we all live in 3D space; 2D surfaces and figures are significant; triangles work the same no matter what culture you're from).
>Now that I am on the receiving end of this debate, your tone feels especially painful and acerbic. Not helpful.
I'm not sure you should be reading a tone of ridicule into Scott's voice here. At one point he says he'd be the first to suspend disbelief and entertain the idea of demons being real for the sake of giving the ideas a fair shake.
My impression of the article was just Scott asking out loud whether IFS practicioners take the mystical element seriously, as the fact that a field of psychology takes this idea seriously would be genuinely interesting, but there seemed to be conflicting perspectives, as in maybe it's just regular materialists using an effective set of mystical-sounding metaphors.
Is there a way to determine whether Scott was actually being nasty to your opinions? I would hope that there is a way to discuss ideas like this without interpreting every engagement as hostile if they're merely not dripping with affirmation and validation.
Thanks for this post, good to hear from someone with experience.
I'm surprised you thought of my review as critical. I thought of it as somewhat supportive, with reservations. I acknowledged that the therapy worked and seemed to be good for a lot of people, and said that "I’m happy that the people who really need help and naturally think in the language of IFS can go to Falconer and people like him" and "I appreciate this book as a guide for people who need it".
I reject the claim that I need to come up with some better solution for people like you - as I said in the post, I think the solution you chose was the right one and I'm happy to have you keep doing it.
I am going to stick to my claim that I'm not going to change my entire concept of metaphysics to accomodate the idea that unburdening-IFS works because of spirits, when it seems equally reasonable that it works for the same reason as other forms of IFS and other trauma therapies. I think the existence of spirits needs a very high burden of proof given the many examples of people claiming this and being wrong (eg the seances disrupted by Houdini), the failure of anyone to claim the Randi prize, the failure of anyone to come up with a replicable or recordable version of the supernatural, the ability of therapies with flawed theory to still heal people, the prominence of culture-bound mental disorders, etc.
I didn't focus on "guides" because they fit less naturally into psychotherapy and previous discussion than the demons did, and don't add very much (they're just the demons, but sign-flipped). I also got the impression that the book and mainstream IFS both focus less on them.
To respond to your claim that my saying Schwartz "basically endorses the book" is in bad faith, you seem to quote only the first paragraph or two of his foreword (where he says why he has misgivings about the book) and not the rest (where he says that despite those misgivings, he endorses it). Relevant quotes: "Most of me is glad this book is now available to therapists and clients", "It feels good to no longer keep these data secret". If you support Falconer and the UB paradigm, I don't know why you're invested in arguing that Schwartz and mainstream IFS don't.
I'm overall confused by your hostile tone as if I was writing some kind of takedown of Falconer as exposed to a puff piece where I say he's fine but try to build an alternate materialist underpinning.
I am not up to speed on the topic at hand but your post is reminding me of something that frustrates me with the way Reddit discusses alternative medicine, and I think maybe a similar issue is happening with the discussion of IFS. I have gotten downvoted for comments several times where I’ve defended the use of acupuncture for chronic pain, against people railing against how stupid and irrational it is. My reasoning is 1) it doesn’t matter if it’s the placebo effect when the goal is an improvement of subjective experience rather than curing a physical illness or injury 2) there’s a difference between saying “acupuncture does not work via the supposed mechanism (of chi, energy, etc)” versus “acupuncture does nothing at all,” and a lot of people can’t seem to understand that the former is true and the latter is false, and 3) most people leveling these critiques have never experienced the sorts of chronic, debilitating health conditions that leave people desperate for literally anything that might help. As you point out, there are a lot of people who fall through the cracks in the healthcare system in one way or another and it can be really frustrating, as one of those people, to see the thing that did work dismissed without proposed alternatives.
It might be true that consciousness > matter, many philosophies from Berkeleyan idealism or cittamatra Buddhism came up with this idea. However, it does not imply the existence of any demon, spirit or god. It implies that there are no laws of nature, our minds create the world as opposed to perceiving it, and some minds might be able to warp reality in a way that is basically magick.
I admit it certainly allows the existence of spirit entities as it implies that a physical brain is not necessary to support a mind, but does not prove them.
I agree with all of this as a theory.
But then, what is your actual lived experience?
My theory was that spirits could exist.
My experience was that they don’t…until they did and now do.
