a problem with cramming an attempt at powerful introspection into expensive 1-hour blocks.
The hard part of implementing this isn’t the reconsolidation part. That part is like 10-20 minutes, especially with practice. The hard part is identifying the things that need to be reconsolidated in the first place, and because that is basically a debugging process, it can take a fair amount more time.
I’ve seen a lot of “one theory fits all” therapeutic methods in the past (like Method Of Levels), but in practice for the type of work I do with people, none of them are very good at quickly identifying things because they’re too good at describing everything, and the brain isn’t just one thing.
So now I work with what I call “search grids”—common patterns of bugs that I can go through and check, is it this? is it that? is it more like X or Y? -- and it saves boatloads of time.
(To be fair, though, I work with only a select audience with selected problems, so it’s quite possible that the applicability of my grids isn’t that good outside that audience, even though I think I’ve a fair shot at an evolutionary justification for drawing the lines on my grids where they are.)
Still, I can’t even imagine trying to really solve somebody’s problems in an hour a week, unless they were already trained and had been coached through the methods once or thrice. And if they’re at that point, I ’d work with them via email anyway. The only part of these processes that actually requires real-time interaction is getting people over what I call their “meta-issue”—the schema they have that gets in the way of being able to reflect on their issues.
For example, I’ve had clients who had what you might call a “be a good student” schema that keeps them from accurately reporting their emotions, responses, or progress in applying a reconsolidation technique. Others who would deflect and deny ever having any negative experiences or even any problems, despite having just asked me for help with same. These kinds of meta-issues are the hardest and most time-consuming part of getting someone ready to change.
Ten or twelve years ago when I thought I’d unlocked the secrets of the universe and that memory reconsolidation was going to change everything and everyone, I didn’t realize yet that hard part 1 (needing to identify the things to change) and hard part 2 (needing to get past meta issues), meant that it is impossible to mass-produce change techniques.
That is, you can’t write a single document, record a single video, etc. that will convey to all its consumers what they need in order to actually implement effective change.
I don’t mean that you can’t successfully communicate the ideas or the steps. I just mean that implementing those steps is not a simple matter of following procedure, because of the aforementioned Hard Parts. It’s like expecting someone to learn to bike, drive, or debug programs from a manual.
This doesn’t mean it’s impossible for someone to teach themselves from such material, but it’s not trivial, and my dreams of revolutionizing personal development by mass-producing books or workshops died an ignoble death almost a decade ago. (Incidentally, this limtation is also why for almost any given school of therapy, you will find that people who advertise doing therapy in that school, aren’t always capable of doing more than giving it lip service or cargo cultery.)
It’s a bit like the Interdict of Merlin in HPMOR: successful techniques can only be passed from one living mind to another, or independently discovered. You can write down your notes and share the story of your discovery, and then people either discover it again for themselves, learn it from interacting with someone who knows, or go through the motions and cargo-cult it.
The only part of these processes that actually requires real-time interaction is getting people over what I call their “meta-issue”—the schema they have that gets in the way of being able to reflect on their issues.
For example, I’ve had clients who had what you might call a “be a good student” schema that keeps them from accurately reporting their emotions, responses, or progress in applying a reconsolidation technique. Others who would deflect and deny ever having any negative experiences or even any problems, despite having just asked me for help with same. These kinds of meta-issues are the hardest and most time-consuming part of getting someone ready to change.
Oof, yeah, this resonates a lot with experiences I’ve been having with myself and others the last few months, since coming out of a workshop on the bio-emotive framework. There are towers of meta-issues, meta-issues that prevent themselves from being looked at… what a mess.
In retrospect this illuminates something for me about the CFAR workshop and its techniques—a pattern I ran into for years was that I gradually became averse to every single CFAR technique I tried, so I never used them on my own, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think—and this is deeply ironic—that the CFAR techniques as a whole never went meta enough to catch “meta-issues,” not in any really systematic way.
the CFAR techniques as a whole never went meta enough to catch “meta-issues,” not in any really systematic way.
