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Pretty funny that people habitually refer to their various internal alert systems and debugging processes as their "self". "What, yeah, BacklogCleaner? That's me alright."

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I’m tiptoeing carefully around the whole sinkhole of “there is a self/there is only no-self”. Been going on for 2500 years in Indic culture and it’s fucking •yawn• at this point. I’d rather watch Itchy and Scratchy then another round of the old anatta/anatman v atman stuff

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BUT, that said, if you can get around the nomenclature, (ie if you’ve been a heavy Buddhist person, relinquish your allergy for a minute to the word “Self”)...the Internal Family Systems model has a brilliant approach for working with these parts. And what the IFS model calls...

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capital-a Self is actually a flowing of qualities (Calm, Clear, Connected, Curious, Creative, Confident, Courageous, Compassionate). Mostly we live and operate in the social world from our Manager(s) parts, and can get very wrapped up with that.

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Anyway, it’s funny, because as embodied ultra-social primates we are kind of checkmated into being assigned self-hood. Partly it’s a result of being organisms with language and weird brain structures, and partly because we do it to each other.

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I’m not going to be able to say anything epic about this topic, but wanted to give a shout out to IFS. I think the model’s pretty damn good and useful, and plays nicely with other good approaches (like

@DougTataryn

’s BEF, Jaak Panksepp’s , Danny Siegel’s, etc)

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Schwartz, founder of IFS, in some ways may have booby-trapped it or made it unworkable for Buddhish people who are attached to their dislike of the word “self” (I’m trolling you guys, with love). In some ways I wish he’d picked a more buddhish-palatable word, because the model’s