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.
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.