The “That’s unacceptable! This is an outrage! You can’t treat me that way! I deserve better” reaction seems to be really important to protect yourself from being taken advantage of.
Why? Is there some useful behavior that you would not engage in if you were not experiencing the emotion?
I don’t have to actually be outraged to yell at someone… assuming that yelling is the most useful response in the first place. (And it often isn’t.)
it’s very rare for me to stand up for myself, complain about being mistreated, get in a fight, etc. It’s more natural to me to blame myself if other people are treating me in a way I don’t like. I need to preserve at least some ability to get outraged, otherwise I’ll put up with any old kind of treatment.
If you have to get outraged to stand up for yourself, this is an indication of a boundary problem: it’s a substitute for healthy assertion. (I know, because I’m still discovering all the settings where I was taught to use it as a substitute!)
So, if someone has a “self-defense” objection to dropping a judgment, I first help them work on removing the judgments that keep them from being able to assert boundaries in the first place.
(IOW, the reason people usually have problems asserting their boundaries is because they were imprinted with other moral judgments about the conditions under which they’re allowed to assert boundaries!)
It’s typically been my goal to put up with as much unpleasantness as I can without complaining, for as long as I can. The trouble is that some of the things I’ve taught myself to tolerate are not good for me. (Everything from untreated illness, to accepting rules that it would be smarter to bend, to letting people put me down in rather hurtful ways.) Becoming more “stoic” (in the sense of more inclined to endure bad circumstances rather than change them) seems dangerous to me—I’m already too “stoic” for my own good!
The trouble is that some of the things I’ve taught myself to tolerate are not good for me. (Everything from untreated illness, to accepting rules that it would be smarter to bend, to letting people put me down in rather hurtful ways.)
While I haven’t been doing work with the developmental stuff for very long (maybe the last 6 months), that sounds pretty much like a Levin stage 1 dysfunction… almost exactly like one of the ones I fixed recently, which has made me much less stoic in that sense.
Becoming more “stoic” (in the sense of more inclined to endure bad circumstances rather than change them) seems dangerous to me—I’m already too “stoic” for my own good!
I’d suggest Weiss & Weiss’s “Recovery from Co-dependency” and Levin’s “Cycles of Power” as being very helpful with this.
The essential thesis of both works is that there are patterns of child development during which we learn how to get certain categories of need met, wherein the choices we make lay the groundwork for personality traits (like assertion, self-care, thoughtfulness, etc.).
Generally speaking, a choice that might be adaptive in one phase (say, learning not to cry out as a baby, but instead to wait for someone to show up unprompted) can then result in making later choices that are basically workarounds.
So you end up with messy code in your brain, with lots of patches and workarounds… and the books are like a software developer’s “patterns and antipatterns” catalog, listing typical bugs, workarounds, and how things ought to be set up in the first place.
I’ve made some rather substantial changes to personality characteristics like these (e.g. becoming less stoic, being more comfortable with novelty, more flexible about changes of plans) in the last 2.5 months, and I’ve barely done anything past development stage 2 yet.
[A side note: I’m not actually using the methods described in the books to implement the changes; the books discuss roleplay in psychotherapy, and miscellaneous self-care activities. I’m instead using other, more-direct mindhacking techniques, while referring to the books as a map of what to change and what to change it to. For example, I’ve just realized this morning that a chronic problem I’ve had with planning is probably related to a missed developmental goal in stage 3, so I’m going to go dig through their case studies and such for stage 3 to figure out what I need to change so that I naturally behave differently in that area. But I won’t be making that change by roleplaying being a two-year old (with a therapist pretending to be a parent), as Weiss and Weiss suggest people with stage 3 issues do!]
How’d you learn to yell at people/firmly defend boundaries/etc. in the absence of a feeling of outrage? I couldn’t find anything but car dyno tuning when googling for “Levin Stage 1.” The only person I know to have taught himself that skill spent months working as the “mugger/bad guy” in a women’s self-defense course.