There is no level of meta systemization that can overrule a person’s meta issues, because their meta issues are always “one level higher than you”. ;-) To put it more precisely, no passive information-passing process can bypass a person’s meta issues, any more than you can turn a shredder into a fax machine by feeding it a copier manual. The incoming information gets processed through an existing filter that deletes any information that doesn’t fit the paradigm, or mangles the information until it does fit.
As I was joking above, self-help really is governed by the Interdict of Merlin: you can discover powerful “spells”, or you can pass them mind-to-mind, but you can’t learn them from a book, except insofar as the book might give you enough clues to rediscover the spell for yourself.
There are towers of meta-issues, meta-issues that prevent themselves from being looked at… what a mess.
Actually, meta-issues don’t have meta-levels, they only simulate recursion via iteration. A meta-issue might be something like, “when you are learning something from a teacher, then try to suck up by being super-successful really fast”. This is only one meta-level, and while it can look recursive in effect, it’s just an illusion.
Let’s say I tell the person with this meta-issue they need to inquire about some emotional state. If we’re at a part of the process where there’s a possibility for them to have succeeded in fixing the problem we’re working on, they will under-report issues and problems (like a lingering negative feeling) or describe hyper-optimistic scenarios that don’t match what they’re really feeling.
Then, if I point this out, they may now apply the pattern again, by trying to prove even harder that they’ve already learned what I’m telling them, even though they haven’t.
(This isn’t really recursion or a new meta-level, it’s just the same pattern being applied to a new stimulus or situation that only incidentally happens to be at a different meta-level, if that makes sense.)
So the only escape from this iterated pseudo-recursion is for them to catch themselves in the act of this automatic response, which requires either a lot of iteration (like it did for me when I was learning my own meta-issues), or an outside party who can spot it and say, “stop that! you’re doing it again...” until the person can recognize themselves doing it.
The incoming information gets processed through an existing filter that deletes any information that doesn’t fit the paradigm, or mangles the information until it does fit.
By the way, I believe this to be related to the kind of thing that Valentine was trying to point at in the Kensho post:
Imagine you’re in a world where people have literally forgotten how to look up from their cell phones. They use maps and camera functions to navigate, and they use chat programs to communicate with one another. They’re so focused on their phones that they don’t notice most stimuli coming in by other means.
Somehow, by a miracle we’ll just inject mysteriously into this thought experiment, you look up, and suddenly you remember that you can actually just see the world directly. You realize you had forgotten you were holding a cell phone.
In your excitement, you try texting your friend Alex:
YOU: Hey! Look up!
ALEX: Hi! Look up what?
YOU: No, I mean, you’re holding a cell phone. Look up from it!
ALEX: Yeah, I know I have a cell phone.
ALEX: <alex_cell_phone.jpg>
ALEX: If I look up from my phone, I just see our conversation.
YOU: No, that’s a picture of your cell phone. You’re still looking at the phone.
YOU: Seriously, try looking up!
ALEX: Okay…
ALEX: looks up
YOU: No, you just typed the characters “looks up”. Use your eyes!
ALEX: Um… I AM using my eyes. How else could I read this?
YOU: Exactly! Look above the text!
ALEX: Above the text is just the menu for the chat program.
YOU: Look above that!
ALEX: There isn’t anything above that. That’s the top.
ALEX: Are you okay?
You now realize you have a perplexing challenge made of two apparent facts.
First, Alex doesn’t have a place in their mind where the idea of “look up” can land in the way you intend. They are going to keep misunderstanding you.
Second, your only familiar way of interacting with Alex is through text, which seems to require somehow explaining what you mean.
But it’s so obvious! How can it be this hard to convey? And clearly some part of Alex already knows it and they just forgot like you had; otherwise they wouldn’t be able to walk around and use their phone. Maybe you can find some way of describing it to Alex that will help them notice that they already know…?
