based on the idea that niceness is the cause of all anxiety.
All anxiety? Surely not. People get anxious about exams and going to the dentist and mortgages and impending wars and loads of other stuff that hasn’t got squat to do with this particular behaviour. That’s so obvious that nobody would make their model that absurdly broad.
I think what the author wanted to say was “based on the idea that there exists a psychological pattern that leads to anxiety and is caused by niceness.”
(Just nitpicking bad writing here, but it has to be said.)
(Just nitpicking bad writing here, but it has to be said.)
It’s not bad writting, it’s you judging writing based on not having the context. Likely you misunderstand the word model.
But as far as the dentist example goes, a large part of the anxiety of going to the dentist is about you not wanting to feel pain but allowing someone else to do something painful to you without you being allowed to be angry at them. That’s what niceness is about in that model.
Most people who feel anxiety before exams have a history of surpressing anger at their teachers but our school system doesn’t consider it okay to express that anger.
Both of those situations are possible to be modeled in that model.
I do of course lack the context, that’s true. Does the context define anxiety in such a narrow way that it makes more sense to trace it all back to being nice? (I imagine that’s what it would take for the context to justify that particular phrasing.)
I’m not particularly convinced that dentist anxiety would be any better in a world where yelling at your dentist for hurting you were considered socially acceptable, though. Anyway, even if those two examples can be explained away, better examples of anxiety that don’t seem to relate to niceness in any way aren’t difficult to think of at all. Some people become anxious from being inside an elevator or an airplane or just a very small room, or atop a tall building. Or being surrounded by sharks. Or on fire. Surely in many cases, anxiety is a direct result of perceived danger, or of anticipating or being confronted with scary things.
Angry outbursts can relieve anxiety, sure, but surely not every single instance of anxiety is caused by not letting oneself be angry.
The main point of the context is that it’s one of four models he presents.
It’s perfectly fine to model every cow as being spherical. There’s nothing irrational about saying that you have a model where every cow is spherical. It’s also not bad writing.
Different models have different usefulness.
I’m not particularly convinced that dentist anxiety would be any better in a world where yelling at your dentist for hurting you were considered socially acceptable, though.
In that issue anxiety is produced when your system I considers going to the dentist bad because he will hurt you but your system II drags you to the dentist. Simply yelling at the dentist doesn’t resolve the dilenma.
To actually release the anxiety you need to reconcile your system I and system II. Depending on how good you can do that, your system I can also shut down the pain response so that the dentist doesn’t have to give you anesthesia.
Surely in many cases, anxiety is a direct result of perceived danger, or of anticipating or being confronted with scary things.
The standard word for the emotion that people usually fear as result of direct perceived danger is fear.
Apart from that you miss the deeper point. If you look at a person getting afraid in an elevator there something that distinguishes them from other people who don’t get afraid in an elevator. People don’t randomly develop claustrophibia out of nothing.
A person who constantly suppresses his emotions is more likely to develop claustrophibia. Therapeutically it’s useful to work on the topic of expressing one’s emotions instead of being nice to overcome the issue. There are more direct and faster ways to cure claustrophibia but that doesn’t mean that the hidden emotion model isn’t applicable. That’s why it’s in David Burns book.
There we are at: “Scientists who write a claim that a lay person disagrees with are bad writers because they obviously don’t mean what they claim.”
One concluding footnote. It seems to offend you a lot that I called that one sentence ‘bad writing’. I want to point out that ‘bad writing’ has been the more generous explanation of the strangeness of that particular sentence. A slip of the pen is no big deal, it happens all the time. It would be quite a bigger accusation if I insisted, like you, on taking that phrasing completely at face value, and then called the author a nutter for endorsing a model like that.
(Of course, a still more generous interpretation would be that the word ‘anxiety’ is being used here in a specialised way with a very narrow definition, and that the apparent absurdity here is just a matter of lacking that context. Which you’re now hinting at by calling the rest ‘fear’—supposing that that’s a separate class of feelings—but still haven’t explicitly confirmed or denied.)
All anxiety? Surely not. People get anxious about exams and going to the dentist and mortgages and impending wars and loads of other stuff that hasn’t got squat to do with this particular behaviour. That’s so obvious that nobody would make their model that absurdly broad.
I think what the author wanted to say was “based on the idea that there exists a psychological pattern that leads to anxiety and is caused by niceness.”
(Just nitpicking bad writing here, but it has to be said.)
It’s not bad writting, it’s you judging writing based on not having the context. Likely you misunderstand the word model.
But as far as the dentist example goes, a large part of the anxiety of going to the dentist is about you not wanting to feel pain but allowing someone else to do something painful to you without you being allowed to be angry at them. That’s what niceness is about in that model.
Most people who feel anxiety before exams have a history of surpressing anger at their teachers but our school system doesn’t consider it okay to express that anger.
Both of those situations are possible to be modeled in that model.
I do of course lack the context, that’s true. Does the context define anxiety in such a narrow way that it makes more sense to trace it all back to being nice? (I imagine that’s what it would take for the context to justify that particular phrasing.)
I’m not particularly convinced that dentist anxiety would be any better in a world where yelling at your dentist for hurting you were considered socially acceptable, though. Anyway, even if those two examples can be explained away, better examples of anxiety that don’t seem to relate to niceness in any way aren’t difficult to think of at all. Some people become anxious from being inside an elevator or an airplane or just a very small room, or atop a tall building. Or being surrounded by sharks. Or on fire.
Surely in many cases, anxiety is a direct result of perceived danger, or of anticipating or being confronted with scary things.
Angry outbursts can relieve anxiety, sure, but surely not every single instance of anxiety is caused by not letting oneself be angry.
The main point of the context is that it’s one of four models he presents.
It’s perfectly fine to model every cow as being spherical. There’s nothing irrational about saying that you have a model where every cow is spherical. It’s also not bad writing.
Different models have different usefulness.
In that issue anxiety is produced when your system I considers going to the dentist bad because he will hurt you but your system II drags you to the dentist. Simply yelling at the dentist doesn’t resolve the dilenma.
To actually release the anxiety you need to reconcile your system I and system II. Depending on how good you can do that, your system I can also shut down the pain response so that the dentist doesn’t have to give you anesthesia.
The standard word for the emotion that people usually fear as result of direct perceived danger is fear.
Apart from that you miss the deeper point. If you look at a person getting afraid in an elevator there something that distinguishes them from other people who don’t get afraid in an elevator. People don’t randomly develop claustrophibia out of nothing.
A person who constantly suppresses his emotions is more likely to develop claustrophibia. Therapeutically it’s useful to work on the topic of expressing one’s emotions instead of being nice to overcome the issue. There are more direct and faster ways to cure claustrophibia but that doesn’t mean that the hidden emotion model isn’t applicable. That’s why it’s in David Burns book.
There we are at: “Scientists who write a claim that a lay person disagrees with are bad writers because they obviously don’t mean what they claim.”
I’m kind of done with this conversation.
One concluding footnote. It seems to offend you a lot that I called that one sentence ‘bad writing’. I want to point out that ‘bad writing’ has been the more generous explanation of the strangeness of that particular sentence. A slip of the pen is no big deal, it happens all the time.
It would be quite a bigger accusation if I insisted, like you, on taking that phrasing completely at face value, and then called the author a nutter for endorsing a model like that.
(Of course, a still more generous interpretation would be that the word ‘anxiety’ is being used here in a specialised way with a very narrow definition, and that the apparent absurdity here is just a matter of lacking that context. Which you’re now hinting at by calling the rest ‘fear’—supposing that that’s a separate class of feelings—but still haven’t explicitly confirmed or denied.)