Writing this as an LMSW with 2+ years of seeing clients under my belt, this is basically how I see my role. I’m not imparting Ancient Wisdom or some magical mantra, how can I when I’m a regular schmuck like you?
Instead, I’m forcing you to look at things you might not reflect too deeply about on your own and also making you look at the parts of your life that makes your skin crawl. Not because I enjoy watching you squirm, but because its hard for us to do this ourselves and we are really good at avoiding those messy questions we have about what matters to us or why we are consistently dissatisfied.
People who do therapy and get a complex about it have completely missed the point. If it’s working, it should open up a better understanding of your processing system and discover your preferences, as Scott said. Though I lightly disagree and do think all of us have hidden compartments as it relates to what we might value and prefer. Just to different degrees.
In programming there's a process called rubber ducky debugging, where you explain your (programming) problem to a rubber ducky.
It's ridiculous, but helps surprisingly well. I wonder how much of that would work for real life problems?
The primitive chat program Eliza worked like that for some people. These days, with much better chat bots, you can do even more of that to get people to describe their problems. (But because the modern chat bots actually talk back, you need to be careful about what they say..)
Can't they just talk to themselves? In their head? Then again, apparently a lot of people literally don't have an internal monologue... How does that even work? Do they just... not think about anything abstract?
There's a lot of tricks that seem stupid but actually work, like just setting a 5 minute timer to come up with ideas for a solution to some problem. I think a lot of the problem is just people don't even begin to think about their problems in detail.
When I talk to myself in my head I frequently skip details that I find obvious or have thought about multiple times or don't find interesting. Sometimes I'll have a verbal thought and then imagine an event, image, memory, or general concept and then continue verbally to make some observation about that without fully articulating a verbal description of the intermediate thought. A word-for-word transliteration of my thoughts would be hard for an outside observer to understand because it'd be filled with non-verbal gaps. It's the brain equivalent of skimming lines you're familiar with and focusing on the important parts.
I assume some but not all people do something similar, at least some of the time.
But sometimes the solution to the problem is in the parts that you were skimming past because you didn't realize they were important. The rubber duck helps you not do this, because you're pretending it's a person who isn't you and doesn't have all the context you have in your head so you have to explain every piece of context without skipping parts.
I suppose mentally imagining a full conversation with someone else inside your head where you skip no steps and verbalize everything would do the same thing. And some people probably do that. The rubber duck just helps.
In my capacity running a laboratory, I've sometimes noticed students will propose an experiment that will produce data relevant to what they want to study, but without thinking about what exact results the experiment could produce and what we would learn from any given result. Sometimes when they perform this exercise they realize that the experiment they proposed will produce only vibes and that no result will be unambiguously interpretable.
Seems like trying to manifest a tulpa might come with costs that would be more difficult to manage than the costs associated with acquiring and talking to a rubber duck.
That depends I think. From what I understand about tulpas, you would be in a dialogue with another human being or an equivalent in terms of capacity of dialogue. But the concept of rubber duck debugging is that the rubber duck doesn't talk back. In programming, we have pair programming or asking your colleague for help to have that dialogue experience. I think the concept of the rubber duck is often you have an issue, start explaining it to someone, realize what the issue is and fix it, and with the rubber duck you save time and you don't need another person.
Same here. The usual partially verbal partially nonverbal inner speech is fast and convenient... but it also makes it very convenient to avoid noticing the uncomfortable parts.
Switch to the verbal mode, and suddenly it becomes more difficult to stop yourself mid-sentence without noticing that you did that. It also helps to state your assumptions explicitly, which I usually do when talking, but don't do when thinking.
Actually going through the process of getting the words out where you can hear them seems to force the brain to organize things. While organizing you often end up saying "Wait a minute, that doesn't follow."
Writing it down can help even more (also helps to remember it later). But it's a lot more work, and rubber ducky is often enough.
I have done rubber ducky. It may be enough to pretend you're talking to someone else in your head (someone familiar). But maybe not.
I've got a variant of rubber-ducky that I call John Carmack Debugging, where I write an email to John Carmack asking for help with a problem.
The thing is that John Carmack is a very busy person. I don't want him to email me back asking for the answer to a dumb question I should have thought of. So after writing the email, I think "well, what information is John Carmack going to want", and then I figure out something I should look for, and I go check it out and include it in the email.
Then I do that again.
After a few iterations of this I inevitably solve the problem on my own.
Speaking as someone who doesn't have an internal monologue, I can definitely think about abstract things. Honestly, it seems to me the other way around, that having one is an impairment. The way I think of it, I *can* think in words, but I don't have to, and usually don't, because words are for communicating with other people. Words are labels for concepts, and I think in concepts. Thinking about things there aren't words for isn't a stumbling block for me.
What puzzles me about people who think in internal monologues is, are you not aware you're thinking something unless your internal voice "says" it? Are you aware when you're acting on multiple motives simultaneously? If you're deciding whether to trust someone, can you weigh the pros and cons at the same time, or do you have to do it in succession?
I figure there must be people without internal monologues who aren't very self-aware, but I sometimes wonder how anyone who has one can be, if they only notice the thoughts they verbalize.
> If you're deciding whether to trust someone, can you weigh the pros and cons at the same time, or do you have to do it in succession?
Great point, I didn't even think of time dependency, or parallel vs serial advantages to wordless thoughts. I'll chalk this up as another win for "Team No Internal Monologue." :-)
But yeah, you did a better job articulating it than I did - thinking in a monologue is limiting - words kind of suck.
Just adding that this is exactly my experience, including the ability to switch between thinking modes, so N=2, at least. Thinking wordlessly is much faster than streaming a monologue but can be more error prone. My experience is that broad concepts emerge all at once and then I have to struggle to put them into a more linear word-based expression.
What is it like for you when you become aware that you're thinking of something because you see pictures?
I *can* generate visual images, but they're basically never part of my regular thought processing. I can envision what something would look like if I try to, but as far as I can recall, visual images never appear in my mind unbidden.
When I was a child, I used to be able to generate imaginary images, overlaid over my field of view while looking at other things, but this was mentally taxing and I could only do it a limited number of times in a given time frame before I'd "run out of juice" and stop being able to generate them. I didn't stop exercising this ability, but still gradually lost it as I got older (I don't remember at what age, but it was definitely gone by the age of ten.)
>What is it like for you when you become aware that you're thinking of something because you see pictures?
...I mean I'm always aware of it, because I always think that way. Anything that isn't a picture is an internal monologue/sound. (Unless you want to count emotional reactions as "thinking", which I don't.)
...I guess follow-up questions; if you don't think in monologues, does that mean you never get songs stuck in your head?
My experience is that my initial thoughts are more like feelings or shapes (this is good/feels right, that is bigger/more important than this, etc.), and I then often verbalize them a split-second afterwards if I'm focusing on them. My brain will often spit out what feels like a full idea or reaction to an idea almost instantly, and then I may spend a few seconds or longer describing that idea to myself to confirm that I really get it in a more detailed way. It sounds like other people think largely in images.
I bet noticing thoughts is somewhat independent of verbalizing. My assumption is that everyone has a stream of consciousness of different types of thoughts. Some get noticed, some don't, others get noticed but then forgotten or discarded as the stream continues to flow, etc. Meaning that people who don't verbalize don't necessarily notice all their thoughts either, although not to say that you don't.
More generally, I bet the research on things like internal monologues is pretty confused. There's probably a variety of "thinking primitives" that people use that no one has yet described well or figured out the incident of, partly because it's difficult to get people to accurately describe thought processes that are fast and not very easily describable.
>Then again, apparently a lot of people literally don't have an internal monologue... How does that even work? Do they just... not think about anything abstract?
I'm more or less like this, unless I'm specifically crafting prose for talking to somebody online or in the outside world, I don't generally think in words.
And my thoughts are fairly abstract - I was math and physics, and follow the basic overly-rational STEMLORD archetype of most male rationalists.
I think it's actually better to think without words - words inherently condense the numinous vapor of nuance into hard lines and crisp definitions (subtextual connotations aside), and reduce relationships to more simpler and more linear relationships with fewer connections.
But a lot of stuff in both the world and our thoughts are in a broad and diverse connectome of other thoughts, inferences, and relationships with a thousand other things. Think Kuhn's edgeless web of inferences and induction that are the weave and weft that all of science is built upon. A lot of things have layers of detail and connections to further inferential concepts than word-relations and word-details actually capture, the words abstract away some of the actual detail and nuance, and abstract away the farther inferential connections.
So if you can think without them, you can think more completely, or see further and more distant connections, or maybe see details and relationships you wouldn't necessarily see without writing or thinking essentially a chapters-worth of words to explore all those edges and nooks and crannies, and even then to do so incompletely.
Hey, just a heads up, I pinged you in DM's with a question - not sure how notifications work on substack, but I know I always see replies so thought it was worth notifying you here.
I think people sometimes get confused by words, and they sometimes get confused by not using words. If you have a better working memory and are smarter in general, you probably get confused less either way.
How do people with internal monologues think about abstractions that have no accompanying words? Do they think at the speed of speech? Isn't the constant chatter exhausting?
Seriously though. It's tempting for me to assume that people with constant internal monologues are worse thinkers by dint of it but I try (I try) to be more realistic and charitable. I assume everyone does the real work of cognition with the abstractions directly, and the degree to which the output (or maybe just some epiphenomenal off-gassing) is channeled into the phonological loop varies. When I "hear my thoughts" it's just because I'm preparing to communicate in some way, and preparation is exactly what it feels like. It's repetitive, derivative, and if it was happening all the time *to me* it'd be a handicap to my thinking rather than a benefit. But I'm guessing that people with internal monologues have a somewhat different relationships to their inner speech. If I'm trying to work through something, sometimes the scaffolding of language is helpful to bounce back to places I'm not naturally going in my quiet churning process. And if I'm excited about something and I'll just talk aloud "to myself"--an imaginary audience. But my best thinking is done in conversation with another (which is why I'm up in everybody's comments). Other people's ideas help you explore new places in your mental landscape much more so than climbing up on a rickety tower of your own words.
A lot of good therapy is helping people arrive at places of problematic dissonance in their own understanding, and crucially, you can't just point these out to them. This, I assume, is part of why therapists ask questions rather than, like, tell you things. You have to go through the motions yourself. I think this is a lot of why CBT is effective--it's a structured version of you having to think through why what you're thinking isn't super sense making, yourself. Not that I've ever once thought of this as "finding my authentic self," nor has any therapist presented it to me in this light. As someone who has been in therapy for psychiatric problems more or less continuously for...like 25 years?...I do not relate to the instagram girlboss version at all.
if your best thinking is done in conversation with another, surely that entails words? how do you encounter other people’s ideas if not through the medium of language?
in some of these comments unmediated conceptual thought sounds legitimately powerful as hell. but if you ever want to translate it into a real-world conversation, or to be able to act on it with something like rationale that might make sense to other people? it just seems to me that the language step isn’t dispensable.
maybe it’s a bad habit or a bad shortcut to try to work at that level literally all the time; i could buy there being real tradeoffs. but also, language is a really powerful and useful substrate to think in.
ime, thinking in language, you want to be conscious of the rough degree to which the terms you’re using are kludgy shorthand and, like, use an asterisk where necessary. if you are a sophisticated narrative manipulator there are some additional major hazards associated with that, eg self-mistrust and consequent paralysis. but major hazards of eschewing language in thought would seem to include things like ‘walling oneself off in a functionally impenetrable mental pocket universe’ which is at least as dire?
That is a good point. I'm one of the wordless thinkers, but then when it's time to communicate a nuanced idea to another person, I really struggle with putting into words the gestalt in my mind.
Unlike a yourself or a colleague, the Duck doesn't have an preconceived mental model of the problem space. So you have to walk the Duck through the problem thoroughly. That usually results in the mental gap being obvious, because you Can't skip "unimportant details."
So sure you Could, in theory, work it all out in your head, but how many of us are Fermi? Was Fermi even Fermi?
My favorite Fermi quote, about John von Neumann (to his Phd student):
"You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can. And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, so you can see how impressive Johnny is” — Enrico Fermi
I have to admit, I has just assumed that "they just talk to themselves [...] In their head" is a factually accurate description of what occurs in rubber ducky debugging.
But I'm not in silicon valley, maybe tech companies have much more advanced rubber ducks than I do.
"Can't they just talk to themselves? In their head?"
When that is working you don't need the rubber duck.
A variation of this is when the following happens:
Programmer #1: Hey, Programmer #2, can you come look at this?
Programmer #2: Sure. What's going on?
P1: This isn't working. I'm doing this and then that. It is supposed to do that, but first it does this thing that I don't want. I've been trying to debug it all day and it keeps doing this other thing. Look, let me show you ...
<opens text editor ... points to code>
P2: <starts looking at code>
P1: Oh! Shoot, I need to xxx. Thanks!
P2: Not a problem. Come over any time.
Yes, in theory, P1 doesn't need P2. And often that is the case. Sometimes, however, P1 does need P2.
I propose it's related to the mechanism that makes typos invisible until you hit "Send". That is, taking it outside your own head makes you see it differently.
I was retroactively horrified to learn that the batshit-craziest neighbor I ever had - I will spare the details but I assume most of you can fill in your own - was a credentialed therapist, or psychologist, or counselor, or whatever.
The idea that people sought her help whether to see reality or seek guidance on their decisionmaking - pretty much discredited the whole enterprise in my view.
Well, it's like anything. The 10th percentile teacher is awful, much worse than just not having any teacher. The 10th percentile masseuse will make you never want a massage again. The 10th percentile plumber introduces more problems than they fix. But it would be foolish to dismiss teachers, masseuses and plumbers whole cloth on that basis.
I am just not very chatty generally, so why should I be chatty with myself? Doing simple things doesn't need internal or external commentary, it's just intuitive. Meditation is a practice to block distracting thoughts and just be in the moment. This just comes naturally to me during many enjoyable or routine experiences. When I am practicing for a speech, I do think it through in linguistic terms.
I sometimes wonder how animals think, in so far as they do, without being able to express their thoughts in words. One can only assume they play out internal narrative dramas in their heads, visualising a sequence of actions and probable or possible conclusions.
I think shame can be a big barrier to this, similarly with talking about yourself to your loved ones.
A therapist being separate from the rest of your life means that they can ask probing questions, and you can answer those questions with the knowledge that it won't jeopardize your relationships.
But internal questioning tends to just happen in people's day to day lives, who may want to avoid considering fraught or shameful aspects of themself while trying to work and shop and talk with others.
For what it's worth, I've found that talking to myself didn't do much, and talking to a rubber duck didn't work either, but talking to ChatGPT gave me the same rubber-duck effect I got when talking about my problems to a real person.
I think it's because ChatGPT triggers the same "forcing you to break down the problem into communicable concepts" effect that you get when you explain it to people, that I don't get when I know the inanimate object isn't going to react to what I say in any way.
Depending on what specific thing is going on the helpfulness of this varies. Someone had an anecdote about their therapist, who used a nerf gun to gently point out whenever they were being excessively uncharitable to themselves or baselessly self deprecating. This was to slowly train them out of their poor self image. It can be useful to have a 3rd person to point out when your internal monologue is full of shit, such as "I enjoy this activity!" And someone asking specific questions to check it (you'll just come up with questions you can easily answer, it's much harder to be evasive with a third party)
>In programming there's a process called rubber ducky debugging, where you explain your (programming) problem to a rubber ducky.
Have you actually ever seen someone use a rubber duck for this though? I've heard people use this a few times and used the phrase myself, but it wasn't because we were talking to a rubber ducky but because we were asking someone else for help and while talking about the problem figured it out before the other person could even speak.
And I always end those discussions by apologizing and thanking the person for for being my rubber duck. And they always respond with some variant of 'no problem.' And I always vow in my head to use a duck first before I break someone else's concentration and waste their time. And yet...
You can't know ahead of time if it's a rubber duck or I.T. problem. The latter is where you have an unknown unknown stopping you, and the I.T. Guy at least knows to check for that problem (eg single apostrophes can be 3 different characters that all look the same in some fonts, but will be not equal to each-other in spreadsheet formulas)
Oh god. I spent so long wondering why my regex wasn't working correctly, and finally realised the data used the unicode 'minus' character instead of a dash.
The worst one is whitespace errors. Did you know that copy pasting 2 lines from a pdf has different whitespace characters at the line break than any other format (and you have to account for that in when making custom format text boxes)
I'd love to be someone's rubber duck. Sounds like it might be an interesting conversation assuming I understand the basics of what they're talking about.
You can even level up, starting as a rubber duck, potentially becoming a true expert on the topic.
The level after rubber duck is "Elisa", where you occasionally say random things using their previous words, or repeat a part of a sentence they said previously.
The next level is introducing some basic rationalist checks, like if they say "and then I did X, and Y happened", you ask "are you sure that Y happened? how did you check that?" or maybe "maybe Y was there already before you did X, have you checked that?".
The next level, you remember some things that were useful in previous debates, and introduce them randomly. "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" or "is is possible that the other thing was turned off?".
And after that, you do all the things from the previous levels, but also apply some actual domain logic you have already learned.
I literally have a rubber duck on my desk at work for this. It does work.
(But also I have some of those funkopop figurines that for whatever reason work better -- Lying Cat at work and Janet at home. Tutelary spirits, household gods, whatever.)
But also, in my current relatively senior role I also spend a lot of time being a human "rubber duck" for coworkers who come to me for wisdom.
The first I ever heard of this was Sid Meier's (the legendary game developer) on a podcast talking about his role in the company now that he was older. He didn't have any specific duties, but anybody could come to his office with a problem to get his advice. He kept a rubber duck on his desk and would make them explain the problem to the rubber duck first before getting his help, and often that was enough.
I'm pretty sure (but not certain) that that is where the phrase comes from. In the original context, there's also an element of the old legend teaching the younger people that they have the power themselves and don't need him, even when they think they might.
I think the point is that some things are painful to think about and someone might need the extra weight of having another person's time/interest/nagging/expertise/cost leaning on them before they'd actually think about the things that need addressing.
Eliza, rubber ducks, dogs, cats, and LLM chatbots are less effective at this. At least for some people/issues. Clearly there's a spectrum in the background here.
I think this type of process can help, but the issue is around subjects you need to address but are avoiding. I suspect a lot of people would struggle to thoroughly interrogate themselves without outside prompting. Especially if you can easily dismiss the entity, whether it’s a rubber duck or chat bot.
In operations, it's "put every step of your process on a sticky note on the wall."
I've done this a hundred times. Just by documenting the whole thing, you inevitably uncover incredibly stupid and wasteful stuff that lots of smart people have been doing for years.
I don't think that's what the job of therapy should be. The job of therapy should be to get people to be who they *want* to be (within reason), not to force people to conform to what another person (I.e. the therapist) believes their "true, authentic, deep down preferences" to be.
I agree to this extent: therapy, and people's experience with it, are heterogeneous. There's no one thing that therapy is "like." I don't doubt that some experiences with therapy are good. But I share your initial judgment that most therapy is bad.
Perhaps you can imagine instead a calculator who produces results in an unknown language. So you soon stop paying attention since you don’t understand what it says, and eventually you forget where it is altogether.
Or it produces results you mostly can't do anything about (and again you stop paying attention and then forget where it is)
I have chronic pain, and whenever a therapist asks me "where do you feel that emotion in your body?", I try to tune into my body's signals and just feel the pain I'm in, way more loudly than the emotion.
I see it more like a network error. The utility function calculator produces meaningful results and sends them to some subsystems of your body (and as a result you start smiling or yelling or you get depressed), but when the consciousness asks about the results, it gets no response.
And a good "authentic-self therapy" is about fixing the network errors, while a bad one is trying to reprogram the subsystems (either to make the utility function calculator send a different result, or to make the consciousness pretend that it received one even if in fact it did not).
this is extraordinarily well put. the two bad scenarios describe precisely why i’ve been angrily resistant to therapy (especially CBT, which is the best attested modality and best case matches the second bad scenario, worst case the first) all my life. if i trusted that a therapist was going to help me fix network errors, i think that might be a whole different calculus.
Many Thanks! Yes, that seems like a good analogy, and transmitting to one subsystem while failing to transmit to others has analogs in other domains e.g. blindsight.
My brain's utility function calculator keeps returning "undefined" when I imagine not existing.
More elaborately, it tries to simulate my emotional reaction to being in the state of non-existence, fails for obvious reasons, and returns a feeling of confusion instead of "want" or "do not want'.
I wonder to what extent asexuality and aromanticism can be explained by preference alexithymia for sexual and relationship partners, respectively. I don't think all; it's plausible to have no strong desire for any kind of sex or relationship, just like some people don't enjoy food at all as much as others. On the other hand, exploring different types of sex and relationships requires much more effort and risk than trying different foods, and if you don't realize what you're missing out on, you might never do much exploring.
Surely that would be better explained by anxiety and I bet theres already stuff about anxiety decreasing horniness and that the young have 10000% more anxiety
Asexuality is very wastebasket-y -- a lot of external theories of asexuality don't account for things like "there's a huge population of people who identify as asexual and have casual sex or sex-adjacent relationships all the time" (this is very visible in kink spaces). Theories that *do* account for this tend to buy into it too hard, i.e. "asexuality definitely includes this and you're invalidating people's experiences if you say otherwise". Any theory of asexuality has to account for "it's a label that includes a lot of very sexually or sexual-adjacent-ly active people", which quickly gets you to "there is obviously no singular underlying cause explaining all or even most of it".
Are they using the term differently than most of us hear it? Asexual used to mean, as far as I understand, having zero interest in any sex. Someone might have sex while being asexual, but it was more of a "if it will make him/her happy" rather than a desire they had themselves. Maybe they were in a relationship because their partner wanted it or to fulfil societal expectations. If that's the kind of sex these people are having, they may still meet a relatively normal version of "asexual" while still having sex.
Most kinky-asexuals seem to be people who find the "actually having sex with another person" part relatively uninteresting, but have strong sex drives directed at something a couple levels of abstraction out from "having sex with another person" (a relatively simple form of this is 'people who are a lot more into bondage than sex', but it gets really abstract further out). A lot of BDSM is surprisingly disconnected from obvious sex per se. This seems to comprise a pretty large chunk of self-identified asexuality, and likely also some parts that are less obviously kinky. People come to the label "asexual" for wildly disparate reasons -- low sex drive is one, extreme introversion is another, this is yet another, etc -- so it's not a coherent thing to talk about the singular cause of.
There definitely exist kinksters who are way more into their kink than actual sexual intercourse. I previously mentioned the time I went to a bar and there was a guy wearing a rubber suit, tied up, and suspended from the ceiling.
I didn't know that specific guy well enough to know if he's asexual, but that community definitely has people who prefer more outlandish activities to actual sex.
