I think it’s probably true that the Litany of Gendlin is irrecoverably false, but I feel drawn to apologia anyway.
I think the central point of the litany is its equivocation between “you can stand what is true (because, whether you know it or not, you already are standing what is true)” and “you can stand to know what is true”.
When someone thinks, “I can’t have wasted my time on this startup. If I have I’ll just die”, they must really mean “If I find out I have I’ll just die”. Otherwise presumably they can conclude from their continued aliveness that they didn’t waste their life, and move on. The litany is an invitation to allow yourself to have less fallout from acknowledging or finding out the truth because you finding it out isn’t what causes it to be true, however bad the world might be because it’s true. A local frame might be “whatever additional terrible ways it feels like the world must be now if X is true are bucket errors”.
So when you say “Owning up to what’s true makes things way worse if you don’t have the psychological immune system to handle the negative news/deal with the trauma or whatever”, you’re not responding to the litany as I see it. The litany says (emphasis added) “Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse”. Owning up to what’s true doesn’t make the true thing worse. It might make things worse, but it doesn’t make the true thing worse (though I’m sure there are, in fact, tricky counterexamples here)
(The Litany of Gendlin is important to me, so I wanted to defend it!)
I think it’s probably true that the Litany of Gendlin is irrecoverably false, but I feel drawn to apologia anyway.
I think the central point of the litany is its equivocation between “you can stand what is true (because, whether you know it or not, you already are standing what is true)” and “you can stand to know what is true”.
When someone thinks, “I can’t have wasted my time on this startup. If I have I’ll just die”, they must really mean “If I find out I have I’ll just die”. Otherwise presumably they can conclude from their continued aliveness that they didn’t waste their life, and move on. The litany is an invitation to allow yourself to have less fallout from acknowledging or finding out the truth because you finding it out isn’t what causes it to be true, however bad the world might be because it’s true. A local frame might be “whatever additional terrible ways it feels like the world must be now if X is true are bucket errors”.
So when you say “Owning up to what’s true makes things way worse if you don’t have the psychological immune system to handle the negative news/deal with the trauma or whatever”, you’re not responding to the litany as I see it. The litany says (emphasis added) “Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse”. Owning up to what’s true doesn’t make the true thing worse. It might make things worse, but it doesn’t make the true thing worse (though I’m sure there are, in fact, tricky counterexamples here)
(The Litany of Gendlin is important to me, so I wanted to defend it!)