I’ve found it helps somewhat to remember that shame/self attack is collaborating with people who are against me by imagining their attacks or their contempt even when they aren’t around. I don’t have to do that. Even if there are practical reasons to avoid setting them off, this doesn’t mean I need to imagine their emotions vividly.
Alternate hypothesis: The vividness of my emotions is not under my direct control, and it is least under my direct control while I am already experiencing vivid emotions.
Experiential evidence for alternative hypothesis: I have spent approximately 30 years training myself to ‘gain control’ of my emotional responses, especially fear, anger, and shame. Several times, when I have noticed that ‘gaining control’ was simply a ‘bottling up’ process that led to an exacerbating explosion later, I have torn down the regulating mechanisms and attempted to build new, better ones.
Model-based evidence for alternative hypothesis: In the human brain, the amygdala has much shorter and stronger neural pathways to the thalamus and cerebellum than the neocortex. In fact, many of the neocortex’s pathways must pass through the limbic system to reach the somatic control areas.
Narrative analogy to describe alternate hypothesis: Gravity, like neurochemistry, is a force that we cannot escape. On earth, a bird may “hack” gravity to convert its gravitational potential into forward momentum rather than downward momentum by spreading its wings in the correct way, but only if it also possesses the correct wing structure. Birds with sufficiently damaged wings cannot fly. Likewise, humans with sufficiently damaged limbic systems or cingulate cortices cannot self-regulate; otherwise, bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder would simply be a matter of willpower, not medication.
Conjecture: When most people talk about “controlling their emotions”, they are constructing a narrative to explain the fact that their emotions happened to subside long enough for them to experience something that feels from the inside like making a decision to calm down.
Look for ways that you’re already on your side. You care enough to keep yourself alive. You’re working on finding solutions.
Alternative hypothesis: I care enough about the people around me to not inconvenience them with a body and a lot of emotional fallout. I care about the people around me enough to not inconvenience them with rabidly non-functional behavior. I continue to look for a solution so long as I believe that I can contain the rabidly non-functional behavior enough that it does not outweigh the inconvenience of dealing with a body and a lot of emotional fallout.
Experiential evidence for alternative hypothesis: I continually seek out opportunities to push people away, explicitly and consciously so that fewer people will have to deal with my crazy, and explicitly and consciously so that fewer people will be harmed if I am unceremoniously removed from the tapestry of their lives. I will strategically wield rabidly non-functional behavior against people who I feel I am becoming to attached to, explicitly and consciously so that they will decide that they are no longer emotionally entwined with my well-being, and will feel justified and satisfied with their own decision to remove me from their lives.
Model evidence for alternative hypothesis: My personal narrative, when confronted with setbacks, consistently contains ideation that I am the only being who is ultimately responsible for my situation (self-oriented blame for negative events), that the past is the only viable source of information with which to predict the future (a preference for permanency over transience), and that most failure modes tend to be interrelated interactions between multiple systems (a belief in pervasive processes rather than isolated processes). This is called a ‘pessimistic explanatory style’ (or more pessimistically, ‘depressive realism’), and tends to indicate depression and very poor self-esteem.
Narrative analogy to describe alternate hypothesis: Human behavior and motivation tends to follow something like a bell curve (or at least a curve with a clump in the middle and long tails on either side) across most axes. Just as there are sociopaths, who are genuinely incapable at a neurobiological level of valuing others, there are likely to be people who are genuinely incapable at a neurobiological level of valuing themselves. This can be due to organic disorder (either via brain damage or genetic abnormality), or this can be induced as a pervasive kind of “learned helplessness”, if started early enough (the old “baby elephant tied to a tree” story).
Conjecture: Most people take their self-interest as a given; if they need help with self-interest due to depression or learned helplessness, they simply need to build on the basic survival drives that already exist. For some people, those survival drives have been so thoroughly corrupted that they are useless—or worse, dangerous to tap into. (Most situations where I have had people encourage me to think selfishly have ended in rather terrifying displays of sadistic cruelty on my part, because that’s simply the only model of ‘selfishness’ that my brain can really wrap its head around.)
Side note: These are not attempts to refute you. These are acknowledgments of my own internal refutations, which I must overcome before I accept the potential wisdom of what you are saying, and which I myself do not possess the strength-of-will to disable so that I can give your hypotheses a fair shake.
Conjecture: When most people talk about “controlling their emotions”, they are constructing a narrative to explain the fact that their emotions happened to subside long enough for them to experience something that feels from the inside like making a decision to calm down.
At least in my case, ‘controlling my emotions’ is an indirect process that mostly involves controlling my attention and modifying my behavior and environment: Intentionally taking a break from thinking about the distressing thing until I’ve calmed down; doing things that are distracting, like watching a movie, or calming, like taking a nice shower; and arranging my environment to provide calming stimuli, like relaxing background music.
The specific procedures that work best seem to vary substantially from person to person, but procedures of this general type do appear to work for at least a significant fraction of people. (You do have avoid the failure mode of not going back to deal with the problem once you’re calm for best results though.)
(Most situations where I have had people encourage me to think selfishly have ended in rather terrifying displays of sadistic cruelty on my part, because that’s simply the only model of ‘selfishness’ that my brain can really wrap its head around.)
I am reasonably confident that I can help with this via IM, by being a role model if nothing else.
Would it be useful to find social circumstances where a terrifying display of sadistic cruelty is the appropriate response, appreciated as an art form by observers and savored by the nominal victim?
If you mean the BDSM world, I used to be quite the diva—I trained people to dance in ballet boots and arm-binders; I put on staggering productions, I was making quite a name for myself.
Then the girls I was living and performing with broke up with me and alleged abuse, and (because I was deeply in love and had attached my ego-validation processes to their opinion of me to an unhealthy degree) I wholly internalized that narrative.
