That’s not how responsibility works, Professor.” Harry’s voice was patient, like he was explaining things to a child who was certain not to understand. He wasn’t looking at her anymore, just staring off at the wall to her right side. “When you do a fault analysis, there’s no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can’t change afterward, it’s like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity. Gravity isn’t going to change next time. There’s no point in trying to allocate responsibility to people who aren’t going to alter their actions. Once you look at it from that perspective, you realize that allocating blame never helps anything unless you blame yourself, because you’re the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there. That’s why Dumbledore has his room full of broken wands. He understands that part, at least.
Does anyone else run into the problem of frequently giving this advice to yourself and finding it useful, but struggling to find a non-awful way to convey it to other people? I don’t want to get them to self-flagellate, but to look for what leverage they have and not worry as much about what it totally outside of their control. Stoicism seems like the main way people hit on this idea of responsibility in my social circle.
I think Harry phrased it poorly, and if he meant it, he was absolutely wrong.
Allocating blame on yourself is a category error. We morally judge to separate the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff—in short, to sort into piles of approach and avoid. You’re stuck with you—where ever you go, there you are—so the point of the categorical judgment is simply inapplicable.
The sensible and very valuable part of what he is saying is to look to what you can do, and don’t seek to console yourself with “that was his responsibility”. Such interpersonal judgments are all about roles
because you’re the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there.
But you can change your actions more directly and more effectively by changing them. Putting blame on yourself is one of the better paths to depression, which is not an effective state. Blame others where appropriate and useful, but don’t blame yourself, only search for actions to improve the situation, and choose them. You blame others because their actions are not yours to choose. Don’t blame yourself, choose better.
This is a problem with the concept of heroic responsibility. It’s not defined with sufficient resolution to nail down the interpretation of paying attention to specific parts of the causal graph and exclude the interpretation of feeling like a horrible person. I can’t decide if Eliezer doesn’t worry about people coming away with the second impression or if he actually endorses it.
I call it “being solution-oriented”. Stop any discussion or thoughts as to whose “fault” it was, and look at everything which could have been done to prevent the negative outcome. Consider hindsight bias carefully before saying that a particular action which could have prevented a given crisis had an expected positive return.
Stressed? Like someone who is being whipped for their inadequacies and failures? That kind of stress?
People will scourge themselves in ways that they’d curse if the lashes were landing on anyone else’s back. Why is compassion and kindness only for other people? Who but a psychopath would ever even imagine beating another person in ways that we beat ourselves? If it would be cruel to say “X” to someone else, why isn’t it cruel to say it to ourselves? If other people don’t deserve that, we don’t either. The hand that holds that whip is no one’s friend, and deserves the same anger no matter who is taking the lash today.
The first rule in the judgment game is fairness—everyone is judged by the same standards. Everyone gets the same compassion, the same kindness, the same will to protect that anyone else does. A good test for fairness is whether SWIM judging SWIM yields the same result, and that test is a first step away from judging yourself at all.
You asked how to apply my previous thinking while stressed, and I assumed stressed by not applying my thinking, but instead blaming yourself. I don’t think you get there with the idea alone, as ideas have a different function and operation than our judgment and valuations. Ideas are too bloodless to combat judgment on their own. Judgments are beaten by better judgments. When the judgment is knocked down by another, the idea can then join in and keep it down by kicking it in the head any time it stirs, but it’s unlikely to effect a takedown itself, especially in the short term.
I was thinking about Harry’s situation—he’s grieving and under very high stakes time pressure, so there are external sources of stress as well as what he’s imposing on himself.
As for the real world, I’ve been trying to undo a very bad habit of self-attack for a while. Realizing that that the attacks are unfair is a start, but only helps occasionally. Getting angry at it is a risky strategy. If it’s the wrong kind of anger, it just feeds into the internal rage. I didn’t analyse it before, but the difference might be between a fairly emotionally distant “This makes no sense and should stop because it doesn’t make sense” (sometimes helpful) vs. “this attacking part of myself is revolting and infuriating and shouldn’t exist” (really, the same attitude that causing the problem).
Examples of the “makes no sense” which do some good: For a while, I’d look in the mirror and on some days I’d think I looked fairly good and on other days I’d think I looked like hell. Eventually I realized that looking like hell actually meant looking frightened and/or tired. At that point, it occurred to me that telling someone who was frightened or tired that they looked like hell was wildly inappropriate, and I’ve at least cut back on that—sometimes I have negative opinions about how I look, but the intensity is lower.
I also hang onto the idea that beating up on myself for symptoms of depression doesn’t make sense.
Hypothesis: People put amazing amounts of work into emotionally abusing each other. I believe that what reinforces the abuse is seeing that the person abused is seen to feel frightened, squelched, unhappy, etc. The abuse may well continue and intensify until hurt is achieved.
I believe that abuse is a tool for status enforcement.
A person who’s abused may internalize the situation and come to believe that feeling better isn’t safe, because feeling happy, relaxed, confidant, etc. is precisely what draws more abuse.
The solution isn’t just believing that internal abuse is wrong, it’s alieving that living well is safe.
I went through a situation very similar to Ch90. Same story, different details.
Even got the worse-than-useless attempts at comfort—now I can’t even say “I’m sorry” to my uncle for letting his son die. That’s one of the few things that still brings me to tears about this whole incident.
My thought process was fairly similar to Harry’s, and I’ve given it a lot of thought, so I might be able to shed some light on the topic.
Any thoughts about how to apply this sort of thinking when you’re extremely stressed?
When the pressure was on, there was no room for guilt and it was just do do do with some frantic thinking interpersed—even when it was clear that there was little hope. The feeling that I was to blame didn’t come until afterwards, when there was nothing left I could do. At the point where you can still do something, it’s not so much the “it’s your fault and you should feel bad”, but rather “this can’t happen. THINK THINK THINK!” which gets in the way.
The main advice I have here is to come to terms with the possibility ahead of time. Get those tears out of the way now, so that should it happen, you just see it for what it is and not what it “can’t” be.
Practice helps, but it’s hard to deliberately come by legit/safe practice. Even though I had plenty of experience, I didn’t realize at the time that I was a more panicked than I needed to be. I had never lost before, and so I thought I was doing “good enough”—though in hindsight, clues were there.
I can’t imagine anything I could have done at the time to not feel guilt once it was official, and I’m not sure I would have wanted to anyway.
People will scourge themselves in ways that they’d curse if the lashes were landing on anyone else’s back. Why is compassion and kindness only for other people?
Because you usually can’t get away with lashing at others.
Lashing at others is often done to shift blame off the attacker even if it doesn’t help the attacked take responsibility, and so it makes sense to be punished. It’s also easy to win social points for making people feel good and signalling alliance even if it masks over the problem and keeps them stuck.
These things don’t really apply internally, and there is a purpose to it.
The solution isn’t just believing that internal abuse is wrong, it’s alieving that living well is safe.
This is exactly it. Calling something “wrong” and “bad” isn’t that helpful. You wouldn’t need to call it “wrong” if you didn’t have a reason to do it in the first place—and as long as you have that reason, you’re going to have an uncomfortable inner conflict about it and will likely do it anyway.
Actually, I wouldn’t even call it abuse. It’s a message—a very painful message, but just a message nonetheless. Reality isn’t what it should be and it could have been if you made better decisions and were more the kind of person you try to be. Pain isn’t something to avoid. Avoiding pain rather than avoiding that which causes pain is simply wireheading.
The pain is an impulse to do something about it. I thought I was prepared to keep my family safe. I was wrong. It would be bad to feel all happy and guilt free as long as I had not done my homework to make sure I don’t screw up again. No way in hell I’m going to let myself be guilt free if it means I might lose someone else that could have been saved.
As I went through exactly what happened, why it happened, what I could have done differently, how I would have known to do it differently, what changes need to be made to ensure that I do it right in the future, etc… I felt less and less guilt. And then another aspect would come up that I hadn’t thought through and I’d have to do it all over again. In the end it’s just something that is what it is. I wish I had done things differently and that he were still alive—of course I do. However I can’t really beat myself up any more for making the wrong call now that I know exactly what lead me to it. I’m a deterministic system and was in a known state with known inputs, so of course I gave that output. There’s just no other way for it to be—might as well wish 2+2=5. The only thing left to do is to change the system so that it does better in the future.
Ideally you’d just get on track to do what you need to do so that you don’t need the constant motivation of guilt—and then the guilt can just go away immediately instead of when you’re finished working things through. That’s what I do with physical pain. However, I wasn’t able to do that here. Most can’t.
