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. 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.
Hey Chris, I wonder... It occurs to me that some people are "ready" to receive your message (story with insights) and move closer toward change (growth), and others might respond with the kind of skeptical resistance ("no, it must be X in my past"). Do you have a teleological "diagnosis" for this kind of resistance itself? How is that resistance *serving* the person who resists? And if you can understand that, can you then work on the resistance itself...?
I'm glad you noticed this!! Resistance to growth certainly seems to be teleological sometimes.
I imagine it varies in individual cases, but here are two common incentives I've seen:
- Feedback loops of self-disliking, and not wanting lack of growth or failure from attempted growth to be "your fault". Deep rejection of self-love that sustains itself in a feedback loop. But if you don't try you can't fail! (It's even locally optimal!) I suspect the solution to this, on a theoretical level, is to get out of the self-dislike loop, ie untangle one's various emotional insecurities. (But these were probably also learned teleologically! But likely suboptimal…) The practical treatment I would use with a client is somatic therapy and the right Socratic questioning, and sometimes another thing.
- The presence of predictions that "negative emotions are bad (and should be resisted on the level of mental sensation)". (Also notice predictions like this are a self-fulfilling prophecy, where if instead you believed that they're good you then negative emotions _wouldn't be bad_.) This is important because effective introspection inevitably requires digging into negative emotions. So if you don't try to grow you can continue to avoid "bad" negative emotions. (This is locally optimal!) I suspect the theoretical solution to this is to untangle those unconscious predictions. (Which themselves were probably also learned teleologically! But likely suboptimal…) The practical solution I would use with a client is similar to before, maybe with more emphasis on a thing I won't say here.
But again, it's likely a different set of overlapping incentives in every case, and that requires individual attention.
It certainly goes in the direction of my own thoughts on this inquiry. My hunch is that every form of life, very much at or close to its core, is engaged in a fairly "intuitive" (unconscious) balancing of effort vis-a-vis outcome towards self-sustaining (as individual) and growth (both individual and for life as a whole). And since exerting effort is not a predictable enterprise (you often cannot say with any certainty whether a specific effort exerted will lead to an outcome that moves you towards sustaining yourself or growth), different people manifest all sorts of "codified biases" in one direction (more effort than I might expect from an "average" person) or the other (less effort).
The *ways* in which this codification happens are various (biological traits, encoded memories and beliefs, situational factors that align one way or the other) and complex (interact). Importantly, *one* such factor are indeed *beliefs about effort* that can be reached and, with some agreement by the person who at least consciously says they want to grow, become open for "shifting."
The question I have is maybe whether it is possible to build a *relatively generic* hierarchy of these factors so as to have some kind of template or blue-print when going about *discovering* which of them might be *most* amenable to those shifts, given the whole combination or set of factors.
Ultimately, whatever constellation one finds (in oneself and others), I very much agree that starting from a position of "this is bad, and happened to you in the past, so you are not responsible" (trauma) seems to me one of the surest ways of making it "worse." The "bad" label creates, in itself, a desire of whatever causes the resistance to "persist" (because there is an oppositional force applied by the moralizing). And the "happened to you" creates (or at least supports) a belief that whatever the cause, it may well be outside of one's voluntary control. Finally, the (often explicit) mentioning of lack of responsibility (other agents *caused* it) cements this view nicely.
From the outside, it can then seem as though the person has become "lazy" about actually applying themselves (in a direction of personal growth), but by providing this external-locus-of-control narrative (trauma), whoever may have wanted to help has very much created the conditions later being considered "lazy"...
1st & 2nd paragraph- just letting you know idk what you're trying to say, though i do want to understand
> whether it is possible to build a *relatively generic* hierarchy of these factors so as to have some kind of template or blue-print when going about *discovering* which of them might be *most* amenable to those shifts
Yes I think there's some kind of power law distribution frequency for these misconceptions. For example almost everyone I've counseled has been deeply afraid of other people being mad at them in a way that they later choose to unlearn. And I try to write about the common misconceptions on my blog. However some of these things are simply unique for each person and require individual effort.
I know we spared a bit at Manifest, but what you're saying here makes a lot of sense to me.
The book "The Depths" talks about the likely evolutionary origins of depression. Most depressions are triggered by some sort of loss. It's a mechanism to get the brain to hunker down and play safe. The continual replay of bad memories is designed to force the brain to think a lot about them to hopefully figure out ways to avoid those bad things happening in the future. Of course, this can all go off the rails, as we know. But it helpful to see the utility and understand the mechanisms at play.
