Using Negative Hallucinations to Manage Sexual Desire
[Edit 2023-10-05]: Thanks to jimmy’s comments I realized that I was abusing this technique. I agree with jimmy that integrating your sexuality instead of suppressing it is better, based on my partial attempts and successes so far. This seems painfully obvious in hindsight. However, this technique works as advertised for me, and I expect I will be using it in the future. If you want to use this technique I advise you to tread lightly. It is very powerful. I was able to completely suppress sexual thoughts for at least 2 weeks in a row iirc.
[Edit]: I think I have mistitled this post. It should not contain the negative hallucination part, because it is not required at all for the technique to change your perception of your body. It’s enough to imagine a fictional scene that contains the properties named below. This really seems to trip people off.
If you often experience strong sexual desire that is distracting you from work, consider trying this:
Imagine you have no primary sexual organs. It’s just a flat piece of skin down there. Furthermore, imagine that you don’t experience any sexual arousal no matter how somebody touches you.
Also imagine the same for the object of your sexual desire (usually another person).
This does not need to be applied to positive emotions that are not sexual desire. E.g. it is fine to feel a positive emotion when you imagine hugging somebody.
In my experience doing this is super effective. It shuts down my sexual desire within seconds. I have used it many times now so I am pretty sure that it works, and I am not imagining it.
I expect this technique works well, because it only requires that you adhere to the constraints specified in the first two paragraphs. You don’t need to control what you are thinking any further. You can imagine rubbing yourself against somebody else, flat skin on flat skin. But it just feels kind of pointless and so you stop. It’s like imagining rubbing your elbow against the elbow of another person. It’s not something you are in danger of imagining too much.
I find this technique really useful for preventing myself from sexualizing people, and to not get distracted by sexual thought. I was pretty good at it before, but using this technique feels at least an order of magnitude better.
All of this, of course, breaks down once somebody touches you in an erotic way or unmistakably informs you that your primary sexual organs actually do exist. This technique is for managing sexual desire in your own mind before any physical interaction takes place.
I see techniques that work through disassociating parts of your body to be in the dark arts category. Yes, you can get some results through it but I prefer working towards inner alignment to solve problems than using disassociation.
I’m inclined to agree, at least to the point of “Be very careful, and make sure you have good monitoring to make sure you can tell if anything goes wrong.”
I spent years suppressing some of my own emotions in several ways (without really knowing/understanding what I was doing or being thoughtful about it) and ended up with a dissociative depression that has taken years and meds to get out of. Depending on the person and the method you can end up in an attractor state that is not at all like what you wanted.
I guess I must have not explained myself correctly. I am unsure which part of this technique is supposed to suppress emotions. You are not suppressing anything, instead, you make the feeling of sexual desire actually disappear. Without forcing anything.
I am pretty sure of this because I know what it feels like to suppress emotions and that seems like a very different mental motion.
Imagine you are angry because had an unpleasant interaction with a clerk. I can often dissolve, not suppress, that anger by realizing that this person might have had a bad day or even a really bad life working a terrible job they don’t enjoy. Or maybe that is just their personality, which they did not really choose themselves, and which likely means that they have probably zero friends. When I think like that I just experience empathy for that person. I fail to see what is wrong with doing this. And I don’t think the tek in the OP is different along the suppression vs. dissolving axis.
You haven’t explained anything about why the technique has the effect it has or demonstrated in any way that you have the expertise to know why it has the effect it does.
There are multiple different mental motions that can result in emotions being suppressed.
The model coming from Gendlin’s Focusing is that having a felt sense is key for dissolving emotions. If you hallucinate away the part of the body where the felt sense that corresponds to the emotion happens to be located that hampers dissolving.
Ehh. Quoting myself:
And then you said:
I used it and it worked. What else do you want me to say?
Do you want me to send you all my time tracking data from the past 3 years, and analyze the statistical correlation between masturbation and procrastination? Maybe we need to wait a bit though such that more time passes and a change becomes unambiguously visible after I started to use the technique. I think that would show it, if I am not wrong about the effectiveness.
Yes, I agree. And seems different from any of them (that I am aware of). Also, see the second paragraph here.
Again, see the second paragraph here.
I think I have mistitled this post. It should not contain the negative hallucination part, because it is not required at all for the technique. Its enough to imagine a fictional scene.
You used it and it had the effect you wanted. That in no way implies that you know why it had that effect. That seems pretty much part of epistemology 101.