I couldn’t because going through and learning what I needed to learn required plowing through nasty ugh-fields. Places where my identity conflicted with reality. No, I’m not perfect at handling situations under stress, and yes it can actually be the difference between having my cousin alive and not. Those aren’t fun thoughts, and I didn’t want to have to face them. The guilt needed to be high enough to push me through it anyway. I even had my hypnotherapist buddy help guide me through it at first, until I was able to more easily recognize subtle deflections I was making in order to not feel all the pain.
It’d have been better if I just faced all uncomfortable thoughts without flinching. I wish I were able to just accept everything as it comes and make sure I learn enough from bad experiences without needing to feel these pressures, but I’m not there yet. And so of course I felt guilty. The alternative wasn’t acceptable.
It’s pretty obvious why you wouldn’t want to go into details, but this seems rather too vague to be of use. Should I think of plans in case I need to find a student in Hogwarts, to fight a troll, to convince a student to disobey McGonagall? Should I do a headcount every time I walk into a room and try to guess where missing people are and what will happen if someone announces there’s a troll in the castle? Should I sign up to Defense classes and duelling clubs and the Armies so I’ll get training in thinking and acting under pressure? Should I think of possible ways Hermione could end up dead or hurt or in Azkaban and ways I can prevent that? Should I imagine those outcomes in excruciating detail so that I won’t be too shocked if they happen? Once Hermione gets eaten by the troll, how do I use the replays and alternate versions in my head to become better?
Nah, it’s fine. That one was hard for me because it hit a spot I hadn’t worked through yet, but I’m good now and not afraid to give details. I just feel weird bringing up personal details when it doesn’t feel relevant—like if I were to start talking about the taste of death blood/vomit unnecessarily :P
On the forethought/practice side of things (as opposed to the emotional prep side), it really depends on your risk level. For MoR!Harry, probably something like “all of the above”. For me personally, the risk level isn’t obscene like that, but given how big my family is and the fun stuff we do, it was almost surprising no one had been seriously injured (before the accident). There’s no way I could have planned out the logistics of incident any more carefully—everything was right there. The only mistake I made that night that definitely would have made a difference was treating the guy in danger as less of a PC and more of an NPC. It’s actually a mistake I’ve made in the past, but I had no idea it would apply to him. Even in hindsight it’s not obvious.
In terms of preparing for that kind of thing, other than common sense safety protocols, I keep in mind which situations are potentially life threatening and which risk a broken bone at most—and taking extra risks in the latter category because it gets me practice and is fun (never actually broken a bone, or been present while one broken, btw).
In terms of learning from the aftermath, it seems like it just follows from taking responsibility but not blame. You’re a deterministic system. Why’d you do what you did? No, “I’m a crappy person” isn’t a real answer since there’s no fundamental crappiness to excise. In my case, there were several things I didn’t think of. None of them I could have been expected to specifically prepare for beforehand, but I probably would have done better if I was less panicked. So why was I panicked? Well, my cousin might die and that’s not okay for one, and two, I had never had panic level problems before—I had always managed that really well, and I wasn’t far above my normal level, so it wasn’t on my mind to regulate it down. I had things to do, and didn’t feel like I had time to think. I didn’t, really, but I didn’t have time to not think and just do the first plan either. So the takeaway is to be emotionally prepared next time and to set myself a lower level of mental excitation to aim for (both actionable for me). I feel like I can let myself off the hook for not noticing a problem that had never impacted me before—I can’t see how I could possibly foresee the next “like” thing without unreasonable amounts of thought.
The one game changing decision was to focus on getting him out of danger instead of wasting time trying to figure out how much time we had on the clock. Even now, there’s no obvious answer. I’ll shift in the direction of more effort towards understanding the situation first, and keep it on mind as a potential source of critical info even if I really can’t take a few seconds to figure things out—which really seemed to be the case. The more likely way I could have gotten that right was to have less trust in him to start with—or to prepare him to be more trustworthy. Both of those get long faster than they get informative, but I’ve been down those paths as well. But yeah, basically take responsibility to change, view yourself neutrally to figure out why you actually did what you did, and what you can actually change so that you’ll do better in the future—and then chase it down until there are no worthwhile changes to be made.
The emotional prep side I’ll write about in response to Benito’s reply to me—maybe tomorrow or something since I have to go have fun now :)
The main advice I have here is to come to terms with the possibility ahead of time. Get those tears out of the way now, so that should it happen, you just see it for what it is and not what it “can’t” be.
Do you mean come to terms with your loved ones dying before there’s a problem, or that, after the problem starts / they die, come to terms with it as soon as possible?
I meant beforehand—it’s just easier real time if you don’t have to deal with the “this can’t happen!” impulse. Though if you find yourself in the midst of things without having it beforehand just put the emotional reaction off and be realistic. You just don’t want to get overly panicked and deny the real danger level. By denying the danger level, you’ll you’ll rule out dangerous/costly options even if they’re the right call. Ben Franklin apparently messed this one up.
Coming to terms with it isn’t a happy process though, so people tend not to do it until they’re hit in the face with it. Most people will find ways of not thinking about it by pretending they believe in heaven, or pretending they’ve accepted it being a couple common ones—sometimes pretending they don’t care. It’s certainly not a fun process—it’s just that I think it’s worth it anyway. Litany of Gendlin, and all that.
How does one go about doing that? I can tell whether I have a plan to prevent a bad thing or deal with its consequences, and whether I’m repressing thoughts of bad things happening, encouraging them, or letting them happen, but I’m not sure how I know I’ve come to terms with something.
Well… It’s hard to explain. I’ve never managed to “just tell” someone and have them pick it up—despite trying. I’ve always had to guide them through one so that they feel the difference between what they were doing and what I was getting at. I was mostly just pointing it out for the extra motivation to “come to terms with it”—so that if/when you do bump into the option, you know to take it.
EDIT: My newer hack at the problem is mostly “just go read ‘focusing’ by Gendlin”, and then maybe get back to that routine.
Also, I didn’t actually create that routine—just that explanation of it. Credit goes to Joe Fobes for that. He knows his stuff when it comes to hypnosis and therapy and stuff.
Thanks! You’re right, I don’t get it. I do have questions, though:
How do you recognise success? I don’t think I could distinguish it from giving up or going numb.
What do endpoints look like? Like, can I answer “I wish he wasn’t going to die” with “Because then he won’t be alive and that’s bad, duh” or do I need to find some way to pick that apart?
How does looping back work? “Why do I wish he’d sign up for cryonics? Because if he doesn’t he will die. I wish he wasn’t going to die.” works, but I don’t know what to do with “Why am I even acknowledging things? Because jimmy said I’ll be more effective at preventing things if I come to terms with them”.
Damn! That’s a disappointing thing to be right about. I admire your continued curiosity on the topic.
How do you recognise success? I don’t think I could distinguish it from giving up or going numb.
For example, you’re probably not crying over not having a yacht to sail around on. Like, sure, it’d be nice, but of course you don’t have a yacht. It feels a lot like that. Someone that just spent all their money on one just to have it sink would be upset about it because they’re framing it differently. They’re “supposed to” have a yacht, and reality is violating their picture of what they “ought to” have. It’s about updating your picture to have it match reality again. Once it feels like there’s no way reality “could” be different, then there’s no more room for the ought-is divergence to cry about. Just of course it sank—that’s what yachts do when you run them into rocks. And of course I ran it into rocks, I was told it was clear. And of course I was told it was clear, Bob is incompetent, and I knew I was taking a risk when hiring him. It’s just all understood down to the level where it’s just not important enough to go into it. What am I gonna do? Wish that the known-incompetent bob magically got it right? How much sense does that make?
There’s no loss of motivation, just loss of distractions. If you want a yacht, fix it—it’s just no longer “this can’t have happened”, it’s “it did happen. Shrug”. It’s all pull motivation now, not a pushing motivation—which is good because things tend to buckle under compression loading anyway.
Perhaps more important is that it just feels right. With going “numb”, it’s like “I can’t let myself want because it hurts too much and I wish I didn’t have to bury this hurt”—we can do better than that. It’s kinda one of those “when you’re dreaming you don’t realize you’re dreaming, but when you’re awake you know you’re awake” things. You’ll know when you’re there. It’s not like “eh, am I doing it right? Is this how I “should” feel?”. It’s more like “ahhhhh… peace at last”. Just nothing else you could ask for. I mean, it’d be nice if it never sank, but I’m about as tempted to yearn for that as I am to go on wishing that 2+2=3 - because neither could conceivably happen without ignoring known facts. No more gap where you can wish it went the other way. And so now you can just focus where you need to, because it’s clear what you need to do and you’re on your way to doing it—and it’s the best outcome not ruled out by your understanding of the world.
