Second session of IFS
This is a new therapist of mine that I've been trying in hopes of actually making progress in therapy. My past therapists have felt temporarily helpful, but never helped much in the long term.
Today, my therapist seemed to be trying to differentiate different parts of my identity.
The entirety of the session I felt like we weren't accomplishing anything and it was a big waste of time. It felt so abstract and conceptual that I found it hard to grasp what the conversation was even about.
There were multiple moments where he would ask me something and then tell me to visualize it. For example, he asked what my future looked like, to which I replied, "I don't know, its kind of a fog". He said I seemed to have some resistance so I should try to interact with it. I told him that the resistance felt like a void, there was nothing to interact with.
He also seemed to be trying very hard to differentiate different parts of my psyche without asking me about anything about my past. It just kind of felt like he would ask me something, something would come up for me to mention, and he would dissect it into 'parts'.
This felt very abstract and subjective.
He gave me this task at the end of session to go into a cafe or other social setting that I had mentioned prior I had difficulty doing. He said to essentially ignore the part that was guarding me from not going in, and just go in anyway. I felt that didn't make sense at all with all that we abstractly spoke about in therapy.
Like, if the part that is guarding my wounded part from further wounding of social situations, then why would I ignore its signals just to likely get wounded again? Not only that, but that seems like if the part that is guarding actually exists, then ignoring it wouldn't help the system in my eyes, it just further perpetuates trauma of my childhood when I had been ignored.
I'm honestly very skeptical about IFS so far. I always have been pretty skeptical of it, even its remote siblings, such as EMDR. I honestly just don't feel or believe that there are different parts. These 'parts' just feel like different reactions to very specific situations. I don't feel like I'm portraying one of these parts or even some of these parts at a given time. Its just who I am, not some altered state of myself.
I've resigned to keep trying to be active in therapy, but so far I don't see the point of IFS.
Any advice or commentary is welcome.