But this works a lot better in therapy books than it does in real life.
I’m still confused by you having this experience, since my (admittedly) anecdotal one is that actually all of that stuff does work roughly as well as the therapy books suggest it does. (Different worlds, I guess. :)) Though with some caveats; from my own experience doing this and talking with others who do find it to work:
Often an initial presenting symptom is a manifestation of a deeper one. Then one might fix the initial issue so that the person does get genuine relief, but while that helps, the problem will return in a subtler form later. (E.g. my own follow-up on one particular self-intervention, which found some of the issues to have been healed for good but others to have returned in a different form.)
The roots of some issues are just really hard to find and blocked behind many, many defenses that are impossible to get to in any short amount of time.
I’d guess that the people who write the therapy books are being mostly honest when they say that the selection of stories is representative, in that they do get quick results with many clients, so it’s fair to say that none of the stories are exceptionally rare in nature… but the authors also do want to promote the technique, so they don’t go into as much detail on the cases that were long and messy and complicated and for those reasons wouldn’t be very pedagogically useful to cover in the book anyway. So then they kind of gloss over the fact that even with these techniques, it can still take several years to get sufficiently far.
I do also think that—as you speculate in that post—therapist quality is definitely a thing. At least a therapist should be capable of being open and non-judgmental towards their clients, and it’s not hard to find all kinds of horror stories about bad therapists who thought that a client’s problems were all rooted in the client being polyamorous, or something similar.
Also, what childhood trauma made my subagents so averse to doing dishes?
Could be many reasons. :) Though it doesn’t need to be a literal childhood trauma; it can just be an aversion picked up through association.
A typical one would be something like being told to do the dishes as a kid, not liking the way your parents go around ordering you, and then picking up a general negative association with various chores.
Someone else might have an aversion due to an opposite problem, like not being allowed to do many chores on their own and then picking up the model that one gets rewarded better by being dependent on others.
A third person might have had a parent who also really disliked doing the dishes themselves (for whatever reason) and internalized the notion that this is something to avoid.
(I don’t think these are just-so stories; rather they’re all variations of patterns I’ve encountered either in myself or others.)
The second and third one are also easy to rephrase in an equivalent Bayesian framework (in the second one, the mind comes to predict that independence causes bad outcomes; in the third one, it picks up the belief “doing the dishes is bad” through social learning). For the first one, the prediction is not quite as clear, but at least we know conditioning-by-association to be a thing that definitely happens.
I’m still confused by you having this experience, since my (admittedly) anecdotal one is that actually all of that stuff does work roughly as well as the therapy books suggest it does. (Different worlds, I guess. :)) Though with some caveats; from my own experience doing this and talking with others who do find it to work:
Often an initial presenting symptom is a manifestation of a deeper one. Then one might fix the initial issue so that the person does get genuine relief, but while that helps, the problem will return in a subtler form later. (E.g. my own follow-up on one particular self-intervention, which found some of the issues to have been healed for good but others to have returned in a different form.)
The roots of some issues are just really hard to find and blocked behind many, many defenses that are impossible to get to in any short amount of time.
I’d guess that the people who write the therapy books are being mostly honest when they say that the selection of stories is representative, in that they do get quick results with many clients, so it’s fair to say that none of the stories are exceptionally rare in nature… but the authors also do want to promote the technique, so they don’t go into as much detail on the cases that were long and messy and complicated and for those reasons wouldn’t be very pedagogically useful to cover in the book anyway. So then they kind of gloss over the fact that even with these techniques, it can still take several years to get sufficiently far.
I do also think that—as you speculate in that post—therapist quality is definitely a thing. At least a therapist should be capable of being open and non-judgmental towards their clients, and it’s not hard to find all kinds of horror stories about bad therapists who thought that a client’s problems were all rooted in the client being polyamorous, or something similar.
Could be many reasons. :) Though it doesn’t need to be a literal childhood trauma; it can just be an aversion picked up through association.
A typical one would be something like being told to do the dishes as a kid, not liking the way your parents go around ordering you, and then picking up a general negative association with various chores.
Someone else might have an aversion due to an opposite problem, like not being allowed to do many chores on their own and then picking up the model that one gets rewarded better by being dependent on others.
A third person might have had a parent who also really disliked doing the dishes themselves (for whatever reason) and internalized the notion that this is something to avoid.
(I don’t think these are just-so stories; rather they’re all variations of patterns I’ve encountered either in myself or others.)
The second and third one are also easy to rephrase in an equivalent Bayesian framework (in the second one, the mind comes to predict that independence causes bad outcomes; in the third one, it picks up the belief “doing the dishes is bad” through social learning). For the first one, the prediction is not quite as clear, but at least we know conditioning-by-association to be a thing that definitely happens.