What do endpoints look like? Like, can I answer “I wish he wasn’t going to die” with “Because then he won’t be alive and that’s bad, duh” or do I need to find some way to pick that apart?
Nah, that doesn’t sound like a good answer. The “uh.. Duh?” answer comes up when it seems implied that the asker doesn’t share the “it is bad” impression, but we’re after a different thing here. Regardless of whether we think it’s actually bad, we’re tracking down the particular reasons that have emotions attached. For example, “Because then his family won’t get to have him in their lives”, and “because I can’t have him in my life”. For me, those were both painful to acknowledge—the latter in particular.
How does looping back work? “Why do I wish he’d sign up for cryonics? Because if he doesn’t he will die. I wish he wasn’t going to die.” works, but I don’t know what to do with “Why am I even acknowledging things? Because jimmy said I’ll be more effective at preventing things if I come to terms with them”.
The “why?” doesn’t have to be all of the following questions—it’s just purposely vague so that you answer the one (or more) that feels important.
If you need to going down the “Why am I even acknowledging things?” path, that answer is fine, but not the end of the road. The next question is then “why do I even care what this ‘jimmy’ guy says!?”
I was thinking about Harry’s situation—he’s grieving and under very high stakes time pressure, so there are external sources of stress as well as what he’s imposing on himself.
I ended up deleting my comments about Harry in this regard. What happens when “heroic responsibility meets failure”, when someone accustomed to doing the impossible finally fails when it counts, and holds himself “heroically responsible”? The whipping begins, and right on cue, we get chapters 91 and 92. In a real person, I think the beating will be savage and the person will likely break himself. But fictional Harry with a Superhuman Dark Side doesn’t seem to break, he just gets harder. Someone with a mysterious dark side doesn’t make for the most generalizable model of human psychology. We’ll see what EY does with this.
A person who’s abused may internalize the situation and come to believe that feeling better isn’t safe, because feeling happy, relaxed, confidant, etc. is precisely what draws more abuse.
Very interesting point about abuse as a tool for status enforcement. (As an aside, i’d point out what a bizzarro category error it is to be playing a status game against yourself).
Yes. being happy is showing status, which attracts bullies who want to take you down a peg. The abuse gets reinforced by working to reduce status and making the person fearful and miserable, but it is likely prompted by exhibiting a higher status state that can be taken down a peg or two.
And that’s a real consideration in the presence of an abuser, which likely becomes an ingrained habit of protection that persists after the abuser is gone. But it’s possible to form new habits.
The solution isn’t just believing that internal abuse is wrong, it’s alieving that living well is safe.
For some people, very likely true. I doubt that all people whipping themselves started off being whipped by others, but I can see how abuse from others would make self abuse more likely in the way you described.
Another potential benefit to whipping yourself is hosting a pity party, which can work with a lot of people, and even has some mileage for a party of one.
More generally, any benefit to the whipping promotes more whipping. I had a different benefit going, which I called self sadism. What if instead of associating with the you that is being whipped, what happens if you associated with the you that is doing the whipping? Self sadism. A grim, cruel, sarcastic pleasure in seeing disappointments and setbacks come to fruition. I decided that was an unhelpful attitude in the long run.
From A Beautiful Mind:
I still see things that are not here. I just choose not to acknowledge them. Like a diet of the mind, I just choose not to indulge certain appetites; like my appetite for patterns; perhaps my appetite to imagine and to dream.
I’ve gotten used to ignoring them and I think, as a result, they’ve kind of given up on me. I think that’s what it’s like with all our dreams and our nightmares, Martin, we’ve got to keep feeding them for them to stay alive.
That was my first diet of the mind—stop indulging in self sadism.
When I realized I was hearing the voice again on the other side of the whip, I eventually found a new tactic. As I said before, alienating that voice as SWIM and is not my friend is step one. Then I would tell him to shut up. La la la, I can’t hear you, la la la. Often followed with some teenage vulgarity.
Wasn’t I recently mentioning the power of habit with you? A habit of doing something different. I didn’t even realize I had this example. I think Tony Robbins would call it a pattern interrupt. I think’s it’s a pretty good one and works on multiple levels. I had a pretty bad patch where I started responding to whipping this eay, and the bad patch is no more, and hasn’t been around in a while. Really, I’m in a better patch than I’ve ever been in, because I looked at what I was doing, and found the ways I was making life harder than it had to be.
“this attacking part of myself is revolting and infuriating and shouldn’t exist”
I’ve commented before on “it isn’t fair” being a bit of semantic free nonsense. “It shouldn’t exist” is another. How could a thing have a moral obligation not to exist? It does exist. But it doesn’t have to be a crippling problem. Do something different when you bump into him. Do something else besides listen. Almost anything would do. “Don’t listen” isn’t helpful advice. Life isn’t a series of “not doings”. “Do something else” is helpful advice. That’s something you can do.
I also hang onto the idea that beating up on myself for symptoms of depression doesn’t make sense.
Yep, nothing quite like being depressed about being depressed. The power of positive feedback. Again, a mental focus issue. Seemingly intractable problems occur when our response to them makes them worse.
Much like Harry’s inner Slytherin, I figured out what I was doing wrong with my mental focus in a number of ways. Listening to the whipping voice was a bad idea. If I had a “friend” like that, you’d tell me to get rid of him. That’s good advice whether he’s in or out of my head.
Another problem is trying to be “safe”, in anticipating everything that might go wrong. Sounds like a good idea, to avoid the problems. It’s good to avoid problems. But that turns life into an endless slog through problems. By the availability heuristic, if all you think about are problems, that’s all that exists in the world. Further, it is just horrible decision theory to spend life working on the worst case scenarios, as you’re not spending that time on much more likely better scenarios, making them even better.
Life is not so hard. The world is not so hazardous (certainly not for me with decent health and earning potential living in the US). If it seems that hard, it’s because I’m doing something wrong. I don’t have to figure out the right thing to do, I just have to figure out what prompts the mistake, and do something else in response to that prompt.
I see it as a cycle—the abuser pushes until they see signs of hurt. They may abuse again because they feel like it, but if the abusee shows signs of feeling better, the abuser is very likely to start abusing again.
(Seeing that Nancy has replied herself, I worry that I’m mansplaining here, but …)
The idea, I think, is that it goes like this:
Abuse begins.
Abuser ratchets up level of abuse until victim is visibly hurt.
From victim’s perspective, what’s happening is that (abuse ratcheting up) correlates with (not feeling unbearably wretched yet).
Victim (or some bit of victim’s brain) draws the conclusion that feeling more wretched sooner is the way to stop the abuse ratcheting up.
There is no contradiction because Nancy didn’t say that “feeling happy … is precisely what draws more abuse” but that “a person who’s abused may … come to believe that … feeling happy … is precisely what draws more abuse”.
No problem with your explanation—you didn’t claim that you knew what I was saying better than I did and you basically got my point right.
You’ve pointed at something I may need to clarify.
I believe both that abusers will attack when their victim is feeling better, and that the victim may conclude (as an alief—all this stuff is very visceral) that it’s safer to not feel better. How pervasive the alief is (just when in the presence of the abuser? when around people who resemble the abuser? when the abuser is in their life? all the time?) varies a lot.
and that the victim may conclude (as an alief—all this stuff is very visceral) that it’s safer to not feel better.
Which is in fact accurate in the presence of an abuser looking to keep you down, alert to any sign of happiness, and ready to respond with abuse in turn.
I do it by reflex. But sometimes I seem to be helpful talking other people through it. Try chatting with a friend about wanting to think this way while stressed and asking them if they could talk you through it if you come to them. Role play a couple plausible scenarios where you would be unproductively upset with yourself and see if you think mopey!you would be persuaded.
Sometimes, I find it helpful to parody (in a warm, we’re-sharing-a-joke way, not a cold, you’re-being-an-idiot way) the idea that feeling bad could be helpful. “Let’s sit here and feel bad together! Even if mopeyness falls off with the square of the distance, with two of us, we’ll have a slightly larger range on our magical problem fixing field.”
Obviously depends on your audience! Pick a funny image that the other person can recognize themself in and laugh fondly about. Riddikulus!
Any thoughts about how to apply this sort of thinking when you’re extremely stressed?
Don’t?
In all seriousness, its entirely rational to realise you are not in a fit state of mind to examine the issue and focus on other things until you are in a better frame of mind.
Pursuant to which, what you do want to do is identify efficient de-stressing methods which work for you, and try to train them to be as reflexive as possible. I know it sounds obvious, but it’s a valuable type of conditioning which simply doesn’t occur to a lot of people.
