March 2nd, 2021
- Someone asked about IFS vs starving their needy parts. I wrote:
- Yeah I also think starving of parts doesn't really work. Maybe with certain addictive patterns, but in general... something is actively generating whatever thoughts you're having, and trying to get them to shut up is literally disrespecting your own thinking process and saying it shouldn't have had that thought. Works better to assume that all of your thoughts are your brain actively making the best sense it can of your situation, and then if that sense seems bizarre (eg being triggered by something that intellectually you know isn't a threat) then you inquire curiously into why this part of you can't tell the difference, and what it would need in order to be able to tell the difference, without insinuating that it's wrong.
- You don't need to give the part personhood in order to do this, but in an odd sense I find it does help to give the part dignity.
- Also, some thoughts re Ideal Parent Figure protocol
- worth you also having this high-level bit of framework I think, which is the 5 components of secure attachment
- safety
- attunement
- comfort & physical affection
- unconditional expressed delight [in your existence]
- unconditional support for your explorations
- so basically you want to imagine the ideal parent doing whatever they would need to do in order for you to experience as much as possible of these things. and since you're like 1y old, it is utterly not your job to take care of any of that
- Re post-blame
- A friend expressed a kind of desperation that some pattern of theirs (I don't know what it was) might be "understandable" rather than "something that can be straightforwardly labeled as "bad" or "toxic""
- I responded with:
- I have a thing to share here, and I want to preface this by saying that you don't have to believe me (or if parts of you believe me and other parts don't, that's also aok 👍
- Whatever's going on for you, even if twisty & fucked up, is, from my perspective, understandable and not straightforwardly bad or toxic.
- This seems true to me in the same way in which if you were like "I'm worried that if I sail too far, I'll fall off the earth" I would be like "I don't know where you're going or what trials might await you, but, I'm pretty damn sure the earth is a sphere and that won't be an issue."
- Shifting gears from the naive flat earth model to a real outdated one... the perspective from which it could possibly be the case that something could straightforwardly be labeled "bad" or "toxic" seems to me confused in the same way that geocentrism is confused. Like yeah, it's a paradigm, and it makes a kind of intuitive sense since the earth certainly doesn't feel like a moving train if you're on it, but it's out of date and there's a better one where you don't even need epicycles.
- Now that I've written that all out, I want to re-iterate the bit at the top slightly differently: don't take my word for it. I grokked with parts of me that the earth goes around the sun (figuratively) long before any of that understanding seeped into the parts of me that had been forced by the inquisition to recant. And it's a whole process grokking that with one's whole system.
- #2tweet The swans sure are getting darker these days, eh?
- have thought for awhile that untangle seems like a good verb for sorting out internal and interpersonal stuff (vs eg "cut" or "hack" - see Reality is alive: don't carve it)
