But what if you think that you have stronger positive motivations
Motivation is measured in feeling, not thinking. Thinking about what feelings you might or might not have is like dancing about architecture—it might be entertaining, but it’s not very informative. ;-)
to do something else, say, World of Warcraft?
You’re only assuming that it’s a positive motivation, and in your shoes (if I understand your situation correctly) it’s not a great assumption, even if the vast majority of Warcraft players are primarily positively-motivated.
Myself, I got bored with WoW after a couple of months, so I can’t speak for the WoW players out there.
(More relevant comments will come later, after I think of some.)
I wasn’t talking about myself in particular there. I was trying to be more abstract.
Okay, here’s something.
When I was in college, I often had something that I wanted to be doing, but I had all that damn homework to do. When I sat down to do my homework, all I could think about was how awful it was and how much I’d rather be doing something else. But if I went and did something else, I had to deal with having a lot of homework to do and not doing it. I eventually found what turned out to be a satisfactory way to resolve the dilemma.
I dropped the course, and felt very relieved afterward.
As I’ve mentioned before, I can honestly say that I only graduated because of my parents’ pressure. If I dropped out of college after my second or third year, I think I could have avoided a lot of unnecessary suffering; so far, the only real benefit I’ve gotten from my college degree has been that my parents are satisfied with the amount of education I have.
So, I’m not entirely clear, but I get the impression you’re presenting this as an example of something that you wouldn’t do if you dropped the negative motivation for it.… and implying that this is somehow bad.
If so, then I’d point out that if indeed the only positive result you got from your degree is your relief with your parents’ satisfaction, then you could’ve gotten that result a lot easier and quicker by deleting your brain’s evaluation of their dissatisfaction as a SASS threat.
FWIW, both I and my clients have passed through periods that I’ve tongue-in-cheekly called, “the dark night of the soul”—a period where you’ve removed one or more major negative motivations, and then realize you have no idea WTF you’re doing with your life or want to do with it in the future.
However, a period like this is not the result of having no negative motivation—it’s the result of having removed only one level of negative motivation, without reaching your fundamental values or criteria yet. (That is, you no longer have negative motivation, but you’re still judging your life by negative criteria.)
Once you get the criteria as well as the motivation, things start to turn around, and you begin (re)discovering all the things you actually like about life and the world. One of the key issues for me was realizing that I cannot “figure out” or “solve” what I want. (As I said, thinking about feelings is like dancing about architecture.)
What I’ve realized is that I have to actually ask myself what I already want, and that when I ask that question, there are answers, so long as I do NOT engage in trying to figure out what I should want, or what would “make me happy”, or any other sort of goal-oriented process.
Fundamentally, positive motivation is not something that you use in order to get something else. As long as you treat it as a tool to get yourself to do something, you’re still stuck in the same box—your real motivation at that point is whatever problem you’re trying to solve by adding positive motivation.
If so, then I’d point out that if indeed the only positive result you got from your degree is your relief with your parents’ satisfaction, then you could’ve gotten that result a lot easier and quicker by deleting your brain’s evaluation of their dissatisfaction as a SASS threat.
Having your parents tell you “If we are sufficiently dissatisfied, you’ll be homeless” is kind of scary. :(
Getting a college degree is supposed to be of great benefit—and if I had gone on to have a career as an engineer or programmer or something, it would have been. And at least I have the social status associated with “college graduate” instead of “college dropout”.
FWIW, both I and my clients have passed through periods that I’ve tongue-in-cheekly called, “the dark night of the soul”—a period where you’ve removed one or more major negative motivations, and then realize you have no idea WTF you’re doing with your life or want to do with it in the future.
That sounds like me right now.
I feel like I ought to do something impressive with my life. Many of the other students in my high school thought I was some kind of super-genius who was going to end up as the next Bill Gates or something, and I feel that, by not living up to my potential, as it were, it would be like I’m letting them down. I have a fantasy that I go to sleep one day, spend the next ten to fifteen years as a philosophical zombie, and become consciousness after having done something impressive enough that I can retire and not worry about having to do anything else. (Like in those mediocre movies “13 Going on 30” and “Click”.) I’m embarrassed whenever someone asks me what I do for a living, and ashamed that I’m . I want to be respected, but I’m not willing to do what it takes to earn that respect in either the most common manner (become an employee) or the next most common manner (become an entrepreneur). And I’m worried about what will happen when my parents get too old to support me. (I’m 27, and they’re both 61.) I’ve tried my best to deal with this by simply not caring about what happens to me in the future, but that’s hard, and eventually the future happens anyway.
I think there should have been a paragraph break in there somewhere. :(
I feel like I ought to do something impressive with my life.
What pushes you forward, holds you back. That is, it is precisely this feeling of “ought” that is the problem.
When you have an ought or a should, it is generally shorthand for “something bad will happen if I don’t”. The something bad is not expressed, because then whenever you comply with your “should” you appear more “moral” to your compatriots, than if you are “merely” complying out of duress.
It’s essential to identify the precise nature of the unconsciously-represented threat (which is where SASS comes in), and to flip it around to the positive form of that need.
Many of the other students in my high school thought I was some kind of super-genius who was going to end up as the next Bill Gates or something, and I feel that, by not living up to my potential, as it were, it would be like I’m letting them down.
And are you afraid they won’t like you, or won’t respect you?
Don’t analyze—just feel what it’s like to let them down… is it more like being lonely and rejected, or ashamed and humiliated? Are you a less-good person for doing this, a less-important person, or something else?
