So, I have some concrete answers to the “what disclaimers would help?” thing, but having slept on it I’m generally pretty uncomfortable with the way this post is currently written and disclaimers feel more like a band-aid than a solution.
This post seems to be aiming for a purely descriptive look at the problem, but… well first of all, “Misery Pit” just isn’t a neutral descriptive word. (It’s evocative and clearly communicates the phenomenon, but this is a phenomenon that’s highly triggering to many people who are still grappling with it and I don’t think “evocative” is the best criteria).
It’s also very essentialist that lends itself to binary division of humans into misery-pit and non-misery-pit status (followed by arguments about what counts). You could solve this by trying to say “Misery-pit-ness is a spectrum, not a binary”, but even this seems to frame the question in an anti-helpful way.
The relevant question is not “how misery-pit-ish am I?” or “how misery pit-ish is this person I interact with?” It’s “can I improve my current strategies for getting my needs met? What skills should I work to gain next?”.
I can imagine some people who need/want lots of reassurance finding this post to be a useful gut punch that motivates them to solve it. But I can much more easily imagine lots of people who either need something different from this post to help them, or who have already mostly solved this issue but for whom bringing up the way it’s discussed here to be a deeply unpleasant experience. (I’ve run into one such person already)
I’m not sure if there was a specific intended target audience here, but what comes across to me is more “people who don’t struggle with this, watch out for people who want lots of reassurance” as opposed to “people who want lots of reassurance, here are some strategies that are better than asking for reassurance a lot and here’s why asking for reassurance a lot isn’t very workable.”
And I think those are both important conversation to have, but I think the first conversation basically comes for free if you write the second post, whereas the second conversation doesn’t necessarily come for free with the first one.
(I’d also personally prefer a version of the post that’s making a stronger effort to be kind/empathetic, but expect people to vary a lot on what exactly that means and whether they think that matters and a bunch of worldview stuff that everyone here probably isn’t on the same page about, and am not sure how to think about that)
But, as a concrete answer for useful disclaimers:
This post is literally the sort of thing trigger warnings were invented for. You sort of imply one with the first paragraph but it could be way more explicit.
I think this post presupposes that either you don’t struggle with this currently, or that you have prerequisite skills such that “directly engage with the ‘constantly ask for reassurance’” is the best next-action (and that the framing in this post is the best framing). In it’s current form, I think it could either use explicit disclaimers about what state or skills you need to have in order for this post to be useful.
can I improve my current strategies for getting my needs met?
Sorry, I don’t mean to argue against your comment in any way, but can I just latch on to this to make an unrelated point?
Kaj had a great post some days ago about how you can’t meditate your way out of suffering, because meditation is trying to abstract away from a part of you, and you can’t do that if your reasons for doing that are coming from the same part of you. Something similar is going on here.
“How do I get my needs met?” is certainly the most pressing question to a needy person. But it’s a wrong question, because it’s a restatement of neediness. Any action coming from it will be colored with neediness. It’s like trying to escape a swamp by pulling on your own hair.
The right question is: assuming as an immutable fact that my needs aren’t met, how do I minimize my own self-harm? That’s a heartbreaking question, because even asking it seems to imply you’ll never get warmth from people again. But at least this question isn’t colored with neediness, it doesn’t sabotage itself. You can make progress on it.
A similar re-framing hugely helped me in the past. There was a time when I genuinely did not expect to feel happy or pleasant feelings again. For some reason or another, the approach I ended up taking was, “Given that I’ll never be happy again, how should I act?”
I don’t feel confident suggesting this sort of re-framing to someone in general. I can easily imagine someone being overwhelmed by the idea of never being happy again or never having their needs met by others, and possibly doing something drastic. Though something does feel more complete about this approach. Like cousin_it said, it’s a sort of “break out of the old frame” move.
Ah, that does seem like a fair point. I think which question is most useful depends on individual circumstance, and I’m not sure the “how to get needs met” question necessarily causes the framing problem you mention, but I can definitely imagine cases where your reframe seems more helpful.
