Eight Cs and Six

Two index cards lie side by side on a consultation desk. One carries eight words in a column: calm, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, courage, creativity, connectedness. The other carries six: comfortable, curiosity, courageous, clarity, clean, calmness. A client has brought both in her coat pocket, and she asks, with the mild suspicion of a person who has found two keys that almost match, whether they are the same list.

They are not the same list, and the difference is worth stating with care, because each list does a different job. In Internal Family Systems the eight Cs, together with a second list called the five Ps, which are presence, patience, perspective, persistence, and playfulness, describe Self-energy. A therapist does not teach them, and a client does not work through them in order. They are markers, the qualities a clinician listens for to judge whether the protective parts have stepped back far enough for the Self to lead. When a client speaks about a part with curiosity and without contempt, the therapist takes it as evidence that Self is present. The list describes a state, and the state arrives all at once or not at all.

The Commission's Six C's are a progression. Comfortable, Curiosity, Courageous, Clarity, Clean, and Calmness are taken in that order, and the order carries weight. Clarity cannot be rushed before Curiosity, Clean cannot arrive before Courageous, and Calmness is not a reward for the work but the natural condition of a person who has done it. Each C serves a stage of the path. Comfortable is the settling in, learning to sit with what is real without reaching for a distraction. Curiosity is the excavation, in which a person stops judging a pattern and gets interested in it. Courageous is telling the truth when it costs something. Clarity is finding the person who was always there beneath the performance. Clean is living undivided, so that a person's words, commitments, and relationships stop disagreeing with who she is. Calmness is sustained freedom, the quiet of someone no longer at war with herself. The list describes a movement, and the movement has a direction.

Four of the words are shared: curiosity, clarity, courage, and calm. Lists that describe a person who has stopped defending herself tend to reach for similar words, and the overlap is unremarkable. What matters is the job each list does.

The differences are in kind. The IFS list is a set of attributes of a state, unordered, observed by a therapist in the room, and the same word names the same quality whenever Self is present. The Six C's are a set of movements in a sequence, undertaken by a person alone, each one doing work the previous one made possible. Take calm. In IFS it is the steadiness a client feels when a part has stepped aside, and it can be present in a single session. In the path, Calmness is the last C, reached after the others, and it names a condition a life settles into. Take courage. In IFS it is the willingness to turn toward a burdened part. In the path, Courageous is the telling of a truth that costs something, in a real room, with real people in it. The words match while the tasks differ.

Each list also holds words the other lacks. Compassion, confidence, creativity, and connectedness appear only in the IFS list, and the path does not use them as C's. Comfortable and Clean appear only in the Six, and neither has a counterpart among the eight. Comfortable in particular sits at the opposite end of the order from where Self-energy is usually assessed. In IFS a client is invited to turn toward a part and its burden, and in the path Comfortable comes first, before anything has been examined, and asks only that a person stay with what is real.

For a clinician the counsel is short. Keep the lists apart in the room. A client who reports that she is feeling curious and calm on the path should not be told she has reached Self, and a client whom an IFS therapist describes as showing Self-energy has not thereby completed a stage of the path. Neither list is a measure on the other's scale. A client who has met both can be told that they have different jobs, one to recognize a state and the other to follow a progression, and that she is free to use either, both, or neither.

The IFS essay before this one sets the two maps of the mind side by side, and the one page brief covers the coordination between the frameworks. Questions about the Six C's can go to us through the inquiry form on the therapy page.