That was, in fact, the exact moment of the beginning of my collapse.
The seeds were planted a lot earlier, of course—I spent most of my childhood in rather nastily abusive situations, and developed an unhealthy obsession with status and power and dominance—but I’m fairly certain the actual structural collapse occured in mid-2006, when all the support structures that I had built to compensate for those earlier flaws got ripped away.
Alternate hypothesis: The vividness of my emotions is not under my direct control, and it is least under my direct control while I am already experiencing vivid emotions.
Experiential evidence for alternative hypothesis: I have spent approximately 30 years training myself to ‘gain control’ of my emotional responses, especially fear, anger, and shame. Several times, when I have noticed that ‘gaining control’ was simply a ‘bottling up’ process that led to an exacerbating explosion later, I have torn down the regulating mechanisms and attempted to build new, better ones.
Model-based evidence for alternative hypothesis: In the human brain, the amygdala has much shorter and stronger neural pathways to the thalamus and cerebellum than the neocortex. In fact, many of the neocortex’s pathways must pass through the limbic system to reach the somatic control areas.
Narrative analogy to describe alternate hypothesis: Gravity, like neurochemistry, is a force that we cannot escape. On earth, a bird may “hack” gravity to convert its gravitational potential into forward momentum rather than downward momentum by spreading its wings in the correct way, but only if it also possesses the correct wing structure. Birds with sufficiently damaged wings cannot fly. Likewise, humans with sufficiently damaged limbic systems or cingulate cortices cannot self-regulate; otherwise, bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder would simply be a matter of willpower, not medication.
Conjecture: When most people talk about “controlling their emotions”, they are constructing a narrative to explain the fact that their emotions happened to subside long enough for them to experience something that feels from the inside like making a decision to calm down.
Alternative hypothesis: I care enough about the people around me to not inconvenience them with a body and a lot of emotional fallout. I care about the people around me enough to not inconvenience them with rabidly non-functional behavior. I continue to look for a solution so long as I believe that I can contain the rabidly non-functional behavior enough that it does not outweigh the inconvenience of dealing with a body and a lot of emotional fallout.
Experiential evidence for alternative hypothesis: I continually seek out opportunities to push people away, explicitly and consciously so that fewer people will have to deal with my crazy, and explicitly and consciously so that fewer people will be harmed if I am unceremoniously removed from the tapestry of their lives. I will strategically wield rabidly non-functional behavior against people who I feel I am becoming to attached to, explicitly and consciously so that they will decide that they are no longer emotionally entwined with my well-being, and will feel justified and satisfied with their own decision to remove me from their lives.
Model evidence for alternative hypothesis: My personal narrative, when confronted with setbacks, consistently contains ideation that I am the only being who is ultimately responsible for my situation (self-oriented blame for negative events), that the past is the only viable source of information with which to predict the future (a preference for permanency over transience), and that most failure modes tend to be interrelated interactions between multiple systems (a belief in pervasive processes rather than isolated processes). This is called a ‘pessimistic explanatory style’ (or more pessimistically, ‘depressive realism’), and tends to indicate depression and very poor self-esteem.
Narrative analogy to describe alternate hypothesis: Human behavior and motivation tends to follow something like a bell curve (or at least a curve with a clump in the middle and long tails on either side) across most axes. Just as there are sociopaths, who are genuinely incapable at a neurobiological level of valuing others, there are likely to be people who are genuinely incapable at a neurobiological level of valuing themselves. This can be due to organic disorder (either via brain damage or genetic abnormality), or this can be induced as a pervasive kind of “learned helplessness”, if started early enough (the old “baby elephant tied to a tree” story).
Conjecture: Most people take their self-interest as a given; if they need help with self-interest due to depression or learned helplessness, they simply need to build on the basic survival drives that already exist. For some people, those survival drives have been so thoroughly corrupted that they are useless—or worse, dangerous to tap into. (Most situations where I have had people encourage me to think selfishly have ended in rather terrifying displays of sadistic cruelty on my part, because that’s simply the only model of ‘selfishness’ that my brain can really wrap its head around.)
Side note: These are not attempts to refute you. These are acknowledgments of my own internal refutations, which I must overcome before I accept the potential wisdom of what you are saying, and which I myself do not possess the strength-of-will to disable so that I can give your hypotheses a fair shake.
At least in my case, ‘controlling my emotions’ is an indirect process that mostly involves controlling my attention and modifying my behavior and environment: Intentionally taking a break from thinking about the distressing thing until I’ve calmed down; doing things that are distracting, like watching a movie, or calming, like taking a nice shower; and arranging my environment to provide calming stimuli, like relaxing background music.
The specific procedures that work best seem to vary substantially from person to person, but procedures of this general type do appear to work for at least a significant fraction of people. (You do have avoid the failure mode of not going back to deal with the problem once you’re calm for best results though.)
I am reasonably confident that I can help with this via IM, by being a role model if nothing else.
Would it be useful to find social circumstances where a terrifying display of sadistic cruelty is the appropriate response, appreciated as an art form by observers and savored by the nominal victim?
If you mean the BDSM world, I used to be quite the diva—I trained people to dance in ballet boots and arm-binders; I put on staggering productions, I was making quite a name for myself.
Then the girls I was living and performing with broke up with me and alleged abuse, and (because I was deeply in love and had attached my ego-validation processes to their opinion of me to an unhealthy degree) I wholly internalized that narrative.
That was, in fact, the exact moment of the beginning of my collapse.
The seeds were planted a lot earlier, of course—I spent most of my childhood in rather nastily abusive situations, and developed an unhealthy obsession with status and power and dominance—but I’m fairly certain the actual structural collapse occured in mid-2006, when all the support structures that I had built to compensate for those earlier flaws got ripped away.