Or… maybe if you rendezvous with them, you can somehow figure out how to reach forward and just pull their head up? But you’re not sure you can do that; you’ve never used your hands that way before. And you might hurt them. And it seems kind of violating to try.
… my personal impression had been that it’s actually quite easy to see what Looking is and how one might translate it into reductionist third-person perspectives. But my personal experience had been that whenever I tried to share that translation, I’d bounce off of weird walls of misunderstanding. After a while I noticed that the nature of the bounce had a structure to it, and that that structure has self-reference. (Once again, analogies along the lines of “get out of the car” and “look up from your phone” come to mind.) After watching this over several months and running some informal tests, and comparing it to things CFAR has been doing (successfully, strugglingly, or failing to do) over the six years I’ve been there, it became obvious to me that there are some mental structures people run by default that actively block the process of Looking. And for many people, those structures have a pretty strong hold on what they say and consciously think. I’ve learned to expect that explaining Looking to those structures simply will never work. [...]
If I try to argue with a paperclip maximizer about how maximizing paperclips isn’t all there is to life, it will care to listen only to the extent that listening will help it maximize paperclips. I claim that by default, human mind design generates something analogous to a bunch of paperclip maximizers. If I’m stuck talking to one of someone’s paperclip maximizers, then even if I see that there are other parts of their mind that would like to engage with what I’m saying, I’m stuck talking to a chunk of their mind that will never understand what I’m saying.
… with the particular difference that he was pointing to a case where the meta-issue involves one’s basic ontology, and where (if I interpret him correctly) he thinks that most people have that meta-issue by default.
Yep, that’s it exactly. I metaphorically yank people’s heads up from their phones for pay. ;-)
Actually, it’s more like I keep sticking my hand in front of the phone until they learn to notice the difference and look up themselves. Fortunately, this doesn’t take too long for most people, but how fast it goes depends on how good they are at fooling me into thinking they’re actually looking up when they’re really still looking at the phone.
The easiest way to detect “looking at the phone” is to ask someone a yes or no or question, and see how long of an answer you get. If somebody starts talking about the past or future, they’re not actually paying attention to their inner experience, because inner experience is always present tense. e.g. “I see my mom yelling at me” is an experience, while “my mom used to yell at me” is a commentary on experience. Causal chains (x happened because y) are also commentary, as are generalizations.
(Incidentally, this is another reason I dislike IFS’ model: it encourages adding commentary like “a part of me X” instead of just saying “X”, which makes it more difficult to know if what you’re hearing is describing experience, or commentary/abstraction on experience.)
I imagine it would be possible to create a training program for people to recognize these verbal patterns and to then verify their own spoken or written statements using them, but it would be harder to get people to go through such a program vs. paying me to help fix a problem of theirs, and learning it by doing it along the way.
The easiest way to detect “looking at the phone” is to ask someone a yes or no or question, and see how long of an answer you get. If somebody starts talking about the past or future, they’re not actually paying attention to their inner experience, because inner experience is always present tense. e.g. “I see my mom yelling at me” is an experience, while “my mom used to yell at me” is a commentary on experience. Causal chains (x happened because y) are also commentary, as are generalizations.
This is a really really good paragraph. You can also watch eyes more closely for the defocus moment. Hypnotists use this one.
a training program for people to recognize these verbal patterns and to then verify their own spoken or written statements using them
hard part 1 (needing to identify the things to change) and hard part 2 (needing to get past meta issues).
Yes, all the people who are really good at this stuff have really finely honed reflexes related to: Sniffing out common issues and, immediately going meta when they encounter resistance. I do think this can be more systematized (have you shared your grids anywhere?) but don’t think people can always be debugged quickly.
So now I work with what I call “search grids”—common patterns of bugs that I can go through and check, is it this? is it that? is it more like X or Y? -- and it saves boatloads of time.
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with NLP meta patterns, but this is how they were originally developed.
