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.
I guess I must have not explained myself correctly.
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.
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.
There are multiple different mental motions that can result in emotions being suppressed.
And I don’t think the tek in the OP is different along the suppression vs. dissolving axis.
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.
You haven’t explained anything about why the technique has the effect it has …
Ehh. Quoting myself:
You can imagine rubbing yourself against somebody else, flat skin on flat skin. But it just feels kind of pointless and so you stop.
And then you said:
… or demonstrated in any way that you have the expertise to know why it has the effect it does.
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.
There are multiple different mental motions that can result in emotions being suppressed.
Yes, I agree. And seems different from any of them (that I am aware of). Also, see the second paragraph here.
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.
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.
You can imagine rubbing yourself against somebody else, flat skin on flat skin. But it just feels kind of pointless and so you stop.
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 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’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.