Personally, I like meditation and biofeedback, since you can do them whenever and wherever, and use them to either tone down your stress enough to function, or try to get a full reset, depending on how much time you have.
My issue is that I don’t have a good procedure in place for constructive blame: by default, when I blame myself for something mostly what happens is that I rehearse to myself what a terrible person I am without trying to figure out what I could do differently in the future (and then actually making sure that that happens).
Well, being a stoic for such a long time means my reflex is usually, “What is useful here?” And when I run that check on kvetching, it doesn’t make the cut. Sometimes I pretend to feel guiltier, since most people read practicality as callousness, but internally, I focus on, “What different action should I take or new data should I look for?”
ETA: Actually, the other check that helps me is asking: “Is there a causal link between my feeling bad and my being helpful?” Usually, no, or if there is, it does the opposite of what I’d like!
It’s blame in the sense of responsibility, not in the sense of just feeling bad. I tend to frame things in terms of heroic responsibility, but a bit more regatively—in terms of negligence. Every day I go out and sin against people, by commission or omission (or, in a more secular phrasing: every day I go out and metaphorically punch a few people in the face, in my thoughts and in my deeds, in what I have done, and what I have failed to do).
The reason I use the word ‘blame’ is because the harm I inflict on others is real and it’s not alright. The fact that I haven’t figured out how to be less negligent, more empathetic, etc does not magically mitigate their hurt. I use the word blame because working out right actions is not an abstract question that I plan to apply in the future, it’s something I’m doing fumblingly enough to hurt people now, so I’d better improve right quick.
Current theory: rehearsing to yourself or to other people what a terrible person you are is a natural, self-protective response to what seems like an impossible demand. Sometimes the demand actually is impossible, sometimes the demand is understood correctly and falsely believed to be impossible, and sometimes the demand is defensively interpreted as impossible because the reasonable part is felt to be not worth doing but it doesn’t feel safe to just refuse it.
I think this analysis is helping me to break the cycle of rumination about being a terrible person because it lowers the intensity. It’s much better than “you shouldn’t think you’re a terrible person”—that just becomes another failure.
a natural, self-protective response to what seems like an impossible demand. Sometimes the demand actually is impossible, sometimes the demand is understood correctly and falsely believed to be impossible, and sometimes the demand is defensively interpreted as impossible because the reasonable part is felt to be not worth doing but it doesn’t feel safe to just refuse it.
This can be a response to any demand which is felt to be impossible.
Here’s an example which is going to be a little vague because there’s some privacy I want to maintain, but recently I demanded that someone not repeat the huge social mistake he’d just made. He started talking about what an awful person he was.
In my opinion, what was going on was that he wasn’t sure what the boundaries that he needed to not cross were, and wasn’t sure he could regulate his behavior, so he was trying to avoid further punishment by saying he was helpless and suffering enough already.
Since then, he’s apologized in a way which I think means he understands the issues and will do better.
In my opinion, what was going on was that he wasn’t sure what the boundaries that he needed to not cross were, and wasn’t sure he could regulate his behavior, so he was trying to avoid further punishment by saying he was helpless and suffering enough already.
This is very enlightening. I’m going to probe this by modulating my response to it, and see what I find. Thanks; one karma point feels insufficent.
I think a post on this (?and related) would be much apprecaited if you and/or someone with similar experience could put one together.
Since then, he’s apologized in a way which I think means he understands the issues and will do better.
I fear you lost me agian. What is this evidence for?
I may write something up when I’m more sure that I’m right and have resolved more of my difficulties. At this point, I’ve toned down a lot of the self-hatred, but there’s an underlying difficulty with doing much of anything that’s still a serious problem for me.
That last sentence was mostly included because I imagined people wanting to know what happened next. However, it’s also evidence that what I was asking of him wasn’t as impossible as he initially thought it was.
I am sometimes successful at this; when I am, the script usually goes something like, “What am I worried/upset about? What should I have done differently? What can I do to prepare for this next time?” And then I actually talk myself through the things I could have done differently and whether they would have been successful, and if I hit upon something that would have worked, I try to identify a heuristic or plan that would help me do better in situations like these in the future. And do something to implement it immediately, if possible, or at least burn in into my head so I won’t forget.
And if I don’t hit upon anything I could have done that I think would have been a good idea, I just say to myself, well, that was just a bad situation. (Like if I happened to do badly at something because of luck, even though statistically, I’m pretty sure what I did was a good idea, even having updated on the evidence of it not going well once.)
This usually helps because if I keep worrying, I just ask myself, “is this a different concern I need to address, or is it the same just feeling-bad as before?” And then if it’s a different concern, I do the same thing, trying to identify if this worry is actually a signal I need to think harder about the problem.
And if I really, truly decide, on reflection, that the worry isn’t a useful signal, I find that really helps in getting it to go away. Because that way my worrying side feels vindicated, because the concerns have really been addressed; I’m not just forcing them out of my brain because they are worries and worries are bad, but because they are worries with no basis in reality. Once I actually feel confident of that, then I’m not worried anymore.
The trickier part, sometimes, is remembering to do this. I’m less sure about how to do that.
I used to have this problem a lot more than I do now.
It’s possible the change is just the result of the aging chemistry of my body, but I like to think that the thing that turned it around was literally telling myself, “I want to be the kind of person who is cool with having done that.” I had to accept the thing that had happened and had to become the kind of person that would accept it.
Or maybe I just had to age. It’s possible that’s why I don’t do a lot of the things I used to find myself unable to stop doing.
“I’m trying to think if there’s anything I should be doing right now,”
Naturally Harry thinks of what he could have done differently and/or what he can do better in the future, but his main conscious focus is “here and now”. No past, no future, no daydreaming. Here and now. I think this is an excellent advice.
“I’m trying to think if there’s anything I should be doing right now,” said Harry Potter. “It’s hard, though. My mind keeps on imagining ways the past could have gone differently if I’d thought faster, and I can’t rule out that there might be a key insight in there somewhere.”
I’d misremembered this—I thought he’d been trying to get his mind off his possible mistakes, but couldn’t, and I get the impression that the people in this part of the discussion didn’t think he’d even been trying to get his mind off possible mistakes.
Actually, he wasn’t sure where the answer lies, so thinking about his past mistakes might actually offer a useful clue, though I wonder whether his mind is drawn to the topic more than it should be.
It’s also possible that this discussion is using HPMOR as springboard to talk about the problem of attending too much to past mistakes rather than trying to find solutions.
“Allow” is a strange word; when I’m rehearsing to myself what a terrible person I am it’s more like “I caused this bad thing to happen because of my terribleness.”
When you feel that way, do you feel that terribleness in you is an inherent unchangeable state, like ‘vanquishes dark lords’, which causes bad things to happen around you?
Meta: I’m not trying to do anything related to blame; I’m trying to understand something odd and interesting, with a likely side effect of being able to provide useful advice.
Can you project that onto outside influences? I’ve got qualms about suggesting how to blame other people, but can you replace “I am a terrible person” with “I have bad luck”?
So then, NOT attempting to do so must be evidence that you aren’t a terrible person? Would it help to consider all of the things that you could have done worse?
Does it feel wrong to anyone else that he’s basically complaining to a woman old enough to be his grandmother about how immature she is? This despite the fact that she’s proven herself repeatedly to be willing to listen to good advice, and has pulled his bacon out of the fire by quick-witted crisis management at least once?
Of course. This isn’t surprising behaviour, but it is behaviour that makes me think less of Harry. (That said, it’s one of his few traits that makes me actually think he’s eleven, so perhaps I should be grateful)
Immaturity may not be precisely correct, but he’s definitely not accusing her of incompetence. Irresponsibility, perhaps. He’s not saying that she tried and failed, he’s saying that she didn’t try. He’s saying that she’s just blindly playing a role, instead of actually acting responsibly, and that it’s so hard-wired into her that it’s not even worth him trying to correct it. Hard-wired irresponsibility is close enough to immaturity that it’s a reasonable approximation.
She’s handled a couple of crises well, but she didn’t gain very much respect for not scolding Harry for taking more money out of his vault than she thought he needed.
I don’t want to get them to self-flagellate, but to look for what leverage they have and not worry as much about what it totally outside of their control.
Someone please tell Shinji Ikari about this radical notion.
I don’t want to get them to self-flagellate, but to look for what leverage they have and not worry as much about what it totally outside of their control.
Someone please tell Shinji Ikari about this radical notion.