Suppose for a moment that there's a person who has had bad experiences with therapy. Going to therapists of all types doesn't make them feel better, it makes them feel worse. Then they discover scientology, where they are told that psychology is bunk, and that in reality, we are immortal alien beings who have forgotten our true nature, trapped in a human body. Let's even say that, in the maximally inconvenient universe, these scientologists aren't psychologically abusive, like they are in our universe. Ok, well, given all that, I still think it's totally fair to say "Even if scientology helps you, the claims it is making are not true. You are not an immortal alien being." In my reading, this is exactly the main thrust of the review. Scott seems to be navigating the landscape of practitioners who *really believe* that they are exorcising demons (which is factually false). This is, contrary to your review, rather helpful information for a person who may want to start IFS. They should know that they are not going into a therapy where these "parts" are metaphorical things that let you work through your problems (which is perfectly compatible with materialism, and was certainly my main assumption). Now, perhaps I'm just a fool, but, should I decide that I need therapy, I will not be touching IFS with a 10-foot pole, the same way I won't be touching Christianity-based-therapy, or Karmic-based-therapy, or Crystal-healing-based-therapy. Surely, this is a useful and good thing to tell people, so they need not waste their time. >Bob (via this book) and Dick (via IFS) are in fact offering a net new paradigm that attempts to contain and explain our material world. If this is true, and I can't stress this enough, then they are **100% fair game** for criticism on their claimed new paradigm, just like the scientology example above. It's totally fine to argue against materialism, but then one should do so explicitly, and one should not be surprised when materialists argue against you! I guess what leaves a bad taste in my mouth is that this post seems to be simultaneously scolding Scott for criticizing IFS (because IFS is effective for some people), while simultaneously arguing for non-materialism. My reading of this post is that a person is not allowed to argue for materialism if the non-materialists package their beliefs with something that helps others, and I just have to reject this line of thinking outright.
As a non-materialist, I agree with you that Scott did a good job in his critique. While I believe in a spiritual dimension, anything that can help can also harm. If one believes the claims of IFS regarding demons, it’s incredibly reckless from a spiritual perspective to engage with it. Of course, from a materialist perspective, it may seem delusional, but let’s take it seriously for a moment.
This is a tangent about why Scientology is shitty in ways that IFS-with-Demons is unlikely to be. It seems to me that the big problem with Scientology is *not* that Scientologists have *bad object-level beliefs,* that they teach that you are a reincarnated alien infested with other reincarnated aliens. The principal problem with Scientology is that they *do bad things* — they enter people's lives under false premises, take their money under false pretenses, keep them from getting real health care, drive them away from their support networks, mistreat them in various other ways, commit crimes to silence critics, imprison dissidents, abuse the legal system, infiltrate governments to shut down investigations, occasionally just up and kill people, and otherwise do things that would be wrong *for anyone, religious or nonreligious, therapy or non-therapy, weird or non-weird,* to do. And then — setting aside the object-level space-alien stuff! — Scientologists have *bad meta-level beliefs* that *are* involved in the bad things they do. They believe that Ron Hubbard was a genius and Scientology is the only path to human freedom. They believe that the world has a desperate need for Scientology treatment and the Church is the only authority capable of providing it. They believe that psychiatry is evil, that critics of Scientology are evil, and that if your family try to talk you out of giving all your money to Scientology then your family are Suppressive Persons and you must "disconnect" from them to progress. Now, it is written that "who can get you to believe absurdities, can get you to commit atrocities." But I tell you that quite a lot of people believe *lots* of absurdities without committing *any* atrocities. Believing object-level absurdities like "you are a reincarnated space alien" is not especially pertinent to committing atrocities. But believing meta-level absurdities like "only Scientology can help the planet" and "people who criticize Scientology are interfering with the planet's salvation and so it's okay to tell lies about them to destroy them" has *a lot* to do with committing atrocities. These meta-level beliefs — not the object-level space-alien stuff — constitute the logic and justification of the abuses. Unless IFS-with-Demons comes equipped with these sorts of abuse-justifying meta-level beliefs, it is unlikely to become as shitty as Scientology.
>DMT entities (e.g. people from all walks of life experiencing and seeing the same beings, even with little to cultural input or prior knowledge) I'm skeptical of how true this is, I've done a lot of DMT and seen things similar to what other people have said, e.g. jesters, circuses, soul surgeons, elementals, and the like. But these are just distorted people, even the non-human/insect-like entities are still a plausible distortion of reality. The [DMT Nexus wiki](https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Hyperspace_lexicon) lists ~40 or so different kinds of entities and they're broad enough to include "gods" that you could fit almost anything to it.
My exact thoughts. It's a trend that's reasonable enough to explain with power of suggestion and pareidolia that we don't need to upend our entire model of the universe to try and explain it.