A term I see used a lot (in self-curated online spaces, admittedly) is 'aspec' or 'asexual spectrum.' So it can mean no or little interest in sex, or outright disgust at the prospect of sex, or someone who enjoys sex but feels their enjoyment doesn't like up with the "standard" experience of sexuality
It's like really any term in queer spaces, there's a tension between terms used for their strict definition and terms used to gesture at a community where one may find belonging.
I happen to think asexuality has at least two causes (at minimum, it really seems like some people are just born that way and others have obvious trauma), but I don't think sexual-adjacent people are an obvious problem for most explanations. If a large number of self-described anosmics were really into perfume, that could mean we are very confused about what anosmia is and should change our model to account for these people, or it could mean *they* are very confused about what anosmia is and should stop using words wrong.
I think we've talked about this in the past -- the "kinky asexuals" are definitely #2, but not necessarily are "people where that confusion is inexplicable". I can follow the logic in how "someone with little noticeable sexual attraction to other human beings" ends up at the "asexual" label, even if they very, very clearly have sexual attraction to something from a perfect bird's-eye sexologist view. This is actually, in a roundabout way, the case for some kind of preference alexithymia? People seem *remarkably* bad at noticing basic facts about themselves this way!
(The other thing to consider re. etiology of asexuality discussions is that we keep prescribing SSRIs, drugs with the well-known side effect of "20-50% of the people who take this have their sex drives ruined for life", to children.)
But unless *I* have been using the word wrong all these years, anosmia is an inability to smell, not a lack of desire to smell. And FWIW--possibly not much--some people with actual anosmia brought on by e.g. COVID do use perfumes to try to stimulate their olfactory senses to reboot.
How does one explain any of that in Darwinian terms? Would one postulate an environment in which females wind up having sex even though they don't have all that much desire for it because male sexuality compensates for their deficiency? But then the commonality of female sexuality (even if their desire is not as strong as males) is indicative that it's still being selected in them.
Female sexuality wouldn't matter that much in the first place because in humans, female consent is, well... purely optional. This is far from the standard in animals by the way; most animals do seem to have more even sexual power dynamics due to a lack of major sexual dimorphism, and in some cases, it's the females that are significantly more powerful. As a general rule, it's the females that act as the final gatekeeper to reproduction. So I have no idea how humans ended up the way they did. I understand the dimorphism is due to issues with safely giving birth, but still...
But I wasn't under the impression that humans organized socially like apes. And even in that case, females would heavily outnumber the males, and could beat the living shit out of them if they didn't like them.
(There was this one documentary I watched where they were following this one group of apes that had two males. One of them was physically weaker but was very nice to the females, and the other one was much stronger but was socially inept and generally just an unlikeable ass. There was a lot of back and forth, but one day the females got tired of the asshole ape's shit and beat him up until he ran away, leaving the nice one as the sole male of the group. Nice guys do win in the end, who knew.)
Humans, on the other hand, traditionally lived in groups that had equal gender distribution despite their significant sexual dimorphism, which inevitably results in very lopsided gender dynamics. While this probably isn't optimal, the sexual dimorphism is likely necessary to make sure females don't die while going through labor, which is only a problem in the first place because human brains are too damn big. But I'm sure you understand why making brains bigger was more important in the end.
Females being gatekeepers would actually explain females not wanting sex as much, maybe at all. If males are willing to consistently pester females until females give in (or maybe the stronger version you're alluding to), then sexual selection just becomes a female choosing which male to go with. That promotes selecting certain, mostly positive, traits among the males - strength, ability to provide, ability to defend against other males. None of that strictly requires that the females want or care about sex. There are human societies where the females all remove, or have removed for them, the ability to feel pleasure during sex, yet they still seem to have plenty of children.
(I'm not suggesting any of this is a good idea, just thinking through the implications).
I don't think it's true. If A can't kill B in an all-out confrontation, but plausibly can pry out their eye or something, does it follow from any game-theoretic or evo-game-theoretic results that A has to concede to all B's demands? Further, it makes little evolutionary sense for men to murder their rape victims (might as well not rape them), or even to damage them too severely (which would facilitate the rape when the victim could be inclined to pry out an eye).
Edit: > So I have no idea how humans ended up the way they did.
I think for mammals, humans' sexual dimorphism is about normal.
Human females have a sex drive, can orgasm and so on.
If the default mode of human reproduction was rape, then there would be little benefit to genes which enable women to enjoy sex.
In the ancestral environment, humans were not independent particles in brownian motion who would randomly collide, with the outcome of the interaction determined by sexual dimorphism. Instead, they lived in tribes. I think that having consential sex with a woman of your tribe would probably make their relatives, who had emotional bonds to her less inclined to kill you than if you violently raped her. Specifics would depend on the proto-culture, of course, and such restrictions would not apply in the context of conflict between groups.
Probably less than you'd think. Of the ace people I know, several are extremely involved in kink or have an encyclopedic knowledge of kink- and sex-related things. I think sex-preference alexithymia is much more likely in "allosexual" people, because even identifying as ace indicates you've spent more time thinking about your sexual preferences than average (or that your 15 and trying on a new label)
I would add that I’ve known several (very-online, very tumblr) young women who thought they were asexual, and now are very sure they are lesbians and are living happy lives with a sexual partner who they are attracted to and enjoy sex with. At least one also now has an autism diagnosis given by a professional.
It looked to me like some element of not realising that they were ‘allowed’ to be solely attracted to women, and that also this didn’t have to include all women. Mentally, they didn’t seem to be aware that being lesbian was an option that could really apply to them, and so they took their lack of sexual response or interest in the stuff all over the internet (and tumblr) as a sign that they were unable to feel any sexual interest. There also seemed to be an element that being asexual was higher status in their (online, at least) circles than being a lesbian (which was viewed as old-fashioned and too much about women), and also that being asexual allowed you to express a lack of interest in porny stuff and in male bodies in a way that being lesbian did not, in those spaces.
I don’t think it’s even slightly ‘one thing’. It’s an identity and label which developed on tumblr, and is used by a lot of different (almost all young) people to describe a lot of different things.
Could be. The (inverted from prior years) status dynamics produce all sorts of novel results. I remember hearing about kids saying they were 'semi-bisexual', or bisexual but only attracted to one gender--the opposite. So basically they were straight, but that means you're homophobic or something now.
I always thought I was gray-ace and only recently realized I wasn't actually attracted to most of my prior partners. Given my age this is unlikely to change, but it's kind of amusing and disturbing at the same time.
(Wait, so you had sex you didn't want to make the other person happy?) Yup, women used to do it all the time. It was actually kind of fun as the one thing they can hold over you in most cases didn't work in this case. Maybe they enjoyed not being pestered for sex.
I kinda fit the profile in that I'm (Maybe?) kinda ace, in that I never particularly want sex but do find it enjoyable in a physical sense; but not enough to reconfigure my life around it or spend any real effort to get it.
To make the traditional analogy: I've never been hungry in my life so I won't seek out pizza, but if you offer me pizza I'll still eat it because it tastes good.
Yeah, I've seen a lot written about that phenomenon among aces, and I also relate to it. These comments about the de facto character of the ace community have definitely been interesting, however...
The problem with Western therapy is that it's SO generic. If your marriage sucks, you need specific skills to make it work or alternatively I guess help finding a new partner you can be happy with. All of these things require hands on training in relevant practical skills and help with meeting three right kind of people. So a matchmaker or a life couch. Same thing if your problem is job or health or lack of good friendships - you need professional classes, social clubs, gym coach and so on. Just sitting on the couch and talking is based on ideal of mind over matter, whereas in reality humans require a right environment and skills that can only be learned through practice rather than abstract reasoning. For alexithymia it might be acting classes to practice and recognize expression of different emotions. Also it's important to recognize that people are often stuck in a local maxima and making changes is likely to initially make things worse, with no guarantee that they will ever get better. Are you really likely to improve your life long term after divorcing a cheerleader? Anyway, when such changes are undertaken, someone will need a lot of hands on support rather than just talk to get to the other end.
I wonder if this is a consequence of television/internet having so much influence on our social lives. We focus on the things that are easy to do on the screen (debating, having insights) and ignore the things that require turning away from the screen (working, training).
Or maybe it is a business thing, trying to extract a lot of value quickly in a way that scales well. If you write a book "How to Be the Most Special Snowflake", you can easily sell million copies. Doing something actually useful (coaching) won't scale that well.
Therapy can act as a bridge between what people want or need to do and what they're currently doing. A therapist won't take you bodily to acting class or hover over you while you email your friends, but they can, to put it in (actual) therapy speak, "identify barriers" to you doing those things. People who lack good friendships know they aren't going to get them by sitting alone at home--knowledge of what they ought to be doing is not what's standing in the way. Therapy can help you figure out what is standing in the way and try to diffuse or otherwise route around it. Your proposal, to skip directly to the doing of things, would only work if everybody's skills needs were the same and everybody's barriers relatively trivial. (And from the little I've seen of relationships counseling, it is allll about skills building.)
Actually I don't know. I recently made one good friend after more than 20 years of no close friendships, but I have no idea how to replicate that and make more. This is not as dire as it may sound as I am married and have kids. All the while I was not staying at home or avoiding meaningful conversations. I took many classes to develop hobbies and tried to reach out to other students to pursue those hobbies together, but nobody was ever interested.
Now, having a friend suddenly inspired me to do all kind of other good things. There were no barriers in my head, I just needed someone to come with me to a class, or share their own experiences to make me not feel my difficulties are so unique.
But in terms of helping me make more friends specifically, someone would need to a lot of people and understand who would be an apparently very rare close friendship match to me, and then provide some structure for friendship to develop. I don't see how me alone sitting on the coach and talking would accomplish this goal efficiently. I would need to become such an expert, despite my obvious lack of talent and prior success in the area.
Total spinoff from your main point, feel free to ignore:
Do people have good experiences with dating coaches (specifically) / life coaches, etc ? I'm a bit of a cranky guy and got nothing out of therapy the one time I tried it (one data point isn't enough to say therapy is useless for me, but I'm a cranky guy and generalized from one data point), and so have not looked into any sort of therapy/life coaching since. I'm curious if anyone else has had not-great experiences with therapy, but then really enjoyed a life coach / date coach / something more than sitting on a couch and talking.
Have you looked into Indian arranged marriages? You don't have to be Indian to participate. But basically the focus is to find someone with good compatibility of values and similar caliber to yourself in terms of health, finances, attractiveness and so on. Then your friends and families help vet the match for any severe issues and finally you meet and take it up from there.
Now, obviously being cranky is a disadvantage and you should make an effort to become more stable and easy going. But the process encourages both people to be open about tradeoffs. Maybe you are cranky but a good provider and she is poor and plain looking. If you both discuss these issues ahead of time and still decide to work together, it's more likely to lead to friendship that grows over time.
I’ve never met any of these overly therapists folks who feel they are better than anyone else. Is the ratio really any higher than among other groups-MDs, lawyers, yoga instructors, etc?
I believe the joke is that it is high among people who write boring stories about themselves. You find them less in real life and more on the Internet.
Therapy culture was a big thing in big cities for a while--before he got cancelled Woody Allen was a big deal, and he was big into psychoanalysis. It was quite popular in NYC in the end of the 20th century. I wouldn't be surprised if the people writing those stories are the children of the people who were into classical Freudian psychoanalysis all the time.
One more thing, in passing. My experience is that good therapy depends upon a match of the modality, practitioner, and client. There some pretty meh practitioners out there, and some modalities that I judge are less effective than others. But in the hands of a good practitioner l, even a meh modality can yield good results. And even if both practitioner and modality are meh, but are a good fit for a particular client, there can be good results. And this is without going into how easy or hard it is for the client to access their issues and their causes.
Really? I thought Scott had made a pretty good case that there wasn't much evidence at all for the superiority of some forms of therapy over others. Am I misremembering? Or do you disagree? This would be very useful information as someone planning to start it for the first time soon.
Fifty years of research supports the view that there are "common factors" across therapy modalities that determine efficacy, not the individual modalities themselves. Those common factors are: patient motivation, shared assessment between patient and therapist, and a good working relationship between the patient and therapist. So this doesn't contradict what Scott said, it adds nuance to it.
The Dodo Bird verdict. All therapies are equally good and useful! The usual explanation is that they are all placebo, which works for unclear reasons, probably something about a high-status person acknowledging your problems.
I'm the kind of person that routinely thinks through my own motivations and place in life. Often this involves 30-90 minute sessions, perhaps on a long walk, to think through what I'm feeling. I think therapy is often the same thing, for people who struggle to do this on their own. From what I understand, most good therapists just listen and ask prodding questions to keep the train of thought going, not really answer the questions themselves. Sometimes they point out the obvious conclusions of the patient's own thoughts.
Similarly, physical therapists or workout coaches could just tell people which exercises to do, with no need to have recurring sessions with the coach/therapist there. In practice, lots of people need the motivation and direction of someone else in order to do the hard part consistently.
This is as right as far as it goes, which seems further than most of the comments here. But there is, to continue the PT metaphor, much that we can't see about ourselves. Being able to take a long walk and work through things is a good start, and it seems you are satisfied with the results. If better results (from the same walk) were possible if you had more skills, would you want them?
The problem with most therapies, however, is that most of the 'skills' are palliative (if not actually just made up), and the incentives for 'style' of therapy discourage anyone from telling you true things about yourself the way a PT more easily can.
Chemotherapy doesn't make the average person better off, that's not a good metric to use for interventions.
As long as there's some people who it reliably helps, we should be focused on getting better at identifying who it can help and getting it to only them, instead of rejecting it for teh people it doesn't help.
Yes (presumably) but not the average person overall.
Presumably the analogy is as follows: Alice would be helped by therapy method A but not B. Bob would be helped by B but not A. Both methods have equal success (50% if assigned randomly) but that doesn't mean they are interchangeable or "placebo". Rather, the therapist has to strive to identify and give each patient the therapy that does work for them.
The status of psychodynamic psychotherapy as an empirically supported treatment for common mental disorders – an umbrella review based on updated criteria
Falk Leichsenring, Allan Abbass, Nikolas Heim, John R. Keefe, Steve Kisely, Patrick Luyten, Sven Rabung, Christiane Steinert
To assess the current status of psychodynamic therapy (PDT) as an empirically supported treatment (EST), we carried out a pre-registered systematic umbrella review addressing the evidence for PDT in common mental disorders in adults, based on an updated model for ESTs. Following this model, we focused on meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published in the past two years to assess efficacy. In addition, we reviewed the evidence on effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and mechanisms of change. Meta-analyses were evaluated by at least two raters using the proposed updated criteria, i.e. effect sizes, risk of bias, inconsistency, indirectness, imprecision, publication bias, treatment fidelity, and their quality as well as that of primary studies. . . . High quality evidence in depressive and somatic symptom disorders and moderate quality evidence in anxiety and personality disorders showed that PDT is superior to (inactive and active) control conditions in reducing target symptoms with clinically meaningful effect sizes. Moderate quality evidence suggests that PDT is as efficacious as other active therapies in these disorders.
Typo in the last paragraph? Fails to parse for me. "Weirdly, the original complaint a lot of people happened with the polyamory memoir that started this discussion was ..."
I think as far as True-Selfing goes, the best way to find what you are missing is to examine really closely the things in your life that don't work or aren't working, usually around social interactions. But to do this you first have to avoid blaming everyone else or other things on the thing that didn't work well and acknowledge that it's worth examining regardless of what the causative factors may be (basically, being a scientist about it and not deciding the conclusion before doing the investigation).
Why assume finding your "true self" is a good thing? Sure, they might be miserable in their current situation, but at least they have the fortune of not knowing that there's an alternative. But if they find out they do have desires that can potentially be fulfilled, how far will they go to accomplish that? Even in the example you gave, that knowledge ultimately resulted in a divorce, and that's still a relatively benign example. What if their desires completely alienate them from society? What if they have desires that can only be fulfilled through hurting others?
Desire is a dangerous, volatile thing. People without it are relatively harmless and docile. For the sake of a stable society, shouldn't we keep any unnecessary desire from flourishing?
Cooperation tends to involve an alignment of desires. It is hard to cooperate with people who don't know what they want. When it comes to design work, those are the worst clients. They want you to make them happy but can't tell you how to get there. The lack of satisfaction can get projected in unhelpful ways. It disrupts relationships.
I suspect, on average, that a person who more deeply knows their own desires will be better able to integrate into society.
I think for most desires that people are likely to unlock, this would generally be good. They find out that they should take more vacations and actually go to [type of place] and would be more fulfilled in life. As long as they recognize that nothing is going to fully fulfil them, but they are somewhat more content/happy, that all sounds good.
On the darker side, maybe they discover that they actual want to hurt people or diddle kids. That seems...less beneficial for themselves or others. Even unlocking the idea of wanting to be significantly more promiscuous can be a big problem for the person - if they cheat on their spouse, get divorced, and end up much less happy than if they had just stayed in their current lane.
It is, but ignorance of desire is not the same as absence of it. In the alexithymia paradigm Scott was describing, the person is not without desire, they simply don't understand or even know about their experience of it. In two of the examples in particular, relationships and emotions, substituting societal for psychological preferences doesn't produce "harmless and docile" behaviors between people; it more often produces cycles of explosive fights, crippling depression, and spiraling anxiety that feel totally opaque and inescapable to those trapped within them, because they don't even see the forces at play driving them to their behaviors.
> What if they have desires that can only be fulfilled through hurting others?
I guess the answer depends on what you believe will happen when they have desires to hurt others and are *not* consciously aware of that.
One school of thought says that in such case they will probably instinctively arrange situations that allow them to hurt others while having a good excuse. "I only did it in self-defense" (in a conflict that you provoked by a verbal attack). "When they grow up, they will thank me for being a conservative parent that spanked them often." Etc.
On the other hand, when you become consciously aware of that, your options are... yes, to do it anyway... but also, to *not* do it (and be aware that you are prone to rationalize), or to find a consenting partner for a role-play, or to find something similar but less harmful, etc. (Perhaps soon there will be an option to satisfy this desire by hurting virtual people in a realistic VR.)
Yeah, if I believed that I had a "true self" with currently unknown preferences, and that I could be happier if I discovered and fulfilled those preferences, I'm not sure I would want to know.
What if my true self wants to consume meth or murder prostitutes? (Or less exotically, abandon my wife and kids?)
Also, I have a selfish desire to preserve my current self over this alternative. If I knew that this true self would not only be more fulfilled but would be healthier, more accomplished and more pro-social, I guess I would turn over those cards.
I'm much more interested in therapy that can take me in a specific direction - reduce akrasia or make me a better father or something - even if my "true self" is the opposite of that.
This seems like survivorship bias to me. I mean, you're already Scott Alexander.
For the rest of us, becoming what we want to be requires a messy process that might end up failing. But we have to change to become extraordinary (ironically people like Scott, who already have it made, are flexible enough to have the best odds of opportunities of further upward momentum coming from an unexpected angle).
I used to be totally dominated by other people's preferences, but now I've discovered my true self. But is this a reasonable thing to believe? It sounds like an over-update. Much therapy takes place in a time of crisis.
I think of myself as an NPC because I don't seem to have the kind of ambition that drives people to overcome obstacles; I tend to just sit in whatever local optimum I happen to find myself in instead of trying for something better. I don't think the adults in my life intented to teach child and teenage me that what I want doesn't matter (as in this Calvin and Hobbes strip: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/10/20), and I tried my darndest to refuse to learn that lesson, but eventually I simply ran out of rebellion and became an NPC.
Part of the cause of this is that I still have legacy code in my brain that was written by an 6-year-old hedonist that goes something like this:
Everything I do can be divided into two categories: fun and work. Fun is that which I choose to do because I enjoy them. If I don't enjoy them, I shouldn't choose to do them. Work consists of all the unpleasant things that get in the way of Fun: things which I wouldn't do if I wasn't being forced to do them. I don't want to grow up to be a person like my parents who work all the time and never have fun; my goal in life is to spend as much time having as much Fun as possible and doing as little Work as possible. Corollary: jobs are always Work and never Fun, because if jobs were Fun, you wouldn't have to pay people to do them.
The biggest problem with therapy culture (not therapy, but the ecosystem/discourse around it) is not the true-selfism but (1) continuing pathologisation of normal human experiences leading to the creation or reinforcing of notions of people as both fragile and damaged and lacking resilience. See: the idea that pretty much everyone is traumatised, likely by their childhood experiences (2) outsourcing of emotional support to professionals not by necessity but because of belief that friends and family don't know how to provide it and could be dangerous (3) last but biggest, encouraging endless inward looking self-focus instead of engaging with the external physical and social world, this includes looking for internal solutions to externally solvable problems and centering internal experiences over intersubjective ones.
Disclaimer: I had actual therapy after traumatic bereavement, it was useful; and because I think by talking still see a "counsellor" I pay to sit there and listen to me talk at her without a feeling I'd need to reciprocate. So not anti therapy at all.
> continuing pathologisation of normal human experiences leading to the creation or reinforcing of notions of people as both fragile and damaged and lacking resilience
There's also the possibility that current global culture is so far gone from the kind of social environment that evolution equipped us to handle, that we've managed to push a large chunk of humanity into a state of unhealthy, constant stress. Gabor Maté makes a solid case for that in "The Myth of Normal".
Agreed. Most of our brain was wired in the ancestral environment, with perhaps a few ten thousand years of adaption (via selection) to the neolithic revolution on top of that. The idea that we are well-adapted to live in towns or use the internet seems absurd.
What I can't wrap my head around is why we perceive our world as so stressful, when our ancestors had a much higher probability of dealing with actual tragedies (war, famine, disease, injust punishment, you name it) and much less understanding and power to influence these events.
Is there an opposite situation where therapy can also help someone aware of their preference but perhaps not aware that their prioritisation of these is done to a level that makes it difficult to interact with them? I say this considering that at a lot of evangelists of therapy culture don't come across as people following cultural expectations but people who are genuinely opinionated about the correctness of their preferences, and for all the criticisms of various sorts of therapy, I don't think they reinforce that level of belief.
This exactly describes what I think is going on with jhanas - I don't think people are actually achieving transcendent joy, I think they're just detaching themselves from their emotions and convincing themselves they are, just like the guy who convinces himself he isn't angry while slamming doors.
I'm not sure personal experience is actually useful here - if I'm right than the advanced meditation experience gives you practice at convincing yourself of false things, which would mean doing advanced meditation makes you less able to judge the effects (just like drinking alcohol makes you worse at judging how drunk you are).
