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All of Peter Chang's Comments + Replies

Covid 8/20: A Little Progress
Peter Chang20

While I agree that the recommendation to not wear a mask in public places due to the "astonishingly weak" evidence about the effectiveness of masks is very misguided at best, your analogies do not seem appropriate.

This is telling us it is dangerous and wrong to tell anyone to wear a seat belt, because they might think they then can’t be hurt in an accident.

Not quite. This analogy would make sense if: (1) people are more incentivized to drive more dangerously when wearing their seatbelts AND (2) driving accidents are somehow contagious beyo... (read more)

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On Creativity - The joys of 5 minute timers
Peter Chang10

Good, concise post! Though I think it'd be helpful to differentiate the different types of creativity - e.g.) creativity required to solve a difficult math question for which a solution necessarily exists may be a different type of creativity required to approach a problem for which you are not even sure the solution exists in the first place. For me, this technique is more helpful when approaching the latter-type problem than the former: for already-solved math problems, for example, I find it helpful to fully try out one approach until I hit a dead-... (read more)

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Building up to an Internal Family Systems model
Peter Chang30

Thank you so much for your detailed response!

That makes a lot of sense. I think I need to focus on working with my "impatience" part before I can truly get into the kind of patient and tolerant Self that you are describing.

I think I might have gotten a bit derailed due to my experience training for memory competitions. I had to come up with 2700+ very specific visual images of characters each corresponding to a pair of playing cards, and so I've developed this sometimes-annoying habit of quickly making a tenuous association between any infor... (read more)

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Building up to an Internal Family Systems model
Peter Chang30

I'm a little late to the party, but I just read through and did the exercises of The Self Therapy last week and feeling very excited about how many components of the model "clicked" with me. Reading this post gave me insights into why those components resonated with me, so thank you very much for taking the time to write up this supremely helpful post!

The one aspect of the model that I've been having a lot of trouble with, which I view as problematic since the entire model essentially hinges on this practice, is to have an "organic... (read more)

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4Kaj_Sotala
Happy to hear that the post was useful to you! First piece of advice: don't do that. :-) I feel pretty comfortable saying that this approach is guaranteed not to produce any results. Intellectualizing parts will basically only give you the kind of information that you could produce by intellectual analysis, and for intellectual analysis you don't need IFS in the first place. Even if your guesses are right, they will not produce the kind of emotional activation that's necessary for change. A few thoughts on what to do instead... It sounds (correct me if I'm wrong) like you are giving the part a visual appearance by thinking of the nature of the problem, and choosing an image which seems suitably symbolic of it; then you try to interact with that image. In that case, you are picking a mental image, but the image isn't really "connected" to the part, so the interaction is not going to work. What you want to do is to first get into contact with the part, and then let a visual image emerge on its own. (An important note: parts don't have to have a visual appearance! I expect that one could do IFS even if one had aphantasia. If you try to get a visual appearance and nothing comes up, don't force it, just work with what you do have.) So I would suggest doing something like this: * Think of some concrete situation in which you usually procrastinate. If you have a clear memory of a particular time, let that memory come back to mind. Or you could imagine that you are about to do something that you've usually been procrastinating on. Or you could just pick something that you've been procrastinating on and try doing it right now, to get that procrastination response. * Either way, what you are going for are the kinds of thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations that are normally associated with you procrastinating. Pay particular attention to any sensations in your body. Whatever it is that you are experiencing, try describing it out loud. For example: "when I think of