It sounds like you don’t identify as the source of these feelings when you have them, hence your framing of other people suggesting the feelings to you. Is that an accurate description of your position?
Let me offer an alternative frame for what I think is going on when I see similar strong-feelings-as-a-result-of-circling in myself and others (although it’s certainly possible that your experience is quite different from the experiences I’m using as a reference): there are some parts of you (the generic you) that have strong feelings about things for a variety of reasons, and for a variety of reasons your response to this is often to shut those parts up and stuff them in a corner in the back of your mind. It generally doesn’t feel safe to let these parts out, so you don’t.
Circling can offer an environment in which things feel safe enough in some emotional sense (the term of art is that people are “holding space” for you) that these parts temporarily get let out, and the result can be surprisingly strong displays of emotion, crying, screaming, shuddering, etc. I have personally had this effect on people without any explicit suggestion on my part that they have strong feelings about anything; I “hold space” for them (whatever that means, I don’t have gears around it yet) and they start crying. This has been done for me at least twice and I’ve done it for others at least four times now.
When this has happened to me it has not felt even slightly hypnotic; I strongly identified as the parts that were having the emotions (although I think I identify as my S1 in general much more than most rationalists), and it never felt like the emotions were coming from anywhere other than me.
Yeah, to me it feels like “sure, you can do ‘magic’ and make me cry and hug and shudder, but that has very little to do with my long-term behavior patterns, it’s just a transient effect.” It feels like being flipped onto the mat by a skilled martial artist; I’m being a guinea pig for someone to demonstrate a cool trick.
My experience is that the cluster of experiences around “cry and hug and shudder” are what it feels like to become aware of something that’s important to my system 1, and that those moments are intervention points for shifting system 1′s heuristics. Progress on reducing akrasia, unendorsed social anxiety, etc. has often come from moments like that.
I don’t know you well, but I model you as someone with strong willpower and a general “mind over matter” attitude. This may make it less salient what your system 1 is up to?
Because suggestibility + being prompted to have strong vulnerable feelings results in actually having said strong vulnerable feelings.
It sounds like you don’t identify as the source of these feelings when you have them, hence your framing
of other people suggesting the feelings to you. Is that an accurate description of your position?
Let me offer an alternative frame for what I think is going on when I see similar strong-feelings-as-a-result-of-circling in myself and others (although it’s certainly possible that your experience is quite different from the experiences I’m using as a reference): there are some parts of you (the generic you) that have strong feelings about things for a variety of reasons, and for a variety of reasons your response to this is often to shut those parts up and stuff them in a corner in the back of your mind. It generally doesn’t feel safe to let these parts out, so you don’t.
Circling can offer an environment in which things feel safe enough in some emotional sense (the term of art is that people are “holding space” for you) that these parts temporarily get let out, and the result can be surprisingly strong displays of emotion, crying, screaming, shuddering, etc. I have personally had this effect on people without any explicit suggestion on my part that they have strong feelings about anything; I “hold space” for them (whatever that means, I don’t have gears around it yet) and they start crying. This has been done for me at least twice and I’ve done it for others at least four times now.
When this has happened to me it has not felt even slightly hypnotic; I strongly identified as the parts that were having the emotions (although I think I identify as my S1 in general much more than most rationalists), and it never felt like the emotions were coming from anywhere other than me.
Yeah, to me it feels like “sure, you can do ‘magic’ and make me cry and hug and shudder, but that has very little to do with my long-term behavior patterns, it’s just a transient effect.” It feels like being flipped onto the mat by a skilled martial artist; I’m being a guinea pig for someone to demonstrate a cool trick.
My experience is that the cluster of experiences around “cry and hug and shudder” are what it feels like to become aware of something that’s important to my system 1, and that those moments are intervention points for shifting system 1′s heuristics. Progress on reducing akrasia, unendorsed social anxiety, etc. has often come from moments like that.
I don’t know you well, but I model you as someone with strong willpower and a general “mind over matter” attitude. This may make it less salient what your system 1 is up to?