My search grids don’t look much like anything from NLP, least of all metaprograms. Instead, they’re patterns of common bugs in the brain that I believe are evolutionarily defined, and likely to be universal.
For example, working with people on self-image problems, I’ve found that there appear to be only three critical “flavors” of self-judgment that create life-long low self-esteem in some area, and associated compulsive or avoidant behaviors:
Belief that one is bad, defective, or malicious (i.e. lacking in care/altruism for friends or family)
Belief that one is foolish, incapable, incompetent, unworthy, etc. (i.e. lacking in ability to learn/improve/perform)
Belief that one is selfish, irresponsible, careless, etc. (i.e. not respecting what the family or community values or believes important)
(Notice that these are things that, if you were bad enough at them in the ancestral environment, or if people only thought you were, you would lose reproductive opportunities and/or your life due to ostracism. So it’s reasonable to assume that we have wiring biased to treat these as high-priority long-term drivers of compensatory signaling behavior.)
Anyway, when somebody gets taught that some behavior (e.g. showing off, not working hard, forgetting things) equates to one of these morality-like judgments as a persistent quality of themselves, they often develop a compulsive need to prove otherwise, which makes them choose their goals, not based on the goal’s actual utility to themself or others, but rather based on the goal’s perceived value as a means of virtue-signalling. (Which then leads to a pattern of continually trying to achieve similar goals and either failing, or feeling as though the goal was unsatisfactory despite succeeding at it.)
Simply knowing this fact is hugely helpful in narrowing down the search space for the memories needing reconsolidation. All you have to do is look for emotionally salient instances or patterns of learning that problematic behavior X equated to judgment flavor Y. If you’ve ever done something like Method of Levels or similarly undirected “theories of everything”, you’ll know you can wander through somebody’s conscious understanding of the problem for ages without getting anywhere or even being sure you are getting somewhere.
In contrast, if somebody tells me that they’ve been pursuing X goal for years and keep failing at it, or even when they do achieve it, it feels awful, or if they have impostor syndrome, I can go after it immediately by looking at what virtue they’re trying to signal (or flipping it and asking what bad judgment they would have of themselves if they had to give up on the goal or it were impossible for them), and then we’re off to the races of tracking down examples of where they learned that judgment from, the various implicit learnings that went with it, and the underlying social values and assumptions they absorbed in the process.
Along the way, this also helps pinpoint self-destructive and self-undermining behavior and self-talk (and gets rid of them), without having to first dig around in someone’s self-talk to get at the beliefs. (Which is a big win, because people are rarely aware of the ways they treat themselves badly, and often think they are helping or “motivating” themselves by being pessimistic or self-critical or having overly high expectations. So if you ask people what they think is their problem, they will often insist they need more of precisely the thing that is causing the problem in the first place!)
What I found interesting about this article was that it highlights why I’ve needed to pinpoint which “flavor” of low self-esteem was involved in a memory in order to fix the relevant behavior or belief: without that key piece of information, you can’t generate a correct contradiction for it!
In my early use and development of the implicit beliefs framework (SAMMSA) that I now use this grid in, I was just asking the client what positive quality the other person in the memory thought the client lacked, and then helping them discover how they in fact possessed that quality at the time. But this process was still a bit hit or miss until I worked out that there were really only those three kinds or flavors of quality, regardless of how the thing was named or presented, which made things easier because I could point to the three things and ask “which of these is it more like?”
Sometimes people hesitate a bit, and think it’s between two of them, and we might have to try it both ways in such a case. But that’s still a lot faster than wandering around with no idea where to start or if you’re getting anywhere. Discovering the three “EPIC failures of trust” (flavors of moral judgment) made the process reliable because it adds a well-formedness condition that can be checked before completing the technique, thus allowing earlier error correction and early trimming of dead-ends from the search tree, so to speak.
And now, thanks to this article, I have a better understanding of why this was needed, in a higher-order sense, which might lead to the development of new techniques, or at least a filter for better understanding or improving other techniques that appear to work via memory reconsolidation.