Quoting myself:
This is a high-level explanation of why it works. I am not talking about it on the level of neurons or specific mental algorithms. But to me, it seems that this explanation captures a core part of why the technique works. You can just perform the experiment and imagine this, then you will see that it works. It is not a hard experiment to perform.
I don’t feel like that explains very much. It doesn’t feel like the kind of model that can tell you what side effects the intervention has.
I see, I agree. I guess we had different ideas about what constitutes an explanation. This probably does not satisfy your requirements for an explanation. I am also not sure how to generate such a model. It seems like I have an intuition about that this can not be dangerous, but they don’t really have underlying an understanding of what exactly is going on. It’s probably more of the type where I have observed certain things in the past that were not dangerous and this seems sufficiently like them. But at least to some extend that intuition has compressed the actual observed instances, such that I can’t recall all of them in detail to give you the same opportunity to generate an intuition based on them (given that you would believe I report the instances accurately).
You may well be right about all of that, but I still maintain that a warning to be careful is a good idea when trying to change how your mind is operating in regards to any basic drive. It can be very hard to tell, from the inside, whether a mental motion matches what someone else verbally described.
I would also add that I am going to be wary of using any technique the requires convincing part of my mind of a falsehood, which this is at least adjacent to. Sure, there are likely to be some such techniques, maybe many, that are safe and effective, but it is a kind-of-thing that I think deserves a higher level of scrutiny in general.
I read that people are using meta-level commands to reach this like ‘align this two parts of me’ or ‘cure this problem’ without specifying how actually this will happen and it works for some.
I don’t think its somewhat of a stretch to put this in the dark arts category. It’s not like I erase from my world model the fact that I have primary sexual organs, or that it would feel a certain way being touched a certain way. It is a temporary very shallow overwrite, that instantly gets reversed when you stop doing the technique. I think it is not required to even reference your body at all.
What I am doing seems more like what you do when you do a thought experiment. You imagine a hypothetical situation with specific constraints. You can imagine this situation and feel your body at the same time. In the thought you don’t have primary sexual organs, in the real world you do. Based on one brief experiment that still seems to work. Unsurprisingly, because I am pretty sure that 25-50% of the time I was using the technique like this already.
All of this seems very different, at the very least quantitatively, from e.g. changing your terminal goals for instrumental reasons.
Reality is that you have junk between your legs. You engage in this thought experiment “What if I didn’t?”. You realize that if reality were different than it is, it would call for a different response than it seems to call for when you are looking at reality. So far so good, no darkness in noticing this.
You then go on to apply the response to the imagined falsehood to reality, knowing that you only reached this response because you were imagining a falsehood. This is fundamentally “dark” and “irrational” because it is building and acting upon known delusion.
The fact that you are still aware that you have primary sexual organs and expect the result to get instantly reversed when it stops doesn’t mean it’s not dark, it’s just an argument that you will be able to contain the darkness, but it’s really really hard to actually do that.
If nothing else, having a technique like that which “works” removes the motivation to figure it out without deluding yourself. This process of “imagine a different premise, get a different felt result” works just as well when the imagined premise isn’t false or known to be false, so you can just as easily imagine a different accurate premise and reach your desired conclusion—if you can actually justify your desired conclusion, that is.
The “hard part” isn’t in “changing desires to match what they should be”, its figuring out what they “should be” in the first place. If sex feels more meaningful than rubbing flat skin on flat skin, maybe it is. And maybe you should grapple with that until you know what to do with it. If you think you know why it isn’t, then maybe you should picture that, and see if you actually feel compelled by your own argument.
I feel like had the technique been “Imagine ice cream tastes like pure turmeric powder”, it would basically be the same technique. I haven’t tried this, but maybe this would work for somebody who is fantasizing about eating ice cream, which causes them to eat too much ice cream.
In that case, I predict people would not have had these (from my perspective) very weird reactions. Imagining random sex scenes feels as meaningful as eating ice cream to me. I could have explained myself much better. Apparently, I did not say precisely enough that I have the problem of having random sexual thoughts. It’s not about imagining having sex with some person you love or anything like that. At least not most of the time. It’s not clear to me that this would actually be better. I think it would not be.
I am not reflectively stable. If don’t want to love somebody because they look a certain way, I want to love somebody for their mind and I am interacting with it.
I am honestly pretty confused by all these reactions. It makes me wonder if this just is not a problem for most people, or if most people have just not realized that this is a problem. I am pretty sure it’s both.
It would.
We would. I would, at least, and I predict that others would too because the fundamental reason remains.
