“Feeling guilty/ashamed, then lashing out in order to feel better” is a good example of an exile/protector dynamic. It may be possible to reduce the strength of such reactions through an intellectual argument, as you seem to suggest yourself to have done. But as Ruby suggested, the underlying insecurity causing the protector response is likely to be related to some fear around social rejection, in which case working on the level of intellectual concepts may be insufficient for changing the responses.
I suspect that the “nobody is good” move, when it works, acts on the level of self-concept editing, changing your concepts so as to redefine the “evil” act to no longer be evidence about you being evil. But based on my own experience, this move only works to heal the underlying insecurity when your brain considers the update to be true—which is to say, when it perceives the “evil act” to be something which your social environment will no longer judge you harshly for, allowing the behavior to update. If this seems false, or the underlying insecurity is based on a too strong of a trauma, then one may need to do more emotional kind of work in order to address it.
That said, one may adjust the problematic response pattern even without healing the original insecurity: e.g. sufficiently strong external pressure saying that the response is bad, may set up new mechanisms which suppress the-responses-which-have-been-judged-as-bad. But this may involve building a higher tower of protectors, meaning that healing the original insecurity would allow for more a flexible range of behavior.
Incidentally, I don’t think that tone arguments are always made in bad faith. E.g. within EA, there have been debates over “should we make EA arguments which are guilt/obligation-based”, which is basically an argument over the kind of a tone to use. Now, I agree that tone arguments often are themselves a protector reaction, aimed at just eliminating the unpleasant tone. But there also exists a genuine disagreement over what kind of a tone is more effective, and there exist lots of people who are genuinely worried that groups using too harsh of a tone to create social change are shooting themselves in the foot.
My guess is that people arguing for a “nice” tone are doing so because of an intuitive understanding that a harsh tone is more likely to trigger protector responses and thus be counterproductive. People may even be trying to communicate that it would be easier for them personally to listen if their protector responses weren’t being triggered. On the other hand, people arguing for a harsh tone are doing so because of an intuitive understanding that the “nice” tone is often too easily ignored, and that making people feel guilty over the defensive reaction in the first place is also a strategy which can be made to work. This seems to be an area where different people will react differently to the same strategies, causing people to be inclined to over-generalize from their own experience.
the “nobody is good” move, when it works, [changes] your concepts so as to redefine the “evil” act to no longer be evidence about you being evil. But … this move only works to heal the underlying insecurity when your brain considers the update to be true—which is to say, when it perceives the “evil act” to be something which your social environment will no longer judge you harshly for, allowing the behavior to update.
I suspect that typically, when someone thinks “I shouldn’t do X because that would make me evil and I shouldn’t be evil”, what their brain is actually computing is something like “I shouldn’t do X because people who I care about would then consider me evil, and that would be bad for me”, even if that’s not how it appears subjectively.
Note that this is different from thinking that “I shouldn’t do X because that’s wrong”. I’m not claiming that a fear of punishment would be the only thing that disinclined us from doing bad things. You can consider X to be wrong and refrain from doing it, without having a subconscious fear of punishment. The difference is that if you are afraid of being punished, then any suggestion of having done wrong is likely to trigger a defensive reaction and a desire to show that you did no wrong. Whereas if you don’t feel the fear, you might just think “oh, the thing that I did was wrong”, feel healthy regret, and act to fix it.
Sometimes you might feel like you are evil (that is, likely to be punished) because you have done, or repeatedly do, something bad. In some of these cases, it can help to redefine your concepts. For instance, if you did bad things when you were young, you can think “I did bad things when I was young and didn’t know any better, but I’m a grownup now”. Or “these things are evil, but nobody is actually purely good, so doing them doesn’t make me any worse than other people”.
Now, if “I shouldn’t be evil” actually means “I shouldn’t do things that make people punish me”, then attempting these kinds of redefinitions will also trigger a subconscious evaluation process which has to be passed for the redefinition to succeed.
If you think that “I did bad things when I was young and didn’t know any better, but I’m a grownup now”, then this corresponds to something like “I did bad things when I was young, but nobody is going to hold those things against me anymore”. This redefinition will only succeed if the latter sentence feels true to your brain.
If you think that “these things are evil, but nobody is actually purely good, so doing them doesn’t make me any worse than other people”, then this corresponds to something like “these things are blameworthy, but everyone does them, so doing them won’t get me judged any more harshly than anyone else”. Again, this redefinition will only succeed if the latter sentence feels true to your brain.
This is assuming that you are trying to use those redefinitions to heal the original bad feeling. One can also use these kinds of thoughts to suppress the original bad feeling (create a protector which seeks to extinguish the bad feeling using counter-arguments). In that case, the part of your mind which was originally convinced of you being in danger, doesn’t need to be convinced otherwise. But this will set up an internal conflict as that part will continue to try to make itself heard, and may sometimes overwhelm whatever blocks have been put in place to keep in silent.