Ok, Status then. What would it be like if your parents were proud of you, regardless of whether you ever accomplished anything or not? (Again, don’t think… just ask the question and feel the answer.)
It’s like I tricked them or something—what do they have to be proud of, if all I do is stay home and do nothing? Now I’m feeling confused. My father has told me that it reflects badly on him as a parent if I don’t, say, arrive at high school on time. (He’s also said that now that I’m legally an adult, I’m not his responsibility any more, and he can’t be dragged into family court over my behavior, so I can do what I want. He also told me that a friend of his actually did have to go to family court because his daughter was always late to school.) And now I’m rambling again. Anyway, at this point, they’re perfectly happy to accept “self-sufficient” as enough from me; they don’t want me to be homeless and starving after they can’t support me financially any more, and have repeatedly made the point that “there’s no government welfare for single, non-disabled, childless men who don’t work” in the United States.
Now, this is where the fun bit comes in. Pay attention to how your brain just successfully defended you against changing your assumptions.
Specifically, the assumption that your parents need to be proud of something… when, in fact, normal healthy parents are proud of their kids when they make mudpies or say “gaga” or something.
To put it another way, your brain has habituated to assuming that your parents’ pride is supposed to be conditional on you doing something, and that it’s therefore somehow “not right” for you to feel pride in yourself, unless you’re doing something that would get your parents to be proud of you.
This is the way SASS imprinting works—we pay attention to what our parents and peers give us positive and negative SASS for, and then we internalize the algorithms we observe them using, for when to give ourselves (and other people) positive or negative SASS.
This is how we acquire our (effective) value systems, and the way to undo it is by changing the rules under which our self-supplied SASS pellets and shocks are delivered.
Part of doing this is just realizing that it’s really you who controls your own SASS allocation. Just now, by me asking you how you’d feel if your parents were proud of you, you began to feel some of the relief that you’d feel if you increased your self-delivered level of Status. (Specifically, in the “pride” part.)
Of course, as discussed elsewhere in this thread, you stopped imagining as soon as you found an objection to the experience.
Notice how you then quickly changed what you were imagining to restore your previous world model—you were to imagine what would happen if your parents had unconditional pride in you, and you immediately began asking, “but what do they have to be proud of?”
And the reason you’re “feeling confused” is because I just asked a question that draws on your brain’s information in a way that leads to a contradiction in your current mental model… similar to the confusion a theist feels when an atheist argument hits too close to home.
The response is also similar: defend the existing belief structure by treating the original belief as axiomatic… and the rest of what you wrote is, as you said, “rambling”… a successful distraction to get you away from even temporarily accepting a premise that would annihilate a chunk of your current worldview.
One of the reasons this sort of thing is difficult is because children are wired to believe their parents are intrinsically perfect, and that therefore any negative consequences of interacting with parents are considered to be your fault. If your parents aren’t proud of you (giving you Status pellets), then you must be defective.
Of course, later on in life, we do gain the ability to criticize our parents, their values and behaviors. But by that point, the damage is already done: we’ve already adopted their rules for SASS allocation, tucked away out of conscious awareness. And thus, we rarely question them.
Now, the questions I’ve asked you are part of the process of pulling your imprinted SASS allocation rules into the light, where they can be destroyed by reflection. They don’t work, however, if you back away from the question. Your desire to experience something new—to learn more of the truth, if you will—has to exceed your desire to remain comfortably within your existing world view.
If you repeat the question—and this time, actually allow yourself to experience what it would be like if your parents had always been proud of you… then a portion of your current worldview will die, but YOU will become more free.
And that’s because your current SASS rules are over-constrained compared to a normal, healthy human being—one who knows in the back of their mind that their parents were always proud of them, always loved them… and thus has set their internal Status and Affiliation setpoints to a higher minimum setting than yours.
So, if you’ve ever wondered what the difference was between you and those other people, now you know. And you also have a piece of what you need to know to DO something about it.
The rest is really up to you.
I don’t normally do the sort of thing I’ve been doing with you, with people who aren’t paying me money to do so. But that’s not as much a matter of needing to make a living, as it has to do with the fact that people who haven’t put something important on the line in order to get my advice, aren’t usually that motivated to stick with it through their resistance to the actual process of changing.
When somebody’s paying me money, though, they implicitly grant me a role and a degree of Status in their mind that facilitates their complying with my instructions, even when it’s difficult. It also allows me to hand them back some of that Status, through my paying attention to what they’re saying, and showing persistence in sticking with the interaction myself, even if it’s as difficult for me as it is for them.
(This same sort of transaction also occurs in therapy, coaching, and other paid interactions between human beings, btw. Because by default, we assume that at least our Status and Affiliation have to come from other people. The irony, however, is that the people who really have SASS in their lives are the ones who learned good rulesets from their parents for when to give themselves (and others) positive SASS.)
Okay, more thoughts. I haven’t read your response to the other comment because I haven’t finished reacting to this one yet. (And, for the record, I feel like this has already helped me more than most of the in-person therapy I’ve ever had. It’s easier for me to write these kinds of things online than it is for me to tell them to a therapist I’ve been dragged to.)
I don’t know if the focus on my parents specifically is quite right. What about peers (past, present, or imagined)?
Specifically, the assumption that your parents need to be proud of something… when, in fact, normal healthy parents are proud of their kids when they make mudpies or say “gaga” or something.
Anyway, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure my mom is proud of me in the way you describe. My father, I’m not so sure. I don’t think he’s good at understanding other people’s emotions, and he has a tendency to be very critical. I’m a little afraid of him, too.