Yeah, there's really no way to convince you of this haha
It's like someone who's never had an altered state of consciousness thinking that any one particular altered state maps onto concepts they think they understand
All I can say is, as someone with some experience, you're in an area where you're likely to chain category errors together
There exists evidence that would persuade me - for example, if people who claimed to experience jhanas suddenly spent a lot more of their free time meditating or did other unusual/costly things to reach that mode more often. They just don't actually happen, which is why I'm skeptical.
Oh, sure I can try to explain. You only reach jhanas by letting go of any desires/preferences. They're necessarily a side effect of the journey not the end goal. The type of 'goal oriented happiness seeker' mindset that you're modeling is just incapable of getting there
Also honestly I'm confused about what your evidence/expectations are. Plenty of people who experience jhanas find that strong evidence there is 'more to discover' which motivates them to meditate a lot more.
Would you grant that the “runner’s high” is probably real? Jhana 1 is in a similar direction, they’re probably closely related. You can’t really fool yourself about it.
Runner's high is both a less implausible statement (no one claims it's a special form of transcendence, just an enjoyable experience with a clear physical trigger) and more importantly backed by evidence (people who claim to experience it run a lot more than people who don't, despite running being a lot of effort). Jhanas have lower priors (the claim is much more outlandish), and the people who claim to experience them don't act in any of the unusual ways you'd expect if they were real.
In general, moods are not a strictly internal state - someone viewing you from outside can generally infer your mood from how you act. If you claim to not be angry and slam a door, someone can infer that you're angry despite the denials. If you enjoy running, it's generally not hard to tell (people experiencing runner's high run a lot and act happy and enthusiastic about it). Jhanas different from this in that people who claim to have them don't act in the ways that you would infer "they're experiencing transcendent joy" from.
Disclosure, I'm a meditator who claims to have limited experience with the jhanas, even though they don't play a major role in my practice.
Meditative states have a distinct EEG signature. That doesn't mean they are "good" or "transcendent" or even "joyful", but I think it's unlikely that it is mere rationalization. The change to EEG is much more dramatic than ie someone telling a lie.
I think they are basically real, and the pedagogy around accessing them is going to undergo an order of magnitude improvement in the next couple of years from the efforts of Jhourney and others. So I think we can just wait and see.
Regarding your comment about "people who claimed to experience jhanas suddenly spent a lot more of their free time meditating", this is one of the markers of an stage called the "Arising and Passing Away" https://www.integrateddaniel.info/the-arising-and-passing-away. There are other roadmaps in related traditions like nondual Shaiva tantra which have fairly discrete points where people really want to pursue the path like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaktipata.
The jhanas are great but I never found them to be as transcendent as other people, though they are well outside the realm of ordinary experience. Imo, similar intensity can be experienced by other (still non-ordinary) means, and the people that freak out about them are like turbo-normies who would never do those things.
As someone who's gotten (a weaker form) of J1, I wouldn't call it "transcendent joy", just... a pretty dang nice experience that's fun to do when you're in a car (and not driving it), or waiting around for a doctor's appointment, or falling asleep for the night, or on a long plane ride, or are otherwise in a situation where there's 20 minutes to burn. Under optimal conditions, it can match mid-tier sex (though with a bafflingly high satiation-to-craving ratio relative to most other experiences, in a similar way as how microdosing on psychedelics makes a day a good deal better than default but feels weirdly aversive and I keep forgetting to do it), but that's not the typical case. The typical case is just that it's a pretty pleasant experience. I suspect the people talking it up fall into one of three categories.
1: They practiced it a whole lot.
2: They are unusually susceptible to it, in the same way that people can describe MDMA as "a transcendent life-altering experience" or just go "yeah it was pretty enjoyable".
3: They're sorts of people who relate a story of That One Time they caught a *really* big fish, instead of the (much less exciting) story of the ordinary day they caught an ordinary fish, or the ordinary day they didn't catch anything. Meditators don't tell tales of the one time they were in an airport and managed to get an off-and-on altered state going, that was about as nice as eating some fresh brownies, before getting their focus demolished five minutes later by someone a few seats over coughing too loudly.
I'm guilty of 3, personally. It takes a bit of effort to remember that about a quarter of time when I sit down and try to get J1 it doesn't properly take off.
You *can* stick an advanced meditator in an MRI machine to see what's going on when they claim they're in various jhanas, and "Case Study of Ecstatic Meditation: fMRI and EEG Evidence of Self-Stimulating a Reward System" did exactly that. Might be worth a read. They didn't get good data on J1, but got a look at the others (which I haven't been able to personally attain, I've been stuck on J1 for a while)
The way I think of it is that you’re always trying to get to a best-fit curve. Nobody gets everything they want all the time. Nobody is ever at a state of rest where things don’t need to be assessed and reassessed. You might want something at a 10 but you settle for the thing you want at a 7 because you need to accommodate some other moral imperative. We’re a buffet table of wants and motivations and I think it can be a mistake to over-identify any single one of them as your primary self. You’re the music of those things, not any single note.
Is there a word for people who understand their moods but don't understand the reason behind them very well? Like the difference between:
"I'm angry because Fred is a stupid moron coming to my office to waste my time" vs.
"I'm angry because a work task went badly, a meeting ran long, I'm hungry, and I thought I was about to have lunch but now Fred has come to my office to talk to me. Fred isn't doing anything wrong but I feel angry at him for other reasons."
The second guy is much much more likely to be nice to Fred and to control and understand his anger. He might tell Fred to come back after lunch instead of getting in a fight. It's not implausible to me that therapy could help turn person 1 into person 2, or help with a more continuous case where someone is generally unhappy or angry because of something in their lives they hadn't really thought about.
Getting people to become person 2 is something I consider part of my job. Because if you can learn to do that, you can apply that process in the future and eventually leave my office.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that 1 doesn't have alexithymia. He knows he's angry, he just doesn't understand what has caused him to be angry.
I often don't know how to connect moods to causes. This might be a defense mechanism of some kind, because if I don't know what made me sad, nobody can punish me for complaining about it. On the bright side, not connecting anger to Fred means I don't lash out at Fred when he doesn't deserve it...
Not that I know of, but how about a metaphor? Mistaking the straw that broke the camel's back for the whole load.
In other words, confusing the proximal cause of a fit of anger (Fred coming in at a bad time) with the whole load of mishaps and vexations without whose occurrence Fred's bad timing would have seemed merely a mildly annoying inconvenience.
'Maybe “finding your true self” just means “being able to access your preferences, the same way non-alexithymics do as a matter of course”.'
Meh. 'Finding' your True Self is just a bad model. Too simplistic and removed from base reality to be useful.
The brain is a network with many different structures and substructures, that form factions with varying access to consciousness, all competing, cooperating and often being very confused. There is no specific part or coalition of it, that's more true, than any of the others. You can create a self-conception, that harmonizes conflicting preferences and minimizes prediction error reliably, makes you generally thrive.... and hopefully it will last longer than next Tuesday, if you're lucky. But this is not some hidden gem deep inside a person, that just needs to be discovered. It is rather a self-propagating process that you have to build, maintain and often adapt to changing environments and requirements.
I actually think it's a pretty well defined psychological concept. Just elaborated it at length in another comment, no need to repeat here - just search my username on the page :)
I enjoyed reading your comment, hard agree on the priest hypothesis.
Regarding romantic vs psychological self:
I understand your definition of psychological "true self" to mean something like persistent patterns in the personality structures/cognition, that persist through inner work and therapy.
If this is the notion we use, then it makes no sense to say that you "find it". It's already there, by definition.
Regardless, what's interesting to me is the way those involved in "therapy culture" uses the term "true self". This is more than a metaphysical musing - the notion is connected to a few damaging Romantic era ideas.
These ideas are:
* True/ideal self is "already there" - taken seriously, this idea focuses inner work on "peeling off" layers to get to a "natural state", rather than building new capacities.
* Children are "undamaged" and "natural", and we should treat them as somehow "pure" rather than help them grow and develop.
N.b. I'm not claiming these two ideas are hard-and-fast invariant consequences, but rather reasonable stances given strong Romantic influences in your worldview.
I much prefer notions of "ideal self", a more perfect version of who you can become, an ideal to joyfully aspire to.
Hope you don't mind the rant, thanks for a thought-provoking comment
I think we're largely in agreement. Those romantic ideas are quite confused - it doesn't take much time around a toddler's tantrums to see how they are not so "pure" and "undamaged". Their polar opposite, blank slatism, is also clearly wrong. From what I've read, it seems that by the time we're 7 or so, our basic character is more or less built though, and that's what we have to work with.
So the psychological self we're talking about is largely developmental. I like the analogy of our psyche as a band trying to play together. The players and their instruments and their basic strengths and weaknesses are more or less stable (that's our basic character), but some of the instruments are out of tune, others are not plugged in, another is way too loud and distorted, the players don't listen to each other enough, and there is a weird guy in a corner with a huge bagpipe who just ignores everyone else and keeps playing his own tune. In this analogy, our "true self" is the best sound that this band is reasonably able and willing to play, if they put the effort and possibly find some guidance. I agree that "ideal self" is probably a better name for it.
Yes, I looked up the term after my dismissive comment and found it reasonably well-defined, coherent and perhaps even somewhat useful, as originally invented by Winnicott. Personally, I still prefer a modelling that's closer to specific brain structures, networks and predictive processing, but that's all admittedly a fair bit harder to make sense of quickly.
I don't think getting in touch with your "true self" is necessarily a good thing. To take the food analogy, should we encourage people to get in touch with their "true" preferences for hamburgers, crisps, and sweets? To take the sexuality analogy, should we encourage people with paraphilias to get in touch with their "true, authentic selves"?
"To take the sexuality analogy, should we encourage people with paraphilias to get in touch with their "true, authentic selves"?"
If you're rounding "paraphilia" to e.g. "acted-upon violence", no, but that's a fairly small minority of anything that can be called a paraphilia. Most things to which the term applies are fairly benign; it is probably not bad to be in touch with the fact you'd prefer your wife wear stockings during sex. For the things that *aren't* benign, having greater self-awareness and self-control over them is a good thing, not a bad one -- someone with *uncontrolled* sexually abusive urges isn't exactly an improvement. Being aware of just what the dark recesses of your soul want to goad you into is part of fighting them.
I don't even think the concept is coherent. We get to choose who we are to a great extent so there isn't a thing "your true self". Spend alot of time studying math and you go from someone who is a math phone to someone who can appreciate it (done well...can do opposite too).
In regards to advice that people do or don't need:
I've put a lot of work into improving my kinesthesia. For quite a while, I'd talk about it as though this was something that would be good for everyone and I couldn't understand why most people weren't very interested in doing it.
Later, I came to understand that I was on the numb side of typical kinesthesia. I started out on what might be considered the subtly clumsy side of normal. Functional, but not generally physically skilled, except for good dexterity.
I was surprised to find there was a reason I would occasionally fall down. My legs were so tight that I didn't step forward enough unless I swung my lower leg around the outside. If I didn't swing it high enough, I'd catch my toes on the ground and fall. In a sense, not a big deal when I was a kid, but it's much better not to be falling now.
I wasn't trying to improve walking and it was a surprise when walking changed from something to be ignored to a moderate pleasure. I was driven by a sense that something was wrong and I needed for it to be better.
Athletes use Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais Method and such because they care a lot. Most people seem to be fairly comfortable with what they can do. They might even be concerned that trying to change their kinesthesia would make matters worse rather than better.
I tune out signals from my body because if I pay close attention to how my body feels, I start feeling/noticing minor pains that have no apparent cause and that don't go away. Is that bad?
I'm not sure whether Ferrett is exaggerating his emotional reactions for humorous effect, but let's assume he isn't. It's certainly possible to have a lot of shame about physical difficulties.
How I knew I had problems with kinesthesia-- I was somewhat interested in tai chi at the beginning, and then I had some really good bodywork, which involved gentle touch and visualization-- no poking. I'm actually outraged that the trainer would poke a tight muscle like that.
I didn't actually frame it as problems with kinesthesia, I thought of it as getting moved into my body, which I think is a common framing. It's more accurate to describe it as allowing sensations from my body to register on my conscious mind.
A Gestalt Synergist (a style with involves Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method, and gestalt psychology) got my shoulders to relax, which was amazing to me because it involved sensations I didn't have words for. I thought there were words for everything. It also just seemed obvious to me that there was a change involved that I wanted more of.
She asked me whether I could feel that my shoulders were lower, which I did feel, but I lied because I couldn't believe shoulders could be lower. I thought shoulders were where they were. Quite a few years later, I got in touch and told her that I actually could feel that my shoulders were lower.
Also, years later, a therapist told me it was a bad idea to put a client on the spot by asking that sort of question.
So, how can I tell my kinesthesia was bad? Note what I said above about walking. People generally don't fall from catching their toes on the ground. It can happen as people get older and weaker, but it was happening to me when I was in elementary school. It was muscle tension rather than weakness. Back then, I had no idea what was going on, I'd just suddenly be on the ground.
I didn't figure out how to strike a match or pour water without dripping a lot until my thirties or forties. In both cases, this was a matter of timing, though striking a match also involves applying enough strength. It wasn't that my hand was too weak, it was that it simply didn't occur to me to press down firmly on the match and move a little quickly.
Attempting to pour a liquid would cause me problems with it dripping because I didn't tilt whatever I was pouring from fast enough to break the surface tension. In both cases, I could call it excessive caution which meant I didn't move decisively. I've never been able to snap my fingers.
Some of what I've written is the first I've put the details into words.
I've never done a high five successfully. My reaction is more like "why is that hand coming at me?", and then the moment is past.
Possibly related: I didn't see movement consciously until I saw the first Fantasia movie at about 15. I'm not sure when it was theatrically released in the 60s. I was young but not a little kid. It was the scene with the falling leaves.
As for Ferrett and breathing, it's similar for me, but there's a more gentle method for finding out. Put one hand on your chest and the other on your belly. Now breathe and see what moves. Your belly should expand when you inhale because your diaphragm should press down on your viscera and your muscles should be mobile enough to let your belly expand. This makes more room for your lungs.
I asked an athletic friend about whether lungs burning was a cliche that's an accurate description of the sensation of breathing hard, and he said yes. I'm only able to feel hard breathing in my throat.
Truth between us-- I don't do cardio or anything but the lightest of strength training because the sensations involved register with me as proof of my fundamental inferiority for not being able to do things easily. I'm aware this doesn't make sense, but it's quite a sore spot. Some of you are probably feeling a compulsion to give advice at this point. Please only give advice if you've had personal experience with dealing with your own exercise aversion. Otherwise, it's likely to come off as "Fix yourself right now, you stupid piece of shit."
My best theory is that I grew up in an environment where I was expected to just know how to do things. I was in my twenties until I ran into Leary's eight circuit theory which included the idea that it's normal to need to learn things and spend time being bad at them until you get better at them. That's just grasping the idea intellectually, I'm still not fully comfortable with it, though learning qi gong has helped.
> You know how sometimes you pretend to like something because it’s high-status, and if you do it well enough you actually believe you like the thing? Unless I pay a lot of attention, all my preferences end up being not “what I actually enjoy” but like “what is high status” or “what will keep people from getting angry at me”.
Honestly, this quote never cease to horrify me every time I’m reminded of it.
Isn't this simply one of those cases where different advice is applicable to different people: some people would benefit from being more assertive, others from being more mindful of others, some would benefit from taking more risks and others from being more cautious, etc along any number of dimensions, and whether advice in a given direction is good or not depends more on who takes it than on the advice itself (with the unfortunate dynamic that people are more likely to seek out advice that supports their world view, which tend to move them further along an unhealthy extreme direction). I think this is something Scott himself wrote about on the previous blog, but I can't remember the title of that piece.
Going purely of vibes, it does seem the present zeitgeist puts too high a premium on authenticity and self-discovery, but presumably there are also people who would benefit from moving farther in that direction. It would probably be better to formulate advice in terms of set points rather than directions, "this is how much you should focus on finding your true preferences relative to other concerns, adjust up or down as needed", but such advice requires more work to formulate, won't fit as well into established narratives, and is less optimized for viral spread, etc.
Come to think of it, the golden mean fallacy is a meta-example of this: avoiding extreme positions or behaviours seems like a good first-pass heuristic, but some people will take ~this~ advice too far and apply it in cases where one alternative is clearly better.
I worry you haven't sufficiently defined therapy culture. I mean it seems to me you gave a really good argument for thinking and talking about your mental state in an intelligent and engaged way.
But that's not how I would understand the term. Indeed, I'd understand therapy culture as being related to genuine self-discovery in much the way DEI culture is related to fighting racial bias and inequality. It's a kind of way of speaking and talking that creates the illusion you are handling a problem without actually doing the hard work that might help so it tends to make it worse.
Concepts keep escaping from their original therapy habitat, finding new niches and turning into cultural kudzu. PTSD triggers, a way for people with severe trauma to understand and explain their intense reactions to mostly innocuous things, become trigger warnings. Validating emotions, a thing you do because emotions can't be argued with, becomes endorsing the existence(?) of people and everything they say and do. Safe space qua your therapist's office, a way to encapsulate the idea that your therapist will neither hurt you nor reveal your secrets, becomes safe spaces everywhere. Reflective listening as employed by someone who is genuinely trying to understand you and help you feel understood becomes corporate-speak intended to defuse and dismiss concerns as quickly as possible.
Also I don't like the whole true self language because it denies the extensive role we play in constructing who we are. Our preferences aren't just given out by god -- maybe some basic dispositions -- but you can learn to have quite different preferences on most things. It's mostly stuff very near core evo activities like mating that is really super sticky.
It seems to me that there are people out there who would benefit from following the 'therapy culture' advice, but that the people who are most prone to it are those who should be seriously considering the opposite of that advice.
Now that I'm in my mid-40s, I cannot imagine wanting to see a therapist for "self-discovery" or to find my authentic True Self. If anything, my biggest problem is that I have a concept of an authentic life at all! Existentialist philosophy was an infohazard. It seems that almost everybody else manages to get through the objectively horrifying process of aging by lying to themselves, pulling little tricks on their brain, or failing that just finding one distraction after another.
The search for your true self is the kind of thing you might find appealing if you felt you were writing your life's journey from scratch, but most people's lives past 40 are more like being called in by the studio to finish the last third of a script that some dude couldn't finish because he got coked out, and who cares anyhow because it's a sequel to some genre flick of no particular distinction. There are absolutely people who can motivate themselves to do the best possible job in that situation, but I doubt they are doing it by searching their souls to find and express the real and authentic.
I must be weird, because "finish the last third of a script that some dude couldn't finish because he got coked out and who cares anyhow because it's a sequel to some genre flick of no particular distinction" actually sounds like an interesting challenge, as long as you're talking about a literal movie script and not using it as a metaphor.
If you had to give a ballpark estimate, how many people would you suspect fit this criteria?
Would you expect it to be more or less common in developed, high hierarchy-of-needs societies? Intuitively, I’d expect people to be less aware of their preferences when they’re in stressful situations, faced with more pressing concerns. That conflicts with the narrative of “therapy culture” as a luxury belief.
Hey, this is backwards. The analyst sits near the patient's head, a bit back from it so they are not visible to the patient. But maybe Blondie here wants to show off her looks?
I'm not sure whether I'm amused or dismayed that this *defense* of therapy culture includes (or at least strongly suggests) my own subculture's *critique* of therapy culture, i.e. "Therapists will just tell you to divorce your husband."
"Maybe she needed more therapy, not less! Or, at least, better therapy."
Hi Scott!
This points to an anti-generalization that I find myself saying to people more and more frequently. Someone has a bad experience at, let's say, the doctor and then generalize that the medical profession is filled with greedy crooks who order expensive irrelevant tests to cover their heinies. (Similar things can be said for other service professionals like chiropractors, lawyers, accountants, plumbers, etc.)
I struggle with migraines and went down that healthcare road myself and held that jaded perspective for a while. Standard treatments didn't work for me. But eventually, rather than live with the pain, I kept going. Found new doctors, tried new approaches, and created a treatment program that makes the migraines only a minor nuisance once every month or two rather than being an all-consuming black hole 4 times per week.
Looking back, one thing I learned is that there are good doctors and not-so-good doctors, and it makes a huge difference when you have a good one. This should be obvious, because we all know that there are clearly good teachers and not-so-good teachers. A good teacher meets the individual student where they're at rather than trying to apply a canned approach to every student. Well, many doctors, lawyers, accountants, chiropractors, therapists, etc. also take the canned one-size-fits-all approach. If they don't really care about the particulars of your situation, that's what you'll get. Or maybe they find you annoying or a hassle... Or maybe they can make more money if they spend less time on each patient...
At a college, students tell each other which professors are the good ones, but there often isn't that kind of discussion for service professionals. And so, when these issues come up, I make a point of guiding people to visit a specific chiropractor, rather than just to see "a chiropractor".
Your description of generalized prefrence alexithymia reminds me a little of Winnicott's idea of the "false self," which he argues is the result of inadequate mirroring in an individual's infancy, leading to them forming basically a hypervigilant/"compliant" relationship with the world, rather than a spontaneous one. He also argues that this sort of patient is impossible to do traditional psychoanalysis on, until their false self has been erradicated.
Therapy arose in the 19th and got big in the 20th century already, and what they now call "therapy culture" is its full mainstreaming. I don't think something quite this big would arise without answering to some need. And I don't think you need to look very far to find the need. Its early rise coincides quite well with the first wave of secularization of the West. People used to have spiritual advisors (some still do but it's no longer so mainstream). Someone with a professional role who you could talk to about your personal problems and dilemmas, and would (more or less try to) embody some accumulated traditional wisdom. I don't think it's much of a new insight that a good % of therapy is just a secular version of the same, with some changes. Now you're a paying client, which prices it out for many people (bad!), but also gives you choice and empowers you as client (good). The cultural core of the wisdom being applied is now somewhat scientifically attuned (good), but can be spiritually shallow (bad).
As to the question of the "true self", we have to be clear that we're not talking about some transcent self here, so the old debates about self vs no-self don't apply. The self we're talking about is the psychological self here, which is a fairly well-understood phenomenon. When the pieces of you at odds with each other, or exaggeratedly at odds with the world, or too porous, or whatever, get worked on and more or less integrated, you're still "yourself", with your personality and tastes and quirks, but with less suffering, less stuck, somewhat more sane, and probably more capable of embodying the kinds of personal virtues that make you happy and proud to be who you are in the long term. That's what "finding your real self" amounts to. It's good stuff.
Nowadays there has appeared a current of pushback against "therapy culture", and again it's not hard to pinpoint what kind of excess it's aiming at. We live in the era of performance of identity, awash in the mass manipulation generated by modern psychological marketing, unleashed by the lack of friction created by social media platforms. So if there's psychological self to be found, and a vague cultural awareness of it, there's immediately going to be thousands of shitty grifters trying to sell us ersatz versions of it for a subscription fee. And we should not underestimate the sheer impact of psychological marketing - people who are "well in their skin" are hard to sell shit to, so the entire enterprise is basically a globally self-optimized machine for making everyone feel bad about everything, from their body to the world we live in. So of course we do, and then we wonder where the "mental health crisis" may be coming from.
