This isn’t a criticism of this post or of Vaniver, but more a comment on Circling in general prompted by it. This example struck me in particular:
Orient towards your impressions and emotions and stories as being yours, instead of about the external world. “I feel alone” instead of “you betrayed me.”
It strikes me as very disturbing that this should be the example that comes to mind. It seems clear to me that one should not, under any circumstances engage in a group therapy exercise designed to lower your emotional barriers and create vulnerability in the presence of anyone you trust less than 100%, let alone someone you think has ‘betrayed’ you. This seems like a great way to get manipulated, taken advantage of by sexual abusers, gaslighted etc, which is a particular concern given the multiple allegations of abuse and sexual misconduct in the EA/Circling communities (1, 2, ChristianKl’s comment). Reframing these behaviours as personal emotions and stories seems like it would further contribute to the potential for such abuse.
It seems clear to me that one should not, under any circumstances engage in a group therapy exercise designed to lower your emotional barriers and create vulnerability in the presence of anyone you trust less than 100%
I agree with this almost completely. Two quibbles: first, styles of Circling vary in how much they are a “group therapy exercise” (vs. something more like a shared exploration or meditation), and I think “100%” trust of people is an unreasonable bar; like, I don’t think you should extend that level of trust to anyone, even yourself. So there’s actual meat in the question of “what’s it like to Circle with someone that you 90% trust? Should you do that?”.
Also I think the ideal of Circling agrees with this underlying sentiment, in that the goal is not to lower emotional barriers but to understand them. It may be that as part of understanding them, they get lowered, or they might be maintained or raised. I’ve been in many Circles where the content of the Circle was “huh, it seems like we don’t trust each other enough to be open / handle deep topic X. What’s that like?”.
One of the things that I worry about some with Circling and rationalists is something like… the uncanny valley of noticing emotional responses while not trusting them, or something? Like I’m reminded of this comment by jimmy:
You have to be careful when dismissing subconscious fears as irrational. They were put there for a reason, and they may still be relevant. If I was staying in a “haunted house” in a city where it was not isolated or abandoned or anything, I don’t think it’d scare me one bit. A secluded/abandoned haunted house might be scary, and for good reasons. It would be unwise to assume that your fear is entirely irrational.
I went to a local park with some friends one night to hang out. Both I and another friend were uneasy about it, but dismissed our fears as irrational (and didn’t mention it). We both figured that we didn’t have any reason to think that something bad was gonna happen in the sense that you can’t predict the future through “ESP”, but it didn’t occur to us that “you’re scared because that isn’t a safe place to be at night you dolt!”
Turns out some guys showed up and tried to stab us, nearly succeeding. I learned the “almost hard” way not to disregard fears right off the bat.
If I thought Circling would on average make people more exploitable or worse at defending themselves / avoiding bad outcomes, I wouldn’t recommend it. I’m less clear about what to do when there’s a valley you need to cross, which I think is true for theory and rationality as well, and my rough guess is “the only way out is through.”
I’m less clear about what to do when there’s a valley you need to cross, which I think is true for theory and rationality as well, and my rough guess is “the only way out is through.”
I’d add: “in theory, and rationality, and physical exercise, and… whatever’s going on in Circling*, it’d be nice if it were possible to safely gain a bunch of relevant skills without exposing yourself to danger. But it’s not, and meanwhile, you’re already in danger.”
(I endorse making this claim for something like Circling, but I admit that my exact model is still pretty fuzzy. Introspection, extrospection, authenticity, emotional self-regulation, maintaining safeguards and other things all seem like part of the cluster of skills that Circling seems to be training)
I don’t think on average Circling makes one more exploitable, but I expect it increases variance, making some people significantly more exploitable than they were before because previously invisible boundaries are now visible, and can thus be attacked (by others but more often by a different part of the same person).
And yeah it does seem similar to the valley of bad rationality; the valley of bad circling, where when you’re in the valley you’re focusing on a naive form of connection without discernment of the boundaries.
I don’t think the principle of orienting towards your own impression/emotions/stories is about reducing emotional barriers. Nonviolent communication is perfectly capable of expressing boundaries.
There might be some situations where a person lacks the skill to express boundaries in a nonviolent way and then loses some protection when they are put into a context where they are expected to communicate nonviolently but if there’s a good Circling facilitator that facilitator’s role is to help the person to actually express their boundaries.
