Sift, don't swallow

A builder's guide to therapy fads, starting with IFS

Because building ambitious things is hard, ambitious builders naturally gravitate toward anything that makes it seem easier.

One way this manifests, especially in Silicon Valley, is in the cult-like attraction to the latest therapy and self-help fads: from Landmark and Tony Robbins, to CBT and mindfulness, to psychedelics and biohacking, to the parts-based/experiential/somatic frameworks, most notably Internal Family Systems (IFS), that have become ascendant.

Each framework makes big promises, offering its own well-charted path to whatever lies on the other side of all the anxiety, burnout, emotional numbing, and other psychological ills that afflict the ambitious.

In reality, none of these paths is as well-charted or universally applicable as its acolytes seem to imply and as we, in any case, wish to believe. What’s worse, as I’ve argued elsewhere, each framework smuggles in philosophical baggage from systems of thought that range from suspicious to outright scornful of the builder’s ambition. And yet there are also troves of valuable insight and tooling buried amid the baggage, if you know where to dig.

This is the ambitious builder’s dilemma: we need all the tools we can get to keep our psychological software up-to-date with our ambition; and yet, if we’re not careful, the therapies dispensing these tools can undermine the very ambition we entrusted them to serve.

So how do we mine these therapies for value without succumbing to their costs? The best way I can answer is by example, so let’s consider the case of IFS: the "hot new therapy” of Silicon Valley.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) through a builder’s lens

Mining the value

If you aren’t already familiar with IFS, it is a therapeutic orientation (originally developed by Richard Schwartz in the 1980s) that analyzes human psychology in terms of interacting subpersonalities or “parts.” Given its popularity among the kinds of psychologically-minded Silicon Valley founders I work with, I’ve seen ample evidence of its value as well as its costs. By and large, the clients who’ve done a lot of IFS show a more differentiated awareness of their emotional states, and they have a richer vocabulary for identifying and distinguishing between the mindsets often encoded in those states—such as the “inner critic” and the “taskmaster” (loosely mapping to what I call the “drill sergeant”), the helpless “inner child” and the “firefighter” who rushes in to protect it via numbing and avoidance strategies (not so unlike my “Zen master”), and so on. And they already have tools for dialoguing with and gaining some healthy distance from these “parts,” enough to be able to work out what their authentic Self wants and believes.

If you struggle either to feel and connect with your emotions in the first place, or to stay grounded and rational in their presence, the tools of IFS (like those of meditation, or somatic experiencing, or DBT, or mindfulness-based CBT, or emotion-focused therapy, or a range of other modalities, as best suited to your style and personality) can help. Specifically, these therapies can:

• orient you toward the kinds of physiological signals you might not otherwise attend to, and help you trace those signals to the emotions that are generating them

• give you evocative images and metaphors for better understanding your emotional states and capturing them in words

• help you understand and develop empathy for even your most “irrational” emotional states by tracing them to their developmental origins (e.g., how your excess anger at your team members today stems from an unmet need for care and support when you were 10)

• give you practice and skills for connecting with another human being (the therapist) on an authentic emotional level while still maintaining healthy adult boundaries

IFS particularly excels at evocative metaphors, tried-and-tested hacks for heating or cooling your emotional states, and tricks for catching and disrupting old thinking habits without self-flagellation. So long as you recognize these as the metaphors, hacks, and tricks they are, you can get tons of leverage by adapting and repurposing them to your needs.

Mitigating the costs

Unfortunately, the IFS framework takes its own metaphors very literally. Beyond treating the “parts” as useful heuristics to check for in their mental lives, I often notice my IFS-experienced clients reifying the “parts” to a degree that interferes with building a more accurate, updated, and holistic self-view. And they tend to resign themselves to the permanent presence of these disparate parts in their “system.” Despite IFS’s formal claim that the parts can be “unburdened” through therapy, these clients tend to assume they will always periodically “dissociate” or “people please” on account of their protector parts, and will need to spend hours unblending from, befriending, and witnessing those parts on each occasion. Compared to those who’ve never done any parts-based therapy, the IFS-experienced clients are more surprised and skeptical when I suggest, for instance, that they can largely shed their overanxious “protector” parts by taking some calculated risks (as I’ve seen many others, including myself, do successfully). Whether this points to a fault in IFS, or a misconstrual by some of its practitioners, or a preexisting bias among those drawn to IFS or other therapies of its kind, it’s a common failure mode worth attending to.

Relatedly, many of my IFS-experienced clients have formed rigid assumptions about the forms of “self-care” they require, given the ostensible needs of their various parts. The idea of skipping their morning workout or afternoon meditation session for a day to make an important deadline feels anathema, as if they fear their inner child might be too fragile to handle it.