If you repeat the question—and this time, actually allow yourself to experience what it would be like if your parents had always been proud of you… then a portion of your current worldview will die, but YOU will become more free.
I’m getting a little better at imagining it, and I can believe it of my mom, but I don’t know if it’s actually true of my father. And I think it would be good to want to believe the truth, whatever it is. Litany of Tarski, Litany of Gendlin, and all that. Right now, I do want my father’s approval, very much so—but I think it might be possible for me to throw that out the window, by adopting the attitude that if he doesn’t think that, say, beating Battletoads is a worthy accomplishment, that’s his problem, not mine. The guy can’t even sing! (Should I try this?)
I think I need to get out and see more people, some of them on a regular basis. Sitting in the house alone or with my parents isn’t helping. According to legend, “There is life outside your apartment”, but I’m not sure where to find it. I’ll sign up for that Lesswrong NYC Meetup group, and maybe I’ll try to get some phone numbers from people at the local bookstore—and this time, actually call them. Anyone have any suggestions that don’t involve getting a job, taking a class, or spending a lot of money?
All right, now I’ll go read the reply to my earlier half-comment.
They can also be imprimers, but your parents tend to get first crack at you and lay down a lot of stuff before you even have any conscious/verbal comprehension of what’s going on. Fixing a block generally has to happen at the earliest point where a rule was created, not where it was later simply reinforced. Otherwise, they have a tendency to come back, which is really annoying.
I’m getting a little better at imagining it, and I can believe it of my mom, but I don’t know if it’s actually true of my father. And I think it would be good to want to believe the truth, whatever it is.
If I set the thermostat on my wall to a temperature that it’s not at, does that mean I’m disbelieving the truth of the current temperature?
The objective here is not for you to believe something happened that didn’t happen. Rather, it’s to correct your mistaken judgment that your level of self-pride is to be determined by your quantity of effortful and worthy accomplishments, as judged by others.
Specifically, what happens when you imagine that your parents were always proud of you, is that your brain is forced to realize (emotionally, not just intellectually) that its current set of SASS rules are not The One True Rules For Survival In Your Tribe, but simply one possibility out of many.
That’s what I mean by “a portion of your worldview will die, but YOU will become more free.” The confusion you experienced when you first imagined it, was your brain’s reaction to the battle between your apologist and revolutionary. The rambling that followed was the apologist trying to repair the damage.
Right now, I do want my father’s approval, very much so—but I think it might be possible for me to throw that out the window, by adopting the attitude that if he doesn’t think that, say, beating Battletoads is a worthy accomplishment, that’s his problem, not mine. The guy can’t even sing! (Should I try this?)
No—that entire concept is still stuck in the same worldview you have now, where people’s status is determined by the worth of their accomplishments in the eyes of another. That’s the bit of your worldview that needs to die, not be reinforced!
More specifically, it’s the rule that says your status is lowered by not having such accomplishents. It’s perfectly okay to believe that having more accomplishments raises your status, so long as the lack of accomplishments doesn’t take you below the level of status required for health and happiness.
That’s how people with healthy motivation act—they feel more pride when they accomplish things, but there’s no threat to their pride when they’re not doing anything… and thus no vicious cycle of negative motivation.
I think I need to get out and see more people, some of them on a regular basis. Sitting in the house alone or with my parents isn’t helping. According to legend, “There is life outside your apartment”, but I’m not sure where to find it. I’ll sign up for that Lesswrong NYC Meetup group, and maybe I’ll try to get some phone numbers from people at the local bookstore—and this time, actually call them. Anyone have any suggestions that don’t involve getting a job, taking a class, or spending a lot of money?
I’m about to drop this thread of conversation, because it seems to me that you’re starting to think I’m your therapist or life coach or something. If you want to fix your brain, I’ll help, but I’m not going to keep dragging you back to pay attention to the part of things that actually needs fixing.
The part of my work that I enjoy and would do to some extent without pay is the part where I actually help people… not the part where I have to beat them about the head and shoulders (figuratively speaking) to keep them focused on the bit that will actually help.
But so far, every attempt I’ve made to help someone in a significant way for free, has resulted in the person drifting off as soon as they realize that it’s still going to cost them something (in the personal/emotional sense) to change. (No matter how much they previously protested that they would be different.)
And I could be wrong, but from this comment and the other one, that’s the direction this looks like it might be taking.
No—that entire concept is still stuck in the same worldview you have now, where people’s status is determined by the worth of their accomplishments in the eyes of another. That’s the bit of your worldview that needs to die, not be reinforced!
More specifically, it’s the rule that says your status is lowered by not having such accomplishents. It’s perfectly okay to believe that having more accomplishments raises your status, so long as the lack of accomplishments doesn’t take you below the level of status required for health and happiness.
That’s how people with healthy motivation act—they feel more pride when they accomplish things, but there’s no threat to their pride when they’re not doing anything… and thus no vicious cycle of negative motivation.
Again, thank you for the whack from the Clue Stick. Sometimes you have to hear the same thing in several different ways before you understand it.
Oh, and I really am feeling a lot better now. At least for the moment.
I’m about to drop this thread of conversation, because it seems to me that you’re starting to think I’m your therapist or life coach or something. If you want to fix your brain, I’ll help, but I’m not going to keep dragging you back to pay attention to the part of things that actually needs fixing.
That was the part where I start acting on my positive motivation. ;)
Oh, and I really am feeling a lot better now. At least for the moment.
One thing you should be aware of is that SASS rules are often highly contextual, and removing the action of a rule in one context doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve gotten rid of it in another context, or that you don’t have overlapping and partially-redundant rules.