The problem is when a powerful person uses authenticity or NVC in a way where they express their own desires without accounting for the interests of the less powerful person in an exchange.
From what I read about the allegations towards Brent, him openly expressing his desires in cases where he was powerful and pushing his desires as being important for others to fulfill is one way how this plays out.
One feature of the SAS seminars of Circling Europe is for example that there’s are no confidentiality agreements because they see such an agreement as creating a should that prevents people from authentically expressing themselves.
At the same time I find confidentiality agreements important to protected vulnerable/low power people who share information in circles and I do make confidentiality agreements when I lead circles.
Whenever one has a lot of power in a social situation it’s necessary to do more then just follow one’s own desires to avoid slipping into patterns that are abusive of other people.
The principle of trusting that you only have to be authentic and can then trust that the universe will see that nobody comes to harm is dangerous.
I think you are missing nshepperd’s point. The rules described in the original post are classic techniques for cult brainwashing. The reframing of personal attacks to be reflections of personal failures of the victim primes them for radical reformation of their internal beliefs, and makes them extremely impressionable.
Used by professionals this can be an extremely powerful therapeutic tool used for good. But I have to agree that it seems like a very bad idea to do this with a bunch of randos you met on the Internet. Besides opening yourself up to brainwashing, it is also a situation ripe for abuse.
The quote doesn’t say that there’s a personal failing. “I feel alone” isn’t a statement of something being a failure. It’s just a statement about the current emotional state. It’s about authentically expressing what’s there currently without judgement.
Circling Europe does provide professional training. Vaniver and others do have professional certification from Circling Europe. I personally do have other relevant professional training in a framework called perceptive pedagogy.
There’s a discussion about how much professional training someone should have before you go to a circle that they lead but that’s a different discussion from that of Circling as practiced according to the values of Circling Europe.
“I feel alone” isn’t a statement of something being a failure. It’s just a statement about the current emotional state.
Perhaps this is a tangent to the discussion, but “I feel alone” is not a statement about an emotional state. It is a confused statement that on the surface appears to be about emotions (“I feel...”) but the thing that follows those first two words is not an emotion, but a claim about the world: “(I am) alone.”
“I feel sad” is a description of an emotional state. “I feel sad about...” or “I feel sad that..” are descriptions of emotional states, together with, but separate from, a statement of a belief about the world. “I feel alone” and similar phrases, such as the general pattern “I feel that...”, confuse feelings with beliefs.
Every statement of the form “I feel that...” is false, because what follows the “that” is a belief about the world, not a feeling. Acknowledging it as a belief makes it possible to consider “Is this belief true? Why do I believe it is true?” Miscalling it a feeling protects it from testing against reality: “How can you question my FEELINGS?”
This seems like a promising starting point to explore what’s going on, from my perspective.
the thing that follows those first two words is not an emotion, but a claim about the world: “(I am) alone.”
As it happens, I’m currently typing this comment in a room that I’m in by myself. But there’s a specific bodily / emotional sensation that I’m not feeling at present, which I was feeling the last time I said “I feel alone” to someone, despite being in a room with multiple people then.
It’s also the case that I can feel my chair pressing into my body, and the top of the desktop pressing into my leg where I’m awkwardly resting it, and some tension in my arms because they had to stretch to my distant keyboard. (Don’t worry, I’ve since moved closer to it.)
One thing that’s true of my experience (which I expect to be true of the experience of, like, somewhere around 80% of people?) is that I will sometimes get sensations that are connected to ‘beliefs’ as part of my sensorium. That is, they’re more like the haptic sensations corresponding to sitting than they are like my internal monologue or other things that I traditionally think of as “beliefs”. Sometimes this is an embodied sensation, like “it would be inappropriate for me to say something here” might manifest as a tightness of the throat, but sometimes it isn’t.
[Staying with the level of sensation helps build this mapping and keep things ‘accurate’; if I feel a tightness in the throat and I don’t know what belief about the world it corresponds to yet, it’s probably better for me to share the sensation than it is to share my guess of what I’m reacting to about the world.]
Speculation time: sometimes I think embodied emotions are straightforwardly phyisiological; like I get angry and feel it in my arms because my SNS is actually making my arms behave differently. Other times I think what’s happening is something like the proprioceptive sense, but for ‘important concepts’, like relationships / what other people are thinking / how particular fields of math or science work.