It’s a bit like the Interdict of Merlin in HPMOR: successful techniques can only be passed from one living mind to another, or independently discovered. You can write down your notes and share the story of your discovery, and then people either discover it again for themselves, learn it from interacting with someone who knows, or go through the motions and cargo-cult it.
Yeah, “Interdict of Merlin” has been a helpful (to me) handle on why a lot of rationality technique sharing is hard.
The hard part of implementing this isn’t the reconsolidation part. That part is like 10-20 minutes, especially with practice. The hard part is identifying the things that need to be reconsolidated in the first place, and because that is basically a debugging process, it can take a fair amount more time.
I’ve seen a lot of “one theory fits all” therapeutic methods in the past (like Method Of Levels), but in practice for the type of work I do with people, none of them are very good at quickly identifying things because they’re too good at describing everything, and the brain isn’t just one thing.
So now I work with what I call “search grids”—common patterns of bugs that I can go through and check, is it this? is it that? is it more like X or Y? -- and it saves boatloads of time.
(To be fair, though, I work with only a select audience with selected problems, so it’s quite possible that the applicability of my grids isn’t that good outside that audience, even though I think I’ve a fair shot at an evolutionary justification for drawing the lines on my grids where they are.)
Still, I can’t even imagine trying to really solve somebody’s problems in an hour a week, unless they were already trained and had been coached through the methods once or thrice. And if they’re at that point, I ’d work with them via email anyway. The only part of these processes that actually requires real-time interaction is getting people over what I call their “meta-issue”—the schema they have that gets in the way of being able to reflect on their issues.
For example, I’ve had clients who had what you might call a “be a good student” schema that keeps them from accurately reporting their emotions, responses, or progress in applying a reconsolidation technique. Others who would deflect and deny ever having any negative experiences or even any problems, despite having just asked me for help with same. These kinds of meta-issues are the hardest and most time-consuming part of getting someone ready to change.
Ten or twelve years ago when I thought I’d unlocked the secrets of the universe and that memory reconsolidation was going to change everything and everyone, I didn’t realize yet that hard part 1 (needing to identify the things to change) and hard part 2 (needing to get past meta issues), meant that it is impossible to mass-produce change techniques.
That is, you can’t write a single document, record a single video, etc. that will convey to all its consumers what they need in order to actually implement effective change.
I don’t mean that you can’t successfully communicate the ideas or the steps. I just mean that implementing those steps is not a simple matter of following procedure, because of the aforementioned Hard Parts. It’s like expecting someone to learn to bike, drive, or debug programs from a manual.
This doesn’t mean it’s impossible for someone to teach themselves from such material, but it’s not trivial, and my dreams of revolutionizing personal development by mass-producing books or workshops died an ignoble death almost a decade ago. (Incidentally, this limtation is also why for almost any given school of therapy, you will find that people who advertise doing therapy in that school, aren’t always capable of doing more than giving it lip service or cargo cultery.)
It’s a bit like the Interdict of Merlin in HPMOR: successful techniques can only be passed from one living mind to another, or independently discovered. You can write down your notes and share the story of your discovery, and then people either discover it again for themselves, learn it from interacting with someone who knows, or go through the motions and cargo-cult it.
Oof, yeah, this resonates a lot with experiences I’ve been having with myself and others the last few months, since coming out of a workshop on the bio-emotive framework. There are towers of meta-issues, meta-issues that prevent themselves from being looked at… what a mess.
In retrospect this illuminates something for me about the CFAR workshop and its techniques—a pattern I ran into for years was that I gradually became averse to every single CFAR technique I tried, so I never used them on my own, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think—and this is deeply ironic—that the CFAR techniques as a whole never went meta enough to catch “meta-issues,” not in any really systematic way.