So, even if you’ve now removed the “unworthy if you don’t accomplish to standards” rule (and I’m not certain you have, without testing), be aware that this doesn’t equal removing all your status-negating rules, let alone your rules for other types of SASS.
By being aware of that, you’ll be less likely to conclude the whole thing is a failure, the next time a SASS-threat feeling occurs.
(This is important, btw—I went through a lot of ups and downs before I realized that the mere existence of another SASS threat after I thought I’d fixed something did NOT equal “I failed as a person and a self-help guru” and therefore justify further lowering my SASS! Recursion and paradox are always a mindhacker’s close companions, though luckily not in an exponential-blowup kind of way. More like a loops-implemented-with-recursion way. But I digress.)
That was the part where I start acting on my positive motivation. ;)
Specifically, the assumption that your parents need to be proud of something… when, in fact, normal healthy parents are proud of their kids when they make mudpies or say “gaga” or something.
To put it another way, your brain has habituated to assuming that your parents’ pride is supposed to be conditional on you doing something, and that it’s therefore somehow “not right” for you to feel pride in yourself, unless you’re doing something that would get your parents to be proud of you.
Isn’t unconditional praise empty praise? Is getting a trophy at “Everyone Gets A Trophy Day” meaningful?
One of the reasons this sort of thing is difficult is because children are wired to believe their parents are intrinsically perfect, and that therefore any negative consequences of interacting with parents are considered to be your fault. If your parents aren’t proud of you (giving you Status pellets), then you must be defective.
My parents were proud of my academic achievements. I wasn’t, not really. Doing very well in school feels more like something that happened to me, rather than something that I achieved. On the other hand, my parents don’t care that I’ve beaten Battletoads, or ascended in Nethack, or beat Space Megaforce on Tricky difficulty without continuing, but, dammit, I’m certainly proud that I managed to do it! (Unfortunately, as the saying goes, that and $3.99 plus sales tax will get you a pack of Magic cards—I have no way of making any actual money off of this.) For a long time, I’ve gotten at least some pride from sources my parents have disapproved of. On the other hand, I used to have peers to impress with my mad game-playing skillz. ;)
Of course, later on in life, we do gain the ability to criticize our parents, their values and behaviors. But by that point, the damage is already done: we’ve already adopted their rules for SASS allocation, tucked away out of conscious awareness. And thus, we rarely question them.
I’ve been arguing with my parents about the merits of video games since I was, what, twelve? My mom is still convinced the use of the word “boss” to describe the powerful enemy fought at the end of each level was a Japanese plot to make American workers less productive by making them unable to cooperate with their supervisors at work.
Because by default, we assume that at least our Status and Affiliation have to come from other people. The irony, however, is that the people who really have( SASS in their lives are the ones who learned good rulesets from their parents for when to give themselves* (and others) positive SASS.
I don’t normally do the sort of thing I’ve been doing with you, with people who aren’t paying me money to do so. But that’s not as much a matter of needing to make a living, as it has to do with the fact that people who haven’t put something important on the line in order to get my advice, aren’t usually that motivated to stick with it through their resistance to the actual process of changing.
Thank you. I appreciate this. Really.
I have more to say in addition to the nit-picking I’ve already done in this comment, but I need to take a bit of a break right now, because I’m hungry and feeling a little down right now; I need to do something turn off the self-pity before I can start imagining myself into a different emotional state.
Isn’t unconditional praise empty praise? Is getting a trophy at “Everyone Gets A Trophy Day” meaningful?
What you’ve just said is isomorphic to a theist arguing that their holy book is holy because it came from a god, and that they know this because it says so in the book.
Be a rationalist. How do you know what you think you know? You believe in this “empty praise” concept, because it’s part of your framework for SASS allocation, and your brain defends it for that same reason. If you want to know the truth, you need to be prepared for the possibility that it may shatter all of your premises.
If your parents had offered you a different worldview, you would currently believe something else than what you currently do. And plenty of less-rational people than you are winning more at life than you, simply because they received a slightly-more functional set of SASS allocation rules by an accident of birth.
I’ve been arguing with my parents about the merits of video games since I was, what, twelve?
And yet, just by having that argument, you had to have accepted the core premise that pride should be based on accomplishments stemming from personal effort—you were only arguing about which accomplishments fit this description. Other families might place pride in knowing things, being a part of the family, showing loyalty, outsmarting people, knowing the right people, or any of dozens of other possible behavioral categories.
Um...
Sociometer theory is somewhat isomorphic to the truth, but it’s lacking in important distinctions. It ignores the fact that there are people who pride themselves in being nonconformists, or the actions of people who practically beg to be persecuted, and then wear their persecution like a badge of honor. In order to make sense of such behaviors, you have to understand that your esteem isn’t really measured by other people, except to the extent that you’ve been imprinted to measure it that way.
If a kid picks on you as a child, and your parents stand up for you, you learn that what others think may not be all that important. But if your parent teases you for being a crybaby, or tells you to ignore the other kids (and implicitly dismisses your fear), or tells you that you should just learn to fight back… you learn that your sociometer needs to be calibrated more from the outside than the inside.
In principle, a fully-developed human being would not require SASS from others, but rather give SASS to others. “Natural” schools of PUA, and charisma trainers of most other types already know this: making others feel important, liked, safe, and entertained is the best way to receive these values in return.
And you can’t genuinely give any of those things to other people, unless you know how to give them to yourself.
Okay, now I’ve read it. Oddly enough, I don’t have too much to say. (The fact that it’s almost 4 AM may have something to do with that.)