Like, imagine we’re drifting on rafts on a body of water; I could see us moving away from each other and call that out to you, and you could presumably also see the same thing. Or there could be the two of us having a conversation, and I could have a sensation that seems basically the same, except it’s metaphorical; “I’m feeling us moving apart” in the weird part of my world-model that’s using a spatial analogy for stances we’re taking towards each other or beliefs we have about each other or whatever. Sharing that seems potentially more useful here, because we might be tracking movement through different ‘metaphorical oceans’.
Acknowledging it as a belief makes it possible to consider “Is this belief true? Why do I believe it is true?” Miscalling it a feeling protects it from testing against reality: “How can you question my FEELINGS?”
One ‘fun game’ you can play with friends is to have person A turn away from person B, who then lightly touches the back of person A, with a randomly chosen number of fingers, and then person A has to guess how many fingers they’re being touched with. (Generally, people do ‘okay’ at this, which is much less well than they expect to be able to do.) Or you can do the cutaneous rabbit effect.
Much less fun to do a demonstration of, and so I recommend just reading about it, are edge cases of pain sensation, like when a man felt intense pain due a nail passing through his boot, despite it missing his foot.
That is, if you view feelings as sense data like any other, it makes sense to apply the same sorts of consistency checks that you would to normal sense data. Like, if you live in a world where your eyes can be fooled, and your feeling of how many points are touching your back can be imprecise, presumably you should have similar sorts of suspicion towards your feeling that your housemate isn’t doing their fair share of the chores.
According to me, the way you fix things like optical illusions is not by closing your eyes, but instead by developing a more precise model of how exactly your vision works.
In the NVC model “I feel alone” would be a “mental emotion” and I agree that there are many cases that distinction is useful.
In the Circling context in which I have been you wouldn’t correct a person into making that distinction but accept “I feel alone” as an authentic expression. The fact that Vaniver uses feel here suggests that the Circling Europe training also didn’t enforce that distinction strongly.
In radical honesty a person saying “I feel betrayed” would be asked to say “I’m angry at you, because X happened and I imagine it means you betrayed me”. The person is often asked to say it multiple times till they connect with the anger.
“I feel alone” and similar phrases, such as the general pattern “I feel that...”, confuse feelings with beliefs.
I think this is complicated by the fact that there is, in fact, a distinct qualia of feeling that (at least I get) when alone, and it’s sort of like “I believe I am alone, and am sad about that”, but it’s a different flavor of sadness than, like, sad that my friend died, or that I didn’t get a job I was excited about.”
(I think “I feel betrayed” similarly conveys a particular flavor of feeling, and I’m somewhat wary of tabooing it for people who are trying to figure out what they feel and what they want to do about it. But it also seems important that “there is a separate fact-of-the-matter of ‘did Bob betray Alice?’ and ‘is Alice experiencing something that has that-distinct-flavor-of-emotion that ‘betrayed’ connotes’?”, and that the conversation will probably go better for Alice is she is attending to this fact)
Is this not handled by the word ‘lonely’? ‘Alone’ and ‘lonely’ are different, after all. “I feel lonely” seems to be the usual way to convey what you’re describing.
It seems more grammatical to say “lonely,” but I notice the two words have different feels to me, and it could be the case that “alone” fits more than “lonely” does, tho the difference between them is subtle.
Indeed; “I feel alone” has different connotations than “I feel lonely”. Namely:
“I feel lonely” simply connotes “I have a certain mental/emotional state”.
“I feel alone” connotes “I feel lonely; also, I believe that I am alone (and that the latter is the cause of the former), but I don’t want to claim this outright—I prefer only to imply it, in a way that prevents anyone from asking whether that belief is true”.
I think I’ve felt distinct things that corresponded to:
“I feel less companionship than I did a moment ago”
“I feel the absence of companionship”
“I think I would be happier if I had more companionship.”
Now, which one of those is “I feel alone” and which one is “I feel lonely”? Probably not obvious, and maybe I’d even refer to them using the same short phrase each time. But it seems useful to try to feel and convey those sorts of distinctions using word choice, as well as more words.