I think part of the impoverishment in the public debate about therapy is the odd mystique it has, which of course is cultivated and encouraged by psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as the universities and hospitals where they must attend extensive extra school.
At bottom, therapy is just talking to someone -- often, that person is small-minded and not very smart, but sometimes that person is insightful, creative, imaginative, and attentive. People who haven't had much of that kind of conversation before often feel, correctly, that they have discovered one of the most valuable and incredible things in the world, something they didn't really know existed or was possible. They can think things they never would have imagined they might think, they can be freed from destructive assumptions, they can practice other ways of thinking and being.
You know... kinda like the experience of reading ACX/SSC! In other words, good therapy is just... you guessed it... rationalist practice!
This is an extremely partial and grudging defence indeed.
When people criticise "therapy culture" I don't think they're against the entire concept of ever talking to anyone about your problems. I think it's mostly about the language and attitudes of therapy escaping into the wild and being used by ordinary, ostensibly-healthy people to justify being jerks.
Therapy will often teach you to focus on yourself in a way that can lead to selfishness. A certain degree of selfishness is somewhat acceptable for people who have serious problems, in the same way that lying around in bed all day is acceptable when you're seriously ill. But when the therapy mindset is used by everybody then it leads to everybody putting themselves first.
When you decide your desires are "needs" then you can justify just about anything.
Honestly, I think that the whole discussion about preferences and "finding my True Self" treats these things as exogenous to the self, imposed from the outside and immutable.
Your preferences and your "True Self" are, to a large degree, mutable. Maybe not *consciously* mutable, but for everything but the most core things, these things can be changed. And in fact *are* being mutated every time you make choices and take actions.
So your "True Self" is the one *you are currently defining by your actions, choices, and beliefs* on a day-to-day basis. And the challenge isn't to *find* this True Self, it's *creating the best True Self you can*.
As was said in the context of making RPG character choices, "Choose Different". You are the one defining your character as you go. There are no "out of character" events, there are only "my character is changing" events.
extremely niche comment that won't be explained, if you know you know:
>You know how sometimes you pretend to like something because it’s high-status, and if you do it well enough you actually believe you like the thing? Unless I pay a lot of attention, all my preferences end up being not “what I actually enjoy” but like “what is high status” or “what will keep people from getting angry at me”.
I'm guessing this friend isn't *actually* lintamande, but the quote definitely reminds me of Sevar.
The friend is Ozy (as you can see by following the link). lintamande is one of Kelsey Piper's handles (I believe this is public info, e.g. her instagram has both names). Kelsey and Ozy know each other, but are different people (or pulling a world-class pretence to be). I agree a lot of the Cheliaxi characters sound influenced by that post.
So Scott, are you talking about all psychotherapies, or about freeform talk-about-whatever therapy? If the latter, I wish you'd make that clear. CBT practitioners like me do time-limited, problem-focused treatments, and that's very different. The goals are not vague, and it's quite possible to assess whether and how much the person's problem has changed. Unless you're inclined to think that CBT, too, is mostly bogus, I wish you would make it clear that it's not in the scorned-with-a-few-grudging-exceptions category.
Also, I'd like to speak up about some ways that freeform talk therapy can be genuinely helpful to people, beyond the way you mentioned. One is to provide a place where people can unburden themselves of disturbing secrets. A guy once came to me ostensibly for treatment of a form of OCD, but he made it clear as soon as we discussed the OCD that he was absolutely unwilling to try to dismantle it. He was about 90% convinced that his OCD concerns were valid fears, and that his compulsions were necessary to keep him safe. So I said, OK, let's talk over your life for a few sessions and see if there's some other way I can be helpful. Within a couple sessions he disclosed that he had a sexual kink that nobody knew about, and that having it made him feel ugly and grotesque and separate from "normal people." So we talked in detail about his kinky interests, and I gave him some information about his kink (it's actually a common one, and last time I checked the literature people with that kink were found not to be less healthy than other people, just higher on openness to experience). And he could see that I was not creeped out by what he'd told me. And all that greatly diminished the shame he felt. So now, about a year later, he's totally "out" with his kink to his friends, and is not having trouble finding woman who like it too, or are curious to give it a try. His life's a lot better, and he spends a lot less time ruminating about OCD-related matters.
Some people come to a therapist without any secret to disclose except that they are terribly lonely, and nothing they have tried has fixed that. Some of them have good social skills and are able to "make friends," with people, but secretly feel disconnected from the friends they've made. Others are stuck in a marriage that feels dead, but are unwilling to consider divorce until the children are older. For these people, seeing a therapist is like visiting a friend. They have someone who is interested in them and wishes them well. That alone makes them feel much better, sometimes enough better to change some problematic things in their lives. I have seen therapy of this kind referred to scornfully as "buying friendship," and I actually think the term is fairly accurate, but the scorn is not so justified. All friendships involve some sort of transaction -- there are things the friend expects you to give, such as sympathetic interest in their breakup, or reassurance about something. In some ways it's cleaner to just pay cash. And I wouldn't call it fake. I don't think most of us are faking interest and goodwill. I'm not. It's one of the bonuses of being a therapist, getting to know and care about people you ordinarily would never even meet, and would not feel an affinity for if you did. The therapist just has to steer clear of expecting from the patient what they would expect from a full, real-life friend -- expecting the other person to get them, take an interest, sympathize, etc. In a lot of ways being someone's paid friend is not greatly different from sex work, which I also think is a legitimate and valuable service.
The cliché about sex work is that sex workers aren't really getting paid for the sex, they're getting paid to go away at the end of the session. I wonder whether something similar might not be true for a lot of client-therapist relationships. (Perhaps this too is already a cliché?)
Well, if we hung around indefinitely after the session a lot of the specialness of the set-up would be lost. We'd slide into small talk, or they'd feel like it was their turn to show an interest in me, or we'd go out to lunch and they'd discover ways my walking pace or eating and spending habits are not compatible with theirs, etc etc
Examples of where CBT could be accused of being bogus..
- "psychogenic" non-epileptic seizures; CBT does not reduce seizure frequency
- CFS/ME- could well be that CBT causes the patient to self-report as improved, but objective measures of recovery (such as actigraphy) show that the patient isn't improving. With a slight hint (below the level of statistical significance in the data I saw) that maybe CBT actually makes the patient sicker than no treatment.
To be blunter .. if it is indeed the case that actigraphy data shows that CBT makes CFS/ME patients sicker, and earlier clinical trials measured this actigraphy data but didn't publish the results (because the results showed the treatment was harmful), then that's serious misconduct on the part of the people doing the clinical trials.
Mire bluntly: some of CBT's claims to be "evidence based" are based n serious scientific fraud.
===
It could still be true, of course ,that CBT works for other conditions, closer to the ones it was originally tended for .
From the write up of the CODES clinical trial of CBT for dissociative seizures:
" At 12 months, no significant difference in monthly dissociative seizure frequency was identified between the groups (median 4 seizures [IQR 0–20] in the CBT plus standardised medical care group vs 7 seizures [1–35] in the standardised medical care group; estimated incidence rate ratio [IRR] 0·78 [95% CI 0·56–1·09]; p=0·144). "
I did not say CBT was appropriate for every condition, could not be used by jackasses in a stupid way, or could not be used as a treatment in a study where the researcher lied about his results. My point was that it is unlike freeform talk therapy in being symptom focused & time-limited. Also, it is clear whether the patient has benefitted or not, because the criteria for improvement are not vague ones like "increased self-acceptance." The examples of studies showing that CBT does not help certain things, and can in fact be harmful to people with some kinds of problems have no bearing on my point -- you could say the same about penicillin.
Also,, I think you misunderstood the results of the CODES trial. The hint was that CBT + usual medical care patients did *better* than those who only got usual medical care: 4 CBT + medical treatment had seizures, while 7 with medical treatment only had seizures. So the CBT + med patients did better though, as you correctly point out, the results did not reach statistical significance. Also "Benefits in the CBT plus standardised medical care treatment group included a longer period without dissociative seizures in the last 6 months of the study, fewer somatic symptoms, better health-related quality of life, and improved psychosocial functioning, compared with those who received standardised medical care alone." So while on the primary outcome measure CBT did not improve outcomes enough to reach statistical significance, it did on the secondary outcomes mentioned in the quote.
Though, honestly, CBT does not seem like a very good fit for "psychogenic" seizures. Seems likelier to me that somethings neurologically wrong with these people, even if it's not epilepsy.
There is a question of "how to" for preference alignment, and if therapy is the answer then so be it. There is also a question of how malleable our preferences are, and whether it makes sense to develop preferences that more easily attained. If preferences are malleable and therapy can make them cheaper, then so be it.
What I don't see is how preferences anywhere in this matrix would necessarily finger "therapy culture" as the solution. Is this definition of "therapy culture" the complete set of non-medication solutions?
All of this seems to be assuming that "doing what *I* want" is desirable. One alternative I've seen is
"The attitude behind the move was concisely expressed in 2010 when a contestant on a Chinese dating show told her blue-collar suitor: "I'd rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle." The statement went viral." -- Adam Minter
All of this self-centeredness is called "internally directed" in psychlogical lingo, and it's valorized in US culture, but many other cultures prioritize being "externally directed", that is, doing what society and everybody around you expects.
Then again, there are food fads that sweep US culture, along with food status characteristics. ("My farmers' market has bigger, better, fresher tomatoes than yours.") It helps when flaunting your status-gaining attitudes to consciously believe that you actually prefer those things, especially in a culture that valorizes adhering to your authentic self. It's not automatic that stating out loud what you actually prefer is the best strategy, *especially* in the Darwinian snake pit of status competition that is high school.
In regard to polyamory, I would expect that to be quite a mess. For one thing, different people have vastly different preferences for how to run their love lives and (looking at history) there's no reason to believe that we can match up people so the various matches don't contain strong disalignments in preferences. Should people openly express the disalignment between what they've got and what they want, be aware of it but suppress mentioning it, or push it out of sight into the subconscious?
I think you're conflating two issues here. One is internally vs externally directed cognition, i.e how much attention you pay to your inner state of thoughts and emotions, vs how much you pay attention to stuff out there. That's a lively debate - therapy culture says you will get benefits from spending (quality) time internally directed, but you don't have look far to find dissenting voices (see for example https://quillette.com/2024/03/08/identity-satiation/).
Another quite different thing is how much you pursue the desires you feel as your own, vs how much you pursue what society tells you you should. It's quite telling that the example you give is from Chinese, because this kind of cultural submission is a traditional characteristic of many Asian cultures, and the Chinese are really strong on it. (I'm more familiar with India, where I'd say it's powerful but not so overwhelming - also more directed towards your closer community, rather than society as a whole).
The opposite value is highly dominant in the West (yes, even in the conservative side of the great divide). Amod Lele of the blog Love of All Wisdom has a whole series on it, he names it Qualitative Individualism, and offers an analysis of its sources, which he traces back to Aristotle among others. (That's a google suggestion for anyone interested, he's worth a read.)
Given how deeply rooted this value is for modern Western culture, I'd be interested to hear it if you have a critique. These days it's so much "in the air", that the mere suggestion that you should just follow what society tells you to do is sure get some sneers, a host of examples of misdirected social beliefs (which vary depending on your personal politics), and a long list of all the ways that major societal institutions are not your friend.
I can relate to both: ignorance of feelings and ignorance of preferences. I have kinda got much better with the first one, however at times it feels I have just learned to guess my emotions by the secondary effects. Like, once I literally said “my girlfriend is always so unbearable whenever I drink coffee”, only to realize it’s not a fact about her.
However, the alexithymia of preferences is harder — I cried reading “Better than Two”, feeling “oh wow you could live like that??”. And still it took some time for me to find that “I want”
However, I wouldn’t think it’s an illness. From where I grew up — post-Soviet Ukraine, and then studied in Russia — there are lots of people who seem to be out of touch with their emotions. Coming to Canada, it surprised me how everyone could be so mature and adult with their emotions.
I’d bet it’s a developmental phase. Same as that other Scott’s post about how the gods are “literally real” for people 3000 years ago, or for kids 2-3-4 years old today. Same way, maybe some people (or cultures) are just stuck in that phase for longer?
I distinctly remember “learning” how emotions feel, and glorifying feeling of terror because it was the first one that became available. I loved reading Stephen King for a while, because that was the only way to feel emotions
"But that’s the same kind of complaint as “sometimes people without ADHD take Adderall”, not “Adderall is a scam”"
Is there any number of people without ADHD taking Adderall that can make it a scam? If Adderall really works to treat ADHD, but also 50% of the population gets a bullshit diagnosis and a prescription, you have to admit *something* is a scam, right? Would it be fair to call that thing "ADHD culture"?
I've never seen a first principles critique that objected to the basic idea of therapy. No one seems to think that talking about your problems couldn't possibly help anyone ever. Critiques of therapy culture always sound to me like people claiming ADHD is overdiagnosed, and "but Adderall really helps people with ADHD" does not address the complaint of someone who thinks ADHD is extremely rare.
Other than your specific and insightful example of alexithymia, I don’t think the notion of a true self is a helpful one.
When someone wants something, typically what they they’re aware of wanting is some intermediate—a step towards an ultimately unconscious objective. For example you might be aware that you crave a beer, but what you really want is intimacy (beer to bar to meet artificially uninhibited person to increase likelihood of intimacy). And beneath intimacy is some other unconscious objective beneath which is another and another and you can keep drilling down to the inevitable raw impulse. I don’t think a person is best defined by this, in the same sense that a car isn’t best defined by its ignition. I think humanity is best defined by all the social/cultural/ethical/practical obstacles between impulse and its realization.
Incidentally, this also relates to the way rapidly advancing technology is hollowing out society by removing many of these obstacles between raw impulse and its realization. Having things increasingly available on demand is undermining the feelings of gratitude and sacrifice and purpose at the core of stable communities.
Perhaps is is easier to start with the opposite. There are such things as pretending, or being forced to do something, or being forcefully prevented from doing something; either by literal force or by a threat. So, as a first iteration, "true self" is how one thinks / feels / acts in absence of external forces that push them to thinks / feels / acts differently.
But there is also learning, in various forms (learning facts, getting experience, discovering new things, changing one's mind...). Learning can change how one thinks / feels / acts, so... does it mean that learning changes one's "true self"? Also, there are various kinds of learning, from reading books to brainwashing, experience can be empowering or traumatizing. Is the impact of the forceful kind of learning different in principle from a currently acting force? Are you supposed to unlearn some things to achieve your "true self", and which ones exactly?
Now again, some things do *not* change, even in long term. Despite many things I have learned and changed my mind about, three decades after I started reflecting on these things, I have similar traits (e.g. intelligence, introversion), hobbies (e.g. math, science fiction), values (e.g. rationality, philanthropy). It is not exactly the same, but it feels like... a natural extrapolation of my previous self. Some of that could be blamed on biology; maybe quite a lot. When I tried to do something against my nature, I sometimes learned a lot, but then I returned to some more advanced version of the original thing. So it seems that the "true self" can evolve, but not in an arbitrary direction.
The law of equal and opposite advice applies to therapy -- some people ignore themselves, those people should start paying more attention to themselves; other people ignore the world around them, those people should start paying more attention to the world around them. Some people need to find their "true self"; some people need to learn new facts and gain new skills. Many people choose the opposite of what they need: the ones focused on themselves decide they need to know even more about themselves; the ones distracted from themselves decide they have no time for such silly things.
Both options can be abused by people who want to manipulate you. You can be pushed away from your "true self", and the abuser will declare such concept silly; or you can be pushed towards something that the abuser says is your "true self", carefully navigating you to reach the predetermined conclusion. There is a related dynamic in gender roles: men are often told to stop suppressing their emotions and show their true feelings, but when it turns out that their true feelings at given moment are socially inappropriate, e.g. they are angry or horny, or they feel sad or afraid at the moment when they are expected to be strong, they are socially punished for such self-expression.
As I see it, finding your "true self" mostly means overcoming everyday distractions and considering your long-term preferences, and also identifying external pressures and finding out what you would want to do in absence of those pressures. Then, maybe you can plan how to overcome those forces and act on those preferences. And then you need to stop dreaming and actually do it.
Unawareness of preferences vs the toxic therapy-talk as two kinda-opposed traps that one can be reminds me of something Scott wrote about before. Therapy mindsets are in the water supply and perhaps now some people are getting an overdose. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/16/cbt-in-the-water-supply/
I think the criticism of therapy culture needs some refinement to figure out exactly what it is.
- I have a friend with probably BPD whose life was literally turned around by cognitive behavioral therapy. The change in her life and her ability to function was night and day.
- Less drastically, I don't think most people would disagree that having someone thoughtful to talk out your problems with might help, in the same way that a personal trainer can help with fitness or a life coach can help you achieve goals.
- That said, I suspect that the critics of therapy culture have some narrower complaints that are more interesting.
This post seems so incredibly wrong it might not even fit into the "not even wrong" category. The number of people eating PB&Js who hate peanut butter (as a totally bizarre example), jelly, or bread and can be cured with therapy is approximately zero. The true problem with therapy is that it tells peanut butter haters that hating peanut butter is fine. Almost all therapy is re-enforcement of terrible behaviors such as complaining about things that take less time to do on your own than they take for you to ask your spouse to do, pretending your chemical addictions are normal, justifying abnormal behaviors, etc.
The rare therapist is the one who tells a 36 year old woman that her husband is actually quite good because he works and loves his kids. And that therapist is the only one who is correct in 99.99% of situations.
Just as a side note: preference falsification is a thing of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification. And, as a non US person, have always found Americans to be universally alexithymia - affected.
To the point now - I personally find it incredibly annoying when people ask for my "favorite" (movie, food, book, etc., even friend!). One software provider whose password recovery mechanism asked me to input ONE in a choice of 10 "favorites" just made me despair - I could not find ANY clear favorite in a list of ten categories. Not everyone has a single clear top preference. In anything. And no it doesn't mean that it's all the same to me. I have setsof likings, just no clear rankings inside those sets of likings. And, "different" does not imply a ranking. Generally speaking, I like diversity more than anything else. Which fits of course the whole polyamory theme.
Therapy culture is another auto-brainwashing phenomenon invented by society to voluntarily entrench conformity. What's worse is most people who would actually benefit from therapy lie on some personality disorder spectrum, and are the worst candidates for psychotherapy for they don't see anything amiss. I think the result of therapy is partially determined a priori. The result is a falsehood, just like everything else. Everyone dies anyway, there's no point.
It is very important to keep in mind that although we all have preferences, some of which we may discover later in life, many of those preferences – perhaps all of them — are malleable. Foods we once found distasteful, after we’ve made them a part of our diet for a while, come to be enjoyable. We hate running or rising early, but after choosing to do it for a while, we come to take great pleasure in it. This is especially true for things that are good and healthy. Over time, we come to love things that at first we did only through difficult choice. It would be a huge mistake to imagine that we discover our true selves simply by identifying the things we currently prefer, or to imagine that our “true self” is little more than our present cravings.
I don't know a Greek word for it, either, but this "preference alexithymia" reminds be on what Maslow has written on what he called the "pseudo self" (in "Toward a Psychology of Being"). Traumatised people, often children, whose wishes and preferences are denied for long enough, will become blind to them. Their own idea of themselves is subsumed by internalised standards of others.
Writing this as an LMSW with 2+ years of seeing clients under my belt, this is basically how I see my role. I’m not imparting Ancient Wisdom or some magical mantra, how can I when I’m a regular schmuck like you?
Instead, I’m forcing you to look at things you might not reflect too deeply about on your own and also making you look at the parts of your life that makes your skin crawl. Not because I enjoy watching you squirm, but because its hard for us to do this ourselves and we are really good at avoiding those messy questions we have about what matters to us or why we are consistently dissatisfied.
People who do therapy and get a complex about it have completely missed the point. If it’s working, it should open up a better understanding of your processing system and discover your preferences, as Scott said. Though I lightly disagree and do think all of us have hidden compartments as it relates to what we might value and prefer. Just to different degrees.
In programming there's a process called rubber ducky debugging, where you explain your (programming) problem to a rubber ducky.
It's ridiculous, but helps surprisingly well. I wonder how much of that would work for real life problems?
The primitive chat program Eliza worked like that for some people. These days, with much better chat bots, you can do even more of that to get people to describe their problems. (But because the modern chat bots actually talk back, you need to be careful about what they say..)
Can't they just talk to themselves? In their head? Then again, apparently a lot of people literally don't have an internal monologue... How does that even work? Do they just... not think about anything abstract?
There's a lot of tricks that seem stupid but actually work, like just setting a 5 minute timer to come up with ideas for a solution to some problem. I think a lot of the problem is just people don't even begin to think about their problems in detail.
When I talk to myself in my head I frequently skip details that I find obvious or have thought about multiple times or don't find interesting. Sometimes I'll have a verbal thought and then imagine an event, image, memory, or general concept and then continue verbally to make some observation about that without fully articulating a verbal description of the intermediate thought. A word-for-word transliteration of my thoughts would be hard for an outside observer to understand because it'd be filled with non-verbal gaps. It's the brain equivalent of skimming lines you're familiar with and focusing on the important parts.
I assume some but not all people do something similar, at least some of the time.
But sometimes the solution to the problem is in the parts that you were skimming past because you didn't realize they were important. The rubber duck helps you not do this, because you're pretending it's a person who isn't you and doesn't have all the context you have in your head so you have to explain every piece of context without skipping parts.
I suppose mentally imagining a full conversation with someone else inside your head where you skip no steps and verbalize everything would do the same thing. And some people probably do that. The rubber duck just helps.
In my capacity running a laboratory, I've sometimes noticed students will propose an experiment that will produce data relevant to what they want to study, but without thinking about what exact results the experiment could produce and what we would learn from any given result. Sometimes when they perform this exercise they realize that the experiment they proposed will produce only vibes and that no result will be unambiguously interpretable.
It's interesting that a rubber duck can do so much good.
I wonder how much good a tulpa could do. It seems likely it could be as good as a rubber duck. Could it be better?
I suspect anyone raised on sesame street finds it easier to manifest a tulpa from a rubber ducky than most things.
Do de rubber duck!
https://youtu.be/W6_d22aMqZs?si=qdCvi3s5mweBkdBs
Seems like trying to manifest a tulpa might come with costs that would be more difficult to manage than the costs associated with acquiring and talking to a rubber duck.