If I were to refer someone for IFS, I’d first want to make sure they know that they need not resign themselves to a fractured and compartmentalized existence; rather they can nourish and integrate their healthy parts and marginalize the outdated or destructive ones until they experience themselves, not as a multitude of bickering parts, but as one harmonious, uninhibited, fully-flourishing self.

Finally, let us reckon with a cost that’s especially pronounced in IFS but by no means unique to it: the assumption of moral neutrality. According to the “No Bad Parts” doctrine of IFS, all of our parts have good intentions for us, even if they are burdened with false assumptions about how best to serve those intentions. But this is importantly untrue of the parts of ourselves that have habitually succumbed to self-deception, or of the internalized voices of former caregivers or authority figures who in fact did not have our best interests in mind. If we suspect this of some part of ourselves, it behooves us to identify its motives (e.g., is this part of me looking to get a quick fix of pseudo-validation or an illusion of control by tearing me, or others, down? Is it more interested in shielding me from discomfort than actually fostering my growth?). And if we don’t endorse those motives, we can choose to withdraw our energy and support from them—to starve our worst parts for the sake of our best.

In my own work with clients, I often analogize such bad-faith inner voices to online trolls: the shitpoasters who always come back with new objections and “yeah, buts” as long as we keep engaging with them, since their interest is not in the truth but in keeping us talking. The same goes for our inner “trolls”—like the ones that doggedly cling to the narrative that we are helpless and weak, or that the world is hostile and cruel, to distract us from taking action. The healthy response to such trolls is not to spend energy dialoguing with them; it’s to call them out, calmly and succinctly (e.g., “these aren’t real reasons, they’re just excuses”) and speak to the honest fear underneath (e.g., “I know it’s scary to put ourselves out there, but we’ve got this”), then get on with our life.

Instead, IFS counsels empathizing with such parts and attempting to meet their needs. But the “needs” of a self-deceptive narrative are not legitimate, reality-based needs: e.g., the “need” of our “helpless and weak” troll isn’t really “safety” or “control”, but evasion of responsibility. So any attempt to dialogue with the trolls in good faith only emboldens them to keep lying to us (insofar as we seem to be “buying it”). Perhaps this is why the “unburdening” of one’s parts never seems to last very long.

The intent of such moral neutrality, common to every mainstream therapeutic approach, is to honor your agency and provide a safe space for you to work out your own values and choices. But in practice it often has the opposite effect. By pretending away your agency over the ill-motivated, even downright immoral parts of yourself, they 1) also deny you responsibility for your virtues, 2) stigmatize the acknowledgement of real moral fault, and 3) rob you of the chance to own and improve those moral faults in therapy: that is, to be morally ambitious. If you notice a practitioner promoting acceptance or tolerance of internal narratives you yourself are not proud of, you can push back on this: let the practitioner know that you don’t need all that validation to feel like they’re on your side, and that you’d actually feel more supported if they empathized with your remorse and took seriously your desire to improve.

The upshot: build your therapy

Perhaps the biggest takeaway of the IFS example is that we must notice and resist the urge to treat any given framework as gospel, even if it (implicitly or explicitly) tells us to. Try on the frameworks and tools that resonate, ideally more than one so you have some basis for comparison, and approach them as the mixed bags that they are. Use or adapt what serves your self-determined aims, and toss the rest. If you outsource your agency and judgment to a framework, you’ll eventually pay for it in rigidity, self-excusing narratives, and rituals that start consuming the very time and ambition you set out to protect.

Incidentally, this is why my builder’s mindset framework (which you should subject to as much scrutiny as any other!) doesn’t prescribe any one standardized path or regimen for “becoming a builder,” much as I’ve been asked—and in some cases tempted with big rewards—to provide one. Instead, I apply a broad set of principles to my coaching and therapy, and co-create my clients’ individual “regimen” with them accordingly. Of course I also use plenty of procedures and exercises in the process, many adapted from existing therapies like IFS. But none of them fit every client’s path nor look the same from one client to the next.

Perhaps science will one day advance to a point where we can reliably prescribe the right therapeutic “regimen” to anyone based on some known set of variables, just as athletic trainers prescribe exercise regimens to athletes and physicians prescribe insulin regimens to diabetic patients. Alternatively, we may discover that the very mechanics of psychological growth preclude such exact prescriptions, given the kind of agency a person must exercise over her own mindsets and motivations in order for any change to really stick. My experience aligns more with this latter possibility: the more actively and extensively my clients shape whatever “regimen” we develop together, the faster and farther they tend to grow. And speaking for myself and every decent practitioner I’ve met, regardless of their framework: never are we more alive than in the meeting of minds and souls wherein we get to lend our creativity to the custom design of an unscalable growth regimen suited to the N=1 ambitious individual in front of us.