i still haven't found the original blog post but i did find a minute-long video from richard schwarz
> “the Ego isn’t your enemy - it is a bunch of protective, manager parts that is necessary to try to keep you safe.”
Conversation
people think i've done a lot of IFS because of how warmly i talk about it here but actually i've barely done any at all. IFS for me is mostly about having a really respectful conceptual framework that avoids what i see as disrespectful conceptual mistakes in other frameworks
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having IFS as a perspective on your internal chaos helps you remember that every single thing that a part of you is trying to do carries some good intent. it's just often a good intent that has lost sight of the bigger perspective. but you don't have to fight good intent
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which is why i really don't like western introductions to meditation / buddhism that make out thoughts and the thinking mind to be some kind of great enemy standing between you and enlightenment. parts of you that generate thoughts are doing it for a good reason
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when you yell at your parents and they don't seem to be really listening it makes you wanna double down and yell harder because you really really want to be listened to
thoughts and thought-generating parts can be like that, and you can learn to listen to them
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especially, you can learn to listen to what they really care about, what they really want, what they're really fighting for and protecting, deep down below their surface-level complaints. the goodness of it will shine through. "oh," you'll think, "the rest of me wants that too"
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so many of my loudest parts just want to be heard and that's literally it, they don't even want me to necessarily do anything about what they're saying other than just be listened to by me so they can stop holding onto the thing
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otoh there is of course an important difference between listening to a part and indulging / enabling it. you can listen to a part and then exercise what the IFS people call Self-leadership; "i've heard you and my final decision is still no, but thank you for speaking up"
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there's a broader question for me here about practices that build vs. undermine self-trust. i think it's easy to start meditating in a way that deeply undermines self-trust, that amounts to waiting for your internal babies to shut up and stop screaming without comforting them
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even supposedly advanced western meditators reliably get into trouble, mostly involving sex, and you have to wonder if it's because their practice successfully caused them to shut up parts of themselves that had to get what they wanted through sneakier means than usual
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meanwhile IFS, even just as a conceptual framework, seems to me much better at enabling self-trust, by starting from the pov that your parts are all trying to do good things and are worth listening to. that's how they begin to trust you and each other
Replying to
overall there's a lot of wonky and interesting stuff happening at the collision of meditation memes and therapy memes and i am excited for the tension between them to continue to produce good tweets and hopefully some relief and clarity too
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i sincerely believe that what we are attempting to do here around these parts is an MMA of personal development and i like it and i think it's good and we should keep doing it. best of luck to you all
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only instead of fighting to see who wins our metric should be how unbearably sexy we find each other
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