That depends I think. From what I understand about tulpas, you would be in a dialogue with another human being or an equivalent in terms of capacity of dialogue. But the concept of rubber duck debugging is that the rubber duck doesn't talk back. In programming, we have pair programming or asking your colleague for help to have that dialogue experience. I think the concept of the rubber duck is often you have an issue, start explaining it to someone, realize what the issue is and fix it, and with the rubber duck you save time and you don't need another person.
Same here. The usual partially verbal partially nonverbal inner speech is fast and convenient... but it also makes it very convenient to avoid noticing the uncomfortable parts.
Switch to the verbal mode, and suddenly it becomes more difficult to stop yourself mid-sentence without noticing that you did that. It also helps to state your assumptions explicitly, which I usually do when talking, but don't do when thinking.
You can develop some pretty far-out ideas whose degree of falsehood is hard to see without external input.
The rubber ducky doesn't give you external input. It just forces you to verbalise everything, and don't take mental shortcuts, like described by https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-some?r=67x85&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=51696377
Actually going through the process of getting the words out where you can hear them seems to force the brain to organize things. While organizing you often end up saying "Wait a minute, that doesn't follow."
Writing it down can help even more (also helps to remember it later). But it's a lot more work, and rubber ducky is often enough.
I have done rubber ducky. It may be enough to pretend you're talking to someone else in your head (someone familiar). But maybe not.
I've got a variant of rubber-ducky that I call John Carmack Debugging, where I write an email to John Carmack asking for help with a problem.
The thing is that John Carmack is a very busy person. I don't want him to email me back asking for the answer to a dumb question I should have thought of. So after writing the email, I think "well, what information is John Carmack going to want", and then I figure out something I should look for, and I go check it out and include it in the email.
Then I do that again.
After a few iterations of this I inevitably solve the problem on my own.
I've never actually emailed John Carmack.
He might actually enjoy getting the series of revised emails. (In a convenient package.)
Now I'm wondering whether prayer works (or can work) in exactly the same way.
Exactly. Typing the problem into a Slack DM to my boss is often enough to solve the problem without ever sending the DM!
Speaking as someone who doesn't have an internal monologue, I can definitely think about abstract things. Honestly, it seems to me the other way around, that having one is an impairment. The way I think of it, I *can* think in words, but I don't have to, and usually don't, because words are for communicating with other people. Words are labels for concepts, and I think in concepts. Thinking about things there aren't words for isn't a stumbling block for me.
What puzzles me about people who think in internal monologues is, are you not aware you're thinking something unless your internal voice "says" it? Are you aware when you're acting on multiple motives simultaneously? If you're deciding whether to trust someone, can you weigh the pros and cons at the same time, or do you have to do it in succession?
I figure there must be people without internal monologues who aren't very self-aware, but I sometimes wonder how anyone who has one can be, if they only notice the thoughts they verbalize.
> If you're deciding whether to trust someone, can you weigh the pros and cons at the same time, or do you have to do it in succession?
Great point, I didn't even think of time dependency, or parallel vs serial advantages to wordless thoughts. I'll chalk this up as another win for "Team No Internal Monologue." :-)
But yeah, you did a better job articulating it than I did - thinking in a monologue is limiting - words kind of suck.
Just adding that this is exactly my experience, including the ability to switch between thinking modes, so N=2, at least. Thinking wordlessly is much faster than streaming a monologue but can be more error prone. My experience is that broad concepts emerge all at once and then I have to struggle to put them into a more linear word-based expression.
>are you not aware you're thinking something unless your internal voice "says" it?
No, it's not exclusively monologue, there's pictures in there too.
>If you're deciding whether to trust someone, can you weigh the pros and cons at the same time, or do you have to do it in succession?
I can't do anything at the same time. Everything is in succession.
What is it like for you when you become aware that you're thinking of something because you see pictures?
I *can* generate visual images, but they're basically never part of my regular thought processing. I can envision what something would look like if I try to, but as far as I can recall, visual images never appear in my mind unbidden.
When I was a child, I used to be able to generate imaginary images, overlaid over my field of view while looking at other things, but this was mentally taxing and I could only do it a limited number of times in a given time frame before I'd "run out of juice" and stop being able to generate them. I didn't stop exercising this ability, but still gradually lost it as I got older (I don't remember at what age, but it was definitely gone by the age of ten.)
>What is it like for you when you become aware that you're thinking of something because you see pictures?
...I mean I'm always aware of it, because I always think that way. Anything that isn't a picture is an internal monologue/sound. (Unless you want to count emotional reactions as "thinking", which I don't.)
...I guess follow-up questions; if you don't think in monologues, does that mean you never get songs stuck in your head?
My experience is that my initial thoughts are more like feelings or shapes (this is good/feels right, that is bigger/more important than this, etc.), and I then often verbalize them a split-second afterwards if I'm focusing on them. My brain will often spit out what feels like a full idea or reaction to an idea almost instantly, and then I may spend a few seconds or longer describing that idea to myself to confirm that I really get it in a more detailed way. It sounds like other people think largely in images.
I bet noticing thoughts is somewhat independent of verbalizing. My assumption is that everyone has a stream of consciousness of different types of thoughts. Some get noticed, some don't, others get noticed but then forgotten or discarded as the stream continues to flow, etc. Meaning that people who don't verbalize don't necessarily notice all their thoughts either, although not to say that you don't.
More generally, I bet the research on things like internal monologues is pretty confused. There's probably a variety of "thinking primitives" that people use that no one has yet described well or figured out the incident of, partly because it's difficult to get people to accurately describe thought processes that are fast and not very easily describable.
>Then again, apparently a lot of people literally don't have an internal monologue... How does that even work? Do they just... not think about anything abstract?
I'm more or less like this, unless I'm specifically crafting prose for talking to somebody online or in the outside world, I don't generally think in words.
And my thoughts are fairly abstract - I was math and physics, and follow the basic overly-rational STEMLORD archetype of most male rationalists.
I think it's actually better to think without words - words inherently condense the numinous vapor of nuance into hard lines and crisp definitions (subtextual connotations aside), and reduce relationships to more simpler and more linear relationships with fewer connections.
But a lot of stuff in both the world and our thoughts are in a broad and diverse connectome of other thoughts, inferences, and relationships with a thousand other things. Think Kuhn's edgeless web of inferences and induction that are the weave and weft that all of science is built upon. A lot of things have layers of detail and connections to further inferential concepts than word-relations and word-details actually capture, the words abstract away some of the actual detail and nuance, and abstract away the farther inferential connections.
So if you can think without them, you can think more completely, or see further and more distant connections, or maybe see details and relationships you wouldn't necessarily see without writing or thinking essentially a chapters-worth of words to explore all those edges and nooks and crannies, and even then to do so incompletely.
I wonder. I do have a pretty clear internal monologue, and was a pretty big STEMlord back in the day.
Hey, just a heads up, I pinged you in DM's with a question - not sure how notifications work on substack, but I know I always see replies so thought it was worth notifying you here.
I think people sometimes get confused by words, and they sometimes get confused by not using words. If you have a better working memory and are smarter in general, you probably get confused less either way.
How do people with internal monologues think about abstractions that have no accompanying words? Do they think at the speed of speech? Isn't the constant chatter exhausting?
Seriously though. It's tempting for me to assume that people with constant internal monologues are worse thinkers by dint of it but I try (I try) to be more realistic and charitable. I assume everyone does the real work of cognition with the abstractions directly, and the degree to which the output (or maybe just some epiphenomenal off-gassing) is channeled into the phonological loop varies. When I "hear my thoughts" it's just because I'm preparing to communicate in some way, and preparation is exactly what it feels like. It's repetitive, derivative, and if it was happening all the time *to me* it'd be a handicap to my thinking rather than a benefit. But I'm guessing that people with internal monologues have a somewhat different relationships to their inner speech. If I'm trying to work through something, sometimes the scaffolding of language is helpful to bounce back to places I'm not naturally going in my quiet churning process. And if I'm excited about something and I'll just talk aloud "to myself"--an imaginary audience. But my best thinking is done in conversation with another (which is why I'm up in everybody's comments). Other people's ideas help you explore new places in your mental landscape much more so than climbing up on a rickety tower of your own words.
A lot of good therapy is helping people arrive at places of problematic dissonance in their own understanding, and crucially, you can't just point these out to them. This, I assume, is part of why therapists ask questions rather than, like, tell you things. You have to go through the motions yourself. I think this is a lot of why CBT is effective--it's a structured version of you having to think through why what you're thinking isn't super sense making, yourself. Not that I've ever once thought of this as "finding my authentic self," nor has any therapist presented it to me in this light. As someone who has been in therapy for psychiatric problems more or less continuously for...like 25 years?...I do not relate to the instagram girlboss version at all.
if your best thinking is done in conversation with another, surely that entails words? how do you encounter other people’s ideas if not through the medium of language?
in some of these comments unmediated conceptual thought sounds legitimately powerful as hell. but if you ever want to translate it into a real-world conversation, or to be able to act on it with something like rationale that might make sense to other people? it just seems to me that the language step isn’t dispensable.
maybe it’s a bad habit or a bad shortcut to try to work at that level literally all the time; i could buy there being real tradeoffs. but also, language is a really powerful and useful substrate to think in.
ime, thinking in language, you want to be conscious of the rough degree to which the terms you’re using are kludgy shorthand and, like, use an asterisk where necessary. if you are a sophisticated narrative manipulator there are some additional major hazards associated with that, eg self-mistrust and consequent paralysis. but major hazards of eschewing language in thought would seem to include things like ‘walling oneself off in a functionally impenetrable mental pocket universe’ which is at least as dire?
That is a good point. I'm one of the wordless thinkers, but then when it's time to communicate a nuanced idea to another person, I really struggle with putting into words the gestalt in my mind.
Unlike a yourself or a colleague, the Duck doesn't have an preconceived mental model of the problem space. So you have to walk the Duck through the problem thoroughly. That usually results in the mental gap being obvious, because you Can't skip "unimportant details."
So sure you Could, in theory, work it all out in your head, but how many of us are Fermi? Was Fermi even Fermi?
Besides, rubber ducks are cheap.
My favorite Fermi quote, about John von Neumann (to his Phd student):
"You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can. And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, so you can see how impressive Johnny is” — Enrico Fermi
I have to admit, I has just assumed that "they just talk to themselves [...] In their head" is a factually accurate description of what occurs in rubber ducky debugging.
But I'm not in silicon valley, maybe tech companies have much more advanced rubber ducks than I do.
"Can't they just talk to themselves? In their head?"
When that is working you don't need the rubber duck.
A variation of this is when the following happens:
Programmer #1: Hey, Programmer #2, can you come look at this?
Programmer #2: Sure. What's going on?
P1: This isn't working. I'm doing this and then that. It is supposed to do that, but first it does this thing that I don't want. I've been trying to debug it all day and it keeps doing this other thing. Look, let me show you ...
<opens text editor ... points to code>
P2: <starts looking at code>
P1: Oh! Shoot, I need to xxx. Thanks!
P2: Not a problem. Come over any time.
Yes, in theory, P1 doesn't need P2. And often that is the case. Sometimes, however, P1 does need P2.
No, we don't know why.
I propose it's related to the mechanism that makes typos invisible until you hit "Send". That is, taking it outside your own head makes you see it differently.
I was retroactively horrified to learn that the batshit-craziest neighbor I ever had - I will spare the details but I assume most of you can fill in your own - was a credentialed therapist, or psychologist, or counselor, or whatever.
The idea that people sought her help whether to see reality or seek guidance on their decisionmaking - pretty much discredited the whole enterprise in my view.
Well, it's like anything. The 10th percentile teacher is awful, much worse than just not having any teacher. The 10th percentile masseuse will make you never want a massage again. The 10th percentile plumber introduces more problems than they fix. But it would be foolish to dismiss teachers, masseuses and plumbers whole cloth on that basis.
I'd say there might be an unfortunate correlation with crazy, in those drawn to the field. But my n is small, for sure.
A school counselor I knew was a chaos agent, and not in a good way.
I am just not very chatty generally, so why should I be chatty with myself? Doing simple things doesn't need internal or external commentary, it's just intuitive. Meditation is a practice to block distracting thoughts and just be in the moment. This just comes naturally to me during many enjoyable or routine experiences. When I am practicing for a speech, I do think it through in linguistic terms.
I sometimes wonder how animals think, in so far as they do, without being able to express their thoughts in words. One can only assume they play out internal narrative dramas in their heads, visualising a sequence of actions and probable or possible conclusions.
I think shame can be a big barrier to this, similarly with talking about yourself to your loved ones.
A therapist being separate from the rest of your life means that they can ask probing questions, and you can answer those questions with the knowledge that it won't jeopardize your relationships.
But internal questioning tends to just happen in people's day to day lives, who may want to avoid considering fraught or shameful aspects of themself while trying to work and shop and talk with others.
For what it's worth, I've found that talking to myself didn't do much, and talking to a rubber duck didn't work either, but talking to ChatGPT gave me the same rubber-duck effect I got when talking about my problems to a real person.
I think it's because ChatGPT triggers the same "forcing you to break down the problem into communicable concepts" effect that you get when you explain it to people, that I don't get when I know the inanimate object isn't going to react to what I say in any way.
Depending on what specific thing is going on the helpfulness of this varies. Someone had an anecdote about their therapist, who used a nerf gun to gently point out whenever they were being excessively uncharitable to themselves or baselessly self deprecating. This was to slowly train them out of their poor self image. It can be useful to have a 3rd person to point out when your internal monologue is full of shit, such as "I enjoy this activity!" And someone asking specific questions to check it (you'll just come up with questions you can easily answer, it's much harder to be evasive with a third party)
>In programming there's a process called rubber ducky debugging, where you explain your (programming) problem to a rubber ducky.
Have you actually ever seen someone use a rubber duck for this though? I've heard people use this a few times and used the phrase myself, but it wasn't because we were talking to a rubber ducky but because we were asking someone else for help and while talking about the problem figured it out before the other person could even speak.
And I always end those discussions by apologizing and thanking the person for for being my rubber duck. And they always respond with some variant of 'no problem.' And I always vow in my head to use a duck first before I break someone else's concentration and waste their time. And yet...
Good habits are hard to build.
You can't know ahead of time if it's a rubber duck or I.T. problem. The latter is where you have an unknown unknown stopping you, and the I.T. Guy at least knows to check for that problem (eg single apostrophes can be 3 different characters that all look the same in some fonts, but will be not equal to each-other in spreadsheet formulas)
Oh god. I spent so long wondering why my regex wasn't working correctly, and finally realised the data used the unicode 'minus' character instead of a dash.
The worst one is whitespace errors. Did you know that copy pasting 2 lines from a pdf has different whitespace characters at the line break than any other format (and you have to account for that in when making custom format text boxes)
I'd love to be someone's rubber duck. Sounds like it might be an interesting conversation assuming I understand the basics of what they're talking about.
You can even level up, starting as a rubber duck, potentially becoming a true expert on the topic.
The level after rubber duck is "Elisa", where you occasionally say random things using their previous words, or repeat a part of a sentence they said previously.
The next level is introducing some basic rationalist checks, like if they say "and then I did X, and Y happened", you ask "are you sure that Y happened? how did you check that?" or maybe "maybe Y was there already before you did X, have you checked that?".
The next level, you remember some things that were useful in previous debates, and introduce them randomly. "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" or "is is possible that the other thing was turned off?".
And after that, you do all the things from the previous levels, but also apply some actual domain logic you have already learned.
I've had people thank me for my rubber duck service after I told them the goddamn answer.
I literally have a rubber duck on my desk at work for this. It does work.
(But also I have some of those funkopop figurines that for whatever reason work better -- Lying Cat at work and Janet at home. Tutelary spirits, household gods, whatever.)
But also, in my current relatively senior role I also spend a lot of time being a human "rubber duck" for coworkers who come to me for wisdom.
I also have a literal rubber duck - it's "dressed like a scientist" (in a lab coat and goggles), I got it at a biotech conference
The first I ever heard of this was Sid Meier's (the legendary game developer) on a podcast talking about his role in the company now that he was older. He didn't have any specific duties, but anybody could come to his office with a problem to get his advice. He kept a rubber duck on his desk and would make them explain the problem to the rubber duck first before getting his help, and often that was enough.
I'm pretty sure (but not certain) that that is where the phrase comes from. In the original context, there's also an element of the old legend teaching the younger people that they have the power themselves and don't need him, even when they think they might.
I think the point is that some things are painful to think about and someone might need the extra weight of having another person's time/interest/nagging/expertise/cost leaning on them before they'd actually think about the things that need addressing.
Eliza, rubber ducks, dogs, cats, and LLM chatbots are less effective at this. At least for some people/issues. Clearly there's a spectrum in the background here.
I think this type of process can help, but the issue is around subjects you need to address but are avoiding. I suspect a lot of people would struggle to thoroughly interrogate themselves without outside prompting. Especially if you can easily dismiss the entity, whether it’s a rubber duck or chat bot.
Never heard of this but I love it.
Seems like it should only be surprising if one thinks of one's mind as an open book.
If you think of most of your mind as a black box, it's maybe less surprising that using it differently results in different outcomes.
In operations, it's "put every step of your process on a sticky note on the wall."
I've done this a hundred times. Just by documenting the whole thing, you inevitably uncover incredibly stupid and wasteful stuff that lots of smart people have been doing for years.
I've done that, too. But only when I was trying to understand a (needlessly complex) release process.
I don't think that's what the job of therapy should be. The job of therapy should be to get people to be who they *want* to be (within reason), not to force people to conform to what another person (I.e. the therapist) believes their "true, authentic, deep down preferences" to be.
Therapist here and I agree with you. I read Mike above as also agreeing with you.
I mean consciously want, not unconsciously.
Say more?
I agree to this extent: therapy, and people's experience with it, are heterogeneous. There's no one thing that therapy is "like." I don't doubt that some experiences with therapy are good. But I share your initial judgment that most therapy is bad.
>Imagine someone with generalized preference alexithymia.
Can I imagine a utility function calculator subsystem which keeps throwing arithmetic exceptions? :-)
Perhaps you can imagine instead a calculator who produces results in an unknown language. So you soon stop paying attention since you don’t understand what it says, and eventually you forget where it is altogether.
Many Thanks! Good point!
Or it produces results you mostly can't do anything about (and again you stop paying attention and then forget where it is)
I have chronic pain, and whenever a therapist asks me "where do you feel that emotion in your body?", I try to tune into my body's signals and just feel the pain I'm in, way more loudly than the emotion.
I see it more like a network error. The utility function calculator produces meaningful results and sends them to some subsystems of your body (and as a result you start smiling or yelling or you get depressed), but when the consciousness asks about the results, it gets no response.
And a good "authentic-self therapy" is about fixing the network errors, while a bad one is trying to reprogram the subsystems (either to make the utility function calculator send a different result, or to make the consciousness pretend that it received one even if in fact it did not).
this is extraordinarily well put. the two bad scenarios describe precisely why i’ve been angrily resistant to therapy (especially CBT, which is the best attested modality and best case matches the second bad scenario, worst case the first) all my life. if i trusted that a therapist was going to help me fix network errors, i think that might be a whole different calculus.
Many Thanks! Yes, that seems like a good analogy, and transmitting to one subsystem while failing to transmit to others has analogs in other domains e.g. blindsight.
My brain's utility function calculator keeps returning "undefined" when I imagine not existing.
More elaborately, it tries to simulate my emotional reaction to being in the state of non-existence, fails for obvious reasons, and returns a feeling of confusion instead of "want" or "do not want'.
Many Thanks! Well, to me, "undefined" does seem to be the right answer for that case... :-)
Neither "want" nor "do not want" capture "past caring"...
I wonder to what extent asexuality and aromanticism can be explained by preference alexithymia for sexual and relationship partners, respectively. I don't think all; it's plausible to have no strong desire for any kind of sex or relationship, just like some people don't enjoy food at all as much as others. On the other hand, exploring different types of sex and relationships requires much more effort and risk than trying different foods, and if you don't realize what you're missing out on, you might never do much exploring.
Surely that would be better explained by anxiety and I bet theres already stuff about anxiety decreasing horniness and that the young have 10000% more anxiety
Alas, anxiety reducing medication also often suppresses libido.
I suspect this is a very underreported factor.
Asexuality is very wastebasket-y -- a lot of external theories of asexuality don't account for things like "there's a huge population of people who identify as asexual and have casual sex or sex-adjacent relationships all the time" (this is very visible in kink spaces). Theories that *do* account for this tend to buy into it too hard, i.e. "asexuality definitely includes this and you're invalidating people's experiences if you say otherwise". Any theory of asexuality has to account for "it's a label that includes a lot of very sexually or sexual-adjacent-ly active people", which quickly gets you to "there is obviously no singular underlying cause explaining all or even most of it".
Are they using the term differently than most of us hear it? Asexual used to mean, as far as I understand, having zero interest in any sex. Someone might have sex while being asexual, but it was more of a "if it will make him/her happy" rather than a desire they had themselves. Maybe they were in a relationship because their partner wanted it or to fulfil societal expectations. If that's the kind of sex these people are having, they may still meet a relatively normal version of "asexual" while still having sex.
Most kinky-asexuals seem to be people who find the "actually having sex with another person" part relatively uninteresting, but have strong sex drives directed at something a couple levels of abstraction out from "having sex with another person" (a relatively simple form of this is 'people who are a lot more into bondage than sex', but it gets really abstract further out). A lot of BDSM is surprisingly disconnected from obvious sex per se. This seems to comprise a pretty large chunk of self-identified asexuality, and likely also some parts that are less obviously kinky. People come to the label "asexual" for wildly disparate reasons -- low sex drive is one, extreme introversion is another, this is yet another, etc -- so it's not a coherent thing to talk about the singular cause of.
There definitely exist kinksters who are way more into their kink than actual sexual intercourse. I previously mentioned the time I went to a bar and there was a guy wearing a rubber suit, tied up, and suspended from the ceiling.
I didn't know that specific guy well enough to know if he's asexual, but that community definitely has people who prefer more outlandish activities to actual sex.
That dude clearly knows what he wants and is going to go and do it ... but what hw ants isn't conventional sex, exactly.
(Readers could perhaps imagine the scene illustrated in the style of Tom of Finland...)
A term I see used a lot (in self-curated online spaces, admittedly) is 'aspec' or 'asexual spectrum.' So it can mean no or little interest in sex, or outright disgust at the prospect of sex, or someone who enjoys sex but feels their enjoyment doesn't like up with the "standard" experience of sexuality
It's like really any term in queer spaces, there's a tension between terms used for their strict definition and terms used to gesture at a community where one may find belonging.
