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Kaj Sotala

@xuenay

25 Jan

Every now and then I see people ask for good introductions to Internal Family Systems. So, here are my picks:

For a "what *is* IFS" overview I would recommend elemental.medium.com/inside-the-rev… if you like text or if you prefer video (gets going at the 4 minute mark). If you like text and are STEM-minded there's also my own lesswrong.com/posts/5gfqG3Xc… .

(If I had to pick just one of those I'd recommend the video.)

For "how to *do* IFS", the video gets into it a bit but the most detailed how-to guide is smile.amazon.com/Self-Therapy-S… . A nice complement is smile.amazon.com/Power-Focusing… , technically about Focusing but very IFS-like in style.

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Kaj Sotala

@xuenay

31 Dec 20

Says something about me that I'm going through a list of *legal policies* all nerding out, like "okay, hmm, that's good, that's good, that's not so great, okay cool, can I change that one maybe we'll see, hmm..."

(game: Suzerain, rockpapershotgun.com/2020/12/31/the… )

I promised to uphold national values instead of enacting democratic reforms but a lot of these policies sound kinda democratic to me, where's my real ultimate supreme power, I can even be impeached :| oh well, this will do (until I can change it maybe)

on the other hand the president has no term limits so that's good

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Kaj Sotala

@xuenay

22 Oct 20

Oof. I was today years old when I realized that _none of the people who ever hurt me did it because there was anything fundamentally wrong with me_.

I don't mean that as in "realized intellectually", I mean as in "realized emotionally so that in any shame-tinged memory that I can think of, the other person decomposes to their inner pain and what they did to me in reaction to that pain and it's obviously not really about me".

So I was doing a lot of meditation / parts work today and came to an early experience where I thought dad didn't care about how he made me feel, and then that got juxtaposed with later memories of how he obviously did care and OH at that moment he just didn't realize how I felt.

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Kaj Sotala

@xuenay

21 Oct 20

Just realized that me always having had a hard time picking a favorite movie/book/whatever has been an instance of being out of contact with my body/felt senses.

In retrospect it's kind of obvious: my thought was usually "things are good on so many different dimensions, how could I possibly ever rank them?" Like this novel might have good world-building but the other one has better characterization so how can I tell which one is better.

Which I now recognize as an instance of the classic "I don't trust/have access to an intuitive judgment of this, so I want some explicit algorithm that lets me make a rational decision" source of paralysis.

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Kaj Sotala

@xuenay

5 Oct 20

@nickcammarata

@nickcammarata Thank you making the possibility of that state this explicit. Now I'm motivated to get there as well.

@nickcammarata

@nickcammarata Initial stab at this: what's my first reaction if I imagine myself in such a state?

Parts start piping up with objections. Saying "you don't deserve that", "what would [person] think", etc. So one of the steps: get familiar with & address those objections.

@nickcammarata

@nickcammarata Another issue: what would it feel like in practice? This is often one of my problems directing metta at myself: who/where is the "me" I should orient it at?

But could work at it from other direction. "You don't deserve it" also implies a me. How does _that_ feeling manifest?

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Kaj Sotala

@xuenay

2 Oct 20

Some emotion/trauma stuff claims that things like blocked emotions manifest as muscle tension, so that you are subconsciously tensing particular muscles in order to block yourself from feeling something or doing a particular thing. Now why would this be necessary?

Ideomotor theory proposes that the mental representation of an action causes the action to happen. For example, as I consciously think about writing the rest of this sentence, the thought of carrying out that action is translated to a set of motor commands to do so.

But what if my sentence is bad? Suppose that the thought occurs to me to say something offensive that will get me in trouble. One part of my brain generates this thought, a second part notices this would have a bad consequence. What can the second part do?

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