Vg jnf arprffnel sbe gur Puvyqera gb or qlfshapgvbany. Gur yrff gurl jrer noyr gb pbaarpg jvgu bgure crbcyr gur zber gurl jrer qevira gb pbaarpg jvgu gurve Rinf. Hagvy gur raq, nyzbfg rirelguvat sbyybjrq gur Fpranevb.
I’m talking about Rebuilt, especially 3.0. Kaworu is kind of like a kid Dumbledore; nice, mysterious, facetious, and completely sucks at consoling or giving advice.
That post consisted of (fairly minor) Evangelion spoilers, encoded with rot13 for the benefit of people who haven’t seen it yet.
(For completeness’ sake: the language of Ente Isla is English with a bunch of letter substitution, and the language that Ledo speaks in Gargantia is a letter-substituted offshoot of German. They’re similar to rot13, but much more pronounceable, since vowels map to vowels and consonants to consonants. More info here.)
Someone did, but not until the last episode of the TV series.
And Shinji’s personal and emotional life was screwed up, but NERV did indeed manage to stop every invading alien Angel; the threat that did them in was of a far different nature.
BTW, the psychological technique you seem to be referring to from Stoicism is usually called the “dichotomy of control.” And yes, it appears to be quite Googleable.
I loved this:
Does anyone else run into the problem of frequently giving this advice to yourself and finding it useful, but struggling to find a non-awful way to convey it to other people? I don’t want to get them to self-flagellate, but to look for what leverage they have and not worry as much about what it totally outside of their control. Stoicism seems like the main way people hit on this idea of responsibility in my social circle.
I think Harry phrased it poorly, and if he meant it, he was absolutely wrong.
Allocating blame on yourself is a category error. We morally judge to separate the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff—in short, to sort into piles of approach and avoid. You’re stuck with you—where ever you go, there you are—so the point of the categorical judgment is simply inapplicable.
The sensible and very valuable part of what he is saying is to look to what you can do, and don’t seek to console yourself with “that was his responsibility”. Such interpersonal judgments are all about roles
But you can change your actions more directly and more effectively by changing them. Putting blame on yourself is one of the better paths to depression, which is not an effective state. Blame others where appropriate and useful, but don’t blame yourself, only search for actions to improve the situation, and choose them. You blame others because their actions are not yours to choose. Don’t blame yourself, choose better.
This is a problem with the concept of heroic responsibility. It’s not defined with sufficient resolution to nail down the interpretation of paying attention to specific parts of the causal graph and exclude the interpretation of feeling like a horrible person. I can’t decide if Eliezer doesn’t worry about people coming away with the second impression or if he actually endorses it.
Any thoughts about how to apply this sort of thinking when you’re extremely stressed?
I call it “being solution-oriented”. Stop any discussion or thoughts as to whose “fault” it was, and look at everything which could have been done to prevent the negative outcome. Consider hindsight bias carefully before saying that a particular action which could have prevented a given crisis had an expected positive return.
Stressed? Like someone who is being whipped for their inadequacies and failures? That kind of stress?
People will scourge themselves in ways that they’d curse if the lashes were landing on anyone else’s back. Why is compassion and kindness only for other people? Who but a psychopath would ever even imagine beating another person in ways that we beat ourselves? If it would be cruel to say “X” to someone else, why isn’t it cruel to say it to ourselves? If other people don’t deserve that, we don’t either. The hand that holds that whip is no one’s friend, and deserves the same anger no matter who is taking the lash today.
The first rule in the judgment game is fairness—everyone is judged by the same standards. Everyone gets the same compassion, the same kindness, the same will to protect that anyone else does. A good test for fairness is whether SWIM judging SWIM yields the same result, and that test is a first step away from judging yourself at all.
You asked how to apply my previous thinking while stressed, and I assumed stressed by not applying my thinking, but instead blaming yourself. I don’t think you get there with the idea alone, as ideas have a different function and operation than our judgment and valuations. Ideas are too bloodless to combat judgment on their own. Judgments are beaten by better judgments. When the judgment is knocked down by another, the idea can then join in and keep it down by kicking it in the head any time it stirs, but it’s unlikely to effect a takedown itself, especially in the short term.
I was thinking about Harry’s situation—he’s grieving and under very high stakes time pressure, so there are external sources of stress as well as what he’s imposing on himself.
As for the real world, I’ve been trying to undo a very bad habit of self-attack for a while. Realizing that that the attacks are unfair is a start, but only helps occasionally. Getting angry at it is a risky strategy. If it’s the wrong kind of anger, it just feeds into the internal rage. I didn’t analyse it before, but the difference might be between a fairly emotionally distant “This makes no sense and should stop because it doesn’t make sense” (sometimes helpful) vs. “this attacking part of myself is revolting and infuriating and shouldn’t exist” (really, the same attitude that causing the problem).
Examples of the “makes no sense” which do some good: For a while, I’d look in the mirror and on some days I’d think I looked fairly good and on other days I’d think I looked like hell. Eventually I realized that looking like hell actually meant looking frightened and/or tired. At that point, it occurred to me that telling someone who was frightened or tired that they looked like hell was wildly inappropriate, and I’ve at least cut back on that—sometimes I have negative opinions about how I look, but the intensity is lower.
I also hang onto the idea that beating up on myself for symptoms of depression doesn’t make sense.
Hypothesis: People put amazing amounts of work into emotionally abusing each other. I believe that what reinforces the abuse is seeing that the person abused is seen to feel frightened, squelched, unhappy, etc. The abuse may well continue and intensify until hurt is achieved.
I believe that abuse is a tool for status enforcement.
A person who’s abused may internalize the situation and come to believe that feeling better isn’t safe, because feeling happy, relaxed, confidant, etc. is precisely what draws more abuse.
The solution isn’t just believing that internal abuse is wrong, it’s alieving that living well is safe.
I went through a situation very similar to Ch90. Same story, different details.
Even got the worse-than-useless attempts at comfort—now I can’t even say “I’m sorry” to my uncle for letting his son die. That’s one of the few things that still brings me to tears about this whole incident.
My thought process was fairly similar to Harry’s, and I’ve given it a lot of thought, so I might be able to shed some light on the topic.
When the pressure was on, there was no room for guilt and it was just do do do with some frantic thinking interpersed—even when it was clear that there was little hope. The feeling that I was to blame didn’t come until afterwards, when there was nothing left I could do. At the point where you can still do something, it’s not so much the “it’s your fault and you should feel bad”, but rather “this can’t happen. THINK THINK THINK!” which gets in the way.
The main advice I have here is to come to terms with the possibility ahead of time. Get those tears out of the way now, so that should it happen, you just see it for what it is and not what it “can’t” be.
Practice helps, but it’s hard to deliberately come by legit/safe practice. Even though I had plenty of experience, I didn’t realize at the time that I was a more panicked than I needed to be. I had never lost before, and so I thought I was doing “good enough”—though in hindsight, clues were there.
I can’t imagine anything I could have done at the time to not feel guilt once it was official, and I’m not sure I would have wanted to anyway.
Because you usually can’t get away with lashing at others.
Lashing at others is often done to shift blame off the attacker even if it doesn’t help the attacked take responsibility, and so it makes sense to be punished. It’s also easy to win social points for making people feel good and signalling alliance even if it masks over the problem and keeps them stuck.
These things don’t really apply internally, and there is a purpose to it.
This is exactly it. Calling something “wrong” and “bad” isn’t that helpful. You wouldn’t need to call it “wrong” if you didn’t have a reason to do it in the first place—and as long as you have that reason, you’re going to have an uncomfortable inner conflict about it and will likely do it anyway.
Actually, I wouldn’t even call it abuse. It’s a message—a very painful message, but just a message nonetheless. Reality isn’t what it should be and it could have been if you made better decisions and were more the kind of person you try to be. Pain isn’t something to avoid. Avoiding pain rather than avoiding that which causes pain is simply wireheading.
The pain is an impulse to do something about it. I thought I was prepared to keep my family safe. I was wrong. It would be bad to feel all happy and guilt free as long as I had not done my homework to make sure I don’t screw up again. No way in hell I’m going to let myself be guilt free if it means I might lose someone else that could have been saved.
As I went through exactly what happened, why it happened, what I could have done differently, how I would have known to do it differently, what changes need to be made to ensure that I do it right in the future, etc… I felt less and less guilt. And then another aspect would come up that I hadn’t thought through and I’d have to do it all over again. In the end it’s just something that is what it is. I wish I had done things differently and that he were still alive—of course I do. However I can’t really beat myself up any more for making the wrong call now that I know exactly what lead me to it. I’m a deterministic system and was in a known state with known inputs, so of course I gave that output. There’s just no other way for it to be—might as well wish 2+2=5. The only thing left to do is to change the system so that it does better in the future.
