As opposed to what?
MixedNuts
Karma: 7,215
The standard strategy seems to be to work up to sex very progressively, going a little further on each encounter, so there’s never any bright line to cross. Why is this failing for you?
My current understanding of how hypnosis works is:
The overwhelming majority of our actions happen automatically, unconsciously, in response to triggers. Those can be external stimuli, or internal stimuli at the end of a trigger-response chain started by an external stimulus. Stimulus-response mapping are learnt through reinforcement. Examples: walking somewhere without thinking about your route (and sometimes arriving and noticing you intended to go someplace else), unthinkingly drinking from a cup in front of you. (Finding and exploiting those triggers is incredibly useful if you have executive function issues.)
In the waking state, responses are sometimes vetted consciously. This causes awareness of intent to act. Example: those studies where you can predict when someone will press a button before they can.
This “free won’t” isn’t very reliable. In particular, there’s very little you can do about imagery (“Don’t think of a purple elephant”). Examples: advertising, priming effects, conformity.
Conscious processes can’t multitask much, so by focusing attention elsewhere, stimuli cause responses more reliably and less consciously. See any study on cognitive load.
Hypnosis works by putting you in a frame of mind where cooperation is easy; that’s mostly accomplished by your expectation to be hypnotised. For self-hypnosis you’re pretty cooperative already (“I am doing that, therefore it works and it’s good.”), otherwise rapport with the hypnotist and yes sets (consenting to hypnosis, agreeing to listen/sit/look at something, truisms) help. Inducing trance seems to be mostly a matter of directing attention elsewhere while preserving this frame of mind. Old school hypnotists liked external foci like swinging pocket watches, candle flames and spirals; mindfulness inductions work similarly; Erickson was fond of pleasant imagery; I’m partial to thinking about the process of hypnosis itself.
Modern writers tend to use “trance” to mean a highly suggestible state, whereas older ones just mean a state where you act on autopilot. Flow is the latter kind of trance but not the former, as the thing you’re concentrating on does prompt you to take some actions (“play these notes”) but not in any form that resembles suggestion. I’m less certain about this than about the rest of my model, the link between trance and suggestibility might be deeper.
So the evolutionary explanation for hypnosis would look something like this:
It’s easier to build a reflex agent than a utility maximiser, so evolution did that.
However, conscious decision-making does better, especially if you’re going to be all technological and social, so evolution added one on top of the preexisting connectionist idiot.
It is easily disrupted, because evolution is a complete hack and only builds things that are robust as long as you don’t do anything unusual.
Important info you didn’t mention: the thing tastes bitter and horrendous.
I’ve found that thinking about something outside yourself (and thus not your own happiness) makes lots of people less depressed, and somewhat happy. However, the last sentence is clearly false, as many anecdotal reports of “I’m so happy!” show. Maybe it works that way for some people?
Focusing is about saying no long enough to get into flow, or at least some kind of mental state where your short-term memory doesn’t constantly evaporate. If you have to say no all the time, you’ll wind up twenty hours later having written six lines and with a head full of jelly.
Shiny boyfriend is long-distance, so moving to a different part of the wrong continent changes nothing.
Being home all day is quite depressing, yes. It works as long as I can pick myself up and go on long walks/errands/errands that turn into long walks when I get lost, but I tend to stay home more than I should.
I’m not alone, though. I have a flatmate and spend all day Skyping with shiny boyfriend and talking to friends over IM and debating on IRC. I actually crashed recently due to lack of alone time, so in the future I’ll make sure to take some.
...got tips or links on that? I’m thinking of doing that on top of my usual extended release intake, possibly in combination with other occasional-use meds such as alcohol.
I’m aware that I’m going in quite a bit more detail than you might be willing to give, but I’m confused.
Say you want to receive oral sex. (I don’t think that’s an uncommon preference.) Do you go through elaborate acrobatics so you can “just go forward” without her actively helping, or is there some nonverbal way to signal you want that (pushing her head down? smoooooth), or once you have tacitly agreed that sex is going to occur can you use words to decide what kind?
Say you want something unusual, either for society at large or relative to what you’ve done before. Do you also just go forward? That seems like it would cause quite a few “Whoa, not that” moments, and a lot of “Um, I may or may not be into what you want to do, but I can’t tell what it is” awkwardness.
Is she also just going forward with her own script, or only correcting yours when needed? If the former, doesn’t that cause confusion and bumping noses? (Maybe being good at reading body language and not so clumsy avoids that.) If the latter, isn’t that a lot of corrections (or maybe a full switch back to using words) for her to get what she wants? Or do you do a sort of Designated Control Freak thing where the last person to object becomes in charge?
I imagine most of the course corrections will be minor, along the lines of “Slow down, tiger” or “My ears aren’t really all that sensitive, kiss my neck instead”, but it seems like major ones would tend to be mood-killers. If she asks for X, you can say “Sorry, not into that, but how about Y or Z?” or “Hmm, not sure but I’d like to try”; if she starts doing X when you didn’t really expect it, you’re more likely (or so I’d guess) to go “Whoa ew no stop” or “Ouch” or “WTF are you doing?”, all of which seem hard to recover from. I assume the idea is to notice that she’s going for X, and nonverbally redirect her toward Y or Z?
Not precise enough! Do I want to have sex with you right now, after dinner, after you drive me home, next time we see each other, on your birthday, at some unspecified point in the future, after marriage? Are you my boyfriend, my friend with benefits, my date, someone I’ve been flirting with for weeks, someone I’ve been flirting with for half an hour, someone I’ve been talking to but didn’t realise there was any flirting going on, a complete stranger? Are we in bed half-naked, cuddling on the couch, at your front door, out on a date, at a nightclub, at a book club, at an orgy, on AdultFriendFinder, on LessWrong? Why are you specifying “with me”?
But… at some point you do ask if they are a Soviet spy too!
How do y’all have sex without asking at some point? Do you just kinda follow a script and try to guess the other person’s script from their body language and hope that you get it right enough that they don’t have to stop and correct you, and that your default ideas of sex more or less match? And once sex is underway, do you switch to words, or have some other method for requesting things, or just have the same kind of sex every time?
Or am I mistaken about what “asking” covers? I’m counting both asking after a makeout session and commencing sex five seconds later, and asking “Wanna meet up five days from now and do these sexual things?” and then initiating those things on the assumption you’re working from the same script.
If a pill isn’t designed to be split, it means the manufacturer thinks it’s unsafe to split. The manufacturer has expertise you should usually defer to.
In particular, don’t split bupropion unless you want a seizure.
Make sure the pills can be split, if you do that.
My personal experience only contains switches the other way. Maybe I don’t ask enough and others don’t ask me enough.
How to put this delicately… do we have any data on whether this is more likely to change a “yes” to a “no” than the opposite?
How do you do that?
I was thinking in case you need them again, to avoid the cost of convincing a doctor to prescribe them anew, but that too.
If you want to stop taking prescription meds and they’re cheap enough, keep buying them and stockpile.
(Source: Burninate)
By “quite fast” do we mean a few hours, or a few dates? If the latter: You are in fact allowed not to have sex on the first date, or the first time they’re in your bedroom. You can go as far as you’re comfortable with and no further—and know where you’ll stop in advance, so you’re not anxious beforehand, and then go a little further on subsequent dates.
Is your anxiety tied to specific acts, or to sex itself? Does it help if I point out that the boundaries of what counts as sex are very blurry, and do your anxieties change if you change what you think of as sex?