Perhaps. I am skeptical that these feelings can be distinguished in the way you say; how would you, for instance, differentiate between “I feel the absence of companionship” from “I feel lonely, and I think this is due to absence of companionship”—in other words, what you conceptualize as an affective state, could also be conceptualized as the combination of an affective state with a cognitive one, yes? But this is speculative; I do not insist on it (only on the fact that the answers to questions like this are not at all clear).
More to the point, however, is that supposing that the distinctions you describe are as they say they are, it nonetheless seems like quite a poor idea to refer to them using the same word that we also use to refer to an entirely external fact. The confusions that such terminological conflation leads to are obvious (and described, in part, in this comment thread), and can lead us into all sorts of error.
how would you, for instance, differentiate between “I feel the absence of companionship” from “I feel lonely, and I think this is due to absence of companionship”
For me personally, the first one is like seeing the words “absence of companionship” in my mind’s eye, and the second one is like feeling a tugging at my navel, trying to label it with “absence of companionship”, and getting only partial resonance. Like, I’m not confident yet, and so it seems like there’s still more info there that I should search for; maybe it’s romantic companionship, maybe it’s having a regular D&D group again, maybe it’s something else.
in other words, what you conceptualize as an affective state, could also be conceptualized as the combination of an affective state with a cognitive one, yes?
Yes, altho I don’t think I’d categorize ‘states’ that way. (Like, all mental states are ‘cognitive’ in some sense, and the standard definition of ‘affective’ seems very broad; like, I see a cat on the street and I feel valence and motivational intensity.)
it nonetheless seems like quite a poor idea to refer to them using the same word that we also use to refer to an entirely external fact.
I mean, it sure is nice to use two syllables instead of more than a dozen! When typing you really don’t have a good option besides using more words to achieve more precision, but when physically embodied subtext can be quite rich. (Like, compare describing a ‘spiral staircase’ with text, or with your voice and hands.)
This is an excellent, and very underappreciated, point.
Just to provide some terminology—the relevant term/concept is propositional attitude (Wikipedia page, SEP page). The error that Richard describes is that of mistakenly believing that ‘feel’ may coherently be understood as a propositional attitude (and that “I feel that …” may coherently be understood as a propositional attitude report), that is somehow different from ‘believe’ (and reports of beliefs). But of course this isn’t the case.
I’m sorry but the type of certifications done by an organization like Circling Europe is insufficient. I’m not sure if circling is intrinsically even a good idea given that it necessarily involves participation of multiple other non-professionals. But even setting that aside, I would assume a level of training and oversight comparable to the psychotherapy field would be necessary before I’d feel comfortable with this at all.
I don’t think there’s good evidence that the field of psychotherapy knows how to teach skills effectively in a superior way. Neither academic literature nor personal experience with people trained in that form suggest that it’s particularly effective.
As far as the research goes alliance and empathy seem to matter much more then the kinds of things that are taught in psychotherapy training.
On the other hand, I do think that the training that Circling Europe does succeeds at building some empathy with their training.
I see that lack of an ethical codex / oversight is an actual problem. I’m not sure how effective psychiatric oversight happens to be in practice. The group setting does have advantages over 1-on-1 setting as far as having people check the work of other people.
This isn’t a criticism of this post or of Vaniver, but more a comment on Circling in general prompted by it. This example struck me in particular:
It strikes me as very disturbing that this should be the example that comes to mind. It seems clear to me that one should not, under any circumstances engage in a group therapy exercise designed to lower your emotional barriers and create vulnerability in the presence of anyone you trust less than 100%, let alone someone you think has ‘betrayed’ you. This seems like a great way to get manipulated, taken advantage of by sexual abusers, gaslighted etc, which is a particular concern given the multiple allegations of abuse and sexual misconduct in the EA/Circling communities (1, 2, ChristianKl’s comment). Reframing these behaviours as personal emotions and stories seems like it would further contribute to the potential for such abuse.
I agree with this almost completely. Two quibbles: first, styles of Circling vary in how much they are a “group therapy exercise” (vs. something more like a shared exploration or meditation), and I think “100%” trust of people is an unreasonable bar; like, I don’t think you should extend that level of trust to anyone, even yourself. So there’s actual meat in the question of “what’s it like to Circle with someone that you 90% trust? Should you do that?”.
Also I think the ideal of Circling agrees with this underlying sentiment, in that the goal is not to lower emotional barriers but to understand them. It may be that as part of understanding them, they get lowered, or they might be maintained or raised. I’ve been in many Circles where the content of the Circle was “huh, it seems like we don’t trust each other enough to be open / handle deep topic X. What’s that like?”.