I suspect depression is often a strategy. A strategy that *would* be swapped out if your nervous system was convinced that another non-depressive strategy was better. I want to emphasize the present-moment nature of the utility I speak of here— you seem to agree in utility but possibly be implying that the decision was in the past (decided by evolution and genes and whatever) not actively in the present
Hey Chris, I wonder... It occurs to me that some people are "ready" to receive your message (story with insights) and move closer toward change (growth), and others might respond with the kind of skeptical resistance ("no, it must be X in my past"). Do you have a teleological "diagnosis" for this kind of resistance itself? How is that resistance *serving* the person who resists? And if you can understand that, can you then work on the resistance itself...?
I'm glad you noticed this!! Resistance to growth certainly seems to be teleological sometimes.
I imagine it varies in individual cases, but here are two common incentives I've seen:
- Feedback loops of self-disliking, and not wanting lack of growth or failure from attempted growth to be "your fault". Deep rejection of self-love that sustains itself in a feedback loop. But if you don't try you can't fail! (It's even locally optimal!) I suspect the solution to this, on a theoretical level, is to get out of the self-dislike loop, ie untangle one's various emotional insecurities. (But these were probably also learned teleologically! But likely suboptimal…) The practical treatment I would use with a client is somatic therapy and the right Socratic questioning, and sometimes another thing.
- The presence of predictions that "negative emotions are bad (and should be resisted on the level of mental sensation)". (Also notice predictions like this are a self-fulfilling prophecy, where if instead you believed that they're good you then negative emotions _wouldn't be bad_.) This is important because effective introspection inevitably requires digging into negative emotions. So if you don't try to grow you can continue to avoid "bad" negative emotions. (This is locally optimal!) I suspect the theoretical solution to this is to untangle those unconscious predictions. (Which themselves were probably also learned teleologically! But likely suboptimal…) The practical solution I would use with a client is similar to before, maybe with more emphasis on a thing I won't say here.
But again, it's likely a different set of overlapping incentives in every case, and that requires individual attention.
Does that answer your question?
It certainly goes in the direction of my own thoughts on this inquiry. My hunch is that every form of life, very much at or close to its core, is engaged in a fairly "intuitive" (unconscious) balancing of effort vis-a-vis outcome towards self-sustaining (as individual) and growth (both individual and for life as a whole). And since exerting effort is not a predictable enterprise (you often cannot say with any certainty whether a specific effort exerted will lead to an outcome that moves you towards sustaining yourself or growth), different people manifest all sorts of "codified biases" in one direction (more effort than I might expect from an "average" person) or the other (less effort).
The *ways* in which this codification happens are various (biological traits, encoded memories and beliefs, situational factors that align one way or the other) and complex (interact). Importantly, *one* such factor are indeed *beliefs about effort* that can be reached and, with some agreement by the person who at least consciously says they want to grow, become open for "shifting."
The question I have is maybe whether it is possible to build a *relatively generic* hierarchy of these factors so as to have some kind of template or blue-print when going about *discovering* which of them might be *most* amenable to those shifts, given the whole combination or set of factors.
Ultimately, whatever constellation one finds (in oneself and others), I very much agree that starting from a position of "this is bad, and happened to you in the past, so you are not responsible" (trauma) seems to me one of the surest ways of making it "worse." The "bad" label creates, in itself, a desire of whatever causes the resistance to "persist" (because there is an oppositional force applied by the moralizing). And the "happened to you" creates (or at least supports) a belief that whatever the cause, it may well be outside of one's voluntary control. Finally, the (often explicit) mentioning of lack of responsibility (other agents *caused* it) cements this view nicely.
From the outside, it can then seem as though the person has become "lazy" about actually applying themselves (in a direction of personal growth), but by providing this external-locus-of-control narrative (trauma), whoever may have wanted to help has very much created the conditions later being considered "lazy"...
1st & 2nd paragraph- just letting you know idk what you're trying to say, though i do want to understand
> whether it is possible to build a *relatively generic* hierarchy of these factors so as to have some kind of template or blue-print when going about *discovering* which of them might be *most* amenable to those shifts
Yes I think there's some kind of power law distribution frequency for these misconceptions. For example almost everyone I've counseled has been deeply afraid of other people being mad at them in a way that they later choose to unlearn. And I try to write about the common misconceptions on my blog. However some of these things are simply unique for each person and require individual effort.
I know we spared a bit at Manifest, but what you're saying here makes a lot of sense to me.
The book "The Depths" talks about the likely evolutionary origins of depression. Most depressions are triggered by some sort of loss. It's a mechanism to get the brain to hunker down and play safe. The continual replay of bad memories is designed to force the brain to think a lot about them to hopefully figure out ways to avoid those bad things happening in the future. Of course, this can all go off the rails, as we know. But it helpful to see the utility and understand the mechanisms at play.
I suspect depression is often a strategy. A strategy that *would* be swapped out if your nervous system was convinced that another non-depressive strategy was better. I want to emphasize the present-moment nature of the utility I speak of here— you seem to agree in utility but possibly be implying that the decision was in the past (decided by evolution and genes and whatever) not actively in the present