I happen to think asexuality has at least two causes (at minimum, it really seems like some people are just born that way and others have obvious trauma), but I don't think sexual-adjacent people are an obvious problem for most explanations. If a large number of self-described anosmics were really into perfume, that could mean we are very confused about what anosmia is and should change our model to account for these people, or it could mean *they* are very confused about what anosmia is and should stop using words wrong.
I think we've talked about this in the past -- the "kinky asexuals" are definitely #2, but not necessarily are "people where that confusion is inexplicable". I can follow the logic in how "someone with little noticeable sexual attraction to other human beings" ends up at the "asexual" label, even if they very, very clearly have sexual attraction to something from a perfect bird's-eye sexologist view. This is actually, in a roundabout way, the case for some kind of preference alexithymia? People seem *remarkably* bad at noticing basic facts about themselves this way!
(The other thing to consider re. etiology of asexuality discussions is that we keep prescribing SSRIs, drugs with the well-known side effect of "20-50% of the people who take this have their sex drives ruined for life", to children.)
But unless *I* have been using the word wrong all these years, anosmia is an inability to smell, not a lack of desire to smell. And FWIW--possibly not much--some people with actual anosmia brought on by e.g. COVID do use perfumes to try to stimulate their olfactory senses to reboot.
How does one explain any of that in Darwinian terms? Would one postulate an environment in which females wind up having sex even though they don't have all that much desire for it because male sexuality compensates for their deficiency? But then the commonality of female sexuality (even if their desire is not as strong as males) is indicative that it's still being selected in them.
Female sexuality wouldn't matter that much in the first place because in humans, female consent is, well... purely optional. This is far from the standard in animals by the way; most animals do seem to have more even sexual power dynamics due to a lack of major sexual dimorphism, and in some cases, it's the females that are significantly more powerful. As a general rule, it's the females that act as the final gatekeeper to reproduction. So I have no idea how humans ended up the way they did. I understand the dimorphism is due to issues with safely giving birth, but still...
sexual dimorphism is often linked to multiple partners or harems.
But I wasn't under the impression that humans organized socially like apes. And even in that case, females would heavily outnumber the males, and could beat the living shit out of them if they didn't like them.
(There was this one documentary I watched where they were following this one group of apes that had two males. One of them was physically weaker but was very nice to the females, and the other one was much stronger but was socially inept and generally just an unlikeable ass. There was a lot of back and forth, but one day the females got tired of the asshole ape's shit and beat him up until he ran away, leaving the nice one as the sole male of the group. Nice guys do win in the end, who knew.)
Humans, on the other hand, traditionally lived in groups that had equal gender distribution despite their significant sexual dimorphism, which inevitably results in very lopsided gender dynamics. While this probably isn't optimal, the sexual dimorphism is likely necessary to make sure females don't die while going through labor, which is only a problem in the first place because human brains are too damn big. But I'm sure you understand why making brains bigger was more important in the end.
Females being gatekeepers would actually explain females not wanting sex as much, maybe at all. If males are willing to consistently pester females until females give in (or maybe the stronger version you're alluding to), then sexual selection just becomes a female choosing which male to go with. That promotes selecting certain, mostly positive, traits among the males - strength, ability to provide, ability to defend against other males. None of that strictly requires that the females want or care about sex. There are human societies where the females all remove, or have removed for them, the ability to feel pleasure during sex, yet they still seem to have plenty of children.
(I'm not suggesting any of this is a good idea, just thinking through the implications).
> female consent is, well... purely optional.
I don't think it's true. If A can't kill B in an all-out confrontation, but plausibly can pry out their eye or something, does it follow from any game-theoretic or evo-game-theoretic results that A has to concede to all B's demands? Further, it makes little evolutionary sense for men to murder their rape victims (might as well not rape them), or even to damage them too severely (which would facilitate the rape when the victim could be inclined to pry out an eye).
Edit: > So I have no idea how humans ended up the way they did.
I think for mammals, humans' sexual dimorphism is about normal.
Human females have a sex drive, can orgasm and so on.
If the default mode of human reproduction was rape, then there would be little benefit to genes which enable women to enjoy sex.
In the ancestral environment, humans were not independent particles in brownian motion who would randomly collide, with the outcome of the interaction determined by sexual dimorphism. Instead, they lived in tribes. I think that having consential sex with a woman of your tribe would probably make their relatives, who had emotional bonds to her less inclined to kill you than if you violently raped her. Specifics would depend on the proto-culture, of course, and such restrictions would not apply in the context of conflict between groups.
Probably less than you'd think. Of the ace people I know, several are extremely involved in kink or have an encyclopedic knowledge of kink- and sex-related things. I think sex-preference alexithymia is much more likely in "allosexual" people, because even identifying as ace indicates you've spent more time thinking about your sexual preferences than average (or that your 15 and trying on a new label)
I would add that I’ve known several (very-online, very tumblr) young women who thought they were asexual, and now are very sure they are lesbians and are living happy lives with a sexual partner who they are attracted to and enjoy sex with. At least one also now has an autism diagnosis given by a professional.
It looked to me like some element of not realising that they were ‘allowed’ to be solely attracted to women, and that also this didn’t have to include all women. Mentally, they didn’t seem to be aware that being lesbian was an option that could really apply to them, and so they took their lack of sexual response or interest in the stuff all over the internet (and tumblr) as a sign that they were unable to feel any sexual interest. There also seemed to be an element that being asexual was higher status in their (online, at least) circles than being a lesbian (which was viewed as old-fashioned and too much about women), and also that being asexual allowed you to express a lack of interest in porny stuff and in male bodies in a way that being lesbian did not, in those spaces.
I don’t think it’s even slightly ‘one thing’. It’s an identity and label which developed on tumblr, and is used by a lot of different (almost all young) people to describe a lot of different things.
Could be. The (inverted from prior years) status dynamics produce all sorts of novel results. I remember hearing about kids saying they were 'semi-bisexual', or bisexual but only attracted to one gender--the opposite. So basically they were straight, but that means you're homophobic or something now.
I always thought I was gray-ace and only recently realized I wasn't actually attracted to most of my prior partners. Given my age this is unlikely to change, but it's kind of amusing and disturbing at the same time.
(Wait, so you had sex you didn't want to make the other person happy?) Yup, women used to do it all the time. It was actually kind of fun as the one thing they can hold over you in most cases didn't work in this case. Maybe they enjoyed not being pestered for sex.
I kinda fit the profile in that I'm (Maybe?) kinda ace, in that I never particularly want sex but do find it enjoyable in a physical sense; but not enough to reconfigure my life around it or spend any real effort to get it.
To make the traditional analogy: I've never been hungry in my life so I won't seek out pizza, but if you offer me pizza I'll still eat it because it tastes good.
Yeah, I've seen a lot written about that phenomenon among aces, and I also relate to it. These comments about the de facto character of the ace community have definitely been interesting, however...
The problem with Western therapy is that it's SO generic. If your marriage sucks, you need specific skills to make it work or alternatively I guess help finding a new partner you can be happy with. All of these things require hands on training in relevant practical skills and help with meeting three right kind of people. So a matchmaker or a life couch. Same thing if your problem is job or health or lack of good friendships - you need professional classes, social clubs, gym coach and so on. Just sitting on the couch and talking is based on ideal of mind over matter, whereas in reality humans require a right environment and skills that can only be learned through practice rather than abstract reasoning. For alexithymia it might be acting classes to practice and recognize expression of different emotions. Also it's important to recognize that people are often stuck in a local maxima and making changes is likely to initially make things worse, with no guarantee that they will ever get better. Are you really likely to improve your life long term after divorcing a cheerleader? Anyway, when such changes are undertaken, someone will need a lot of hands on support rather than just talk to get to the other end.
I wonder if this is a consequence of television/internet having so much influence on our social lives. We focus on the things that are easy to do on the screen (debating, having insights) and ignore the things that require turning away from the screen (working, training).
Or maybe it is a business thing, trying to extract a lot of value quickly in a way that scales well. If you write a book "How to Be the Most Special Snowflake", you can easily sell million copies. Doing something actually useful (coaching) won't scale that well.
Therapy can act as a bridge between what people want or need to do and what they're currently doing. A therapist won't take you bodily to acting class or hover over you while you email your friends, but they can, to put it in (actual) therapy speak, "identify barriers" to you doing those things. People who lack good friendships know they aren't going to get them by sitting alone at home--knowledge of what they ought to be doing is not what's standing in the way. Therapy can help you figure out what is standing in the way and try to diffuse or otherwise route around it. Your proposal, to skip directly to the doing of things, would only work if everybody's skills needs were the same and everybody's barriers relatively trivial. (And from the little I've seen of relationships counseling, it is allll about skills building.)
Actually I don't know. I recently made one good friend after more than 20 years of no close friendships, but I have no idea how to replicate that and make more. This is not as dire as it may sound as I am married and have kids. All the while I was not staying at home or avoiding meaningful conversations. I took many classes to develop hobbies and tried to reach out to other students to pursue those hobbies together, but nobody was ever interested.
Now, having a friend suddenly inspired me to do all kind of other good things. There were no barriers in my head, I just needed someone to come with me to a class, or share their own experiences to make me not feel my difficulties are so unique.
But in terms of helping me make more friends specifically, someone would need to a lot of people and understand who would be an apparently very rare close friendship match to me, and then provide some structure for friendship to develop. I don't see how me alone sitting on the coach and talking would accomplish this goal efficiently. I would need to become such an expert, despite my obvious lack of talent and prior success in the area.
Total spinoff from your main point, feel free to ignore:
Do people have good experiences with dating coaches (specifically) / life coaches, etc ? I'm a bit of a cranky guy and got nothing out of therapy the one time I tried it (one data point isn't enough to say therapy is useless for me, but I'm a cranky guy and generalized from one data point), and so have not looked into any sort of therapy/life coaching since. I'm curious if anyone else has had not-great experiences with therapy, but then really enjoyed a life coach / date coach / something more than sitting on a couch and talking.
Have you looked into Indian arranged marriages? You don't have to be Indian to participate. But basically the focus is to find someone with good compatibility of values and similar caliber to yourself in terms of health, finances, attractiveness and so on. Then your friends and families help vet the match for any severe issues and finally you meet and take it up from there.
Now, obviously being cranky is a disadvantage and you should make an effort to become more stable and easy going. But the process encourages both people to be open about tradeoffs. Maybe you are cranky but a good provider and she is poor and plain looking. If you both discuss these issues ahead of time and still decide to work together, it's more likely to lead to friendship that grows over time.
Wait, so Indian matchmakers will set up Westerners? That's interesting. Pale skin is seen as attractive so I guess I could see that.
I’ve never met any of these overly therapists folks who feel they are better than anyone else. Is the ratio really any higher than among other groups-MDs, lawyers, yoga instructors, etc?
I believe the joke is that it is high among people who write boring stories about themselves. You find them less in real life and more on the Internet.
Therapy culture was a big thing in big cities for a while--before he got cancelled Woody Allen was a big deal, and he was big into psychoanalysis. It was quite popular in NYC in the end of the 20th century. I wouldn't be surprised if the people writing those stories are the children of the people who were into classical Freudian psychoanalysis all the time.
One more thing, in passing. My experience is that good therapy depends upon a match of the modality, practitioner, and client. There some pretty meh practitioners out there, and some modalities that I judge are less effective than others. But in the hands of a good practitioner l, even a meh modality can yield good results. And even if both practitioner and modality are meh, but are a good fit for a particular client, there can be good results. And this is without going into how easy or hard it is for the client to access their issues and their causes.
Lots of research on efficacy supports your second sentence.
Really? I thought Scott had made a pretty good case that there wasn't much evidence at all for the superiority of some forms of therapy over others. Am I misremembering? Or do you disagree? This would be very useful information as someone planning to start it for the first time soon.
Fifty years of research supports the view that there are "common factors" across therapy modalities that determine efficacy, not the individual modalities themselves. Those common factors are: patient motivation, shared assessment between patient and therapist, and a good working relationship between the patient and therapist. So this doesn't contradict what Scott said, it adds nuance to it.
I'm confused. What you're saying above is exactly how I understood it. But the second sentence that you initially referred to was:
> There some pretty meh practitioners out there, and some modalities that I judge are less effective than others.
Isn't that contradicted by the idea that it is "not the individual modalities themselves that determine efficacy"?
Ah! The second sentence I was referring to is:
“ My experience is that good therapy depends upon a match of the modality, practitioner, and client.”
Oh ffs, I am an idiot. How did I miss that?!
Apologies.
What is the evidence that therapy culture (or perhaps, just therapy) actually makes people better off, on average?
The Dodo Bird verdict. All therapies are equally good and useful! The usual explanation is that they are all placebo, which works for unclear reasons, probably something about a high-status person acknowledging your problems.
I'm the kind of person that routinely thinks through my own motivations and place in life. Often this involves 30-90 minute sessions, perhaps on a long walk, to think through what I'm feeling. I think therapy is often the same thing, for people who struggle to do this on their own. From what I understand, most good therapists just listen and ask prodding questions to keep the train of thought going, not really answer the questions themselves. Sometimes they point out the obvious conclusions of the patient's own thoughts.
Similarly, physical therapists or workout coaches could just tell people which exercises to do, with no need to have recurring sessions with the coach/therapist there. In practice, lots of people need the motivation and direction of someone else in order to do the hard part consistently.
This is as right as far as it goes, which seems further than most of the comments here. But there is, to continue the PT metaphor, much that we can't see about ourselves. Being able to take a long walk and work through things is a good start, and it seems you are satisfied with the results. If better results (from the same walk) were possible if you had more skills, would you want them?
The problem with most therapies, however, is that most of the 'skills' are palliative (if not actually just made up), and the incentives for 'style' of therapy discourage anyone from telling you true things about yourself the way a PT more easily can.
Chemotherapy doesn't make the average person better off, that's not a good metric to use for interventions.
As long as there's some people who it reliably helps, we should be focused on getting better at identifying who it can help and getting it to only them, instead of rejecting it for teh people it doesn't help.
It doesn't make the average person its prescribed to better off?
Yes (presumably) but not the average person overall.
Presumably the analogy is as follows: Alice would be helped by therapy method A but not B. Bob would be helped by B but not A. Both methods have equal success (50% if assigned randomly) but that doesn't mean they are interchangeable or "placebo". Rather, the therapist has to strive to identify and give each patient the therapy that does work for them.
The status of psychodynamic psychotherapy as an empirically supported treatment for common mental disorders – an umbrella review based on updated criteria
Falk Leichsenring, Allan Abbass, Nikolas Heim, John R. Keefe, Steve Kisely, Patrick Luyten, Sven Rabung, Christiane Steinert
First published: 09 May 2023
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.21104
Abstract
To assess the current status of psychodynamic therapy (PDT) as an empirically supported treatment (EST), we carried out a pre-registered systematic umbrella review addressing the evidence for PDT in common mental disorders in adults, based on an updated model for ESTs. Following this model, we focused on meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published in the past two years to assess efficacy. In addition, we reviewed the evidence on effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and mechanisms of change. Meta-analyses were evaluated by at least two raters using the proposed updated criteria, i.e. effect sizes, risk of bias, inconsistency, indirectness, imprecision, publication bias, treatment fidelity, and their quality as well as that of primary studies. . . . High quality evidence in depressive and somatic symptom disorders and moderate quality evidence in anxiety and personality disorders showed that PDT is superior to (inactive and active) control conditions in reducing target symptoms with clinically meaningful effect sizes. Moderate quality evidence suggests that PDT is as efficacious as other active therapies in these disorders.
Thank you.
Typo in the last paragraph? Fails to parse for me. "Weirdly, the original complaint a lot of people happened with the polyamory memoir that started this discussion was ..."
Yeah, I think "happened" should be "had".
I think as far as True-Selfing goes, the best way to find what you are missing is to examine really closely the things in your life that don't work or aren't working, usually around social interactions. But to do this you first have to avoid blaming everyone else or other things on the thing that didn't work well and acknowledge that it's worth examining regardless of what the causative factors may be (basically, being a scientist about it and not deciding the conclusion before doing the investigation).
Why assume finding your "true self" is a good thing? Sure, they might be miserable in their current situation, but at least they have the fortune of not knowing that there's an alternative. But if they find out they do have desires that can potentially be fulfilled, how far will they go to accomplish that? Even in the example you gave, that knowledge ultimately resulted in a divorce, and that's still a relatively benign example. What if their desires completely alienate them from society? What if they have desires that can only be fulfilled through hurting others?
Desire is a dangerous, volatile thing. People without it are relatively harmless and docile. For the sake of a stable society, shouldn't we keep any unnecessary desire from flourishing?
Cooperation tends to involve an alignment of desires. It is hard to cooperate with people who don't know what they want. When it comes to design work, those are the worst clients. They want you to make them happy but can't tell you how to get there. The lack of satisfaction can get projected in unhelpful ways. It disrupts relationships.
I suspect, on average, that a person who more deeply knows their own desires will be better able to integrate into society.
I think for most desires that people are likely to unlock, this would generally be good. They find out that they should take more vacations and actually go to [type of place] and would be more fulfilled in life. As long as they recognize that nothing is going to fully fulfil them, but they are somewhat more content/happy, that all sounds good.
On the darker side, maybe they discover that they actual want to hurt people or diddle kids. That seems...less beneficial for themselves or others. Even unlocking the idea of wanting to be significantly more promiscuous can be a big problem for the person - if they cheat on their spouse, get divorced, and end up much less happy than if they had just stayed in their current lane.
>Desire is a dangerous, volatile thing.
It is, but ignorance of desire is not the same as absence of it. In the alexithymia paradigm Scott was describing, the person is not without desire, they simply don't understand or even know about their experience of it. In two of the examples in particular, relationships and emotions, substituting societal for psychological preferences doesn't produce "harmless and docile" behaviors between people; it more often produces cycles of explosive fights, crippling depression, and spiraling anxiety that feel totally opaque and inescapable to those trapped within them, because they don't even see the forces at play driving them to their behaviors.
> What if they have desires that can only be fulfilled through hurting others?
I guess the answer depends on what you believe will happen when they have desires to hurt others and are *not* consciously aware of that.
One school of thought says that in such case they will probably instinctively arrange situations that allow them to hurt others while having a good excuse. "I only did it in self-defense" (in a conflict that you provoked by a verbal attack). "When they grow up, they will thank me for being a conservative parent that spanked them often." Etc.
On the other hand, when you become consciously aware of that, your options are... yes, to do it anyway... but also, to *not* do it (and be aware that you are prone to rationalize), or to find a consenting partner for a role-play, or to find something similar but less harmful, etc. (Perhaps soon there will be an option to satisfy this desire by hurting virtual people in a realistic VR.)
Who needs VR? The majority of videogames are about violence.
Does this need a Content Warning? I guess. But keep in mind that Kazuma Kiryu has never killed a man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvVsyD6lTJQ
Never. Killed. Anyone.
>People without it are relatively harmless and docile. For the sake of a stable society, shouldn't we keep any unnecessary desire from flourishing?
So would you say you have a desire for predictability and control?
Yeah, if I believed that I had a "true self" with currently unknown preferences, and that I could be happier if I discovered and fulfilled those preferences, I'm not sure I would want to know.
What if my true self wants to consume meth or murder prostitutes? (Or less exotically, abandon my wife and kids?)
Also, I have a selfish desire to preserve my current self over this alternative. If I knew that this true self would not only be more fulfilled but would be healthier, more accomplished and more pro-social, I guess I would turn over those cards.
I'm much more interested in therapy that can take me in a specific direction - reduce akrasia or make me a better father or something - even if my "true self" is the opposite of that.
This seems like survivorship bias to me. I mean, you're already Scott Alexander.
For the rest of us, becoming what we want to be requires a messy process that might end up failing. But we have to change to become extraordinary (ironically people like Scott, who already have it made, are flexible enough to have the best odds of opportunities of further upward momentum coming from an unexpected angle).
I doubt that being Scott is all that easy.
I used to be totally dominated by other people's preferences, but now I've discovered my true self. But is this a reasonable thing to believe? It sounds like an over-update. Much therapy takes place in a time of crisis.
Yes, why not? The NPC meme describes such people with only other's preferences. And Ayn Rand wrote whole books about it.
What made you transition from one to the other? I never thought it is possible.
I think of myself as an NPC because I don't seem to have the kind of ambition that drives people to overcome obstacles; I tend to just sit in whatever local optimum I happen to find myself in instead of trying for something better. I don't think the adults in my life intented to teach child and teenage me that what I want doesn't matter (as in this Calvin and Hobbes strip: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/10/20), and I tried my darndest to refuse to learn that lesson, but eventually I simply ran out of rebellion and became an NPC.
Part of the cause of this is that I still have legacy code in my brain that was written by an 6-year-old hedonist that goes something like this:
Everything I do can be divided into two categories: fun and work. Fun is that which I choose to do because I enjoy them. If I don't enjoy them, I shouldn't choose to do them. Work consists of all the unpleasant things that get in the way of Fun: things which I wouldn't do if I wasn't being forced to do them. I don't want to grow up to be a person like my parents who work all the time and never have fun; my goal in life is to spend as much time having as much Fun as possible and doing as little Work as possible. Corollary: jobs are always Work and never Fun, because if jobs were Fun, you wouldn't have to pay people to do them.
The biggest problem with therapy culture (not therapy, but the ecosystem/discourse around it) is not the true-selfism but (1) continuing pathologisation of normal human experiences leading to the creation or reinforcing of notions of people as both fragile and damaged and lacking resilience. See: the idea that pretty much everyone is traumatised, likely by their childhood experiences (2) outsourcing of emotional support to professionals not by necessity but because of belief that friends and family don't know how to provide it and could be dangerous (3) last but biggest, encouraging endless inward looking self-focus instead of engaging with the external physical and social world, this includes looking for internal solutions to externally solvable problems and centering internal experiences over intersubjective ones.
Disclaimer: I had actual therapy after traumatic bereavement, it was useful; and because I think by talking still see a "counsellor" I pay to sit there and listen to me talk at her without a feeling I'd need to reciprocate. So not anti therapy at all.
> continuing pathologisation of normal human experiences leading to the creation or reinforcing of notions of people as both fragile and damaged and lacking resilience
There's also the possibility that current global culture is so far gone from the kind of social environment that evolution equipped us to handle, that we've managed to push a large chunk of humanity into a state of unhealthy, constant stress. Gabor Maté makes a solid case for that in "The Myth of Normal".
Agreed. Most of our brain was wired in the ancestral environment, with perhaps a few ten thousand years of adaption (via selection) to the neolithic revolution on top of that. The idea that we are well-adapted to live in towns or use the internet seems absurd.
What I can't wrap my head around is why we perceive our world as so stressful, when our ancestors had a much higher probability of dealing with actual tragedies (war, famine, disease, injust punishment, you name it) and much less understanding and power to influence these events.