Ideally you’d just get on track to do what you need to do so that you don’t need the constant motivation of guilt—and then the guilt can just go away immediately instead of when you’re finished working things through. That’s what I do with physical pain. However, I wasn’t able to do that here. Most can’t.
I couldn’t because going through and learning what I needed to learn required plowing through nasty ugh-fields. Places where my identity conflicted with reality. No, I’m not perfect at handling situations under stress, and yes it can actually be the difference between having my cousin alive and not. Those aren’t fun thoughts, and I didn’t want to have to face them. The guilt needed to be high enough to push me through it anyway. I even had my hypnotherapist buddy help guide me through it at first, until I was able to more easily recognize subtle deflections I was making in order to not feel all the pain.
It’d have been better if I just faced all uncomfortable thoughts without flinching. I wish I were able to just accept everything as it comes and make sure I learn enough from bad experiences without needing to feel these pressures, but I’m not there yet. And so of course I felt guilty. The alternative wasn’t acceptable.
It’s pretty obvious why you wouldn’t want to go into details, but this seems rather too vague to be of use. Should I think of plans in case I need to find a student in Hogwarts, to fight a troll, to convince a student to disobey McGonagall? Should I do a headcount every time I walk into a room and try to guess where missing people are and what will happen if someone announces there’s a troll in the castle? Should I sign up to Defense classes and duelling clubs and the Armies so I’ll get training in thinking and acting under pressure? Should I think of possible ways Hermione could end up dead or hurt or in Azkaban and ways I can prevent that? Should I imagine those outcomes in excruciating detail so that I won’t be too shocked if they happen? Once Hermione gets eaten by the troll, how do I use the replays and alternate versions in my head to become better?
Nah, it’s fine. That one was hard for me because it hit a spot I hadn’t worked through yet, but I’m good now and not afraid to give details. I just feel weird bringing up personal details when it doesn’t feel relevant—like if I were to start talking about the taste of death blood/vomit unnecessarily :P
On the forethought/practice side of things (as opposed to the emotional prep side), it really depends on your risk level. For MoR!Harry, probably something like “all of the above”. For me personally, the risk level isn’t obscene like that, but given how big my family is and the fun stuff we do, it was almost surprising no one had been seriously injured (before the accident). There’s no way I could have planned out the logistics of incident any more carefully—everything was right there. The only mistake I made that night that definitely would have made a difference was treating the guy in danger as less of a PC and more of an NPC. It’s actually a mistake I’ve made in the past, but I had no idea it would apply to him. Even in hindsight it’s not obvious.
In terms of preparing for that kind of thing, other than common sense safety protocols, I keep in mind which situations are potentially life threatening and which risk a broken bone at most—and taking extra risks in the latter category because it gets me practice and is fun (never actually broken a bone, or been present while one broken, btw).
In terms of learning from the aftermath, it seems like it just follows from taking responsibility but not blame. You’re a deterministic system. Why’d you do what you did? No, “I’m a crappy person” isn’t a real answer since there’s no fundamental crappiness to excise. In my case, there were several things I didn’t think of. None of them I could have been expected to specifically prepare for beforehand, but I probably would have done better if I was less panicked. So why was I panicked? Well, my cousin might die and that’s not okay for one, and two, I had never had panic level problems before—I had always managed that really well, and I wasn’t far above my normal level, so it wasn’t on my mind to regulate it down. I had things to do, and didn’t feel like I had time to think. I didn’t, really, but I didn’t have time to not think and just do the first plan either. So the takeaway is to be emotionally prepared next time and to set myself a lower level of mental excitation to aim for (both actionable for me). I feel like I can let myself off the hook for not noticing a problem that had never impacted me before—I can’t see how I could possibly foresee the next “like” thing without unreasonable amounts of thought.
The one game changing decision was to focus on getting him out of danger instead of wasting time trying to figure out how much time we had on the clock. Even now, there’s no obvious answer. I’ll shift in the direction of more effort towards understanding the situation first, and keep it on mind as a potential source of critical info even if I really can’t take a few seconds to figure things out—which really seemed to be the case. The more likely way I could have gotten that right was to have less trust in him to start with—or to prepare him to be more trustworthy. Both of those get long faster than they get informative, but I’ve been down those paths as well. But yeah, basically take responsibility to change, view yourself neutrally to figure out why you actually did what you did, and what you can actually change so that you’ll do better in the future—and then chase it down until there are no worthwhile changes to be made.
The emotional prep side I’ll write about in response to Benito’s reply to me—maybe tomorrow or something since I have to go have fun now :)
Do you mean come to terms with your loved ones dying before there’s a problem, or that, after the problem starts / they die, come to terms with it as soon as possible?
I meant beforehand—it’s just easier real time if you don’t have to deal with the “this can’t happen!” impulse. Though if you find yourself in the midst of things without having it beforehand just put the emotional reaction off and be realistic. You just don’t want to get overly panicked and deny the real danger level. By denying the danger level, you’ll you’ll rule out dangerous/costly options even if they’re the right call. Ben Franklin apparently messed this one up.
Coming to terms with it isn’t a happy process though, so people tend not to do it until they’re hit in the face with it. Most people will find ways of not thinking about it by pretending they believe in heaven, or pretending they’ve accepted it being a couple common ones—sometimes pretending they don’t care. It’s certainly not a fun process—it’s just that I think it’s worth it anyway. Litany of Gendlin, and all that.
How does one go about doing that? I can tell whether I have a plan to prevent a bad thing or deal with its consequences, and whether I’m repressing thoughts of bad things happening, encouraging them, or letting them happen, but I’m not sure how I know I’ve come to terms with something.
Well… It’s hard to explain. I’ve never managed to “just tell” someone and have them pick it up—despite trying. I’ve always had to guide them through one so that they feel the difference between what they were doing and what I was getting at. I was mostly just pointing it out for the extra motivation to “come to terms with it”—so that if/when you do bump into the option, you know to take it.
If you think you can be the exception, here’s my current hack at the problem
EDIT: My newer hack at the problem is mostly “just go read ‘focusing’ by Gendlin”, and then maybe get back to that routine.
Also, I didn’t actually create that routine—just that explanation of it. Credit goes to Joe Fobes for that. He knows his stuff when it comes to hypnosis and therapy and stuff.
Thanks! You’re right, I don’t get it. I do have questions, though:
How do you recognise success? I don’t think I could distinguish it from giving up or going numb.
What do endpoints look like? Like, can I answer “I wish he wasn’t going to die” with “Because then he won’t be alive and that’s bad, duh” or do I need to find some way to pick that apart?
How does looping back work? “Why do I wish he’d sign up for cryonics? Because if he doesn’t he will die. I wish he wasn’t going to die.” works, but I don’t know what to do with “Why am I even acknowledging things? Because jimmy said I’ll be more effective at preventing things if I come to terms with them”.
Damn! That’s a disappointing thing to be right about. I admire your continued curiosity on the topic.
For example, you’re probably not crying over not having a yacht to sail around on. Like, sure, it’d be nice, but of course you don’t have a yacht. It feels a lot like that. Someone that just spent all their money on one just to have it sink would be upset about it because they’re framing it differently. They’re “supposed to” have a yacht, and reality is violating their picture of what they “ought to” have. It’s about updating your picture to have it match reality again. Once it feels like there’s no way reality “could” be different, then there’s no more room for the ought-is divergence to cry about. Just of course it sank—that’s what yachts do when you run them into rocks. And of course I ran it into rocks, I was told it was clear. And of course I was told it was clear, Bob is incompetent, and I knew I was taking a risk when hiring him. It’s just all understood down to the level where it’s just not important enough to go into it. What am I gonna do? Wish that the known-incompetent bob magically got it right? How much sense does that make?
There’s no loss of motivation, just loss of distractions. If you want a yacht, fix it—it’s just no longer “this can’t have happened”, it’s “it did happen. Shrug”. It’s all pull motivation now, not a pushing motivation—which is good because things tend to buckle under compression loading anyway.
Perhaps more important is that it just feels right. With going “numb”, it’s like “I can’t let myself want because it hurts too much and I wish I didn’t have to bury this hurt”—we can do better than that. It’s kinda one of those “when you’re dreaming you don’t realize you’re dreaming, but when you’re awake you know you’re awake” things. You’ll know when you’re there. It’s not like “eh, am I doing it right? Is this how I “should” feel?”. It’s more like “ahhhhh… peace at last”. Just nothing else you could ask for. I mean, it’d be nice if it never sank, but I’m about as tempted to yearn for that as I am to go on wishing that 2+2=3 - because neither could conceivably happen without ignoring known facts. No more gap where you can wish it went the other way. And so now you can just focus where you need to, because it’s clear what you need to do and you’re on your way to doing it—and it’s the best outcome not ruled out by your understanding of the world.