If you think that you’ve been eating “too much” ice cream, presumably you have reason to believe some undesirable consequences will follow from eating this much ice cream. In this case, you can just imagine this will be the result of eating ice cream. There is no need to live in fantasy land in order to not eat things that reality supports not eating—you just have to exit the fantasy you’re in that is driving you to eat it.
I don’t mean theoretically. While it does get more nuanced, this is the basis of how I relate to my tastes for food, and as a result I don’t have any temptation to eat too much ice cream or anything else I recognize to be unhealthy. I used to, but it no longer appeals to me. Writing this reminds me how delicious liver is, and that I need to eat some more.
Right. And these are your opportunities to work towards fixing that :)
I’m not making any assumptions about what kind of sexual thoughts must have prompted this, nor any stance about what kind of sexual thoughts would be appropriate for you. That’s for you to decide with yourself. If you say it’s not working the way you want it to, I believe you. It’s not uncommon.
What I’m pointing out is that you don’t actually need to feed yourself false training data in order to do this, and doing so actively impedes the process of cohering into something resembling reflective stability. Whatever the valid reasons to not do the problem behavior, those can be used to motivate change, and when you do that you get far more interesting and better results.
It’s not as simple as “Here’s something I’m convinced is a valid reason, now will it go away?”, but it is not theoretical either. Integrating one’s sexual drives does change their shape, and this can have quite pronounced effects in ways that you wouldn’t know to anticipate in advance.
Your comments have been very useful to me. I wrote many thousands of words of reflection on this. I realized that I was suppressing my sexual feelings in an unhealthy way. I tried so far 2 ways to integrate them better that failed.
I am a bit more optimistic about the current approach, which tries to allocate specific periods of time where I will allow myself to let my sexual feelings run free, and I aim to do so in a way where they become an extension of non-sexual love instead of this ad-hoc monster that possesses you temporary, where you then regret what you do afterwards.
Good, I’m glad my comments had the effect I was aiming for.
It’s an interesting and fun project for sure. A few notes...
* I wouldn’t expect to get it all figured out quickly, but rather for things to change shape over the course of years. Pieces can change quickly of course, but there’s a lot to figure out and sometimes you need to find yourself in the right experience to have the perspective to see what comes next.
* I’d also caution against putting the cart too far ahead of the horse, even if you have pretty good justification. “Extension of non-sexual love” sounds right, but also just so much weird and unexpected stuff that it’s hard to foresee in sufficient detail that it’s likely that your perspective on what this entails isn’t complete.
* Freedom to explore is freedom to learn, but also freedom to fail—like removing training wheels from a bike so that you can engage with the process of balancing, but also risk falling. Managing this tradeoff can be tricky, especially when the cost of failure gets high.
* “Allocating specific periods of time to run free” reminds me of how I’ve been approaching my daughters developing appetite. Monday through Saturday she has to eat what we make her so that she gets good nutrition and builds familiarity with good foods, and on Sunday’s she’s free to learn exactly how much ice cream is *too* much and otherwise eat whatever she wants. I’m not entirely sure what to think yet and the arbitrariness of it bothers my sense of aesthetics a bit, but I’m relatively happy with how it’s going so far and I’m not really sure how to do it any less arbitrarily in context.
As an update, the 3rd thing I tried also failed. Now I ran out of things to try. The problem is that anything that is non-sexual love seems to be corrupted by sexual love, in a way that makes the non-sexual part worse. E.g. imagine you have a female friend that you like to talk to because she is a good interlocutor. When not talking to her, you might think about what topics would be good to talk about, how to make the conversations better at a meta-level, or how much you enjoy talking to her.
I expect that if you would now start to have sex with that female friend your mind would get corrupted by sexual desire. E.g. instead of thinking about what to discuss in the next meeting, a sexual fantasy would pop into your head.
That seems strictly worse. This is not exactly what happened in my failed attempts number 2 and 3. But I think this example highlights the underlying dynamic that made none of my attempts work out. Attempt number 1 failed because there wasn’t enough love there that you could extend in the first place.
My current strategy is to just not think anything sexual anymore, and be sensitive to any negative emotions that arise. I then plan to use my version of IDC on them to figure out what the subagents that generate the emotions want. So far it seems that to some extent realizing this corruption dynamic has cooled down the sexual part of my mind a bit. But attempt 3 only failed yesterday so this cooling effect might only be temporary.
I feel like I have figured out a lot of stuff about this general topic in the last month. Probably more than in the rest of my life so far. Mainly by properly processing my emotions instead of ignoring them using my IDC technique. It feels like I have figured it out to 75% or something like that. And the good thing is that I don’t need to figure it out all the way, to get large benefits. I expect to be much better off now even if I would not do any more optimization.