“Feeling guilty/ashamed, then lashing out in order to feel better” is a good example of an exile/protector dynamic. It may be possible to reduce the strength of such reactions through an intellectual argument, as you seem to suggest yourself to have done. But as Ruby suggested, the underlying insecurity causing the protector response is likely to be related to some fear around social rejection, in which case working on the level of intellectual concepts may be insufficient for changing the responses.
I suspect that the “nobody is good” move, when it works, acts on the level of self-concept editing, changing your concepts so as to redefine the “evil” act to no longer be evidence about you being evil. But based on my own experience, this move only works to heal the underlying insecurity when your brain considers the update to be true—which is to say, when it perceives the “evil act” to be something which your social environment will no longer judge you harshly for, allowing the behavior to update. If this seems false, or the underlying insecurity is based on a too strong of a trauma, then one may need to do more emotional kind of work in order to address it.
That said, one may adjust the problematic response pattern even without healing the original insecurity: e.g. sufficiently strong external pressure saying that the response is bad, may set up new mechanisms which suppress the-responses-which-have-been-judged-as-bad. But this may involve building a higher tower of protectors, meaning that healing the original insecurity would allow for more a flexible range of behavior.
Incidentally, I don’t think that tone arguments are always made in bad faith. E.g. within EA, there have been debates over “should we make EA arguments which are guilt/obligation-based”, which is basically an argument over the kind of a tone to use. Now, I agree that tone arguments often are themselves a protector reaction, aimed at just eliminating the unpleasant tone. But there also exists a genuine disagreement over what kind of a tone is more effective, and there exist lots of people who are genuinely worried that groups using too harsh of a tone to create social change are shooting themselves in the foot.
My guess is that people arguing for a “nice” tone are doing so because of an intuitive understanding that a harsh tone is more likely to trigger protector responses and thus be counterproductive. People may even be trying to communicate that it would be easier for them personally to listen if their protector responses weren’t being triggered. On the other hand, people arguing for a harsh tone are doing so because of an intuitive understanding that the “nice” tone is often too easily ignored, and that making people feel guilty over the defensive reaction in the first place is also a strategy which can be made to work. This seems to be an area where different people will react differently to the same strategies, causing people to be inclined to over-generalize from their own experience.
Kaj, I’m having real trouble parsing this:
Would you clarify?
To rephrase:
I suspect that typically, when someone thinks “I shouldn’t do X because that would make me evil and I shouldn’t be evil”, what their brain is actually computing is something like “I shouldn’t do X because people who I care about would then consider me evil, and that would be bad for me”, even if that’s not how it appears subjectively.
Note that this is different from thinking that “I shouldn’t do X because that’s wrong”. I’m not claiming that a fear of punishment would be the only thing that disinclined us from doing bad things. You can consider X to be wrong and refrain from doing it, without having a subconscious fear of punishment. The difference is that if you are afraid of being punished, then any suggestion of having done wrong is likely to trigger a defensive reaction and a desire to show that you did no wrong. Whereas if you don’t feel the fear, you might just think “oh, the thing that I did was wrong”, feel healthy regret, and act to fix it.
Sometimes you might feel like you are evil (that is, likely to be punished) because you have done, or repeatedly do, something bad. In some of these cases, it can help to redefine your concepts. For instance, if you did bad things when you were young, you can think “I did bad things when I was young and didn’t know any better, but I’m a grownup now”. Or “these things are evil, but nobody is actually purely good, so doing them doesn’t make me any worse than other people”.
Now, if “I shouldn’t be evil” actually means “I shouldn’t do things that make people punish me”, then attempting these kinds of redefinitions will also trigger a subconscious evaluation process which has to be passed for the redefinition to succeed.
If you think that “I did bad things when I was young and didn’t know any better, but I’m a grownup now”, then this corresponds to something like “I did bad things when I was young, but nobody is going to hold those things against me anymore”. This redefinition will only succeed if the latter sentence feels true to your brain.
If you think that “these things are evil, but nobody is actually purely good, so doing them doesn’t make me any worse than other people”, then this corresponds to something like “these things are blameworthy, but everyone does them, so doing them won’t get me judged any more harshly than anyone else”. Again, this redefinition will only succeed if the latter sentence feels true to your brain.
This is assuming that you are trying to use those redefinitions to heal the original bad feeling. One can also use these kinds of thoughts to suppress the original bad feeling (create a protector which seeks to extinguish the bad feeling using counter-arguments). In that case, the part of your mind which was originally convinced of you being in danger, doesn’t need to be convinced otherwise. But this will set up an internal conflict as that part will continue to try to make itself heard, and may sometimes overwhelm whatever blocks have been put in place to keep in silent.
Related: Scott Alexander’s Guilt: Another Gift Nobody Wants.