Compared To
Most people arrive with a vocabulary already. They know their attachment style from a quiz, have heard of “parts” from a therapist or a podcast, learned to catch cognitive distortions in a workbook, or have been told to do their shadow work. None of that is wrong, and much of it describes the same territory this site covers in older language. These pages say where each idea came from, what it shares with the psychodynamic picture Geist uses, and where the two part ways.
The short version: the psychodynamic tradition is usually the older relative. Parts work closely resembles the earlier ideas of self-states and internal objects, attachment styles come from Bowlby’s revision of object relations, cognitive therapy from a psychoanalyst who left, and shadow work from Jung, who was there at the beginning. Knowing the lineage makes the newer vocabulary more useful, not less.
Pages in This Section
- Internal Family Systems and Parts Work
- Managers, firefighters, exiles and the Self, next to self-states, defenses and internal objects.
- Attachment Styles
- Secure, anxious, avoidant and disorganized, next to the inner scenes and dyads they summarize.
- CBT and Cognitive Distortions
- Automatic thoughts and core beliefs, next to pathogenic beliefs and the question of why a belief resists evidence.
- Shadow Work
- Jung’s shadow, next to repression, projection and what a defense is afraid of.
What They Share
Every approach on these pages agrees on four things. That much of what drives us runs outside awareness. That patterns learned early persist past their usefulness. That naming a pattern, in the right way, loosens it. And that the relationship in which the naming happens matters as much as the content. They differ on emphasis, on vocabulary, on how much weight to give the past, and on how much to trust the person’s own account. Geist leans toward the person’s own account, which is why your words outrank its ideas.
What Geist Does With Your Vocabulary
If you talk about your anxious attachment, your inner critic part, your catastrophizing or your shadow, Geist will use your words. It does not correct them or translate them into its own terms in conversation. Underneath, it maps them onto the frameworks described on this site, because that is how it keeps track of what recurs. See how it works.