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!]
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!]