I had a very similar experience a few months ago (replacing “typical female” with “typical male”). Or at least an experience that could have outputted a nearly identical post.
The experience felt incredibly crippling and dehumanizing. Towards the beginning of my experience I predicted ways in which I was likely to make bad decisions, and ways I was likely to be emotionally affected. For a few weeks I made an effort (which felt near-herculean) NOT to make those errors and avoiding those emotional consequences. Eventually I ran out of willpower, and spent a month watching myself making the bad decisions I had predicted.
I came out this with a very different mental model of myself. I’m not sure I consider it a positive yet. I make better predictions about myself but am not noticeably better at actually acting on the information.
This experience has definitely been a positive for me, because I now have a more accurate model of my own behaviour which does allow me to more successfully solve problems. (Solving this particular problem has cause relationship satisfaction to shoot up from an albeit quite low slump to a real high point for both me and my OH.)
I’ll just share the main specific technique I learned from the experience, just in case it might also work for you. When I treat my conscious and unconscious as separate agents, I accept that I cannot control my unconscious thinking (so just trying really hard not to do it won’t help much), but I can /model/ how my unconscious reacts to different stimuli. If you draw the diagram with “Me”, “Hamster” (what I call my unconscious) and “World” (including, specifically to here, the behaviour of my OH), and use arrows to represent what can affect what, then it’s a two-way arrow between Me and World, a one-way arrow from World to Hamster, and a one-way arrow from Hamster to Me. After I drew that diagram it became pretty bloody obvious that I needed to affect the world in such a way as to cause positive reactions in Hamster (and for which I need accurate models of both World and Hamster), and most ideally, kickstart a Me → World → Hamster → Me positive feedback loop.
Would the Litany of Tarski and a hug from nyan_sandwich help?
I’m interested in the ways you and Sarokrae actually noticed these “blips.” I usually don’t notice myself making decisions, when I make them; perhaps if I did spend some time predicting how a person in my circumstances would make bad decisions, I could notice them afterwards.
I’m not sure if describing what the blip feels like would help without going through the process of discovery, but I’ll have a go anyway: it’s noticing that you have a thought in your head without remembering the process you got through to reach it. When there’s a new thought formed that’s within easy mental grasp distance, especially when it’s a judgement of a person or an emotion e.g. attraction, and the reason for it is not within an easy grasp distance, then that’s a sign for me that it’s an unconscious conclusion.
Basically if a new thought that feels “near” appears, but when I ask myself why, the answer feels “far”, that’s a sign that if I did retrieve the answer it would be a rationalisation rather than the actual explanation, and I attempt to abort the retrieval process (or at least proceed with many mental warning signs).
I had a very similar experience a few months ago (replacing “typical female” with “typical male”). Or at least an experience that could have outputted a nearly identical post.
The experience felt incredibly crippling and dehumanizing. Towards the beginning of my experience I predicted ways in which I was likely to make bad decisions, and ways I was likely to be emotionally affected. For a few weeks I made an effort (which felt near-herculean) NOT to make those errors and avoiding those emotional consequences. Eventually I ran out of willpower, and spent a month watching myself making the bad decisions I had predicted.
I came out this with a very different mental model of myself. I’m not sure I consider it a positive yet. I make better predictions about myself but am not noticeably better at actually acting on the information.
This experience has definitely been a positive for me, because I now have a more accurate model of my own behaviour which does allow me to more successfully solve problems. (Solving this particular problem has cause relationship satisfaction to shoot up from an albeit quite low slump to a real high point for both me and my OH.)
I’ll just share the main specific technique I learned from the experience, just in case it might also work for you. When I treat my conscious and unconscious as separate agents, I accept that I cannot control my unconscious thinking (so just trying really hard not to do it won’t help much), but I can /model/ how my unconscious reacts to different stimuli. If you draw the diagram with “Me”, “Hamster” (what I call my unconscious) and “World” (including, specifically to here, the behaviour of my OH), and use arrows to represent what can affect what, then it’s a two-way arrow between Me and World, a one-way arrow from World to Hamster, and a one-way arrow from Hamster to Me. After I drew that diagram it became pretty bloody obvious that I needed to affect the world in such a way as to cause positive reactions in Hamster (and for which I need accurate models of both World and Hamster), and most ideally, kickstart a Me → World → Hamster → Me positive feedback loop.
Would the Litany of Tarski and a hug from nyan_sandwich help?
I’m interested in the ways you and Sarokrae actually noticed these “blips.” I usually don’t notice myself making decisions, when I make them; perhaps if I did spend some time predicting how a person in my circumstances would make bad decisions, I could notice them afterwards.
I’m not sure if describing what the blip feels like would help without going through the process of discovery, but I’ll have a go anyway: it’s noticing that you have a thought in your head without remembering the process you got through to reach it. When there’s a new thought formed that’s within easy mental grasp distance, especially when it’s a judgement of a person or an emotion e.g. attraction, and the reason for it is not within an easy grasp distance, then that’s a sign for me that it’s an unconscious conclusion.
Basically if a new thought that feels “near” appears, but when I ask myself why, the answer feels “far”, that’s a sign that if I did retrieve the answer it would be a rationalisation rather than the actual explanation, and I attempt to abort the retrieval process (or at least proceed with many mental warning signs).