Is there an opposite situation where therapy can also help someone aware of their preference but perhaps not aware that their prioritisation of these is done to a level that makes it difficult to interact with them? I say this considering that at a lot of evangelists of therapy culture don't come across as people following cultural expectations but people who are genuinely opinionated about the correctness of their preferences, and for all the criticisms of various sorts of therapy, I don't think they reinforce that level of belief.
This exactly describes what I think is going on with jhanas - I don't think people are actually achieving transcendent joy, I think they're just detaching themselves from their emotions and convincing themselves they are, just like the guy who convinces himself he isn't angry while slamming doors.
I would caution confidence on anything related to advanced meditation not learned from personal experience, but it's a hypothesis
I'm not sure personal experience is actually useful here - if I'm right than the advanced meditation experience gives you practice at convincing yourself of false things, which would mean doing advanced meditation makes you less able to judge the effects (just like drinking alcohol makes you worse at judging how drunk you are).
Yeah, there's really no way to convince you of this haha
It's like someone who's never had an altered state of consciousness thinking that any one particular altered state maps onto concepts they think they understand
All I can say is, as someone with some experience, you're in an area where you're likely to chain category errors together
If that's not persuasive, oh well
There exists evidence that would persuade me - for example, if people who claimed to experience jhanas suddenly spent a lot more of their free time meditating or did other unusual/costly things to reach that mode more often. They just don't actually happen, which is why I'm skeptical.
Oh, sure I can try to explain. You only reach jhanas by letting go of any desires/preferences. They're necessarily a side effect of the journey not the end goal. The type of 'goal oriented happiness seeker' mindset that you're modeling is just incapable of getting there
Also honestly I'm confused about what your evidence/expectations are. Plenty of people who experience jhanas find that strong evidence there is 'more to discover' which motivates them to meditate a lot more.
Would you grant that the “runner’s high” is probably real? Jhana 1 is in a similar direction, they’re probably closely related. You can’t really fool yourself about it.
Runner's high is both a less implausible statement (no one claims it's a special form of transcendence, just an enjoyable experience with a clear physical trigger) and more importantly backed by evidence (people who claim to experience it run a lot more than people who don't, despite running being a lot of effort). Jhanas have lower priors (the claim is much more outlandish), and the people who claim to experience them don't act in any of the unusual ways you'd expect if they were real.
In general, moods are not a strictly internal state - someone viewing you from outside can generally infer your mood from how you act. If you claim to not be angry and slam a door, someone can infer that you're angry despite the denials. If you enjoy running, it's generally not hard to tell (people experiencing runner's high run a lot and act happy and enthusiastic about it). Jhanas different from this in that people who claim to have them don't act in the ways that you would infer "they're experiencing transcendent joy" from.
Disclosure, I'm a meditator who claims to have limited experience with the jhanas, even though they don't play a major role in my practice.
Meditative states have a distinct EEG signature. That doesn't mean they are "good" or "transcendent" or even "joyful", but I think it's unlikely that it is mere rationalization. The change to EEG is much more dramatic than ie someone telling a lie.
I think they are basically real, and the pedagogy around accessing them is going to undergo an order of magnitude improvement in the next couple of years from the efforts of Jhourney and others. So I think we can just wait and see.
Regarding your comment about "people who claimed to experience jhanas suddenly spent a lot more of their free time meditating", this is one of the markers of an stage called the "Arising and Passing Away" https://www.integrateddaniel.info/the-arising-and-passing-away. There are other roadmaps in related traditions like nondual Shaiva tantra which have fairly discrete points where people really want to pursue the path like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaktipata.
The jhanas are great but I never found them to be as transcendent as other people, though they are well outside the realm of ordinary experience. Imo, similar intensity can be experienced by other (still non-ordinary) means, and the people that freak out about them are like turbo-normies who would never do those things.
As someone who's gotten (a weaker form) of J1, I wouldn't call it "transcendent joy", just... a pretty dang nice experience that's fun to do when you're in a car (and not driving it), or waiting around for a doctor's appointment, or falling asleep for the night, or on a long plane ride, or are otherwise in a situation where there's 20 minutes to burn. Under optimal conditions, it can match mid-tier sex (though with a bafflingly high satiation-to-craving ratio relative to most other experiences, in a similar way as how microdosing on psychedelics makes a day a good deal better than default but feels weirdly aversive and I keep forgetting to do it), but that's not the typical case. The typical case is just that it's a pretty pleasant experience. I suspect the people talking it up fall into one of three categories.
1: They practiced it a whole lot.
2: They are unusually susceptible to it, in the same way that people can describe MDMA as "a transcendent life-altering experience" or just go "yeah it was pretty enjoyable".
3: They're sorts of people who relate a story of That One Time they caught a *really* big fish, instead of the (much less exciting) story of the ordinary day they caught an ordinary fish, or the ordinary day they didn't catch anything. Meditators don't tell tales of the one time they were in an airport and managed to get an off-and-on altered state going, that was about as nice as eating some fresh brownies, before getting their focus demolished five minutes later by someone a few seats over coughing too loudly.
I'm guilty of 3, personally. It takes a bit of effort to remember that about a quarter of time when I sit down and try to get J1 it doesn't properly take off.
You *can* stick an advanced meditator in an MRI machine to see what's going on when they claim they're in various jhanas, and "Case Study of Ecstatic Meditation: fMRI and EEG Evidence of Self-Stimulating a Reward System" did exactly that. Might be worth a read. They didn't get good data on J1, but got a look at the others (which I haven't been able to personally attain, I've been stuck on J1 for a while)
The newly inserted paragraph three cleared up my question. Not having heard of therapy culture I usually assume therapy is some form of CBT.
The way I think of it is that you’re always trying to get to a best-fit curve. Nobody gets everything they want all the time. Nobody is ever at a state of rest where things don’t need to be assessed and reassessed. You might want something at a 10 but you settle for the thing you want at a 7 because you need to accommodate some other moral imperative. We’re a buffet table of wants and motivations and I think it can be a mistake to over-identify any single one of them as your primary self. You’re the music of those things, not any single note.
Is there a word for people who understand their moods but don't understand the reason behind them very well? Like the difference between:
"I'm angry because Fred is a stupid moron coming to my office to waste my time" vs.
"I'm angry because a work task went badly, a meeting ran long, I'm hungry, and I thought I was about to have lunch but now Fred has come to my office to talk to me. Fred isn't doing anything wrong but I feel angry at him for other reasons."
The second guy is much much more likely to be nice to Fred and to control and understand his anger. He might tell Fred to come back after lunch instead of getting in a fight. It's not implausible to me that therapy could help turn person 1 into person 2, or help with a more continuous case where someone is generally unhappy or angry because of something in their lives they hadn't really thought about.
This is an excellent comment.
Insight.
If not therapy, mindfulness can work for this.
Getting people to become person 2 is something I consider part of my job. Because if you can learn to do that, you can apply that process in the future and eventually leave my office.
But 1 doesn't understand his moods. He's blaming Fred.
Understanding your moods but not the reason behind them would be "I'm angry and don't feel like talking to Fred."
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that 1 doesn't have alexithymia. He knows he's angry, he just doesn't understand what has caused him to be angry.
Probably, as with so many things in life, it's a spectrum.
I often don't know how to connect moods to causes. This might be a defense mechanism of some kind, because if I don't know what made me sad, nobody can punish me for complaining about it. On the bright side, not connecting anger to Fred means I don't lash out at Fred when he doesn't deserve it...
Not that I know of, but how about a metaphor? Mistaking the straw that broke the camel's back for the whole load.
In other words, confusing the proximal cause of a fit of anger (Fred coming in at a bad time) with the whole load of mishaps and vexations without whose occurrence Fred's bad timing would have seemed merely a mildly annoying inconvenience.
'Maybe “finding your true self” just means “being able to access your preferences, the same way non-alexithymics do as a matter of course”.'
Meh. 'Finding' your True Self is just a bad model. Too simplistic and removed from base reality to be useful.
The brain is a network with many different structures and substructures, that form factions with varying access to consciousness, all competing, cooperating and often being very confused. There is no specific part or coalition of it, that's more true, than any of the others. You can create a self-conception, that harmonizes conflicting preferences and minimizes prediction error reliably, makes you generally thrive.... and hopefully it will last longer than next Tuesday, if you're lucky. But this is not some hidden gem deep inside a person, that just needs to be discovered. It is rather a self-propagating process that you have to build, maintain and often adapt to changing environments and requirements.
"True Self" is a legacy notion from the Romantic Era, might serve as a culturally anchored placeholder that nudges people into a quest for agency
I actually think it's a pretty well defined psychological concept. Just elaborated it at length in another comment, no need to repeat here - just search my username on the page :)
I enjoyed reading your comment, hard agree on the priest hypothesis.
Regarding romantic vs psychological self:
I understand your definition of psychological "true self" to mean something like persistent patterns in the personality structures/cognition, that persist through inner work and therapy.
If this is the notion we use, then it makes no sense to say that you "find it". It's already there, by definition.
Regardless, what's interesting to me is the way those involved in "therapy culture" uses the term "true self". This is more than a metaphysical musing - the notion is connected to a few damaging Romantic era ideas.
These ideas are:
* True/ideal self is "already there" - taken seriously, this idea focuses inner work on "peeling off" layers to get to a "natural state", rather than building new capacities.
* Children are "undamaged" and "natural", and we should treat them as somehow "pure" rather than help them grow and develop.
N.b. I'm not claiming these two ideas are hard-and-fast invariant consequences, but rather reasonable stances given strong Romantic influences in your worldview.
I much prefer notions of "ideal self", a more perfect version of who you can become, an ideal to joyfully aspire to.
Hope you don't mind the rant, thanks for a thought-provoking comment
I think we're largely in agreement. Those romantic ideas are quite confused - it doesn't take much time around a toddler's tantrums to see how they are not so "pure" and "undamaged". Their polar opposite, blank slatism, is also clearly wrong. From what I've read, it seems that by the time we're 7 or so, our basic character is more or less built though, and that's what we have to work with.
So the psychological self we're talking about is largely developmental. I like the analogy of our psyche as a band trying to play together. The players and their instruments and their basic strengths and weaknesses are more or less stable (that's our basic character), but some of the instruments are out of tune, others are not plugged in, another is way too loud and distorted, the players don't listen to each other enough, and there is a weird guy in a corner with a huge bagpipe who just ignores everyone else and keeps playing his own tune. In this analogy, our "true self" is the best sound that this band is reasonably able and willing to play, if they put the effort and possibly find some guidance. I agree that "ideal self" is probably a better name for it.
Yes, I looked up the term after my dismissive comment and found it reasonably well-defined, coherent and perhaps even somewhat useful, as originally invented by Winnicott. Personally, I still prefer a modelling that's closer to specific brain structures, networks and predictive processing, but that's all admittedly a fair bit harder to make sense of quickly.
I don't think getting in touch with your "true self" is necessarily a good thing. To take the food analogy, should we encourage people to get in touch with their "true" preferences for hamburgers, crisps, and sweets? To take the sexuality analogy, should we encourage people with paraphilias to get in touch with their "true, authentic selves"?
Good people need to get more in touch with themselves, bad people, less.
"To take the sexuality analogy, should we encourage people with paraphilias to get in touch with their "true, authentic selves"?"
If you're rounding "paraphilia" to e.g. "acted-upon violence", no, but that's a fairly small minority of anything that can be called a paraphilia. Most things to which the term applies are fairly benign; it is probably not bad to be in touch with the fact you'd prefer your wife wear stockings during sex. For the things that *aren't* benign, having greater self-awareness and self-control over them is a good thing, not a bad one -- someone with *uncontrolled* sexually abusive urges isn't exactly an improvement. Being aware of just what the dark recesses of your soul want to goad you into is part of fighting them.
I don't even think the concept is coherent. We get to choose who we are to a great extent so there isn't a thing "your true self". Spend alot of time studying math and you go from someone who is a math phone to someone who can appreciate it (done well...can do opposite too).
In regards to advice that people do or don't need:
I've put a lot of work into improving my kinesthesia. For quite a while, I'd talk about it as though this was something that would be good for everyone and I couldn't understand why most people weren't very interested in doing it.
Later, I came to understand that I was on the numb side of typical kinesthesia. I started out on what might be considered the subtly clumsy side of normal. Functional, but not generally physically skilled, except for good dexterity.
I was surprised to find there was a reason I would occasionally fall down. My legs were so tight that I didn't step forward enough unless I swung my lower leg around the outside. If I didn't swing it high enough, I'd catch my toes on the ground and fall. In a sense, not a big deal when I was a kid, but it's much better not to be falling now.
I wasn't trying to improve walking and it was a surprise when walking changed from something to be ignored to a moderate pleasure. I was driven by a sense that something was wrong and I needed for it to be better.
Athletes use Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais Method and such because they care a lot. Most people seem to be fairly comfortable with what they can do. They might even be concerned that trying to change their kinesthesia would make matters worse rather than better.
I tune out signals from my body because if I pay close attention to how my body feels, I start feeling/noticing minor pains that have no apparent cause and that don't go away. Is that bad?
I don't know.
How do you know if you have bad kinesthetia?
The Ferrett hired a personal trainer and failed *standing* and *breathing*...
https://www.theferrett.com/2017/08/10/i-failed-standing-adventures-in-personal-training/
I'm not sure whether Ferrett is exaggerating his emotional reactions for humorous effect, but let's assume he isn't. It's certainly possible to have a lot of shame about physical difficulties.
How I knew I had problems with kinesthesia-- I was somewhat interested in tai chi at the beginning, and then I had some really good bodywork, which involved gentle touch and visualization-- no poking. I'm actually outraged that the trainer would poke a tight muscle like that.
I didn't actually frame it as problems with kinesthesia, I thought of it as getting moved into my body, which I think is a common framing. It's more accurate to describe it as allowing sensations from my body to register on my conscious mind.
A Gestalt Synergist (a style with involves Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method, and gestalt psychology) got my shoulders to relax, which was amazing to me because it involved sensations I didn't have words for. I thought there were words for everything. It also just seemed obvious to me that there was a change involved that I wanted more of.
She asked me whether I could feel that my shoulders were lower, which I did feel, but I lied because I couldn't believe shoulders could be lower. I thought shoulders were where they were. Quite a few years later, I got in touch and told her that I actually could feel that my shoulders were lower.
Also, years later, a therapist told me it was a bad idea to put a client on the spot by asking that sort of question.
So, how can I tell my kinesthesia was bad? Note what I said above about walking. People generally don't fall from catching their toes on the ground. It can happen as people get older and weaker, but it was happening to me when I was in elementary school. It was muscle tension rather than weakness. Back then, I had no idea what was going on, I'd just suddenly be on the ground.
I didn't figure out how to strike a match or pour water without dripping a lot until my thirties or forties. In both cases, this was a matter of timing, though striking a match also involves applying enough strength. It wasn't that my hand was too weak, it was that it simply didn't occur to me to press down firmly on the match and move a little quickly.
Attempting to pour a liquid would cause me problems with it dripping because I didn't tilt whatever I was pouring from fast enough to break the surface tension. In both cases, I could call it excessive caution which meant I didn't move decisively. I've never been able to snap my fingers.
Some of what I've written is the first I've put the details into words.
I've never done a high five successfully. My reaction is more like "why is that hand coming at me?", and then the moment is past.
Possibly related: I didn't see movement consciously until I saw the first Fantasia movie at about 15. I'm not sure when it was theatrically released in the 60s. I was young but not a little kid. It was the scene with the falling leaves.
As for Ferrett and breathing, it's similar for me, but there's a more gentle method for finding out. Put one hand on your chest and the other on your belly. Now breathe and see what moves. Your belly should expand when you inhale because your diaphragm should press down on your viscera and your muscles should be mobile enough to let your belly expand. This makes more room for your lungs.
I asked an athletic friend about whether lungs burning was a cliche that's an accurate description of the sensation of breathing hard, and he said yes. I'm only able to feel hard breathing in my throat.
Truth between us-- I don't do cardio or anything but the lightest of strength training because the sensations involved register with me as proof of my fundamental inferiority for not being able to do things easily. I'm aware this doesn't make sense, but it's quite a sore spot. Some of you are probably feeling a compulsion to give advice at this point. Please only give advice if you've had personal experience with dealing with your own exercise aversion. Otherwise, it's likely to come off as "Fix yourself right now, you stupid piece of shit."
My best theory is that I grew up in an environment where I was expected to just know how to do things. I was in my twenties until I ran into Leary's eight circuit theory which included the idea that it's normal to need to learn things and spend time being bad at them until you get better at them. That's just grasping the idea intellectually, I'm still not fully comfortable with it, though learning qi gong has helped.
> You know how sometimes you pretend to like something because it’s high-status, and if you do it well enough you actually believe you like the thing? Unless I pay a lot of attention, all my preferences end up being not “what I actually enjoy” but like “what is high status” or “what will keep people from getting angry at me”.
Honestly, this quote never cease to horrify me every time I’m reminded of it.
Isn't this simply one of those cases where different advice is applicable to different people: some people would benefit from being more assertive, others from being more mindful of others, some would benefit from taking more risks and others from being more cautious, etc along any number of dimensions, and whether advice in a given direction is good or not depends more on who takes it than on the advice itself (with the unfortunate dynamic that people are more likely to seek out advice that supports their world view, which tend to move them further along an unhealthy extreme direction). I think this is something Scott himself wrote about on the previous blog, but I can't remember the title of that piece.
Going purely of vibes, it does seem the present zeitgeist puts too high a premium on authenticity and self-discovery, but presumably there are also people who would benefit from moving farther in that direction. It would probably be better to formulate advice in terms of set points rather than directions, "this is how much you should focus on finding your true preferences relative to other concerns, adjust up or down as needed", but such advice requires more work to formulate, won't fit as well into established narratives, and is less optimized for viral spread, etc.
Come to think of it, the golden mean fallacy is a meta-example of this: avoiding extreme positions or behaviours seems like a good first-pass heuristic, but some people will take ~this~ advice too far and apply it in cases where one alternative is clearly better.
TYPO: Should be: "The original complaint a lot of people *had* with the polyamory memoir"
I worry you haven't sufficiently defined therapy culture. I mean it seems to me you gave a really good argument for thinking and talking about your mental state in an intelligent and engaged way.
But that's not how I would understand the term. Indeed, I'd understand therapy culture as being related to genuine self-discovery in much the way DEI culture is related to fighting racial bias and inequality. It's a kind of way of speaking and talking that creates the illusion you are handling a problem without actually doing the hard work that might help so it tends to make it worse.
Concepts keep escaping from their original therapy habitat, finding new niches and turning into cultural kudzu. PTSD triggers, a way for people with severe trauma to understand and explain their intense reactions to mostly innocuous things, become trigger warnings. Validating emotions, a thing you do because emotions can't be argued with, becomes endorsing the existence(?) of people and everything they say and do. Safe space qua your therapist's office, a way to encapsulate the idea that your therapist will neither hurt you nor reveal your secrets, becomes safe spaces everywhere. Reflective listening as employed by someone who is genuinely trying to understand you and help you feel understood becomes corporate-speak intended to defuse and dismiss concerns as quickly as possible.
>Concepts keep escaping from their original therapy habitat, finding new niches and turning into cultural kudzu.
Love it! Thank you!
Also I don't like the whole true self language because it denies the extensive role we play in constructing who we are. Our preferences aren't just given out by god -- maybe some basic dispositions -- but you can learn to have quite different preferences on most things. It's mostly stuff very near core evo activities like mating that is really super sticky.
This post from Scott's old blog comes to mind here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/
It seems to me that there are people out there who would benefit from following the 'therapy culture' advice, but that the people who are most prone to it are those who should be seriously considering the opposite of that advice.
Now that I'm in my mid-40s, I cannot imagine wanting to see a therapist for "self-discovery" or to find my authentic True Self. If anything, my biggest problem is that I have a concept of an authentic life at all! Existentialist philosophy was an infohazard. It seems that almost everybody else manages to get through the objectively horrifying process of aging by lying to themselves, pulling little tricks on their brain, or failing that just finding one distraction after another.
The search for your true self is the kind of thing you might find appealing if you felt you were writing your life's journey from scratch, but most people's lives past 40 are more like being called in by the studio to finish the last third of a script that some dude couldn't finish because he got coked out, and who cares anyhow because it's a sequel to some genre flick of no particular distinction. There are absolutely people who can motivate themselves to do the best possible job in that situation, but I doubt they are doing it by searching their souls to find and express the real and authentic.
I must be weird, because "finish the last third of a script that some dude couldn't finish because he got coked out and who cares anyhow because it's a sequel to some genre flick of no particular distinction" actually sounds like an interesting challenge, as long as you're talking about a literal movie script and not using it as a metaphor.
Aging does totally suck, though.
“The unexamined life,” I suppose.
If you had to give a ballpark estimate, how many people would you suspect fit this criteria?
Would you expect it to be more or less common in developed, high hierarchy-of-needs societies? Intuitively, I’d expect people to be less aware of their preferences when they’re in stressful situations, faced with more pressing concerns. That conflicts with the narrative of “therapy culture” as a luxury belief.
Hey, this is backwards. The analyst sits near the patient's head, a bit back from it so they are not visible to the patient. But maybe Blondie here wants to show off her looks?
I'm not sure whether I'm amused or dismayed that this *defense* of therapy culture includes (or at least strongly suggests) my own subculture's *critique* of therapy culture, i.e. "Therapists will just tell you to divorce your husband."
"Maybe she needed more therapy, not less! Or, at least, better therapy."
Hi Scott!
This points to an anti-generalization that I find myself saying to people more and more frequently. Someone has a bad experience at, let's say, the doctor and then generalize that the medical profession is filled with greedy crooks who order expensive irrelevant tests to cover their heinies. (Similar things can be said for other service professionals like chiropractors, lawyers, accountants, plumbers, etc.)
I struggle with migraines and went down that healthcare road myself and held that jaded perspective for a while. Standard treatments didn't work for me. But eventually, rather than live with the pain, I kept going. Found new doctors, tried new approaches, and created a treatment program that makes the migraines only a minor nuisance once every month or two rather than being an all-consuming black hole 4 times per week.
Looking back, one thing I learned is that there are good doctors and not-so-good doctors, and it makes a huge difference when you have a good one. This should be obvious, because we all know that there are clearly good teachers and not-so-good teachers. A good teacher meets the individual student where they're at rather than trying to apply a canned approach to every student. Well, many doctors, lawyers, accountants, chiropractors, therapists, etc. also take the canned one-size-fits-all approach. If they don't really care about the particulars of your situation, that's what you'll get. Or maybe they find you annoying or a hassle... Or maybe they can make more money if they spend less time on each patient...