How’d you learn to yell at people/firmly defend boundaries/etc. in the absence of a feeling of outrage?
It’s not like I tried to learn that as a skill, specifically. What I learned were subcomponents of that skill, which included such things as noticing that I needed something, the need wasn’t being met, it being okay to have needs and to be upset they’re not being met, etc. etc.
(Being more assertive came about as an unplanned, but natural side-effect of having the building blocks available; I simply noticed that I’m automatically behaving in a more assertive way, rather than trying to behave in a more assertive way.)
I couldn’t find anything but car dyno tuning when googling for “Levin Stage 1.”
I’m referring to Pamela Levin’s developmental cycles model, described in “Cycles of Power” and heavily used in “Recovery from co-dependency.” Stage 1 (called “Being” by Levin, and “Bonding” by Weiss & Weiss), is the stage where infants (zero to six months) learn how to respond to their internal physical state, and more or less set their basic emotional tone for responding to themselves and the world.
There are some online resources about the stages at behaviourwall.com—they appear to be selling some sort of courseware for teachers in the UK to address student behavioral problems through remedial skills work.
The complete model (as described in the books I suggest) includes both developmental tasks or goals (skills to be learned) and “affirmations” (signals sent from parent to child to establish the child’s outlook or attitude), as well as typical patterns of dysfunction and distortion occurring in the skills and attitudes.
Btw, don’t be fooled by the pretty charts on behaviourwall.com… there’s not enough information there to actually do anything. In general I have noticed that if a given “affirmation” or task is one you haven’t successfully acquired, you will not really know what it means from a brief description; examples of healthy and dysfunctional people’s thoughts and behavior relevant to that task or affirmation is essential to being able to even grasp what a real problem is, let alone how to address it.
Without this information, the task and affirmation descriptions sound like nonsense or trivialities, especially since they’re phrased for comprehension by children!
For example, the stage 3 affirmation, “you can think about your feelings” sounds stupidly obvious, but the actual skill meant by this phrase is not so simple or obvious! It really means something more like “you can think about your goals while in the grip of a strong emotion, while considering what you really want, without first worrying whether what you think or say is going to embarrass your parents or get you in trouble, and without needing to suppress what you actually want because it’s not allowed… ”, and, well, a much longer description than that. ;-)
(And of course, it’s not just the idea that you can do that, but the actual experience of being able to do it that matters. The “can” of actually riding a bicycle, not the “can” of “of course it’s possible to ride bicycles”.)
Why? Is there some useful behavior that you would not engage in if you were not experiencing the emotion?
I don’t have to actually be outraged to yell at someone… assuming that yelling is the most useful response in the first place. (And it often isn’t.)
If you have to get outraged to stand up for yourself, this is an indication of a boundary problem: it’s a substitute for healthy assertion. (I know, because I’m still discovering all the settings where I was taught to use it as a substitute!)
So, if someone has a “self-defense” objection to dropping a judgment, I first help them work on removing the judgments that keep them from being able to assert boundaries in the first place.
(IOW, the reason people usually have problems asserting their boundaries is because they were imprinted with other moral judgments about the conditions under which they’re allowed to assert boundaries!)
That’s probably a good insight.
It’s typically been my goal to put up with as much unpleasantness as I can without complaining, for as long as I can. The trouble is that some of the things I’ve taught myself to tolerate are not good for me. (Everything from untreated illness, to accepting rules that it would be smarter to bend, to letting people put me down in rather hurtful ways.) Becoming more “stoic” (in the sense of more inclined to endure bad circumstances rather than change them) seems dangerous to me—I’m already too “stoic” for my own good!
While I haven’t been doing work with the developmental stuff for very long (maybe the last 6 months), that sounds pretty much like a Levin stage 1 dysfunction… almost exactly like one of the ones I fixed recently, which has made me much less stoic in that sense.
I’d suggest Weiss & Weiss’s “Recovery from Co-dependency” and Levin’s “Cycles of Power” as being very helpful with this.