There is no level of meta systemization that can overrule a person’s meta issues, because their meta issues are always “one level higher than you”. ;-) To put it more precisely, no passive information-passing process can bypass a person’s meta issues, any more than you can turn a shredder into a fax machine by feeding it a copier manual. The incoming information gets processed through an existing filter that deletes any information that doesn’t fit the paradigm, or mangles the information until it does fit.
As I was joking above, self-help really is governed by the Interdict of Merlin: you can discover powerful “spells”, or you can pass them mind-to-mind, but you can’t learn them from a book, except insofar as the book might give you enough clues to rediscover the spell for yourself.
Actually, meta-issues don’t have meta-levels, they only simulate recursion via iteration. A meta-issue might be something like, “when you are learning something from a teacher, then try to suck up by being super-successful really fast”. This is only one meta-level, and while it can look recursive in effect, it’s just an illusion.
Let’s say I tell the person with this meta-issue they need to inquire about some emotional state. If we’re at a part of the process where there’s a possibility for them to have succeeded in fixing the problem we’re working on, they will under-report issues and problems (like a lingering negative feeling) or describe hyper-optimistic scenarios that don’t match what they’re really feeling.
Then, if I point this out, they may now apply the pattern again, by trying to prove even harder that they’ve already learned what I’m telling them, even though they haven’t.
(This isn’t really recursion or a new meta-level, it’s just the same pattern being applied to a new stimulus or situation that only incidentally happens to be at a different meta-level, if that makes sense.)
So the only escape from this iterated pseudo-recursion is for them to catch themselves in the act of this automatic response, which requires either a lot of iteration (like it did for me when I was learning my own meta-issues), or an outside party who can spot it and say, “stop that! you’re doing it again...” until the person can recognize themselves doing it.
By the way, I believe this to be related to the kind of thing that Valentine was trying to point at in the Kensho post:
And later in this comment:
… with the particular difference that he was pointing to a case where the meta-issue involves one’s basic ontology, and where (if I interpret him correctly) he thinks that most people have that meta-issue by default.
Yep, that’s it exactly. I metaphorically yank people’s heads up from their phones for pay. ;-)
Actually, it’s more like I keep sticking my hand in front of the phone until they learn to notice the difference and look up themselves. Fortunately, this doesn’t take too long for most people, but how fast it goes depends on how good they are at fooling me into thinking they’re actually looking up when they’re really still looking at the phone.
The easiest way to detect “looking at the phone” is to ask someone a yes or no or question, and see how long of an answer you get. If somebody starts talking about the past or future, they’re not actually paying attention to their inner experience, because inner experience is always present tense. e.g. “I see my mom yelling at me” is an experience, while “my mom used to yell at me” is a commentary on experience. Causal chains (x happened because y) are also commentary, as are generalizations.
(Incidentally, this is another reason I dislike IFS’ model: it encourages adding commentary like “a part of me X” instead of just saying “X”, which makes it more difficult to know if what you’re hearing is describing experience, or commentary/abstraction on experience.)
I imagine it would be possible to create a training program for people to recognize these verbal patterns and to then verify their own spoken or written statements using them, but it would be harder to get people to go through such a program vs. paying me to help fix a problem of theirs, and learning it by doing it along the way.
This is a really really good paragraph. You can also watch eyes more closely for the defocus moment. Hypnotists use this one.
Korzybski’s failed ambition. Also similar to the early (good, prior to cult) work of the NLP people on their ‘meta-model’ of map-territory confusions.
hard part 1 (needing to identify the things to change) and hard part 2 (needing to get past meta issues).
Yes, all the people who are really good at this stuff have really finely honed reflexes related to: Sniffing out common issues and, immediately going meta when they encounter resistance. I do think this can be more systematized (have you shared your grids anywhere?) but don’t think people can always be debugged quickly.
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with NLP meta patterns, but this is how they were originally developed.
My search grids don’t look much like anything from NLP, least of all metaprograms. Instead, they’re patterns of common bugs in the brain that I believe are evolutionarily defined, and likely to be universal.
