Overview

My understanding of Cleaning Up (to use a neutral term here) is encapsulated by the following:

1. The “primary datum” is experience: that is, a direct experience of a hurt or a titillation. This is where we must (logically speaking) begin.
2. Then we can use whatever method we wish to understand that hurt. A shortcut will involve tracing that hurt or titillation back to at least one ego-structure. Any method that offers a shortcut will do just fine.
3. That hurt will also be traceable back to a comparable (dyadic) ego-structure. If the first one is “I am powerless,” the second one could be “I am successful” (or powerful, etc.).
4. What we’ll begin to notice, if we’re mindful enough, is that hurt X can be traceable back to the deduced ego-structure A. On some occasion, we’ll also notice, though, that A may “tag in” not-A. Or we could notice that hurt X is traceable back to not-A on some other occasion. What I’ve found is that it’s quite important to notice how a particular hurt “yields” or “gives rise to” at least two different codings. Like: “I am insignificant” and “I am the wiseman.”
5. Over time, whatever the Cleaning Up investigation specifically looks like will lead to the creation of something like “a map.”

Cues

You can use any number of “cues” or “error messages” to initiate the process of Cleaning Up. These include:

• Strong likes and strong dislikes
• Wishes and complaints
• Strong negative emotions like anger, sadness, and fear
• Any particular strong urges
• Any feelings of guilt

Even more generally, the basic 3 categories:

• Recurrent thoughts or feelings
• Stuck energy
• Chronic physical contractions/tensions

Fear, For Example

Starting to notice that fear preponderates is a good thing. 

Exposure therapy, however, won’t work. “If it scares you, do it.” It can’t work because it will simply enable a second ego-structure to be, e.g., the courageous one.

That said, if you regard facing your fear as an opportunity to see how the entire mechanism works (i.e., the hurt plus the ego-structures A and not-A), then you’re golden. You can use “exposure” as a forcing function to initiate a deeper Cleaning Up investigation.

Two Basic Approaches: Ad Hoc And Echoes

How, specifically, does Cleaning Up get under way?

1. Well, life works in an ad hoc way to reveal to you any hurts. If you pay close enough attention, on any given day you’ll see “lights coming on on the dashboard.” These “error messages” are indicating that it would be good to investigate here and to Clean Up.

2. Additionally, you can sit quietly and call back any “echoes,” i.e., any memorably vivid experiences. You can use thoughts, images (more thoughts), or the felt sense of something inside the body to do so. Then you can do anything needful from here: feel without concept, inquire, listen, dialogue with this ego-structure (see IFS), simply witness, etc. All of these approaches–and others–will point to the same truth: this can be fully embraced, and at the same time my essence is not this.

Completeness

You know that the Cleaning Up investigation is complete when most of the territory is mapped. This means at least two things:

One, you don’t discover any more ego-structures that have not been discovered already.

Two, you can account for the lion’s share of rising hurts in any given situation by regarding it as coming from some already discovered ego-structure.

To speak more experientially: you’ll notice that “reactivity” ramps up and ramps down much more quickly. This easy, gentle, natural ramping up and ramping down signifies that the Cleaning Up investigation is more or less complete.