At a college, students tell each other which professors are the good ones, but there often isn't that kind of discussion for service professionals. And so, when these issues come up, I make a point of guiding people to visit a specific chiropractor, rather than just to see "a chiropractor".
Kind regards,
DB
Your description of generalized prefrence alexithymia reminds me a little of Winnicott's idea of the "false self," which he argues is the result of inadequate mirroring in an individual's infancy, leading to them forming basically a hypervigilant/"compliant" relationship with the world, rather than a spontaneous one. He also argues that this sort of patient is impossible to do traditional psychoanalysis on, until their false self has been erradicated.
(Relevant paper: https://psptraining.com/wp-content/uploads/Winnicott-D.W.-1965.-The-maturational-processes-and-the-facilitating-environment.pdf#page=133)
Therapy arose in the 19th and got big in the 20th century already, and what they now call "therapy culture" is its full mainstreaming. I don't think something quite this big would arise without answering to some need. And I don't think you need to look very far to find the need. Its early rise coincides quite well with the first wave of secularization of the West. People used to have spiritual advisors (some still do but it's no longer so mainstream). Someone with a professional role who you could talk to about your personal problems and dilemmas, and would (more or less try to) embody some accumulated traditional wisdom. I don't think it's much of a new insight that a good % of therapy is just a secular version of the same, with some changes. Now you're a paying client, which prices it out for many people (bad!), but also gives you choice and empowers you as client (good). The cultural core of the wisdom being applied is now somewhat scientifically attuned (good), but can be spiritually shallow (bad).
As to the question of the "true self", we have to be clear that we're not talking about some transcent self here, so the old debates about self vs no-self don't apply. The self we're talking about is the psychological self here, which is a fairly well-understood phenomenon. When the pieces of you at odds with each other, or exaggeratedly at odds with the world, or too porous, or whatever, get worked on and more or less integrated, you're still "yourself", with your personality and tastes and quirks, but with less suffering, less stuck, somewhat more sane, and probably more capable of embodying the kinds of personal virtues that make you happy and proud to be who you are in the long term. That's what "finding your real self" amounts to. It's good stuff.
Nowadays there has appeared a current of pushback against "therapy culture", and again it's not hard to pinpoint what kind of excess it's aiming at. We live in the era of performance of identity, awash in the mass manipulation generated by modern psychological marketing, unleashed by the lack of friction created by social media platforms. So if there's psychological self to be found, and a vague cultural awareness of it, there's immediately going to be thousands of shitty grifters trying to sell us ersatz versions of it for a subscription fee. And we should not underestimate the sheer impact of psychological marketing - people who are "well in their skin" are hard to sell shit to, so the entire enterprise is basically a globally self-optimized machine for making everyone feel bad about everything, from their body to the world we live in. So of course we do, and then we wonder where the "mental health crisis" may be coming from.
I think part of the impoverishment in the public debate about therapy is the odd mystique it has, which of course is cultivated and encouraged by psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as the universities and hospitals where they must attend extensive extra school.
At bottom, therapy is just talking to someone -- often, that person is small-minded and not very smart, but sometimes that person is insightful, creative, imaginative, and attentive. People who haven't had much of that kind of conversation before often feel, correctly, that they have discovered one of the most valuable and incredible things in the world, something they didn't really know existed or was possible. They can think things they never would have imagined they might think, they can be freed from destructive assumptions, they can practice other ways of thinking and being.
You know... kinda like the experience of reading ACX/SSC! In other words, good therapy is just... you guessed it... rationalist practice!
This is an extremely partial and grudging defence indeed.
When people criticise "therapy culture" I don't think they're against the entire concept of ever talking to anyone about your problems. I think it's mostly about the language and attitudes of therapy escaping into the wild and being used by ordinary, ostensibly-healthy people to justify being jerks.
Therapy will often teach you to focus on yourself in a way that can lead to selfishness. A certain degree of selfishness is somewhat acceptable for people who have serious problems, in the same way that lying around in bed all day is acceptable when you're seriously ill. But when the therapy mindset is used by everybody then it leads to everybody putting themselves first.
When you decide your desires are "needs" then you can justify just about anything.
Good one. That's also the criticism I've mostly seen of "therapy culture".
Honestly, I think that the whole discussion about preferences and "finding my True Self" treats these things as exogenous to the self, imposed from the outside and immutable.
Your preferences and your "True Self" are, to a large degree, mutable. Maybe not *consciously* mutable, but for everything but the most core things, these things can be changed. And in fact *are* being mutated every time you make choices and take actions.
So your "True Self" is the one *you are currently defining by your actions, choices, and beliefs* on a day-to-day basis. And the challenge isn't to *find* this True Self, it's *creating the best True Self you can*.
As was said in the context of making RPG character choices, "Choose Different". You are the one defining your character as you go. There are no "out of character" events, there are only "my character is changing" events.
extremely niche comment that won't be explained, if you know you know:
>You know how sometimes you pretend to like something because it’s high-status, and if you do it well enough you actually believe you like the thing? Unless I pay a lot of attention, all my preferences end up being not “what I actually enjoy” but like “what is high status” or “what will keep people from getting angry at me”.
I'm guessing this friend isn't *actually* lintamande, but the quote definitely reminds me of Sevar.
The friend is Ozy (as you can see by following the link). lintamande is one of Kelsey Piper's handles (I believe this is public info, e.g. her instagram has both names). Kelsey and Ozy know each other, but are different people (or pulling a world-class pretence to be). I agree a lot of the Cheliaxi characters sound influenced by that post.
So Scott, are you talking about all psychotherapies, or about freeform talk-about-whatever therapy? If the latter, I wish you'd make that clear. CBT practitioners like me do time-limited, problem-focused treatments, and that's very different. The goals are not vague, and it's quite possible to assess whether and how much the person's problem has changed. Unless you're inclined to think that CBT, too, is mostly bogus, I wish you would make it clear that it's not in the scorned-with-a-few-grudging-exceptions category.
Also, I'd like to speak up about some ways that freeform talk therapy can be genuinely helpful to people, beyond the way you mentioned. One is to provide a place where people can unburden themselves of disturbing secrets. A guy once came to me ostensibly for treatment of a form of OCD, but he made it clear as soon as we discussed the OCD that he was absolutely unwilling to try to dismantle it. He was about 90% convinced that his OCD concerns were valid fears, and that his compulsions were necessary to keep him safe. So I said, OK, let's talk over your life for a few sessions and see if there's some other way I can be helpful. Within a couple sessions he disclosed that he had a sexual kink that nobody knew about, and that having it made him feel ugly and grotesque and separate from "normal people." So we talked in detail about his kinky interests, and I gave him some information about his kink (it's actually a common one, and last time I checked the literature people with that kink were found not to be less healthy than other people, just higher on openness to experience). And he could see that I was not creeped out by what he'd told me. And all that greatly diminished the shame he felt. So now, about a year later, he's totally "out" with his kink to his friends, and is not having trouble finding woman who like it too, or are curious to give it a try. His life's a lot better, and he spends a lot less time ruminating about OCD-related matters.
Some people come to a therapist without any secret to disclose except that they are terribly lonely, and nothing they have tried has fixed that. Some of them have good social skills and are able to "make friends," with people, but secretly feel disconnected from the friends they've made. Others are stuck in a marriage that feels dead, but are unwilling to consider divorce until the children are older. For these people, seeing a therapist is like visiting a friend. They have someone who is interested in them and wishes them well. That alone makes them feel much better, sometimes enough better to change some problematic things in their lives. I have seen therapy of this kind referred to scornfully as "buying friendship," and I actually think the term is fairly accurate, but the scorn is not so justified. All friendships involve some sort of transaction -- there are things the friend expects you to give, such as sympathetic interest in their breakup, or reassurance about something. In some ways it's cleaner to just pay cash. And I wouldn't call it fake. I don't think most of us are faking interest and goodwill. I'm not. It's one of the bonuses of being a therapist, getting to know and care about people you ordinarily would never even meet, and would not feel an affinity for if you did. The therapist just has to steer clear of expecting from the patient what they would expect from a full, real-life friend -- expecting the other person to get them, take an interest, sympathize, etc. In a lot of ways being someone's paid friend is not greatly different from sex work, which I also think is a legitimate and valuable service.
The cliché about sex work is that sex workers aren't really getting paid for the sex, they're getting paid to go away at the end of the session. I wonder whether something similar might not be true for a lot of client-therapist relationships. (Perhaps this too is already a cliché?)
Well, if we hung around indefinitely after the session a lot of the specialness of the set-up would be lost. We'd slide into small talk, or they'd feel like it was their turn to show an interest in me, or we'd go out to lunch and they'd discover ways my walking pace or eating and spending habits are not compatible with theirs, etc etc
Examples of where CBT could be accused of being bogus..
- "psychogenic" non-epileptic seizures; CBT does not reduce seizure frequency
- CFS/ME- could well be that CBT causes the patient to self-report as improved, but objective measures of recovery (such as actigraphy) show that the patient isn't improving. With a slight hint (below the level of statistical significance in the data I saw) that maybe CBT actually makes the patient sicker than no treatment.
To be blunter .. if it is indeed the case that actigraphy data shows that CBT makes CFS/ME patients sicker, and earlier clinical trials measured this actigraphy data but didn't publish the results (because the results showed the treatment was harmful), then that's serious misconduct on the part of the people doing the clinical trials.
Mire bluntly: some of CBT's claims to be "evidence based" are based n serious scientific fraud.
===
It could still be true, of course ,that CBT works for other conditions, closer to the ones it was originally tended for .
From the write up of the CODES clinical trial of CBT for dissociative seizures:
" At 12 months, no significant difference in monthly dissociative seizure frequency was identified between the groups (median 4 seizures [IQR 0–20] in the CBT plus standardised medical care group vs 7 seizures [1–35] in the standardised medical care group; estimated incidence rate ratio [IRR] 0·78 [95% CI 0·56–1·09]; p=0·144). "
Translation: it doesn't work
I did not say CBT was appropriate for every condition, could not be used by jackasses in a stupid way, or could not be used as a treatment in a study where the researcher lied about his results. My point was that it is unlike freeform talk therapy in being symptom focused & time-limited. Also, it is clear whether the patient has benefitted or not, because the criteria for improvement are not vague ones like "increased self-acceptance." The examples of studies showing that CBT does not help certain things, and can in fact be harmful to people with some kinds of problems have no bearing on my point -- you could say the same about penicillin.
Also,, I think you misunderstood the results of the CODES trial. The hint was that CBT + usual medical care patients did *better* than those who only got usual medical care: 4 CBT + medical treatment had seizures, while 7 with medical treatment only had seizures. So the CBT + med patients did better though, as you correctly point out, the results did not reach statistical significance. Also "Benefits in the CBT plus standardised medical care treatment group included a longer period without dissociative seizures in the last 6 months of the study, fewer somatic symptoms, better health-related quality of life, and improved psychosocial functioning, compared with those who received standardised medical care alone." So while on the primary outcome measure CBT did not improve outcomes enough to reach statistical significance, it did on the secondary outcomes mentioned in the quote.
Though, honestly, CBT does not seem like a very good fit for "psychogenic" seizures. Seems likelier to me that somethings neurologically wrong with these people, even if it's not epilepsy.
There is a question of "how to" for preference alignment, and if therapy is the answer then so be it. There is also a question of how malleable our preferences are, and whether it makes sense to develop preferences that more easily attained. If preferences are malleable and therapy can make them cheaper, then so be it.
What I don't see is how preferences anywhere in this matrix would necessarily finger "therapy culture" as the solution. Is this definition of "therapy culture" the complete set of non-medication solutions?
All of this seems to be assuming that "doing what *I* want" is desirable. One alternative I've seen is
"The attitude behind the move was concisely expressed in 2010 when a contestant on a Chinese dating show told her blue-collar suitor: "I'd rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle." The statement went viral." -- Adam Minter
All of this self-centeredness is called "internally directed" in psychlogical lingo, and it's valorized in US culture, but many other cultures prioritize being "externally directed", that is, doing what society and everybody around you expects.
Then again, there are food fads that sweep US culture, along with food status characteristics. ("My farmers' market has bigger, better, fresher tomatoes than yours.") It helps when flaunting your status-gaining attitudes to consciously believe that you actually prefer those things, especially in a culture that valorizes adhering to your authentic self. It's not automatic that stating out loud what you actually prefer is the best strategy, *especially* in the Darwinian snake pit of status competition that is high school.
In regard to polyamory, I would expect that to be quite a mess. For one thing, different people have vastly different preferences for how to run their love lives and (looking at history) there's no reason to believe that we can match up people so the various matches don't contain strong disalignments in preferences. Should people openly express the disalignment between what they've got and what they want, be aware of it but suppress mentioning it, or push it out of sight into the subconscious?
I think you're conflating two issues here. One is internally vs externally directed cognition, i.e how much attention you pay to your inner state of thoughts and emotions, vs how much you pay attention to stuff out there. That's a lively debate - therapy culture says you will get benefits from spending (quality) time internally directed, but you don't have look far to find dissenting voices (see for example https://quillette.com/2024/03/08/identity-satiation/).
Another quite different thing is how much you pursue the desires you feel as your own, vs how much you pursue what society tells you you should. It's quite telling that the example you give is from Chinese, because this kind of cultural submission is a traditional characteristic of many Asian cultures, and the Chinese are really strong on it. (I'm more familiar with India, where I'd say it's powerful but not so overwhelming - also more directed towards your closer community, rather than society as a whole).
The opposite value is highly dominant in the West (yes, even in the conservative side of the great divide). Amod Lele of the blog Love of All Wisdom has a whole series on it, he names it Qualitative Individualism, and offers an analysis of its sources, which he traces back to Aristotle among others. (That's a google suggestion for anyone interested, he's worth a read.)
Given how deeply rooted this value is for modern Western culture, I'd be interested to hear it if you have a critique. These days it's so much "in the air", that the mere suggestion that you should just follow what society tells you to do is sure get some sneers, a host of examples of misdirected social beliefs (which vary depending on your personal politics), and a long list of all the ways that major societal institutions are not your friend.
OH MY GOD. I feel so seen by this post.
I can relate to both: ignorance of feelings and ignorance of preferences. I have kinda got much better with the first one, however at times it feels I have just learned to guess my emotions by the secondary effects. Like, once I literally said “my girlfriend is always so unbearable whenever I drink coffee”, only to realize it’s not a fact about her.
However, the alexithymia of preferences is harder — I cried reading “Better than Two”, feeling “oh wow you could live like that??”. And still it took some time for me to find that “I want”
However, I wouldn’t think it’s an illness. From where I grew up — post-Soviet Ukraine, and then studied in Russia — there are lots of people who seem to be out of touch with their emotions. Coming to Canada, it surprised me how everyone could be so mature and adult with their emotions.
I’d bet it’s a developmental phase. Same as that other Scott’s post about how the gods are “literally real” for people 3000 years ago, or for kids 2-3-4 years old today. Same way, maybe some people (or cultures) are just stuck in that phase for longer?
I distinctly remember “learning” how emotions feel, and glorifying feeling of terror because it was the first one that became available. I loved reading Stephen King for a while, because that was the only way to feel emotions
Reminds me of Data from Star Trek when he installed the "emotion chip" in the movie, and thoroughly enjoys hating a bad-tasting drink: https://youtu.be/McHvqjI17rA?si=elsMOfWNyHTwnWBk
"But that’s the same kind of complaint as “sometimes people without ADHD take Adderall”, not “Adderall is a scam”"
Is there any number of people without ADHD taking Adderall that can make it a scam? If Adderall really works to treat ADHD, but also 50% of the population gets a bullshit diagnosis and a prescription, you have to admit *something* is a scam, right? Would it be fair to call that thing "ADHD culture"?
I've never seen a first principles critique that objected to the basic idea of therapy. No one seems to think that talking about your problems couldn't possibly help anyone ever. Critiques of therapy culture always sound to me like people claiming ADHD is overdiagnosed, and "but Adderall really helps people with ADHD" does not address the complaint of someone who thinks ADHD is extremely rare.
Why are they taking the Adderall if it is doing nothing for them? That stuff isn't exactly free, even in generic form.
I suspect that, as a stimulant, it does something for most people who take it, even if that something isn't "treat ADHD".
Other than your specific and insightful example of alexithymia, I don’t think the notion of a true self is a helpful one.
When someone wants something, typically what they they’re aware of wanting is some intermediate—a step towards an ultimately unconscious objective. For example you might be aware that you crave a beer, but what you really want is intimacy (beer to bar to meet artificially uninhibited person to increase likelihood of intimacy). And beneath intimacy is some other unconscious objective beneath which is another and another and you can keep drilling down to the inevitable raw impulse. I don’t think a person is best defined by this, in the same sense that a car isn’t best defined by its ignition. I think humanity is best defined by all the social/cultural/ethical/practical obstacles between impulse and its realization.
Incidentally, this also relates to the way rapidly advancing technology is hollowing out society by removing many of these obstacles between raw impulse and its realization. Having things increasingly available on demand is undermining the feelings of gratitude and sacrifice and purpose at the core of stable communities.
The "true self" thing is tricky.
Perhaps is is easier to start with the opposite. There are such things as pretending, or being forced to do something, or being forcefully prevented from doing something; either by literal force or by a threat. So, as a first iteration, "true self" is how one thinks / feels / acts in absence of external forces that push them to thinks / feels / acts differently.
But there is also learning, in various forms (learning facts, getting experience, discovering new things, changing one's mind...). Learning can change how one thinks / feels / acts, so... does it mean that learning changes one's "true self"? Also, there are various kinds of learning, from reading books to brainwashing, experience can be empowering or traumatizing. Is the impact of the forceful kind of learning different in principle from a currently acting force? Are you supposed to unlearn some things to achieve your "true self", and which ones exactly?
Now again, some things do *not* change, even in long term. Despite many things I have learned and changed my mind about, three decades after I started reflecting on these things, I have similar traits (e.g. intelligence, introversion), hobbies (e.g. math, science fiction), values (e.g. rationality, philanthropy). It is not exactly the same, but it feels like... a natural extrapolation of my previous self. Some of that could be blamed on biology; maybe quite a lot. When I tried to do something against my nature, I sometimes learned a lot, but then I returned to some more advanced version of the original thing. So it seems that the "true self" can evolve, but not in an arbitrary direction.
The law of equal and opposite advice applies to therapy -- some people ignore themselves, those people should start paying more attention to themselves; other people ignore the world around them, those people should start paying more attention to the world around them. Some people need to find their "true self"; some people need to learn new facts and gain new skills. Many people choose the opposite of what they need: the ones focused on themselves decide they need to know even more about themselves; the ones distracted from themselves decide they have no time for such silly things.
Both options can be abused by people who want to manipulate you. You can be pushed away from your "true self", and the abuser will declare such concept silly; or you can be pushed towards something that the abuser says is your "true self", carefully navigating you to reach the predetermined conclusion. There is a related dynamic in gender roles: men are often told to stop suppressing their emotions and show their true feelings, but when it turns out that their true feelings at given moment are socially inappropriate, e.g. they are angry or horny, or they feel sad or afraid at the moment when they are expected to be strong, they are socially punished for such self-expression.
As I see it, finding your "true self" mostly means overcoming everyday distractions and considering your long-term preferences, and also identifying external pressures and finding out what you would want to do in absence of those pressures. Then, maybe you can plan how to overcome those forces and act on those preferences. And then you need to stop dreaming and actually do it.
Unawareness of preferences vs the toxic therapy-talk as two kinda-opposed traps that one can be reminds me of something Scott wrote about before. Therapy mindsets are in the water supply and perhaps now some people are getting an overdose. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/16/cbt-in-the-water-supply/
I think the criticism of therapy culture needs some refinement to figure out exactly what it is.
- I have a friend with probably BPD whose life was literally turned around by cognitive behavioral therapy. The change in her life and her ability to function was night and day.
- Less drastically, I don't think most people would disagree that having someone thoughtful to talk out your problems with might help, in the same way that a personal trainer can help with fitness or a life coach can help you achieve goals.
- That said, I suspect that the critics of therapy culture have some narrower complaints that are more interesting.
This post seems so incredibly wrong it might not even fit into the "not even wrong" category. The number of people eating PB&Js who hate peanut butter (as a totally bizarre example), jelly, or bread and can be cured with therapy is approximately zero. The true problem with therapy is that it tells peanut butter haters that hating peanut butter is fine. Almost all therapy is re-enforcement of terrible behaviors such as complaining about things that take less time to do on your own than they take for you to ask your spouse to do, pretending your chemical addictions are normal, justifying abnormal behaviors, etc.
The rare therapist is the one who tells a 36 year old woman that her husband is actually quite good because he works and loves his kids. And that therapist is the only one who is correct in 99.99% of situations.
Well, clearly *somebody* here is not even wrong.
Banned for this comment.
Just as a side note: preference falsification is a thing of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification. And, as a non US person, have always found Americans to be universally alexithymia - affected.
To the point now - I personally find it incredibly annoying when people ask for my "favorite" (movie, food, book, etc., even friend!). One software provider whose password recovery mechanism asked me to input ONE in a choice of 10 "favorites" just made me despair - I could not find ANY clear favorite in a list of ten categories. Not everyone has a single clear top preference. In anything. And no it doesn't mean that it's all the same to me. I have setsof likings, just no clear rankings inside those sets of likings. And, "different" does not imply a ranking. Generally speaking, I like diversity more than anything else. Which fits of course the whole polyamory theme.
Therapy culture is another auto-brainwashing phenomenon invented by society to voluntarily entrench conformity. What's worse is most people who would actually benefit from therapy lie on some personality disorder spectrum, and are the worst candidates for psychotherapy for they don't see anything amiss. I think the result of therapy is partially determined a priori. The result is a falsehood, just like everything else. Everyone dies anyway, there's no point.
How many people go into therapy to "find their true selves" Vs dealing with trauma and its maladaptive consequences?
It is very important to keep in mind that although we all have preferences, some of which we may discover later in life, many of those preferences – perhaps all of them — are malleable. Foods we once found distasteful, after we’ve made them a part of our diet for a while, come to be enjoyable. We hate running or rising early, but after choosing to do it for a while, we come to take great pleasure in it. This is especially true for things that are good and healthy. Over time, we come to love things that at first we did only through difficult choice. It would be a huge mistake to imagine that we discover our true selves simply by identifying the things we currently prefer, or to imagine that our “true self” is little more than our present cravings.
I don't know a Greek word for it, either, but this "preference alexithymia" reminds be on what Maslow has written on what he called the "pseudo self" (in "Toward a Psychology of Being"). Traumatised people, often children, whose wishes and preferences are denied for long enough, will become blind to them. Their own idea of themselves is subsumed by internalised standards of others.