Relatedly, I’m not keen on the framing of this as “a phenomenon that can adversely affect communities”.
Imagine an article that begins “This is an attempt to describe a phenomenon that can adversely affect communities. Sometimes some of the cells in a person’s body will start dividing uncontrollably and refusing to die. This can make them very sick and require a lot of expensive treatment, and typically they die anyway. It can cost a community a hell of a lot of money.”
That wouldn’t be incorrect but, to me, it would feel somehow indecent, as if the primary thing that’s bad about someone getting an incurable cancer is the cost to other people.
And it seems to me that there’s something similar about writing as if the primary thing that’s bad about some people being persistently wretched in ways that don’t improve much when others try to help them is the cost to those other people.
And then the label you attach to these persistently wretched people—“misery pit”—is one that on the face of it clearly describes an inanimate thing rather than a person. (At one point there’s even a contrast between “non-misery-pit humans” and “misery pits”; note no “humans” in the latter.)
Again, none of this is exactly incorrect. If some people in your community are unfixably miserable, that is indeed bad for the community. It may be helpful: perhaps “keep away from unfixably miserable people”, which is implicitly the recommendation here, is the best advice that can actually be given. But, still, something about it feels indecent to me, as if there ought to be another way of expressing the thing that gives the same advice but doesn’t quite so insistently dehumanize the people it’s talking about.
I do think there are intermediate stages of misery-pit-ness.
The target audience was “people like the people I’ve talked to about this before who find this model/framing helpful to them in their efforts to set and enforce boundaries before, not after, they are harmed by taking on too much responsibility for other people”. I don’t have any really useful advice for misery pits themselves that isn’t implicitly in the post. The second conversation doesn’t come free with the first because it requires more content which I don’t happen to have.
I’ve added a content warning but I noticed as I was composing it I wasn’t really sure what to say, so I’m low-confidence that it’s anything like what you had in mind.
The second suggestion seems to me inapplicable—it’s a definition post, not a strategy post. I don’t think you need to be in any specific state to potentially want vocabulary.
So, I have some concrete answers to the “what disclaimers would help?” thing, but having slept on it I’m generally pretty uncomfortable with the way this post is currently written and disclaimers feel more like a band-aid than a solution.
This post seems to be aiming for a purely descriptive look at the problem, but… well first of all, “Misery Pit” just isn’t a neutral descriptive word. (It’s evocative and clearly communicates the phenomenon, but this is a phenomenon that’s highly triggering to many people who are still grappling with it and I don’t think “evocative” is the best criteria).
It’s also very essentialist that lends itself to binary division of humans into misery-pit and non-misery-pit status (followed by arguments about what counts). You could solve this by trying to say “Misery-pit-ness is a spectrum, not a binary”, but even this seems to frame the question in an anti-helpful way.
The relevant question is not “how misery-pit-ish am I?” or “how misery pit-ish is this person I interact with?” It’s “can I improve my current strategies for getting my needs met? What skills should I work to gain next?”.
I can imagine some people who need/want lots of reassurance finding this post to be a useful gut punch that motivates them to solve it. But I can much more easily imagine lots of people who either need something different from this post to help them, or who have already mostly solved this issue but for whom bringing up the way it’s discussed here to be a deeply unpleasant experience. (I’ve run into one such person already)
I’m not sure if there was a specific intended target audience here, but what comes across to me is more “people who don’t struggle with this, watch out for people who want lots of reassurance” as opposed to “people who want lots of reassurance, here are some strategies that are better than asking for reassurance a lot and here’s why asking for reassurance a lot isn’t very workable.”
And I think those are both important conversation to have, but I think the first conversation basically comes for free if you write the second post, whereas the second conversation doesn’t necessarily come for free with the first one.
(I’d also personally prefer a version of the post that’s making a stronger effort to be kind/empathetic, but expect people to vary a lot on what exactly that means and whether they think that matters and a bunch of worldview stuff that everyone here probably isn’t on the same page about, and am not sure how to think about that)
But, as a concrete answer for useful disclaimers:
This post is literally the sort of thing trigger warnings were invented for. You sort of imply one with the first paragraph but it could be way more explicit.