The essential thesis of both works is that there are patterns of child development during which we learn how to get certain categories of need met, wherein the choices we make lay the groundwork for personality traits (like assertion, self-care, thoughtfulness, etc.).
Generally speaking, a choice that might be adaptive in one phase (say, learning not to cry out as a baby, but instead to wait for someone to show up unprompted) can then result in making later choices that are basically workarounds.
So you end up with messy code in your brain, with lots of patches and workarounds… and the books are like a software developer’s “patterns and antipatterns” catalog, listing typical bugs, workarounds, and how things ought to be set up in the first place.
I’ve made some rather substantial changes to personality characteristics like these (e.g. becoming less stoic, being more comfortable with novelty, more flexible about changes of plans) in the last 2.5 months, and I’ve barely done anything past development stage 2 yet.
[A side note: I’m not actually using the methods described in the books to implement the changes; the books discuss roleplay in psychotherapy, and miscellaneous self-care activities. I’m instead using other, more-direct mindhacking techniques, while referring to the books as a map of what to change and what to change it to. For example, I’ve just realized this morning that a chronic problem I’ve had with planning is probably related to a missed developmental goal in stage 3, so I’m going to go dig through their case studies and such for stage 3 to figure out what I need to change so that I naturally behave differently in that area. But I won’t be making that change by roleplaying being a two-year old (with a therapist pretending to be a parent), as Weiss and Weiss suggest people with stage 3 issues do!]
How’d you learn to yell at people/firmly defend boundaries/etc. in the absence of a feeling of outrage? I couldn’t find anything but car dyno tuning when googling for “Levin Stage 1.” The only person I know to have taught himself that skill spent months working as the “mugger/bad guy” in a women’s self-defense course.
It’s not like I tried to learn that as a skill, specifically. What I learned were subcomponents of that skill, which included such things as noticing that I needed something, the need wasn’t being met, it being okay to have needs and to be upset they’re not being met, etc. etc.
(Being more assertive came about as an unplanned, but natural side-effect of having the building blocks available; I simply noticed that I’m automatically behaving in a more assertive way, rather than trying to behave in a more assertive way.)
I’m referring to Pamela Levin’s developmental cycles model, described in “Cycles of Power” and heavily used in “Recovery from co-dependency.” Stage 1 (called “Being” by Levin, and “Bonding” by Weiss & Weiss), is the stage where infants (zero to six months) learn how to respond to their internal physical state, and more or less set their basic emotional tone for responding to themselves and the world.
There are some online resources about the stages at behaviourwall.com—they appear to be selling some sort of courseware for teachers in the UK to address student behavioral problems through remedial skills work.
The complete model (as described in the books I suggest) includes both developmental tasks or goals (skills to be learned) and “affirmations” (signals sent from parent to child to establish the child’s outlook or attitude), as well as typical patterns of dysfunction and distortion occurring in the skills and attitudes.
Btw, don’t be fooled by the pretty charts on behaviourwall.com… there’s not enough information there to actually do anything. In general I have noticed that if a given “affirmation” or task is one you haven’t successfully acquired, you will not really know what it means from a brief description; examples of healthy and dysfunctional people’s thoughts and behavior relevant to that task or affirmation is essential to being able to even grasp what a real problem is, let alone how to address it.
Without this information, the task and affirmation descriptions sound like nonsense or trivialities, especially since they’re phrased for comprehension by children!
For example, the stage 3 affirmation, “you can think about your feelings” sounds stupidly obvious, but the actual skill meant by this phrase is not so simple or obvious! It really means something more like “you can think about your goals while in the grip of a strong emotion, while considering what you really want, without first worrying whether what you think or say is going to embarrass your parents or get you in trouble, and without needing to suppress what you actually want because it’s not allowed… ”, and, well, a much longer description than that. ;-)
(And of course, it’s not just the idea that you can do that, but the actual experience of being able to do it that matters. The “can” of actually riding a bicycle, not the “can” of “of course it’s possible to ride bicycles”.)