And plenty of less-rational people than you are winning more at life than you
I’m not so sure about that, mostly because I still haven’t figured out what it means to be winning at life. I don’t have a job, but at least I don’t have a job I hate. For a long time, I’ve been determined to avoid ending up living Thoreau’s “life of quiet desperation” or, to use a more recent metaphor, living in a Dilbert cartoon. And I’m not living in a Dilbert cartoon. I don’t want to be Dilbert, yet another cog in the corporate machine. I’d rather be Dilbert’s garbageman, the only person in the whole strip who isn’t stupid, evil, or a victim of someone who is. My brother currently works at Goldman Sachs, and he’s getting up early so he can spend all day putting numbers into spreadsheets and then go home and collapse into bed. I don’t know if I’d trade places with him. In the fable of the grasshopper and the ant, I sort of take the side of the grasshopper, or at least that’s what try to convince myself of.
Now, if I could only stop worrying about what happens when the axe eventually falls...
I’m not so sure about that, mostly because I still haven’t figured out what it means to be winning at life. … Now, if I could only stop worrying about what happens when the axe eventually falls...
You may not know what it is, but surely you know what it’s not. ;-)
Isn’t unconditional praise empty praise? Is getting a trophy at “Everyone Gets A Trophy Day” meaningful?
No, but unconditional praise is not the same as unconditional love. (The latter seems to be closer to what PJ was talking about as parental pride, if I’m reading him correctly.) They are too often confused. Unconditional love is important, but unconditional praise is harmful, as is conditional praise that is predictable enough that the child learns to anticipate it and act based on it, praise that is given like a reward (a “status pellet”) rather than as a genuine expression of gratitude or impressedness. Alfie Kohn has written a lot of interesting things on this and related subjects.
This is reminding me of Branden’s idea of “primitive self-affirmation” which is prior to self-esteem. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen anything where he pursues the idea further.
It also reminds me of something I read when I was fairly young—it was advice to parents who have a kid with a fatal disease—to just enjoy the present with the kid. At the time, this seemed like reasonable advice, except that I had no idea of what it would mean in practice.
It may not be a coincidence that I have bad problems with akrasia.
Motivation is measured in feeling, not thinking. Thinking about what feelings you might or might not have is like dancing about architecture—it might be entertaining, but it’s not very informative. ;-)
You’re only assuming that it’s a positive motivation, and in your shoes (if I understand your situation correctly) it’s not a great assumption, even if the vast majority of Warcraft players are primarily positively-motivated.
Myself, I got bored with WoW after a couple of months, so I can’t speak for the WoW players out there.
(More relevant comments will come later, after I think of some.)
I wasn’t talking about myself in particular there. I was trying to be more abstract.
Okay, here’s something.
When I was in college, I often had something that I wanted to be doing, but I had all that damn homework to do. When I sat down to do my homework, all I could think about was how awful it was and how much I’d rather be doing something else. But if I went and did something else, I had to deal with having a lot of homework to do and not doing it. I eventually found what turned out to be a satisfactory way to resolve the dilemma.
I dropped the course, and felt very relieved afterward.
As I’ve mentioned before, I can honestly say that I only graduated because of my parents’ pressure. If I dropped out of college after my second or third year, I think I could have avoided a lot of unnecessary suffering; so far, the only real benefit I’ve gotten from my college degree has been that my parents are satisfied with the amount of education I have.
So, I’m not entirely clear, but I get the impression you’re presenting this as an example of something that you wouldn’t do if you dropped the negative motivation for it.… and implying that this is somehow bad.
If so, then I’d point out that if indeed the only positive result you got from your degree is your relief with your parents’ satisfaction, then you could’ve gotten that result a lot easier and quicker by deleting your brain’s evaluation of their dissatisfaction as a SASS threat.
FWIW, both I and my clients have passed through periods that I’ve tongue-in-cheekly called, “the dark night of the soul”—a period where you’ve removed one or more major negative motivations, and then realize you have no idea WTF you’re doing with your life or want to do with it in the future.
However, a period like this is not the result of having no negative motivation—it’s the result of having removed only one level of negative motivation, without reaching your fundamental values or criteria yet. (That is, you no longer have negative motivation, but you’re still judging your life by negative criteria.)
Once you get the criteria as well as the motivation, things start to turn around, and you begin (re)discovering all the things you actually like about life and the world. One of the key issues for me was realizing that I cannot “figure out” or “solve” what I want. (As I said, thinking about feelings is like dancing about architecture.)
What I’ve realized is that I have to actually ask myself what I already want, and that when I ask that question, there are answers, so long as I do NOT engage in trying to figure out what I should want, or what would “make me happy”, or any other sort of goal-oriented process.
Fundamentally, positive motivation is not something that you use in order to get something else. As long as you treat it as a tool to get yourself to do something, you’re still stuck in the same box—your real motivation at that point is whatever problem you’re trying to solve by adding positive motivation.
Having your parents tell you “If we are sufficiently dissatisfied, you’ll be homeless” is kind of scary. :(
Getting a college degree is supposed to be of great benefit—and if I had gone on to have a career as an engineer or programmer or something, it would have been. And at least I have the social status associated with “college graduate” instead of “college dropout”.
That sounds like me right now.