One of the things that I worry about some with Circling and rationalists is something like… the uncanny valley of noticing emotional responses while not trusting them, or something? Like I’m reminded of this comment by jimmy:
If I thought Circling would on average make people more exploitable or worse at defending themselves / avoiding bad outcomes, I wouldn’t recommend it. I’m less clear about what to do when there’s a valley you need to cross, which I think is true for theory and rationality as well, and my rough guess is “the only way out is through.”
I’d add: “in theory, and rationality, and physical exercise, and… whatever’s going on in Circling*, it’d be nice if it were possible to safely gain a bunch of relevant skills without exposing yourself to danger. But it’s not, and meanwhile, you’re already in danger.”
(I endorse making this claim for something like Circling, but I admit that my exact model is still pretty fuzzy. Introspection, extrospection, authenticity, emotional self-regulation, maintaining safeguards and other things all seem like part of the cluster of skills that Circling seems to be training)
Note that I previously wrote up a lot of my concerns and thoughts-on-tradeoffs over on Unreal’s Circling post.
I expect understanding something more explicitly—such as yours and another persons boundaries—w/o some type of underlying concept of acceptance of that boundary can increase exploitability. I recently wrote a shortform post on the topic of legibility that describes some patterns I’ve noticed here.
I don’t think on average Circling makes one more exploitable, but I expect it increases variance, making some people significantly more exploitable than they were before because previously invisible boundaries are now visible, and can thus be attacked (by others but more often by a different part of the same person).
And yeah it does seem similar to the valley of bad rationality; the valley of bad circling, where when you’re in the valley you’re focusing on a naive form of connection without discernment of the boundaries.
I don’t think the principle of orienting towards your own impression/emotions/stories is about reducing emotional barriers. Nonviolent communication is perfectly capable of expressing boundaries.
There might be some situations where a person lacks the skill to express boundaries in a nonviolent way and then loses some protection when they are put into a context where they are expected to communicate nonviolently but if there’s a good Circling facilitator that facilitator’s role is to help the person to actually express their boundaries.
The problem is when a powerful person uses authenticity or NVC in a way where they express their own desires without accounting for the interests of the less powerful person in an exchange.
From what I read about the allegations towards Brent, him openly expressing his desires in cases where he was powerful and pushing his desires as being important for others to fulfill is one way how this plays out.
One feature of the SAS seminars of Circling Europe is for example that there’s are no confidentiality agreements because they see such an agreement as creating a should that prevents people from authentically expressing themselves.
At the same time I find confidentiality agreements important to protected vulnerable/low power people who share information in circles and I do make confidentiality agreements when I lead circles.
Whenever one has a lot of power in a social situation it’s necessary to do more then just follow one’s own desires to avoid slipping into patterns that are abusive of other people.
The principle of trusting that you only have to be authentic and can then trust that the universe will see that nobody comes to harm is dangerous.
I think you are missing nshepperd’s point. The rules described in the original post are classic techniques for cult brainwashing. The reframing of personal attacks to be reflections of personal failures of the victim primes them for radical reformation of their internal beliefs, and makes them extremely impressionable.
Used by professionals this can be an extremely powerful therapeutic tool used for good. But I have to agree that it seems like a very bad idea to do this with a bunch of randos you met on the Internet. Besides opening yourself up to brainwashing, it is also a situation ripe for abuse.
The quote doesn’t say that there’s a personal failing. “I feel alone” isn’t a statement of something being a failure. It’s just a statement about the current emotional state. It’s about authentically expressing what’s there currently without judgement.
Circling Europe does provide professional training. Vaniver and others do have professional certification from Circling Europe. I personally do have other relevant professional training in a framework called perceptive pedagogy.
There’s a discussion about how much professional training someone should have before you go to a circle that they lead but that’s a different discussion from that of Circling as practiced according to the values of Circling Europe.
Perhaps this is a tangent to the discussion, but “I feel alone” is not a statement about an emotional state. It is a confused statement that on the surface appears to be about emotions (“I feel...”) but the thing that follows those first two words is not an emotion, but a claim about the world: “(I am) alone.”
