Damon Sasi (@DaystarEld) is a mentor of mine, and he is also a therapist who claims to be very psychologically healthy. What’s his inner experience like?
“Probably for an average week, maybe I’ll suffer for like five minutes”
“I don’t think I have any prolonged internal conflict”
“Self-loathing to me was a weird concept […] Like, what does it mean to like self-loathe?”
It’s not that he had a great childhood, either.
[My childhood] wasn’t terrible. And I say this and then maybe I’ll give some examples and people will be like, maybe it was terrible. […] my parents divorced when I was pretty young. Both my parents, I think, were very absent. […]
He would get drunk often. He once hit me in the back with a two by four. My older brother was pretty physically abusive before he chilled out. And by chilled out, I mean like, we’re cool now, but I left home after high school specifically to get away from him. […]
I think overall the experience I had growing up was just being very alone. I didn’t feel like my parents were really my parents. I feel like books raised me in very strong and very real ways I could give examples of. I had a lot of friends. I enjoyed my friendships quite a lot, but I didn’t feel like I had family, basically at all. […]
What is it like to be psychologically healthy?
I don’t think I’ve ever hated anyone ever in my life. Possibly this is not true for like very brief moments or brief periods of time or something and it’s like hard to remember them. It’s just really easy to like let go of hurt or anger against other people.
This is why I actually had to become very good at just forming boundaries when I was young. Like just very clear, very clear boundaries with other people because I just couldn’t hold onto anger against them no matter what they did to me, which was like not great given my upbringing. […]
there was one occurrence in my entire life where I think I came closest to what people call depression […]
I’ve had little T traumas or hang ups or whatever word you want to use for them. But big T traumas just feel like they never happened in part because I never felt like I lacked agency in my life. […]
basically zero [Big 5 personality] neuroticism […]
Details in podcast.
https://chrislakin.blog/p/what-is-it-like-to-be-psychologically
Related posts: what becoming more secure did for me by @Chipmonk and How feeling more secure feels different than I expected by @Kaj_Sotala
Hmmm, I think ‘healthy’ is saying too much. This is one particular way of being psychologically healthy, but in my model you can be psychologically healthy and suffer more than 5 minutes per week and experience inner conflict some of the time. I think this is implicitly making the target too narrow for people that care about getting there and might consider this a reference point.
Also, I’m curious if the depression comment also refers to adaptive depression, like when someone very close to you dies and you need to adapt? (I’m not making a case that prolonged grief is good but I would make the case that grieving for 6 months or so is not psychologically unhealthy).
All the other points seem fine to me ❤️
I didn’t pick the title, but I definitely consider it inclusive rather than exclusive or normative :)
More specifically, I think there are peaks and valleys in psychological health, and I don’t think the space I occupy is necessarily one of the highest peaks. But I would say that, regarding suffering or prolonged internal conflict, these measures feel pretty useful for determining two of the axes that point directionally at “health,” unless there’s a convincing argument that there are points in which more suffering or more internal conflict can be better, which I have yet to find convincing (and I suspect people who believe that would operationalize them differently than I would).
And yes, the reason I described the depressive episode the way I did was to indicate that I’ve only felt anything close to that due to life circumstances where the feelings were fairly legible and understandable! Six months of grief (or more) after someone dies is definitely not a sign of mental unhealth.
Does a narrow, hardly achievable target actually have a negative effect? It would be interesting to see some research, in particular as it’d imply sequence “Challenging the Difficult” makes things worse for part of people.
I’ve heard that, for sleep in particular, some people have Received Wisdom that everyone needs 8 hours of sleep per day, and if they’re not getting it, that’s a problem, and this has led some people who naturally sleep 7 hours to worry and stress about it, causing insomnia and whatnot.
Of course, ideally such people would have better ability to manage such worries (and better “I should do some more googling before stressing about it too hard” reflexes), but in practice many do not.
It’s bad form to psychoanalyze people in public, especially when they’ve made themselves vulnerable. But for the benefit of others I want to register that what’s written here is consistent with both psychological health and specific forms of being very unwell. And even for people for whom this is what psychological health looks like, you can’t cargo cult it.
I appreciate the acknowledgement against psychoanalyzing people in public, and I agree that trying to cargoculting any of this is unlikely to go well, but I’d be curious to know what specific things you think can also fall under “being very unwell?” I just reread the excerpts Chris highlighted and the only thing I can think of is the “letting go of anger” thing, which is only a sign of unwellness, imo, if it leads to being exploited/abused/etc.
Never [consciously] hating anyone more than transiently and finding a childhood that bad to not be terrible are consistent with an unwell person in denial (in a way I don’t think holds for all of your statements. e.g. “self loathing was a confusing concept for me” feels much more consistent with the kind of confusion I’d expect from 99th percentile mental health).
Hm. I think I disagree on both counts; we maybe need to operationalize the words, but while I think hatred of others can be very valuable in some cases from a game theoretic perspective, and is very natural given that, lacking it is absolutely not something I’ve seen consistent in “unwell people,” and I’ve never known it to be “useful” for people who can protect themselves or others without it.
To be clear, anger is extremely valuable for self protection and boundaries, and I never claimed to not get angry. So if that’s what you meant, then yes, people who can’t summon anger in defense of themselves or others are often unwell or in denial of how bad their circumstances are.
But in most cases I’ve seen, “hatred” of people, especially people who are fundamentally not malicious or sadistic, but just fairly flawed, seems to me a much stronger sign of unwellness than wellness, particularly if the person is not subject to ongoing pain or suffering.
As for finding the childhood “not terrible,” I’m reminded of the xkcd on self reporting pain ratings :P
I grew up in a relatively safe part of the Miami suburbs, but it was still Miami, and I was guest to a lot of shitty households (even before I started working as a therapist) that made me thankful for the things I did have; three meals a day most days, a mom who worked multiple jobs to afford private school for at least a few years, gifts on holidays and birthdays, a secure home that I never worried about losing (other than from the occasional hurricane) and which I knew would always be there for me if I needed a place to stay, even when I much preferred going elsewhere.
You might say this is just the result of anchoring in a different direction, but to me it just feels like having had a wide perspective. I don’t not know what good families are like. I knew it from the start, because of fiction. It was always obvious what was wrong, when something was wrong, and what was right when it was right.
My basic point is just that I and many people would describe similarly mixed upbringings as not terrible, and they wouldn’t be in denial about it. My family messed up in a lot of ways, but they were still, most of the time, a functional system, where people gave each other support and showed affection and took care of each other when they were hurt or sick. It was also a place where people occasionally screamed at each other, and cried. Sometimes things were broken, sometimes people were hit. These are terrible things to have happen, but they were not the dominant experience compared to the good things.
I mentioned some of the most negative things because they were relevant to point out the ways my upbringing was not obviously responsible for some positive aspects of myself, but there was plenty of positive unrelated to the things I mentioned, and I gave that disclaimer because I think most people do not actually have a wide enough sample set to accurately judge the the range from “not terrible” to “terrible,” especially given (understandable) protectiveness of children’s wellbeing.
I’ve had many conversations with many people, young and old, why the things they experienced as children were abusive or “not okay.” I’ve also had to intervene in enough truly, actually abusive households to know what my own experience was and wasn’t. I don’t excuse anything my family did, which is a big part of why I left, but they tried their best. I wish I’d grown up in a happier home, but I was still luckier than many others I grew up around, and I don’t hold any ill will toward people who were clearly lacking in the knowledge, resources, emotional stability, etc, to do better than they did.