It seems like the spirit of the Litany of Gendlin is basically false?
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.
And it’s precisely the things that you are avoiding looking at that are most likely to be those things you can’t handle, as that’s WHY you developed the response of not looking at them.
Pedantically speaking, whether this is true or not depends on what you mean by “it”; owning up to it [a fact about the world external to oneself] does not make it [that fact] worse, but if your psychology can’t handle unpleasant truths, then owning up to it [a specific fact about the external world] make may it [the world as a whole] worse.
But this is a bit of a dodge; I think the right way to look at it is that, in most cases, a false belief is a form of debt; you’ll probably have to own up to it eventually, and there’s a cost to be paid when you do, but time-shifting that cost further into the future creates additional costs, because you make worse decisions and form other incorrect beliefs in the mean time.
Habryka framed the Gendlin litany as a stoic meditation, which made me dislike it a bit less. i.e, it’s something you say to yourself to help make it true that you can endure the truth, by choosing to adopt a frame where the truth is already out there. (not sure if habryka exactly endorses this summary)
The main issue I then have with it (through this frame) is it says “people can endure what is true”, rather than “I can endure what’s true” – “people” sounds like it’s making a claim about the external world, rather than a mantra I’m repeating to myself. (Although I can imagine a reading where the “people” is still directed inward rather than outward)
I guess put another way, further steelmanning the original version: the fact that people can stand what’s true, doesn’t mean that they do stand what’s true. You can be reminding yourself of what’s possible, and committing to cleave towards the truth and be the sort of the person who will stand what’s true by framing it as something you’re already enduring.
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!)
We obviously can’t give our attention to every truth. The LoG has to be contextual. If you’re spending a lot of resources pursuing an impossible goal because you’re willfully ignoring an uncomfortable fact, stop denying the truth. Build the emotional skills to work through disappointment in a healthy way and move on with your life.
My issue with the LoG is its tone. It seems to frame the process of coping with disappointment as a dispassionate one. Like we’re supposed to be a computer. I think that’s unhelpful on the margin for most people most of the time.
I wonder why it seems like it suggests dispassion to you, but to me it suggests grace in the presence of pain. The grace for me I think comes from the outward- and upward-reaching (to me) “to be interacted with” and “to be lived”, and grace with acknowledgement of pain comes from “they are already enduring it”
It seems like the spirit of the Litany of Gendlin is basically false?
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.
And it’s precisely the things that you are avoiding looking at that are most likely to be those things you can’t handle, as that’s WHY you developed the response of not looking at them.
Pedantically speaking, whether this is true or not depends on what you mean by “it”; owning up to it [a fact about the world external to oneself] does not make it [that fact] worse, but if your psychology can’t handle unpleasant truths, then owning up to it [a specific fact about the external world] make may it [the world as a whole] worse.
But this is a bit of a dodge; I think the right way to look at it is that, in most cases, a false belief is a form of debt; you’ll probably have to own up to it eventually, and there’s a cost to be paid when you do, but time-shifting that cost further into the future creates additional costs, because you make worse decisions and form other incorrect beliefs in the mean time.
Habryka framed the Gendlin litany as a stoic meditation, which made me dislike it a bit less. i.e, it’s something you say to yourself to help make it true that you can endure the truth, by choosing to adopt a frame where the truth is already out there. (not sure if habryka exactly endorses this summary)
The main issue I then have with it (through this frame) is it says “people can endure what is true”, rather than “I can endure what’s true” – “people” sounds like it’s making a claim about the external world, rather than a mantra I’m repeating to myself. (Although I can imagine a reading where the “people” is still directed inward rather than outward)
I guess put another way, further steelmanning the original version: the fact that people can stand what’s true, doesn’t mean that they do stand what’s true. You can be reminding yourself of what’s possible, and committing to cleave towards the truth and be the sort of the person who will stand what’s true by framing it as something you’re already enduring.
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!)
We obviously can’t give our attention to every truth. The LoG has to be contextual. If you’re spending a lot of resources pursuing an impossible goal because you’re willfully ignoring an uncomfortable fact, stop denying the truth. Build the emotional skills to work through disappointment in a healthy way and move on with your life.
My issue with the LoG is its tone. It seems to frame the process of coping with disappointment as a dispassionate one. Like we’re supposed to be a computer. I think that’s unhelpful on the margin for most people most of the time.
I wonder why it seems like it suggests dispassion to you, but to me it suggests grace in the presence of pain. The grace for me I think comes from the outward- and upward-reaching (to me) “to be interacted with” and “to be lived”, and grace with acknowledgement of pain comes from “they are already enduring it”