Nah, that doesn’t sound like a good answer. The “uh.. Duh?” answer comes up when it seems implied that the asker doesn’t share the “it is bad” impression, but we’re after a different thing here. Regardless of whether we think it’s actually bad, we’re tracking down the particular reasons that have emotions attached. For example, “Because then his family won’t get to have him in their lives”, and “because I can’t have him in my life”. For me, those were both painful to acknowledge—the latter in particular.
The “why?” doesn’t have to be all of the following questions—it’s just purposely vague so that you answer the one (or more) that feels important.
If you need to going down the “Why am I even acknowledging things?” path, that answer is fine, but not the end of the road. The next question is then “why do I even care what this ‘jimmy’ guy says!?”
I ended up deleting my comments about Harry in this regard. What happens when “heroic responsibility meets failure”, when someone accustomed to doing the impossible finally fails when it counts, and holds himself “heroically responsible”? The whipping begins, and right on cue, we get chapters 91 and 92. In a real person, I think the beating will be savage and the person will likely break himself. But fictional Harry with a Superhuman Dark Side doesn’t seem to break, he just gets harder. Someone with a mysterious dark side doesn’t make for the most generalizable model of human psychology. We’ll see what EY does with this.
Very interesting point about abuse as a tool for status enforcement. (As an aside, i’d point out what a bizzarro category error it is to be playing a status game against yourself).
Yes. being happy is showing status, which attracts bullies who want to take you down a peg. The abuse gets reinforced by working to reduce status and making the person fearful and miserable, but it is likely prompted by exhibiting a higher status state that can be taken down a peg or two.
And that’s a real consideration in the presence of an abuser, which likely becomes an ingrained habit of protection that persists after the abuser is gone. But it’s possible to form new habits.
For some people, very likely true. I doubt that all people whipping themselves started off being whipped by others, but I can see how abuse from others would make self abuse more likely in the way you described.
Another potential benefit to whipping yourself is hosting a pity party, which can work with a lot of people, and even has some mileage for a party of one.
More generally, any benefit to the whipping promotes more whipping. I had a different benefit going, which I called self sadism. What if instead of associating with the you that is being whipped, what happens if you associated with the you that is doing the whipping? Self sadism. A grim, cruel, sarcastic pleasure in seeing disappointments and setbacks come to fruition. I decided that was an unhelpful attitude in the long run.
From A Beautiful Mind:
That was my first diet of the mind—stop indulging in self sadism.
When I realized I was hearing the voice again on the other side of the whip, I eventually found a new tactic. As I said before, alienating that voice as SWIM and is not my friend is step one. Then I would tell him to shut up. La la la, I can’t hear you, la la la. Often followed with some teenage vulgarity.
Wasn’t I recently mentioning the power of habit with you? A habit of doing something different. I didn’t even realize I had this example. I think Tony Robbins would call it a pattern interrupt. I think’s it’s a pretty good one and works on multiple levels. I had a pretty bad patch where I started responding to whipping this eay, and the bad patch is no more, and hasn’t been around in a while. Really, I’m in a better patch than I’ve ever been in, because I looked at what I was doing, and found the ways I was making life harder than it had to be.
I’ve commented before on “it isn’t fair” being a bit of semantic free nonsense. “It shouldn’t exist” is another. How could a thing have a moral obligation not to exist? It does exist. But it doesn’t have to be a crippling problem. Do something different when you bump into him. Do something else besides listen. Almost anything would do. “Don’t listen” isn’t helpful advice. Life isn’t a series of “not doings”. “Do something else” is helpful advice. That’s something you can do.
Yep, nothing quite like being depressed about being depressed. The power of positive feedback. Again, a mental focus issue. Seemingly intractable problems occur when our response to them makes them worse.
Much like Harry’s inner Slytherin, I figured out what I was doing wrong with my mental focus in a number of ways. Listening to the whipping voice was a bad idea. If I had a “friend” like that, you’d tell me to get rid of him. That’s good advice whether he’s in or out of my head.
Another problem is trying to be “safe”, in anticipating everything that might go wrong. Sounds like a good idea, to avoid the problems. It’s good to avoid problems. But that turns life into an endless slog through problems. By the availability heuristic, if all you think about are problems, that’s all that exists in the world. Further, it is just horrible decision theory to spend life working on the worst case scenarios, as you’re not spending that time on much more likely better scenarios, making them even better.
Life is not so hard. The world is not so hazardous (certainly not for me with decent health and earning potential living in the US). If it seems that hard, it’s because I’m doing something wrong. I don’t have to figure out the right thing to do, I just have to figure out what prompts the mistake, and do something else in response to that prompt.
It seems like you’re contradicting yourself there. Would you mind clarifying?
I see it as a cycle—the abuser pushes until they see signs of hurt. They may abuse again because they feel like it, but if the abusee shows signs of feeling better, the abuser is very likely to start abusing again.
(Seeing that Nancy has replied herself, I worry that I’m mansplaining here, but …)
The idea, I think, is that it goes like this:
Abuse begins.
Abuser ratchets up level of abuse until victim is visibly hurt.
From victim’s perspective, what’s happening is that (abuse ratcheting up) correlates with (not feeling unbearably wretched yet).
Victim (or some bit of victim’s brain) draws the conclusion that feeling more wretched sooner is the way to stop the abuse ratcheting up.
There is no contradiction because Nancy didn’t say that “feeling happy … is precisely what draws more abuse” but that “a person who’s abused may … come to believe that … feeling happy … is precisely what draws more abuse”.
No problem with your explanation—you didn’t claim that you knew what I was saying better than I did and you basically got my point right.
You’ve pointed at something I may need to clarify.
I believe both that abusers will attack when their victim is feeling better, and that the victim may conclude (as an alief—all this stuff is very visceral) that it’s safer to not feel better. How pervasive the alief is (just when in the presence of the abuser? when around people who resemble the abuser? when the abuser is in their life? all the time?) varies a lot.
Which is in fact accurate in the presence of an abuser looking to keep you down, alert to any sign of happiness, and ready to respond with abuse in turn.
I do it by reflex. But sometimes I seem to be helpful talking other people through it. Try chatting with a friend about wanting to think this way while stressed and asking them if they could talk you through it if you come to them. Role play a couple plausible scenarios where you would be unproductively upset with yourself and see if you think mopey!you would be persuaded.
Sometimes, I find it helpful to parody (in a warm, we’re-sharing-a-joke way, not a cold, you’re-being-an-idiot way) the idea that feeling bad could be helpful. “Let’s sit here and feel bad together! Even if mopeyness falls off with the square of the distance, with two of us, we’ll have a slightly larger range on our magical problem fixing field.”
Obviously depends on your audience! Pick a funny image that the other person can recognize themself in and laugh fondly about. Riddikulus!
When feasible, do the things that relieve your stress.
Don’t?
In all seriousness, its entirely rational to realise you are not in a fit state of mind to examine the issue and focus on other things until you are in a better frame of mind.
Pursuant to which, what you do want to do is identify efficient de-stressing methods which work for you, and try to train them to be as reflexive as possible. I know it sounds obvious, but it’s a valuable type of conditioning which simply doesn’t occur to a lot of people.
Personally, I like meditation and biofeedback, since you can do them whenever and wherever, and use them to either tone down your stress enough to function, or try to get a full reset, depending on how much time you have.
This only works in non-time critical situations.
This is absolutely excellent. Do you mind if I quote this in fiction I’ll write in the future?
Please do. But if you remember, please let me know when you do, so I can take a look.
My issue is that I don’t have a good procedure in place for constructive blame: by default, when I blame myself for something mostly what happens is that I rehearse to myself what a terrible person I am without trying to figure out what I could do differently in the future (and then actually making sure that that happens).
Well, being a stoic for such a long time means my reflex is usually, “What is useful here?” And when I run that check on kvetching, it doesn’t make the cut. Sometimes I pretend to feel guiltier, since most people read practicality as callousness, but internally, I focus on, “What different action should I take or new data should I look for?”
ETA: Actually, the other check that helps me is asking: “Is there a causal link between my feeling bad and my being helpful?” Usually, no, or if there is, it does the opposite of what I’d like!
That’s the productive question. Blaming yourself is unproductive.