I think this post presupposes that either you don’t struggle with this currently, or that you have prerequisite skills such that “directly engage with the ‘constantly ask for reassurance’” is the best next-action (and that the framing in this post is the best framing). In it’s current form, I think it could either use explicit disclaimers about what state or skills you need to have in order for this post to be useful.
Sorry, I don’t mean to argue against your comment in any way, but can I just latch on to this to make an unrelated point?
Kaj had a great post some days ago about how you can’t meditate your way out of suffering, because meditation is trying to abstract away from a part of you, and you can’t do that if your reasons for doing that are coming from the same part of you. Something similar is going on here.
“How do I get my needs met?” is certainly the most pressing question to a needy person. But it’s a wrong question, because it’s a restatement of neediness. Any action coming from it will be colored with neediness. It’s like trying to escape a swamp by pulling on your own hair.
The right question is: assuming as an immutable fact that my needs aren’t met, how do I minimize my own self-harm? That’s a heartbreaking question, because even asking it seems to imply you’ll never get warmth from people again. But at least this question isn’t colored with neediness, it doesn’t sabotage itself. You can make progress on it.
A similar re-framing hugely helped me in the past. There was a time when I genuinely did not expect to feel happy or pleasant feelings again. For some reason or another, the approach I ended up taking was, “Given that I’ll never be happy again, how should I act?”
I don’t feel confident suggesting this sort of re-framing to someone in general. I can easily imagine someone being overwhelmed by the idea of never being happy again or never having their needs met by others, and possibly doing something drastic. Though something does feel more complete about this approach. Like cousin_it said, it’s a sort of “break out of the old frame” move.
Ah, that does seem like a fair point. I think which question is most useful depends on individual circumstance, and I’m not sure the “how to get needs met” question necessarily causes the framing problem you mention, but I can definitely imagine cases where your reframe seems more helpful.
Relatedly, I’m not keen on the framing of this as “a phenomenon that can adversely affect communities”.
Imagine an article that begins “This is an attempt to describe a phenomenon that can adversely affect communities. Sometimes some of the cells in a person’s body will start dividing uncontrollably and refusing to die. This can make them very sick and require a lot of expensive treatment, and typically they die anyway. It can cost a community a hell of a lot of money.”
That wouldn’t be incorrect but, to me, it would feel somehow indecent, as if the primary thing that’s bad about someone getting an incurable cancer is the cost to other people.
And it seems to me that there’s something similar about writing as if the primary thing that’s bad about some people being persistently wretched in ways that don’t improve much when others try to help them is the cost to those other people.
And then the label you attach to these persistently wretched people—“misery pit”—is one that on the face of it clearly describes an inanimate thing rather than a person. (At one point there’s even a contrast between “non-misery-pit humans” and “misery pits”; note no “humans” in the latter.)
Again, none of this is exactly incorrect. If some people in your community are unfixably miserable, that is indeed bad for the community. It may be helpful: perhaps “keep away from unfixably miserable people”, which is implicitly the recommendation here, is the best advice that can actually be given. But, still, something about it feels indecent to me, as if there ought to be another way of expressing the thing that gives the same advice but doesn’t quite so insistently dehumanize the people it’s talking about.
I do think there are intermediate stages of misery-pit-ness.
The target audience was “people like the people I’ve talked to about this before who find this model/framing helpful to them in their efforts to set and enforce boundaries before, not after, they are harmed by taking on too much responsibility for other people”. I don’t have any really useful advice for misery pits themselves that isn’t implicitly in the post. The second conversation doesn’t come free with the first because it requires more content which I don’t happen to have.
I’ve added a content warning but I noticed as I was composing it I wasn’t really sure what to say, so I’m low-confidence that it’s anything like what you had in mind.
The second suggestion seems to me inapplicable—it’s a definition post, not a strategy post. I don’t think you need to be in any specific state to potentially want vocabulary.