I feel like I ought to do something impressive with my life. Many of the other students in my high school thought I was some kind of super-genius who was going to end up as the next Bill Gates or something, and I feel that, by not living up to my potential, as it were, it would be like I’m letting them down. I have a fantasy that I go to sleep one day, spend the next ten to fifteen years as a philosophical zombie, and become consciousness after having done something impressive enough that I can retire and not worry about having to do anything else. (Like in those mediocre movies “13 Going on 30” and “Click”.) I’m embarrassed whenever someone asks me what I do for a living, and ashamed that I’m . I want to be respected, but I’m not willing to do what it takes to earn that respect in either the most common manner (become an employee) or the next most common manner (become an entrepreneur). And I’m worried about what will happen when my parents get too old to support me. (I’m 27, and they’re both 61.) I’ve tried my best to deal with this by simply not caring about what happens to me in the future, but that’s hard, and eventually the future happens anyway.
I think there should have been a paragraph break in there somewhere. :(
What pushes you forward, holds you back. That is, it is precisely this feeling of “ought” that is the problem.
When you have an ought or a should, it is generally shorthand for “something bad will happen if I don’t”. The something bad is not expressed, because then whenever you comply with your “should” you appear more “moral” to your compatriots, than if you are “merely” complying out of duress.
It’s essential to identify the precise nature of the unconsciously-represented threat (which is where SASS comes in), and to flip it around to the positive form of that need.
And are you afraid they won’t like you, or won’t respect you?
Don’t analyze—just feel what it’s like to let them down… is it more like being lonely and rejected, or ashamed and humiliated? Are you a less-good person for doing this, a less-important person, or something else?
In this context, ashamed and humiliated.
Ok, Status then. What would it be like if your parents were proud of you, regardless of whether you ever accomplished anything or not? (Again, don’t think… just ask the question and feel the answer.)
Relieved. And a bit guilty.
It’s like I tricked them or something—what do they have to be proud of, if all I do is stay home and do nothing? Now I’m feeling confused. My father has told me that it reflects badly on him as a parent if I don’t, say, arrive at high school on time. (He’s also said that now that I’m legally an adult, I’m not his responsibility any more, and he can’t be dragged into family court over my behavior, so I can do what I want. He also told me that a friend of his actually did have to go to family court because his daughter was always late to school.) And now I’m rambling again. Anyway, at this point, they’re perfectly happy to accept “self-sufficient” as enough from me; they don’t want me to be homeless and starving after they can’t support me financially any more, and have repeatedly made the point that “there’s no government welfare for single, non-disabled, childless men who don’t work” in the United States.
Now, this is where the fun bit comes in. Pay attention to how your brain just successfully defended you against changing your assumptions.
Specifically, the assumption that your parents need to be proud of something… when, in fact, normal healthy parents are proud of their kids when they make mudpies or say “gaga” or something.
To put it another way, your brain has habituated to assuming that your parents’ pride is supposed to be conditional on you doing something, and that it’s therefore somehow “not right” for you to feel pride in yourself, unless you’re doing something that would get your parents to be proud of you.
This is the way SASS imprinting works—we pay attention to what our parents and peers give us positive and negative SASS for, and then we internalize the algorithms we observe them using, for when to give ourselves (and other people) positive or negative SASS.
This is how we acquire our (effective) value systems, and the way to undo it is by changing the rules under which our self-supplied SASS pellets and shocks are delivered.
Part of doing this is just realizing that it’s really you who controls your own SASS allocation. Just now, by me asking you how you’d feel if your parents were proud of you, you began to feel some of the relief that you’d feel if you increased your self-delivered level of Status. (Specifically, in the “pride” part.)
Of course, as discussed elsewhere in this thread, you stopped imagining as soon as you found an objection to the experience.
Notice how you then quickly changed what you were imagining to restore your previous world model—you were to imagine what would happen if your parents had unconditional pride in you, and you immediately began asking, “but what do they have to be proud of?”
And the reason you’re “feeling confused” is because I just asked a question that draws on your brain’s information in a way that leads to a contradiction in your current mental model… similar to the confusion a theist feels when an atheist argument hits too close to home.
The response is also similar: defend the existing belief structure by treating the original belief as axiomatic… and the rest of what you wrote is, as you said, “rambling”… a successful distraction to get you away from even temporarily accepting a premise that would annihilate a chunk of your current worldview.
One of the reasons this sort of thing is difficult is because children are wired to believe their parents are intrinsically perfect, and that therefore any negative consequences of interacting with parents are considered to be your fault. If your parents aren’t proud of you (giving you Status pellets), then you must be defective.
Of course, later on in life, we do gain the ability to criticize our parents, their values and behaviors. But by that point, the damage is already done: we’ve already adopted their rules for SASS allocation, tucked away out of conscious awareness. And thus, we rarely question them.
Now, the questions I’ve asked you are part of the process of pulling your imprinted SASS allocation rules into the light, where they can be destroyed by reflection. They don’t work, however, if you back away from the question. Your desire to experience something new—to learn more of the truth, if you will—has to exceed your desire to remain comfortably within your existing world view.
If you repeat the question—and this time, actually allow yourself to experience what it would be like if your parents had always been proud of you… then a portion of your current worldview will die, but YOU will become more free.
And that’s because your current SASS rules are over-constrained compared to a normal, healthy human being—one who knows in the back of their mind that their parents were always proud of them, always loved them… and thus has set their internal Status and Affiliation setpoints to a higher minimum setting than yours.
So, if you’ve ever wondered what the difference was between you and those other people, now you know. And you also have a piece of what you need to know to DO something about it.
The rest is really up to you.
I don’t normally do the sort of thing I’ve been doing with you, with people who aren’t paying me money to do so. But that’s not as much a matter of needing to make a living, as it has to do with the fact that people who haven’t put something important on the line in order to get my advice, aren’t usually that motivated to stick with it through their resistance to the actual process of changing.