“I feel sad” is a description of an emotional state. “I feel sad about...” or “I feel sad that..” are descriptions of emotional states, together with, but separate from, a statement of a belief about the world. “I feel alone” and similar phrases, such as the general pattern “I feel that...”, confuse feelings with beliefs.
Every statement of the form “I feel that...” is false, because what follows the “that” is a belief about the world, not a feeling. Acknowledging it as a belief makes it possible to consider “Is this belief true? Why do I believe it is true?” Miscalling it a feeling protects it from testing against reality: “How can you question my FEELINGS?”
This seems like a promising starting point to explore what’s going on, from my perspective.
As it happens, I’m currently typing this comment in a room that I’m in by myself. But there’s a specific bodily / emotional sensation that I’m not feeling at present, which I was feeling the last time I said “I feel alone” to someone, despite being in a room with multiple people then.
It’s also the case that I can feel my chair pressing into my body, and the top of the desktop pressing into my leg where I’m awkwardly resting it, and some tension in my arms because they had to stretch to my distant keyboard. (Don’t worry, I’ve since moved closer to it.)
One thing that’s true of my experience (which I expect to be true of the experience of, like, somewhere around 80% of people?) is that I will sometimes get sensations that are connected to ‘beliefs’ as part of my sensorium. That is, they’re more like the haptic sensations corresponding to sitting than they are like my internal monologue or other things that I traditionally think of as “beliefs”. Sometimes this is an embodied sensation, like “it would be inappropriate for me to say something here” might manifest as a tightness of the throat, but sometimes it isn’t.
[Staying with the level of sensation helps build this mapping and keep things ‘accurate’; if I feel a tightness in the throat and I don’t know what belief about the world it corresponds to yet, it’s probably better for me to share the sensation than it is to share my guess of what I’m reacting to about the world.]
Speculation time: sometimes I think embodied emotions are straightforwardly phyisiological; like I get angry and feel it in my arms because my SNS is actually making my arms behave differently. Other times I think what’s happening is something like the proprioceptive sense, but for ‘important concepts’, like relationships / what other people are thinking / how particular fields of math or science work.
Like, imagine we’re drifting on rafts on a body of water; I could see us moving away from each other and call that out to you, and you could presumably also see the same thing. Or there could be the two of us having a conversation, and I could have a sensation that seems basically the same, except it’s metaphorical; “I’m feeling us moving apart” in the weird part of my world-model that’s using a spatial analogy for stances we’re taking towards each other or beliefs we have about each other or whatever. Sharing that seems potentially more useful here, because we might be tracking movement through different ‘metaphorical oceans’.
One ‘fun game’ you can play with friends is to have person A turn away from person B, who then lightly touches the back of person A, with a randomly chosen number of fingers, and then person A has to guess how many fingers they’re being touched with. (Generally, people do ‘okay’ at this, which is much less well than they expect to be able to do.) Or you can do the cutaneous rabbit effect.
Much less fun to do a demonstration of, and so I recommend just reading about it, are edge cases of pain sensation, like when a man felt intense pain due a nail passing through his boot, despite it missing his foot.
That is, if you view feelings as sense data like any other, it makes sense to apply the same sorts of consistency checks that you would to normal sense data. Like, if you live in a world where your eyes can be fooled, and your feeling of how many points are touching your back can be imprecise, presumably you should have similar sorts of suspicion towards your feeling that your housemate isn’t doing their fair share of the chores.
According to me, the way you fix things like optical illusions is not by closing your eyes, but instead by developing a more precise model of how exactly your vision works.
In the NVC model “I feel alone” would be a “mental emotion” and I agree that there are many cases that distinction is useful.
In the Circling context in which I have been you wouldn’t correct a person into making that distinction but accept “I feel alone” as an authentic expression. The fact that Vaniver uses feel here suggests that the Circling Europe training also didn’t enforce that distinction strongly.
In radical honesty a person saying “I feel betrayed” would be asked to say “I’m angry at you, because X happened and I imagine it means you betrayed me”. The person is often asked to say it multiple times till they connect with the anger.
I think this is complicated by the fact that there is, in fact, a distinct qualia of feeling that (at least I get) when alone, and it’s sort of like “I believe I am alone, and am sad about that”, but it’s a different flavor of sadness than, like, sad that my friend died, or that I didn’t get a job I was excited about.”