It’s blame in the sense of responsibility, not in the sense of just feeling bad. I tend to frame things in terms of heroic responsibility, but a bit more regatively—in terms of negligence. Every day I go out and sin against people, by commission or omission (or, in a more secular phrasing: every day I go out and metaphorically punch a few people in the face, in my thoughts and in my deeds, in what I have done, and what I have failed to do).
The reason I use the word ‘blame’ is because the harm I inflict on others is real and it’s not alright. The fact that I haven’t figured out how to be less negligent, more empathetic, etc does not magically mitigate their hurt. I use the word blame because working out right actions is not an abstract question that I plan to apply in the future, it’s something I’m doing fumblingly enough to hurt people now, so I’d better improve right quick.
Current theory: rehearsing to yourself or to other people what a terrible person you are is a natural, self-protective response to what seems like an impossible demand. Sometimes the demand actually is impossible, sometimes the demand is understood correctly and falsely believed to be impossible, and sometimes the demand is defensively interpreted as impossible because the reasonable part is felt to be not worth doing but it doesn’t feel safe to just refuse it.
I think this analysis is helping me to break the cycle of rumination about being a terrible person because it lowers the intensity. It’s much better than “you shouldn’t think you’re a terrible person”—that just becomes another failure.
I’m not sure I follow. What demand?
This can be a response to any demand which is felt to be impossible.
Here’s an example which is going to be a little vague because there’s some privacy I want to maintain, but recently I demanded that someone not repeat the huge social mistake he’d just made. He started talking about what an awful person he was.
In my opinion, what was going on was that he wasn’t sure what the boundaries that he needed to not cross were, and wasn’t sure he could regulate his behavior, so he was trying to avoid further punishment by saying he was helpless and suffering enough already.
Since then, he’s apologized in a way which I think means he understands the issues and will do better.
This is very enlightening. I’m going to probe this by modulating my response to it, and see what I find. Thanks; one karma point feels insufficent.
I think a post on this (?and related) would be much apprecaited if you and/or someone with similar experience could put one together.
I fear you lost me agian. What is this evidence for?
I may write something up when I’m more sure that I’m right and have resolved more of my difficulties. At this point, I’ve toned down a lot of the self-hatred, but there’s an underlying difficulty with doing much of anything that’s still a serious problem for me.
That last sentence was mostly included because I imagined people wanting to know what happened next. However, it’s also evidence that what I was asking of him wasn’t as impossible as he initially thought it was.
I am sometimes successful at this; when I am, the script usually goes something like, “What am I worried/upset about? What should I have done differently? What can I do to prepare for this next time?” And then I actually talk myself through the things I could have done differently and whether they would have been successful, and if I hit upon something that would have worked, I try to identify a heuristic or plan that would help me do better in situations like these in the future. And do something to implement it immediately, if possible, or at least burn in into my head so I won’t forget.
And if I don’t hit upon anything I could have done that I think would have been a good idea, I just say to myself, well, that was just a bad situation. (Like if I happened to do badly at something because of luck, even though statistically, I’m pretty sure what I did was a good idea, even having updated on the evidence of it not going well once.)
This usually helps because if I keep worrying, I just ask myself, “is this a different concern I need to address, or is it the same just feeling-bad as before?” And then if it’s a different concern, I do the same thing, trying to identify if this worry is actually a signal I need to think harder about the problem.
And if I really, truly decide, on reflection, that the worry isn’t a useful signal, I find that really helps in getting it to go away. Because that way my worrying side feels vindicated, because the concerns have really been addressed; I’m not just forcing them out of my brain because they are worries and worries are bad, but because they are worries with no basis in reality. Once I actually feel confident of that, then I’m not worried anymore.
The trickier part, sometimes, is remembering to do this. I’m less sure about how to do that.
I used to have this problem a lot more than I do now.
It’s possible the change is just the result of the aging chemistry of my body, but I like to think that the thing that turned it around was literally telling myself, “I want to be the kind of person who is cool with having done that.” I had to accept the thing that had happened and had to become the kind of person that would accept it.
Or maybe I just had to age. It’s possible that’s why I don’t do a lot of the things I used to find myself unable to stop doing.
Me too.
The answer is already in the story:
“I’m trying to think if there’s anything I should be doing right now,”
Naturally Harry thinks of what he could have done differently and/or what he can do better in the future, but his main conscious focus is “here and now”. No past, no future, no daydreaming. Here and now. I think this is an excellent advice.
I’d misremembered this—I thought he’d been trying to get his mind off his possible mistakes, but couldn’t, and I get the impression that the people in this part of the discussion didn’t think he’d even been trying to get his mind off possible mistakes.
Actually, he wasn’t sure where the answer lies, so thinking about his past mistakes might actually offer a useful clue, though I wonder whether his mind is drawn to the topic more than it should be.
It’s also possible that this discussion is using HPMOR as springboard to talk about the problem of attending too much to past mistakes rather than trying to find solutions.
Do you emotionally believe that only terrible people allow bad things to happen?
“Allow” is a strange word; when I’m rehearsing to myself what a terrible person I am it’s more like “I caused this bad thing to happen because of my terribleness.”
When you feel that way, do you feel that terribleness in you is an inherent unchangeable state, like ‘vanquishes dark lords’, which causes bad things to happen around you?
Meta: I’m not trying to do anything related to blame; I’m trying to understand something odd and interesting, with a likely side effect of being able to provide useful advice.
That is the worry, yes.
Can you project that onto outside influences? I’ve got qualms about suggesting how to blame other people, but can you replace “I am a terrible person” with “I have bad luck”?
In the case I have in mind, attempting to do so would provide more evidence that I am a terrible person.
So then, NOT attempting to do so must be evidence that you aren’t a terrible person? Would it help to consider all of the things that you could have done worse?
Not particularly.
Does it feel wrong to anyone else that he’s basically complaining to a woman old enough to be his grandmother about how immature she is? This despite the fact that she’s proven herself repeatedly to be willing to listen to good advice, and has pulled his bacon out of the fire by quick-witted crisis management at least once?
He’s an angry 11 year old, and this isn’t the first time he’s yelled at her.
Of course. This isn’t surprising behaviour, but it is behaviour that makes me think less of Harry. (That said, it’s one of his few traits that makes me actually think he’s eleven, so perhaps I should be grateful)
He seems bad at using people. And that is a weakness, compared with his opponent.
Maturity and competence are not the same thing.
Immaturity may not be precisely correct, but he’s definitely not accusing her of incompetence. Irresponsibility, perhaps. He’s not saying that she tried and failed, he’s saying that she didn’t try. He’s saying that she’s just blindly playing a role, instead of actually acting responsibly, and that it’s so hard-wired into her that it’s not even worth him trying to correct it. Hard-wired irresponsibility is close enough to immaturity that it’s a reasonable approximation.
She’s handled a couple of crises well, but she didn’t gain very much respect for not scolding Harry for taking more money out of his vault than she thought he needed.
I think this is related to Harry’s problem, highlighted in the three armies arc, with considering other people as potential sources of ideas.
I think it’s helps to remove blame and responsbility from the equation when you try to get people to do fault analysis.
When trying someone to lead through a learning experience it’s good to produce an enviroment where the person doesn’t feel judged.
Someone please tell Shinji Ikari about this radical notion.
Vg jnf arprffnel sbe gur Puvyqera gb or qlfshapgvbany. Gur yrff gurl jrer noyr gb pbaarpg jvgu bgure crbcyr gur zber gurl jrer qevira gb pbaarpg jvgu gurve Rinf. Hagvy gur raq, nyzbfg rirelguvat sbyybjrq gur Fpranevb.
I’m talking about Rebuilt, especially 3.0. Kaworu is kind of like a kid Dumbledore; nice, mysterious, facetious, and completely sucks at consoling or giving advice.
I’m sorry, are you from Gargantia or Ente Isla? I can’t understand a word.
That post consisted of (fairly minor) Evangelion spoilers, encoded with rot13 for the benefit of people who haven’t seen it yet.
(For completeness’ sake: the language of Ente Isla is English with a bunch of letter substitution, and the language that Ledo speaks in Gargantia is a letter-substituted offshoot of German. They’re similar to rot13, but much more pronounceable, since vowels map to vowels and consonants to consonants. More info here.)
Someone did, but not until the last episode of the TV series.
And Shinji’s personal and emotional life was screwed up, but NERV did indeed manage to stop every invading alien Angel; the threat that did them in was of a far different nature.
BTW, the psychological technique you seem to be referring to from Stoicism is usually called the “dichotomy of control.” And yes, it appears to be quite Googleable.
I think somewhere on LW there’s a rationality quote to this effect, possibly by Geoff Anders. But I can’t find it at the moment.
This one?
Yes.