Self-leadership and self-love dissolve anger and trauma — LessWrong
I find the “bids and boundaries” framework from my previous post to be very useful, but also a little… sterile, perhaps. Imagine prefixing every request you ever make with “it’s okay to say no, but…”; or always refusing bids which you think you might come to resent; or always asking people if it’s okay to flirt with them before doing it. That makes relationships less risky, but also shallower and less spontaneous.[1] Can we get the best of both worlds? I think so, via the two skills I discuss in this post: self-leadership and self-love. These terms have straightforward meanings, but also more specific connotations in the IFS framework. In IFS, the “Self” is the aspect of you which mediates between other parts, and which is present when those parts aren’t active. Self-leadership is the ability to consistently engage with the world in a way that all your parts endorse, rather than letting some of them seize control in ways that others will later resent. It’s a difficult skill because whe