Agreed that there’s something missing. I didn’t provide much of a model about what emotions are, mostly because I didn’t have much of one when I wrote this. It was also the case that for some time I used my lack of a mechanistic model of emotions as an excuse to ignore the ways I was obviously hurting.
In response to Raemon’s comment here, I and a few others gave some more concrete thoughts on what negative repercussions are.
I intend to write some follow up posts with what I’ve learned in the intervening years. One thing I need to expand on is what I actually did with “fix it or stop complaining”, because if I take your comment at face value, we were clearly not doing the same thing, yet we both felt it sensical to call what we did “fix it or stop complaining”.
Another thought, these days I’m thinking a bit more in terms of “disavowed desires” instead of “repressed emotions”. Desires (or subagents) feel like the mental things that generate loops across time, that make things come up again and again. Emotions are the transient expressions of these desires. Emotions actually can “just go away” if you ignore them, but I haven’t found that to be the case for desires (I’m thinking less “I desire to have some lunch” and more “I desire to be accepted by others”. Well, it’s less “can I get this to go away rn?” (which you can almost always do with [drugs/video games/media/activity/etc]) and more “will this pop back up?”).
This post of mine includes the exposition of one disavowed desire I’ve struggled with which generated a lot of emotions over the years which I ignored. The header “A Serious Pardox” describes the disavowed desire. Knots by R.D Laing describes in poetic language a lot of these emotional paradoxes.
All that being said, I’ve spent the last yearish more in a mode of understanding and building agency. This has felt possible because I feel I’ve unraveled enough emotional paradoxes that I’ll know if/when I’m doing something that hurts me (agency isn’t safe when you’re not aligned). I’ve got a fewthreads about the process of building agency with an eye on not backsliding on emotional stuff, and another post which frames a lot of this journey.
Agreed that there’s something missing. I didn’t provide much of a model about what emotions are, mostly because I didn’t have much of one when I wrote this. It was also the case that for some time I used my lack of a mechanistic model of emotions as an excuse to ignore the ways I was obviously hurting.
In response to Raemon’s comment here, I and a few others gave some more concrete thoughts on what negative repercussions are.
I intend to write some follow up posts with what I’ve learned in the intervening years. One thing I need to expand on is what I actually did with “fix it or stop complaining”, because if I take your comment at face value, we were clearly not doing the same thing, yet we both felt it sensical to call what we did “fix it or stop complaining”.
Another thought, these days I’m thinking a bit more in terms of “disavowed desires” instead of “repressed emotions”. Desires (or subagents) feel like the mental things that generate loops across time, that make things come up again and again. Emotions are the transient expressions of these desires. Emotions actually can “just go away” if you ignore them, but I haven’t found that to be the case for desires (I’m thinking less “I desire to have some lunch” and more “I desire to be accepted by others”. Well, it’s less “can I get this to go away rn?” (which you can almost always do with [drugs/video games/media/activity/etc]) and more “will this pop back up?”).
This post of mine includes the exposition of one disavowed desire I’ve struggled with which generated a lot of emotions over the years which I ignored. The header “A Serious Pardox” describes the disavowed desire. Knots by R.D Laing describes in poetic language a lot of these emotional paradoxes.
All that being said, I’ve spent the last yearish more in a mode of understanding and building agency. This has felt possible because I feel I’ve unraveled enough emotional paradoxes that I’ll know if/when I’m doing something that hurts me (agency isn’t safe when you’re not aligned). I’ve got a few threads about the process of building agency with an eye on not backsliding on emotional stuff, and another post which frames a lot of this journey.