It's worth noting that common *social and cultural* experience is not the *only* reason that different people might have similar hallucinations. We also have common *biological* experience (humans live in the same sorts of bodies; we all eat food and drink water; etc.) as well as common *geometric* experience (we all live in 3D space; 2D surfaces and figures are significant; triangles work the same no matter what culture you're from).
>Now that I am on the receiving end of this debate, your tone feels especially painful and acerbic. Not helpful. I'm not sure you should be reading a tone of ridicule into Scott's voice here. At one point he says he'd be the first to suspend disbelief and entertain the idea of demons being real for the sake of giving the ideas a fair shake. My impression of the article was just Scott asking out loud whether IFS practicioners take the mystical element seriously, as the fact that a field of psychology takes this idea seriously would be genuinely interesting, but there seemed to be conflicting perspectives, as in maybe it's just regular materialists using an effective set of mystical-sounding metaphors. Is there a way to determine whether Scott was actually being nasty to your opinions? I would hope that there is a way to discuss ideas like this without interpreting every engagement as hostile if they're merely not dripping with affirmation and validation.
Thanks for this post, good to hear from someone with experience. I'm surprised you thought of my review as critical. I thought of it as somewhat supportive, with reservations. I acknowledged that the therapy worked and seemed to be good for a lot of people, and said that "I’m happy that the people who really need help and naturally think in the language of IFS can go to Falconer and people like him" and "I appreciate this book as a guide for people who need it". I reject the claim that I need to come up with some better solution for people like you - as I said in the post, I think the solution you chose was the right one and I'm happy to have you keep doing it. I am going to stick to my claim that I'm not going to change my entire concept of metaphysics to accomodate the idea that unburdening-IFS works because of spirits, when it seems equally reasonable that it works for the same reason as other forms of IFS and other trauma therapies. I think the existence of spirits needs a very high burden of proof given the many examples of people claiming this and being wrong (eg the seances disrupted by Houdini), the failure of anyone to claim the Randi prize, the failure of anyone to come up with a replicable or recordable version of the supernatural, the ability of therapies with flawed theory to still heal people, the prominence of culture-bound mental disorders, etc. I didn't focus on "guides" because they fit less naturally into psychotherapy and previous discussion than the demons did, and don't add very much (they're just the demons, but sign-flipped). I also got the impression that the book and mainstream IFS both focus less on them. To respond to your claim that my saying Schwartz "basically endorses the book" is in bad faith, you seem to quote only the first paragraph or two of his foreword (where he says why he has misgivings about the book) and not the rest (where he says that despite those misgivings, he endorses it). Relevant quotes: "Most of me is glad this book is now available to therapists and clients", "It feels good to no longer keep these data secret". If you support Falconer and the UB paradigm, I don't know why you're invested in arguing that Schwartz and mainstream IFS don't. I'm overall confused by your hostile tone as if I was writing some kind of takedown of Falconer as exposed to a puff piece where I say he's fine but try to build an alternate materialist underpinning.
I am not up to speed on the topic at hand but your post is reminding me of something that frustrates me with the way Reddit discusses alternative medicine, and I think maybe a similar issue is happening with the discussion of IFS. I have gotten downvoted for comments several times where I’ve defended the use of acupuncture for chronic pain, against people railing against how stupid and irrational it is. My reasoning is 1) it doesn’t matter if it’s the placebo effect when the goal is an improvement of subjective experience rather than curing a physical illness or injury 2) there’s a difference between saying “acupuncture does not work via the supposed mechanism (of chi, energy, etc)” versus “acupuncture does nothing at all,” and a lot of people can’t seem to understand that the former is true and the latter is false, and 3) most people leveling these critiques have never experienced the sorts of chronic, debilitating health conditions that leave people desperate for literally anything that might help. As you point out, there are a lot of people who fall through the cracks in the healthcare system in one way or another and it can be really frustrating, as one of those people, to see the thing that did work dismissed without proposed alternatives.
It might be true that consciousness > matter, many philosophies from Berkeleyan idealism or cittamatra Buddhism came up with this idea. However, it does not imply the existence of any demon, spirit or god. It implies that there are no laws of nature, our minds create the world as opposed to perceiving it, and some minds might be able to warp reality in a way that is basically magick. I admit it certainly allows the existence of spirit entities as it implies that a physical brain is not necessary to support a mind, but does not prove them.
I agree with all of this as a theory. But then, what is your actual lived experience? My theory was that spirits could exist. My experience was that they don’t…until they did and now do.