I agree that my understanding is not complete. But I think my model is pretty good now. Definitely much better than before, because before I did not have a model. I thought about this point specifically for 5-15 hours. Here is the most important section of my notes on it, based on some analysis I did after watching the first 10 episodes of
Toradora!
.
The main update that I have had so far is that maybe adding sexuality in the way it exists in my brain right now would always be a downgrade in most relationships. But in principle, you could probably find a version of it, if could effectively selfmodify, that would upgrade most relationships.
I wouldn’t be discouraged. There are a lot of ways to do “the same thing” differently, and I wouldn’t expect a first try success. In particular, I’d expect you to need a lot more time letting yourself “run free”—at least “in sim”—and using that to figure out what exactly it is that you want and how to actually get it without screwing anything else up. Like, “Okay, if I get that, then what?”/”What’s so great about that” and drilling down on that felt sense until something shifts.
Sure took me a while, at least. And I wouldn’t claim to be “finished”
How sure are you that this is actually a problem? Is it the hypothetical female friend that has an issue with just focusing on sex as much as you’d be tempted to, or is it a you thing? The former can definitely complicate things, but if it’s the latter I’d be inclined to just run with it and see what happens. It’s a lot harder to get distracted by the possibility of having sex immediately after having it.
Yeah, that’s the inhibitory side of the equation. Kinda like fasting for a while and realizing that it’s not necessary/helpful/appropriate to panic about being hungry, and chilling out for a bit.
But if you don’t eat sooner or later or make an earnest effort to obtain sufficient food, it might not stay so easy to continue to set the hunger aside.
:) good.
This does sound like premature/overattachment. I bet watching what happens to the other aspects of the relationship puts a damper on that impulse.
This sounds pretty idealized. “Should” is a red flag word here, as it covers over what “is”, the reasons things are the way they are, and why you want things to be another way instead. In context, “maximally” is too because “maximally” on any dimension rarely matches “optimally”—so whence this motivation, and what is being avoided?
That’s not to say that it’s wrong or misguided as ideals often have important value, but the real world tends to be messy and bring surprises.
Could it permanently damage sexual desire? Is it better than fapping?
I am not sure. I don’t think it has damaged my sexual desire even though I used this technique maybe 20-40 times. I guess this is based on that I did get sexual thoughts after waking up. Being groggy I forget to apply the technique, and only realized after having sexual thoughts for over 20 minutes that I could use the technique to escape.
Also, that might give you an idea of why I even need to come up with a weird technique like this. Because I think it would have gone on a lot longer than 20 minutes. And I wasn’t even touching anything. Just laying there imagining. I was a heavy porn addict as a teenager. That was terrible. But I don’t think this problem is exclusive to porn. At points in time when I had a mate, I would just do it for hours on end most days. And I stopped most of the time because my mate wanted to stop. You might think “sounds fun”, and it wasn’t funless, but retrospectively it seems like an addiction. One that shares many similarities with a porn or video game addiction.
I am unsure about the long-term consequences as I have not used this technique for long enough to evaluate that I think, but my guess is that it is not dangerous. I guess that this technique can not overwrite the actual physical signals that your body sends to your brain when these are sent. I expect it to only be useful for controlling imagination.
For me, it seems that fapping is very very bad. Possibly the single worst thing for my productivity. But I feel like I might have an “ultra-sexual mind”. I am pretty sure there is a strong correlation between fapping and wasting multiple days afterward by playing video games and watching series. I am not quite sure what the causal relationships are, but there is a very strong correlation.
I have time tracking data where I record everything I do throughout the entire day. I haven’t run any deep analysis on it that would determine this. But on the off-chance that somebody would like to do it (I don’t know why anybody would) I can give them years’ worth of time tracking data. I am relatively sure that I would not care if any analysis of this data would be made public (possibly with the exception of some very minor censors like the names of people I met with).
Could the same technique be used to increase sexual desire if you need—just imagine that you penis is 10 times larger than usual?
I am pretty sure the specific thing you suggested will not work at all, but I won’t even try, because I have no interest in this ability. I am pretty sure you can exaggerate how good something will feel in your imagination though. But this seems significantly harder. And one of the main reasons why I think the original tek is good is that it is very very easy to do. Keep in mind that if you exaggerate then you might be disappointed when something real happens.
Whatever sinks your boat, I suppose. For some people the fantasy would have the opposite effect. Castration fetishes are a thing, however self-contradictory they might seem.