For example, working with people on self-image problems, I’ve found that there appear to be only three critical “flavors” of self-judgment that create life-long low self-esteem in some area, and associated compulsive or avoidant behaviors:
Belief that one is bad, defective, or malicious (i.e. lacking in care/altruism for friends or family)
Belief that one is foolish, incapable, incompetent, unworthy, etc. (i.e. lacking in ability to learn/improve/perform)
Belief that one is selfish, irresponsible, careless, etc. (i.e. not respecting what the family or community values or believes important)
(Notice that these are things that, if you were bad enough at them in the ancestral environment, or if people only thought you were, you would lose reproductive opportunities and/or your life due to ostracism. So it’s reasonable to assume that we have wiring biased to treat these as high-priority long-term drivers of compensatory signaling behavior.)
Anyway, when somebody gets taught that some behavior (e.g. showing off, not working hard, forgetting things) equates to one of these morality-like judgments as a persistent quality of themselves, they often develop a compulsive need to prove otherwise, which makes them choose their goals, not based on the goal’s actual utility to themself or others, but rather based on the goal’s perceived value as a means of virtue-signalling. (Which then leads to a pattern of continually trying to achieve similar goals and either failing, or feeling as though the goal was unsatisfactory despite succeeding at it.)
Simply knowing this fact is hugely helpful in narrowing down the search space for the memories needing reconsolidation. All you have to do is look for emotionally salient instances or patterns of learning that problematic behavior X equated to judgment flavor Y. If you’ve ever done something like Method of Levels or similarly undirected “theories of everything”, you’ll know you can wander through somebody’s conscious understanding of the problem for ages without getting anywhere or even being sure you are getting somewhere.
In contrast, if somebody tells me that they’ve been pursuing X goal for years and keep failing at it, or even when they do achieve it, it feels awful, or if they have impostor syndrome, I can go after it immediately by looking at what virtue they’re trying to signal (or flipping it and asking what bad judgment they would have of themselves if they had to give up on the goal or it were impossible for them), and then we’re off to the races of tracking down examples of where they learned that judgment from, the various implicit learnings that went with it, and the underlying social values and assumptions they absorbed in the process.
Along the way, this also helps pinpoint self-destructive and self-undermining behavior and self-talk (and gets rid of them), without having to first dig around in someone’s self-talk to get at the beliefs. (Which is a big win, because people are rarely aware of the ways they treat themselves badly, and often think they are helping or “motivating” themselves by being pessimistic or self-critical or having overly high expectations. So if you ask people what they think is their problem, they will often insist they need more of precisely the thing that is causing the problem in the first place!)
What I found interesting about this article was that it highlights why I’ve needed to pinpoint which “flavor” of low self-esteem was involved in a memory in order to fix the relevant behavior or belief: without that key piece of information, you can’t generate a correct contradiction for it!
In my early use and development of the implicit beliefs framework (SAMMSA) that I now use this grid in, I was just asking the client what positive quality the other person in the memory thought the client lacked, and then helping them discover how they in fact possessed that quality at the time. But this process was still a bit hit or miss until I worked out that there were really only those three kinds or flavors of quality, regardless of how the thing was named or presented, which made things easier because I could point to the three things and ask “which of these is it more like?”
Sometimes people hesitate a bit, and think it’s between two of them, and we might have to try it both ways in such a case. But that’s still a lot faster than wandering around with no idea where to start or if you’re getting anywhere. Discovering the three “EPIC failures of trust” (flavors of moral judgment) made the process reliable because it adds a well-formedness condition that can be checked before completing the technique, thus allowing earlier error correction and early trimming of dead-ends from the search tree, so to speak.
And now, thanks to this article, I have a better understanding of why this was needed, in a higher-order sense, which might lead to the development of new techniques, or at least a filter for better understanding or improving other techniques that appear to work via memory reconsolidation.
Yeah, “Interdict of Merlin” has been a helpful (to me) handle on why a lot of rationality technique sharing is hard.