(I think “I feel betrayed” similarly conveys a particular flavor of feeling, and I’m somewhat wary of tabooing it for people who are trying to figure out what they feel and what they want to do about it. But it also seems important that “there is a separate fact-of-the-matter of ‘did Bob betray Alice?’ and ‘is Alice experiencing something that has that-distinct-flavor-of-emotion that ‘betrayed’ connotes’?”, and that the conversation will probably go better for Alice is she is attending to this fact)
Is this not handled by the word ‘lonely’? ‘Alone’ and ‘lonely’ are different, after all. “I feel lonely” seems to be the usual way to convey what you’re describing.
It seems more grammatical to say “lonely,” but I notice the two words have different feels to me, and it could be the case that “alone” fits more than “lonely” does, tho the difference between them is subtle.
Indeed; “I feel alone” has different connotations than “I feel lonely”. Namely:
“I feel lonely” simply connotes “I have a certain mental/emotional state”.
“I feel alone” connotes “I feel lonely; also, I believe that I am alone (and that the latter is the cause of the former), but I don’t want to claim this outright—I prefer only to imply it, in a way that prevents anyone from asking whether that belief is true”.
I think I’ve felt distinct things that corresponded to:
“I feel less companionship than I did a moment ago”
“I feel the absence of companionship”
“I think I would be happier if I had more companionship.”
Now, which one of those is “I feel alone” and which one is “I feel lonely”? Probably not obvious, and maybe I’d even refer to them using the same short phrase each time. But it seems useful to try to feel and convey those sorts of distinctions using word choice, as well as more words.
Perhaps. I am skeptical that these feelings can be distinguished in the way you say; how would you, for instance, differentiate between “I feel the absence of companionship” from “I feel lonely, and I think this is due to absence of companionship”—in other words, what you conceptualize as an affective state, could also be conceptualized as the combination of an affective state with a cognitive one, yes? But this is speculative; I do not insist on it (only on the fact that the answers to questions like this are not at all clear).
More to the point, however, is that supposing that the distinctions you describe are as they say they are, it nonetheless seems like quite a poor idea to refer to them using the same word that we also use to refer to an entirely external fact. The confusions that such terminological conflation leads to are obvious (and described, in part, in this comment thread), and can lead us into all sorts of error.
For me personally, the first one is like seeing the words “absence of companionship” in my mind’s eye, and the second one is like feeling a tugging at my navel, trying to label it with “absence of companionship”, and getting only partial resonance. Like, I’m not confident yet, and so it seems like there’s still more info there that I should search for; maybe it’s romantic companionship, maybe it’s having a regular D&D group again, maybe it’s something else.
Yes, altho I don’t think I’d categorize ‘states’ that way. (Like, all mental states are ‘cognitive’ in some sense, and the standard definition of ‘affective’ seems very broad; like, I see a cat on the street and I feel valence and motivational intensity.)
I mean, it sure is nice to use two syllables instead of more than a dozen! When typing you really don’t have a good option besides using more words to achieve more precision, but when physically embodied subtext can be quite rich. (Like, compare describing a ‘spiral staircase’ with text, or with your voice and hands.)
This is an excellent, and very underappreciated, point.
Just to provide some terminology—the relevant term/concept is propositional attitude (Wikipedia page, SEP page). The error that Richard describes is that of mistakenly believing that ‘feel’ may coherently be understood as a propositional attitude (and that “I feel that …” may coherently be understood as a propositional attitude report), that is somehow different from ‘believe’ (and reports of beliefs). But of course this isn’t the case.
I’m sorry but the type of certifications done by an organization like Circling Europe is insufficient. I’m not sure if circling is intrinsically even a good idea given that it necessarily involves participation of multiple other non-professionals. But even setting that aside, I would assume a level of training and oversight comparable to the psychotherapy field would be necessary before I’d feel comfortable with this at all.
I don’t think there’s good evidence that the field of psychotherapy knows how to teach skills effectively in a superior way. Neither academic literature nor personal experience with people trained in that form suggest that it’s particularly effective.
As far as the research goes alliance and empathy seem to matter much more then the kinds of things that are taught in psychotherapy training.
On the other hand, I do think that the training that Circling Europe does succeeds at building some empathy with their training.
I see that lack of an ethical codex / oversight is an actual problem. I’m not sure how effective psychiatric oversight happens to be in practice. The group setting does have advantages over 1-on-1 setting as far as having people check the work of other people.