When somebody’s paying me money, though, they implicitly grant me a role and a degree of Status in their mind that facilitates their complying with my instructions, even when it’s difficult. It also allows me to hand them back some of that Status, through my paying attention to what they’re saying, and showing persistence in sticking with the interaction myself, even if it’s as difficult for me as it is for them.
(This same sort of transaction also occurs in therapy, coaching, and other paid interactions between human beings, btw. Because by default, we assume that at least our Status and Affiliation have to come from other people. The irony, however, is that the people who really have SASS in their lives are the ones who learned good rulesets from their parents for when to give themselves (and others) positive SASS.)
Anyway, now I’m rambling, too. ;-)
Okay, more thoughts. I haven’t read your response to the other comment because I haven’t finished reacting to this one yet. (And, for the record, I feel like this has already helped me more than most of the in-person therapy I’ve ever had. It’s easier for me to write these kinds of things online than it is for me to tell them to a therapist I’ve been dragged to.)
I don’t know if the focus on my parents specifically is quite right. What about peers (past, present, or imagined)?
Anyway, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure my mom is proud of me in the way you describe. My father, I’m not so sure. I don’t think he’s good at understanding other people’s emotions, and he has a tendency to be very critical. I’m a little afraid of him, too.
I’m getting a little better at imagining it, and I can believe it of my mom, but I don’t know if it’s actually true of my father. And I think it would be good to want to believe the truth, whatever it is. Litany of Tarski, Litany of Gendlin, and all that. Right now, I do want my father’s approval, very much so—but I think it might be possible for me to throw that out the window, by adopting the attitude that if he doesn’t think that, say, beating Battletoads is a worthy accomplishment, that’s his problem, not mine. The guy can’t even sing! (Should I try this?)
I think I need to get out and see more people, some of them on a regular basis. Sitting in the house alone or with my parents isn’t helping. According to legend, “There is life outside your apartment”, but I’m not sure where to find it. I’ll sign up for that Lesswrong NYC Meetup group, and maybe I’ll try to get some phone numbers from people at the local bookstore—and this time, actually call them. Anyone have any suggestions that don’t involve getting a job, taking a class, or spending a lot of money?
All right, now I’ll go read the reply to my earlier half-comment.
They can also be imprimers, but your parents tend to get first crack at you and lay down a lot of stuff before you even have any conscious/verbal comprehension of what’s going on. Fixing a block generally has to happen at the earliest point where a rule was created, not where it was later simply reinforced. Otherwise, they have a tendency to come back, which is really annoying.
If I set the thermostat on my wall to a temperature that it’s not at, does that mean I’m disbelieving the truth of the current temperature?
The objective here is not for you to believe something happened that didn’t happen. Rather, it’s to correct your mistaken judgment that your level of self-pride is to be determined by your quantity of effortful and worthy accomplishments, as judged by others.
Specifically, what happens when you imagine that your parents were always proud of you, is that your brain is forced to realize (emotionally, not just intellectually) that its current set of SASS rules are not The One True Rules For Survival In Your Tribe, but simply one possibility out of many.
That’s what I mean by “a portion of your worldview will die, but YOU will become more free.” The confusion you experienced when you first imagined it, was your brain’s reaction to the battle between your apologist and revolutionary. The rambling that followed was the apologist trying to repair the damage.
No—that entire concept is still stuck in the same worldview you have now, where people’s status is determined by the worth of their accomplishments in the eyes of another. That’s the bit of your worldview that needs to die, not be reinforced!
More specifically, it’s the rule that says your status is lowered by not having such accomplishents. It’s perfectly okay to believe that having more accomplishments raises your status, so long as the lack of accomplishments doesn’t take you below the level of status required for health and happiness.
That’s how people with healthy motivation act—they feel more pride when they accomplish things, but there’s no threat to their pride when they’re not doing anything… and thus no vicious cycle of negative motivation.
I’m about to drop this thread of conversation, because it seems to me that you’re starting to think I’m your therapist or life coach or something. If you want to fix your brain, I’ll help, but I’m not going to keep dragging you back to pay attention to the part of things that actually needs fixing.
The part of my work that I enjoy and would do to some extent without pay is the part where I actually help people… not the part where I have to beat them about the head and shoulders (figuratively speaking) to keep them focused on the bit that will actually help.
But so far, every attempt I’ve made to help someone in a significant way for free, has resulted in the person drifting off as soon as they realize that it’s still going to cost them something (in the personal/emotional sense) to change. (No matter how much they previously protested that they would be different.)
And I could be wrong, but from this comment and the other one, that’s the direction this looks like it might be taking.
Again, thank you for the whack from the Clue Stick. Sometimes you have to hear the same thing in several different ways before you understand it.
Oh, and I really am feeling a lot better now. At least for the moment.
That was the part where I start acting on my positive motivation. ;)
One thing you should be aware of is that SASS rules are often highly contextual, and removing the action of a rule in one context doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve gotten rid of it in another context, or that you don’t have overlapping and partially-redundant rules.
So, even if you’ve now removed the “unworthy if you don’t accomplish to standards” rule (and I’m not certain you have, without testing), be aware that this doesn’t equal removing all your status-negating rules, let alone your rules for other types of SASS.
By being aware of that, you’ll be less likely to conclude the whole thing is a failure, the next time a SASS-threat feeling occurs.
