Emotional issues often have an immediate payoff.

Update: a new post explains this better:

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1. It can be extremely valuable to view emotional issues as having an immediate payoff. For example, depression, anxiety, insecurity, failure at work, failure in romance, muscle tension, chronic pain, etc. can help one avoid fears or achieve unconscious goals.
   [UPDATE: I should revise this entire post to use the term “locally optimal” instead….]

2. But very few people seem to consider that, and instead most people assume that emotional issues are all bad.

3. Unfortunately, taking the concept of trauma too seriously can lead to more trauma.

1. Emotional issues often have an immediate payoff

2022. I was depressed. There’s five months where I couldn’t tell you what I did. 

I remember wondering during that time, “Why am I so depressed? Why are my emotions so irrational? Why is my brain so dumb?”

At the same time, my social interactions were not going as I wanted:

• I was having trouble making close friends.

• I would like a woman and then never hear from her again. This happened a few times.

• Whenever I expressed any kind of disapproval, those around me seemed to get mad at me.

And I didn’t realize it consciously, but interacting with others felt emotionally unsafe.

Separately, something about me is that when I’m depressed and low energy, I don’t want to interact with other people. 

So, if interacting with other people was unsafe, then one way for me to be safe was to be depressed. 

Maybe I didn’t have a ‘dumb brain’ after all…

What if my depression wasn’t a problem? What if it was actually a solution to a different problem?

In which case, my problem wasn’t “being depressed” as I had thought. Instead, it was not knowing how to interact with other people in a way that felt emotionally safe. 

I was working with a great counselor at the time, and once we found this, we worked on making social interactions safe. Within a few weeks/sessions my fears were handled and I didn’t need to be depressed anymore. 

Also, while I was depressed I had moved to the middle of nowhere — conveniently far from almost anyone I might have wanted to talk to. But within three weeks of this shift I moved to a big city and had ten times as much social interaction. I have not needed to be depressed again in more than 1.5 years since.

Seeing my depression as potentially part of a helpful strategy in the present helped me grow.

Original post: Depression was useful?

Generalizing this idea:

It can be extremely valuable to view emotional issues as having an immediate payoff. For example, depression, anxiety, insecurity, failure at work, failure in romance, muscle tension, chronic pain, etc. can help one avoid fears or achieve unconscious goals. (Growth principles, #1)

Why growth can be hard: Unconscious Predictions

I like to use the word “teleology” to describe this mindset (c.f., The Courage to be Disliked). “The explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they may arise.”

From the perspective of teleology, what is learned from an experience depends entirely on how it’s interpreted: how your predictions about the future change. And there are many ways to interpret any given experience, so any experience can’t be deterministically emotionally damaging. 

Besides, not everyone who goes through terrible experiences acquires sticky neuroses, so there must be other factors at play.¹

For the people I’ve facilitated growth for, their emotional issues almost always turn out to be adaptive in a way that’s helping them now — as opposed to their problems just being residues from the past. My practice is about helping them intuit more effective strategies that require less suffering.

2. But very few people understand that.

Usually, when I tell someone I spent half a year being depressed, they tell me something like, “I’m so sorry to hear that!” Their first assumption is that my depression was a strictly bad thing — and they have little uncertainty that it might have actually been a useful (albeit unconscious) strategy that was actively serving me. 

(In my case, if I could’ve flicked a switch and not been depressed anymore, I would’ve started interacting with people a lot more and immediately felt hurt!² As had happened many times. I was still emotionally insecure and seeking validation from others.)

I spoke to hundreds of people about minds in the past year, and fewer than five consider teleological/strategic explanations of emotional issues before they consider trauma/causative explanations. I hear things like:

• “That person is depressed/anxious/etc. because <bad thing happened to them>.” 

• “I do <harmful thing> so often because it has become a habit.”

• “Mental illness is just brain chemicals.”

Then I tell them my story — or one of the dozens of other stories I’ve collected from clients and friends (chronic back pain, insomnia, social conflict, anxiety, procrastination, …) — and they’re dumbfounded! As if it had never occurred to them that something that looks like a emotional ‘issue’ might NOT be all bad.

To be clear, I’m not saying that mental issues are always best treated teleologically, and I don’t doubt that sometimes the best treatments are more causal/biological mechanisms (e.g., addressing lead poisoning, micronutrient deficiencies, or infections).

But if your objective is growth, then it can be extremely useful to consider that your issues might have an immediate payoff. But, again, almost no one I know does this.

I created muscle tension to avoid my feelings

Yes, even self-loathing has a payoff

Note: It requires a lot of skill to diagnose teleology. In my case, I only became aware that my depression was helping me after working with an excellent counselor. Since then I’ve learned the skill for myself, and in my experience facilitating growth for other people I can’t remember anyone who was able to do this on their own. (And if they could, they would’ve long solved their issue.)

3. Taking the concept of trauma too seriously can lead to more trauma.

If you believe that you were permanently damaged by something in your past, then you might not even try to grow, resulting in the ‘damage’ becoming permanent just as you feared. 

For example, just before my depression I also had a string of social failures. If I had interpreted these failures as trauma that caused my depression, then I might not have tried to improve my situation. After all, other people had caused my depression — so other people would have to stop it, right? Out of my hands!

But ultimately my depression was not solved by anyone else changing.

So I’m wary of the common trauma mindset. When taken to the extreme, it disqualifies the potential for personal agency. It can even help exacerbate issues. 

The most mentally unhealthy people I know tend to also believe that growth will be slow and difficult. And maybe they’re actually right about their situation! But I find it very interesting that they don't believe “I just haven’t found the right combination of facilitator and method for me yet.”

If this is you: Would you like a different self-fulfilling prophecy?

The Courage to be Disliked infamously wrote “Trauma Does Not Exist”, and I can mostly see why now. Terrible phrasing though.

Thanks to Stag Lynn, Kaj Sotala, Damon Sasi, Claire Mingyuan Wang, Epistea Residency, CFAR, Anna Salamon, Alex Zhu, Max L, Nolan Kent, and many others for mentorship and support.

What next?

You’ve read this post and you believe my theory. You want to grow, and you believe it’s possible. What next?

While my ultimate goal is to make growth quick, easy, and scalable, my only recommendation for now is to work with an extraordinary facilitator. Recommendations in a post soon.

You can also maybe get 20% of the effect in 10x as much effort by reading and practicing Focusing and Already Free.

1. Some people will read this and think “It’s genetics!” But how do you know?

2. During the second month of my depression I wrote at length in my journal about “realizing that I can decide to be happy”. And then I forgot about this ability and never tried it again. Convenient, right?