there can genuinely be a cost to using self-help / mind-hacking / therapeutic / transformative techniques that are okay but not that good; they can sorta help you while also causing subtle forms of damage you have to deal with using better techniques
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part of the issue is that very few people in this area, that i have seen, actively acknowledge the possibility of damage here ( is the best counterexample i know of). obviously if you are trying to sell a book or a course it is disincentivized
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the techniques you might call “hacky,” in the sense of being kludgy / inelegant / unprincipled, operate by “adding spaghetti code” to the bodymind. uses the term “layering” here which i really like and have gotten a lot out of; UtEB uses the term “counteractive”
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eg let’s say you’re trying to stop being so angry at your partner. a “counteractive” or “layering” approach to this is to try to install a new habit of noticing when you’re getting angry and doing something else, e.g. going for a walk, or “communication skills”-type stuff
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this is not bad, exactly - it can be a helpful band-aid - but it’s brittle and hard to maintain because you aren’t addressing the underlying source of the anger. “transformative” or “delayering” approaches would instead address that - eg in IFS, working with protector + exile
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techniques like IFS are in principle capable of addressing the underlying source of the anger; once you do that you don’t need to counteract it anymore, it just effortlessly happens less if at all. you’ve “delayered” instead of “layering”
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Hey so pretty new to this space of Twitter and have see IFS being mentioned by you and others (such as ).
Any books/articles/readings on where to start?
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recent-ish thread of recs:
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Every now and then I see people ask for good introductions to Internal Family Systems. So, here are my picks:
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Thanks for this! Started going through some of the recs through the replies.