Introduction

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a psychotherapy school/technique/model which lends itself particularly well for being used alone or with a peer. For years, I had noticed that many of the kinds of people who put in a lot of work into developing their emotional and communication skills, some within the rationalist community and some outside it, kept mentioning IFS.

So I looked at the Wikipedia page about the IFS model, and bounced off, since it sounded like nonsense to me. Then someone brought it up again, and I thought that maybe I should reconsider. So I looked at the WP page again, thought “nah, still nonsense”, and continued to ignore it.

This continued until I participated in CFAR mentorship training last September, and we had a class on CFAR’s Internal Double Crux (IDC) technique. IDC clicked really well for me, so I started using it a lot and also facilitating it to some friends. However, once we started using it on more emotional issues (as opposed to just things with empirical facts pointing in different directions), we started running into some weird things, which it felt like IDC couldn’t quite handle… things which reminded me of how people had been describing IFS. So I finally read up on it, and have been successfully applying it ever since.

In this post, I’ll try to describe and motivate IFS in terms which are less likely to give people in this audience the same kind of a “no, that’s nonsense” reaction as I initially had.

Epistemic status

This post is intended to give an argument for why something like the IFS model could be true and a thing that works. It’s not really an argument that IFS is correct. My reason for thinking in terms of IFS is simply that I was initially super-skeptical of it (more on the reasons of my skepticism later), but then started encountering things which it turned out IFS predicted - and I only found out about IFS predicting those things after I familiarized myself with it.

Additionally, I now feel that IFS gives me significantly more gears for understanding the behavior of both other people and myself, and it has been significantly transformative in addressing my own emotional issues. Several other people who I know report it having been similarly powerful for them. On the other hand, aside for a few isolated papers with titles like “proof-of-concept” or “pilot study”, there seems to be conspicuously little peer-...