Somewhat anecdotally, Internal Family Systems also seems effective for trauma/phobia treatment, and the model in this post would help explain why. If you access a traumatic memory in a way where the experience is explicitly framed as you empathetically listening to a part of your mind that’s distinct from you and has this memory, then that foregrounds the context of “I’m safe and doing trauma treatment” and makes the trauma memory just a sensation within it.
This is also interesting to compare with this account of what it is like to be enlightened. The way that Ingram frames it is that while you can still be upset or emotionally affected by things that happen to you in the present, you will always maintain a sharp sense of your environment as the primary context. So e.g. recalling past upsetting events won’t make you upset, because it’s always obvious to you that those are just memories.
Scott’s post reminded of memory reconsolidation. It seems to me that a “trapped prior” is similar to an “emotional schema” (not sure if that’s the right term from UtEB).
If one can be aware of their schema or trapped prior, then there seems to be a higher chance of iterating upon it. However, it’s probably not that simple to iterate even if you are aware of it.
Somewhat anecdotally, Internal Family Systems also seems effective for trauma/phobia treatment, and the model in this post would help explain why. If you access a traumatic memory in a way where the experience is explicitly framed as you empathetically listening to a part of your mind that’s distinct from you and has this memory, then that foregrounds the context of “I’m safe and doing trauma treatment” and makes the trauma memory just a sensation within it.
This is also interesting to compare with this account of what it is like to be enlightened. The way that Ingram frames it is that while you can still be upset or emotionally affected by things that happen to you in the present, you will always maintain a sharp sense of your environment as the primary context. So e.g. recalling past upsetting events won’t make you upset, because it’s always obvious to you that those are just memories.
Scott’s post reminded of memory reconsolidation. It seems to me that a “trapped prior” is similar to an “emotional schema” (not sure if that’s the right term from UtEB).
If one can be aware of their schema or trapped prior, then there seems to be a higher chance of iterating upon it. However, it’s probably not that simple to iterate even if you are aware of it.