(This is important, btw—I went through a lot of ups and downs before I realized that the mere existence of another SASS threat after I thought I’d fixed something did NOT equal “I failed as a person and a self-help guru” and therefore justify further lowering my SASS! Recursion and paradox are always a mindhacker’s close companions, though luckily not in an exponential-blowup kind of way. More like a loops-implemented-with-recursion way. But I digress.)
Ah, ok, good then.
Okay.
Isn’t unconditional praise empty praise? Is getting a trophy at “Everyone Gets A Trophy Day” meaningful?
My parents were proud of my academic achievements. I wasn’t, not really. Doing very well in school feels more like something that happened to me, rather than something that I achieved. On the other hand, my parents don’t care that I’ve beaten Battletoads, or ascended in Nethack, or beat Space Megaforce on Tricky difficulty without continuing, but, dammit, I’m certainly proud that I managed to do it! (Unfortunately, as the saying goes, that and $3.99 plus sales tax will get you a pack of Magic cards—I have no way of making any actual money off of this.) For a long time, I’ve gotten at least some pride from sources my parents have disapproved of. On the other hand, I used to have peers to impress with my mad game-playing skillz. ;)
I’ve been arguing with my parents about the merits of video games since I was, what, twelve? My mom is still convinced the use of the word “boss” to describe the powerful enemy fought at the end of each level was a Japanese plot to make American workers less productive by making them unable to cooperate with their supervisors at work.
Um...
Thank you. I appreciate this. Really.
I have more to say in addition to the nit-picking I’ve already done in this comment, but I need to take a bit of a break right now, because I’m hungry and feeling a little down right now; I need to do something turn off the self-pity before I can start imagining myself into a different emotional state.
What you’ve just said is isomorphic to a theist arguing that their holy book is holy because it came from a god, and that they know this because it says so in the book.
Be a rationalist. How do you know what you think you know? You believe in this “empty praise” concept, because it’s part of your framework for SASS allocation, and your brain defends it for that same reason. If you want to know the truth, you need to be prepared for the possibility that it may shatter all of your premises.
If your parents had offered you a different worldview, you would currently believe something else than what you currently do. And plenty of less-rational people than you are winning more at life than you, simply because they received a slightly-more functional set of SASS allocation rules by an accident of birth.
And yet, just by having that argument, you had to have accepted the core premise that pride should be based on accomplishments stemming from personal effort—you were only arguing about which accomplishments fit this description. Other families might place pride in knowing things, being a part of the family, showing loyalty, outsmarting people, knowing the right people, or any of dozens of other possible behavioral categories.
Sociometer theory is somewhat isomorphic to the truth, but it’s lacking in important distinctions. It ignores the fact that there are people who pride themselves in being nonconformists, or the actions of people who practically beg to be persecuted, and then wear their persecution like a badge of honor. In order to make sense of such behaviors, you have to understand that your esteem isn’t really measured by other people, except to the extent that you’ve been imprinted to measure it that way.
If a kid picks on you as a child, and your parents stand up for you, you learn that what others think may not be all that important. But if your parent teases you for being a crybaby, or tells you to ignore the other kids (and implicitly dismisses your fear), or tells you that you should just learn to fight back… you learn that your sociometer needs to be calibrated more from the outside than the inside.
In principle, a fully-developed human being would not require SASS from others, but rather give SASS to others. “Natural” schools of PUA, and charisma trainers of most other types already know this: making others feel important, liked, safe, and entertained is the best way to receive these values in return.
And you can’t genuinely give any of those things to other people, unless you know how to give them to yourself.
Okay, now I’ve read it. Oddly enough, I don’t have too much to say. (The fact that it’s almost 4 AM may have something to do with that.)
I’m not so sure about that, mostly because I still haven’t figured out what it means to be winning at life. I don’t have a job, but at least I don’t have a job I hate. For a long time, I’ve been determined to avoid ending up living Thoreau’s “life of quiet desperation” or, to use a more recent metaphor, living in a Dilbert cartoon. And I’m not living in a Dilbert cartoon. I don’t want to be Dilbert, yet another cog in the corporate machine. I’d rather be Dilbert’s garbageman, the only person in the whole strip who isn’t stupid, evil, or a victim of someone who is. My brother currently works at Goldman Sachs, and he’s getting up early so he can spend all day putting numbers into spreadsheets and then go home and collapse into bed. I don’t know if I’d trade places with him. In the fable of the grasshopper and the ant, I sort of take the side of the grasshopper, or at least that’s what try to convince myself of.
Now, if I could only stop worrying about what happens when the axe eventually falls...
You may not know what it is, but surely you know what it’s not. ;-)
Not reading this one yet. Haven’t finished my reply to the other one yet.
No, but unconditional praise is not the same as unconditional love. (The latter seems to be closer to what PJ was talking about as parental pride, if I’m reading him correctly.) They are too often confused. Unconditional love is important, but unconditional praise is harmful, as is conditional praise that is predictable enough that the child learns to anticipate it and act based on it, praise that is given like a reward (a “status pellet”) rather than as a genuine expression of gratitude or impressedness. Alfie Kohn has written a lot of interesting things on this and related subjects.
This is reminding me of Branden’s idea of “primitive self-affirmation” which is prior to self-esteem. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen anything where he pursues the idea further.
It also reminds me of something I read when I was fairly young—it was advice to parents who have a kid with a fatal disease—to just enjoy the present with the kid. At the time, this seemed like reasonable advice, except that I had no idea of what it would mean in practice.
It may not be a coincidence that I have bad problems with akrasia.
What does SASS stand for?
You also could’ve searched the “Pain and Gain motivation” post page for the first reference to SASS.
(Perhaps someone should make a wiki entry for it, though.)